Kitson looked at him for a second or two, her face showing nothing. “I didn’t get the message.”
Thorne shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.” He nodded toward where Brigstocke had been just a minute before. “I’d thought it would be a good time to catch you, you know? Reckoned you’d be another one with a family routine on a Sunday.”
Kitson moved past him, picked up the magazine she’d been reading, and dropped it into her bag. She took a step toward the toilets, then turned to Thorne, nodding as though she’d just remembered something. “I was at the gym…”
The Incident Room was coming to life, starting to fill with noise and movement. Holland walked across it, evidently catching the tail end of Thorne and Kitson’s conversation.
“You should get together with Stoney,” he said. “He’s well into weights and all that.” Holland looked over to where Andy Stone was sitting on the edge of a desk, chatting to a trainee detective. “He might be a lanky so-and-so, but he looks like a light heavyweight with his shirt off…”
Kitson looked at Thorne and raised her eyebrows. Her face was open and relaxed again. Her tone, when she spoke to Holland, was matey and suggestive. “Easy, tiger,” she said.
Holland started to say something else, but Thorne was already moving away from them. He knew that by the end of the day the heat and the frustrations of the case would combine to leave him as tightly wound as the E-string on a pedal-steel guitar. He wanted to get into his office, call Eve, and organize something that would help lessen that tension just a little.
“Christ, you sound even more harassed than I am…”
“I told you, Saturdays are the busiest day.”
“Keith’s mum still no better, then?”
“Sorry?”
“Keith not around to help out?”
“Oh. No…”
Thorne looked up as Kitson walked in and moved across to her desk. Her look told him that she knew exactly whom he was talking to. Thorne lowered his voice…
“Fancy going to see a film tonight?”
“Yeah, why not. There’s a copy of Time Out in the flat, I’ll see what’s on…”
From nowhere, and for no immediately obvious reason, the case burst its way into their conversation. Into Thorne’s head. The image that would not focus. The thought that would not reveal itself.
Something he’d read and something he hadn’t…
At the sound of Eve’s voice, the phantom thought vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. “Tom?”
“Yeah…that’s fine. Maybe we could do a bit of shopping tomorrow.”
There was a pause. “Anywhere in particular?”
Thorne dropped the volume even further, cupped his hand around the mouthpiece.
“The bed shop…”
Eve laughed, and when she spoke again, her voice was lowered. Thorne guessed from the noise that she had a shop full of customers. “Thank fuck for that,” she said.
“I’m pleased you’re pleased,” Thorne said.
“Yes, well, it’s about bloody time. I’d decided I wasn’t going to mention it again. I didn’t want to sound desperate.”
Thorne glanced up. Kitson was hunched over some paperwork. “Listen, I had a long look at myself in the mirror this morning. I’d say ‘desperate’ is a pretty good word for it…”
Fiona only had a couple of rooms left.
The girls usually worked to a set pattern in terms of floors, corridors, and so on, but the order in which individual rooms were cleaned varied from day to day. Rooms with a Do Not Disturb sign hung on the door would obviously get done later than those with used breakfast trays left outside, while some rooms would get knocked onto a later shift.
There were two rooms at the end of her corridor on the first floor that still needed doing. She looked at her watch. It was twenty to ten…
Fiona grabbed a bucket crammed with sponges, sprays, and bottles, nudging the vacuum cleaner toward the bedroom door with her foot. She knocked on the door and counted to five, thinking about eggs and bacon and bed. It was the same most mornings. By this time, by the end of this corridor, she would be thinking about home, a late breakfast, and a few more gorgeous hours wrapped up in her duvet.
Twenty minutes. She might get both rooms done before the end of her shift if she was lucky, though it would obviously depend on what sort of state they were in.
She reached down for the passkey card hanging from a curly plastic chain around her waist…
There was a tune going through her head. The song that had woken her on the clock radio, a present from her grandma when the exams had finished. The song was very old-fashioned, just a singer and a guitar, but the tune had stayed with her all morning.
She eased the card into the lock and slid it out again. The light below the handle turned green. She pushed down and leaned against the door…
From the corner of her eye, she saw someone coming toward her along the corridor. It looked like one of the snotty old cows that ran housekeeping. She couldn’t be sure because the woman’s face was all but hidden behind an enormous arrangement of lilies.
Turning sideways, she eased open the door with her hip. The vacuum was kicked across the threshold, left to hold the door ajar while she turned back to the trolley to grab her other bits and pieces…
Two months later, Fiona would be offered her chance, her place in the drama course in Manchester, but she would not take it up. Not that September, at any rate. She would get her two B’s and a C but it would not mean a great deal to her. Two months later, her mother would remove the slip of paper from the envelope and read out the results and try to sound excited, but her daughter would still not be hearing very much. The scream that had torn through her body eight weeks earlier would still be echoing in her head and drowning out pretty much everything.
The sound of a scream and a picture of herself, of a young girl stepping through a doorway and turning. Faced with a peculiar kind of filth. Stains that she could never hope to remove with the bleaches and the waxes and the cloths that spill from a bucket, tumbling noisily to the bedroom floor.
It wasn’t much past ten yet, but Thorne was already starting to wonder what the lunchtime special at the Royal Oak might be when the middle-aged woman walked into his office.
“I’m looking for DC Holland,” she said.
She’d marched in without knocking, so Thorne wasn’t keen from the start, but he tried to be as nice as he could. The woman was short and dumpy, probably pushing sixty. She reminded him a bit of his auntie Eileen, and he suddenly had a good idea who she was.
“Oh, right, are you Dave’s…?”
The woman cut him off and, as she spoke, she dragged a chair from behind Kitson’s desk, plonked it in front of Thorne’s, and sat herself down.
“No, I’m not. I’m Carol Chamberlain. Ex-DCI Chamberlain from AMRU…”
Thorne reached for a pen and paper to take notes, thinking, Fucking Crinkly Squad, all I need. He leaned across the desk and proffered a hand. “DI Thorne…”
Ignoring the hand, Carol Chamberlain opened her briefcase and began to rummage inside. “Right. You’ll do even better. I only asked for Holland”—she pulled out a battered green folder covered in yellow Post-it notes, held it up—“because his was the name…attached to this.” Emphasizing the last word, she dropped the folder down onto Thorne’s desk.
Thorne glanced at the file and held up his hands. He tried his best to sound pleasant as he spoke. “Listen, is there any chance we can do this another time? We’re up to our elbows in a very big case and—”
“I know exactly what case you’re up to your elbows in,” she said. “Which is why we should really do it now.”
Thorne stared at her. There was a steel in this woman’s voice that suggested it would not be worth his while to argue. With a sigh, he pulled the folder across the desk, began to leaf through it.
“Five weeks ago, DC Holland pulled the file on an unsolved murder from 1996.” Aside from the steel, her voice had th
e acquired refinement that often came with rank, however distant, but Thorne thought he detected the remnants of a Yorkshire accent beneath. “The victim’s name was Alan Franklin. He was killed in a car park. Strangled with washing line.”
“I remember,” Thorne said. He flicked a couple of pages over. It was one of the cases Holland had pulled off CRIMINT. “There were a couple of these that we looked at and then dismissed. Nothing suggested that…”
Chamberlain nodded, dropped her eyes to the folder. “This was handed to me as a cold case. My first cold case, as it happens…”
“I read about the initiative. It’s a good idea.”
“I’ve been looking at the Franklin murder again…”
“Right…” Thorne stopped, noticing the faintest trace of enjoyment then, another tiny line around her mouth that cracked open for just half a second and was gone. It was enough to prompt a reaction in him, a flutter of something that began, as always, at the nape of his neck…
“Alan Franklin should have been known to us, to those who were investigating his murder back in ’96. His name should have come up on a routine check…”
Thorne knew there was no need to ask why. He knew she was about to tell him. He watched, and listened, and felt the tingle grow and spread around his body.
“In May 1976, Franklin stood trial at Colchester Crown Court. He was accused of rape. Accused and acquitted.”
Thorne caught a breath, let it out again slowly. “Jesus…”
Like a beam of light in the right direction…
Later, when Thorne and the woman he’d thought was Dave Holland’s mother knew and liked each other better, Carol Chamberlain would confess to him that this was one of those rare moments she’d missed more than anything. The seconds looking at Thorne, just before she revealed the most significant fact of all. When she’d had to fight very hard to stop herself grinning.
“Alan Franklin was accused of raping a woman named Jane Foley…”
Part Three
Harm’s Way
The grunting seemed to be coming from somewhere very deep down. A noise of effort and of immense satisfaction. Rising up from his guts and exploding, carried on hot breath from between dirty, misshapen teeth. Beneath these animal sounds—dog noise, monkey noise, pig noise—the counterpoint provided by the dull slapping of hot flesh against cold as he pushes himself harder, again and again.
Refusing to speed up. Giving no sign that it might soon be over.
Taking his pleasure.
Inflicting his pain.
How was this allowed to happen? Naïveté and trust had proved to be the perfect complements to frustration and hatred. It had happened in a moment. How long ago was that? Fifteen minutes? Thirty?
There seems little point in struggling. It will be over eventually, it must be. No point in thinking about what happens afterward. Probably a shy smile, maybe an apology and a cigarette and a speech about signals and crossed wires.
Fucker. Fucker. Fucker.
Until then…
Eyes that cannot bear to stay open, shut tight and a new picture presents itself. Small at first, and far away. Posed, waiting in a distant circle of light at the end of a tunnel.
Now it is the grunting and the slapping that begin to recede into the distance as the picture gets closer, rushing up the tunnel, sucking up the darkness until it is fully formed and clearer than it has ever been.
Clearer even than it ever really was. The colors more vivid: the red wetness against the white shirt; the cobalt blue of the rope’s coils around the neck like an exotic snake at his throat. The sounds and smells of the body and the rope, deafening and pungent. Creaking and fecal.
The feeling: the unique horror of seeing it. Seeing the indescribable pain in those eyes at being seen.
Then, at the end, watching it. Sensing something struggle to escape, and finally float free, up and away from the body that twirls slowly at the end of a frayed and oily rope.
Part Three
Harm’s Way
The grunting seemed to be coming from somewhere very deep down. A noise of effort and of immense satisfaction. Rising up from his guts and exploding, carried on hot breath from between dirty, misshapen teeth. Beneath these animal sounds—dog noise, monkey noise, pig noise—the counterpoint provided by the dull slapping of hot flesh against cold as he pushes himself harder, again and again.
Refusing to speed up. Giving no sign that it might soon be over.
Taking his pleasure.
Inflicting his pain.
How was this allowed to happen? Naïveté and trust had proved to be the perfect complements to frustration and hatred. It had happened in a moment. How long ago was that? Fifteen minutes? Thirty?
There seems little point in struggling. It will be over eventually, it must be. No point in thinking about what happens afterward. Probably a shy smile, maybe an apology and a cigarette and a speech about signals and crossed wires.
Fucker. Fucker. Fucker.
Until then…
Eyes that cannot bear to stay open, shut tight and a new picture presents itself. Small at first, and far away. Posed, waiting in a distant circle of light at the end of a tunnel.
Now it is the grunting and the slapping that begin to recede into the distance as the picture gets closer, rushing up the tunnel, sucking up the darkness until it is fully formed and clearer than it has ever been.
Clearer even than it ever really was. The colors more vivid: the red wetness against the white shirt; the cobalt blue of the rope’s coils around the neck like an exotic snake at his throat. The sounds and smells of the body and the rope, deafening and pungent. Creaking and fecal.
The feeling: the unique horror of seeing it. Seeing the indescribable pain in those eyes at being seen.
Then, at the end, watching it. Sensing something struggle to escape, and finally float free, up and away from the body that twirls slowly at the end of a frayed and oily rope.
SEVENTEEN
It was as grim a story of broken bodies and bruised lives as Tom Thorne had ever heard…
A week since Carol Chamberlain had sat in Thorne’s office and blown everything wide open. Holland was at the wheel of a car-pool Laguna as they drove into Essex, heading toward Braintree. The two men were comfortable enough with each other to let silences fall between them, but today’s was particularly heavy. Thorne could only hope that what was in Holland’s head was a sight less dark than what was in his own.
As grim a story…
Jane Foley was raped by Alan Franklin. Thorne was convinced of it, though if it had not been proved then, there was very little chance that the truth would emerge over twenty-five years later. What nobody doubted, then or now, were the bizarre and brutal actions taken by her husband, Dennis. What he had done to Jane, and then to himself, on the afternoon of August 10, 1976.
Thorne would probably never know for certain exactly what had gone on in that house, what had passed between those two people and led to those last, intimate moments of horror. Thorne did know that he would spend a good deal of time imagining those moments: the terror of Jane Foley as her husband draws near to her; the guilt and the anguish and the fear of a man who has just committed murder; the blood not yet dry on his hands, the towrope slippy with it as he fashions a makeshift noose.
Worst of all, the incomprehension of the two children, finding the bodies of their parents…
Thorne started slightly as Holland smacked his palms against the wheel. He opened his eyes to see that they’d run into a line of slow-moving traffic. Ever since they’d come off the M11 it had been snarled up. Midmorning on a Saturday and no good reason for the jam, but it was there all the same.
“Shit,” Holland said. It was the first word either of them had spoken in nearly an hour.
If Thorne was going to spend time thinking about what had happened between Jane and Dennis Foley, he was also going to be dwelling on something equally painful. Something that, God help him, might have been responsible for horrors all
of its own.
Thorne had fucked up. He had fucked up as badly as he could remember and, for him, that was saying something…
Carol Chamberlain had presumed that the officers working on the Franklin murder in 1996 had also fucked up. It looked as if they’d failed to check Franklin’s name against the General Registry at Victoria, which would have revealed his part in the Jane Foley rape case twenty years before that.
In fact, it was a matter of record that those officers had phoned the General Registry. What was not a matter of record, what would have to remain conjecture, was that the brain-dead pen pusher on the other end of the phone—a man long since retired and, Thorne hoped, long since dead—had missed Franklin’s name. One eye on his crossword as the other had simply skipped past it. It had been a costly mistake.
But Thorne’s had been costlier.
Unlike the officers in 1996, Thorne had not checked. Jane Foley’s name had never been run past the General Registry, had never been put through the system. Strictly speaking, it had not been Thorne’s job to do it, but that didn’t matter. As far as Thorne was concerned, he carried the can. He never made sure, and even if he had thought of it, it would not have struck him as important.
Why would they need to check out the name of a woman who didn’t really exist? Jane Foley was the made-up name of a made-up person, wasn’t it? Jane Foley was a fantasy…
Thorne knew very well that if they…he…anyone had checked, made one simple phone call after they’d found Remfry’s letters, that Ian Welch might still be alive. As might Howard Anthony Southern…
The traffic had begun to move again. Holland yanked the gear stick down, took the car up into second. “I wouldn’t mind, but there’s never a decent bloody pileup at the end of it…”
The body of the third victim had been discovered, in a hotel in Roehampton, at around the same time as the woman from the Crinkly Squad had walked into Thorne’s office and dropped her very welcome bomb-shell. She had still been there when the call came through and Thorne had invited her along to the murder scene. It had seemed the very least he could do.
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