‘Don’t you fucking dare.’ Cat scrambled to her feet and reached across to try and slap the newspaper from his hands. When he stepped back and lifted it above his head so that she was unable to reach, she grabbed fistfuls of his shirt instead. ‘Don’t you dare.’
‘I wasn’t trying—’
‘You’ve got no right.’
‘OK, easy . . .’
She held on tight to him, pressing her forehead against his chest and they stayed that way for half a minute or so, Cat clinging to him, while he stared over her head, blew out thin streams of smoke and made reassuring noises.
‘Come on, now.’
He watched her turn to walk slowly back to the sofa and lower herself on to it like a woman three times her age. He said, ‘Look, I didn’t come here to start a row or anything.’ He waved the paper again. ‘It’s in all of them, you know, what’s happened. Every single one. The papers and the telly, they’ll be all over this now, looking at all the . . . angles or whatever, so I thought you might need a bit of support, that’s all. And like I said, I have got a . . . vested interest, or whatever you call it.’
Cat looked up at him, expressionless.
‘I mean I’m not daft. I wasn’t expecting you to put flags out, anything like that.’
‘What were you expecting?’
He smiled and shrugged, looked at his watch as though it made a difference. ‘Well, a drink might be nice for a kick-off.’
TWENTY
Roth and Brigstocke seemed content to stand, so Thorne took the seat next to Boyle in front of the monitor and pressed the necessary buttons. The screen flickered into life, displaying the live feed from a room two floors below them at Highgate station. A black and white image which, at first glance, might have been a still, had not one of the eight men sitting on plastic chairs leaned back suddenly and yawned.
A voice off-camera: ‘Shouldn’t be too much longer.’
Boyle pointed at the screen, ran a finger along the line. ‘Got to hand it to whoever rounded this lot up.’ The finger moved again, jabbed at the man sitting second from the left. ‘Can’t have been easy finding seven blokes who looked anything like this freak.’
‘Best detective work I’ve seen in ages,’ Roth said.
Thorne leaned forward and looked at the ‘freak’ in question. Though Grantleigh Figgis – after a brief consultation with the duty solicitor – had given his permission several hours before to the identity parade, he now looked as though he might be regretting his decision. He sat, straight-backed, palms flat on his knees, his lips moving as though he was giving himself a last-minute pep talk. Like the seven men lined up alongside him, he wore a flat cap he’d been given in the hope it might make the job of the man tasked with identifying him easier. All of them had been asked to push the caps back so as not to shield their features and, though the lighting was basic and the image hardly pinprick sharp, the tension etched across Figgis’s face was clear enough.
‘He’s a worried man,’ Boyle said.
Thorne heard a cigarette being lit behind him, turned when a hand was laid on his shoulder. ‘So he should be,’ Roth said, squeezing. ‘If Tom here likes you for something, well . . . it’s a done deal, right?’
‘That’s what they reckon,’ Boyle said.
Thorne turned back to the monitor. He was every bit as fired up as Boyle and the rest of them, but now he sat and watched Figgis talking to himself and wondered if the man he’d been responsible for bringing in was as nervous as he was, or had slept any worse. It didn’t much matter, either way. Thorne knew exactly what he was afraid of, but he’d been in similar situations many times before and reminded himself that a scared suspect was not necessarily a guilty one.
Innocent or otherwise, Figgis would be terrified of being picked out.
The men in the line-up had begun to fidget.
‘What’s taking them so long?’ Brigstocke asked.
Thorne knew that in an adjacent room, a uniformed inspector who was unconnected with the case and had been appointed as identification officer for the day would be running through the procedure with Felix Barratt and with Prosser, the solicitor. Though he had already declared himself happy with the set-up, Barratt would once again be offered the option of attempting the identification from behind a one-way mirror. The men on the chairs had already been given their instructions, but it was important that the man who would try to pick one of them out was equally comfortable with what was about to happen.
They could only hope he was as good at identifying people as he claimed to be with birds.
‘Here we go.’ Boyle slapped his hands against his thighs.
The ID Officer led Barratt and Prosser into the room and the uniformed officer already present instructed the men on the chairs to raise the numbered pieces of paper they had each been given.
Grantleigh Figgis was number two.
Thorne watched as the inspector stepped close to Felix Barratt. ‘I’m now going to ask you to look at a group of people, one of whom may or may not be the man you claim to have seen on Saturday afternoon, getting into a car on Archway Road.’
Barratt straightened his tie and tugged at the hem of his tweed jacket. He said, ‘I understand.’
‘Could you please walk along the line and back again? Take all the time you need . . .’
Barratt did as he was asked, walking nice and slowly, stopping for several seconds in front of each candidate, before turning to the inspector. ‘Could you ask them to stand up?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Boyle said.
‘It might make it easier,’ Barratt said.
The inspector asked Prosser if he had any objections. The solicitor shook his head and the men were instructed to stand. Barratt moved along the line one more time then walked back to stand next to the inspector.
He said, ‘OK.’
‘Is the man you saw on Saturday afternoon in this room?’
Boyle leaned closer to the screen. ‘Come on.’
Barratt lowered his voice, as though wary of being overheard, but the sound was clear enough to those gathered around the monitor. ‘Number two,’ he said.
Boyle pumped his fist. ‘You fucking beauty!’
‘Well, I think it might be number two.’
‘Oh shit,’ Roth said.
Boyle was on his feet, his excitement having instantly given way to irritation. ‘He thinks?’
‘It might be number two.’ The inspector stared at Barratt, then made a careful note on his clipboard. ‘But you’re not sure.’
Thorne was watching Grantleigh Figgis.
His eyes were closed and he was breathing heavily.
The piece of paper with his number on slipped from his fingers and floated to the floor.
‘Not sure, no,’ Barratt said. ‘The man I saw was on the other side of the road. I was very clear about that when the officer came round.’
Boyle turned to look at Thorne, as though the pointless farce being played out for them on screen was somehow all his fault. Thorne looked right back at him and said, ‘Everything Barratt told me was in my report.’
The DI had clearly seen and heard enough and Roth was quick to follow him as he stalked from the room.
‘I read your report,’ Brigstocke said. He joined Thorne at the monitor and they watched Felix Barratt being led from the room before another officer moved forward to escort Grantleigh Figgis back to his cell. ‘Let’s be honest, it was never really on the cards, was it?’
‘Boyle’s a born optimist,’ Thorne said.
Brigstocke smiled. ‘One word for it.’
They caught up with Roth and Boyle in the corridor.
‘. . . would have clinched it, no worries,’ Boyle said. ‘But there’s no chance he’ll go for it now.’
Thorne did not need to ask who or what the DI was talking about. A positive identification might have persuaded the superintendent that, though there was not yet enough evidence to charge Figgis, they certainly had grounds to extend the custody
period. Now, barring a last-gasp confession or the miraculously fast return of positive DNA results, they would have no choice but to release their suspect within the statutory twenty-four hours.
There was not much time left.
‘So, we make it work for us,’ Boyle said. ‘If life gives you lemons, all that.’
Roth grunted his enthusiastic endorsement.
Thorne looked at them both, waited. Roth studied his shoes and, when Boyle deigned to reveal his plan of action, he spoke as if explaining something blindingly obvious to a seriously remedial cadet.
‘His sort are always the same, aren’t they?’
Thorne kept his mouth shut, though if he knew anything with certainty it was that Boyle was talking nonsense. Half a dozen of that ‘sort’ selected at random were unlikely to have much more in common than any other group.
‘Like dogs returning to their own vomit.’
‘I’ve never had a dog,’ Thorne said.
‘Dead or alive, he’ll want to go back to wherever he’s left the boy.’ Boyle left a second or two for acknowledgement of his genius then pressed on when it was not forthcoming. ‘I’m telling you, he won’t be able to resist. So, we cut him loose and we watch him. Let him do our job for us.’
Thorne thought that, as cunning plans went, it was up there with Baldrick’s best, but chose once again not to speak up, knowing that others would.
‘Sounds bang-on to me, boss,’ Roth said.
At that moment, the identification officer stepped into the corridor and walked towards them. He shrugged, brandishing the clipboard he’d used a few minutes earlier to record the result of the ID parade.
He said, ‘I can’t put it on here for obvious reasons and it’s no use to us officially, but for what it’s worth, Barratt told me after we’d left the room that he thought it probably was number two.’
‘That’s helpful of him,’ Thorne said.
‘But that he wasn’t sure the man he saw was quite that tall.’
Boyle muttered, ‘Twat,’ before turning away to confer with Roth about surveillance arrangements.
Thorne could not be sure who the insult had been aimed at, but guessed that was exactly what Boyle had intended.
TWENTY-ONE
Once her unwanted visitor had drunk all the booze in the flat and she had finally managed to get rid of him, Cat decided that she needed some air. She walked down the main road, then cut into Whittington Park and sat on a bench at the corner of the football pitch. It wasn’t somewhere too many locals would go after dark unless they were looking to buy drugs or fancied being robbed, but it was nice enough when there were people about.
She sat and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on her face.
She tried to blot out the shouts of children from the playground.
She thought about Billy.
It was hard to imagine just how bad he would be feeling banged up in there, how helpless. How much worse than the way she knew he felt every minute of the day. Bored shitless, killing time, the stink of his cellmate’s farts every night and slopping-out every morning.
It was all there in his letters.
Missing her. Missing their boy.
He was a silly bastard but still, she had lied to him. Done the dirty behind his back, which was unforgivable. No, he hadn’t been around back then when she’d needed him, needed somebody, and it was only those couple of times when a few drinks had done what they did, but all the same she knew how she would feel if he’d been the one playing away. How badly she’d have wanted to hurt him.
They had Kieron, though, which had always made everything OK.
They hadn’t made him, but they had him.
She felt the tears come, laid her head back and let the sun dry them. They used to have him . . .
It wasn’t like she’d never thought about any of this before, or didn’t feel like a whore every single time she looked at her son, but the man bowling through her door that morning had made a shitty situation so much worse, and it wasn’t as if she didn’t know that he was up to something. She wasn’t buying the father-suddenly-choosing-to-care act for a moment. Even if she hadn’t seen him for the best part of ten years and had no real idea what he’d been up to since Kieron was born, she knew him well enough.
The likes of him usually had an angle.
People like Billy. People like her.
She wandered back on to the main road, bought a bottle from the off-licence to help her sleep, a pasty from the brand-new Greggs and trudged back up the hill. She tried to eat and tried every bit as hard to keep her head down, telling herself not to stare whenever a child walked past, alone or with an adult. Unable to help herself, she looked hard at every single one.
One woman stopped, yanked her child back and glared.
Said, ‘What?’
Fifty yards from the entrance to the block, Cat saw that she had another visitor. Leaning against the grubby glass doors and looking at her watch, like she was waiting for a bus. Cat didn’t break stride as she dropped what was left of the pasty into a bin and tried to decide if she should run headlong into the woman’s arms or slap her stupid.
‘I’m sorry,’ Maria said. Cat was still half a dozen paces away, so the older woman waited. ‘I probably should have phoned.’ She glanced hopefully past Cat, towards the lifts. She opened her mouth and closed it again, set herself.
Cat had made her mind up. She wasn’t going to slap her, but she wasn’t going to invite her up for tea and cake either. ‘Yeah?’
‘Only I saw the papers this morning, and thought, well . . .’
Another one, Cat thought. ‘I might need some support?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Maria shifted from foot to foot. ‘I mean, whether you’d want it or not was another question, but actually, there was a journalist hanging about here when I arrived.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, we shouldn’t be very surprised, I suppose.’
Cat ignored the we, looked around.
‘Oh no, don’t worry, he’s long gone. I’ve been here a while.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘Only to tell him to piss off,’ Maria said.
Cat smiled in spite of herself and Maria smiled, too.
‘Cheeky so-and-so asked me if I knew where you were, when you were coming back. He asked me if I was a friend of yours.’ She looked away. ‘I didn’t say anything, obviously.’
The implication would have been clear enough, even without the woman’s somewhat sorry-for-herself expression.
I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know the answer.
Cat wasn’t sure she could be much help.
She said, ‘They’ve arrested someone.’
‘What? I mean . . . who?’
‘I’m not supposed to say.’
‘Well, that’s good.’
‘I suppose.’
‘You must be so relieved.’
Cat felt anything but relief. It took a good deal of effort to stop herself shouting: I don’t give a toss who they arrest as long as they find out where Kieron is. She could see that Maria was waiting for more; hoping for it. Cat said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening. They haven’t told me.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be the first to know when there’s news,’ Maria said.
Cat nodded and stared at the woman who, under normal circumstances, would have been the second to know. A woman to whom she’d been so close until two days before, who knew almost everything about her.
Maria looked tired.
She still looked stylish, of course, but had not made the usual effort.
Cat wanted so much to tell Maria Ashton the one thing she didn’t know, but that could never happen. Not while Cat still had the urge to throw her to the pavement, to pull out her glossy hair at the roots and scratch every inch of make-up off her face.
It was an ugly urge, Cat recognised that. Shameful and pointless. But it refused to go away.
‘How’s Josh doing?’ She waited, watching Maria’s eyes fill, watching small
white teeth gnaw at a trembling lip.
‘Oh, Cat.’
‘Look, I need to go.’ Cat marched across and opened the doors, then turned. She said, ‘Just so you know. So you can tell Josh. Wherever my Kieron is, he’s missing him.’
TWENTY-TWO
‘About bloody time,’ Jim Thorne said. ‘Thought you’d lost the number.’
‘Yeah, sorry. It’s—’
‘Work . . . course it is. Don’t worry, I’m only winding you up.’
Thorne had carried the phone through to the sitting room. He pulled his feet up, kept one eye on the highlights of the Netherlands v Scotland match from that afternoon.
‘Your mum worries, that’s all.’
‘I know,’ Thorne said.
‘Well, you never stop worrying about your kids, do you? Doesn’t matter how old they are.’
‘I know,’ Thorne said.
‘Especially now.’
‘Right.’
Now everything’s gone to shit. Now your wife’s buggered off and there’s a divorce to get sorted. Now you’re starting again.
‘So, everything good?’ his father asked.
Thorne almost laughed. His old man had never been the most tactful or socially aware of souls. Always more comfortable around machines than he was with people. ‘Yeah, ticking along,’ he said. ‘Just got a big case on, so . . .’
There was a short silence before his father said, ‘Righto.’
Thorne could hear his parents’ TV in the background. His dad was watching the football, too.
‘I meant to say, your mum went to see the quack about her blood pressure this morning. Had to nag her, mind you. Reckons it’s still a bit too high for his liking.’
‘Has he put her on something?’
‘Oh, she’s been on tablets for ages. What d’you call them . . . the red and white ones. Now, he’s told her she needs to sort her diet out and she’s not very happy about it.’
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