There was a seedy-looking burger van opposite the bus stop and Thorne was suddenly starving. The late-night bagel bakery was five minutes’ walk away. It was a toss-up between food poisoning and the risk of missing the last bus.
Ten minutes later the bus rumbled into view and he was already wishing he hadn’t had the burger. As he rummaged in his jacket for the exact change, Thorne wondered why on earth he should be feeling something like relief that he was on his way home alone.
The man on the machine next to him stopped pedaling and sat for a few moments, eyes closed, getting his breath back. The man climbed off and walked across to the water fountain. Still pedaling fast, he watched as the man gulped down water, flung his sweat towel around his neck, and walked through into the weight room.
When the song he was listening to had finished, he unplugged his headphones, got off the bike, and followed him.
Howard Anthony Southern was a creature of habit and was serious about looking after himself. These two things meant that keeping an eye on him, getting to know him, was not only easy but fairly enjoyable. He worked out anyway, but a few extra hours a week couldn’t hurt. It was easy enough to join the same gym and make sure he was here at the same time that Southern was as often as he could. That wasn’t always straightforward, of course. Sometimes he couldn’t get away, but he’d seen enough to know what he was dealing with.
He knew enough already. That Southern had done what he’d done, that his name was on the list, was more than enough. Still, it was good to find out a bit more. To know for certain how much stronger than Southern he was, how easy it would be to take him when the time came. To see his face contorted and running with sweat. To glimpse in advance what it would be like as he strained against the ligature…
He walked through into the weight room. Southern was on the pec-fly. He took a seat next to him on the mid-row, began to work.
He could see instantly that Southern was eyeing up a woman on the other side of the room. She was bending and stretching, her flesh taut against the black Lycra. Southern pressed his forearms toward each other, grunting with the effort, all the time watching the woman in the mirror that ran along one wall.
He knew this was why Howard Southern came here.
He wondered if Southern had offended again since his release. Was he more careful having been caught once? He might have been getting away with it for years. Was he watching the woman in the mirror and thinking about forcing himself on her? Working himself into a lather, his eyes like sweaty hands on her, convincing himself just how much she wanted it…
The weights dropped back with a clang as Southern released the handles. He turned and puffed out his cheeks.
“Why do we do it?”
This was a bonus. He’d been planning to talk to Southern today anyway. To strike up a casual conversation at the juice bar maybe, or in the locker room…
“It’s bloody madness, isn’t it?” Southern nodded toward the woman in the black leotard. “Here I am killing myself for the likes of her.”
He smiled back at Southern, thinking that the idea was right, but that he had an altogether different reason.
FOURTEEN
Carol Chamberlain was three quarters of a team of two.
She had been assigned a research officer, but ex–Detective Sergeant Graham McKee was, to use a favorite phrase of her husband’s, about as useful as a chocolate teapot. When he wasn’t in the pub, he made it perfectly clear that he thought Carol should have been the one making coffee and phone calls, while he was out doing the interviews.
A few years ago, she’d have had his undersized balls on a platter. Now she just got on with doing the job, his as well as her own. It might take a bit longer, but at least it would get done properly. She believed in that. She couldn’t be sure yet, but if the case she was on now had been handled properly first time around, there might well have been no need for her to be doing anything at all.
The drive to Hastings hadn’t taken her as long as she’d thought, but she’d left early to be on the safe side. Jack had got up with her, made her some breakfast while she got ready. She could see that he was unhappy that she was going out on a Sunday, but he’d tried to make a joke of it.
“Bloody unsociable hours. Sunday down the drain. Now I know you’re working for the police force again…”
She checked her makeup in the mirror before she got out of the car. Maybe she’d overdone the foundation a little, but it was too late now. She was pleased with her hair, though; she’d run a rinse through it the night before to get rid of most of the gray.
Jack had told her she looked great.
She walked up to the front door and knocked, telling herself to calm down, that she’d done this a thousand times, that there was no need to grip the handle of her briefcase as though it were stopping her from falling…
“Sheila? I’m Carol Chamberlain from AMRU. We spoke on the phone…”
Carol could see that the woman who answered the door was clearly not expecting someone who looked like her, rinse or no rinse. She had gained a stone in weight for each year that she’d been out of the force, and at a little over five feet tall she knew very well how it looked. Her hair could be as fashionable and artificially auburn as she wanted, but—whatever lies Jack might tell her—she could do little about the rest of it. However sharp she felt, she knew that those thirty years on the job showed in her face. Some mornings she stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were like currants sinking into cake mix…
The woman opened the front door a little wider. However disappointed or confused she might be, Carol hoped that good old British reserve would prevent Sheila Franklin saying anything about it.
“I’ll put the kettle on,” she said eventually.
In the kitchen, while tea was being made, they spoke about weather and traffic. Sheila Franklin wiped down surfaces and washed up teaspoons as she went. Settled a few minutes later in the small, simply furnished living room, her face crinkled into a frown of confusion.
“I’m sorry, but I thought you said that the case was being reopened…”
Carol had said no such thing. “I’m sorry if you were misled. I’m reexamining the case, and if it’s considered worthwhile, it might be reopened.”
“I see…”
“How long were you and Alan married?”
Alan Franklin’s widow was a tall, very thin woman whom Carol would have put in her mid to late fifties. Not a great deal older than she was herself. Her hair was pulled back from a face dominated by green eyes that did not stay fixed on any one spot for more than a few seconds. From behind the rim of her teacup, her gaze darted around like a ferret’s as she answered Carol’s questions.
She’d met Franklin in 1983. He would have been in his late forties by then, ten years older than she was. He’d left his first wife and a job in Colchester a few years before that and moved to Hastings to start again. They’d met at work and married only a few months later.
“Alan was a fast worker,” she said, laughing. “Very smooth, he was. Mind you, I didn’t put up much of a struggle.”
As always, Carol had done her homework. She was up to speed with what very few background details there were. “How did Alan’s kids react? What would they have been then? Sixteen? Seventeen…?”
Sheila smiled, but there was something forced about it. “Something like that. I’m not even sure how old they are now. In all the time we were married, I think I saw the boys once. Only one of them bothered to show his face at Alan’s funeral…”
Carol nodded, like this was perfectly normal. “What about the first wife?”
“I never met Celia. Never spoke to her on the phone. I’m not even sure that Alan ever did, to be honest, after they split up.”
“Right…”
Sheila leaned forward and put her cup and saucer down. “I know it probably sounds odd, but that’s just the way it was. It was Alan’s past…”
Carol tried not to let any reaction, any judgment o
f these people’s lives, show on her face, but it was hard. She and Jack had married relatively late, and there were times when relations with his ex-wife were a little strained, but they were civil. They acknowledged each other. And Jack’s daughter had always been a part of their lives.
“I did make an effort with the children,” Sheila said. “For a while I tried to persuade Alan that he should see them, that he should try and build bridges. He was always a bit funny about it.”
“Perhaps he thought his ex-wife had turned them against him.”
“He never said so. The kids were more or less grown up anyway, and we did try briefly to have our own.” She began piling the tea things back onto the tray she had brought them through on. She took hold of the tray and stood up. “I was nearly forty by then, and it never happened…”
Carol followed Sheila as she walked back toward the kitchen. “Did Alan never talk about why he and Celia had divorced?”
“Not really. I think it was unpleasant.”
From what Carol was hearing, that was probably an understatement. “Presumably there was alimony, though? They must have communicated through solicitors…?”
“For the last few years we didn’t even know where they were living. The son who turned up at the funeral only knew Alan was dead because he saw it on the news.”
“I see…”
The cups and saucers were already being washed up. When Sheila turned from the sink, Carol saw her read something in her face. Maybe that judgment she’d been trying to hide…
“Look, it was always just Alan and me,” Sheila said. “We were self-sufficient. Anything that happened before didn’t seem to matter. And I was the same, honestly. I never bothered with old boyfriends or what have you, and we never saw much of my family. Alan had no contact with the family he had before, because he had me.” She took a step toward Carol, who was standing in the doorway, water dripping from a teacup onto the linoleum. Her face seemed to soften as she spoke. “That’s what he always used to say. That I was his life now. What he had before hadn’t worked out and so he didn’t want to think about it. Alan was trying to get away from his old life…”
Carol nodded. “Could I use your loo…?”
She leaned against the sink, letting the water run awhile.
She had never worked much on instinct, but in thirty years Carol Chamberlain had learned to give it breathing space. Back in 1996, Alan Franklin’s murder had gone unsolved. Unsolved, largely because it had been seemingly motiveless.
She smelled the soap, began to wash her hands…
It was at least possible that whatever Alan Franklin had been trying to escape from, here in this house with his new job and nice new wife, had finally caught up with him in that car park.
Sheila Franklin was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs.
“Do you have any of Alan’s old things?” Carol asked. “I don’t mean clothes or—”
“There’s a couple of boxes in the loft. Papers and what have you, I think. Alan put them up there when we moved in.”
“Would you mind if I had a look?”
“God, no, not at all. Actually, you could do me a favor and take them with you.” Sheila looked past Carol, back up the stairs. She blinked slowly and a film appeared over her eyes. “I could do with getting things tidy…”
It wasn’t exactly a photo fit, but then there wouldn’t have been a lot of point…
Thorne had taken the picture out of his bag while the train was pulling out of King’s Cross, laid it out on the table in front of him, stared at it for ten minutes.
The waiter from the café opposite Dodd’s studio had made his statement the day after the body had been found. He’d described a motorcycle courier who’d been hanging around a few days before. He hadn’t actually seen the man in the dark crash helmet and leathers go in through the door, or even go up to it. It was a hot afternoon. He’d had a lot of tables to look after…
A Wednesday, nearly a fortnight ago. Five days before they’d broken down the narrow brown door and smelled a murder scene.
So, Charlie Dodd had not been completely full of shit. The man to whom he had rented out his studio had worn a crash helmet. The lie, Thorne guessed, had been about not seeing the face underneath it. It was a lie that Charlie Dodd thought might make him some money and had ended up costing him a lot more.
At the noise of the buffet trolley squeaking down the carriage Thorne glanced up. Thameslink food would not be his Sunday morning breakfast of choice, but he was hungry. He felt in his pocket for change.
Dodd had probably felt totally safe as the man in the motorbike gear had strolled up the stairs in the middle of the afternoon. As likely as not, he’d felt in control, ready to squeeze the mug for whatever he could get. He’d had no idea of the kind of man he was dealing with.
No witness from the Remfry or Welch killing had mentioned seeing anybody in a crash helmet, but all the same, it needed to be checked out. On any given afternoon, Soho was thick with bikes, scooters, and mopeds, delivering scripts and videos, sandwiches and sushi. It had taken the best part of two days to trace every courier who had been in the area on legitimate business and eliminate them. Two days dicking about to confirm what Thorne had known to be true from the moment the waiter had described what he’d seen.
The face behind that visor had belonged to the killer, and the black rucksack slung across his shoulder had contained a length of blue washing line.
“What can I get you, love?”
The trolley was at Thorne’s table. He asked for tea and a Kit Kat. He took the top off the cardboard cup, mopped up the inevitable spillage with his napkin, and began to dunk the tea bag.
He stared again at the picture he had begun to draw a few days earlier. A man in a crash helmet was too generic to have justified any kind of official image, but Thorne had begun scribbling at his kitchen table and added to it on subsequent days at his desk, or on the tube to and from Hendon. Thorne was about as competent an artist as he was a medieval dancer, but he could see something in his thick and clumsy shading. Something about the heavy, crosshatched pencil lines suggested a darkness behind the visor. Blacker and harder than tinted plastic…
He looked up, and out at the scenery moving past. He watched it get greener, saw the houses get bigger, as the train moved into Hertfordshire.
Thorne drank his tea and ate his chocolate. Reflected in the window, he watched as the old boy sitting across from him dithered over what to order. One of the women working the trolley rolled her eyes at the other, and a teenager in a tracksuit sighed loudly, impatient to get past.
Eileen had rung him from Brighton a couple of nights before. His father’s home help had come down with shingles and there was a bit of a flap on. Eileen had called a neighbor who was coming over with a casserole on Friday, and arranged for a temporary home help to come in, but she wouldn’t be able to start until Monday, and with nobody there to make sure…the old man wouldn’t eat a thing…
Thorne had felt guilty that she’d asked him like it was a favor. A few miles away from St. Albans, a packet of his dad’s favorite mints in his pocket, he felt guiltier still that he was wishing he was somewhere else. Thinking about a Sunday in a pub by the river with Eve.
The automatic door at the end of the carriage slid open. The two women maneuvered the trolley past the teenager in the tracksuit, now enjoying a crafty fag by the toilets. He shrugged at them, turned, and blew his smoke out of the window.
Thorne remembered Yvonne Kitson with her cigarette outside Becke House. He didn’t really think of her as a friend, they had never socialized outside work, but something about that encounter pricked at him. Without thinking too much about it, Thorne reached into his bag for the contact sheet, looked up Kitson’s home number, and dialed. She was probably up to her elbows in getting Sunday lunch ready…
A man, presumably Kitson’s husband, answered.
“Hi, could I speak to Yvonne, please?” Thorne said.
“She’s not
here.”
Thorne waited for a bit more information, but none was forthcoming. “It’s not important. Could you just tell her that Tom Thorne rang? I’ll maybe try later…”
“You can try, but I don’t know when she’ll be back. She said she’d only be a couple of hours…”
Thorne was still thinking about the conversation five minutes later as he walked out of St. Albans Station looking for a taxi. Maybe Yvonne Kitson’s husband was a naturally surly bastard. Maybe he was in a foul mood because he’d got the kids to look after when he wanted to be out playing golf or reading the Sunday papers. Maybe it was something else altogether. Whatever the reason he was pissed off, he didn’t seem bothered about letting a total stranger know about it.
She said she’d only be a couple of hours…
Ahead of him, Thorne watched a young couple climb into the only available cab. He thought about Eve again, the things they could be doing. What the hell, he’d managed to avoid a Sunday being dragged around IKEA…
In the living room, when Thorne had suggested cooking something, his father had reddened and called him a “silly little bastard.” Half an hour later in the pub, his dad seemed an awful lot happier. A pint of bitter and a plate of sausage and chips could cause mood swings in the old man every bit as radical as those brought on by the changing chemistry of his brain.
“This is number three on my list of rules, you know?” his dad said.
They were sitting at a table in the corner: Thorne, his father, and his father’s friend Victor. There used to be quite a gang of them, regulars in this pub two or three nights a week. Since the Alzheimer’s had been diagnosed, his dad’s other old friends tended not to be around quite as much. Victor was the only one who didn’t seem to think he could catch it…
“What is?” Thorne said.
His father held up his pint, pleased as punch. “This. ‘No beer.’ Number three, coming after ‘no going in the kitchen’ and ‘no going out alone.’ My list of stupid rules, you know?”
Lazybones Page 19