“I wonder whether we should go to the police,” said Maggie.
“It’s a bit late for that, Maggie. They’d wonder why we didn’t call them immediately. And what if they froze the money in the bank? We’d lose our first bit of freedom.”
Maggie privately though they had lost it already, but he had said
She let in the clutch. “Where are we going?” asked Fell.
“I thought we’d go out to one of those motorway restaurants and eat junk food, comfort food, for once.”
“You’re a good sort, Maggie.”
Maggie felt the sunlight outside flooding her insides with yellow light. But she felt she had to say something about Melissa Harley.
“About Melissa,” said Maggie. “I feel now I behaved disgracefully. I wasn’t trying to isolate you from people, Fell.”
Fell sighed. “I suppose you think a woman who looks like that would never be interested in me.”
“Not at all,” said Maggie quickly.
“I was hurt,” said Fell. “Badly hurt by your snooping. But the events of last night have made me pretty much forget about it.”
“Let’s not talk any more about it at the moment,” said Maggie, negotiating a roundabout and turning down onto the motorway.
“I’ve had about two driving lessons,” said Fell. “But I can’t imagine myself ever driving on a motorway. Look at them! The inside lane does seventy miles an hour. But the middle lane does eighty and the outside lane ninety or more.”
“You get used to it,” said Maggie. “When I first started driving, I would keep to the inside lane and just chug along behind the trucks.”
After several miles, she turned off at a motorway restaurant.
Soon they were seated over enormous breakfasts of toast, eggs, bacon, mushrooms, beans and sausages.
“So if we can stay awake after this lot,” said Maggie, “we’ll go back to town and start at the library. Are any of your father’s old workmates alive?”
“I’ll need to ask around. Dad was pretty old when he died. I hate this. I don’t know if I can live in my house again. I’ll always be waiting for a knock at the door, dreading that Andy will come back.”
“Let’s not think about that now. But perhaps we should get some sort of security, a burglar-alarm system, something like that, and a peephole on the front door so we can see who is calling. We can look up the business pages in the directory for a security firm.”
Maggie regretted the idea of a greasy breakfast although she finished every bit of it. She felt tired and heavy.
She drove them back into Buss and they parked outside the public library. “When was the robbery?” asked Maggie.
“It was sometime in the seventies. Wait a bit. They talked of nothing else in the town. Let’s start with the local newspaper for 1978.”
An hour later, after ploughing through pages and pages of a bound volume of the
“I don’t want to draw attention to us.”
“I’ll ask the librarian. She won’t be interested. So many people ask her for things, she won’t remember us in particular.”
“I don’t know…,” began Fell doubtfully, but Maggie was already on her feet and moving to the desk. The librarian was a young girl in her twenties. She had real blonde hair and bright blue eyes. Maggie was glad it was she who had gone to ask and not Fell. Maggie’s world was becoming peopled, she felt, with women who might lure Fell away.
“I’m looking for something on a train robbery which took place here,” said Maggie.
“Oh, the Buss train robbery,” said the girl with a smile. Those blue eyes were intelligent. No one that pretty ought to be intelligent as well.
“There was a book written about that by a local man,” said the librarian, switching on the computer on her desk. “I’m sure it’s out of print, but we might still have a copy because it’s of local interest.”
She flicked expertly at the machine. “Ah, here it is.
Maggie went back to Fell, her face glowing with triumph. “Someone wrote a book on it,” she told Fell. “Wait there and I’ll get it.”
She searched the shelves, and to her delight, located the book and brought it back to Fell.
“Can we borrow it?” she asked. “Do you have a library card?”
“Yes,” said Fell, thinking what a refuge this library had been in his dark, lonely days: a world full of books of romance and adventure. The very smell of the books meant comfort. The dome in the ceiling of green glass shed an underwater light down into the library where submarine humans like himself wandered along the shelves seeking escape.
They decided to take the book down to the river bank and study it. The robbery had actually taken place in 1977. “I’m getting old,” said Fell ruefully. “I should have remembered it was seventy-seven.”
Holding the book between them and sitting on the grass by the river, they read steadily.
At last Fell said, “To summarize, the robbery took place at ten o’clock in the morning. The bit where my father comes in seems to be that the train was not due to stop at Buss but the signal was against it and so the train stopped. As soon as it stopped, five masked men attacked the train. There were only six Post Office employees, a train driver and a guard on board. The Post Office employees were threatened at gunpoint and tied up. The guard tried to escape and was beaten to death. It was estimated the robbers got away with five million. Dad was pulled in for questioning. He said he received a phone call telling him to stop the train. The call was traced to a phone box. Dad had an excellent record. Joe Briggs, Tarry Joe, was suspected because it turned out he had a criminal record, but he fled to Spain, and there was no extradition agreement between Britain and Spain then. The others were pulled in for questioning, and the ones I remember meeting when I went to see my father in the signal box were Fred Flint and Johnny Tremp, maintenance workers.”
“So where do we go from here? Didn’t your parents discuss it?” asked Maggie.
“Not a word. In fact, I don’t remember them actually talking much about anything. We’ll start with the phone book and see if Fred Flint and Johnny Tremp are still alive.”
“You would think the police would have caught at least one of them.”
“It says in the book that the police said it was planned like a military operation. They were looking for some sort of criminal with an army background.”
“It’s going to be awfully hard to find out anything after all this time,” said Maggie sadly.
“What amazes me is why Andy Briggs was not picked up at the airport, or Dover or however he came back into the country.”
“They’d be looking for Joe Briggs. Briggs is a common name. They wouldn’t be looking for the son.”
“You’re right. Let’s go home and look at the phone book.”
Maggie hesitated. “I think we should take that book back to the library.”
“Why? I would like to go through it again.”
“It’s like this. If Andy comes back and we’re forced to call the police, they’re going to put two and two together and maybe search the house. If they find this book, it’ll start them thinking.”
“You’re right. Next time we want to check it, we’ll read it in the library.”
As they walked back across the grass, Maggie said, “You could always say you were writing a book about Buss and want to do a chapter on the train robbery. That would give us an excuse to go around asking questions. We could even try to find that local inspector who was on the case, the one from Buss; what was his name?”
“Inspector Rudfern. I could do that, Maggie.”
They returned the book and headed home.
