Bloodline

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne looked across at Brigstocke, who suddenly appeared to find the tabletop uniquely fascinating.

  ‘But we may well be looking at problems down the line, as far as the public perception of our handling of the case goes, so we need to take a few decisions now. Start preparing answers for some of the questions that are bound to be asked, whether we get a result or not.’

  ‘We’ll get a result,’ Jesmond said. He nodded towards Brigstocke, whose interest in the tabletop seemed only to increase. Jesmond’s confidence was to be expected, of course; the last thing Johns wanted to hear was doubt or uncertainty. A bit of gung-ho positivity always went a long way with the brass.

  The smell of bullshit was kicking in nice and early.

  When Thorne had first heard about critical incident panels, he had presumed that they were convened as a result of terrorist incidents and the like, but he had quickly discovered that they were little more than forums for the mitigation of bad publicity; to discuss cases that were likely to attract criticism from the press or community groups. They were little more than damage-limitation exercises. Often, they were all about getting your retaliation in first.

  ‘We need to talk about the media,’ Johns said. ‘How we use, or don’t use them as the inquiry moves forward. Obviously, we’ve kept our powder dry as far as the serial elements of these killings is concerned.’

  ‘Dry-ish.’ Thorne spoke instinctively and held the stare when he caught a look from Jesmond that suggested he should have kept his mouth shut. ‘At least one journalist has already put it together.’

  Johns glanced down at his notes. ‘Nicholas Maier. But he’s assured you he understands the importance of discretion.’

  ‘He understands that we’ll feed him information about the case to keep him quiet. If he’s lucky, maybe enough to get a book out of it.’

  ‘Not much we can do about it,’ Brigstocke said.

  Jesmond launched into a tirade about Nicholas Maier and his ‘ilk’ making a living out of the suffering of others. He called them ‘hacks’ and ‘leeches’, said that they were no more than a few links up the food chain from the killers themselves. There were nods and appreciative murmurs from all but one person around the table. Jesmond’s comments had sounded heartfelt, but Thorne knew that the only thing the Superintendent was really passionate about was his own progress up the greasy pole. The two men exchanged glances again, and Thorne smiled like a good boy. He could not help wondering which hack would be ghost-writing Jesmond’s autobiography a few years down the line.

  ‘We will be keeping a close eye on Mr Maier,’ Johns said. ‘But obviously our main focus this morning is on the hunt for our three potential victims.’ He glanced down at his papers. ‘Andrew Dowd, Simon Walsh and Graham Fowler.’

  ‘As far as that goes, we feel the time might have come to start circulating pictures,’ Brigstocke said.

  Thorne looked across at his DCI and felt a surge of admiration for the man. He had been worryingly non-committal on the way into the meeting and Thorne would not have put money on which way he was liable to jump.

  ‘You’d be ready to move quickly on that?’ Johns asked.

  Brigstocke nodded. ‘The photos of Fowler and Walsh are long out of date, but they’re the best we’ve got: an old driving licence shot of Walsh from the DVLA and the most recent photo that Fowler’s father was able to find. We should be able to get some good ones of Andrew Dowd from his wife as soon as we’re given the word.’

  ‘If she hasn’t cut them all up,’ Jesmond said. ‘Sounds like a bit of a bitch.’

  Johns looked towards Paula Hughes. She had a mop of brown curls and, for Thorne’s money, showed a few too many teeth when she smiled.

  ‘We can get them into all the nationals by tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And the six o’clock news tonight, if we’re quick.’

  Johns nodded, scribbled a note or two.

  ‘We’re still . . . concerned,’ Jesmond said. ‘About alerting Garvey to the fact that we’re on to him.’

  Thorne’s sigh was clearly audible to everyone at the table. Heads turned. ‘I think he’s well aware of that,’ he said. ‘I think that suits him just fine. Why else would he be leaving the X-ray fragments?’

  Jesmond’s eyes hardened. ‘It’s extremely dangerous to make any kind of presumption about a man like Anthony Garvey. We’re not exactly dealing with a rational mind.’

  ‘All the more reason to take no chances.’

  ‘I agree completely. So why broadcast pictures of the very people he intends to kill?’

  ‘So we can find them.’ You fucking idiot. The words sounded so loud in Thorne’s head that, for a second or two, he wondered if he’d spoken them out loud. He caught the eye of the WPC taking notes. Clearly, he hadn’t needed to.

  ‘We have to at least consider the possibility that we might be helping him.’

  ‘I think he knows who he’s after.’ Thorne fought to keep the sarcasm from his voice. ‘And if we don’t do everything we can now, he’s likely to find them before we do.’

  ‘Why should he be able to do that?’

  ‘He’s been searching a damn sight longer than we have.’ Thorne made sure he had Johns’ attention. ‘And if we don’t use these photos, it’s going to start looking like he’s trying a damn sight harder, too.’

  Jesmond reddened and tapped his pencil against the edge of the table. It heartened Thorne enormously to see that the sandy hair was a little more wispy than the last time he had seen him, the face a little more veined.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Thorne said. ‘I really don’t understand why you’re so worried.’

  ‘What if we use these pictures in the press and Garvey kills someone?’

  ‘What if we don’t and he kills someone anyway?’

  ‘Well, obviously, either scenario is one we’ll try to avoid. But we do need to think about which is the least . . . problematic.’

  ‘Problematic?’ As Thorne stared at Jesmond, he remembered reading about an American car company that had discovered a potentially dangerous fault on one of its models. After considering their options, the management decided not to alert the public. They had calculated that it would be more expensive to organise a national recall of the affected vehicles than to pay damages to the injured and the relatives of those killed.

  More problematic . . .

  ‘This is what we need to talk about,’ Johns said. ‘We don’t want to be accused of not doing all we could have done, should this information come to light.’

  ‘Which it will,’ Thorne said.

  Jesmond shook his head. ‘As long as we keep the link between the victims quiet, it’s not a criticism that can be levelled.’

  ‘The papers will get hold of it,’ Thorne said. ‘There are far too many gobshites around, and too many journalists waving chequebooks. And the whole story’s going to come out anyway when Maier’s next book’s published.’

  Thorne thought he saw concern pass across Jesmond’s face, but it was no more than momentary. Jesmond knew that, in all probability, he would have moved on by the time anything damaging emerged. His successor would have to deal with the fallout. Thorne guessed that Johns was thinking the same thing.

  Thorne would still be where he was though, as would the families of Catherine Burke, Emily Walker and the Mackens.

  Jesmond removed his glasses, began rubbing at the lenses with a handkerchief. ‘We have allocated another dozen officers to the search for Andrew Dowd and the others. We’re liaising closely with all the relevant local forces, whose missing persons units have pretty much dropped all other cases.’ He slid his glasses back on and looked around the table, making eye contact with everyone but Thorne. ‘We’ll get there.’

  ‘I’m giving you another dozen, Trevor,’ Johns said. He glanced over at the woman from the Press Office, who quickly scribbled it down. Thorne knew that this was information they were only too happy to see in the papers.

  ‘On top of which, we do have another avenue of investigation,�
�� Jesmond said.

  Johns turned a page. ‘The young woman in Maier’s photograph?’

  ‘Correct.’ Jesmond turned towards Brigstocke. ‘Sounds like a very strong lead to me, Russell. If we can track her down, we might get to Garvey before he can get anywhere near Dowd or the others.’

  ‘I’ve got officers on it,’ Brigstocke said.

  ‘Can we at least run her picture?’ Thorne asked. He reached for the water jug, but moved back when he couldn’t quite reach it and nobody seemed inclined to help. He looked over at Proctor, the community relations representative who had not spoken at all. Said, ‘What is it you actually do?’

  Johns leaned forward. ‘Listen, nobody’s saying we can’t run the other pictures at some point. We’re weighing up the options, that’s all.’ He looked hard at Thorne. ‘I’m sure you understand our position well enough, Inspector. You’re not naïve. So, I’ll put your tone down to a genuine concern for the missing men rather than pure bolshiness.’

  ‘It’s probably a bit of both,’ Thorne said.

  Brigstocke cleared his throat. ‘Tom . . .’

  Jesmond held up a hand and nudged the water jug towards Thorne. ‘I can’t see too much of a problem with running the girl’s picture,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a good compromise.’

  There it was. One of the superintendent’s favourite words. Thorne was amazed it had taken so long to hear it.

  ‘Right, we’ll go that way,’ Johns said. ‘And keep an open mind as far as the other photographs are concerned.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Jesmond said. His eyes closed as he smiled, same as always.

  Thorne poured then sipped his water. It was warm and tasted faintly metallic. ‘If things should change . . . ?’

  ‘We can move quickly,’ the Press Officer said.

  Thorne did not doubt it. He knew that, when it came to shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, there was nobody quicker.

  Brigstocke had been kept back for a one-to-one with Jesmond, but Thorne wasn’t complaining. He was happy to get out of that room and back on to the street, to take a few decent-sized breaths of gorgeous, dirty air.

  Sitting on the Tube back to Colindale, his eyes fixed on the ads above the heads of the passengers opposite, Thorne felt the tension ease a little. He let the images drift and sputter in his mind and the ideas raise their voices above the noise of the train; let his imagination run amok.

  He imagined Jesmond’s face as the contents of the water jug ran down it, and the look on the face of the WPC - equal parts lust and admiration - as she unbuttoned her crisp white shirt and begged him to take her, right there across the blond-wood table.

  He imagined telling Martin Macken that the man who had murdered both his children was sitting in a cell, or breaking news of an altogether more terrible kind to a father he had yet to meet.

  He imagined Louise, smiling at him across the dinner table, across the bed, across a room in some wonderful house, with paintings on the walls and flowers he could not name in matching Chinese vases.

  He imagined her starting to show.

  Taking a life seemed a little easier if the person it belonged to was drunk; same as lifting a wallet. It had certainly been the case with Greg Macken - the responses sufficiently dulled and the defences down, something not quite there in the eyes even before the light had started to fade from them. Watching the man walk away from the pub now, he couldn’t say if he was pissed or not, but even a pint or two would blunt the reflexes. He crossed the road and began to follow. Once someone had poured enough alcohol down their necks, you could take almost anything you liked from them with nothing more deadly than a kebab.

  That was not to say of course, that everyone became easier to deal with when alcohol was involved and he knew that as well as anybody. Had his father not been the kind of drunk more liable to throw a punch than blow a kiss, he might never have kicked off in that Finsbury Park boozer, might never have got himself arrested.

  Might, arguably, still be alive.

  Walking past a crumbling stretch of wall, he bent quickly to pick up a fist-sized rock. He kept his eyes on the figure fifty yards in front of him, watching as the man stepped on to the road when such pavement as there was gave way to muddy verge. He picked up his pace a little, checked his pockets one last time to make sure the bag was there, and the other bits he needed.

  When he was no more than a few yards away, he reached into his jacket for his cigarettes, smiling like an idiot when the man looked over his shoulder and miming the striking of a match; thanking him when he saw the nod, then jogging the last few feet between them so as not to hold him up.

  ‘Swap you a light for a fag?’ the man said.

  Even better . . .

  He thought about his father in those few seconds before he swung the rock, about the yellow fingers knitting themselves together on the metal tabletop and the way his cheeks caved in with every draw on one of those pin-thin roll-ups. The fucked-up teeth showing when he said, ‘Banning this almost everywhere on the out, aren’t they? Banging people up for it. Bloody stupid, considering this is about the only place you can still smoke.’

  The rock bounced off the man’s arm - broke it, more than likely - when he lifted it to protect his face, but the cry of pain was quickly silenced by the second blow. He followed the man down on to the grass and rolled him over, knelt across his chest and hit him several times more, until there was no resistance.

  No, not drunk, he thought, but he looked for that dying light anyway, staring at the point where the man’s eyes should have been as he reached for the plastic bag.

  It was impossible to tell. The face was no more than blood and meat by then.

  He drove the rock down into the mess again, a few more times, until it became too slippery to hold.

  When headlights began creeping towards him, he rolled the body over the brow of the verge and waited there with it, his heart starting to slow and the damp grass tickling his face as the lorry rumbled past. He picked himself up and wiped the worst of the mud from his jeans. The man’s book of matches was lying near the edge of the road and he used one to light a cigarette as he walked back to where he’d parked the car.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Wednesday morning: two weeks since a schoolteacher had come home from work and found the body of his wife; since a man calling himself Anthony Garvey had begun to make himself known.

  Carol Chamberlain wondered if it was too early to pour herself a glass of wine. Despite Thorne’s crack about Ovaltine, it was not the kind of hotel where the rooms were furnished with mini-bars, but over the last few nights she had got through a bottle and a half of the Pinot Grigio she’d bought at the local Threshers and kept cool in the bathroom sink.

  Knowing what Jack would have to say about it, she decided to wait until dinner, and went back to her notes on the Anthony Garvey case.

  Bloody wild-goose chase, by the sound of it, Jack had said. She’d given him a general picture of what she’d been asked to do, not deeming it necessary to mention Ray Garvey’s name, and he had still struggled to share her enthusiasm.

  ‘Why should you be able to get anywhere if the cops can’t?’ he had said.

  Because I am a cop, she’d wanted to say. Inside. And I’m bloody good at this stuff.

  ‘How long are you going to be away?’

  It was the kind of job that might have suited a private detective - a career move she had considered a few years back, when she’d left the Force. Been pushed out. But she knew she’d hate sitting in cars for hours on end, clogging up the footwell with empty crisp packets and watching nondescript houses in the hope of getting a picture or two of an unfaithful wife or husband.

  She’d made light of the hypnotherapist business, but it had not been funny at the time, and she was stupidly grateful to Tom Thorne for the helping hand. It had pulled her back from a cosy future of dog-walking and crosswords. That was a pace of life she might be ready to embrace five or ten years down the line, but not now.
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br />   Christ, she wasn’t even sixty yet.

  Thorne had seemed a little distracted, she’d thought, when they’d met on Saturday. It was hard to tell if there was anything really wrong, though, because, if she were being honest, she could not say that she knew him well enough to discern what was normal. There were too many things they never spoke about, and she always sensed a reaction if she as much as alluded to them.

  Sometimes, watching the dog tear along the seafront, or pottering about with Jack in their tiny garden, those events seemed as if they had happened to somebody else. But she was not ashamed of what she’d done. Back then, the need to get a result had overshadowed everything - a single good one being enough to compensate for a dozen cases’ worth of frustration and failure. It drove her - something she knew she had in common with Tom Thorne - and even now, staring at the mess of paperwork and Post-its spread out on the bed in front of her, she felt an excitement she had feared had all but bled out of her.

  I need to get out of the sodding house a bit more, she thought.

  She had spent the day after she’d met up with Thorne going through the case notes from the original Garvey inquiry. She hadn’t expected any great revelation, but she had been shocked all over again by the casual brutality of the murders. Like Thorne, she found it hard to swallow that they had been carried out by a man whose personality had been horribly altered; one for whom such terrible actions were wildly out of character.

  She had filled her time subsequently on the phone or working at her laptop, making contact with old colleagues, many of whom had been closely involved with the inquiry. She had picked brains and called in favours, telling those who were interested enough to ask what she had been up to since they’d last been in touch.

  ‘You know, keeping my hand in,’ her stock reply.

  At the time of his arrest, Raymond Garvey had been married for seventeen years to his childhood sweetheart. In the wake of the predictable press hounding and after one too many turds through her letterbox, Jenny Garvey had left London and gone to ground, waiting for the man she thought she knew to go to prison, and, later, for her divorce to come through. Chamberlain had traced her to a flat in Southampton. The woman had sounded understandably wary on the phone, but had softened a little when Chamberlain had assured her that she would not be picking at too many old scabs.