Tommy Shepherd waited happily for them to arrive. On the run for four weeks he now had within his reach escape and a new life. He wanted to whistle but kept his silence. The engine shed was a childhood haunt and he was comfortably hidden in the lumber store. Illiteracy had saved him from the news that day. A campaign was mounting in the press for the reintroduction of the death penalty. The depravity of the Moors Murders had shocked the public. But for now, at least, the Homicide Act reserved the death penalty for five specific offences. Destroying an innocent woman’s face with a shotgun was not one of them.
That night Amy Ward lay sublimely unconscious in a hospital bed at King’s Lynn Royal Infirmary. She had undergone her eighth operation, tissue from her back and thigh being used to mask the deep gash which had partly destroyed her jaw and right cheekbone. The shock of the gunshot wound had severely undermined her health and she had only narrowly survived two bouts of pneumonia. Her heart was weak and had acquired an irregular tremor that would kill her – but not soon enough.
Her husband, George, was not at her side. That evening, as the Crossways gang headed for Stretham Engine, he could be found pawing a barmaid in the lounge bar of the King’s Arms at Southery. George loved life and Amy in that order. They would divorce within two years on the grounds of his adultery.
Billy Shepherd arrived early, by rowboat from Belsar’s Hill, and lit a fire in the cellar. It was vaulted and arched in the form of a crypt. The smoke looped through the coal chutes which led up into the engine room. The river damp, trapped in the walls, seeped out in moist waves as the fire warmed the room. At one end of the cellar was a lead-black pile of coal sacks – rustled occasionally by the movement of mice and rats. Billy placed the note he had got his grandfather to write on a stool in the light beside the fire. He put two bottles of whisky on the stone-flagged floor and three tin mugs beside it. He poured himself a measure.
He settled down to wait. His appetite, always voracious, nagged. He smoked to kill it. Like Tommy he had been a thin and delicate child– but their resemblance would not last long. Billy was thickening out in a layer of honed muscle which had already obscured the bones beneath his face. It was taking on the beaten look of newly rolled sheet steel – a chassis for life.
Billy timed ten minutes on the Timex he had stolen from Woolworth’s that Christmas. Then he began to whistle. It was their signal; and above, in the engine shed, Tommy edged closer to the coal chute to listen. A bat flitted in and out of the broken windows as dusk fell. The silence creaked and overhead Telstar completed another orbit.
He heard Reg Camm’s Ford Anglia park carefully on the drove road by the river. His tentative steps stopped just outside the cellar door.
‘It’s OK,’ said Billy, knowing it wasn’t.
Reg Camm stood in the shadows. ‘You can see the smoke,’ he said. Even in the half-light he radiated stress – the voice dancing on the edge of panic, his fingers flickering as he massaged his corn-blond hair. Billy pointed to the stool.
Camm read the note and looked around in disbelief, then he read it out loud.
‘I need money and I know who my friends are. I’ll go away with it and not come back. I can’t get away without the money. Give it to Billy. All of it. Tommy.’
He looked at Billy.
The door opened. The light of a torch died in the stairwell. It was Peter. It was always just Peter. Reg knew his real name, not Billy.
They never knew why Peter needed the money. Reg had met him at Newmarket, in Tattersalls, studying form the way the professionals do. Up close. Reg owed the bookies nearly £10,000 – that’s why he needed the money. Peter owed them nothing. Peter had a plan, a purpose, a secret future. That’s why he needed the money. And he couldn’t wait for it to arrive.
Reg knew why they had to wear the balaclavas – to cover Peter’s face. Amy Ward was right, she did know the leader of the Crossways gang.
Peter came forward to the edge of the firelight and it gave his normally pallid face a rich warmth, something it never enjoyed in life. He carried a holdall, a holdall they recognized now with a mixture of excitement and resignation.
He picked up the note and read it. He wasn’t surprised. ‘All of it?’ he asked.
The Crossways Gang considered each other. Billy was the only pro. For him crime was a way of making a living not an adjunct to it. He’d been involved in petty crime since the age of ten, adept at stealing cars in a school uniform, a primary school uniform. By the time he reached secondary school he was as used to crime as most children are to the Saturday morning cinema. He brought to it the blasé attitude of the professional, an attitude which made him the ideal lookout and driver. And he wanted the money for a purpose too, a one-way ticket to America and a new life.