‘Believe me, neither could I, and the monster evaded a life sentence by killing himself.’

The tow truck for the police car arrived and Jane watched as Juliet 1 was slowly pulled out of the rubble by a winch cable. The elderly owner of the house stood watching with a solemn expression as more bits of the bay window gave way and fell on the front of the car. Once it was safely extracted, and a safe distance from the house, they cleared the debris from the car. Dabs pointed to a bullet hole in the bonnet. He tried to open it, but was unable due to the damage from the crash.

‘From the entry point it’s probably lodged in the air filter. Hopefully we’ll find it at the lab or in the house rubble when we sift through it.’

Part of the front windscreen, on the passenger side, was still intact but covered with fractures that looked like large spiders’ webs. Dabs pointed to a one-centimetre circular hole in the windscreen.

‘That’s a bullet hole as well.’

He got in the car to look for any bullets.

After a few minutes he came out holding the front passenger headrest and showed it to Jane. She saw some of the white headrest padding protruding from holes on either side of it. As Dabs got the car keys from the ignition, he said a bullet had penetrated the windscreen, then hit the right side of the radio operator’s head, before passing through the headrest and into the rear seat, and was probably somewhere in the boot.

‘Even though the bullet would have lost velocity when it passed through the windscreen, the officer was lucky it didn’t hit him straight in the forehead and kill him.’

He opened the boot of the car and looked inside. He had a big smile as he photographed the bullet, then picked it up and showed it to Jane.

‘That one’s in even better shape than the bullet we recovered under the car,’ she observed.

She took the bullet from him and put it in a plastic container and then an exhibits bag.

*

After speaking briefly to the bank manager, who couldn’t help much as he didn’t see the robbery, Kingston left the Colonel, Stanley and Bax to take the Securicor guards’ statements. He crossed over the High Road to the Crown public house to speak to the landlady, Fiona Simpson, who’d initially called the police. He knocked on the pub door and it was opened by a small, slim, buxom woman in her mid-forties, who had shoulder-length, black curly hair. She was dressed casually in a blue velour jumpsuit and slippers, and had an orange dusting cloth in her hand. He held up his warrant card.

‘I’m DI Kingston, from the Flying Squad. Is the landlady Mrs Simpson in?’ he asked, thinking she was the cleaner.