Widows

by Lynda La Plante

  Dolly memorized the letter before burning it, and slipped the keys onto her own key ring. Harry would have been proud of her. As she carried Wolf up the stairs, she repeated the password over and over to herself: “Hungerford, Hungerford.” The name was easy to remember and the sign-in at the bank was simple, too: “Mrs.,” then Harry’s initials and then “Smith.”

  As she got ready for bed she wondered how much money the Fisher brothers would give to get their hands on the ledgers. She brushed her hair and then went over to the bedroom window. An unmarked police car was parked a little way down from her front gate, waiting, watching. “Bastards,” she muttered to herself, and pulled the curtains.

  Chapter 3

  A crowd of police officers had been at Dolly Rawlins’s place for nearly two days, searching every inch of the house. They had even stripped bare the little cot in the nursery and slit open the tiny mattress with a penknife. And they think we’re the animals, she thought to herself as she held back the tears. Their dead baby’s nursery, the untouched, sacred reminder of the little boy she and Harry had lost, was now soiled, tainted and dirty. She felt as if she was losing her baby all over again, but although the callous disregard for her feelings wounded her deeply, she didn’t show it.

  After the police had finished inside the house, they moved outside. Nothing was left unturned. The garden was dug up, the plant pots were emptied and the soil sifted through, but they found nothing. Not even a stray dry-cleaning ticket was unaccounted for.

  In the lounge, all the drawers from Harry’s desk had been tipped out on the floor, every letter and envelope, every picture frame pulled open. Dolly watched as they mutilated her beautiful home. She didn’t speak, just watched, her body tense with anger; she knew they would find nothing. Harry was too clever, far too clever for the filth. At the sight of DC Andrews, sitting on her upturned sofa taking apart a photo frame he’d picked up from the fireplace, Dolly snapped.

  “You leave that, you bastard!” She made a grab for it.

  Andrews looked to Fuller, who was standing reading Dolly’s private letters. Dolly turned to him.

  “Tell him not to take that! It’s the last photo we had taken together, on our anniversary.”

  Fuller continued reading. “Take it down the Yard,” he said to Andrews, without looking at Dolly. “We need a recent shot of Rawlins to show the victims of this and every other unsolved armed robbery in London.”

  Dolly had had enough. She picked her way through the debris strewn across her lounge, to the telephone.

  “This is harassment!” she barked at Fuller. “I want to talk to your commanding officer. What’s his name?” There was no reply. “I’ll have you for this! And I want my husband’s watch back . . . you hear me? I bought it for him and I want it back! It’s the only thing I have left of him.”

  Fuller continued to ignore Dolly, which infuriated her further. She picked up the phone. “Your commanding officer! Who is he? I want his name!”

  Now Fuller looked at her. “Detective Inspector George Resnick,” he said with a smirk.

  Dolly replaced the receiver as if it had burned her hand. The only time she had ever seen Harry bothered was over Detective Inspector George Resnick. Determined to prove Harry’s involvement in a security van raid, Resnick had turned up at the house to interview Dolly. Resnick threatened that no matter how often Dolly lied, one day he would send Harry Rawlins down for life.

  Dolly had warned Harry that he needed to get Resnick sorted. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” she had said casually, “if Resnick was the one stitched up? Imagine if everyone thought he was taking bribes and the press got hold of it?”

  The following Sunday at breakfast Harry had dropped a copy of the News of the World on the table. Resnick’s career lay in tatters on the front page. Harry had smiled at his wife and opened a bottle of champagne. They had toasted seeing the last of him.

  But now it seemed Resnick was back on Harry’s case, determined to sully his name now that he wasn’t around to defend himself or to protect her.

  “My husband’s dead,” Dolly said to Fuller. “Isn’t that enough for you?”

  The short squat figure of Detective Inspector George Resnick thudded down the station corridor, the inevitable cigarette stuck in his mouth, his overcoat open and a battered hat perched on the back of his head. Resnick carried a thick heavy folder under his arm and, as he passed the main detectives’ offices, he flicked doors open and barked his orders without breaking stride.

  “Fuller, my office pronto, bring the reports. Andrews, get me some coffee! Alice, I want those forensic reports back today!” Resnick didn’t actually catch sight of anyone he shouted at—but he knew they were there and he knew he’d get what he wanted. Reaching his own office, he took his key, opened his door, entered and kicked it closed behind him, causing the already cracked glass to shudder.

  Alice hurtled out of her office clutching the requested forensic reports, just as Andrews collided with Fuller in the corridor.

  “The coffee machine’s broken!” she said.

  The color drained from Andrews’s face. This wouldn’t go down well with Resnick. He scampered down the corridor in search of another one.

  It was already 9:30 a.m., Fuller had been waiting since nine for his orders and, feeling tetchy, he straightened his already straight tie and tapped on Resnick’s door.

  “Enter!” Resnick bellowed.

  Resnick’s office was in its usual state of confusion. Every available surface was crammed with used coffee cups, paperwork and ashtrays full of discarded cigarette stubs; even the floor had piles of files stacked in lines. The drawers in the filing cabinet were open because they were crammed too full. Resnick stood in the center of the chaos smoking his tenth cigarette of the day, coughing his lungs up and reading a file at the same time.

  Alice began sorting out the mess on his desk. She worked fast, tipping cigarette stubs and ash into the bin and collecting screwed up bits of paper from all over the room. She was there to restore order to Resnick’s disordered life so that, each day, he could see the forest for the trees. Without her, he’d simply drown in files and cigarette ash and piss everyone off even more than he already did. Alice had been with Resnick a long time and she knew the torment he’d been through; she’d been right by his side through every moment of his investigation, she’d seen him in those quiet vulnerable moments late at night and she understood exactly what he had lost when Rawlins set him up and then grassed him to the papers. Above all else, he lost his dignity and standing as an officer—and that was impossible to get back no matter how hard he tried. Most people in the station thought Alice was an angel to cope with Resnick’s mood swings and foul habits on a daily basis, but she loved working for him. He went from role model to embarrassment in the blink of an eye and, although everyone else seemed to have forgotten his spectacular early years in the force, she never would. She would be loyal till the end. And she was the only person he ever said “please” and “thank you” to.

  “Alice is taking my rubbish down to the incinerator to burn, Fuller,” Resnick said. “I don’t allow cleaners in here as things may go missing, be seen by the wrong people or get into the wrong hands.” Fuller blushed, wondering if Resnick was implying something.

  As Alice cleared a space on the desk for the phone, it rang.

  “What?” barked Resnick. He listened, growing redder by the minute and then slammed the phone down. “Criminal Records,” he spat. “Up in arms cos I’ve ‘removed files without permission and without filling in the proper forms.’” Resnick threw a crumpled piece of paper at Fuller. “Fill that in and send it back to the fuckin’ arseholes! And get the rest of the lads in here!”

  As Fuller left the office to summon the rest of Resnick’s men, Andrews arrived with the coffees. Resnick grabbed one, lit another cigarette and began his daily routine of filling his newly emptied and cleaned ashtray. Within seconds, Fuller was back with Detectives Hawkes and Richmond. As everyone settled, Fuller compl
eted the backdated records request sheet and handed it to Alice; she’d go down there in person and smooth things over . . . again.

  Resnick pulled up his chair, plonked himself down in front of his lads and spread out the contents of a file onto his clean and tidy desk. Next, he opened an envelope from forensics and tipped out a bunch of large color photographs of the dead bodies from the raid, horribly mutilated, their faces burned and contorted. The worst of them showed the charred remains of Harry Rawlins, unrecognizable as a human body, apart from the bit with the watch on it.

  “She didn’t need to have him cremated, did she?” Resnick quipped as he laid out the photographs on his desk. Leaning back in his chair he noted that Andrews looked shocked. Fuller wore his usual arrogant, unperturbed expression. Fuller was a good officer, but there was something about him that got right up Resnick’s nose; even now he was sitting there as if he had a red-hot poker up his arse. Andrews, on the other hand, who was perched on the end of a desk because he couldn’t find a chair, was an idiot. Hawkes and Richmond he knew of old; good, hard-working coppers but nothing exciting. Since returning to work from suspension, the top brass had not been so willing to entertain his officer selection requests, so he’d had to take the ones he was given.

  Resnick eased his chair forward, opened the previous night’s reports and glanced over them. He lit yet another cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew the smoke out toward Fuller. Tapping the report, he picked up an enlarged photo of Rawlins’s forearm and wrist watch. “Says here, Fuller, you think we’re spending too much time on this Rawlins business. That correct? That what you think?”

  Fuller bristled and looked to Andrews for support. Resnick was on him like a flash.

  “Oi, Fuller, it’s you I’m talking to, not him!” He stood up. “You think I’m wasting your time do you, Fuller? Well, let me tell you this, you narrow minded little . . .” Resnick stopped himself from swearing and leaned his clenched fists on his desk to steady his anger. “We’ve got the case of the century, right here, and if you can’t see that then you’re even more stupid than I think you are.” Fuller rolled his eyes and Resnick flew into a rage. “‘Here we go again!’ is that what you’re thinking? You’re all told within minutes of joining up, aren’t you? ‘That’s him. That’s the poor sod who was framed!’ Castrated more like and who did it to me, eh?”

  Fuller didn’t like being the target of Resnick’s anger. “One of Harry Rawlins’s mob apparently, sir,” he said, through tight, angry lips.

  “That’s right. And not one of Harry Rawlins’s mob does so much as fart without the nod from him. It was Rawlins that did me in! And now it’s my turn to get him by the balls and wipe him out.”

  Fuller looked Resnick straight in his raging eyes. “It’ll be a bit difficult now the man’s dead.” The silence in the room and the stare between Resnick and Fuller seemed to last forever. In Fuller’s opinion, Resnick was a wreck and a has-been. A bright boy, groomed for promotion, when Fuller was told he was being moved to work under Detective Inspector Resnick, he’d felt shafted. Everything about the man annoyed him: his scuffed, filthy shoes, his stained shirts, the constant smell of BO, his cigarettes and yellow smoke-stained fingers . . . Fuller had decided he’d try and sniff out anything he could on him. It shouldn’t be difficult: everyone knew the fat man’s history. Mud sticks, Fuller thought to himself.

  Resnick rammed his hands deep into his pockets as though restraining himself from thumping this insolent subordinate. When he spoke again he was calm and quiet. “I’m not talking about Rawlins himself, I’m talking about his system. His ledgers . . . which I’m well aware you don’t believe even exist, Fuller.”

  Pacing up and down behind his desk, Resnick spoke fast, spitting out his words while simultaneously gulping smoke into his lungs and blowing it out through his mouth and nose.

  Resnick slapped file after file of unsolved robberies onto his desk. “The A3 Raid, the Euston Bypass Raid, the Blackwall Tunnel Raid.” His stubby finger prodded each file as it landed. “Take a look at the formation on the suspect vehicles, Fuller, each one’s identical, and each time the men got away. We’ve got nothing on any of them, not a single bloody thing.” Resnick’s tirade was interrupted by a coughing fit, the jowls on his face shaking, a puce color rising upward from his neck. “An’ you can bet your sweet life, all of ’em, every single one, was instigated by Harry Rawlins! And do you know why I think that?” Resnick paused, staring daggers at Fuller, waiting for the arrogant prick to say something smart. Wisely, Fuller chose to say nothing. “Cat got your tongue, Fuller?” Resnick taunted. “Let me help you out. I think Harry Rawlins was behind every single one of these unsolved armed robberies, because the MO is exactly the fucking same as the job that blew him sky high! And I also think that all of these robberies will be detailed in his ledgers.” Fuller’s greedy eyes flicked from the mess of files on the desk, to Resnick’s red, sweaty face. Resnick smiled. “That’s right. Dozens of crimes, just waiting to be solved. How would that look on your prissy bloody starched and ironed CV, eh?”

  Resnick waddled over to a whiteboard with a sheet over it and jerked his head. Like a bunch of schoolboys, they hurriedly clustered around him.

  “We solve one, we solve them all.” Resnick announced as he pulled the sheet away like a magician, revealing a detailed drawing and crime scene photographs of the failed robbery in the Strand underpass. With a red felt-tipped pen Resnick ringed a picture of a bread truck. “A truck like this was seen by a witness in front of the security wagon.” Next he ringed the raiders’ Ford Escort van. “This is the van that exploded, killing the three men inside.” Jabbing the circled bread truck with his finger, he hammered his theory home. “In every single one of these robberies—” Resnick pointed to the scattered files on his desk—“they use that same formation: four men. The solo driver up front—that’s the man we want. He’s our link to everything else.”

  Feeling Fuller’s watchful eye on him, Resnick had a sudden desire to belt him one, but controlled his urge and stepped aside to leave the other officers absorbing the crime scene photographs. Helping himself to the remains of Andrews’s coffee, he watched Fuller making copious notes in his CID issue notebook, failing to notice the coffee dribbling down his own shirt front.

  “Why haven’t we found that driver, Fuller? Or the bread truck? It can’t be difficult to trace a vehicle that size that delivers in the West End,” Resnick said. He was enjoying watching Fuller’s mouth twitch with anger.

  Fuller knew Resnick was trying to rile him. He struggled to hide his resentment. “The lads have been searching night and day,” he said. “The fact is, we only got a sketchy description of the truck from one witness. It might not even have been a bread truck—could have been any large white delivery vehicle. And, more to the point, it might have had nothing to do with the robbery.”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said about MO? And if you’d bother to read all the statements from the failed raid, you’d see a witness who was driving in the other lane thought the large white vehicle in front of the security van suddenly stopped. Now, why do you think that might be, Fuller?”

  “Well, maybe the car in front of the supposed bread truck stopped suddenly and in turn . . .”

  Resnick cut him off. “The bread truck driver’s our link, our only link—the one that got away! Mark my words, Fuller, that driver is part of the whole thing. He deliberately stopped suddenly to block the security van.”

  Fuller wasn’t going to get into an argument. “If you say so . . . sir.”

  Resnick detected the beat before Fuller said “sir.” He let it ride but frowned. “My gut feeling says so, Fuller. The driver of that bread truck will know everything and everyone involved, even the back-up team. Harry Rawlins was rumored to keep details of all his crimes and associates in ledgers. If it’s true, then whoever drove that truck away has to know about them and maybe even where they are. We find those ledgers and we’ll clear up God knows how many robberies, and make a shedl
oad of arrests. I want every man that ever came into contact with that bastard Rawlins questioned, along with anyone who comes within pissin’ distance of his wife. I want round-the-clock surveillance on Rawlins’s widow. Get it organized pronto, Fuller.”

  “What about the other two widows?” Fuller asked.

  Resnick caught the twitch at the right side of Fuller’s mouth, but chose to ignore it. “They’re not worth following for more than a couple of days. I can’t see them knowing anything of any use.”

  “And the Rawlins antique shop?”

  “Bollocks to it! That place is a cover, a front for funding the robberies and laundering the proceeds. The business ledgers from that place will be squeaky clean. It’s his criminal ledgers I want!”

  Resnick strode to his office door and farted loudly as he left, imagining that stiff prick Fuller’s face twitching. Bellowing with laughter, Resnick stomped off down the corridor as they all rushed out of his office after him, holding their breath.

  Back in the main CID office, Fuller grabbed hold of Andrews. “You know Rawlins never spent a single day in the nick or got charged with anything while he was alive? All we know for sure is that he was running a legit business. If he was the man behind all those armed robberies, where’s the dough? We searched Rawlins’s house, we got his and his widow’s personal bank details and there’s nothin’—not one thing that puts him in the frame.”

  Andrews nodded. “Maybe Resnick’s wrong about the bread truck driver. We’ve made loads of inquiries at bakeries, shops and supermarkets, so it seems strange that we haven’t traced the van or its driver.”

  “’Course he’s bloody wrong!” Fuller exploded. “But we have to prove it to him—so get Hawkes to carry on with that and you get yourself and Richmond settled outside the Rawlins home. See what the widow’s up to.”