The hotel manager walked through reception, talking quietly to a small group of guests in golfing gear. They stopped at the main doors and chatted some more. The manager shook their hands before watching the bemused golfers duck underneath the police tape and walk away, shaking their heads. It was a game Thorne had little time for, but he guessed they’d have something other than new cars and holidays to talk about on the first tee.
Brigstocke cleared his throat. “Right. Forensics will be moving as quickly as they can, but while we’re waiting, there’s plenty we need to do…”
“We’ll get nothing,” Thorne said. “It’s cleaner than the last place, but it’s still a hotel room. They’ll be gathering samples into next week.”
“We might get lucky,” Holland said.
“More chance of six numbers coming up Saturday night…”
Brigstocke tapped a spoon against his coffee cup. “Let’s cut the morale building short for a minute, shall we? Talk about what we can do…”
Holland raised a hand. “Sir. If I do get six numbers up on Saturday night, I’m officially requesting permission to resign from the case and fuck off to Rio de Janeiro with twin supermodels.” The few seconds of laughter did everybody good.
“I want to know exactly what Ian Welch has been doing since he came out,” Brigstocke said. “Where he’s been staying, who he’s been seeing—”
Stone cut in. “He came out NFA. The prison gave me the address of a hostel…”
Brigstocke nodded. “Good, and you’re going to be calling a lot more governors before we’re finished. We’ll need to contact every prison in the country housing sex offenders, talk to anyone with an imminent release date. That’s the easy bit. We’re also going to trace every rapist, groper, and flasher who’s been released in the last six months. Check that none of them have received letters. Warn them in case they get any.”
“How many are we looking at?” Holland asked.
Brigstocke picked up a small pack of biscuits, sealed in plastic. He dangled it between two fingers. “Based on the last set of Home Office stats, probably one serious sex offender is released somewhere in the country every day.” He tore open the packet with his teeth, spat out the plastic, looked at the faces of the other men around the table. “I know. Frightening, isn’t it? Just going back to the start of this year, we’re going to be looking for something like a hundred and fifty offenders…”
Stone raised his eyebrows. “Well, we should know where most of them are, in theory at least. Still might be a shitload of work, though.”
“Yes, it might be,” Brigstocke said.
“Are we going to be able to justify that? I mean, like you said, these aren’t exactly innocent victims, are they?”
Brigstocke blinked, opened his mouth to shout. Thorne got in first. “Not your worry, Andy.”
“I know. I was just saying…”
Thorne raised a hand. “What we can’t justify are bodies…”
They walked out to their cars. Brigstocke drifted away from the others toward his Volvo, took Thorne with him. He glanced toward Andy Stone.
“Have a word…”
Thorne nodded. “Well, he was making the same sort of point you made yourself earlier. Remfry, Welch, doing what they did, being what they are. Some people might well think that…”
Brigstocke pressed the remote, deactivating the car alarm with a squawk. “I’m not talking about what he said back there. I’m talking about the Gribbin business.”
Thorne had been waiting for this. He had known that Stone’s behavior during the raid was not just going to be forgotten. “Right…”
“Don’t worry, it’s not going as far as the Funny Firm. All been put down to protecting the girl. Still, I want you to let him know he overstepped the mark.”
“Fair enough…”
Brigstocke got into the car, started the engine. He began to pull slowly away. “Call me from the Wexham as soon as Phil’s finished…”
Holland loped across the gravel as Thorne walked to the Corsa. “You up for a drink later?”
“I’m likely to be up for several,” Thorne said.
Holland ran a hand along the front wing of the hire car. “This is the sort of thing you ought to get.”
“Sort of thing I ought to get when?”
“Come on, your car is fucked. This is nice, though…”
“It’s white…and my car is not fucked…”
“Name one thing that’s good about it.”
Thorne opened the Corsa’s door, hesitated before getting in. “What? Straight off the top of my head?”
Holland laughed, leaned down as Thorne climbed in. “If this was a woman we were talking about, you’d dump her.”
The electric window slid down. “You’ve got a very strange mind, Holland.”
“How’s it going with the florist, anyway?”
“Mind your own business.”
There was a rumble as an engine started up. Thorne looked across to see Stone watching them from behind the wheel of his own car, a silver Ford Cougar. He nodded toward it. “What d’you think of Stone’s motor?”
“It’s a bit flash,” Holland said.
Thorne could see Stone slapping his palm off the steering wheel. “Better get a move on. He looks keen to get back.”
Holland took a step away from the car, stopped. “Did your dad have a good time at the wedding?”
“A good time? Yes. I think so…”
“I meant to tell you…” Stone sounded the horn. “William Hartnell was the first Doctor Who. I looked it up on the Internet.”
“I’ll tell him…”
Thorne turned the key in the ignition, watched as Holland ran across and climbed into Stone’s car. He could hear the music being cranked up as the sports car roared past him and out onto the main road with hardly a look from Andy Stone toward anything that might have been coming.
Thorne looked at his watch and turned the engine off again. Not quite one o’clock yet. The postmortem wasn’t until two and it was no more than a ten-minute drive to the hospital. He sat for a few minutes trying to decide between sleep and a Sunday paper and then he started to hear distant shouting, a cheer, a solitary hand-clap. The noise recognizable, tantalizing. Carrying easily on the warm, afternoon air.
It took him twenty minutes to find the game, a quarter of a mile away up the main road in a small park. The season was still a month and a half away, but Sunday footballers cared as little for the calendar as they did for other trivialities like fitness and skill. A team in red and a team in yellow and a dozen or so lunatics watching, living every less than beautiful second of it.
Thorne could not have been more content. He stood on the touchline and lost himself in the game. In a little over an hour he would be watching organs meticulously excised, the flesh expertly sliced and laid aside…
For a while, he was happy to watch a team in red and a team in yellow, running and shouting and kicking lumps out of each other.
Thorne picked up his pint and turned from the bar. Except for Russell Brigstocke, one of whose kids was unwell, and Yvonne Kitson, most of the senior members of the team had come out. There was an unspoken need to loosen up, to enjoy a night out that they might not have the chance to repeat for a while, now that the case had moved up a gear. Now that there was a second body.
Thorne wasn’t planning on staying long. He was wiped out. One drink, maybe two, and then home…
They were gathered around a couple of smallish tables. Holland and Hendricks were sitting at one end with Andy Stone and Sam Karim, a DS who worked as office manager. They were playing Shag or Die, a game that involved choosing between a pair of equally undesirable sexual partners, which had swept through the entire Serious Crime Group in the last few weeks. The choice between Princess Anne and Camilla Parker-Bowles was prompting heated debate. Phil Hendricks was trying to make himself heard, claiming that as a gay man, he should not have to sleep with either of them. His point was eventually accepted as
valid and he was given a choice between Saddam Hussein and Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond to mull over…
If the Royal Oak had a theme other than drinking heavily, nobody had ever worked out what it was. Apart from being the nearest pub to Becke House, it had nothing whatsoever to recommend it. The fairly constant presence of police officers may have had something to do with it, but there was rarely anybody drinking in the pub who didn’t have a badge.
Thorne looked around. Sunday night and the place was all but deserted: a couple at a table near the toilets, staring into their drinks like they’d had a row; the room quiet, save for his team’s graphic deliberations and the tinny, musical stings from the unused arcade game in the corner.
Hardly any more there than had gathered earlier in the Dissecting Room: Phil Hendricks; a trio of mortuary attendants; the exhibits officer; a stills photographer; a video cameraman; the PC who had been first to arrive at the Greenwood Hotel, there to confirm that the body was indeed the same one he had seen on the bed in room 313. And Thorne…
Nine of them, gathered in a cold room with easy-to-clean surfaces and drains in the floor. The smallest murmur or the crunching of peppermints magnified, bouncing off the cracked, cream tiles. A small crowd, waiting for the body of Ian Welch to be uncovered and taken apart.
Thorne had attended hundreds of postmortems, and though it was a process he had become resigned to, he had found that lately it was a difficult one to leave behind, to shed easily. The visceral onslaught disturbed him now far less than the tiny details, the sensory minutiae that might stay with him for days after each session…
Blinking awake in the early hours, as a brain plops gently into a glass jar.
Dabbing at his freshly shaved face, the water spiraling away, its momentary slurp like the sucking of the flesh at the finger that presses into it.
A smell at work, the odor of something very raw, lurking somewhere deep within the medley of sweat and institutional food…
Nine of them gathered. Waiting like embarrassed guests at a bizarre party, strangers to one another. That dreadful hiatus between arriving and anything actually happening…
Finally, Hendricks drew back the white sheet and asked the equally white PC to confirm it was the same body he’d seen earlier. The constable looked as though the only thing he could confirm was rising rapidly up from his stomach. He swallowed hard.
“Yes,” he said, “it is.”
And they were away…
Holland had moved across to the bar to get a round in and Thorne took his place next to Andy Stone. Karim leaned across, eager to involve Thorne in the game. Before he had a chance to speak, Thorne angled his body away, turned into the corner, toward Stone.
“Idiotic, bloody game,” Stone said. Thorne had only just got there, but Stone sounded like he was three or four drinks ahead of him. “If it’s shag or die, you’d shag anybody, wouldn’t you? So what’s the point?”
Thorne swallowed a mouthful of lager and leaned a little closer to Stone. “I need to have a quick word about what happened when we picked Gribbin up.”
If Stone had been on the way to being drunk, he sobered up very quickly. “I was protecting the kid. I didn’t know what he was going to do…”
“Which is exactly what the DCI is going to say. Still, I’m here to tell you, off the record, that you overstepped the mark. That nobody wants to see it happen again, okay?” Stone stared forward, said nothing. “Andy…?” Thorne took another drink. Half the pint had gone already. “Nobody’s very fond of guys like Gribbin, but you were over the top.”
“There’s just so bloody many of them. I don’t understand how there can be so many of them walking about.”
“Listen…”
Stone turned. He spoke low and fast as if imparting dangerous information. “I’ve got a mate on the Child Protection Team over at Barnes. He told me about this time they were after a child killer up in Scotland. This bloke had already killed three kids, they had a description, and some woman claimed she’d spotted him on a beach one bank holiday, right? So they appealed for people to come forward with their holiday snaps, see if anybody might have got a picture of this fucker accidentally…”
Thorne nodded. He remembered the case. He had no idea what Stone wanted to tell him.
“So, they get hundreds of films handed in. They develop them all and go through the pictures. Thousands of them.” Stone picked up his glass, stared into it for a moment. “The woman couldn’t pick out the man she’d seen, but the police identified thirty known child-sex offenders. In one fucking weekend, on one beach. Thirty…”
Stone drained his glass. “Right. Toilet, I think…”
Thorne watched Stone go, and drained his. He decided to leave the Corsa in the car park at Becke House. It was easy enough to get the tube home…
The rest of the evening passed quickly and easily. Thorne had some success with a couple of his dad’s jokes; Holland argued with Sophie on the phone, pulling faces for the lads, doing his best to laugh it off; nobody could choose between Margaret Thatcher and the Queen; Holland spoke to Sophie again, then turned his phone off; Thorne bet Hendricks ten pounds that Spurs were going to finish above Arsenal the following season; Hendricks had one Guinness too many and told Holland that several of his gay friends fancied him…
Stone grabbed Thorne’s arm as they were all stepping out into the clear, warm night. Saying their good-byes.
“Something else my mate told me. They arrested this one bloke who had all these pictures of kids off the Internet, you know? Downloaded them onto his computer, hundreds of them. He said that he was searching through all these pictures, looking at them all, at their faces, hoping that one day he might find the pictures of himself…”
Thorne tried gently to pull away. Stone was squeezing his arm tightly.
“That’s rubbish, isn’t it?” Stone said. “That’s crap. That’s an excuse, don’t you think? That’s not really true, is it, sir…?”
Thorne stepped through the front door into the communal hall he shared with the couple in the flat upstairs. The breath he let out was long and noisy. He picked up the mail, sorted the bills from the pizza delivery menus, fumbled for his flat key.
As soon as the door was open he knew. He could feel the breeze where there should be none. The scent of something carried on it…
He moved quickly into his own small hallway. The cat was rubbing itself against his shin. He put down his bag, dropped the letters onto the table next to the phone, and stepped around the corner into the living room.
He stared at the space where the video had been. Looked up at the dusty shelf he’d never bothered to paint, on which his sound system had sat. The leads were gone, which meant they’d obviously been in the place for a while. The ones who were in a hurry just ripped the spaghetti out of the back, left it still plugged in.
He reached to pick up the few scattered paperbacks that had previously been held upright by his Bose speakers. Clearly, whoever now had his speakers wasn’t a great reader. They had taken every single CD…
Fuckers would hand over his entire collection for a day’s worth of smack.
Thorne walked through to the kitchen, stared at the small window they’d climbed through. The window he’d left open. In a hurry two nights earlier, throwing his stuff for the wedding together and not locking up properly because he was rushing across to calm his fucking stupid father down…
Aside from the obvious gaps, the place seemed pretty much as he’d left it. He guessed that there would be a suitcase or two missing from the wardrobe in the bedroom. Away out of the front door, casual as you like, as if they were taking something very heavy on their holidays.
The smell hit him the second he opened the bedroom door, and Thorne had a pretty good idea where it was coming from. He moved his hand to cover his mouth, needing to unclench the fist as he did so. His first thought when he threw back the duvet was that it must have taken a good deal of skill to have done the job so accurately,
smack in the center of the bed.
Thorne backed quickly out of the room, his guts bubbling. Elvis yowled at his feet; hungry, or keen to deny responsibility for the turd on the bed, one or the other. Thorne wondered if it was too late to ring his father and shout at him for a while.
He looked at his watch. It was ten past twelve…
He’d just turned forty-three.
All through Sunday, every time he was beginning to enjoy himself, he’d remembered the bloody message and become prickly, irritated. It had been there on his answering machine, waiting for him when he’d got back from Slough on Saturday night. He’d ignored it, collapsed exhausted into bed, and played it back first thing the next morning. It was exactly what he did not need. It was spoiling things.
He needed to deal with it.
As he moved around his flat, dressing himself, he remembered the look on Welch’s face when he’d walked into the hotel room. The face was the very best thing. Remfry’s had been the same. It was the look that passes across the face of someone who thinks that they are about to get one thing, and then realizes that they are in for an altogether different sort of experience.
He wondered if they saw that expression on the faces of the women they raped.
He didn’t know the details of their particular offenses, he didn’t care. Rape was rape was rape. He did know that most attacks did not involve dark alleys and deserted bus stops. He knew that most rapists were known to their victims. Were trusted by them. Friends, colleagues, husbands…
They would have seen that terrible realization on the faces of the women they attacked. The horror and surprise. The very last thing they were expecting.
The very last person they were expecting it from.
He’d enjoyed watching that same expression distort the smug, expectant features on the faces of these men. He’d savored it for a few seconds before taking out the knife and the washing line…
Creating an entirely new expression.
He pulled on his jacket and picked up his keys. Checked himself in the mirror by the front door. He glanced down at the answering machine.
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