Widows

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.