'He's pissed off that you're doing it and even more pissed off that you're getting away with it. None of us are going to let it go, you know. Whatever happens, we'll keep making a fuss until you're back in fucking uniform.'
Thorne considered, for a second or two, the uncomplicated life of the wooden top. Domestics. D and D. Traffic. He wouldn't wish it on his worst enemy.
'None of the things that you and your father are accusing me of is against the law, James.'
'Don't hide behind the law, that's pathetic. Especially when you've got no respect for it.'
'I respect the important bits of it.'
'You're not a copper, Thorne, you're a stalker.'
Thorne took a napkin and slowly wiped the sugar from around his mouth. 'I'm just doing my job, James.'
Bishop was agitated. Had been since he'd walked in. Chewing his nails one second, drumming his fingers on the table the next. One part of his body always moving or twitching. Feet kicking, arms stretching. He was jittery. Thorne wondered if he had a drug problem. He didn't find it hard to believe. If he did it was almost certainly funded by his father. Maybe the doctor prescribed something...
Another very good reason for wanting to protect him.
'Your sister thinks that you only pretend to be close to your father so that you can keep sponging off him.'
'She's a silly cunt.' Spitting the words out. Thorne was shocked, but did his best not to show it.
'You do fairly well out of him, though?'
'Look, he gave me a car and he helped with the deposit on my flat, all right?' Thorne shrugged. 'This is nothing to do with money. He's upset and that makes me upset, it's as simple as that. He's my father.'
'So he's not capable of... wickedness?' Thorne had no idea why he'd used that particular word. While he was wondering where it had come from, James Bishop was staring at him as if he'd just dropped down to earth from another planet.
'He's my father.
'So you protect him at all costs?'
'Against the likes of you, yeah.., using the law to act out a vendetta because he happens to have treated some woman who got attacked by the man you're after and because you're shagging somebody he once had a thing with. I'll protect him against that.'
'It's my job to get at the truth, and if that upsets people sometimes, then that's tough.'
Bishop scoffed. 'Christ, you really think you're a hard man, don't you? Part misunderstood copper and part vigilante. I'd call you a dinosaur but they had bigger brains...' He stood up and turned to go.
Thorne stopped him. 'So what sort of copper would you be, James? What do you think it should be about?'
Bishop turned and thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his jacket. He sniffed, pursing lips that were the same as his father's. Thorne could see the small boy hiding just beneath the arrogant posturing. 'What about justice?'
Bishop sneered. 'I had the stupid idea that was fairly fucking important.'
Thorne pictured a young girl, in a bed with a pale pink quilt, trapped inside a body growing frail and flabby from lack of use. He pictured a face, the features partly shadowed, staring down at him from the second floor of a large house. Now he stared back, hard, at those same perfect features, set in the younger face of the man to whom they'd been passed on. 'Oh, it is, James. Very important...'
Thorne followed him to the door. 'Can I drop you anywhere?'
Bishop shook his head and stared out of the doorway at the huge stream of people still flowing round Piccadilly Circus in the early hours of a cold October morning. Without a word he stepped into it, and was immediately gone.
Thorne stood for a few seconds, watching the red Puffa jacket disappearing into the distance, before turning and heading in the opposite direction to pick up his car. Thorne stopped when he saw the shape in the doorway. He froze when it began to move.
He breathed out, relieved, when the shape revealed itself to be the somewhat wobbly figure of Dave Holland. Thorne's first thought was that he'd been hurt. 'Jesus, Dave...' He moved quickly, reaching to gather up the DC by the arms, and then he smelt the booze.
Holland stood up. Not paralytic, but well on the way.
'Sir... been sitting waiting for you. You've been ages...'
Thorne had given up the whisky a long time ago, at the same time as the fags, but it was still a smell he'd recognise anywhere. Instinctively he reeled from it, just needing a second or two. It was a smell that could overpower him. Pungent and pathetic. The smell of need. The smell of misery. The smell of alone.
Francis John Calvert. Whisky, piss and gunpowder. And freshly washed nightdresses.
The smell of death in a council flat on a Monday morning. Holland stood, leaning against the wall, breathing too loudly. Thorne reached into the pocket of his leather jacket for his keys. 'Come on, Dave, let's get inside and I'll make some coffee. How did you get here anyway?'
'Taxi. Left the car...'
There was really no point in asking where Holland had left his car. They could sort it out later. The key turned in the lock. Thorne nudged open the front door with his foot, instinctively turning the bunch of keys in his hand, feeling for the second key that would open the door to his flat. There was a white envelope lying on the doormat in the communal hallway.
Thorne looked at it and thought: There's another note from the killer.
Not 'What's that?' or 'That's odd' or even 'I wonder if...?'. He knew what it was immediately and said as much. Holland sobered up straight away.
Thorne knew that neither the envelope nor the note inside it would trouble a forensic scientist greatly. They would be clean - not a print, not a fibre, not a stray hair. But he still took the necessary precautions. Holland held down the envelope with fingers wrapped in kitchen towel while Thorne used two knives to improvise as tongs and remove the piece of paper.
The envelope had not been sealed. Thorne would probably have steamed it open anyway, but the killer had left nothing to chance. He'd wanted his note read straight away. By Thorne.
He used the knives to flatten the paper out. The note was neatly typed like the others. Thorne knew it was only a matter of time before the typewriter it had been written on was being wrapped up, labeled and loaded into the back of a Forensic Science Services van.
This would be Jeremy Bishop's last note.
TOM,
I HAD CONSIDERED SOMETHING DIFFERENT, AN EMAIL PERHAPS, BUT I'M GUESSING THAT YOU'RE SOMETHING OF A LUDDITE AS FAR AS ALL THAT'S CONCERNED. SO, INK AND PARCHMENT IT IS. CONGRATULATIONS ON THE TV PERFORMANCE BY THE WAY, VERY INTENSE. DID YOU MEAN WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT IT ALL BEING OVER SOON, OR WAS THAT JUST HOT AIR FOR THE CAMERAS? THERE'S NOTHING LIKE CONFIDENCE, IS THERE? OR ARE YOU JUST TRYING TO MAKE ME JITTERY IN THE HOPE THAT I'LL MAKE A MISTAKE ONE QUESTION...WHAT I WAS WONDERING IS, WHAT WAS IT LIKE FINDING HER? BEING THE FIRST ONE THERE? WAS THAT YOUR FIRST TIME, TOM. YOU GET USED TO BLOOD, DON'T YOU? ANYWAY, IF YOU'RE RIGHT, I SUPPOSE I'LL SEE YOU VERY SOON. REGARDS . . .
Holland slumped on to the settee. Thorne read the note a second time. And a third. The arrogance was breathtaking.
There seemed no great point to it. There was no revelation or announcement. It was all on display.
He went into the kitchen, flicked on the kettle and swilled out a couple of coffee-cups. Why did Bishop feel the need to do this? Why was he baiting him about Maggie Byrne, when Thorne had so clearly risen to the bait a long time ago?
He spooned in the instant coffee.
There was something skewed about the tone of the note that Thorne couldn't put his finger on. Something almost forced. Maybe the killer was starting to lose the control he had over everything. Maybe his latest failure had tipped him over the edge. Or maybe he was starting to work towards the insanity plea he would obviously try to cop when the time came.
And the time was most certainly coming.
He stirred the drinks. There was nothing artificial about the madness. Nobody sane could do as this man had done, but still Thorne would fight tooth a
nd nail to prevent it cushioning his fall.
He wanted him to fall hard.
There would be pressure, of course, from those who would want to treat his illness, to care for him. There were always those. There were always plenty for whom violent death was a hobby, or a study option or a gravy train. The lunatics who would write to him inside with requests for advice, or signed pictures, or offers of marriage. The campaigners. The writers of books - bestsellers before the bodies had started to decompose. The makers of films. The old women with pastel hair hammering on the side of the van, spitting...
And the policemen who remembered the smell of the blood.
Was that your first time?
Thorne carried the coffee into the living room, but stopped in the doorway the second he looked at Holland, who was sitting on the settee and staring at the wall opposite. It was not the faraway look of drunkenness, or tiredness, or boredom.
Thorne felt his heartbeat increase.
He hadn't asked why Holland had come here in the first place.
Holland turned to him. 'We were trying to get hold of you...'
Thorne remembered his phone, chucked into the back of his car. 'What's happened, Dave?'
Holland tried to shape an answer and now Thorne recognised the look. He'd seen it fifteen years before, in the bottom of glasses and in shop windows and in mirrors. The look of a young man who's seen far too much death. Holland spoke, his voice, his eyes, his expression dead.
'Michael and Eileen Doyle... Helen Doyle's mum and dad. The next-door neighbour noticed the smell.'
Apparently, the stroke affected only a very small part of my brain. In the brainstem.
The 'inferior pons' this particular bit's called, if you can believe that.
It's just unfortunate that it happens to be the bit that controls things. All the communications pass through it. If your brain's Paddington station, this bit's the signal box. Basically, the signals still get waved or switched on or whatever. When I want to wiggle a toe or sniff or speak, the instruction still goes out. This thing called a relay cell is supposed to make it happen: it fires the signal down the line to the next cell and then the next one. It's like a microscopic version of 'pass it on' all the way to my toe or my nose or wherever. Unfortunately, somewhere in the middle, some of the cells aren't playing the game properly and that's the end of that. In layman's terms, this is me. Bizarrely, though, as one part of my brain is fucked, it feels like other parts are compensating and changing. The bit that deals with sound. It feels like that bit's been upgraded. I can distinguish between sounds that are very similar. I can place a nurse by the squeak of her shoe and tell how far away things are. The sounds give me a picture in my head, like I'm turning into a bat.
And it's helping me to remember.
Those underwater sounds are getting clearer every day. Words are sharpening up. I can make out a lot of what we said to each other now, me and the man who put me in hospital. Fragments of a soundtrack.
A lot of it's me, of course, no real surprise there, waffling on about the party and the wedding and stuff. Christ, I sound very pissed. I can hear the champagne going down my throat and I can hear him laughing at my dismal, drunken jokes. I hear myself playing with the front-door keys. Inviting him inside to finish the drink. Slurred and stupid words. Words that are hardly worth remembering. The last words ever to come out of my mouth.
I'm still groping for the words that came out of his.
TWENTY
As Thorne drove towards the Edgware Road, he found himself fighting to stay awake. The noise of six empty beer cans, rattling around in the footwell, was helping, but it was still a struggle. It had been a long night, and a bleak one. Not even the spectacle of Holland on the phone that morning, squirming and looking pained as he tried sheepishly to explain to Sophie where he'd spent the night, had raised the spirits.
They'd talked long into the night. Holland told Thorne what had happened to Michael and Eileen Doyle. They'd done it with tablets. The police had been called to the house on Windsor Road by a neighbour. She'd presumed they'd gone away to stay with relatives after what had happened to Helen.
A PC found them in an upstairs bedroom. They were holding hands.
In spite of what Holland had already had to drink, Thorne dug out a few cans and they'd sat up talking about everything and nothing. Parents, partners, the job. As the drink met the tiredness head on, Holland had started to drift off, and Thorne began to ramble vaguely about the girls. About Christine and Susan and Madeleine. And Helen. He didn't say anything about their voices He didn't mention how strange he found it that he never heard the voice of Maggie Byrne.
Thorne wondered if Holland heard it. He never asked him.
The note lay beside him on the passenger seat, safely Wrapped up. He saw himself handing it over in exchange for a warrant. He heard himself reading Jeremy Bishop his rights. He pictured himself leading the good doctor away, down the front path, past his terracotta pots full of dead and dying flowers.
Then he arrived at work and it all fell apart.
'They couldn't get a thing. Sorry, Tom.'
Keable did look sorry. But not as sorry as Thorne. They'd been waiting for him, Keable and Tughan, to fuck him up the second he stepped out of the lift.
'A ring's a difficult enough thing to print anyway by all accounts. A small surface area. This one was just a mess Dozens of partials but nothing worth writing up. We even sent it over to the Yard. SO3 have got better equipment, but --'
'What about dead skin on the inside? Hairs from a finger?' Thorne was trying to sound reasonable. Tughan shook his head. 'The bloke I spoke to said it was a forensic nightmare. It's been up and down the country, for Christ's sake, handled by God knows how many people.'
Thorne slumped back against the lift doors and felt fury fighting a battle with tiredness for control of him.
'Did you at least check the hallmark? Check it and you'll find out that ring was made the same year Bishop got married.'
Keable nodded but Tughan was in no mood to humour Thorne. 'Listen, even if we do get something, the chain of evidence is nonexistent.'
The fury won the battle. 'And whose fault is that? This has been one huge fuck-up from start to finish. I should have had a warrant by now. I should be tearing that bastard's house apart. This case should be over by now over.'
Tughan moved back towards his desk. 'It was only ever a slim possibility, Tom. We knew that even if you didn't. What were you planning to do anyway? Slip it on to Bishop's finger like a fucking glass slipper?'
Thorne waited until Tughan's self-indulgent chuckle had finished. 'How are you planning to spend the money the newspaper paid you, Nick?'
The colour rose immediately to Tughan's hollow cheeks. Keable stared hard at him, then back to Thorne, deciding finally that accusations would be best left until another day. 'Listen, Tom,' Keable said, 'Nobody's more upset about this than me and I'm going to crack some heads, trust me.'
And now Thorne felt the tiredness come rushing at him. He could barely keep his head erect. He closed his eyes. He had no idea how long they'd been closed when Keable next spoke. 'We've got this latest note. It's a significant development.'
'Another press conference?'
'I think it would be a good idea, yes.'
Thorne called the lift back up. Raising his arm and bringing his finger to the button was a struggle. He had an idea now of the effort it took for Alison to blink. He wanted to go home. He had no intention of hanging around and answering phones. He needed to lie down and switch himself off.
One final question: 'Is Jeremy Bishop this investigation's prime suspect?'
Keable hesitated a fraction too long before replying, but Thorne didn't hear the answer anyway, thanks to the roaring in his ears.
He was driving much too fast along the Marylebone Road. The exertion of steering, of concentrating, was leaving him wringing with sweat, which dripped from him as he leaned forward, crippled with exhaustion. It took every last ounce
of energy he had to tap out a rhythm on the wheel, as the music exploded from the speakers.
He turned up the volume as high as it would go. He winced. The cheap speakers distorted the sound, turning the treble into shattering glass and the bass into a collision. The music, if it could still be called that, was shaking the car apart, but he would have made it even louder if he could. He wanted to be bludgeoned by the noise. He wanted to be hypnotised.
He wanted to be anaesthetised...
He swerved into the inside lane, reached for his phone and pulled up just past Madame Tussaud's.
He flicked on the hazards turned down the music and hit the speed dial.
A long queue of tourists was standing in the rain, waiting to get in and gawp at the waxy doppelgangers of pop stars, politicians and sportsmen. And, .of course, mass murderers: the Chamber of Horrors was always the most popular attraction.
Anywhere.
The violent death gravy train...
She picked up.
'It's me... I'm sorry about yesterday.'
'OK...' Sounding unsure, hedging her bets.
'Look, Anne, everything's changed, fucked up to be honest, and I just wanted to tell you...' Your ex boyfriend's off the hook. '... the evidence I thought I had hasn't.., materialised, so just ignore what I said, all right?'
'What about Jeremy?'
'Can I see you later?'
'Is he still a suspect?'
This time it was Thorne's turn to hesitate too long before replying.
'Can you come over later?'
'Listen, Tom, I won't say I'm not pleased because I am. I'm sorry about yesterday too, though...'
In the background Thorne could hear a doctor being paged. He waited until it had finished. 'Anne...'
'I'll be over about five-ish. I'm on call tonight so I'll sneak away from here early. All right?'
It was very all right.
He'd legislated for some ineptitude. There had been a little give built into his thinking. But this was way beyond anything he'd imagined.
Fucking morons. Stupid fucking idiots.
It was stupid to expect any kind of equilibrium, he knew that, but this kind of unpredictability was so fucking annoying. He'd started to feel the depression take hold again the second he'd put the phone down, wrapping itself around him, like a dark, itchy blanket. Making him scratch. Making him smell.
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