‘I obviously didn’t,’ snapped Connie, and continued towards the front door. She watched Julia head round to the stables before she let herself in, and ran up the stairs. She couldn’t face any of them but Dolly caught her halfway. ‘Eh! You get the alarm codes? You set them off, didn’t you?’
Connie sniffed, refusing to turn back to her. ‘Yes, I got them, but right now I want to be alone.’
‘Right now, Connie love, we discuss it. Come down here.’
‘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. She felt it was all falling apart and it seemed, at times, that she was the only adult amongst them. She didn’t feel like their mother in any way but she was beginning to think she should call it all off, get rid of the lot of them. She smiled then: she’d got the perfect place, she could push each one of them into the lime pit.
Connie sat in front of her dressing table mirror, studying her face. Why had John said she looked old? ‘Maybe because you are old,’ she whispered, and then twisted her neck, pouting her heroine’s smile. ‘Gonna be rich, though, and then you’ll be young and beautiful, and …’ She stared at herself and for the first time knew she would go through with any robbery Dolly Rawlins had in mind. Rising out of her beloved Marilyn was a Connie that rarely appeared, the other side that she 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 dole out to her. She’d taken the punches, taken the shit, seemed like all her life she’d taken the easy way out, and she wasn’t going to take any more. She pouted and then let her wide sexy lips close into a tight line. ‘Fuck you, Marilyn Monroe …’
Connie breathed on the mirror and, with the tip of her finger, traced the numbers Jim had called to contact the police station. All he’d said was that it was a false alarm. This was valuable information; now 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 to write them down. She found her black eyebrow pencil and a piece of tissue, then closed her eves, 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 Stephens 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, those are the numbers. If the alarm goes off, we call that number.’
Dolly gave that odd smile. ‘You did good, darlin’, very good.’
Connie preened but there was no further praise as Dolly left the room, folding the tissue into her pocket.
She was pleased; it meant that the signal box telephone wires had to be beneath the hut and if all Jim had used was a telephone, all she had to do was cut the wires because the alarm would also be connected to the central box.
Dolly went out alone later that night. 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 prise it open. It didn’t matter which wire belonged to which telephone; she’d simply hatchet 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 her expression wasn’t the usual taut grimace but a sweet soft smile as he 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, as if she knew she would never hear it again, because a new thought began to dawn. What if it had been her voice that Harry had listened to. It had been Dolly who had quietly put him in the right direction. She had never been given the credit by him and had never acknowledged how much he had listened to her. Perhaps not until it was too late. But by then she had been betrayed and he had forgotten his own warnings. He could never have anticipated that she would kill him.
Chapter 16
Mike had a few beers with Colin. He’d called him to say that the prearranged dinner would have to be on another night as there were problems at work; some of his mates had got flu so he was doing extra night shifts.
They talked for a while about the army but then Colin switched the subject to Mike possibly being taken on at his company.
‘Yeah, well, you know, Colin, I’ve been thinking about it, but it sounds like it’d bore the pants off me. I’m not into schleppin’ around in a security wagon all day with a few drops here and there.’
Colin downed his pint. ‘You got it wrong, Mike, this isn’t that kind of company. Like I told you, we handle the big stuff.’ He leaned in and lowered his voice. ‘We deliver the sacks to the mail trains. Ever since they had the big robberies at the main stations, we were brought in. You know about them?’
Mike drank some beer. ‘Nah, they’d be handled by the Robbery Squad, special division, well, 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 could feel his bladder giving way.
Colin leaned ever closer and whispered something as Mike looked on 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 patted Mike’s head, grinning. ‘Think about it and we’ll have that curry next week.’
‘Okay, how about next Thursday?’
Colin agreed. ‘Fine by me. 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?’ She tried to move away but Ester held on tightly. ‘I know, Julia, I can tell by your eyes and your mouth. You get very chatty. So what are you taking?’
Julia shoved at her. ‘For chrissakes, nothing. What’s got into you?’
Ester pushed her away. They kept their voices low, afraid to be heard. ‘Lemme see your arm.’
‘No, I won’t. Why are you doing this? Don’t you trust me?’
Ester pinched her face. ‘No, I don’t. You’ve been acting up since you got back from your 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 before God. I was feeling so bad, and that Norma was hanging on to me.’
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 slowly 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. ‘I wouldn’t do it, 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 dangerous. Then she started to think
about returning the video and the more she thought about it, the more she began to think she should piss off and leave. The robbery was becoming a farce anyway.
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 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. He was just somebody that was connected to her, bad or good, and there was nobody else. Her kids didn’t even know who she was by now. She wouldn’t know them 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, 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 her door was banged loudly.
‘Come on, get up! Time to ride.’ It was Julia. She was usually the first up and about as she took Helen of Troy out in the early mornings.
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 all began talking at once, well pleased with their progress. The general up feeling continued as they ate the eggs and bacon Angela had prepared. Coffee and toast went down as they listened to Julia giving each one separate hints as to where they had gone wrong that morning.
Dolly had a private discussion with Julia. She was getting worried that the stable girls might get suspicious and she wanted Julia to book in at the other place so they could switch for a while. This also meant they would have to get used to different animals, which Julia was a little pessimistic about, but Dolly was insistent. She also mentioned to Julia about finding out exactly where they kept the keys to their local stable yard and then asked her to find out how they could clad 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, past two cottages, so look into it. 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. Ester and Gloria checked the tapes to see if there had been any developments at the signal box. They were now armed with Connie’s information and the number she had seen Jim dial to cancel out the police. They also knew they had four minutes before the police could get to them unless a panda car happened to be cruising nearby.
Gloria had also been under the signal box. She had called out for Buster, a make-believe dog, but nobody had stopped her 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 zig-zag and hadn’t dared get any closer as they unnerved her. Shivers went up her aching spine because the voltage was so high: Connie had told them at supper one night that a dog got on to the line and was thrown up into a tree!
When Gloria got back to the manor, she had severe doubts. ‘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 think to stop it just 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 said flatly, ‘but it’s a bloody big train.’
Ester shook her head. ‘No way, they’d be like ping-pong balls off the side of the train.’
They all remained staring at Gloria’s drawing as she took a thick red pen and drew in the danger zigzags. These will blow us off the track without any shotgun, loves.’
Ester said to 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 towards 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 reversed, 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? What’s he doing here anyway?’
Dolly and Mike parked in a small turning which led 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. ‘Yes, but I’m worried. I mean, how do I know I can trust you?’
Mike leaned back in his seat. ‘I have to trust you. Don’t 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. I don’t want to know anything else. 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. As it is I’ve got myself in trouble – he thinks I want a job with his firm. No way.’
Dolly shifted her weight in the seat. ‘What about some of your other old army friends? Could they help at all?’
‘Look, I got to go, I can’t do any more.’ He hung on tightly to the steering wheel. ‘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 armour-plated, they got a convoy, cops at the front, cops at the back, they keep right on its tail. You do yourself a favour 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, seeing 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 – I won’t grass on you. 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 heading towards her with the three little girls. ‘Here’s Angela and, Mike, she doesn’t know anything. You tell her and she’ll freak out.’
‘Well, at least that’s something.’
Angela was almost at the car when she saw Mike. ‘Hello, my darlin’s.’ Dolly held out her arms for the
girls and they ran to her. One had been collecting some pussywillow 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 towards 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 crass, I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry about the baby, I really am.’
She clung to his hand. ‘I love you.’
He sighed. ‘I know, but, Angela, 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 shit 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 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 and called over, ‘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, weeping. 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? Why are you even thinking about it? You got those kids.’
‘And you got their mother banged up,’ she spat out fast and he turned to face her.
‘You got that house – why? Tell me why.’
She seemed bored by the conversation. ‘Because I won’t have it for long, I’m broke.’
‘So are a lot of people but they don’t do what you’re doing.’
She cocked her head to one side. ‘I’ll look after Angela, don’t you worry about her. You just worry about me, Mike love, and remember, I know everything.’
She's Out Page 33
