The rain had stopped now, and Dolly took her coat off to reveal a pink Dance Center tracksuit. Linda and Shirley bowed their heads to hide their giggles. She looked like a hideous pair of velour curtains. Linda imagined her at the Sanctuary, bouncing about in an aerobics class, sweating like a fat fluffy pink pig. Oblivious, Dolly took a stopwatch out of her pocket and handed it to Bella, then folded her coat neatly and placed it on the picnic blanket.
Following Dolly’s lead, Shirley and Linda each put a heavy rucksack on their backs. Linda tried to lift the chainsaw, but the weight of it was clearly too much for her. ‘This is a bloody waste of time,’ she muttered. ‘It’s obvious that Bella should be the one carrying the saw!’
Shirley tightened the shoulder straps on her rucksack to stop it bouncing as she ran. ‘Why don’t we just do what Dolly says and start rehearsing? We don’t know anything for sure yet.’
Bella winked at Linda and settled down on the picnic blanket to watch them run through the initial stages of the operation.
Dolly sat in the driver’s seat of the Morris, with Shirley and a stony-faced Linda in the back seat. Linda had the chainsaw on her knee, complaining about its weight.
‘OK,’ Dolly explained, ‘we’ve got four minutes from start to finish. Let’s just try timing getting out and starting the chainsaw. Ready, Bella?’
Bella gave them the thumbs up.
‘Three, two, one... GO!’ Dolly leapt out of the driver’s seat, raced to the back of the Morris and pointed Bella’s driftwood shot-gun out into the distance behind them. Shirley scrambled out of the back seat and stood by the edge of the picnic blanket, pointing her driftwood shot-gun in the direction of the security guards. And Linda... Linda was still stuck in the back seat of the Morris, smashing the chainsaw against the door frame like a dog trying to get through a door with a long stick in its mouth.
‘It’s too long to get out of the fucking door!’ Linda screamed in sheer frustration.
‘Well, you got it in there, you must be able to get it out!’ Dolly shouted back.
Eventually Linda maneuvered the chainsaw into the other seat, and flung herself out, dragging the saw after her. She gripped the start cord, pulled it much harder than required, let go of the wrong bit and dropped the saw on her foot. ‘Bollocks to this, I’m not doing it!’ Linda shouted as she hopped around. She threw her rucksack down onto the sand, and refused to budge. As though the raid was for real, Dolly ran back to Linda, picked up the chainsaw, started it and shoved the end into one of the Morris’ door panels.
Shirley was in awe of Dolly’s complete determination not to be beaten. Linda hoped the old cow would drop the saw and cut her own leg off. Meanwhile, Bella sat patiently on the picnic rug, timing everything. The noise of the chainsaw on metal was horrific. It will scare the living shit out of the guards when they hear that from inside their security wagon, Bella thought. By the time they glimpsed the four masked ‘men,’ they’d be putty in their hands.
It took fifteen minutes for Dolly to cut through the side of the car. It wasn’t so much that the saw blade was blunt, but that she simply didn’t have enough strength to push it down into the metal. Linda sat on the edge of the blanket, next to the pillowcases full of sand, feeling guilty as she watched the sweat drip from Dolly’s forehead.
Once Dolly had cut a segment out of the car’s door, she raced to the blanket and picked up one of the sandbags. Automatically, Linda leapt to her feet and Dolly stuffed the sandbag into her rucksack. ‘Ready to reset, Bella,’ called Dolly, breathing heavily. Bella got to her feet as Linda put one sandbag into Dolly’s rucksack and another into Shirley’s.
Linda spoke as she moved. ‘Why are we still timing this shambles? The coppers would have shown up, nipped for a tea break, come back and nicked us all before we even got a sniff of the cash.’
‘GO!’ Dolly screamed and led the way down the fifty-yard run. In no time at all, Shirley and Linda had overtaken her and were having their own race, while Bella effortlessly jogged along by their sides.
At the end of the run, the three younger women waited for Dolly as she came coughing and spluttering across the line and fell to her knees on the pallets. ‘Again,’ Dolly said, sounding as if she was about to be sick.
‘No,’ Bella said taking control of the situation. ‘Let’s get a cup of tea. We’ll go again in twenty.’
Dolly scrambled to her feet. ‘We’ll go again now!’ she screamed.
Bella stood her ground. Bent under the weight of the rucksack, Dolly looked even smaller compared to the elegant height of Bella. ‘We now know the order of events and we know we can do it,’ Bella said calmly. ‘But that took twenty minutes longer than it should have done. If we go again now, we’ll achieve nothing. So, let’s have a cup of tea, get your breath back and we’ll go again in twenty.’
For a moment, no one spoke. The four women walked slowly back along the beach between the neatly laid out pieces of driftwood toward the Morris, the picnic blanket and the waiting hamper.
‘I meant to ask, Shirley...’ Linda said, breaking the tense silence. ‘Where did you get that lovely jumpsuit?’
Chapter 18
Terry Miller had been at the disused quarry for two hours setting up the vehicles. Jimmy Nunn, an ex-racing driver, was an old mate of Terry’s and was going through a bit of a hard time, having, ironically, been banned for dangerous driving. Married and on the dole, Jimmy desperately needed a job and Terry thought he might be their perfect fourth man — not that he’d dream of making that sort of decision without Harry Rawlins’s approval.
Terry had taken Jimmy to meet Harry in a pub three months previously, although Jimmy had had no idea what for. Harry liked to take his time to size up new boys before working with them, or telling them what he was up to. That day at the quarry Harry was there to watch Jimmy at work. If he liked what he saw then he’d tell him what the job was and put him on the team as a driver. Jimmy was a good-looking fella, about thirty-three, six feet, with a big frame. With no criminal record other than petty driving offenses, he’d never had his fingerprints taken. He had been on a couple of bank robberies as a driver before, so came with good references, but his reputation for not cracking under pressure had more to do with the risks he’d taken when he was a racing driver.
Jimmy was testing the engine of the bread truck that Len Gulliver had nicked for Joe Pirelli from the Sunshine Bread Company. It was a good, square-shaped vehicle with double doors at the back. Joe had attached a heavy metal bar under the rear bumper, strong enough to take the impact when the security wagon rammed into the back of it, and had fitted a cross harness to protect the driver from the impact. Jimmy put his foot down and did a circuit of the quarry. It didn’t sound too good, but it would by the time he had finished with it. Once back with Harry and Terry, Jimmy jumped straight out of the van, yanked the bonnet up and leaned into the engine to fine-tune it. Harry was impressed.
While all this was going on, Joe Pirelli was in the woods that ran along the side of the old quarry, test firing his sawed-off shotguns by taking a few pot shots at woodpigeons and the odd pheasant. Joe was a professional and fanatical about his ‘irons,’ regularly cleaning and greasing them down with oil. For the past three years, Joe and Terry had worked together closely and Terry respected his self-assurance and nerves of steel. Joe also had a quick temper and could be violent, but Terry and the others always knew how far they could push him. If you saw his dark eyes give a strange jerky flick, that was the warning... then Joe Pirelli was lethal. Although they shared a mutual respect, they weren’t close friends and rarely socialized together outside of work. One of the boss’s rules. And if you worked for Harry, you did as he said without question; that was the way it was and the way it had to be for everyone’s safety.