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“What’re you saying?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Maybe he’s got another crew, is all.”

“He hasn’t got another crew.” The idea seemed to make him really angry. “Jackman can’t read the notes, remember? He needs us to tell him what they say.”

“Right.” She shrugged again. Looked the notes over.

But she could see the idea that Jackman had kept some of the notes back was eating at him.

“There’s three jobs outlined here,” she said. “I don’t know if it’ll be much help to you, because there isn’t that much detail.”

“Don’t you worry about that, just tell us.” Pete rubbed his hands together.

“There’s a bank job, another post office job, and a factory wage job,” she said.

“Not another post office job too soon,” Robby said. “What’s the factory wage job and the bank job?”

She frowned at the notes, as if working out exactly what they said, and then she gave them just enough detail.

“Right. I’ll go talk to Jackman,” Robby said. “Pete, you get these two to work on going through the post.”

Pete looked relieved to not be going to see Jackman, and Sarah reckoned he wanted to keep his head down.

Robby disappeared downstairs, and Pete herded them to the other side of the floor, behind the plastic sheeting and tossed the two big postal bags into the room.

Sarah upturned one, and then she and Jerry sat on the floor and started opening letters and sorting the contents.

The wind had picked up as the afternoon went on, and it was dark now, although still not that late.

“We can’t keep going with nothing to eat and drink,” she told Pete. “We haven’t had anything since this morning.”

Pete looked up from counting the money orders they’d found so far and sighed.

He was probably hungry, too, Sarah guessed.

“I’ll go down and speak to Mrs. Jameson. Keep at it, hear?”

As soon as he went down the stairs she grabbed up a few unopened letters and moved as fast as she could without making a sound on the wooden floorboards, to the sash window that faced the side of the house next door.

There was no way to escape out of it, there was nothing but a straight drop to the ground, but it opened silently and she threw the letters out one by one as if they were frisbees.

She took a precious moment, as she pulled the sash down, to check that the wind had taken them, and was sitting demurely next to Jerry, opening letters, when Pete returned.

“Feels colder in here,” he said.

“Probably because you’ve been down on the ground floor and it’s heated,” Sarah said. “Maybe we could get a little heater in here, given the weather?”

“Maybe,” Pete muttered.

“I suppose it’s not up to you,” Sarah said, going back to the letters. “We’ll have to ask Robby.”

Pete didn’t say anything else, but Sarah guessed from his face that he didn’t like that.

When Mrs. Jameson called him to come down and get their tea and sandwiches, Jerry sent her a thumbs up.

“Playing them both like a harp,” he chuckled. “It’s a pleasure watching you work.”

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