Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,80
£20 notes and £50 notes, thrown together with all the care and attention of raked leaves. These notes were ‘used’ in the first place; now, they looked downright tatty. But to the women, they were breathtakingly beautiful.
This garden waste bag, along with the other forty-odd others, held their long-awaited, carefully nurtured dreams. Dreams that could have begun twenty-four years ago, had Ester not shot Dolly Rawlins dead in front of four police officers.
But now . . . Now it really was their time.
CHAPTER 21
The squad room was buzzing. Ridley wasn’t late – he was never late. He was with Superintendent Raeburn, waiting to find out if they had been given their ‘Consent to Exhume’ from the coroner.
A low hum filled the room as DC Morgan took bets. An old fossil of a man, Morgan lived in the corner of the squad room, with his own mini fridge tucked away under his desk. He was allowed this because it contained his insulin; but it also contained cans of Coke and bars of chocolate. Morgan walked that fine line between hypo and hyper – and he didn’t give a shit. He was also the squad room bookie.
Morgan had a book on who would get the sergeant’s job: Jack, Anik or an unknown quantity from outside. He had a book on which senior officer would suffer the next heart attack. And he had a book on the exhumation. He was certain that Raeburn would be refused the exhumation for ‘financial reasons’, but then he was one of the few coppers still working who had been at the funeral back in August 1984. He remembered watching Dolly Rawlins bury some bloody stranger. And he knew Raeburn would be secretly praying for a refusal from the coroner, so they could all just let sleeping dogs lie.
When Ridley finally arrived, he had good news for Morgan’s bet.
‘Currently, there’s not sufficient justification for the spend required to exhume the grave,’ Ridley said in a monotone. It was hard to tell whether he was pleased or frustrated by this. ‘On a different note,’ he went on, ‘Barry Cooper has been spotted in Essex. He’s disappeared from his digs, but the local force are tracking him down. Jack, a DS Mary Fleming is going to contact you with some details.’
With a wave of his hand, he disappeared into his office to answer the phone.
Jack fired up his computer and opened a message from DS Fleming of Essex Police. Laura stood behind him and, in a whisper, she read the screen out loud, which meant that Jack had to read at a slow pace as well. She leant her hand on the desk by the side of his keyboard and, as her breathy, whispered reading warmed the back of his neck, Jack thought about making love to Maggie in the spare bedroom. He started reviewing the number of rooms they’d made love in and realised that, since moving to London and since working such opposing shifts, they’d not been anywhere near as adventurous as they used to be. Kitchen? – no. Lounge? – yes. Bathroom? – no. Outdoors? – no. Car? – no. Work?
He smiled as he recalled delivering a pizza to Maggie at the hospital during a night shift. It had been one o’clock; he’d had a particularly boring day at work and had nipped out for a pint or five on his way home. He’d ended up at a pizza place close to the hospital, and had popped in for the company. Maggie had had an arduous shift up until that point, so was lying down in the on-call room when Jack arrived. She’d asked him to hold her and he knew that she must have lost a patient. He held her as tightly as he could, nuzzled his cheek into hers and stroked her hair. Within seconds, they’d forgotten where they were and had made love in the creaky single bed.
Jack was brought crashing back down to earth by Laura leaning even further forward so that she could track the words on the screen with her finger.
‘Fucking hell, Jack, look. Cooper’s army record says he was a sapper! A combat engineer whose duties included breaching fortifications and demolition. He knew his way round explosives. He would have known exactly how to blow a section of train track and leave the carriage intact.’
Just then, Ridley stepped from his office.
‘That was DI Prescott,’ he called across the room. ‘The demolition crew at Rose Cottage have found something.’