‘He was taken,’ Thorne said.
‘Accident waiting to happen, you ask me. And if they’re stupid enough to let that useless mare have him back, she’s only going to fuck it up again. Sit around painting her nails while the poor little sod scalds himself or falls out of a window, whatever.’ She shook her head in disgust. ‘If Kieron was my boy, I wouldn’t take my eyes off him.’
‘You think you’d have been a good mother, do you?’ Kimmel asked.
‘I know I would.’
‘Right.’
‘I should have been.’ She grimaced, swallowed down something sour. ‘I should have been . . .’
‘So, just to be clear . . . you attempted to murder your brother’s girlfriend because she was a mum and you’re not?’ Thorne looked at her. ‘That what you’re telling us?’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Angie leaned across the table. ‘Kieron should have been mine. He was meant to be mine.’
Then, there was just the faint squeak from the recorder again, until Kimmel muttered, ‘Jesus . . .’
Angie sat back, smiling again, seemingly happy that they finally understood. ‘He was meant to be mine and Billy’s.’
EIGHTY-THREE
The officer on duty outside the door studied her ID for a little longer than seemed strictly necessary, before handing it back without a word. Without cracking his face. No, a big smile and a cosy chat were probably not entirely appropriate, all things considered, but nevertheless, she couldn’t help thinking that some kind of reaction might have been . . . nice. An acknowledgement, at the very least, that she was not there in the most pleasant of circumstances.
Maria stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, knowing full well of course what the officer had been thinking; what most people she dealt with these days were thinking, whatever they said to her face.
She must have known.
She walked across and lowered herself into the chair next to the bed. She laid her handbag down gently on the floor. She poured herself a glass of water from the plastic jug and smoothed out her skirt.
Thinking: I should have.
She had thought of little else these last five weeks, as she’d struggled to deal with the fallout. Doing her utmost to keep the media at bay. Guiding Josh through the nightmare of seemingly endless police interviews and medical examinations.
Listening to him cry at night.
I should have known.
Looking at the pitiful figure in the bed, the machines he was wired up to, she found herself wondering why there needed to be an officer stationed at the door in the first place. It was hardly as if the occupant of this room was going to unplug himself, leap to his feet and make a run for it. She smiled to herself and stared at what was left of her ex-husband, of the thing he’d become.
She tried not to think about precisely when he’d become . . . someone different – she could not bring herself to use those words the papers had splashed across their front pages – and comforted herself with the idea that he had only started doing such things since the divorce.
Even so . . .
I should have known.
Fighting against even the smallest suspicion that something might be amiss, because she was a coward. While the only person who had known had stepped up and done something almost supernaturally brave, found his own super-smart way to get the truth out, and saved his friend. Whatever Josh had gone through at his father’s cottage, however much he had suffered, he would always know that much, at least.
Maria would never let her son forget that he was a hero.
As she talked to her ex-husband – her voice low and even – she thought about control. About wielding it and losing it. She thought how strange it was, how funny, that he would never again be able to have the one thing he had valued above anything else, the thing he had set such store by and had used so well and so viciously.
She smiled again.
It was hard to exercise even a modicum of control when you were already dead.
She hadn’t actually been aware of that fact and was amazed when one of the doctors had explained it to her. Who knew that once your brain had given up the ghost – well, ‘showing no evidence of higher brain function or brain-stem reflexes’ was how the doctor had actually put it – you were legally dead? Clogs, to all intents and purposes, already popped.
Maria leaned towards the bed and patted the wrist that lay pale and still against the green blanket.
‘So, you know . . . that’s why I’m here, really.’
Next of kin.
She sat and thought about the only conversation she’d had with Jeff’s mother since it had all happened. The woman’s reaction to the news had been typical, priceless. One cursory burst of jagged, mechanical crying before the selfishness had kicked in.
‘Well, darling, I hope you know that none of this is my fault.’
A second after a sharp knock at the door, a doctor put his head round it and Maria turned.
‘I just wanted to see how you were getting on,’ the doctor said. ‘This is never easy.’
‘I’m fine,’ Maria said. ‘I won’t be very long.’
‘Well, if you need to talk through things a bit more, you know where I am.’ The young man nodded, backing out of the room. ‘So, I’ll see you whenever you’re ready.’
Maria didn’t believe that what Jeff had done was anybody’s fault but his own. He and nobody else had made those terrible decisions. All the same, she knew very well in whose direction his mother had been pointing her bony finger.
Jeff’s father had died several years back. At the time, Maria had tried to comfort Jeff because . . . well, that was what you were supposed to do in such situations, wasn’t it? But she had seen very quickly that comfort was not something her husband actually required on this occasion. At the funeral, he had demonstrated a disconcerting mix of devastation and euphoria. He had actually been singing in the car on the way back to London.
She talked for a few minutes more, then sat for a while with her eyes closed, listening to the drip-drip of the feeding tube, the thrum and hiss of the machine that was the only thing causing her ex-husband’s chest to rise and fall.
The noises were not unpleasant.
She reached for her bag and stood up. ‘Right then, I need to go and do a spot of paperwork.’
At the door Maria stopped and turned. ‘Well, this wasn’t the most riveting conversation we’ve ever had, was it? But it was one of the few where I get to have the last word.’
Half an hour later, stepping out of the lift into the hospital reception, Maria was still agonising over the difficult conversation she would one day need to have with Josh about today. The truth would probably be best when the time came, she decided, however uncomfortable that might be. There had been far too many lies already. By the time she reached the exit, the dread had begun to lift a little and she was trying to decide what the two of them were going to have for dinner.
Pizza, she thought. That was his favourite. Pizza with pineapple.
On the pavement outside, waiting for a gap in the traffic, she looked across to see Cat waving at her from the other side of the road.
She nodded and waved back.
A few seconds later, Maria seized her chance and walked quickly across the road towards her friend.
EIGHTY-FOUR
It’s cold and full-dark, the middle of the night it feels like, and the trees are getting closer together, huddling around him as Thorne moves through the woods. He does not hesitate, doesn’t pause or stumble. He walks quickly, purposefully, as though his feet know exactly where they are taking him, even if Thorne hasn’t got the first idea.
He’s not scared, though. It’s exciting . . .
Suddenly, the sun punches a hole in the canopy above him and he is standing in a brightly lit clearing.
Thorne sees Kieron waving, and hurries across to join him.
‘That’s the poison circle,’ Kieron says. ‘See?’ The boy points to the makeshift
ring of small white rocks laid out around them. He sounds very serious. ‘You need to stay inside the circle, OK? That’s the game.’
Then the others are standing with him. Cat and Maria and Josh. Billy, Angela and Jeff Ashton. The eight of them join hands until they have formed a circle inside the circle and Kieron says it’s time to start the game.
‘Three . . . two . . . one . . . go!’
They quickly start to push and pull, to lean and lurch; jostling for position until, finally, Kieron’s dad is forced across the line of stones.
He says, ‘Poisoned,’ and lowers his head.
They start again. Tussling and laughing.
‘Poisoned,’ Josh says.
‘Poisoned,’ Angela says.
One by one, each of them is driven beyond the border of white stones and the rest join hands again. The dead grow in number and the circle of safety gets smaller, until there are only two of them left.
Thorne and Kieron.
‘Last one left alive is the winner,’ Kieron says. ‘You ready?’
It doesn’t last very long because, although Thorne is obviously far stronger, there’s no way he can’t let the boy win. They wrestle for a few seconds, then Thorne grunts like a beaten man and steps back beyond the stones.
‘Poisoned,’ he says. ‘I’m poisoned.’
Kieron begins to cry and shakes his head. He says, ‘No, I am—’
Which is when the siren starts to scream from somewhere close by and a flock of birds explodes from the treetops. Thorne shields his eyes against the sun and watches them beating their way skywards, before they turn back suddenly and begin diving down and swooping around his head. He ducks for cover and shouts Kieron’s name, but the siren is getting louder and louder and the boy just stands there with tears streaming down his face and his hands pressed to his ears.
Thorne muttered at Alexa chiming at him from the chest of drawers on which she squatted in the corner of the room, then he shouted, until eventually the alarm stopped.
He lay still in the semi-dark, disoriented, slowly surfacing.
He could not remember the last time he had dreamed about the Kieron Coyne case; about Cat or Billy or Josh, or the woman who had committed two murders for reasons he still found hard to fathom. Once or twice over the years, no more than that. Certainly nothing like as often as he still dreamed about Calvert.
Old meat and metal and three pairs of embroidered pillowcases.
She might be out by now, he thought, easing himself up and sitting on the side of the bed. Angela Coyne. She’d received a life sentence, begun at Holloway, but, twenty-four years on, Thorne could not recall the tariff. He’d check when he got to the office, just to satisfy his curiosity.
He stood up, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and padded barefoot into the kitchen. He turned on the radio then leaned against the worktop, waiting for the kettle to boil. Happy enough – happier than he’d been in a while – in the flat he had first seen all those years ago. Standing on the street outside with Phil Hendricks.
‘I still think you probably need to look inside—’
Just before that first ever visit to the Bengal Lancer.
He hadn’t actually bought the place back then, content to be stubborn and hold on to the house in Highbury a while, to piss Jan and her hippy-dippy lecturer around for as long as possible. A few years later, the flat had come back on to the market and he’d snapped it up at a considerably higher price than it had been selling for the first time round.
Idiot . . .
He’d stayed here ever since, living alone for the most part, then renting the flat out for the time he was living south of the river with a woman named Helen Weeks and her son. When that relationship had finally gone the same way as the rest of them, he’d found himself back in Kentish Town.
Single, and fine with that, until a few months before.
He and Dr Melita Perera, the woman with whom Thorne was now involved, had decided not to do anything stupid like move in together, certainly not for a while. When they chose to share a bed for the night, it might be at his place or it might be at her considerably nicer one in Crouch End. It was a suitably grown-up arrangement, Thorne decided, and made a degree of sense considering the chequered history of cohabitation they had in common, and Melita’s lack of enthusiasm for music that featured a fiddle or a pedal-steel guitar.
It also meant that Thorne didn’t have to tidy up quite as much.
Thorne carried his tea across to the kitchen table and sat, remembering.
Angela Coyne had paid the right price for what she’d done, but she had been pretty much the only one. Any hopes that Jeff Ashton might stand trial were dashed when his ex-wife Maria had finally turned off the life-support machine he’d been on for five weeks.
After that it was just . . . details.
Ashton had kept Kieron Coyne sedated for most of the time, using drugs that, as a doctor, had been easily available to him. He had done other things too, of course, but those facts would never be read out in court and, even though a report was circulated internally, Thorne had not felt the need to see it.
It had been clear enough, in the fury distorting that small boy’s face.
Hulk . . . smash!
There had been therapy later on, Thorne had been aware of that much, privately and at school. For Kieron and for Josh. Talking and drawing and structured play.
‘Result,’ Boyle had said at the time. ‘No trial means a damn sight less paperwork and no titting about with the CPS. You ask me, Ashton got what was coming to him, anyway.’
It was more than could be said for Gordon Boyle himself who, after the most cursory of DPS inquiries, had been quietly transferred to a force at the other end of the country. That Boyle’s mishandling of the investigation should be swept under the carpet was hardly surprising, considering the flap once it had emerged that DCI Andy Frankham had been the source of the mysterious press leaks.
The Rubberheelers had been on overtime for weeks.
A swift early retirement, pension frozen and deferred until he was sixty-five.
Not that it had done Grantleigh Figgis any good.
Thorne stood up and took what was left of his tea back into the bedroom.
‘Alexa . . . shuffle songs by Merle Haggard.’ It was music he enjoyed while he was getting ready in the mornings, but sometimes Thorne could not help but wonder if whatever algorithms made the song choices for him had a dark sense of humour built in.
‘House of Memories’ . . .
Only a week or so earlier, Thorne had driven past Seacole House – or at least the block of swanky, overpriced apartments that had replaced it a long time ago – and wondered, as he had many times before, what had become of Catrin Coyne. In the back of his mind, he had an idea that she’d struck up a relationship with her son’s teacher, but he couldn’t be sure and he was struggling to recall the man’s name.
Jennings? Jensen? He couldn’t remember . . .
He liked to think that she had found somebody else and hadn’t simply taken Billy back when he’d come out of prison.
Wherever she was and whatever she was doing, Thorne hoped she had been able to leave what had happened that morning in Highgate Wood behind her. He hoped she was happy and . . . settled, though he had good reason to doubt it.
He had recognised Kieron Coyne’s name on an arrest report, a dozen or so years before; as many years after he had seen him burst through that curtain in hospital and run to his mother.
Disturbing the peace, assault on a police officer, possession of Class A drugs.
Thorne had not been surprised.
He was leaning down to tie his shoelaces when the text alert sounded on his phone.
We still on for tonight, big boy?
Phil Hendricks and his partner Liam were coming over for dinner with Thorne and Melita. Their first time together as a foursome.
Thorne texted back: As long as you behave yourself.
He briefly wondered if he should tell Hendricks ab
out the dream when he saw him that evening and imagined the pair of them trotting out one of their many war stories after a bottle or two. He quickly decided against it. Kieron Coyne’s story was not one fit for sharing over the dinner table, besides which it was rarely a good idea to talk about your nightmares when your girlfriend was a forensic psychiatrist.
Anyway, he knew what Melita would say, that she would be supportive, as she always was.
You’ve got nothing to feel bad about, Tom. You saved him . . .
Thorne wished he could feel the same way. He walked out into the hall, thinking about that old arrest report. He had seen enough damaged souls to know that for some people drugs were not a choice. He knew that, for those desperate enough, they were taken every bit as easily and with as good a reason as the rest of the world gobbled down antibiotics or statins or vitamin pills.
Painkillers . . .
Thorne picked up his leather jacket and opened his front door.
He hadn’t saved Kieron Coyne from anything.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing a novel set twenty-five years ago has much to be said for it – it is certainly a joy to write about a crime being investigated without your cops being almost wholly reliant on email trails, mobile phone cell-site triangulation and CCTV – but it was also a somewhat bizarre experience. I remember the mid-nineties well (most of it, anyway) but quickly realised that I was actually writing a piece of historical crime fiction, albeit one that features A-Zs, video recorders and smoking in pubs, as opposed to hansom cabs or Roman vases. As history has never been my strong point, it will come as no surprise that I needed a great deal of help to combat both the vagaries of memory and my all-but-total ignorance when it came to matters of police procedure a quarter of a century ago.
Sometimes, old episodes of The Bill are simply not enough.
I am far from being the first crime writer to be grateful for the advice and expertise of retired detective Graham Bartlett. His help has been incalculable, and if you want proof that Graham knows what he’s talking about, I can thoroughly recommend his own non-fiction book, Babes in the Wood (co-written with Peter James). The very different expertise of forensic pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton was equally valuable and I am indebted to him for providing fictional colleague Phil Hendricks with his revelatory moment of lateral thinking. Professor David Wilson’s book, My Life with Murderers, was enormously useful and the prison scenes in Cry Baby – including the nicknames of the special units – were largely inspired by Professor Wilson’s writings about his work at HMP Woodhill.
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