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 a hospital corridor.

Gloria Radford, Ester Freeman, Julia Lawson, Connie Stephens and Angela Dunn were all last arrested on the same day, August 27, 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 councilors 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.