Who had almost certainly murdered Meena Athwal and probably several others.
Who had stabbed Susan Best to death in her own home.
A matter of hours…
‘Oh, hell’s bells,’ Shepherd said, behind them.
They turned to look at her. She had clamped a hand across her mouth. The terrier in the basket began to bark and she told it to be quiet.
‘What?’
‘The rooms have already been cleaned.’ The woman was shaking her head and now the hand was pressed to her chest. ‘I mean, I didn’t think and we always send the girl in to do the rooms first thing.’ She stared at them, as though amazed that they weren’t screaming at her. ‘Well, that’s buggered up the DNA, hasn’t it? I’m no expert, but I watch enough bloody police shows on TV to know that much. Oh, what a bloody shame.’
‘It’s fine,’ Thorne said.
He and Tanner had talked about this on the way over and both knew that, for all sorts of reasons, the state of the rooms the men had stayed in would make no difference. Clean or dirty, hotel rooms were always a forensic nightmare, containing traces from hundreds of former occupants which would take many weeks, if not months, to process, even if they had the money or the permission to do so.
They knew very well they would get neither.
‘Hang on,’ Shepherd said. ‘They filled in registration forms, didn’t they? Maybe you could get fingerprints or something.’
Thorne was about to tell her that this too was of no real use, but the manager had already begun rooting excitedly through the filing cabinet. He and Tanner could only watch, saying nothing, as she searched for several minutes, then drew the forms out triumphantly. She held each one gingerly by a corner, looking to Thorne for a nod of approval, before dropping it into an empty plastic bag.
‘Best I can do,’ she said. ‘Not exactly CSI, I know.’
‘We’ll manage,’ Thorne said.
He knew that even if they were given the go-ahead to test and came back with the cleanest set of prints the forensic team had ever come across, they would be wasting their time. Tanner had said as much, back when Hendricks had been carrying out the post-mortem on Amaya Shah. There would be nothing on record, nothing to match a fingerprint or a DNA sample with.
The only forensic evidence these men had ever left at a crime scene had been Kamal Azim’s.
They were never going to catch them that way.
‘Did they have a car?’ Tanner asked. She had spotted a CCTV camera outside the entrance, where there was room for two or three vehicles.
‘Well, if they did they didn’t park it here.’
Tanner nodded. She had been pretty sure that the men they were looking for would not have been so careless as to provide them with a nice checkable number plate, but it had been worth asking.
Noreen Shepherd handed the plastic bag across. ‘There you go,’ she said. ‘Never know your luck.’
Tanner closed the car door and fastened her seat belt and, watching her sit back, Thorne got the sense that he was as much a chauffeur as anything else. He actually preferred being in his own car, but on top of everything else, it rankled. He decided that, wherever they went next, it might be nice if Tanner offered to do the driving.
‘All good,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘So, we missed them, but not by much.’
‘We missed them, that’s the point.’
‘No, the point is that they’re still here. That’s good news for us.’ Tanner turned in her seat to look at him. ‘That last sighting, the woman from the café? As I said at the time, I’m fairly sure they were still working the Shah and Azim killings then. Hanging around just long enough to make sure Amaya’s body was discovered, that it looked the way it was supposed to. If they’re still here, it’s because they’ve got another job to do, and I think we’re getting close to whoever’s putting these jobs their way.’
Thorne said nothing. He started the car.
‘Men like that don’t hang around any longer than they have to,’ Tanner said. She sounded fired up again, keen to crack on. ‘They’re on their toes with the money. In the wind, first chance they get.’
As Thorne nosed the BMW into traffic, he saw how relaxed Tanner looked suddenly, how confident, and he remembered what he’d said about her to Helen the night before.
Not giving a toss… not caring...not thinking.
Thorne was not convinced the news was nearly as good as Tanner thought it was.
FORTY
Thorne had offered to drop Tanner at home before heading back to the office, but five minutes into the journey back to Hammersmith, she suddenly asked if he could let her out at a tube station instead. It appeared that she had suddenly decided she needed to be somewhere, but she showed no inclination to explain, and when Thorne pulled over in a bus lane opposite Baron’s Court station she did not seem in any hurry to get out of the car.
Thorne flicked his hazards on.
Taking rather less care with them than Noreen Shepherd had done, Tanner was examining the registration forms filled in by the two men who had spent the previous night at the Palm Court hotel.
She said, ‘No point running these.’
Thorne took the forms, looked at the names the men had given. Block capitals and scrawled signatures.
Michael O’Toole and Hassan Ali.
‘Not massively imaginative,’ Thorne said.
Tanner’s thin smile was no more than automatic. She quickly sat back and began to talk, describing her trip to the Palmers Green mosque in detail; her subsequent sighting of the man in the gold skullcap at the AHCA meeting the night before.
‘It wasn’t a coincidence,’ she said. ‘He’d gone there to see someone.’
‘Right.’
‘To pass on whatever Haroon Shah had told him.’
She might simply have been thinking aloud, running through the salient points of her investigations over the previous few days, but to Thorne it sounded rather more as if she were recapping for the benefit of a dimwitted sidekick.
Watson, again.
Thorne wondered if Watson ever told Sherlock Holmes that he should think about counselling. That he was starting to sound slightly crazed. He wondered if Watson had ever lost his rag and kicked the Great Detective out of a hansom cab.
‘So, who’s our friend in the gold skullcap then?’
‘Not sure it matters,’ Tanner said. ‘He’s probably just a go-between. One of the links in the chain. In that chain, obviously. Somebody else would be doing it if it was a Hindu or Sikh family. It’s whoever he delivered the message to that we’re after.’
‘It would help if we knew, though.’
The look Tanner gave him suggested to Thorne that perhaps she really did think he was a little slow on the uptake. ‘Obviously, and I’m going to find out.’
‘I wonder if the mosque keeps records of worshippers?’ It was Thorne’s turn to think aloud. ‘Not sure they’d be very forthcoming, mind you. Certainly not without a warrant.’
‘Probably simpler if I just go and ask him,’ Tanner said.
‘You think that’s a good idea?’
‘I don’t see why not. I mean, he’s not going to give me a false name, is he? Wouldn’t want to arouse suspicion.’
Thorne shook his head. ‘You really like getting in these people’s faces, don’t you?’
‘You went to see Meena Athwal’s father.’
‘I don’t think I was that… obvious, though.’
‘You telling me you didn’t enjoy it?’
‘I’m just saying… there’s a difference between rattling someone’s cage a bit and pretty much making it clear you’re on to them.’
‘I know that.’
‘Sometimes, there are consequences.’
Tanner lowered the sun visor and checked her make-up in the vanity mirror. ‘If you’ve got any better ideas I’m keen to hear them.’
Thorne glanced at the rear-view and saw a bus approaching the traffic light
s behind them. They probably had no more than a couple of minutes, but he didn’t want to move just yet.
The picture was already in his head and he wanted to tell her why.
‘There was this case, years ago,’ he said. ‘A man called Frank Calvert.’
Tanner turned, recognising the name. ‘You caught Calvert?’
‘Yeah, I caught him,’ Thorne said. ‘I found him…’
Half a dozen gay men slaughtered in eighteen months and a city-wide manhunt that was going nowhere. Francis Calvert had been one of hundreds of builders questioned; a line of inquiry based on the one solid lead the investigation had. Thorne had been a DC back then and had been sitting in on the interview.
A stroke of luck, good and bad.
‘Something happened, as I was showing him out of the station,’ Thorne said. ‘I’m not sure I really knew, even though that’s the story that was put around afterwards… but I thought that something was off, and, for whatever reason, he saw it in my face. I shook his hand and he walked out of those doors convinced I’d sussed him.
‘I went round to his house a couple of days later, to prove to myself I was being stupid as much as anything else. Just to try and work out what was bothering me so much, you know?’ Thorne paused and opened the window a fraction to suck in some fresh air. It was still sunny, but that wasn’t why his shirt was sticking to his back as he leaned forward. ‘I knocked, but nobody answered, and I almost walked away. Then before I knew what I was doing I’d fetched a truncheon from the car and I was smashing the front door in.
‘His wife was dead in the kitchen. Strangled. He was on the floor in the living room, his brains all over the mirror above the fireplace.’ He reached forward and slowly wrapped his fingers around the steering wheel. ‘The girls were upstairs.’
‘I remember,’ Tanner said. Whispered.
‘Lauren, Samantha and Anne-Marie. She was the youngest… five years old. Just five. He thought it was finished, so he took them all with him.’
In the small back bedroom.
Laid out next to one another on the floor.
The smell of shampoo in their hair and of freshly washed nightdresses and six tiny, white feet in a row.
The picture in his head.
‘Not your fault,’ Tanner said quietly.
Thorne shook his head, not because it didn’t matter and not because he disagreed. Shaking the picture away. ‘He did it because he thought we were on to him, simple as that. That’s all I’m saying. Somehow I… pushed him.’
A horn sounded behind them, but neither of them moved.
Tanner closed the sun visor and lifted her handbag on to her lap. ‘You think we should be playing our cards closer to our chests?’
‘Not sure we’ve got any cards,’ Thorne said. ‘But yes.’
The bus driver leaned on his horn again and braked hard a few feet behind them.
‘You should probably move,’ Tanner said.
The horn sounded again, several seconds of it. Thorne looked in the mirror and watched as the bus swerved sharply around him and drew alongside. The driver lowered his window and shouted.
‘You can’t stop there.’
Thorne reached for his wallet then lowered the passenger side window. He leaned across Tanner, showed his warrant card and shouted back.
‘I can stop where I like. Now fuck off.’
Muttering curses, the driver pulled away, and Thorne was looking a little happier as he tucked his wallet back in his pocket again.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Tanner said. ‘Misuse of warrant card. Arguably discreditable conduct.’
Thorne nodded. ‘Well, that’s both of us finally living up to our reputations, then.’
This time, Tanner’s smile was a little more genuine. She said, ‘Sorry for being a pain in the arse the last couple of days.’
‘I can cope.’
She opened the door. ‘I’d love to say it was down to grief. But there’s no point in lying.’
FORTY-ONE
When Thorne got back to his office, Kitson was watching a video on her iPad, eating lunch from a Tupperware container. She looked up when he walked in, turned the video off.
‘Worth it?’
Thorne tossed his jacket on the back of a chair, which he dropped gratefully into. ‘Depends what you’re talking about. Getting out of bed in the morning? Probably not.’
Kitson got up and closed the door. ‘The hotel.’
‘Well, it was definitely them,’ Thorne said. ‘The pair that abducted Kamal Azim and Amaya Shah.’
‘The ones Tanner thinks killed her girlfriend?’
Thorne nodded. ‘False names, everything paid for in cash… DNA and prints a non-starter, obviously.’
‘Yeah.’ Kitson walked back to her desk and sat down. ‘Tricky to get forensic back-up on a case you’re not supposed to be working.’
‘What case?’ Thorne held up his hands. ‘No idea what you’re talking about.’
‘Ignore me.’ Kitson shook her head. ‘I’m probably just delirious with hunger.’ She plucked out another sandwich and took a bite. ‘Still, a couple of hours away from the office is always nice.’
‘Oh yeah, and I got to meet Noreen, the hotel manager… and Rascal, of course.’
Kitson looked at him.
‘Dog.’ Thorne let his head drop back, rolled it from side to side. ‘Yappy little shit.’
‘The manager or the dog?’
While Kitson continued to eat, Thorne opened a couple of drawers and closed them again. He sent a text to Phil Hendricks suggesting a drink later on. He logged on to his computer and saw a message from the tech support team confirming that the email supposedly sent by Kamal Azim had been traced to an internet café in Brighton. A second email confirmed that Sussex police were intensifying the search for their prime suspect.
‘God help us.’
Kitson looked up. ‘What?’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Thorne said. He groaned with the effort of getting up and walked across to sit on the edge of Kitson’s desk. He helped himself to a cherry tomato from her lunch box. ‘Did Brigstocke notice I was gone?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Good.’ He reached for the lunchbox again, but Kitson slapped his hand away. ‘Not that he doesn’t know. He’s just playing the game and pretending not to.’
‘Just don’t rub his nose in it.’
‘I’m not stupid.’
Kitson pretended to choke on her sandwich.
‘Hilarious.’
‘Just saying. Stay on the right side of him —’ She reached to answer the phone that had begun to ring and grunted a couple of times before she’d managed to swallow what was left of her sandwich. She said, ‘Right… I’ll tell him,’ and looked knowingly at Thorne as she hung up. ‘There you go. Now there’s something you can do on the case you’re supposed to be working and the one that doesn’t exist.’
‘What?’
‘Kamal Azim’s father just walked into Colindale station. Doesn’t think we’re doing quite enough to find his son, apparently.’ She carried on over Thorne’s harsh bark of laughter and industrial-strength muttering. ‘He’s demanding to see someone, because he reckons he’s got a way to help us.’
Thorne stopped swearing. ‘Oh, does he?’
‘Want me to go?’
‘Finish your lunch.’ Thorne was already moving back to his desk. ‘I mean, how can we turn down an offer like that?’ He grabbed his jacket and walked quickly towards the door, feeling a lot better suddenly than he had five minutes before, and remembering what Tanner had said to him in the car.
You telling me you didn’t enjoy it?
It would normally be no more than a five-minute walk from Becke House to Colindale station, but on this occasion Thorne took his time.
It was a nice day, after all.
Hamid Azim did not look best pleased at having been kept waiting. He stood up as soon as Thorne walked through the main doors into the reception area, but
Thorne did not acknowledge him, waiting until he was past the main desk and swiping his entry card before he turned and politely said, ‘This way, sir.’
Azim picked up a large cardboard box he had presumably brought with him and, struggling to carry it, followed Thorne through into the station and along a corridor to one of the interview rooms.
‘Bog-standard, I’m afraid,’ Thorne said, as he closed the door. ‘Everywhere else is busy.’
Azim did not appear overly concerned by the spartan surroundings. As soon as Thorne had sat down, he laid the box on the table in front of him and stepped back, seemingly happy to remain standing. He looked agitated. He took off his rimless spectacles and quickly cleaned them as he shifted from one foot to the other.
Thorne nudged the box aside. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Azim?’
The man looked at him. He seemed even slighter than Thorne remembered, wearing a black windbreaker over brown slacks. His hair looked a little messy. ‘Well, I suppose it would sound rather rude if I said you can find my son. So I will simply say that you could perhaps make a little more effort to find him.’
Thorne did not have to pretend to be taken aback. He said, ‘I can promise you that we’re doing all we can. We put out a fresh appeal on television yesterday.’
‘I saw that. There was an… implication I did not like.’
‘What was that?’
‘A suggestion that he might be missing because he was somehow involved in what happened to that poor girl? “In connection with” you said.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You think my son is a murderer?’ Azim swallowed hard. ‘You think he’s a rapist?’
‘We’re looking at several different possibilities,’ Thorne said.
Azim was blinking fast, staring at Thorne’s face, then at his feet. ‘So, did this appeal help with any of them? Your possibilities?’
‘Not yet, I’m afraid. We haven’t located your son, if that’s what you mean.’
‘There we are.’
‘We got a good response, though, and we’re working through every call that came in.’
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