Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,78

Gloria let out a scream of unadulterated joy. Dolly hoped to God that they were far enough away from the coppers for that not to be heard.

At The Grange, Ester was on autopilot. She had absolutely no idea whether the other women would make it back. The last time she’d seen Dolly, she was surfing a train carriage down a river embankment with Connie inside. So, Ester was blindly sticking to the plan. She’d emptied her share of money into the skip and thrown the sacks into the lime pit, dug and filled three days ago by Gloria. As the money sacks slowly dissolved, Ester used an industrial vacuum to get the cash out of the skip and into black bin bags.

By the time the other four women rode up from the back lane and into the grounds of The Grange, Ester was ready to explode. She swore, ranted, blamed Dolly for the rain that had made the train carriage slip down the embankment, cursed her for the danger she had put them all in. Dolly knew this rage came from fear and from relief; Ester had had to return to The Grange alone, not knowing if anyone else was alive or dead, free or arrested.

Dolly ignored her. ‘Quick – get the money into the skip! Dissolve the sacks and all of your clothes ‒ nothing left! Nothing! Come on! We’re behind schedule!’

They emptied their cash into the skip, so that Ester could keep vacuuming it up and into bin bags.

‘Not one single note can be left behind,’ Dolly urged. ‘If they find one note – it’s over.’

Once all of the money was re-bagged, and all of the sacks and overalls were melting in the lime pit, the skip was dragged over the top. All of the bin bags were thrown into the back of one of John Maynard’s work vans, and all except Ester drove the quarter of a mile to Rose Cottage.

It had been Julia who had discovered the internal layout of Norma’s house. Norma fancied the pants off her and Dolly had told her to get into Norma’s home and, if required, her bed. The coal shaft under the cottage had a long-disused chute opening in the back garden, clearly marked with the construction date, 1841. The chute came out in Norma’s kitchen but had been bricked up decades ago; the only way of getting the cash back out of the chute once it was in was to take the kitchen wall down.

Tonight, Rose Cottage was empty. Norma was away on a police training course for four days. In the garden, Connie passed the bin bags full of money to Julia from the back of John’s van, and Julia poured them down the coal chute. Ester gathered the empty bin bags, Angela checked that not one single note went astray, and Dolly kept lookout. Gloria was back at The Grange, letting the horses loose – they knew that these trail horses would head straight back to the stables just along the road where Julia had stolen them some hours earlier.

Within forty minutes of the train robbery, the five women from The Grange had been in their nightdresses and in bed. As Dolly lay back in her crisp, clean white sheets, wet hair soaking into the pillow case, she allowed what they had just achieved to sink in. She pushed her head back, opened her mouth and let out the loudest cackle she could muster. It echoed down the hallway, seeping into every other bedroom and triggering a chain of celebratory screeching and laughing. No one could believe they’d actually done it – they’d robbed a mail train!

*

For as long as she could remember, Dolly’s life had been a series of events out of her control. It had all started when she made the mistake of leaving the diamonds with Audrey bloody Withey. Audrey had sold them for a fraction of their value, meaning that Dolly couldn’t afford to open the children’s home she’d dreamed of and had somehow ended up taking on responsibility for six other women. All of this had ultimately led her to the decision to rob a mail train.

Some days Dolly would reason that committing this crime had been the only way for all of the women to have the lives they needed, but on others she would admit that the opportunity had been too good to pass up. Whatever the reason, nothing would ever be good enough for Ester. She was the one