“Terrain?” Ridley guessed.

“Yes,” Anik agreed. “The terrain’s, you know, up and down. So, The Grange wouldn’t have been visible from here either. Not much is visible from here, to be fair. Nice view though.”

He walked down the wooden stairs, joining Ridley and Laura on the tracks.

The team then went their separate ways. Anik went to interview James Douglas, the signalman on duty the night the train was robbed. And Laura and Ridley went to interview John Maynard, the builder who had been helping to convert The Grange into a children’s home.

Jack was halfway through a 1 hour and 50-minute train journey from London to Taunton. He had his notepad out and was scribbling names down as he searched for various people in the HOLMES database and also googled news articles from back in the day. Jimmy Nunn, Boxer Davis, Carlos Moreno, Joe Pirelli, Terry Miller: the same names kept coming up, over and over. The East End of London was definitely a different place back then. The criminal “underworld” was actually quite visible, with everyone knowing who the key players were, who to stay away from, who not to cross. There was a definite hierarchy and it was respected. Not like today. Criminals today never climbed to the lofty heights of “notorious.”

Jack came across several old case files belonging to DI George Resnick who, back in the late seventies and early eighties, had seemingly been obsessed with tying the elusive Harry Rawlins to any of the numerous crimes he was suspected of. Resnick had been like a dog with a bone, ignoring all contrary opinions and faithfully following his gut. His name had been dragged through the mud by the gutter press; he’d been suspended, forced toward early retirement, denounced as an embarrassment to the force . . . Still, he stood by what he absolutely knew to be true—that Harry Rawlins was involved in the Strand underpass armed robbery on a security van. It was Resnick, and only Resnick, who’d claimed that Harry Rawlins had survived that otherwise deadly explosion. It was Resnick, and only Resnick, who’d chased a ghost with the absolute conviction of eventually being proved right.

Shit! Jack thought to himself. That’s what I want.

That all-consuming passion for catching the bad guy. That unshakable knowledge you were right.

But Jack knew he was asking for the impossible—because to be that kind of copper, he’d require a nemesis like Harry Rawlins and they just didn’t exist anymore. Each day on the job, all Jack was doing was hoovering up scrotes, wasters, druggies and lazy bastards who had decided that crime was easier than working. That’s why the Rose Cottage case was so intriguing and why tracking Jimmy Nunn was so exciting: because he was being taken back to a time when being a criminal was a vocation and a crime could be a work of art. Jack couldn’t quite believe he was yearning for “proper” gangsters, but the thought of his birth dad being part of this old-school criminal underworld was oddly exhilarating.