‘The supervising guard said in his statement that the tall man who was watching the TV monitor kept scratching his face through the balaclava. At the wedding I was in a group photo. Tommy was standing next to me and Smith and O’Reilly were directly behind me. O’Reilly had a red rash all over his face and Smith made a joke about it, then Tommy said, “Now we know why he prefers the soft touch of nylon.” ’

Teflon looked bemused. ‘What’s your point?’

‘We know Aidan O’Reilly wore a stocking mask in the Leytonstone robbery – stockings are made of nylon and balaclavas of wool,’ Jane explained. ‘If O’Reilly’s allergic to wool, he would get a rash on his face.’

‘So why would he wear a balaclava this time?’ Teflon asked dismissively.

But Jane knew she had the answer to that.

‘He had a cut to his head that would be visible through a stocking mask. A balaclava doesn’t give away any features apart from eye colour, and both the supervisor and the guard, Archie, said the man with the sawn-off had blue eyes . . . just like—’

‘Tommy Ripley,’ Teflon said.

‘Bax, how long did it take our suspects to play their round of golf?’

Bax looked in the observation log.

‘They teed off at seven a.m. and were on the eighteenth at 10.50. Stanley said Smith was a shit golfer, so I would have thought they’d take a bit longer than that.’

‘That’s if they were actually playing golf,’ Teflon said, catching on to Jane’s idea. ‘Does the Royal Epping golf club have woodland on it?’

‘It’s called the Royal Epping Forest – the clue’s in the name,’ Bax replied sarcastically.

‘Can you look in the A-Z and see if there are any roads by the course that you could get to through the woods?’ Jane asked Teflon.

‘I’m on it.’

‘What are you two doing?’ Bax asked.

‘Jane’s on to something big,’ Teflon said as he opened the A-Z.

‘What?’

‘I think the Ripley gang did the Shoreditch job,’ she said.

Bax started to laugh but Teflon was on her side.

‘She’s serious, Bax, and there’s evidence in the guards’ statements that backs her theory up.’ He looked at Jane. ‘There’s three roads with sections of woodland that lead to the course where they could have left and returned.’

‘I reckon it would take about thirty to thirty-five minutes to get from the course to the Security Express depot in Shoreditch on a Saturday morning at seven o’clock,’ Jane said.

‘How could they leave the course and return nearly three hours later without other golfers seeing them?’ Teflon asked.

Bax grinned. ‘Easy. You just need to make sure there’s nobody playing behind you when you go back on. When I was younger, we used to sneak on and off the local course and never got caught once.’