ELEVEN
Louise had sent him a text when he was halfway between Leicester and London: drive safe. you might still be pissed! Thorne had called at lunchtime, after they’d wrapped things up at the Rocket, but she was busy and a little brisk on the phone. Another text arrived just before five, as he and Holland were walking into Brigstocke’s office to review the CCTV footage: sorry about earlier. another takeaway 2nite? can’t be arsed 2 cook. early night? Taking his seat next to Brigstocke, Thorne sent back a smiley face that almost matched his own.
It was the best he had felt all day . . .
While Thorne had been in Leicester talking to Jamie Paice and in Holloway interviewing students, the team had been following those lines of enquiry that had become pressing since the link between the victims had been determined beyond all doubt. All checks thus far had eliminated any of Raymond Garvey’s former friends and established that he had no living male relatives, with an elderly uncle in a care home in Essex the only blood relative of any kind that anyone had been able to trace.
They talked through possibilities, while Kitson set up her equipment. ‘So, some kind of copycat then?’ she suggested.
‘They’re not copies,’ Holland said. ‘Not exactly. Garvey bludgeoned all his victims to death.’
‘You know what I mean, Dave.’
‘All killed outside as well.’
‘Some twisted, fucking . . . homage then, whatever you want to call it.’
‘Yeah, feasible, I suppose. I mean, it’s easy enough to find out who all Garvey’s victims were.’
‘It’s a piece of piss,’ Kitson had said. ‘There were at least two documentaries and there’s loads of books out there.’
Kitson and Holland had looked at Brigstocke. Brigstocke looked at Thorne.
‘Maybe,’ Thorne had said.
He had seen plenty of these books, their garish jackets - black and blood-red the favoured colours - jumping out at him on that first trawl through the websites devoted to Raymond Garvey and others like him. He had already returned to one such site and ordered a couple of the less sensational volumes. Could it really be that simple, though? Was the man responsible for four brutal and meticulously planned murders just some wannabe psycho looking to emulate one of his heroes? A killer trying to inspire a few garish jackets of his own. ‘Maybe . . .’
Now, they were going to get their first look at him.
Kitson had spent the afternoon transferring the tapes from the Rocket Club on to DVD; trawling through hours of footage; highlighting any clips that might be useful; and finally burning them on to a separate disc. With Thorne and Brigstocke ready to watch, she picked up the remote from the trolley on which she’d wheeled in the TV and DVD player.
‘Right, we’ve got three clips of Greg Macken and the man he picked up in the bar of the Rocket Club on Saturday evening.’
‘I think Greg was the one getting picked up,’ Thorne said.
‘Either way.’
‘You don’t look overly thrilled,’ Brigstocke said.
Kitson pressed the button and moved to one side. ‘See for yourself.’
The footage was black and white, silent, with a time code running across the top of the screen.
‘It’s a pretty good picture,’ Holland said.
‘They’ve just had all their equipment upgraded,’ Kitson said. ‘The picture’s not the problem.’
They were looking along a corridor, with the edge of a staircase on the left-hand side of the screen and a stone banister spiralling down out of the frame.
‘These are the main stairs down from the bar on the first floor,’ Kitson said. A group of four girls came towards the camera, heads nodding, enjoying themselves. ‘Obviously there’s music coming from the room where the band were performing. The girls turned on to the stairs and disappeared out of shot. ‘Here we go.’
They watched as Greg Macken and another man moved out of the shadows at the far end of the corridor and walked straight towards the camera. Thorne could not make out the faces, but he could see that Macken’s companion was talking. Macken laughed at something the other man said. Thorne moved his chair towards the screen in anticipation of his first good look at the killer.
‘Don’t get too excited,’ Kitson said.
At that moment the man let his head drop, then turned away from the camera.
‘Fuck . . .’
‘Gets worse,’ Kitson said.
The image froze, then jumped to a shot of the building’s lobby: a wide expanse of grey stone with stairs running up on either side towards the coffee shop, the dining halls and the upstairs bars.
‘We pick them up coming into the lobby five minutes after we last saw them.’
‘Where were they for five minutes?’ Brigstocke asked.
‘Maybe one of them needed the toilet. A quick snog? Who knows? Here they come . . .’
The slight figure of Greg Macken and his taller, better-built friend appeared at the bottom of the right-hand staircase and began walking towards the camera. The man had dark hair, wore jeans and a denim jacket, but Thorne still could not make out the face in any detail. As they reached the point where the features were becoming clearer, the man put a hand on Macken’s shoulder. He leaned in to whisper something, then angled his face away from the camera.
‘He knows where all the cameras are,’ Thorne said.
Kitson nodded as she moved on to the final clip. The camera above the main entrance picked up the couple as they stepped outside, almost immediately after the previous camera had lost them. This time the face was already turned from view, and stayed like that until the man was some distance away. The last image, which Kitson left frozen on the screen, was a nice, clean shot of the back of his head as he and Macken walked away along the pavement.
Kitson tossed the remote back down on top of the trolley.
Brigstocke got up and moved to the chair behind his desk. ‘He’d been in there quite a few times, that’s what some of the students said, right?’
‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘Letting Macken get a good look at him while he got a good look at where all the security cameras are.’
‘Why go to all that trouble?’ Holland said. ‘We know he’s changed his appearance anyway.’
Thorne thought Holland was probably right, but they could not be certain. As Kitson had suggested earlier, the discrepancies in the witness statements could simply be down to the normal lack of reliability when it came to stranger-stranger descriptions. The fact was that very few people could commit a stranger’s appearance to memory, to the extent that some coppers did not even bother noting such things down. Thorne himself had lost count of the number of times a heavy-set six-footer had turned out to be a short-arse who’d need to run around in the shower to get wet.
But whatever the reasons, the three descriptions they had tallied in only two respects: the man was in his late twenties or early thirties and was six feet tall. ‘He knows he’s been seen,’ Thorne said. ‘And I don’t think he’s too worried about that. Getting caught on camera’s something else, though. He doesn’t want to take that risk.’
‘It’s probably a ten-minute walk from the Rocket back to the Mackens’ flat,’ Kitson said. ‘We might have got him on three or four more cameras between the two.’
Brigstocke told her to chase it up, as it was his job to do. Kitson said she already was, even though, based on what they’d just seen, it would probably be a waste of time.
Thorne shook his head, said he knew it would be. He stared at the screen. ‘I think we can forget what I said about him getting careless.’
There was a knock and Sam Karim put his head around the door, waving a slip of paper. ‘The FSS have been on,’ he said. ‘They’ve put the bits of X-ray from the Mackens together with the other two.’
Thorne stuck his hand out for the piece of paper.
‘They’re getting a proper scan organised,’ Karim said, handing it over. ‘They’ll email that across in an hour or so, but meantime they s
aid they’d fax over what they’ve got already and we can call if we’ve got any questions.’
Thorne grunted a ‘thanks’ as he squeezed past Karim into the corridor, then turned towards the Incident Room. A minute later, when he had reached the corner of the room where the fax machine sat, he called the FSS lab in Victoria and asked for the doctor whose name Karim had scribbled down.
‘Bloody hell, that was fast, I haven’t even sent it yet.’ Doctor Clive Kelly asked Thorne to hold on. After a rustle of papers and some slightly tetchy muttering Thorne heard a series of tell-tale beeps. Then the doctor came back on the line: ‘Right, it’s on the way.’
‘I’m standing over the fax machine,’ Thorne said.
‘Not that I could tell you where it is while it’s on the way,’ Kelly said. ‘These things are a mystery to me.’
The fax machine hummed into life and a sheet of paper started to appear. ‘You’re supposed to be the scientist,’ Thorne said.
Kelly laughed. ‘Not my speciality,’ he said. ‘You give me a document and I’ll tell you where the paper came from and when the ink was produced and, if I’m having a good day, I might even tell you how many times the bloke who wrote it scratched his arse. But me putting that document on a machine and pressing a button and you taking it out of another machine in a room miles away . . . that’s just bloody witchcraft.’
As soon as the fax had been received, Thorne took the sheet from the tray and stared down at the new and extended sequence of letters and numbers:VEY48
ADD597-86/09
SYMPHONY
Said, ‘What am I looking at?’
‘Let’s start at the bottom,’ Kelly said. ‘That’s the easy bit. “Symphony” is just a type of MRI scanner. It’s basically the name of the machine that did the X-ray. It’s not strictly speaking an X-ray, of course, as it uses magnetic resonance as opposed to radiation, but—’
‘X-ray of what?’
‘Still can’t tell you that, I’m afraid. But we know where it was done. See the second line?’
‘I’m looking . . .’
‘We thought the numbers might be some Health Service reference or other, and it turns out to be the area code for Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust. And the three letters - ADD - that’s the hospital itself.’ Kelly waited, as though expecting Thorne to start guessing.
‘Right . . . ?’
‘Addenbrooke’s.’
‘In Cambridge?’
‘Easy when you know the answer, isn’t it? There isn’t too much more we can tell you, I’m afraid.’
Thorne said it was OK, that he didn’t really need any more. At forty or so miles away, it was not the nearest hospital to Her Majesty’s Prison Whitemoor, but Addenbrooke’s had a worldwide reputation when it came to neurosurgery. Now Thorne knew exactly what kind of X-ray the pieces of plastic had been cut from.
‘That first line’s still got us all racking our brains,’ Kelly said.
VEY48
Thorne thanked Kelly for his help, then said, ‘I think “48” is probably the age of the patient when the X-ray was done.’
‘Easy when you know the answer.’
‘And “VEY” are the last three letters of his name.’
PART TWO
CRITICAL INCIDENTS
AFTERWARDS
Sally and Buzz
Sally puts down the phone for the third time that day and walks slowly back to her armchair. Buzz is asleep in front of the gas fire, twitching like he’s dreaming of chasing cats or something, and she has to step across him to get to the chair. She reaches down to tug at his soft brown ears, which he loves, before she sits down.
She’s been ringing every day since it happened, trying to get some information. ‘Wasting my time,’ she told her friend Betty. ‘Nobody wants to tell me anything.’ She talked to the police on several occasions in the days immediately afterwards and gave a full statement in the end, but now they speak to her as though she were annoying them. Like they have far better things to do, which always makes her laugh.
It wasn’t like she was asking for anything they weren’t allowed to tell her, not as far as she knows. She just wants to know what’s happening. If there is going to be a court case of some sort, because somebody has to be to blamed for what happened, surely?
They just fobbed her off. Trotted out the same old line about enquiries being ongoing. She could almost hear the sigh in the voice of whichever policeman happened to be manning the phones that day.
‘Oh Christ, it’s that silly old woman from the park again . . .’
A car door slams somewhere outside and Buzz is up, tearing across to the door, barking while she flicks through the TV channels and tells him not to be so silly. Afterwards, he comes back and lays his head on her leg, his tail going ten to the dozen.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, Buzzy-Boy. Not just yet, eh?’
The dog is getting fatter, she can see that, and it’s her fault. She hasn’t been out of the house since it happened, and Betty can’t walk him, not with her legs. Sally’s daughter has taken him out a couple of times, but Buzz misses the daily visit to the park. They both miss it.
She’s got as far as the front gate a couple of times, but her legs have started to tremble and she’s had to go back inside.
‘It’s hardly surprising,’ Betty says. ‘It’s a hell of a shock, getting caught up in something like that.’
But Betty’s wrong. It isn’t shock. It’s guilt.
The woman had been in a hurry, that was obvious, hadn’t wanted to hang about and chat, but Sally thought there must have been something she could have done to keep them there. If she had only talked to the boy for a bit longer, just a few minutes would have done it. Got him to throw a stick for Buzz, maybe. At the time she’d thought he was quiet, that was all. It wasn’t until she read the papers afterwards that she’d found out there was anything wrong with him.
Lord, just thinking about that poor boy keeps her awake most of the night.
The stupidest thing of all was, a few minutes after she’d watched the pair of them hurry away, that policeman’s identification card was being waved in her face and she’d been jabbering away ten to the dozen like the silly old cow she was. Telling him he’d just missed them and showing him which way they’d gone.
She should have known something wasn’t right as soon as he started running.
Sally gets up and goes to the kitchen, makes herself some tea and takes a packet of digestives from the cupboard. She brings them back to the chair on a small tray that Betty picked up for her in Southend, looks through the TV listings magazine to see if there’s one of her quiz shows on.
She’ll try to take Buzz out tomorrow, she tells herself, or failing that the next day. The weather forecast isn’t too good anyway.
She settles down in her chair. Watches an old episode of Catchphrase and drinks her tea. She can still feel it in her legs and in her chest, and the tremor in her hand makes the cup shake a little against the saucer.
TWELVE
As the car turned on to the hospital approach road, Holland said, ‘I still think we’re ahead of the game.’ It was the continuation of a conversation they had begun in the queue for a taxi, which had itself sprung from a discussion that had started just as the train was pulling into Cambridge station.
‘The game being?’
‘Catching him.’
‘Got it,’ Thorne said. ‘So, not knowing who he is, where he is or why the hell he’s doing this puts us ahead, does it?’
‘We do know who the other victims are going to be, though. That’s a decent result, surely?’
‘Half decent.’
The cab was crawling over speed bumps towards the hospital’s main entrance and Holland began digging into his wallet for cash to pay the driver. ‘At the very least we can make sure there aren’t any more killings.’
‘If we can find them,’ Thorne said. ‘I mean, it’s not looking too clever so far, is it?’
They
had quickly established that there were four more likely candidates: the children of those victims of Raymond Garvey whose offspring had not already been successfully targeted. As of that morning, the team had only been able to track down and talk to one out of the four, and had only been able to trace her that quickly because of a criminal record.
‘One out of four?’ Thorne had been as angry as he was incredulous. ‘That’s piss-poor, Russell. We need to find the other three, fast.’
‘You think so?’ Brigstocke’s tone had been every bit as sharp as Thorne’s. ‘Maybe you should be sitting on this side of the desk.’
‘I’m just saying, we need to concentrate on finding them, getting them into protective custody or whatever.’
‘Nobody’s arguing.’
‘That needs to be our top priority.’
‘I’m well aware of that, Tom, which is why I’ve got everyone except the cleaner working on it.’
Thorne had stood in the doorway of Brigstocke’s office and nodded, suddenly aware that he might have been coming across as a little self-righteous. ‘It wasn’t a criticism—’
‘So, why don’t you stop going on like you’re the only one who gives a shit and get out there and do your job?’
The cab stopped and Holland passed the money forward, gave a reasonable tip and asked for a receipt. The driver kept one eye on the rear-view mirror as he scribbled. He had clearly been ear-wigging all the way from the station, and when he had torn off the slip of paper and handed it across, he asked Holland if he and his friend were there to arrest anyone.
Thorne climbed out and slammed the door.
‘Got anybody in mind?’ Holland asked, one foot already outside the car.
The driver grinned. ‘I could tell you some bloody stories and that’s the truth.’
Holland slammed his own door then and followed Thorne, caught up with him by a small cluster of smokers gathered outside the entrance. ‘Is your glass ever half full?’ he asked.
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