Buried (DC Jack Warr #1) - Lynda La Plante Page 0,81

door had once been positioned above the kitchen at Rose Cottage. It had blown off at some point during the fire and landed in the front garden, so it had lain there unrecognised. It was only when a demolition crew, heavily supervised by officers from Thames Valley Police, were taking the cottage down brick by brick that the tunnel from the chute door down into the kitchen had been revealed.

Prescott, Ridley and Jack stood in the doorway of what used to be the kitchen.

‘That far wall, behind the Aga, didn’t come down in the fire,’ Prescott explained. ‘Apparently it was smashed down beforehand. That back wall used to have a coal door in it, which had been shoddily bricked up at some point. So the bottom end of the chute was bricked over, but the top end was still accessible from the front garden. Very dangerous apparently. Anyway, in the crumbling brickwork halfway down the old chute, one of the demolition guys found these.’

Prescott had been building to this. With an air of triumph, he handed Ridley a small, clear evidence bag containing several partly charred, crushed and ripped pieces of paper. It was perfectly clear that they were – or had been – banknotes. And along with the notes was half an old money band off a bundle of £20 notes, marked with ‘£1,000’.

‘There’s easily enough room in the chute for the twenty-seven million taken in the train robbery,’ Prescott continued. ‘But once the cash was in, there was no way to get it out—’

‘Without smashing down the wall.’ Ridley ended Prescott’s sentence.

For a big man, Prescott was very animated when he was excited.

‘Those robbers . . . balls of steel! Fancy shoving twenty-seven million of stolen cash into the wall of a copper’s house! And they were cool enough to play the long game right from the start, because they’d have known they couldn’t get the money back without taking Norma’s kitchen wall down . . .’

He moved outside so that he could smoke, and Ridley went with him, followed by Jack, still holding the evidence bag of ruined money.

He listened to them as the two older men discussed theories, questioning and speculating, ruling things in or out as they chatted. The gang didn’t go for the money while Norma was alive, so she probably wasn’t involved. But how did they know the coal chute was there? Do all these cottages have them and, if so, is that common knowledge? And Mike . . .? It looked like he was the ringleader, with Barry as his right-hand man. But on the night they came back for the money – something went very, very wrong.

*

Mike stood amid the pile of bricks that used to be Norma’s kitchen wall. Crumpled bundles of notes flowed over the bricks like a waterfall. He scooped them up, his hands like two shovels, and stuffed them into the green garden waste bag Ester was holding open. In front of Mike, higher on the pile of bricks and closer to the 1.5 metre square coal chute hole, Angela and Julia separated out the final bundles of £5 notes and £10 notes and threw them into the open hearth. Connie stood by the window as lookout, although Rose Cottage was so secluded that if anyone did turn up unexpectedly, they’d be on the driveway before she spotted them.

Angela slowly stood upright, working through the sharp, needle-like pain in her lower back. She looked towards Julia, hoping for sympathy, but was instead confronted with Julia’s arse in the air as she stretched her own pain away with a Downward Dog yoga pose. As the final two bundles of £50 notes were dropped into a bag, Ester rolled the top of it down, squeezed out all of the air and tied the twisted corners into a knot.

‘Right,’ Angela said, ‘let’s load up the van.’

The women picked up the garden waste bags, two by two, and took them outside, while Mike began stacking the bundles of £5 notes and £10 notes into the empty hearth – there had to be somewhere between £1.5 million and two million altogether.

‘Imagine it’s just paper.’ Angela had returned without Mike noticing. ‘It’s not legal tender any more. It’s impossible to cash in, so it’s got to go. The bag on the sofa is yours, Mike.’

‘Ange . . .’

Mike wanted to say so much but, in truth, he knew he had nothing to say that she wanted to hear. There was a time when Angela had looked at him like he was