“Apparently Tony pinned the kid down and snapped both of his middle fingers so that, and I quote—” Jack put on a gruff, cockney accent—“‘You won’t be able to wank proper for a munff!’”

Laura let out a loud screech. “Is that what Tony sounds like?”

“Probably.”

Jack laughed and they both headed for the squad room. As they walked down the corridor, Anik ran to catch them up.

“What’s the joke?” he panted.

“You had to be there.” said Laura dismissively.

Anik’s face fell.

There were two evidence boards at the front of the squad room now, gradually filling up with information dating all the way back to 1984. Ridley sat at Jack’s desk while Jack led the room. He pinned up three photos with their names scrawled underneath—Harry Rawlins, Joe Pirelli and Terry Miller—and a black silhouette with a big question mark on the face. Pirelli’s and Miller’s photos were mugshots, but Rawlins’s photo was an old newspaper cutting from the opening of a Soho art gallery back in the early eighties. He had a champagne flute to his lips, his head tilted back and his shoulder toward the camera. In truth, it could have been anyone.

“. . . see, on the first Strand underpass job, everyone initially thought that Harry was one of the robbers blown to smithereens, but he wasn’t ’cos he was shot by Dolly Rawlins just over six months later. Speculation was that Harry Rawlins was probably behind the second Strand underpass job, and he was definitely behind the diamond heist. Now, if Dolly Rawlins planned to convert The Grange into a kids’ home, she had to have had at least some capital. I know she was going for funding to do the place up, but she gave Ester Freeman £200,000, in cash, to actually buy the place. Where did she get that from, less than one month out of the nick?”

Ridley raised his hand to bring silence to the room. “Where is all of this going, in relation to our murder victim?”

Jack paused for a moment to think, which Ridley allowed.

“Well, sir, we know the cash found at Rose Cottage is likely to be the cash from the train robbery back in ’95, because of the age and volume of the notes. And because of where it was found. Every police report from ’95 suggests that there’s no way the armed robbers could have got that amount of money out of Aylesbury before the roads were closed and the searches began. At the moment, I’m trying to eliminate the women from having anything to do with the train robbery or our murder victim—but I can’t definitively. Equally, I can’t connect them either. It’s far more likely that they’ll end up being potential witnesses to something, rather than being involved.”

Anik exhaled a sharp, short stream of air from his nostrils, as though mocking the non-committal comment Jack had just made.

“Something to add, Anik?” Ridley asked.

He knew Jack was dawdling on this investigation, which was something he’d deal with when he was good and ready; but the one thing Ridley hated more than anything else was one copper disrespecting another. That’s not what his team stood for and he wouldn’t tolerate such bad manners.