Buried - DC Jack Warr Series 01 (2020)

by LaPlante, Lynda

  Laura couldn’t hold her tongue. ‘Running a brothel isn’t legal, no matter how old the girls are.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’ Bill shrugged. ‘It was the nineties.’

  Blaming the decade for the abuse of vulnerable women was clearly a good enough excuse for Bill, so Laura didn’t say anything more on the subject.

  ‘So, Ester was a madam,’ he continued. ‘Kathleen, as I recall, was a forger. Julia was . . . I’m not sure what Julia was. Connie was a prostitute, and Dolly shot her husband. I’ve missed someone, I think. Ester, Kathleen, Connie, Dolly—’

  Ridley interrupted. ‘It’s fine, Bill. As you rightly said, it’s all in the files.’

  ‘Those women didn’t rob that train,’ Bill repeated. ‘It was a smart, savvy bunch of professional men who, I reckon, came from your neck of the woods. I tell you, when you find those train robbers and, more to the point, when you find that missing money, you’ll be a bloody hero, DCI Ridley.’

  An additional thought popped into Ridley’s head.

  ‘Anik, I want you to cross-reference all the sex offenders that end up on your list with known patrons of The Grange when it was a brothel. And Jack, use Bill’s files to locate all of the surviving women from The Grange.’

  ‘That’ll be a waste of his time,’ Bill interrupted.

  Ridley remained polite, calmly explaining that everyone around at the time of the train robbery needed interviewing again, as potential witnesses at least, and so they could be eliminated from the current enquiry. He then swiftly, and very politely, ended Bill’s visit.

  ‘Thank you so much for coming down, Bill. You’ve been very helpful. May we call on you if we have any more questions?’

  ‘Please do, sir, please do.’ Bill still exuded enthusiasm. ‘It’s exciting to think I might finally get to see this case closed.’

  Ridley nodded at Jack.

  ‘May I take you to the lift?’ Jack asked, rising to his feet and opening the door.

  They walked at Bill’s slow pace.

  ‘This bleedin’ paint’s a depressing colour,’ Bill sneered. ‘Who chose grey?’

  ‘Someone who doesn’t have to walk this corridor. The top floor’s painted sky blue.’

  ‘Course it is! Sky blue for the suits upstairs, depression grey for the workers down here. You’re not from London, are you? Your accent’s further west.’

  ‘I was brought up in Devon. Although I worked hard to get rid of the accent.’ Jack paused. There was something he wanted to ask. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, Bill . . . but did you see Norma when she was ill, towards the end?’

  ‘At least once a week.’ Bill looked Jack in the eye. ‘Cancer’s a shit illness, I won’t lie. But you know, even when the outside didn’t look anything like Norma any more, she was still there. She had a wicked sense of humour ‒ even at the very end. Cancer kills the body then, eventually, the spirit. So, you pay close attention and when you see them flagging, you remind them how loved they are. That’s your only job, really.’

  Bill didn’t ask who Jack was losing, and Jack didn’t tell him.

  *

  The rest of Jack’s day and early evening was spent tracing the women from The Grange. He was a heads-down kind of officer with tasks like this one; whereas Anik, who sat opposite him trawling through a depressingly long list of Aylesbury sex offenders, couldn’t stand this part of the job. Anik was young and enthusiastic, so he saw policing as being ‘out there’ and not in here.

  As Anik waffled on about how disgusting it was that more than five hundred sex offenders allegedly under surveillance were actually off-radar, Jack was discovering all he could about the Grange women.

  He learned that Kathleen O’Reilly had been arrested at The Grange in 1995 during the disastrous ‘arms deal’ raid led by DCI Ron Craigh. No guns were found, Dolly Rawlins sued Craigh for damages and Kathleen was arrested for failing to appear in court. She was immediately sent back to prison to serve out her sentence on a forgery charge. By the time Kathleen was released, her three girls were in care and none of them wanted to see her. She opted for a very slow death by turning to the bottle, until in 2009, her liver finally gave up and she died alone in an A & E corridor.

  Gloria Radford, Ester Freeman, Julia Lawson, Connie Stephens and Angela Dunn were all last arrested on the same day, 27 August 1995 ‒ just days after the mail train robbery in Aylesbury. Ester was arrested for the murder of Dolly Rawlins; the other women were arrested as a matter of procedure because they were present at the scene. Once any kind of conspiracy was eliminated, they were released.

  Ester’s statement to the police was a rambling, venomous spewing of hatred for Dolly Rawlins. She screamed about being double-crossed and about being treated like a piece of shit on Dolly’s Italian leather shoes.

  The statements from the other women supported the fact that these two alpha females had always rubbed each other up the wrong way. It seemed that their mutual disdain had started when Ester conned Dolly out of £200,000 to buy The Grange without divulging that it used to be a brothel; and it ended when Dolly accused Ester of sabotaging her dream of turning it into a children’s home with the help of the other ex-cons. Tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of funding had rested on one unannounced spot check from the board of councillors and, when they’d turned up, Ester was caught hosting an orgy in the sauna. In that split second, Dolly’s dream had shattered into a million irretrievable pieces.

  On the morning of the shooting, DCI Craigh had visited The Grange to bargain with Dolly about the amount of money for damages she wanted from his misguided arms raid. Ester, quite wrongly, had heard them making ‘a deal’, and thought that Dolly was setting her up to be arrested on some trumped-up charge. The red mist descended, Ester spectacularly lost her senses, picked up a gun and emptied all six rounds into Dolly.

  Craigh had been standing right next to Dolly at the time. He retired shortly afterwards.

  Ester was released in 2017, after serving fourteen years for Dolly’s murder and a further eight years for the attempted murder of her cellmate. According to Ester’s parole officer, she now lived in Seaview on the Isle of Wight. Jack noted down her current address.

  Gloria Radford had a record for gunrunning with her husband, Eddie. They both died in the same car crash in 2004. They’d been out celebrating Eddie’s release from prison and came off worse in a head-on collision with the central reservation. It was a blessing that the crash occurred at 3 a.m., as the road was clear of other drivers.

  Connie’s last known location was Taunton, where she’d applied for various safety assessments in connection with running a B & B; but, from there, Jack was struggling to pin down an actual address. And he lost track of Julia Lawson and Angela Dunn around 2010 and 2015 respectively so, for tonight, he gave up.

  Jack glanced across at Anik. He looked miserable, but also preoccupied enough not to notice that Jack was about to misappropriate the HOLMES database. James ‘Jimmy’ Nunn had a mediocre juvenile police record for drink driving, TDA and similar car-related crimes. Then, in his mid-twenties, he moved up to being a getaway driver for hire. Jack was so disappointed, and hoped to God that if this ‘wheels-man’ was the Jimmy Nunn on his birth certificate, there was more to him than that. He turned to Google to fill in the blanks.

  Jimmy Nunn, for a short but glorious time, had been a racing driver. Something undocumented put a sudden end to his blossoming career when he was just 23 years old, and that’s when things started to go wrong. Jimmy had worked as a mechanic to pay the bills, but the money was terrible and this, seemingly, was when he got into more serious crime.

  Jack read article after article, mentioning Jimmy in association with some of the all-time greats: Niki Lauda, James Hunt, Jackie Stewart and Mario Andretti. Jack shook his head.

  ‘What a fucking waste,’ he whispered to himself.

  ‘What’s a fucking waste?’ Anik asked.

  Jack took a second to think up a lie. ‘One of these women lost he
r kids while she was in prison and then drank herself to death.’

  ‘That’s not a waste. They’re better off without a mum like that.’

  ‘Probably,’ Jack agreed, just to bring the conversation to an end.

  By the time he was ready to pack it in, Jack had created a timeline from Jimmy’s birth in 1945, through his wayward teens, his short-lived Formula One career, and on into his adult criminal years. In 1984, however, the timeline ended abruptly. One of the recurring names from Jimmy Nunn’s Formula One years was Kenneth Moore, an engineer now in his mid-70s and living in Hackney. With the digital trail at an impasse, the next step would be to start talking to people who’d actually known Jimmy Nunn . . . Packing his various files into his overnight bag, Jack headed home.

  *

  Jack was surprised to see that Maggie had taken the night off; dinner was in the oven and the wine was poured. This was the first time he’d seen her since he’d told her the news about his dad. She hugged him, handed him his wine and waited for him to talk about Charlie. She wasn’t expecting to hear him talk about a man she’d never heard of before.

  Jack started in the middle, rather than at the beginning.

  ‘Jimmy Nunn could have been right up there with the likes of Jackie Stewart, but then something changed the course of his life and he . . . Well, he just carried on doing what he was good at really ‒ driving.’ Maggie stared at the contents of the dog-eared file, tipped out and scattered across the living room floor. ‘Dad said that, if I wanted, I could learn about my past. I snapped at him, Mags, and said I didn’t need anyone but him and Mum. But, well, by the time I got to work, I was curious.’ He picked up Trudie’s death certificate and showed it to Maggie. ‘Dead end.’

  ‘She was beautiful,’ Maggie commented as she sifted through the old photographs.

  Jack shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe . . . But I’m going to find Jimmy Nunn. I’ve tracked down one of his old work colleagues and Aunt Fran must know something about him.’

  Frances Stanley was Trudie’s sister, and her signature was on Jack’s foster care paperwork, dated 1984. On the floor in front of Maggie and Jack were several birthday and Christmas cards from Fran, but these seemed to have stopped around the time Jack was five or six years old.

  ‘I think I remember speaking to Aunt Fran on the phone once. I’d won something at school and I asked Mum if I could phone her. She was proud of me. Said she’d send me something for being so clever . . . but she never did.’

  ‘Love,’ Maggie said gently, ‘why do you want to find Jimmy Nunn?’ Jack looked at her blankly, as though the answer should be obvious. ‘I mean, you can,’ she continued, ‘and I’ll gladly help you. But why?’

  The oven pinged and dinner was ready. Maggie kissed him and took her glass of wine into the kitchen. By the time she came back, he’d gone. The hallway door was open and she could hear him talking on the phone.

  ‘I’m sorry to call so late, Aunt Fran.’ Jack checked his watch: 11.45. ‘Oh – I’m really sorry, I didn’t realise what time it was. Yes, I’m fine. I know, it’s been ages . . . London now. Yes, we moved with Maggie’s job . . . I’m a police officer.’ Jack laughed politely. ‘I do like it, yes. It’s challenging, you know.’

  Maggie sat down on the sofa to listen.

  ‘The reason I’m calling is that I was wondering what you knew about Jimmy Nunn.’ Jack fell silent except for the occasional ‘hmm’, ‘OK’ and ‘I see’. ‘Well, do you know anyone who might know anything about him . . .? Yes, I know it’s old ground but . . . No, I understand. OK then, well, thank you for your time and apologies again for calling so late. Mum and Dad are fine, yes, thanks for asking . . . I’ll tell them you said hi.’

  Jack came back into the living room and started to gather up the scattered papers and photos and put them back into the file. He looked dejected.

  ‘Don’t worry, love, you’ll find him without her,’ Maggie reassured him, and went back into the kitchen to dish up their dinner.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jack was first in the squad room the next day. Not because he was being keen; he just hadn’t slept well after the dead-end phone call with his Aunt Fran. He was frustrated by her apparent indifference to his request for help, and it had made him suspect she might have something to hide. For the first time in a long time, he’d had a ‘copper’s hunch’, and now he was more determined than ever to find out more about Jimmy Nunn. But he’d have to be careful: if Ridley thought he was slacking, he wouldn’t hesitate to send him back to Devon.

  By the time Ridley and the others walked in, the evidence board displayed photos of all the women from The Grange along with notes to date.

  ‘Dolly Rawlins . . .’ Jack started as they all settled to their desks. ‘Murdered in 1995 by Ester Freeman. Freeman was released in 2017 and now lives on the Isle of Wight with a guy called Geoffrey Porter-Lewis, a retired solicitor. No record. Kathleen O’Reilly died from alcoholism and Gloria Radford died in a car crash, along with her husband, Eddie. Connie Stephens had a B & B in Taunton, but I’m not sure that she has any more. HMRC has got an old address for her, as has the Licensing Authority, Building Inspectors, local fire safety assessors and so on. I’ll keep looking. Nothing on Julia Lawson and Angela Dunn as yet.’

  Ridley looked at Jack, clearly hoping he had more to say – and in that split second, Jack went from being pleased with himself to being deeply disappointed. Ridley could do that with a single look ‒ like a parent who is used to being let down.

  ‘Right,’ he said, ‘tomorrow I want you in the Isle of Wight . . .’ He paused. ‘Seeing as Freeman’s the only lead you’ve got.’

  Jack winced, sat down and the floor was handed to Anik.

  ‘Did you know, sir, that we don’t actually know where around five hundred of our community-based sex offenders are?’ Anik sounded like he was about to give a lecture on police shortcomings. ‘They’re meant to stay at the halfway houses we put them in and . . . well, they don’t.’

  ‘We’ll tackle that disgraceful statistic another day, Anik. For now, let’s hear what we do know rather than what we don’t.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m working through a list of forty-five sex offenders from the Aylesbury area and—’

  ‘What do you mean by “I’m working through”?’ Ridley asked. Anik clearly didn’t understand the question. ‘Get on to the Vulnerable Persons’ Unit and ask for a couple of PCs to do the donkey work for you. You take what they report and collate it into a document that we can use.’

  Anik grinned from ear to ear at the thought of ‘commanding’ a team of PCs.

  ‘I’ll do that, sir. Thank you. And I found an arrest report for a Daniel Green. He’s a vagrant who’s been picked up a couple of times for squatting in Rose Cottage. He used to nick tea lights from the village church, food from the Co-op and then break into the cottage for a kip. Last time he was picked up, he had a load of printed kiddie porn images from the internet, so he could be the “pervert” we’re looking for. He did two and a half months for that. The local bobbies know him by sight ‒ they’re keeping their eyes open. If they don’t find him, he could be “Shirley”.’

  ‘ “Sheila”,’ Jack corrected, childishly hoping to make Anik look as stupid as he felt.

  Anik took no notice and added Daniel Green’s mugshot to the evidence board. Laura then picked up the reins.

  ‘The total amount of cash being transported in the train back in ’95 has been confirmed as £36.7 million; but a number of sacks were left behind during the robbery. It was all in used, untraceable notes. So we’ve stopped trying to find any serial numbers, seeing as they won’t help us link any of the burnt cash to the robbery anyway. But it’s got to be from that, hasn’t it? I mean, if it was legitimate, who wouldn’t at least try to change one point eight million in old money at a bank? No way you’d just burn it . . .’

  Jack concluded Laura’s thought: ‘Unless you had another twenty-five million stashed awa
y in legal tender somewhere else.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Jack and Laura were now talking as one person. ‘One point eight million becomes pocket money when you look at the bigger picture. This haul has to be from the train robbery.’

  Ridley kept the brainstorming going. ‘The other thing we now know is that the accelerant used was petrol. And it has to have been siphoned from a vehicle driven there, as there were no vehicles at the cottage. Laura – track down all the CCTV you can. There won’t be much, but I want you to identify all cars using that top road. Most cars will belong to residents from the estate, but that doesn’t automatically rule them out. Check them all, please.’ Laura nodded her understanding. ‘The rest of you, use the pathology report that Jack’s about to bring you, to find “Sheila” in missing persons. Any questions? Jack . . . with me.’

  And, with that, Ridley was gone.

  *

  As Ridley and Jack walked the corridor towards Foxy’s lab, Jack waited for the bollocking. And here it came.

  ‘How come you only managed to trace three dead women, and the one living woman who was piss-easy to find because her probation officer’s name was in the files sent across by DI Prescott?’ This was rhetorical, so Ridley left no space for Jack to answer. ‘New DCs like Anik should look up to you, Jack, but he doesn’t. You’re just a bloke he works with.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Maggie about the sergeant’s post—’

  ‘Don’t bother unless you really want it,’ Ridley ended as he pushed his way through the heavy rubber doors into Will’s stark, white, sterile labs beyond.

  Foxy was oblivious to the tension between Ridley and Jack. In his domain he barely even noticed that other people were in the room when he was on a roll. Without bothering to say hello to his visitors, he pointed to ‘Sheila’, lying flat on his back on the table in front of them.