‘As some of you know already, we received a call this morning that has changed the focus of the Emily Walker inquiry. I’ve spent most of the day since then on the phone to various senior officers from the Leicestershire constabulary . . .’
While Brigstocke spoke, Thorne thought about control; the exercise of it. Emily Walker’s killer had been meticulous in his preparation, in waiting to make his move and in the use of the bag to suffocate her. Now, there was every reason to believe that the same man was responsible for the death of Catherine Burke. She too had been discovered at home, with no sign of forced entry, so it seemed likely that he had planned her murder every bit as carefully as Emily Walker’s.
A man who waited and watched and then killed twice in three weeks.
‘So, the investigations into these two killings will proceed separately for the time being,’ Brigstocke said. ‘With as much cooperation between ourselves and the boys in Leicester as is required . . .’
Thorne felt his mouth go dry. Twice in three weeks . . . as far as they knew.
‘. . . and if, as seems likely, they turn out to be linked, then we will have the necessary protocols in place.’
By and large, the briefing was about practicalities from then on, as Brigstocke outlined the way forward. Neither force would want to risk the other screwing up their investigations, so it had been agreed that each would have ‘read only’ access to the other’s HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) account. As the Met team’s office manager, DS Sam Karim would be responsible for all case information inputted into their account and for liaising daily with his opposite number in Leicester.
‘Not a problem,’ Karim said.
‘Especially not if his other half ’s a “she”,’ someone added.
It was a ‘delicate’ situation, Brigstocke said, and ‘potentially fraught’, but he trusted his team could handle it.
If his team needed any more reasons to try to make things work, Brigstocke waited until the end to give them the best one of all. He nodded, then turned to the screen behind him as the lights were flicked off. Many in the room had seen the picture of Emily Walker, but none save Brigstocke and his DIs had seen the photo of Catherine Burke that had been emailed across a few hours earlier.
The pictures had been taken from different angles, but projected next to one another, the similarity was evident . . . and horrifying. Though the limbs were splayed differently and there was a little more blood in one bag than the other, Thorne guessed that all eyes in the room would be drawn, eventually, to the faces. To the shock and desperation etched into each woman’s chalk-white skin, just visible through plastic fogged with her dying breath.
When he had finished talking, Brigstocke left the lights out and waited for each officer to walk out past the pictures on the screen.
Thorne was the last to leave.
‘They’re nothing like each other physically,’ he said. Brigstocke turned and the two detectives stood in the semi-dark, staring at the screen. ‘So, if we’re looking for a connection, it’s not like he’s got a type.’
‘If it’s the same killer,’ Brigstocke said.
‘You think it might not be?’
‘I’m just saying we don’t know for sure.’
‘Come on, Russell, look at them . . .’
Brigstocke gave it a few more moments, then turned away, walked across the room and switched the lights back on. ‘The forensics report came in,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to go through it properly, but they’re confirming that the celluloid fragment is a piece cut out from an X-ray.’ He continued before Thorne could ask the obvious question. ‘No, they don’t know what it is either, but there are some very decent prints on it and they’re not Emily’s. We’ve got DNA, too. Some hairs on her sweater. Might not be the killer’s, of course, but we’ve eliminated the husband, so if our sample matches the one from Catherine Burke . . .’
‘They’ll match,’ Thorne said.
‘Sounds like you’re counting on it.’
‘He’s got plans, this bloke,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s probably the only way we’re going to catch him.’
‘As long as we do.’
Thorne leaned back against the wall and stared at the dozens of empty chairs. Already the men and women who had just left them would be settling down at computers and picking up phones; doing everything that could reasonably be done. But Thorne was beginning to sense that real progress was going to depend on the man they were after giving them something more to work with.
‘I might be wrong,’ Thorne said. ‘It might be piss-easy. One look at the stuff these Leicester boys have got and everything could get sorted.’
‘Christ, I hope so,’ Brigstocke said.
Thorne hoped so too, but he could not shake the feeling that this was one of those cases where a break would mean another body.
SIX
Thorne picked up a takeaway from the Bengal Lancer on his way home. He hadn’t bothered phoning ahead with the order, had looked forward to the cold bottle of Kingfisher, the complimentary poppadoms and the chat with the manager while he was waiting.
Louise was slumped in front of some celebrity ice-skating programme when he got back. She seemed happy enough, a fair way into a bottle of red wine.
‘Every cloud,’ she said. She raised her glass as though she were toasting something. ‘Nice to have a drink again.’
Thorne went through to the kitchen, began dishing up the food. He shouted through to the living room, ‘You should,’ then pushed the empty cartons down into the bin.
When he turned round, Louise was standing in the doorway. ‘Should what?’
‘Should . . . have a drink . . . if you want. Relax a bit.’
‘Get pissed, you mean?’
Thorne licked sauce off his fingers, stared at her. ‘I didn’t mean anything, Lou . . .’
She walked back into the living room and, after a moment, he followed her with the plates. They sat on the floor with their backs against the sofa, eating off their laps. Thorne poured himself what was left of the wine; a little over half a glass.
‘Whoever killed the woman in Finchley,’ he said. ‘Looks like he’s done it before.’
Louise chewed for a few more seconds. ‘That Garvey thing you told me about?’
‘Well, that girl, yeah. She’s not his first.’
‘Shit . . .’
‘Right, all I need.’
She shrugged, swallowed. ‘Might be exactly what you need.’
The food was as good as always: rogan josh and a creamy mutter paneer; mushroom bhaji, pilau rice and a peshwari nan to share. Louise ate quickly, helping herself to the lion’s share of the bread. Almost done, she moved her fork slowly through the last few grains of yellow rice. ‘Sounds like you’re going to be busy.’
Thorne glanced across, searching in vain for something in her face that might give him a clue as to how she felt about it. He hedged his bets. ‘It’s a hell of a big team, so we’ll have to see.’
‘OK . . .’
‘Listen, shall I open some more wine?’
‘I really don’t mind.’
Thorne looked again and saw nothing to contradict what she’d said. He carried the plates back to the kitchen and fetched another bottle. They settled down on the sofa and watched TV in silence for a few minutes, Louise laughing more readily than Thorne when a former glamour model went sprawling on the ice. Once the show had finished, Thorne flicked through the channels, finally settling on a repeat of The Wild Geese, a film he had always loved. They watched Richard Burton, Roger Moore and Richard Harris charging about in the African bush, the three just about believable as ageing mercenaries.
‘I talked to Phil,’ Thorne said. ‘I meant to say.’
‘Did you tell him what happened?’
‘I didn’t have to.’ Thorne waited to see if she would pick up on it, say something about having confided in Hendricks about the pregnancy. ‘He said you should call him, you know, if you want to talk.’<
br />
‘I spoke to him last night,’ she said.
‘Oh, right.’
‘He was really sweet.’
On the television, Harris was begging Burton to shoot him before he was hacked to death by the enemy, but the shouting and gunfire were little more than background noise.
‘Why did you tell him you were pregnant?’ Thorne asked. ‘I thought we’d agreed to keep it a secret.’
Louise stared into her glass. ‘I knew he’d be chuffed.’
‘We decided we wouldn’t, though, just in case this happened.’
‘Right, well, it has happened, OK? So arguing about whether I should or shouldn’t have told anyone is a bit pointless now, don’t you think?’ She shuffled along the sofa, a foot or so away from him, and lowered her voice. ‘Christ, it’s not like Phil’s going to run around announcing it.’
There were a few grains of rice and some crumbs on the carpet. Thorne inched away in the other direction and started picking them up, collecting them in his palm.
‘I honestly wouldn’t have minded if you’d told anyone,’ Louise said.
‘I did think about it.’
‘Who would you have told?’
Thorne smiled. ‘Probably Phil.’
They moved back to each other and Thorne asked if she’d mind if he turned off the TV and put a CD on. Normally she might have rolled her eyes and insisted that it was one of hers, or repeated a joke she’d heard from Holland or Hendricks about Thorne’s dubious taste in music. Tonight she was happy enough to nod and stretch out. Thorne put on a Gram Parsons anthology and returned to the sofa, lifted up Louise’s legs and slid in underneath. They listened to ‘Hearts on Fire’ and ‘Brass Buttons’, poured out what was left of the wine.
‘So, what did Phil say?’
‘Stuff you’d expect, really,’ Louise said. ‘How there’s usually a good reason for these things and how the body knows what it’s doing. Knows when there’s something wrong.’ She took a healthy slurp of wine and was struggling suddenly to keep a straight face.
‘What?’
‘He said it might well have been because the baby was going to look like you.’ She was laughing now. ‘That a miscarriage was the preferred option.’
‘Cheeky bastard.’
‘He made me laugh,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘I needed that.’
She began to drift off soon after that and Thorne was not too far behind. He was sound asleep before ten-thirty, with Gram and Emmylou singing ‘Brand New Heartache’, the clink of cutlery from the kitchen as Elvis licked the plates clean, and Louise’s feet in his lap.
The band playing at the Rocket earlier that evening had been fantastic, easily as good as any of the so-called indie bands Alex had heard in the charts recently. They had something to say, and decent songs, and there was a bit more about them than the right kind of skinny jeans and nice arses. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the guitarist was a dead ringer for the lead singer from Razorlight . . .
She loved the heat and the noise; how it felt being in a crowd. She’d been soaked in sweat each time she’d gone outside for a cigarette, and shivering by the time she’d finished it. Afterwards, when the band had packed up, they’d set up some decks and the dance music had started. Some of her friends had stayed on, and were still there as far as she knew, but she’d been about ready to head home by then.
What was it Greg had said about caning it?
She pushed open the door to the flat and listened for voices.
Alex had seen her brother earlier in the bar, but only for a few minutes. Long enough for him to tell her he’d rather die than watch a band called The Bastard Thieves, and for her to clock the figure with whom he was exchanging the lingering, lustful stares. There’d been no sign of him once the gig had finished, but she wasn’t surprised.
She guessed he’d decided to get an early night.
There were lights on upstairs, but she couldn’t hear anything and wondered if perhaps she’d interrupted something. If they’d heard her coming in and were lying there in Greg’s bed, giggling and whispering to each other.
She climbed the stairs, singing softly to herself and keeping a good grip of the handrail. At the top, she threw her coat across the banister then stood there for a few moments, pissed and stupidly gleeful.
Then she crept along the corridor to Greg’s door.
There was no light coming from underneath. She pressed her ear to the flaking wood, but couldn’t hear anything: no giggles and certainly no creaking bed-springs. She reached down and slowly turned the handle. The door was locked.
Alex turned and walked back towards the kitchen, her steps not quite as gentle as she thought they were, trying to decide if she could be bothered making the cheese on toast she was suddenly craving.
She felt genuinely pleased for Greg, and hoped, even if it turned out to be no more than a one-night stand, that he at least enjoyed himself. That he took full advantage.
Her brother did not get lucky very often.
MY JOURNAL
28 September
I’m tired, of course, more or less all the time, because there’s an awful lot of rushing about, keeping all the balls in the air, but when each new challenge has been successfully met, when a tick goes next to a name, there’s a buzz which makes me forget how wiped out I am and makes every ounce of blood, sweat and tears worth it.
And there’s been plenty of all three!
I was thinking earlier about something my father said. He told me once that setting goals and achieving them had been the only thing that had got him through some of the tougher times towards the end. Reading a book all the way through, finishing a crossword, whatever. Obviously, bearing in mind his situation, they were small things, things which the rest of the world would take for granted, but they meant a hell of a lot to him at that time. These goals I’ve set for myself are rather grander, I can see that. A bit more difficult to set up and pull off. But, Christ, the feeling when it all comes together is like nothing on earth. After it’s done - even though I’m already thinking about the other places I need to be and the people I need to be when I get there - I just feel so fired-up and full of it. So desperate to get back and get the words down, to describe how it all went, that I’m scribbling away on these pages before I’ve even bothered to wash off the blood.
‘Journal’, not ‘diary’, and that’s deliberate. A collection of thoughts and ideas and reflections on this weird bloody world. How we end up where we are. Something to be read one day and hopefully enjoyed. Not just what I had for breakfast or watched on TV or any of that.
The brother and sister thing could not have gone a lot better. Students have it pretty bloody easy, if you ask me. I know they moan about paying back loans and all that, but most of them seem happy enough to spend every night in the bar getting wasted. It’s an easier life than most, I reckon. Actually, the brother wasn’t much of a party animal, not like some of them, but after a while it wasn’t the drink he was coming back for anyway.
He wasn’t hard to tempt!
I could see straight away what he’d be attracted to. Just holding the stare for a few seconds longer than normal. The whole ‘bit of rough’ thing. By the time he plucked up the courage to come over and say anything, it was a done deal and we were on the way back to his place quickly enough after that.
The sister had made breakfast for the two of us. I found the tray outside his door afterwards. That was sweet, I have to admit. She knocked first, then I heard the door open and the slap of her bare feet on the stripped floorboards.
He was face down and I was lying across the bed, naked but with the sheet covering the things she didn’t need to see. I knew she’d stopped, was taking it all in, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, work out what had happened. It was really hard to stay still, to control my breathing as much as I needed to.
I heard her say her brother’s name and ‘Oh my God’ a few times. Whisper it.
She went to her brother first and touc
hed him, his shoulder or arm. I heard her breath catch and she started to cry and, when I knew she was looking down at me, I opened my eyes.
Bang! Like a dead man coming back to life.
I stared straight up into her baby blues, all wet and big as saucers. She opened her mouth to scream then, sucked in a nice big breath, but my hand was on her neck quick enough to squeeze and stop it.
By the time I was out of the bedroom the tea was cold and I didn’t take more than a bite or two of the toast. I was enjoying the thought of them getting all worked up about DNA from the spit and teeth marks in the toast, all that.
None of it will matter in the end.
SEVEN
Like all other officers, Thorne was told not to leave important documentation in plain view when he was away from the office. Ancillary staff were instructed not to interfere with workstations while cleaning. However, as neither party adhered particularly closely to best practice, Thorne spent the first half hour of his Monday morning at Becke House searching for several vital scraps of barely intelligible scribble, then carefully reorganising his desktop into the shambolic clutter of paper that passed for a filing system, albeit one that collapsed if someone left a window open.
Or shut the door too quickly.
‘Shit!’
‘Sorry,’ Kitson said. She walked to her desk, smiling as she watched Thorne bend down to pick up the papers that had been blown to the floor. ‘I don’t know, maybe if you used staples or paperclips?’ She eased off her jacket and dropped her handbag, then continued as though addressing a young child or a very stupid dog. ‘Or went completely crazy and typed things up. On. Your. Computer.’
Thorne groaned as he straightened up and again as he dropped back into his chair. ‘You’re a bloody genius,’ he said.
‘It’s just common sense.’ Kitson took the lid from the takeaway coffee she had brought in with her, spooned the froth into her mouth. ‘Unfortunately, most men aren’t exactly blessed with too much of that.’
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