A Killing Resurrected Read Online Free PDF Page A

told Rogers, ‘they all joined in, slamming their weapons on the table with such force that chips were flying everywhere.
    â€˜It was unnerving,’ he said. ‘Utterly and completely unnerving, which was the intent, of course, because I don’t think any of us doubted that they would carry out their threat if we tried to resist.’
    Again by using cards, the players were told to empty their wallets of cash – nothing else – and to drop the money into a cloth bag that was being passed around. Then they were told to turn their pockets inside out, and Alice’s handbag was emptied. The amount alleged to have been taken that night was just short of five thousand pounds.
    The phone in the room was ripped from the wall. Mobile phones were taken from Roach and Warden, to be found later by the police in the shrubbery part way down the drive.
    â€˜Still using the cards,’ Roach said, ‘they told us to lie on our faces under the table, and that was the way they left us. I got to the door as fast as I could when I heard a car leave, but they were gone by the time I got there.
    â€˜They were very deliberate in the way they went about things,’ Roach continued. ‘Clearly they knew there was no one else in the house and they wouldn’t be disturbed, and the fact that one of the cards referred to “the woman”, referring to Alice Nelson, tells me they knew exactly who would be there that night.’
    It came as no surprise to Rogers, when he asked each player for a description of the thieves, they all said the same thing: the men were all roughly the same height and size, but it was hard to tell because they all wore dark, loose-fitting clothing, and their faces were covered by black ski masks. ‘They even wore black trainers,’ one of the players told him. Under ‘Description’, Rogers had dutifully recorded their statements, but had scrawled TBU in the margin, translated by those who knew him as Totally Bloody Useless.
    There could be little doubt that the two robberies had been done by the same gang, but the question was: why now? And why were the robberies more than six months apart?
    Other than taking part in the initial door-to-door enquiries, Tregalles, a uniformed Constable at that time, hadn’t been involved in the investigation itself, but reading through the transcripts now it became clear that Rogers suspected an inside job. The fact that the gang had known ahead of time that a woman would be at the table was enough to make the inspector wonder if the robbery had been arranged by one of the players – perhaps someone who had lost a great deal of money and wanted to get it back. But an exhaustive check into their backgrounds failed to show that any of the players were in financial difficulty.
    A van, stolen the night before the robbery, and assumed to be the one used by the thieves, was found abandoned in a quiet country lane in the early hours of the following morning. It had been doused in petrol and set on fire. Once again, Forensic had hauled in the charred remains, examined them and issued a report but it, too, in Rogers’ words, was TBU.
    Tregalles picked up the Bergman file.
    The call to the police by a barely coherent Sam Bergman had come in at 10.09 on a Saturday morning. He told them that his wife, Emily, and George Taylor, a baker from the shop next door, had been killed in his shop.
    The first policeman on the scene arrived at 10.18, and he had called immediately for assistance.
    Bergman, a jeweller and goldsmith, told police that he and his wife, Emily, always arrived at their shop in Bridge Street at eight thirty each morning except Sunday, in order to vacuum the carpets, clean and polish the display cases, and enter the previous day’s sales in the books. They would also take particularly valuable pieces from the safe for display, and generally get ready for the opening of business at ten o’clock.
    At nine thirty, it