‘I’m sure there’s half a bottle of Bell’s stashed away in here somewhere.’ Kimmel opened a cupboard then closed it again. ‘If you want something stronger.’
‘I want you to tell me I’m not being stupid,’ Thorne said.
‘Oh, you’re being very stupid.’
‘Cheers.’
‘Still happy to come with you, though.’
Thorne shook his head, though he was glad of the offer. ‘I’m guessing they’ll want to talk to you at some point.’
‘Fine with me,’ Kimmel said. ‘I think you can probably count on most of the team. Roth aside, obviously. I’m not a hundred per cent sure which side Brigstocke’s bread is buttered on, either.’
‘He’s sound, I think.’ Thorne looked at her. ‘I think.’
‘What time are you meeting him?’
‘One o’clock.’ Thorne looked at his watch. He took a mouthful of tea and winced. ‘I’ll just happen to run into him in the place across the road, you know.’
‘Come and find me afterwards.’
Thorne told her that he would, took half a step away, then stopped. ‘I meant to say . . . the other night in the pub. Sorry if I made you feel awkward.’
‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ Kimmel said.
He smiled, nodded. ‘Well, that’s a relief, because I didn’t mean what you thought I meant.’
‘Yeah, you did.’
Thorne leaned against the door, looked at her. ‘Yeah, I did. I just came out with that divorce stuff to cover my arse.’
‘Not a problem.’ Kimmel shrugged and poured what was left of her tea into the sink. ‘I haven’t got a boyfriend, either.’
*
DCI Andy Frankham was sitting on a stool in the window and stopped eating his sandwich when he saw Thorne jog across the road towards the sandwich bar. He was eating again by the time Thorne had taken the empty stool next to him.
‘Not hungry, Tom?’
Thorne was actually ravenous, but there was a good-sized queue and he was keen to get things over with. ‘I had something back at the office,’ he said.
Frankham swallowed and took a swig from a bottle of water. ‘OK, let’s have it, then.’
‘It’s about DI Boyle, sir.’
‘You told me that much on the phone.’
So, Thorne told him about Gordon Boyle’s failure to follow up on Grantleigh Figgis’s alibi, how costly he believed that ‘oversight’ had proved to be. ‘I don’t think it was an oversight,’ he said. ‘It suited him.’
‘I take it you’ve checked HOLMES.’
‘Yes, sir, and no such actions were authorised. Nobody was dispatched to that nightclub to check out Figgis’s statement.’
Frankham was eating again. ‘I can see why you didn’t want to have this conversation at the office.’
‘Sir . . .’
‘Obviously you realise that this is a serious accusation and that, whatever the outcome of an investigation, if there is one, you might not come out of it smelling of roses. Quite the opposite, in fact. Something like this can easily affect your relationship with a good many other officers. You need to understand that.’
‘I do,’ Thorne said.
‘You’ve already got something of a reputation.’
Thorne waited and watched Frankham finish his sandwich. He was happy that the DCI chose not to elaborate. ‘Well, while I’m pissing all over my career—’
‘I didn’t exactly say that—’
‘I might as well tell you that I think Boyle’s the one who leaked the Figgis story to the press.’
Frankham looked at him, narrowed his eyes.
‘And that as good as got Figgis killed, if you ask me.’
‘Well, that’s something altogether different and rather more serious. So I need to ask if you have any evidence.’
‘No sir, I haven’t.’
‘So, what, then? Just a feeling? Like you had ten years ago with Frank Calvert?’
‘No—’
‘Like you had with Figgis, too, if I remember rightly.’
‘Nothing like that,’ Thorne said. ‘Boyle deliberately chose not to follow the procedures that would have eliminated Figgis from the inquiry, so I think there’s every chance he was the one who gave him to the papers.’
‘I’m going to need more than that,’ Frankham said. ‘You know I am.’
Thorne nodded. Paula Kimmel had advised him against making this second accusation and he knew that he should have listened. ‘The procedural stuff, though. I mean, surely . . .’
‘I’m not disagreeing,’ Frankham said. ‘We just need to be clear about what can be proved and what can’t.’
Thorne nodded, relieved to hear that we.
‘Now, are you saying that Detective Inspector Boyle’s actions are in any way responsible for the failure of this inquiry?’ Frankham leaned close and spoke slowly. ‘That if he’d done what he should have, we might have apprehended the man who took Kieron Coyne?’ He saw the answer in Thorne’s face and shook his head. ‘I didn’t think so, which is why you need to bear in mind that, even though this is certainly gross incompetence, I can’t see any grounds for criminal proceedings. Why you need to remember that the people I’ll have to take this to will be extremely unhappy about the shitstorm it’s likely to stir up in the press. I mean with that lad still missing and probably worse . . . we’re hardly flavour of the month as it is. Oh, and while we’re talking about shit, you should also remember that it tends to roll downhill.’
‘I’ve thought about all this,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ve talked to other members of the team.’
‘Which ones?’
‘I’d rather not say, sir.’
Frankham shrugged. ‘Loyalty’s good, Tom, though it won’t be something people are going to associate you with down the line. Not if you go ahead with this.’ He wiped his mouth with a serviette. ‘So, I want you to ask yourself an important question before I give you one final chance to pretend this conversation never happened. Whatever Boyle’s done, however much he messed things up, deliberately or otherwise . . . are you gagging to see him hauled across the coals for it because actually you’re the one feeling guilty?’ He let the suggestion sink in. ‘Because Grantleigh Figgis was only ever a suspect in the first place thanks to you?’
Thorne stood up, but Frankham reached out quickly to lay a hand on his arm.
‘If you’re really being honest with yourself and the answer to that is yes, then maybe you want to think about stepping back a bit. That’s all I’m saying. No comebacks, no harm done, and I’m happy to forget everything we’ve talked about. I mean, we could just as easily have been chatting about the football and how great these sandwiches are, right?’
Thorne moved away and stepped towards the door. He was sweating and he could feel a headache building fast. Frankham was absolutely right, of course. Thorne had known it on the day of the reconstruction, when he’d confronted Gordon Boyle at the woods. His finger busy in the Scotsman’s face, shouting and screaming about responsibility and convenience, ranting about the DPS and who was going to get crucified.
Brimful of self-satisfaction and self-righteousness.
And the guilt, boiling in him.
Thorne stopped at the door and turned. He said, ‘No, sir. I don’t want to forget it.’
SIXTY-FIVE
As soon as Cat opened the door and stepped back from it, Maria began to apologise and led Josh into the flat as though he were some fragile, yet unwieldy package she was a little embarrassed to be carrying. Cat told her not to be stupid. She said hello to Josh and did her best to smile, though she could not bring herself to look at him for very long. Maria appeared to be trying equally hard, but didn’t take her eyes off her son for a moment as he veered away from her and walked past Cat as if she wasn’t there.
Like a sleepwalker with better things to do.
‘Thank you,’ Maria said. ‘Really, I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’
Cat nodded, thinking how te
rrible the woman looked, or, at least, how far from immaculate. She was wearing mismatched tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt. There was lipstick on her teeth. She looked as though she’d been sleeping about as much as Cat and shed almost as many tears.
‘I couldn’t think of anyone else to talk to.’
‘It’s fine,’ Cat said, again.
Maria had actually called late the night before, semi-hysterical and begging to come over, but Cat had said no. She’d spent the whole weekend thinking about the phone conversation with Billy, not wanting to move, unable to eat and certainly in no fit state to see anyone, not even Angie. When Billy’s sister had come back on Saturday morning, desperate to know how things had gone, Cat had told her she wasn’t feeling well and had refused to talk about it. She knew very well that Billy would probably tell Angie about the phone call anyway, because he always told her everything, though Cat guessed he’d leave out the part about her hanging up on him just after he’d started to cry.
However wretched she’d been feeling since the call, that part always made Cat feel a little bit better.
As soon as she was inside, Maria sat down and she and Cat watched Josh walk purposefully across the living room and sink down on to the floor. He leaned back against the wall near the doorway that led out into the corridor and stared into space.
‘Do you want a coffee or something?’ Cat didn’t need to point out that she was talking about Maxwell House and not the fancy frothy stuff she sometimes treated herself to when they were out.
When they used to go out.
Maria said ‘lovely’, and ‘thank you’, then carried on talking while Cat went into the kitchen. ‘He’s not been himself since his dad dropped him off last night. Have you, chicken?’ She waited, but Josh said nothing. ‘He’s been a bit upset. A bit more upset than usual, I should say. He left Snowball at his dad’s place, which probably hasn’t helped . . .’
Cat came back with two mugs of coffee and she and Maria sat together on the sofa and stared at the boy.
‘Actually, it was Joshy’s idea to come over.’ Maria leaned close and spoke quietly, though they were almost certainly still close enough for Josh to hear. ‘He’s been nagging me about it ever since he came back.’
‘OK,’ Cat said.
Josh stood up, suddenly, as though he was aware that the adults wanted to talk about him. ‘I want to go and play in Kieron’s room.’
Maria looked at Cat.
‘Well . . .’ Cat had tidied all her son’s toys and games away and she wasn’t sure how she felt about anyone messing with them. Least of all . . .
‘I want to go and play in Kieron’s room.’
The boy’s face remained every bit as blank as it had been since he came in, but Cat could see the plea in Maria’s eyes. She said, ‘All right, but please don’t make a—’
Josh turned and marched out of the room, and the second they heard Kieron’s bedroom door close Maria burst into tears.
‘I don’t know what the matter with him is.’ She reached out a hand. ‘I don’t know what the fuck to do.’
Cat had rarely heard Maria swear, could only remember a handful of occasions. Once, when she’d burned her hand on the hob and another time when she’d had one glass of wine too many and stumbled off a heel. That morning in the woods, obviously.
‘The school thinks he should be seeing someone, and Jeff said he’d try and organise it, but he doesn’t seem very keen on the idea. What do you think? You always know what to do, you’re always so great with . . .’ Maria stopped herself before she spoke the name, her mouth closing slowly and her hand flopping like a dying fish on the sofa cushion.
Cat knew that Maria had been concerned about her son’s behaviour for a long time. It had been the thing they had talked about the most for as long as she could remember. In cafés and parks, in Cat’s front room while the two boys ran around, or sitting in Maria’s kitchen. Some problem at school, that was what Maria had always guessed at, bullying maybe. Or just the delayed fallout from the divorce. Cat had enjoyed being the shoulder this woman cried on, sensing early on that there weren’t too many others being offered.
Since Kieron, though, these problems had come to feel almost laughably trivial. Everything had. It was as though the part of her that gave a shit, that felt even an ounce of compassion for anybody else, had simply shut down.
Then she saw the desperation on Maria’s face.
A cracked map of it, around her eyes.
Cat took her hand. ‘What did Jeff say? When he brought Josh home.’
‘He said Joshy had been a bit of a misery-guts, that’s all. That he didn’t want to do anything. I think Jeff was a bit pissed off because he’d got stuff planned and it didn’t work out.’
‘Has Josh said anything?’
‘A week or so ago he told me was just angry at everything, but now he’s not saying a dicky bird.’ She was squeezing Cat’s hand hard enough to make her wince a little. ‘Like he’s shut down.’
‘It got worse after what happened with Kieron, though, right? You said.’
Maria nodded, struggled to get the words out. ‘He was losing his temper and lashing out at school. He started to wet the bed more, was more scared of the dark. More scared of everything.’ She let out a long breath then sucked another in fast. ‘He told me he thought . . . Kieron was still hiding.’
‘When?’
‘That first night, I think. Just not understanding it, you know?’
Cat swallowed down the jagged fragment that had sheared away from the stone in her chest and risen into her throat. ‘So, maybe you should do exactly what the school says and take him to see someone. You can afford to pay for it, I know you can. You don’t need Jeff’s permission.’
‘He’s Josh’s father.’
‘You’re the one Josh lives with.’
Maria stared at the wall against which her son had been sitting. ‘I swear, I’m at my wits’ end, Cat.’
She sounded it, Cat thought. She certainly looked it. But Cat had heard the woman say much the same thing when her local Waitrose had run out of avocados. The rogue, unsympathetic thought must have been briefly visible on her face, because Maria clocked the look and misread it.
She began shaking her head furiously. ‘I really shouldn’t be here telling you any of this . . . it was Josh’s idea to come round, I told you that, didn’t I? It’s . . . nothing, it’s less than nothing, because how can it compare . . . ?’ She raised her hands and for a moment Cat thought she was about to start slapping herself in the face. ‘I was a terrible wife and I’m obviously a shit mother and I must be just about the worst friend anyone could have, because I should be the one sitting here listening to you. I should be the one trying to—’
‘Stop it,’ Cat said.
‘Because I’m the one who made this nightmare happen.’ She began to shout, to sob. ‘The stupid, selfish bitch who can’t concentrate for five minutes and keep her eye on two little boys. I’m the one who should really be suffering. I’m the one who deserves it—’
Cat leaned across and tried to shush her, then they both froze briefly when they heard Kieron’s bedroom door open, and moved apart. A few seconds later, Josh appeared in the doorway, his face still a blank. He said, ‘OK, then.’
His mother plastered on a smile. ‘Did you have fun, chicken?’
‘I want to go home now,’ Josh said.
‘Absolutely.’ Maria bent down to pick up her handbag then looked up at Cat, who was already on her feet.
Without thinking about it too much, Cat walked slowly across to the doorway, knelt down and pulled the boy into her arms. Wrapped them around him. He didn’t smell the same, but the familiar shape of him – that xylophone of ribs beneath her fingers and the way he fitted so perfectly against her – was intoxicating, and unbearable.
The tears came, of course, because that was what they did.
Cat’s cheek was slick against his when Josh turned his head, pressed his mouth to her ear and whispered, �
�Kieron isn’t hiding any more.’
SIXTY-SIX
With no more football on TV until England’s big game against Germany the following evening, Thorne was reduced to watching highlights of the day’s play at Wimbledon. Sue Barker was getting awfully excited about Steffi Graf going for her seventh title, but, superstitious as he was about any German sporting victory at this point, and not really giving a toss about tennis anyway, Thorne was unable to summon up much enthusiasm.
There was bugger-all else on, anyway.
At least it wasn’t Henman, and posh tossers shouting, ‘Come on, Tim.’
He ate off his lap – a plate of that shepherd’s pie his mum had left in the freezer – and thought about a world where he had cause to be grateful to a nineteen-year-old car mechanic called Damien Hunter and to the eight pints of Carling said mechanic had put away the night before. Thorne guessed that the man into whose face Hunter had thrust a glass come closing time did not see things in quite the same way, but such was the way that the fucked-up world turned.
Out of kilter and out of control.
Capable of throwing anyone off, if they weren’t clinging on tight.
The team had caught the case in the early hours and Thorne, like the rest of them – ground down by two weeks of abject failure – had fallen on it as if it was the biggest case of his career. An attempted murder, albeit one that had been attempted in front of dozens of witnesses and resulted in an almost immediate arrest, gave him something positive to do. A reason to be there. It wasn’t going to tax anyone’s powers of deduction, but it allowed him to move in the right direction.
So Thorne had found himself with plenty to do that day: interviewing witnesses; typing up statements; and assiduously logging pieces of broken, bloodied glass into evidence.
And thinking about Kieron Coyne.
Now, he half-watched Steffi Graf execute what he felt sure would be called a ‘peach of a drop-shot’ and thought about Dean Meade and Grantleigh Figgis. The individuals still wanted in connection with those murders. Two of them, if the witness at Meade’s house was right about how many voices she’d heard that night.
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