*
Across London, Anik was feigning composure as he instructed a uniformed PC on how the search of Mike’s flat was going to go and what they were looking for. Ridley had gone back to the station, leaving Anik with this weighty responsibility. He waved the search warrant round ostentatiously and was a little bit disappointed that he had no one to actually serve it to.
Mike’s flat was a typical, grubby-looking bachelor pad in dire need of a very deep clean. The carpet was worn thin in a T-shaped pattern, showing that Mike walked most frequently from the kitchen, to his favourite armchair, to his bureau. The bureau was stuffed full of paperwork in no kind of order – bills, bank statements, ownership documents for a Range Rover and some payslips for Barry. This bureau gave Anik two vitally important pieces of information – Barry’s mobile phone number, and the only vehicle registered in his name.
Mike’s expendable cash each month amounted to nothing more than pocket money which, judging by the four empty whisky bottles down the side of his armchair, was mainly spent on booze. There was a block of several years when Mike’s bank transactions occurred in Spain rather than in the UK, so that was presumably where he was living.
The uniformed PC entered the lounge, holding an evidence bag containing an obviously well-used toothbrush with splayed bristles. Anik nodded his approval at the toothbrush being an appropriate DNA source.
‘Can you also bag all of this paperwork, please?’ Anik requested, waving his arm vaguely over the bureau before heading towards the kitchen.
As he left the lounge, he grinned to himself. He thought he sounded just like Ridley ‒ authoritative, commanding, intelligent. Ridley was exactly the kind of copper Anik aspired to be. He wanted nothing more than to be able to dish out an order and then walk away from his subordinates, knowing that they’d do as he asked out of total respect . . . so it was a good job he didn’t turn around or he would have seen the PC, who was twice Anik’s age, making a ‘wanker’ motion with his hand.
Anik knew Mike’s kitchen would probably be grubby, seeing as they were now nine days into the investigation, but the food in the fridge was way older than that. He gagged as he opened the fridge door and the smell of the cheesy milk hit his nostrils. In addition to the milk, there was a heavily sprouting red onion, half a bottle of white wine, several bottles of beer and a leaking breast of chicken in an open food bag.
The sink was piled high with dirty mugs, each patterned on the inside with several brown rings of varying shades, dating back weeks. Mike definitely wasn’t a man who could survive for long living alone. He needed to be looked after.
As Anik progressed through the flat, each room was a different degree of filth. There were no surprises and definitely no hidden millions. Less than one hour later, the tiny, one-bedroomed flat had been searched from top to bottom. Anik’s final instruction to the PC was to bag all of Mike’s shoes, so that their treads could be compared to any footprints found at Rose Cottage.
Then he bellowed, Ridley-style, ‘I’ll be in the car!’ and left.
Once on the pavement outside Mike’s flat, he realised that ‘I’ll be in the car!’ would have been a far more impressive exit if he was the driver and actually had the car keys.
*
Mike’s Portakabin contained a grey metal desk with three drawers, a grey metal filing cabinet, two fake leather office chairs and a plastic yucca plant. The desk drawers were pretty much empty apart from the proverbial half-bottle of cheap whisky and two glasses. There was also a chewed pen lid and some paper clips, but nothing else.
Jack flicked through a desk diary, while Laura leafed through files in the cabinet.
‘These are all clients. Low-end security, mainly night shifts. There’s a packing factory, a private hospital, a bit of door work. Nothing exciting. His last few jobs might be worth a look into – see if they could have got him into trouble with anyone.’
In the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet was a grubby old sleeping bag.
‘He sleeps here sometimes.’
Laura stepped outside. Round the back of the Portakabin was a set of deep, wide tyre tracks.
‘Excuse me!’ she shouted to the warden.
‘Range Rover,’ he said before she could ask. ‘Second-hand’s my guess, ’cos new you’d be talking fifty or sixty thousand and Mr Withey didn’t have that. It sometimes sat back there all night, which isn’t strictly allowed but I assumed he’d had another row with the missus and they both needed a little bit of space, so I let it go.’
Laura smiled her thanks and stepped back inside Mike’s Portakabin.
‘He’s on the ball for an old fella.’ She sat on the edge of the metal desk, facing Jack. ‘No laptop. You think he never had one or did he just work from his mobile?’
‘This diary’s mainly work related,’ Jack mused. ‘When he writes down jobs, he includes a lot of detail. Full names, addresses, phone numbers, an outline of what’s needed. Which makes other pages with less detail stand out as maybe hiding something. On the day of the fire, he’s written “RC. 2 a.m. Del.” RC could be Rose Cottage. Who do we think Del is?’
Jack’s mobile pinged and a text message from Anik popped up. Jack read it out.
‘No laptop at the flat. Must be there.’ Jack quickly typed something back and waited for the ping. ‘Anik says it’s all paperwork at the flat. So I don’t think Mike’s got a laptop.’
From nowhere, Laura suddenly got all personal.
‘How’s your dad?’
Jack suddenly felt very guilty for having not thought about Charlie all day, but he definitely didn’t want to have a conversation about him now.
‘He’s going how he wants to go.’
Laura put her hand on Jack’s arm, looked deep into his eyes, gave him a sympathetic tilt of the head . . . but said nothing. He wondered what she wanted him to do – smile? Cry? Ask for a hug? Not knowing how else to get out of having an unwanted emotional exchange, Jack stood, scooping Mike’s diary up and moving away from Laura.
‘Is this all we’re taking?’ he asked.
He knew he’d been rude, but if he wanted a heart-to-heart about losing his dad, it would be with Maggie. He didn’t know how to explain that, so walking away was actually the most polite response he could think of.
Outside, the warden still sat on the stack of tyres with his head dipped and Jack couldn’t tell if he was sleeping until he heard, ‘Ready for off?’
Jack and Laura thanked him for his time, made sure that they could return if and when the identification of ‘Sheila’ was confirmed, and left Mike’s sparse office in the warden’s shaky, but otherwise very capable hands. By the time they had walked back to their car, the warden was still trying to get the key in the door of Mike’s Portakabin to lock it.
‘Sorry for making you feel uncomfortable,’ Laura said.
Jack didn’t know what she was talking about. He stared at her, racking his brain, before deciding that she must be referring to when she put her hand on his arm. He shrugged and smiled a tight, fake smile.
‘I wasn’t uncomfortable. I just thought we’d finished.’
*
When Anik returned to the station, the accompanying PC was carrying nine bagged and tagged pairs of shoes to compare to the footprints found at Rose Cottage. Five came from Mike’s flat, and a further four from Barry’s flat, which they’d also received permission to search.
Barry had not only been out, but his neighbours had confirmed that he hadn’t been seen for just over a week, approximately the same length of time as Mike.
Today had been hugely productive with regards to information about Mike and, although the DNA comparison between the bone marrow and the toothbrush would take between twelve and twenty-four hours to process, most of the officers on Ridley’s team now suspected that their murder victim from Rose Cottage was, in fact, Mike Withey. But Ridley knew that by answering the question of identity, a thousand more questions would need to be asked.
Why was Mike Wit
hey in Rose Cottage? Did he know about, or was he involved in, the train robbery? Or did he stumble across the hidden money years later? Then the biggest of all the questions . . . who killed him? Ridley took Mike’s personnel file into his office and shut his door.
He pored over Mike’s file during this pause in the investigation, while they waited for DNA results. But he didn’t look at Mike’s case reports, as Jack and Laura had done. He looked at Craigh’s. Craigh had been Mike’s DI; therefore Ridley knew how his reports should have been written, so he was looking for anything out of the ordinary. Sure enough, around the time of the wrongful raid in search of weapons at The Grange, Craigh’s reports started to feel clumsy. They lacked detail or seemed incomplete and Mike’s name was often omitted altogether, making Ridley wonder if this was an attempt to distance him from the case. The information that led to the gun raid had come from Mike and was, after all, bogus. Maybe Craigh was protecting his own reputation by distancing himself from Mike? Mike’s personal vendetta against Dolly Rawlins certainly seemed to have influenced his actions and – in Ridley’s opinion – Craigh was covering his back.
The biggest alarm bell for Ridley was that Mike had retired from the police force eight months after the train robbery, spent some time in Spain and acquired enough money from the sale of a villa to buy a massive mansion in Weybridge. Or did he? Did Audrey’s villa sale make anywhere near enough for Mike to buy his £1.5 million house, or did he have money from some other source to make up the shortfall?
From his desk, Ridley could see the two crammed evidence boards in the squad room, and all the faces and names that had so far been connected to one or more crimes dating back as far as 1984.
Did Mike Withey know Norma Walker? And, regardless of Bill Thorn’s saintly opinion of her, was Norma the mounted rider who stopped the train on the night it was robbed? Did Mike help her? Did Barry? It certainly seemed far more likely that people with an inside knowledge of police procedure robbed the train, than a bunch of women setting up a children’s home, even if they were ex-cons. Once Ridley had got his head around everything, he stepped back out into the squad room with his instructions.
‘Anik, go back and speak to Susan Withey. I want a detailed timeline of every move her husband made, from the moment he left the force to the day she reported him missing. And I want to know how much they paid for their house and how much Audrey got from the sale of the villa. Jack, find out everything you can about Mike’s family ‒ Audrey, Shirley, and there’s a younger brother, Greg. And find those missing women from The Grange.’
The pace of this investigation had now increased – from this moment forward, Ridley knew that every little detail would have to be nailed down before he went to the Super accusing a possibly dead ex-copper of committing the biggest train robbery in UK history.
CHAPTER 13
Jack and Maggie sat unnaturally close on their sofa, champagne glasses in hand, fixed grins on their faces, staring at the open laptop on the coffee table in front of them. It was eleven o’clock. Jack wore a nicely ironed shirt, Maggie wore a smart blouse, as though they were going out to a smart dinner party – and both wore pyjama bottoms. Their image in the top right-hand corner of the screen deliberately showed them from the waist up. Eventually the word ‘connecting’ disappeared from the centre of the screen.
‘Hello, darling!’
Penny’s overly excited voice crackled through the laptop speakers and Jack’s head sank in momentary despair as Penny launched into her obviously rehearsed chatter.
‘Mum! Mum, click the camera! Dad! We can hear you, but we can’t see you. Click on the little icon thing that looks like a video camera!’ Jack and Maggie could hear Penny and Charlie having a mumbled conversation, before their faces finally appeared on screen. ‘We can see you now!’
All four of them raised their glasses and said, ‘Cheers.’
Maggie and Charlie looked like typical Brits abroad – they had bright, shiny pink faces and looked half-cut. Charlie’s shirt was open down to his belly button, showing off his abundance of grey hairs that looked ten times greyer against his pink chest. Penny wore a halter-neck dress but had clearly been wearing a spaghetti strap vest-top throughout the day, so now her shoulders were an array of pink and white stripes. Jack couldn’t stop grinning as she went on and on about what they’d been up to.
‘Madeira has the most wonderful food, Jack, Maggie would love it. We’ve seen whales and dolphins, haven’t we, love? And it’s ever so green considering the heat. We’re in Funchal ‒ have you been to Funchal? It’s Europe’s most picturesque and cleanest capital, according to the guide books. It’s famous for pirates. And do you know who was born here? Guess, Jack. Go on.’
‘No idea, Mum,’ Jack lied.
‘Cristiano Ronaldo!’
Jack and Maggie stifled a giggle and sipped their champagne as Penny continued with her various tales of beautiful gardens, long beach walks, the thrill of eating at eleven o’clock each night and drinking cocktails with fruit perched on the rim of the glass. And all the while, Charlie watched every move that she made, listened to every word and laughed at every single terrible attempt at a joke. He was exactly where he wanted to be and Jack knew it. He almost cried because his parents looked so incredibly happy. His relief was palpable.
*
At ten o’clock the next morning, Jack was being frisked by prison guards on his way into Pentonville to see Tony Fisher. Tony and all of the other inmates wore yellow tabards to distinguish them from the visitors ‒ not that that was really required. The cons in this wing were the kind of men you’d cross the road to avoid just because of how they looked.
Tony walked towards Jack with a scowl on his face that said, You’d better be worth getting out of bed for, boy.
When he sat down, he didn’t bother pulling in his chair and getting comfortable, suggesting that he had no intention of staying. He had a natural sneer and, for 75 years old, he was still a frightening man. He had a split lip, a cut just beneath his left eye and a small wound to his neck, which Jack assumed was where his young assailant had tried to cut his throat. Tony was bigger than Jack, stockier and far more intimidating ‒ and he knew it. Tony stared, motionless and silent. If Jack didn’t speak within the next couple of seconds, he had the feeling Tony would get bored and leave.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me, Mr Fisher. I appreciate it.’
Jack knew that a man with such a big ego would prefer to be treated with respect, even if it was fake.
‘I don’t give a fuck,’ Tony growled.
Jack couldn’t help but smile, because he sounded exactly like the impression of a stereotypical East End gangster Jack had done for Laura.
‘I’d like to talk to you about the Witheys. If you don’t mind.’
Tony’s face softened just marginally and he scraped his chair under the table; he was staying after all. He grinned, showing his short, worn, yellowed teeth with blackened lines round the gums.
‘I’ll talk to you about Shirl. I’ll talk to you about her all day long. She was proper tasty and fancied me something rotten. Great tits that just fit into the palm of your hand. Big blue eyes with zero brain behind them. Perfect woman in my books. She was a model, ya know. Pretended to be prim and proper but she was just a council slag underneath all that make-up and fancy hairdo. I reckon she saw me as her ticket out of there and to something better. I owned half of Soho back in the day.’
Jack pandered to Tony’s ego again by revealing everything he knew all about the Fisher brothers’ social standing back in the eighties. It had been comparatively impressive; they were very well respected in the criminal hierarchy and they normally stayed one step ahead of the police, so Tony actually had a lot to be proud of.
‘The rest of the family? Greg was a twat,’ he suddenly blurted out, so he’d obviously been thinking about the rest of the Withey family while Jack was talking. ‘Drugs and all that crap. Made him thicker than Shirl. And Audrey . . . Jesus Christ! She
was an ugly cow. How she produced a stunner like Shirl, I’ll never know.’
‘Did you know Mike Withey?’
‘Not for long. He was a scrote when he was a kid, then he went into the army, which turned him into a pussy. People think the army turns boys into men, but it don’t. It makes pussies who can follow orders, but who can’t think for themselves. That ain’t got nothing to do with being a man in the real world ‒ that’s institutionalisation, that is. And there’s no fucking point in being able to kill a man with your bare hands if you’re not allowed to actually do it. Nah, the only thing Mike could have been when he came back from the army was a copper – from one bunch of sheep to another. No offence,’ he added with a grin. Oddly, Jack agreed. ‘My path never crossed with Mike’s in a professional capacity, you understand. He came to the club a couple of times, Shirl told me bits about him, then there was gossip from people he was into for a couple of grand. Mike Withey had one foot in your world and one foot in mine. He never quite had the balls to be bent, but he was definitely flexible, if you know what I mean.’
Once Jack had asked all the questions he needed to about the Witheys, he moved on to his own investigation.
‘I spoke to a bloke the other day who suggested that you might have known Jimmy Nunn.’
Tony immediately wanted to know who had mentioned his name, and Jack thought there would be no harm in revealing that it was Kenneth Moore. He explained that Ken knew the Fisher brothers by reputation and had ‘great things to say’. This seemed to placate Tony enough for him to answer.
‘Jimmy Nunn was thick as pig shit,’ he said. ‘Best wheels man in the business though. How come you’re asking about Jimmy Nunn? He ain’t been seen for donkey’s years. His missus pegged it, I know that. She was a proper slag ‒ the only man I knew that never had her was my brother, and that’s ’cos he was bent.’
Buried - DC Jack Warr Series 01 (2020) Page 13