“Only if you rat on him.”
John clenched the steering wheel till his knuckles turned white. “I don’t understand you, I thought—”
“You thought what?” she said, her face red with anger.
“That maybe you . . . well, I made a mistake.”
“Yes, you did, John. I don’t like being told who I can go out with by you or anybody else. If I want to screw—”
“Stop talking like that.”
“Talking like what?”
He turned on her. “A cheap tart.”
She slapped his face, almost wanting him to slap her back, but he shook his head and turned away.
“I’ll take you home.”
He started the engine, feeling sick. “Why did you lead me on?” he asked softly.
She gently touched his shoulder. “I’m just not ready to get serious about anyone, not yet.”
He shrugged her hand away. “It’s not as if you’re any spring chicken. How old are you, anyway? You carry on like this and no decent man’ll want you.”
Connie felt as if he had punched her, harder than Lennie ever had. “I’m twenty-five.”
“Well, you got a good figure but I don’t think you can count, sweetheart. You’re not twenty-five.”
She didn’t know what to say. She just felt the tears welling up, trickling down her cheeks. She was only thirty-five but he made her feel as if she was old and worn out. She snuffled as the van turned into the lane by the manor.
“Just drop me here,” she said quietly.
He stopped the van sharply, then leaned across her to open the door for her.
“Jim asked me to marry him,” she said as she climbed out.
“Well, he’s a sucker. He can have you and don’t worry, I won’t rat on him. He’s gonna need every penny he can get keeping you—unless you do more of those films you told me about.”
She slammed the door hard and teetered off along the uneven road in her stilettos. John watched her perfect arse as she sashayed along. Then he drove off, wondering whether or not he could make it up with his girlfriend. Maybe he should even ask her to marry him. She was a decent girl. Sometimes it takes a piece of trash like Connie to make you come to your senses, he thought.
Julia passed him on her way back to the manor. She pulled up alongside Connie and wound down the window. “I was sent out to see if you needed any assistance.”
“I obviously didn’t,” snapped Connie, continuing toward the front door. She watched Julia drive round to the stables before she let herself in, and ran up the stairs, trying to avoid seeing anyone else, but Dolly caught her halfway. “You get the alarm codes? You set it off, didn’t you?”
Connie sniffed, refusing to look at her. “Yes, I got them, but right now I want to be alone.”
“Come on now, Connie love. Come back down here and tell me all about it.”
“Just stop telling me what to do, I done what you wanted, now leave me alone.” She went on up the stairs.
Dolly looked at her watch and then back to the drawing room. She was tired herself but she had to make sure Mike wasn’t setting them up. It was in danger of all falling apart and it seemed, at times, that she was the only adult amongst them. Maybe she should call it all off, and just get rid of the lot of them. She smiled, imagining pushing each one of them into the lime pit.
Connie sat at her dressing table, studying her face in the mirror. “Maybe you are old,” she whispered, and then quickly did a movie-star pout. “Gonna be rich, though, and then you’ll always be young and beautiful, and . . .” For the first time she knew for sure she would go through with any robbery Dolly Rawlins had in mind. She stopped making her Marilyn Monroe face, and the real Connie appeared, the other side that she always hid away, the angry, bitter, tough little Liverpool tart that’d give any lad a backhander, just like her dad gave her, like every man seemed to think he could. She’d taken the punches, taken the shit, all her life, but she wasn’t going to take any more. She closed her full, sexy lips in a tight line. “Fuck you, Marilyn.”
Connie breathed on the mirror and, with the tip of her finger, traced the numbers. Now, thanks to her, Dolly had the code for the alarm. Connie beamed: she wasn’t as dumb as they all made out, but, as the numbers faded in the mirror, she began to panic, searching for something she could use to write them down. She found her black eyebrow pencil and a piece of tissue, then closed her eyes, replaying in her mind the moment Jim, in his panic, punched in the numbers. She might be no good with words, for reading and the like, but she’d always been able to count. No punter ever short-changed tough little Connie Stevens by a penny.
When Dolly appeared, she asked her twice if she was sure she had the right code, staring at the tissue with the childish figures.
“Yeah. If the alarm goes off, we call that number.”
Dolly gave that odd smile. “You did good, darlin’, very good.” Connie felt good, but there was no further praise as Dolly left the room, folding the tissue and putting it into her pocket.
Dolly went out alone later that night. If Jim had just used the telephone, then the wires had to be beneath the hut, and all she had to do was cut them because the alarm would also be connected to the central box. She used a map-reading torch, inching her way beneath the signal box, to check for herself. And, sure enough, in the area marked “No Admittance,” was a large, secure BT fixture, similar to those in residential areas, the ones an engineer sits by with hundreds of tiny wires, and you pass him by wondering what the hell he is doing. Dolly could just make out that she would need some kind of sledgehammer to pry it open. It didn’t matter which wire belonged to which telephone; she’d simply slash her way through the lot of them.
Dolly enjoyed the walk back to the house in the darkness. The air smelt good and clean, a light rain had fallen, the ground sparkled in the moonlight, and she smiled to herself as Harry talked to her in that low soft voice.
“Check everything out for yourself. Never leave anything to chance or to anyone else. Remember, Doll, look out for yourself.” Dolly stopped and his voice died. It was strange, because a new thought dawned on her. What if it had been her voice that Harry had listened to? Maybe it had been Dolly who had quietly pushed him in the right direction. She had just never been given the credit. At least, not until it was too late.
Chapter 16
Mike was having a few beers with Colin, and pushing him for more details about the “big stuff” the company handled.
Colin leaned in and lowered his voice. “We deliver the sacks to the mail trains. After they had the big robberies at the main stations, we were brought in. You know about them?”
Mike took a sip of his pint. “Nah, they’d be handled by the Robbery Squad, special division, if it’s a big one.”
Colin stood up, buttoning his jacket. “Well, if anyone hit what we’re carrying it’d be the biggest in history.”
“Oh yeah?” Mike tried to conceal the tension he was feeling.
Colin leaned even closer and whispered something as Mike looked at him in stunned amazement. “You kidding me? That much?”
Colin winked, tapped his nose. “That’s classified information but that’s how much.”
“Shit. That’s mind-blowing.”
“Yeah, and so’s the security. Routes change every few months, just to safeguard it ever being leaked.” Colin grinned. “Think about it and we’ll have that curry next week. We’ll take the wives, shall we? Make a night of it.”
Ester slipped her arm around Julia, drawing her close. “What are you taking, Julia?” Julia tried to move away but Ester held on tightly. “I know, Julia, I can tell by your eyes. And you get very chatty. So what is it?”
Julia shoved her away. “For Chrissakes, nothing. What’s got into you?”
Ester refused to budge. “Lemme see your arm.”
“No, I won’t. Don’t you trust me?”
Ester examined her face. “No, I don’t. You’ve been acting strangely since you got back from y
our mother’s.”
Julia shook her off but Ester grabbed her again. “Tell me, Julia, or I’ll tell Dolly.”
Julia rolled her eyes. “Okay, look, I took one hit, some gear I’d left at Mother’s, just the one, I swear to God. I was feeling so bad, and Norma was getting on my nerves.”
Ester got out of bed and looked around the room. “I’ll find it, if you got a stash here. I’ll find it, Julia.”
Julia reached out for her. “Darling, there’s nothing, on my mother’s life. There was just a teeny-weeny bit. I wouldn’t get back on it, you know that.”
Ester reluctantly allowed Julia to draw her back to bed. “I hope not, Julia, because if you have started, you’re fucked. And if Dolly found out she’d kick you out of here so fast.”
Julia wrapped her arms around Ester, kissing her neck. “You don’t have to worry, Ester.”
They kissed and then curled up together as Julia tried to think of a good hiding place for her stash and Ester wondered if she should warn Dolly. To use Julia in the robbery if she was back on junk would be madness. Maybe she should just piss off and leave them to it, before the whole thing went tits up.
Gloria felt restless. Her back ached constantly from all the horse riding and she kept thinking about Eddie, wondering how he was. Not that she missed him; if she calculated the years they had been married, the time actually spent together was minimal because he had been in and out of prison so much—and she had been inside herself on and off. It hadn’t really been a marriage at all. The truth was, he was just somebody who was connected to her, for good or ill, and there was nobody else. Her kids wouldn’t even know who she was by now. She wouldn’t know them, either, if she came face to face with them. Maybe it was having the little girls around her that brought back the memories. She’d had her kids taken away when she first got arrested. Like Kathleen’s girls, they had been shuttled from one foster home to another before she signed the adoption papers. She did it to give them a better life. She wondered if they had one, and then started to cry. She cried for the long, wasted years and eventually fell asleep.
It felt as if she’d only just dropped off when there was a loud bang on her door.
“Come on, get up! Time to ride.”
That morning they had a breakthrough. It happened almost all at once: the fear left them and they went from a canter into a gallop and, at the end of the two-hour lesson, they were all beaming and patting each other on the back. The positive feeling continued as they ate the eggs and bacon Angela had prepared while Julia gave each of them separate hints on improving their performance even further.
Dolly was encouraged enough to ask Julia to find out where they kept the keys to the stable yard and how they could cover the horses’ hoofs.
“What do you want to do that for?” Julia asked.
Dolly kept her voice low. “We’ll make a hell of a lot of noise coming out of that stable. We got to ride down the lane, right past two cottages. We got to be silent.” She went back to her coffee and was left at the table with her precious notebook as Angela washed up, while Ester and Gloria checked the tapes to see if there had been any developments at the signal box.
Like Dolly, Gloria had also been under the signal box. She had called out for Buster, a make-believe dog, and nobody had paid her any attention as she clocked the electric cables, the main electricity-power sector and the telephone wires. Gloria had also seen the large danger signs with the red zigzag. Shivers went up her spine because the voltage was so high: Connie had told them at supper one night that a dog got onto the line and was thrown up into a tree!
When Gloria got back to the manor, she didn’t mince her words. “How do we get on the line? We’d get blown into a friggin’ tree if any of us hit that cable.” She was drawing a map of the signal box and the railway junction. “If the gates open and that train moves, it’s gonna go over the bridge, right? Well, after that it’ll pick up speed and no way is it gonna stop.” Gloria prodded her diagram with a chipped fingernail.
Ester frowned, turning the map round. “Maybe she’s gonna stop it at the crossings, then we ride up to it.”
“No way. She stops it there and we’re screwed. There are lanes either side of it—we couldn’t stop a cop car with a bleedin’ horse!” Gloria sniffed.
Julia leaned over them, arms around each of their shoulders. “Maybe she’s gonna blow it up.”
“Oh shut up,” Ester rapped.
“We still got three shotguns,” Gloria shrugged.
Ester looked at Julia. “You know, I think it’s time we had a serious chat. We’re all here being ordered around to do this and that and she’s keeping her mouth shut, scribbling in that ruddy black book of hers. I reckon we’ve got to face her out, ask her just what she intends doing and, more important, how she’s gonna do it.”
Gloria crossed to the window and drew back the curtain. “We got a visitor. Shit! It’s that ruddy cop, Angela’s bloke. I told you we couldn’t trust that two-faced bitch.”
They huddled at the window, watching, as Dolly walked toward Mike, who was getting out of the car. “Stay put, love, let’s just go for a drive, shall we?”
Mike waited for Dolly to get in beside him and then turned the car round and drove out.
“What do you make of that, then?”
Ester sucked in her breath. “Well, I dunno about you two but I think it stinks. What’s she doing driving around with him?”
Dolly and Mike parked in a small turning into a field. He said what he’d come to say and then waited.
“Ex-Army bloke, is he?” Mike nodded. “You sure it’s the truth?”
“All I’m saying is what he told me. Now, I done what I said I would and that’s it.”
Dolly pursed her lips. “How do I know I can trust you?”
Mike leaned back in his seat. “I have to trust you, that you’re not going to stitch me up, Mrs. Rawlins.”
“Oh, I know, love, but I’ve got more to lose than you.”
“I got my job, my kids, my wife. Like I said, I’ve done what you asked me and that’s it.”
Dolly examined her fingernails. “Sorry, love, it isn’t. I need some Semtex.”
“What?”
“You heard.”
“I can’t get that kind of thing!”
“What about your friend?”
“You must be joking! He works for the ruddy security firm, I can’t go asking him for bloody Semtex.”
Dolly shifted her weight in the seat. “What about some of your other old Army friends? Could they get it?”
“Look, I got to go, I can’t do any more.” He gripped the steering wheel tightly. “Let me off the hook, Mrs. Rawlins, and if you want some advice, whatever you’re planning, and I’ve got a bloody good idea what it is, you’ll never hit that security wagon. It’s armor-plated, they got a convoy, cops at the front, cops at the back, they keep right on its tail. You do yourself a favor and scrap whatever you’re thinking of doing.”
“Why? Because you know about it?”
“Because it’s a no-hoper right from the start and—”
“And?” Dolly waited, watching him sweating.
“Look, I grass on you and I’m in the frame so hard I’d get time just for what I done to date. All I’m doing is telling you to pull out, forget it. I don’t care how many blokes you’re using, you’ll never do it.”
Dolly opened the car door and looked down at him. “Thanks for the advice. Maybe you’re right.”
She straightened up and could see Angela coming toward her with the three little girls. “Mike, she doesn’t know anything.”
“Well, at least that’s something.”
“Hello, my darlin’s.” Dolly held out her arms for the girls and they ran to her. One had been collecting some pussy-willow twigs and presented them to her.
“Thank you.” She turned to Angela. “Have a word with Mike, just a few minutes, I’ll wait here.”
Dolly took the girls toward a hedge and began looking for a
bird’s nest, but she could hear what they said and she’d noticed that Mike still had the pen stuck in his jacket pocket.
Angela sat on the edge of the passenger seat, the door open. “Hello, Mike.”
“Hello, sweetheart.” He reached out and took her hand. “Look, I know what I said to you the other day was harsh, but I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry about the baby, I really am.”
She clung to his hand. “You know I love you.”
He sighed. “I know, but, Angela, you and me, it can’t work. I got a wife and two kids and I’ve no intention of leaving them. I never had. If I led you to believe I would, then it was a shitty thing to do, but you have to know it’s over, sweetheart. It should never have started.”
“But it did, Mike.”
“Yes, I know, and it’s all my fault. But the truth is you’re better off without me.”
She started to cry, and he cupped her face between his hands. “I’m sorry, really sorry.”
Dolly coughed. “We should go, Angela love. Say goodbye to the nice man, girls.”
The three little girls waved at Mike, even though they had no idea who he was. Angela got out of the car, her eyes bright with tears. He pulled the door shut, feeling like a heel. He wound down his window. “Mrs. Rawlins, can I have a quick word?” Dolly went to the window. “You hurt her, get her involved, and I’ll see you get busted.”
“Will you now?”
He knew the threat sounded empty. “Why are you even thinking about it? You got those kids.”
“And you got their mother banged up,” she retorted. “I’ll look after Angela, don’t you worry about her. You just worry about me, Mike love, because remember, I know everything.”
Mike felt worn out. He just wanted it to be over. But it wasn’t. He had to get hold of some Semtex and it made him sick just thinking about it.
They walked down the lane, Dolly with a small child’s hand in each of hers. “Don’t cry over him, Angela, he’s not worth it. You’re gonna make your own life now.”
She's Out Page 30
