They were jammed together on one side of a small table, in a corner next to the cigarette machine. Thorne watched as an attractive blonde struggled to find the right coins while jabbering into her mobile. He got a filthy look and turned back to his pint.
‘Is any of this shit helping?’ Lilley asked.
Thorne told her about the murders of Raymond Tucker and Ricky Hodson. Seeing no reason not to, he told her that he’d been sent pictures of both dead men. He answered Lilley’s question without waiting for it to be asked. ‘No, I haven’t the faintest fucking idea why,’ he said.
The blonde was still on the phone. Now she was trying to extract a cigarette from the packet using her teeth.
‘Tell me about Brooks,’ Thorne said. ‘You said his prints were on record.’
‘Marcus had been a bad lad, no two ways about it. He was your typical south London tearaway, sort of kid who would’ve been drowning in ASBOs today, know what I mean? He does a couple of years in the army, buys himself out and ends up doing odds and sods for one or two of the nastier local firms. Deliveries, some security work, whatever. Nothing too heavy himself, as far as we could tell, but he was useful, you know?’
‘Hard man?’
‘If he needed to be, definitely. Then, round about ’95, ’96, Marcus meets this girl, has a kid and changes careers. I don’t mean he becomes an accountant or a brain surgeon or anything, but he walks away from the organised end of things – from anything that’s going to get him in serious trouble – and him and this girl start working for themselves. Some sort of burglary scam they worked together. He’d been doing that, keeping his head down, until he showed up in Simon Tipper’s house and went mental.’
‘Ever find the knife?’
‘No, but we had the prints on the glass, so we never needed to.’
‘You said Brooks was never into anything too heavy himself. Just working on the fringes, right?’ Lilley hummed agreement. ‘Stabbing someone to death sounds a bit out of character.’
She acknowledged the thought with a look then dismissed it with another. ‘People like Brooks are always going to fuck up. Maybe they get carried away when they’re just supposed to be threatening someone. A routine job goes tits up and they panic. Whatever. I wouldn’t have put him down as someone who could lose it that easily, but this shit happens all the time, right?’ She closed her eyes as she drank, then widened them, leaning towards him. ‘Come on, are you telling me you’re still surprised by anything?’
Thorne looked at Lilley’s fingers curled around the stem of her glass. He noticed that the nails were chewed beyond the quick. ‘How long did he get?’
‘Well, here’s where Mr Brooks did surprise me. Once he’d stopped banging on about these fictitious coppers that had stitched him up, he was offered the chance to come up with some real information. He certainly knew stuff about all sorts of characters and, if he’d given the Organised Crime Unit something, we might have been able to make the Tipper murder look a bit more like self-defence. Get the charge knocked down to manslaughter, whatever. But he wouldn’t go for it.’
Thorne could see the sense in refusing to grass. ‘He gets a few years more, maybe, but if he’s kept his mouth shut, he’s not watching his back every minute he’s in there.’
‘I suppose,’ Lilley said. ‘He was put away for eleven years in the end. Did six.’
‘He’s out?’
‘Released five months ago.’
For a second, Thorne had the urge to reach up and scratch at the tickle of excitement crawling beneath his collar. He was pleased that he’d read Lilley right; impressed that the woman had kept such close tabs on someone she’d put away so many years before. He told her as much.
She laughed. ‘Listen, I’m not saying there aren’t one or two I keep a close eye on. And I’m chuffed that you think I’m so… diligent, or whatever. But I wouldn’t have had a fucking clue when Marcus Brooks was getting out of prison if someone else hadn’t asked me about him earlier in the year.’
‘Who?’
‘Bethnal Green CID got in touch in June, when Brooks’ girlfriend and kid were killed in a hit and run.’
‘Christ.’
‘Yeah, nasty…’
‘Hang on.’ Thorne held up a finger. Did the maths. ‘This would have been right around the time Brooks came out, surely?’
‘A fortnight before. A couple of the local boys went to see him inside, to deliver the death message. Can’t have been an easy one.’
‘Hit and run?’
‘Car jumped the lights, went into them on a zebra crossing. On their bloody doorstep, more or less.’
‘Did they get the driver?’ Thorne asked.
‘They got the car, burned out.’
‘No possibility it was deliberate?’
‘It was joy-riders,’ Lilley said. She stared, like she was trying to work out what he might be thinking. ‘Pissed up…’
She was probably right, but Thorne was remembering Bin-bag’s old lady, the look on her face, a couple of hours before.
‘We’ve got long memories.’
‘Even if it was an accident, maybe Brooks thought it was something else.’ Thorne was talking low and fast. ‘What if he decided the Black Dogs had killed his girlfriend and his kid as revenge for Tipper?’
‘Six years on?’
‘No better time to do it, is there? Just when Brooks is about to be released, when he thinks he’s getting his life back.’
‘So, he comes out of prison and starts to even things up?’
‘Tucker, then Hodson…’
Lilley frowned and emptied her glass. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s a thought…’
The music seemed to have been turned up. Meat Loaf had long since given way to Coldplay, or an equally miserable soundalike. Thorne listened, letting things settle. He had a fair idea of what grief and rage could drive someone to do, but still, he wondered if he wasn’t looking too hard for something. ‘Square-peg thinking,’ Jesmond had once called it.
They talked for another few minutes, then Thorne said he should be getting off. He reached for his coat, but Lilley said she was staying put for a while. Thorne offered to get her another drink as a thank you, but she waved him away. He watched her reaching for her purse and wondered if she had anyone to get home to; if there was a way of asking if she fancied something to eat without it sounding like a come-on.
Lilley squeezed out from behind the table. ‘I tell you what, though,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t make a fat lot of difference if it was the Black Dogs who killed Marcus Brooks’ girlfriend or not.’ She smoothed down her skirt. ‘If they didn’t want revenge then, they certainly will now.’
It was past nine-thirty, and Thorne was starving by the time he reached Louise’s place in Pimlico. She went into the kitchen, defrosted some bread to make a sandwich. ‘You should have eaten something in the pub with this DCI,’ she said. ‘What was his name, anyway?’
‘Sharon.’
Louise stuck her head round the kitchen door.
‘Jealous?’ Thorne asked.
‘Do you want this sodding sandwich or not?’
Thorne ate while Louise filled him in on her day. Her kidnapped drug dealer was still refusing to admit that anyone had kidnapped him. She told Thorne that she envied his job; that at least murder victims couldn’t pretend they weren’t dead. Thorne told her she should be grateful to escape the paperwork.
He talked about his meeting.
He told Louise all about the Black Dogs, asked her what she thought about the timing of the accident that had killed Marcus Brooks’ family. He tried, and failed, to convince her that Sharon Lilley was a leggy blonde who’d taken an instant fancy to him.
The conversation was punctuated by the sound of fireworks going off in nearby streets. It was another of Thorne’s pet peeves: the fact that firework night now appeared to last from Halloween through to mid-November. The noise seemed to bother him a little more every year and, sitting and wincing in his gir
lfriend’s living room, he didn’t like the thought of Elvis freaking out back at home.
And it was another smell he hated.
He’d left the car at the Peel Centre, and walking from the Tube to Louise’s flat the air had been thick with it: the acrid, sulphuric smell of gunpowder. The same tang as had bitten at the back of his throat one morning two decades earlier, when he and another DC had walked into a large, brightly lit kitchen and seen their first murder victims: the wife and her mother; the weapon still lying beside the man who had killed them both, before turning the gun on himself.
Remember, remember, the fifth of November…
To Thorne, Bonfire Night always smelled of blood and shotguns. And tasted of whatever had started to rise into the throat of a young DC.
They watched the local news at ten o’clock. There was an update on the hunt for the killer of Deniz Sedat: a Turkish community leader was saying how disappointing it was that no progress had been made, despite the discovery of the murder weapon. There was no mention of the Raymond Tucker or Ricky Hodson killings.
‘How old was the kid?’ Louise asked later.
‘Ten,’ Thorne said. ‘Ten-year-old boy.’
They were together on the sofa. Louise nursed a cup of tea, pulled stockinged feet up beneath her. ‘You’d be destroyed,’ she said.
Thorne turned his attention from the television. ‘What?’
‘Getting that sort of news. Then.’
‘Or any time…’
‘What you said before, though, you know? About the moment when he should be getting his life back.’ She shifted position, slid one of her feet beneath Thorne’s leg. ‘Whatever this bloke might have done in the past, that’s a shitty thing to happen. You’ve been thinking about nothing but coming out for months, right? Getting back to your girlfriend and your kid. Having that to look forward to might be the only thing that gets you through your sentence.’
‘In which case, having it taken away from you sounds like a fairly decent motive.’
‘Like a fucking decent motive.’
Thorne couldn’t be certain that Louise’s enthusiasm for his theory was completely subjective. But the support felt good.
‘We both know that some of these people are toerags,’ she said. ‘The sort who are just waiting to get out and do whatever it was they did all over again. But some just want to do their time and get back to their families. There’s plenty that just want to stay safe and… uncorrupted.’
‘Plenty?’
‘All right, then. Some.’
Louise’s words meant all the more, because Thorne knew that she was no bleeding heart. She was someone who preferred to give the benefit of the doubt, but if it was taken and pissed away, she would be hard as nails second time around. He really started to believe that Marcus Brooks could be the sort of prisoner she was describing; the sort on whom a death message – especially one delivered when it was – would have wreaked unimaginable havoc. ‘Six years out of an eleven stretch,’ he said. ‘He can’t have got himself into too much trouble inside.’
‘Which says a lot, because he’d have been, what? Cat B? That’s a high-security prison, with some serious company.’
‘Parole boards look at what prisoners are coming out to, right?’
‘Absolutely. Brownie points for solid family units…’
‘Christ, if we’re right about this-’
‘What do you mean “we”?’ Louise said. ‘I’m just agreeing with you in the hope of getting a shag later.’
Thorne’s smile died quickly, as he began to reflect on what would be as cold an act of revenge as he had ever come across. ‘If I’m right about this, and the Black Dogs wanted Brooks to suffer for killing their old president, they certainly picked their moment. They waited until just the right time, when they could really fuck up his life.’
‘Or the wrong time,’ Louise said. ‘And the wrong bloke. Because they’re getting it back in spades now, aren’t they?’ She got up and took the plates and mugs through to the kitchen; shouted back to Thorne over the noise as she loaded them into the dishwasher. ‘Even if it is Brooks,’ she said, ‘we still don’t know what this photo business is all about. Why he’s sending them to you, I mean…’
But before Louise had even finished speaking, Thorne suddenly felt as though he might know; could feel a dreadful possibility rushing towards him. What had Louise said before? ‘That’s a high-security prison, with some serious company…’
He got up and grabbed his phone; dialled the number that Sharon Lilley had given him as he was leaving the pub.
He could hear the music in the background, the chat of her fellow-drinkers, when Lilley eventually picked up. He wasn’t hugely surprised that she was still where he’d left her.
‘It’s Tom Thorne. Listen, I’m sorry for calling so late.’
‘Lucky you caught me,’ she said, slowly. ‘I was about to head home.’
‘Just one quick question.’ Something began to jump in Thorne’s stomach. He took a deep breath and asked which prison Marcus Brooks had been released from.
Got the answer he didn’t want to hear.
And then, Thorne knew.
Baby,
I’ll probably keep this one short, because I’m so wiped out, and even though I know I won’t sleep for very long, I’ll have to get up and out. I need to walk when I wake up, to keep moving. If I just lie there, things that I don’t want to think about for too long get in my head, and I’m afraid they might stick, and I can’t stand it.
Actually, the walking has been brilliant. You probably think that sounds stupid, or like I’m taking the piss, because of how much I used to hate it. You couldn’t even get me to walk to the bus stop, remember? It’s weird, but it makes me less tired, not more. I can’t explain it. It sharpens me up, you know? Like the exercise did when I was inside. I just go for miles every night, don’t matter where, and when I get back here, things are a bit clearer. It isn’t like I might forget what I’m going to do or anything, but it helps me focus.
It reminds me why I’m doing this. Why I don’t really care about anything except doing it.
Last night, after I sorted Hodson out, I walked towards these lights I could see out of the window. Across fields and a motorway. I know they were just houses and cars and whatever, so don’t think I’m going totally mental, but while I was walking in the dark, up to my knees in mud and shit and Christ knows what, it felt like I was getting closer to you and Robbie. Like you were both waiting in the lights somewhere.
I had to stop myself running in the end.
Like I said, mental. I’m even grinning about it a bit myself now, because I could hear you pissing yourself while I was writing it!!
Kiss him for me, will you?
I’m sending kisses and all sorts of other stuff to you as well, COURSE I AM. I’ll write again soon, tomorrow maybe, but now I’ve got to at least try and get my head down. I’m so fucking tired.
Sleep well, angel.
X
EIGHT
The last time Thorne had seen Stuart Nicklin had been across a crowded courtroom at the Old Bailey, when he had spoken from the witness box at his trial. But the last time he had been this close to him, Thorne had been screaming and spattered in blood. A school playground in Harrow. A man dead at Thorne’s feet and a woman, a police officer, dying a few yards away while he could do nothing. ‘Congratulations on being alive,’ Nicklin had said to him, smiling. ‘Being alive’s the easy bit though, isn’t it? It’s feeling alive that’s the hard part.’
Thorne had reacted then, lashed out, and watched Stuart Nicklin spitting out the wreckage of teeth and long strings of blood as he was finally seized and led away.
The smile growing broader as he went.
That winter had been mild, and terrible. Nicklin had killed at least four people himself – three young women and an old man – and been directly responsible for as many deaths again. One of them, a man named Martin Palmer, had murdered two women at his behest;
killings he had carried out simply because he had been easy to manipulate, and too terrified of his tormentor not to.
Nicklin had learned early that fear was the most powerful weapon of all. He wielded it as skilfully as any butcher used a blade and with as much deadly force as the police marksman who had finally gunned down Palmer in that school playground, five years before.
It had been a little under two hours on the train to Evesham, then a fifteen-minute cab ride from the station to the prison. Thorne hadn’t eaten anything the whole way, and now, staring at Nicklin’s wide, rejuvenated smile, he was happy to put the feeling in his stomach down to hunger.
‘I feel like I should be sitting in a swivel chair,’ Nicklin said. ‘Stroking a white cat or something.’
‘This’ll have to do.’
‘I was expecting you sooner, if I’m honest.’
‘I only got the first picture four days ago.’
‘Oh, I take that back then. Sorry.’
‘I should think so.’
Nicklin nodded, pleased with himself. ‘I told Marcus you were the right man for the job…’
HMP Long Lartin in Worcestershire housed around six hundred of the country’s most dangerous adult prisoners. Stuart Nicklin certainly fitted into that category. Thorne would never forget the face of a boy named Charlie Garner. A child forced to watch while his mother had been strangled; to sit alone for two days with her body, starving and dirty and howling.
Thorne looked at Nicklin, seated across from him behind a shiny, battered table. He was wearing jeans and training shoes. A dark blue bib over a light grey sweatshirt.
Not a monster, certainly.
However those readers of the Daily Mail and others of a similar persuasion chose to label the likes of Stuart Nicklin, however the word seemed the only one fitting to describe what they had done, Thorne found it hard to believe that such offenders were naturally evil. The description suggested that others were naturally good. This was a concept Thorne found equally tricky to grasp. And it introduced a religious connotation into the discussion which made him hugely uncomfortable.
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