On the train a few days before, Thorne had thought he’d sensed a vulnerability; something not quite hidden by the long coat and shaved head. He thought he caught another glimpse of weakness now, in the vehemence, but it had gone before he had even finished the thought.
‘We’re well aware what people think,’ Nunn said. ‘Most people…’
Neil Diamond, now: ‘Beautiful Noise’. A song Thorne loved, in spite of himself. ‘Well, if you’ve got the faintest idea what I think,’ he said, ‘I’d be happy to hear it. Because at the minute, I haven’t got a fucking clue.’
Nunn leaned forward and turned up the volume. Apparently, their conversation was over.
The Neil Diamond song was still in his head, becoming less of a favourite all the time, when Thorne called Louise, mid-afternoon. He could barely hear her when she picked up.
‘What the hell’s that?’
Louise had to raise her voice over some very uneasy listening in the background. ‘Some piece of thrash-metal Phil brought over with him.’
‘OK…’
Hendricks was still there.
Thorne heard Louise shouting at Hendricks to turn the music down; heard it stop completely a few seconds later. When Louise came back to the phone, she was almost whispering.
‘He’s in a seriously strange mood, by the way.’
So, Hendricks hadn’t mentioned their earlier conversation to Louise. That was probably no bad thing. Thorne toyed with telling her about the message, about Hendricks’ refusal to take it seriously, but decided against it. She was bound to ask the same question Hendricks had, about what Brigstocke thought, and Thorne did not want to get into any of that. He could always have told her that he was acting DCI, of course, but keeping his mouth shut felt slightly better than such near deceit. So he said nothing.
Enough people were thinking badly of him as it was.
‘How’s it been?’ Louise asked, flat.
‘Same as ever. However you feel at the start of the day, it’s downhill from breakfast.’
‘You must be knackered,’ she said. ‘Sorry…’
‘It’s fine.’ He could hear something being shouted in the background. Told her about the text he’d received from Hendricks that morning.
‘Did he? He never said anything.’
It was hardly a surprise. Even as Thorne recounted Hendricks’ you’re the best message, he couldn’t help but think it would be the last joke coming from that direction in a while.
‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘Inaccurate, but funny.’
Thorne was relieved to hear a smile in her voice.
‘When can you get over?’
‘Shouldn’t be too late. Eight, half eight.’
‘Maybe we can finally get to see this movie. There’s usually late shows on a Saturday.’
‘Or the three of us could do something together,’ Thorne said. ‘Might be easier to just get a DVD out.’
‘OK,’ Louise said, frosty again.
‘I’m booked out for the whole day tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, fine. Whatever.’
Thorne guessed that the ‘whatever’ meant anything but; that Louise had been banking on the two of them spending some time alone. But he hadn’t quite been able to forget about that video clip. Perhaps he should simply have told her, because by the time he’d hung up, after half a minute more of fuck all, he knew that Louise was thinking badly of him anyway.
He was on his way out of the door when the panic took hold…
Hurrying across the Incident Room, thinking about ways to get back in Louise’s good books. Pulling on his jacket and cheerfully telling those he wouldn’t see until Monday to enjoy their Sundays at work. Walking past the whiteboard, and glancing at the photographs; the bodies of the first two victims. Tucker and Hodson.
Dead white flesh and coloured ink.
Two thoughts, fragments of conversations, came together – smashed together – in his mind and started the wheels racing.
The feeble joke Bannard had cracked about all bikers looking the same: all long hair and tattoos. And something Hendricks had said at Tucker’s post-mortem, the one they’d watched together…
Thorne walked back to his office, pressed his body against the door after he’d closed it. Wondering, hoping that this was no more than cabin-fever. He used his prepay to call Louise’s flat, then Hendricks’ mobile.
Got no reply from either.
He thought hard, breathed hard for a minute or more, then dialled another number.
TWENTY-SIX
By the time he got off the phone, it was as sorted as it was ever going to be, but Brooks wasn’t happy. It didn’t feel right having to involve other people; having to rely on anybody. Each one should have been his alone, by rights.
This wasn’t the way he did things.
He sat up on the soft bed in Tindall’s spare room, looked at himself in the mirror on the dressing-table opposite.
It was almost beyond belief, this shit-house he’d become.
The way he did things.
Christ…
And it wasn’t like he was talking about the way he packed a suitcase or drove a car. These weren’t things he’d ever thought about, not seriously; even at the darkest moments, just after he’d gone inside. But everything changed you, big or small, didn’t it? Turned you into someone else. Every single thing you saw or thought, so that you were never the same person from one second to the next. How the fuck could you be? Maybe, eventually, good and bad, that made you into the person you were always meant to become.
Murder was now something he did, simple as that. And he was a damn sight happier doing it on his own.
Nobody made him take the advice, or accept the offer of help, on this one, but it made sense under the circumstances. It squared things. And this fucker clearly deserved it as much as anyone else.
He pulled faces at himself…
It wasn’t like he couldn’t work with other people. He’d really enjoyed those couple of years when him and Angie were doing the houses together; loved them. But you had to be working for the same thing, doing it for the same reasons. The two of them had nicked shit and sold it to put food on the table. To pay for clothes and holidays and stuff for Robbie. End of story. They both had the same attitude to the work, so they thought the same way when it came to whether a risk was worth taking, whether the payoff was worth it, whatever. They had the same boundaries.
Nobody else involved in what he was doing could feel the same way he did. Not when he was bringing the hammer down. There’d have to be a moment, some point, when any other person would think they’d had enough, and walk away. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to reach that point.
Nobody else could feel as much, or as little, as he did.
He shuffled forward and off the bed; moved across to the mirror on his knees and pressed his face up close to it. Fuck, he looked like he was pushing fifty. Like his dad had looked those couple of times in the visitors’ room.
Sorry, baby, he thought. I swear I was looking good right before it all happened; looking better than this, anyway. I’d even been working out for a few months, watching what I ate and all that. I didn’t want to come back to you flabby and fucked, like Nicklin and the rest of them, you know?
Everything changes you, big or small; changes your plans. Course, I didn’t know that when I was leaving my spuds at dinnertime and doing circuits in the gym at Long Lartin. Didn’t think you were going anywhere, did I?
That I’d be walking out of one prison and into another.
‘Mr Yashere? DI Thorne.’
A pause. ‘I left a message with you three days ago.’
‘The missing training shoe.’
‘Correct. The shoe that has gone walkabout. Do you have it?’
‘No…’
‘Losing such an important piece of evidence is causing something of a problem, to put it mildly.’ Yashere spoke slowly, with precision. A Nigerian accent.
‘I promise that I will
find it,’ Thorne said. ‘And when I do, I will personally deliver it to you, in a box, with a fuckoff red ribbon round it. But right now I need a favour.’
‘I was just about to go home.’
The Crown Prosecution Service had a small office round the corner at Colindale station, but via the out-of-hours service Thorne had been put through to their Criminal Justice Unit at the main station in Edmonton. This was where Anthony Yashere and his fellow-caseworkers were based: collating exhibits; ensuring the integrity of evidence chains; firing off snippy emails and phone calls when blood stained training shoes disappeared.
Thorne explained what he needed.
Yashere took details, dates and names. Told Thorne that he could probably get him the trial transcript in a few days.
‘Not quick enough,’ Thorne said. ‘Sorry.’
Yashere began to think out loud, guiding Thorne through the process as he logged into his IT system. It provided a summary of all ongoing cases, but was not yet fully up to date with trials whose details had been on the system it had replaced three years before.
Thorne listened to the click of computer keys. To grunts and sighs of frustration.
‘We are going back quite a long way,’ Yashere said. ‘Perhaps I should ask a colleague who knows his way around the system better than I do.’
Thorne had a better idea. ‘Who was the prosecutor? You must have that on record.’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you have a number?’
Yashere logged out of one system and into another. More clicking, more waiting.
‘I think you will need a home number,’ Yashere said. ‘There are not too many fools like you and I still working at this time on a Saturday.’ He said that he’d try to get hold of Stuart Emery and have him call Thorne back.
Thorne gave Yashere his prepay phone number. ‘Can you tell him that it’s very urgent?’ he said.
‘Please don’t forget my missing training shoe, Inspector…’
Thorne tried Hendricks’ mobile again, and got no answer. He paced the office; told Kitson he’d see her on Monday when she stuck her head in to say goodnight; checked his watch every couple of minutes.
Ten minutes after Thorne had spoken to Yashere, Stuart Emery called.
Brooks climbed back up the bare wooden stairs from Tindall’s cellar. There was no electricity down there and he’d had to use a shitty little torch he’d dug out of a kitchen drawer. A kid’s thing with a thin, milky beam. He’d managed to find a couple of hammers, in a dusty canvas tool-bag, among the piles of damp magazines and boxes of videos, and he carried them both up to get a good look in the light.
He chose the smaller of the two: a claw hammer with green paint on the handle. Dropped it into a plastic bag which he carried down the hall and left by the front door.
There was plenty of time yet.
He wandered back into the kitchen and knelt to peer into the fridge. Tindall’s dog immediately climbed from her basket in the corner and scampered across to see what might be going. Milk, beer, onions. There were some tinned tomatoes in a dish, and Brooks thought about making some toast to go with them. In the end he settled for the plate of cooked sausages, set in fat under greasy cling-film.
He carried the plate to the small table against the wall and dropped half a sausage to the floor for the dog. It was chucking it down outside. He could see the rain bouncing off the felt on the shed roof.
He remembered Angie screaming at him one Sunday after he had taken Robbie over the field for a kick-about and they had both come home soaked, bouncing a muddy ball. Robbie thought it was funny, and shook his wet hair all over the kitchen before Angie could fetch a towel, which made her even angrier. The two of them pissing themselves. Angie shouting while she stripped off Robbie’s tiny West Ham shirt.
The dog was on its hind legs, pawing at his shins, so he lifted her up on to his lap. Let her lick the grease off the plate. He rubbed the dog’s bristly belly, and tried to stretch the memory out. In the end, he wasn’t sure if there were bits he was only imagining, but he had a clear enough picture of his son’s face; Robbie shaking his wet head, his two front teeth still coming through.
That would be the picture he’d try to hold on to when he was reaching into the plastic bag later on.
Stuart Emery was brisk, just the right side of surly, asking Thorne what he wanted the information for. Thorne tried to keep it quick and simple.
I want to be proved wrong, he thought.
For the second time, Thorne listened as someone at the end of a phone tried to call up the information that would confirm or assuage his worst fears.
‘Got twelve years of review notes on here somewhere,’ Emery said.
Thorne tried to stay calm while the wind threw rain against the window like tin-tacks.
‘Regina versus Brooks, yes?’
‘September 2000. Middlesex Crown Court.’ Thorne waited, willing each tap of a computer key to be the last.
‘Good job I’m organised,’ Emery said. ‘“Anal”, according to my wife.’
For pity’s sake…
‘Here we go… right. “Sentencing remarks”, “witness statements”, “pathology reports”, “grounds for appeal”… These are just my notes, you understand?’
Thorne stopped him, asked him to go back. Emery read, gave him a name. Then another.
His worst fears.
He spluttered out a ‘thank you’, then jerked the phone back to his mouth as he was about to hang up. He needed to move fast, but there was one more question he needed to ask: ‘Can anybody get hold of this stuff? Is it online?’
‘Well, by and large, it’s just specialist rulings,’ Emery said. ‘Judgements that pass into case law, that kind of thing. Mind you, I suppose most things are on the bloody Internet somewhere, if you can be bothered to look hard enough.’
If you’ve got the time, Thorne thought…
The panic fizzed in him, and anger tightened every muscle, every thought. Anger at Brooks, at the man Thorne knew was putting him up to this, and above all at himself. The procedure in this kind of emergency, this kind of nightmare, should have been straightforward. But Thorne knew too bloody well that he’d left himself no easy options.
He punched in Brigstocke’s mobile number.
Russell, I’ve been fucking stupid and I don’t care what happens when this is finished, but we’ve got a serious situation…
He changed his mind and tried Louise one more time.
‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling.’
‘I nipped out to the supermarket.’
‘Is Phil with you?’
‘No, he left about an hour ago. You OK?’
‘I’ve tried calling him. Shit…’
‘Tom, what’s the matter?’
So, Thorne told her what he’d discovered: about the message that was far from being a wind-up. And in a rush, garbled and guilty, he told her everything else. The evidence he’d kept to himself; the conversations that had gone unreported; the cracked and rotten limb he’d gone out on.
There wasn’t even a pause. ‘You’re a fucking idiot.’
‘I know, and I don’t have time,’ Thorne shouted. ‘You can call me everything under the sun later on. Now, I need to get hold of people. To find Phil.’
‘You said you’d tried to call him…’
‘His phone just kept ringing. He hasn’t got it with him, or he can’t hear it.’
‘I know where he is,’ Louise said. ‘There’s three or four places in town, could be any one of them. He asked me to go with him.’
‘Three or four?’
‘Some nights he calls in on all of them. Depends who he meets.’
‘Christ…’
‘Listen, I’ve been to these places. I know where they are.’
Thorne was finding it hard to concentrate. He was dizzy with the panic; with the increasing odds against everything turning out the right way.
Who gets to do your PM, Phil?
‘T
om…?’
‘I should call Brigstocke. Tell him everything.’
‘Wait.’ Louise’s voice was quiet, steel in it, suddenly. ‘You don’t have to call anyone.’
‘We need to get officers out there.’
‘You willing to fuck your career up?’
‘It doesn’t seem very important now.’
‘We can do this.’
Thorne leaned against his desk, thinking for a moment that he might be sick. There were pinpricks of sweat across his shoulders, in the small of his back. He felt murderous. Helpless. ‘How?’
‘Who do you trust?’ Louise asked.
‘I don’t know. Holland… Kitson…’
‘Just get Holland.’
Thorne felt the urge to argue, but said nothing. Louise had given him orders before, when they’d worked together. She was better at it than he was. ‘Right.’
She told him to stay calm and listen; gave him the addresses of two gay clubs in the West End. ‘You and Holland get to those. I’ll round a couple of my boys up and we’ll take the other two. They’ll do it for me if I tell them it’s important. No questions asked.’
‘It’s Saturday night.’
‘There are plenty of people I can trust, OK?’
Thorne hung up and flew along the corridor. He found Holland at his desk, his nose in a copy of Auto Trader.
‘Remember what I said about leading you into trouble?’
Holland took one look at Thorne’s face and stood up. Thorne began to talk, explaining and apologising, as he all but dragged Holland towards the exit; filling him in as best he could as they took the stairs two at a time and crashed out through the doors, into the rain.
TWENTY-SEVEN
They hit the top end of Tottenham Court Road inside fifteen minutes.
Holland had helped himself to a magnetic blue strobe-lamp and Thorne had stuck it to the roof of the car, running the cable in through the window and plugging it into the cigarette lighter. Neither had said much on the drive, and it wasn’t just a matter of necessary concentration, or Thorne’s use of the horn, or alarm at their speed on the wet roads, that had kept the conversation to a minimum.
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