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  Charlie Wilson always maintained that the line he was meant to have spoken to Butler, 'I don't see how you can make it stick without the poppy and you won't find that' – the 'poppy red' (bread) being a convoluted rhyming slang for money – was a total fabrication. Maybe. I, for one, had never heard any of them use that particular phrase. But Butler didn't need to make anything up; he had prints at the farm.

  'OK.' Bruce wagged a finger at the policeman. 'And you lot fitted up Gordy, good and proper.'

  'He was there, Bruce,' Bill said. 'Gordy was at it, you all were. It was all part of the game back then.'

  'Not for you,' I reminded him.

  His face drooped a little. Did he regret once being quite so right and proper? 'I was out of step.'

  'What happened to your mate? Haslam, was it?' I asked, knowing full well it was.

  'Len? Went in one of the anti-corruption purges in the early seventies. Jumped before he was pushed. Frank Williams was head of security for Qantas by then. Gave him a job, I believe.'

  'All right for some,' muttered Bruce.

  The robbers had not fared well. Most were broke or dead, like Charlie, who escaped, was recaptured by Buder, served his time, then ended up in the drugs trade that killed him. Ronnie escaped from Wandsworth and was still at large in Rio, despite Jack Slipper's various attempts over the years to get him back. But everyone knew that what Ronnie craved most of all was a pint in Redhill, not cocktails on the Copacabana. He was not so much a fugitive as an exile, banished from his beloved homeland.

  Roy spoke up for the first time. 'So – was there a grass?'

  My heart began to beat a little faster. Geoff's role in this – and Marie's – had never come to light. It wasn't my fault, not really, although I had stupidly broken the rule about keeping the wives in the dark. Between them, Geoff and my missus had helped put Butler onto Bruce.

  'Ah, that'd be telling. Was there a Mr Big?' Bill asked mockingly.

  Bruce laughed. 'Now who is playing an old tune?' Bruce maintained he had never denied the Mr Big concept simply because it helpfully diminished his own role in things. He had hoped for a lighter sentence or earlier release if they thought he was a mere lieutenant. It might have helped, too; he only served nine of his twenty-five. Or perhaps attitudes had changed by the time he came to do his time. 'You can tell me now, Bill. If there was a snitch, it's not like I am in a position to do anything about it.'

  Laughton sighed. 'You know we had anonymous calls. About you.'

  Bruce's head snapped round and he glared at him. 'Who from?'

  'Anonymous people. By definition we don't know who they are. One of them mentioned you, Bruce. And you, Tony. That's why we were so sure you'd had something to do with setting it up.'

  Me? This was the first I had heard about that. Who could or would finger me?

  But really, I knew immediately. Janie Riley. Beautiful, sexy, unstable Janie Riley.

  Bill saw certainty forming on my face and moved quickly on. 'But we were already onto both of you. There was no big grass in the firm, Bruce, there didn't need to be. Just a lot of little mistakes on your part. I don't believe there was a Mr Big, either. Only some bloke on the inside we never caught. Eh, Bruce?'

  Bruce remained impassive, brooding on it all. I hoped he didn't come up with Janie as the snitch. Not after all this time.

  Then he surprised us all by saying, apparently a propos of nothing: 'You know Janie Riley topped herself? Pills. Well, pills and a bottle of vodka. It happened while Jack and I were in Mexico. Buster, I mean. He was Jack in Mexico. Shame.'

  Nobody spoke until Roy put his head in his hands. 'What jolt will I get for all this, Mr Naughton?'

  'I don't know, Roy. Four? Six, tops.'

  He groaned. 'Don't talk to me about six. I can't do six.'

  "Course you can,' said Bruce, placing a hand on his shoulder. 'You're still a young bloke.'

  The movement was so quick, the arm a blur, it was as if

  Roy was demonstrating that he still had the reflexes of a twenty-eight year old. He snatched up the pistol and had it in his mouth before any of us could stop him

  'No!' I managed to shout as I lunged forward, but Bruce was there before me, grappling with Roy. I threw myself backwards as the gun went off, the discharge filling the room and traumatising my eardrums. A slow trickle of plaster came down from the ceiling, as if it had escaped from a snow-globe.

  A graceful curl of blue smoke spiralled slowly above the table. We all watched it, transfixed, for a moment.

  Bruce stared down at the weapon in his hands and tossed it to Bill, who caught it and slotted it into his overcoat pocket.

  We all then looked at Roy, and at the thin trickle of blood running from the corner of his mouth. Bruce must have caught the foresight on the skin as he wrenched it from his mouth.

  'I fuckin' hate guns,' said Bruce, handing him an immaculate, folded handkerchief. 'What you doin' with one, Roy? You could hurt yourself, you know?'

  Roy dabbed at the wound and gave a small, hollow laugh. 'I bought that from a mate of Charlie's when I got out. I was going to shoot Dennis for pissing all my money away. Good, solid Dennis, stand-up bloke, developed a taste for the gee- gees and bimbo women. Who would have thought it?' He looked up at Bill. 'Only thing I got to show for the whole kit and caboodle was a house for my mum.'

  'Must be easier ways of getting one of those,' said Bill.

  'I should have stuck to motor-racing.'

  'We all should have,' said Bruce. 'You're still bleeding, mate. Sorry about that. Keep the handkerchief.'

  'We have to go,' said Bill. 'Someone outside will have heard the shot. They'll be in here like Bruce bloody Willis any minute.'

  I shook my head and my ears popped and I was fully back in the room. 'We'll lock up,' I promised. 'Turn out the lights.'

  'Thanks. And can you leave a dish of milk outside for next door's cat?' Roy asked.

  This tickled Bruce and his thin frame shook as he laughed. 'Fuck me, Roy. Don't you ever learn?'

  I remembered then that one of the prints that incriminated Roy had been on the cat's bowl at the farm.

  Roy gave a lascivious wink. 'You haven't seen the neighbour.'

  He stood, and first I, then Bruce shook his hand, a solemn moment with a strange feeling of finality, of the curtain coming down one last time.

  'Thank you for your time, gents,' said Bill. 'I'll be in touch.'

  'I'll always stand character witness,' said Bruce, breaking the gloomy atmosphere. 'I'm good for it.'

  'Christ, only if Peter Sutcliffe's not free,' said Roy, with a grin that seemed to come from the old Roy James.

  Bill Naughton smiled, placed a hand on the small of Roy 's back and propelled him into the hallway. As they headed for the front door, Roy 's arms were already going up above his head in the traditional gesture of surrender.

  Bruce and I sat in silence for a few minutes. I poured the remains of Bill's whisky into my own glass and pulled back the curtains. The sky was growing lighter now, a very tentative dawn, no more than a few spirals of burnished copper in the east.

  'How are you really, Bruce?' I asked, turning back to him.

  A wave of weariness seemed to wash over him. For the first time, he looked his age. I probably did too. Staying up till first light was a young man's game. We needed our beauty sleep.

  'Me?' he said. 'Since I got home, I'm an old crook living on handouts from other old crooks.' He began to build himself another joint. 'You know, when I got back from Mexico and put the word out, I thought there'd be dozens of young guns wanting to get involved with the famous Great Train Robber. Not a bit of it. They were like – "whoa, thirty years? I'm not having any of that". Still the same, even now. I guess that fuckin' judge knew what he was doing, after all.'

  I suddenly remembered I needed a lift back home and that the cops owed me one. I didn't want to walk out to an empty road. 'We should go, too.'

  He looked at the joint, made to light it and thought better of
it. He tucked it into an inside pocket. 'And then there are those twats who think I'm still loaded. That I live in Croydon because I'm an eccentric millionaire. They only got about three hundred grand back, so they reckon we still have the rest. They have no idea. There's some right fuckin' villains out there, including the lawyers. They should look at how much those cunts charged us all.'

  'I can do you a good deal on a BMW.' I handed over a card. 'Give me a bell.'

  He took it and examined it. 'My BMW days are over, but thanks. If I get a second wind, I'll come down for one of those nice old Sixes. You must be doing OK.' He ran a thumb over the printing. 'Embossed and everything.'

  I explained to him that after my run-in with Len Haslam, I'd gone to Germany with the money he had intended to plant on me, where I had bought ex-Post Office yellow VW vans and shipped them back to England. They soon became the favoured transport of the hippie generation, and I made enough, eventually, to come back and open a BMW and NSU franchise, one of which, at least, came good.

  'So you landed on your feet, after all? You know, the only one of the rest of us who really did all right was Gordy. Served his time, came out, got his money, a hundred and sixty grand, and buggered off. Hardly a sniff since, apart from the odd wish-you-were here card from Spain. He did OK, did Gordy.'

  'Him and Tiny Dave.'

  'Ah, yes. The one who really coshed the driver.'

  Jack Mills was dead now, killed by leukemia, although there were those – his family amongst them – who still reckoned it was the robbery that really did for him.

  'It was Dave who hit him?' I asked. 'I always wondered.'

  A shrug. 'I wasn't on the train. Bloody chaos it was, by all accounts. But yeah, that's how it went. With a lot of encouragement from Buster, so I hear. And if Dave hadn't done it, Buster would have. Like a bloody little Jack Russell with that cosh, he was.'

  'Whatever happened to Tiny Dave?' I asked.

  'Ah. Talk about Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Tiny Dave was last seen walking off into the night with his whack, thirty years ago.'

  'Never heard anything?'

  'Of Dave? Not a dicky bird.'

  I remembered him talking about going to Bangkok. I wondered if he'd made it. 'Which means he is either the legendary One Who Got Away. Or…'

  'Someone killed him and took the money. Wouldn't surprise me. That cash never brought anything but bad luck.'

  I recalled Billy Naughton had said much the same thing when we were out on the rowing lake. 'Toxic', he had called it.

  Bruce mistook my silence for disbelief. 'Look at the facts. Charlie dead, Brian Field dead, Bill Boal dead. Buster and Roy bloody basket cases. Ralph was coming back to give

  himself up a few years ago. Been lying low in Belgium. Got a ferry back. The Spirit of Free Enterprise.'' I shook my head at the bad luck. The boat had capsized, killing 193 people. Clearly, Ralph, the dwarf signal man, had been among them. 'And Tommy Wisbey's in a bad way. You hear that? Strokes. Never the same after his sixteen-year-old daughter died in a car accident. And Bobby Welch a cripple. And for what? It was an eye-opener when I realised the poor sod of a train driver ended up with more than me in the end, after the great British public had a whip-round for him.'

  That wasn't strictly true; Mills hadn't received anything like a hundred and fifty grand. More like thirty, as I recalled. But it was a fact that he held on to more of it than Bruce. 'You know the young fireman died too?' I asked.

  'Who?'

  'The co-driver. David something.' Anything to do with the robbery had always caught my eye, often triggered a what-if moment, where I thought about how close I came to being in that dock. 'Heart-attack. Thirty-three or four, he was.'

  'Shit. That's a tough break.' Then, with a twinkle in his eye, 'They blame that one on me as well?'

  'Not that I heard.'

  Bruce stood, pulled on his overcoat, picked up the glasses and cups from the table and took them to the sink. 'Ah, well,' he said with a rueful smile as he rinsed them. 'As the old Sinatra song has it, you might be on top of the world in April, but you'll crash and burn in May.'

  We stood staring at each other, pondering this pearl of wisdom from Ol' Blue Eyes. 'Wasn't he back on top in June?' I asked.

  Bruce put a quarter-inch of milk in a saucer and placed it outside the kitchen door, then locked and bolted it. Placing

  a bony, veined hand on my shoulder, he steered me towards the front door, flicking off lights as he went. When he spoke, the jaunty sing-song tone had disappeared, replaced by a melancholy whisper.

  'Ask Roy. He'll tell you. Sometimes June is a fuck of a long time coming.'

  Aftermath

  Bruce Reynolds: after moving around various safe houses in London, he fled abroad (France, Mexico) but, once the money ran low, he came back to the UK. He was caught by Tommy Butler in Torquay in 1968, given a twenty-five- year sentence but released in 1978. Reynolds and his wife divorced while he was inside, but were reconciled upon his release. He did time in the early 1980s for dealing in amphetamine sulphate, which he still contests. Reynolds is the author of a very successful, and readable autobiography (see Acknowledgements).

  Ronald Biggs: the most famous/notorious of the robbers, but one who played only a small part in the robbery itself. After his escape from Wandsworth in 1965, he moved around the world before settling in Rio, where he fathered a child who saved him from extradition by Jack Slipper. In 2001, he returned to England, a very sick man, having been on the run for a total of thirty-eight years. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 so he could die a free man.

  Ronald 'Buster' Edwards: on the run, he joined Bruce Reynolds in Mexico but, homesick, he eventually returned to the UK and gave himself up. He was sentenced to fifteen years in 1966 and was released in 1975. Despite being portrayed as a lovable cockney rogue by Phil Collins in the movie Buster, there are those who still believe he was the one who coshed driver Jack Mills. Found hanged in his garage in 1994, at the age of 62.

  Charlie Wilson: sentenced to thirty years, he escaped from Winson Green Prison after four months. He was tracked down in 1968 by Tommy Buder in Canada, brought home, and served twelve years. Wilson was shot dead outside his Marbella home in April 1990.

  Roy James: the talented racing driver was jailed for thirty years; he served twelve. An attempt to pick up his driving career failed and for a while he ran a gold VAT scam with Charlie Wilson, narrowly avoiding jail. In early 1993, he was sentenced to six years after shooting his father-in-law and hitting his wife with a pistol butt. He died of a heart-attack in 1997.

  Brian Field: the solicitor was released in 1969. His wife Karin divorced him while he was in prison, and married a German journalist. He died in a motorway accident in 1979.

  Thomas Wisbey: another thirty-year man, he was released in 1976. However, after a period as a car dealer, he fell back into crime and was jailed for ten years in 1989 for cocaine dealing. Now retired.

  Robert Welch: sentenced to thirty years and released in 1976. Crippled by a bungled leg operation in prison, he ran clubs when released. Now retired.

  Gordon Goody: sentenced to thirty years and released in 1975, he claimed in the Carlton TV programme I Was A Great Train Robber that he spent most of his share of the money on lawyers and was 'ripped off for much of the rest.

  James Hussey: sentenced to thirty years, he was released in 1975. He became a car dealer (in Warren Street) but was jailed for seven years in 1989 for cocaine dealing. Retired.

  Roger Cordrey: sentenced to twenty years for rigging railway signals but served fourteen after an appeal. Returned to being a florist in the West Country.

  James White: was on the run for three years, but eventually gave himself up and was sentenced to eighteen years in 1966. Released in 1975 and opted for a quiet life in Sussex.

  William Boal: died of a brain tumour in 1970 while serving his sentence. Bruce Reynolds always maintained he was never part of the gang.

  Leonard Field: involved in the purchase
of Leatherslade Farm. Sentenced to twenty-five years for conspiring to obstruct the course of justice, later reduced to five. Released in 1967.

  John Wheater: a solicitor jailed for three years in 1964 for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. He was released in 1966.

  There are persistent rumours that between one and three robbers were never arrested or prosecuted. The man identified as 'The Ulsterman' in several accounts ('Jock' here) has also never been traced, nor has the mysterious Mark who acted as go-between. Stan (sometimes called Peter), the retired train driver, also disappeared without trace.

  Acknowledgements

  This novel is a work of fiction. It uses real characters and situations, but I have treated them as a novelist, not a historian. Many characters are entirely fictitious, and any resemblance between them and persons living or dead is entirely fictitious. Nevertheless, the arc of the story, from airport job to train robbery and subsequent capture and prosecution, is an accurate representation of the gang's operations.

  I would like to thank Mike Lawrence, motor-racing guru and author of many fine books on the sport, including The Glory of Goodwood (with Simon Taylor and Doug Nye), who was my very first port of call. I knew I wanted to avoid building the story around the two most well-known train robbers, Ronnie Biggs and Buster Edwards. Roy James (there is some confusion over whether he was ever consistently called 'the Weasel', or if the police got it wrong and the name stuck) seemed to me one of the most tragic of the thieves. Whether he was as outrageously talented as some suggest, I'm not convinced, but he was certainly a more than capable driver, on and off the track.

  Mike not only knew the Roy James story intimately, he

  knew Roy himself: he raced against him in his karting days, and thought highly of his skill. The early scenes on the air base came from Mike's memory, but, of course, filtered through my distorting lens.

  Thank you to Holly Groom for additional research on the trial of the robbers and to Sinead Porter of the News International syndication department for allowing me to use part of Colin Maclnnes' article An Honest Citizen's Guide to the Criminal Classes and extracts from The Times newspaper. Thanks also to Duncan Campbell, ace crime reporter and author of the excellent novel If It Bleeds, which features a walk-on by Bruce Reynolds.