Ridley looked round at his team. Everyone was gripped—except Laura, who was frowning as she stared at Jack. Ridley followed her gaze. Jack had his hand up.

“I think Barry’s definitely involved, sir, but there’s nothing to suggest he’s a mastermind. I think we need to look again at the women. If Dolly was the woman that Audrey says she was, she’d have had the balls to hide twenty-seven million in the cellar of an ex-copper.”

Ridley looked skeptical. “Those women have been ruled out. Twice. Once in 1995 and again by us. By you, in fact.”

“There was no evidence,” Jack pointed out. “But then, there was no evidence to connect Dolly to the diamond raid either, yet we now know that she was the one who walked away with everything.”

“So, no evidence means they did it?”

Anik smirked and the sergeant’s post drifted back into his sight.

“And,” Ridley continued, “if they’d just got away with a life-changing sum of money, why the hell, two days later, are they shooting each other?”

“That was Ester,” said Jack. “She’s unstable, but the rest of them aren’t. The diamonds have to be how Dolly bought The Grange in the first place, sir. With all due respect, you haven’t met them. They’re . . . I don’t know, there’s something about them. They’re calm—like they’ve been hiding in plain sight.”

“Or maybe they’re innocent?” Anik chipped in.

Jack ignored him and kept his focus on Ridley.

“We know Angela worked for Ester and had an affair with Mike, whose family has history with Dolly. We’ve been slowly linking them together this whole time, and now Audrey is telling us that her son did the train robbery.”

“Which I agree with, but—”

“Call it gut instinct, sir,” Jack interrupted, “but I know we should be looking at these women.”

“Your ‘gut’ has just spent next month’s overtime budget digging up a grave for no reason,” said Ridley angrily. “I’m the one who’ll get daily flak on that for the foreseeable, not you. You’re all right, Jack. Your newly acquired ‘gut instinct’ has a lot to learn. We’re going after Barry Cooper and when we find him, my gut instinct says we’ll also find the rest of the money and a gang of as-yet unidentified army blokes who were in on the train robbery.”

Jack marched the twelve-minute walk to pathology in just under seven minutes. He was fuming. He’d finally found his passion for this thankless job and now he was being ignored. His mind raced with disjointed thoughts and then oddly settled on something he had only read in passing many weeks ago—the name of George Resnick. The entire station had mocked George when he insisted that Harry Rawlins was alive, and hadn’t been blown up in the Strand underpass. Every scrap of evidence was against him, his team was against him, but he knew he was right. Jack recalled how he’d wanted to feel that sort of tenacity. That sort of certainty. Well, now he did. He knew the women from The Grange were up to their necks in this.