Thorne took it as a hopeful sign.
Brigstocke stepped forward again, ushering Phil Hendricks back to his seat as he did so, and making sure Thorne was given a good, hard look before he opened his mouth. Before he tried to move things forward. ‘Like DCI Hignett said, this is a strange one for all of us. So it’s going to be a case of suck it and see, and I’m sure we’ll make mistakes. As to the direction we move in, we’ll react to the evidence, same as we always do. With that in mind, we will have to look at the possibility that, for whatever reason, Luke Mullen killed his kidnappers. But we’ll look just as hard at a scenario involving a third party, as yet unknown, who murdered Allen and Tickell, took Luke and is now holding him at another location.’ He looked over at the SO7 man, who seemed to approve and was keen to press on.
‘Right, practicalities,’ Hignett said. He addressed his own officers. ‘Good news for those of you who live a bit further north, shitty for the rest of us, but we’ll be working mainly out of Becke House, up at the Peel Centre.’ That got contrasting reactions, from the two sides of the room. Hignett held up his hands. ‘It makes sense, I’m afraid. They’re geared up for a major murder enquiry and, for what it’s worth, Colindale’s a damn sight closer to the Mullen house. Some of you will still be working from here, but I want to avoid a stupid amount of toing and froing. You can spend half a day getting across town and we haven’t got the time.’ He turned to the area of the room in which Thorne was sitting; sarcastic but conceding a possibility at least. ‘Luke Mullen may not have the time.’
‘We need to get this going,’ Brigstocke said. ‘That means we share information and pool resources, and I see no good reason why it shouldn’t work out. We can afford to move in a couple of different directions if we choose, because ultimately they’re bound to converge.’
Now it was Brigstocke’s turn to direct a comment, but Thorne saw it coming and looked down before the DCI had the chance to catch his eye. He stared at his shoes through the rest of it.
‘Because we’re all agreed on one thing,’ Brigstocke said: ‘if we can find whoever killed those two up in that flat, one way or another we’ll find Luke Mullen.’
‘Well that was fun,’ Kitson said. Thorne and several others from the Murder Squad contingent had drifted towards the exit. Despite the somewhat fraught nature of the previous half hour, Thorne was in good spirits. He was pleased to see the likes of Kitson and Karim, happy that they would be working together again, albeit on an operation that no one had really thought through properly.
Thorne and Kitson lingered near the lifts.
‘Define “fun”,’ Thorne said.
‘OK. Relative to trapping your tits in a mangle.’ Kitson smirked, but the lightness didn’t remain on her face for long. Thorne thought she looked tired, and even further out of sorts than when he’d run into her at Becke House a few days earlier.
‘How’s this new lead on the Latif murder shaping up?’ He asked.
‘Early days…’
It seemed to Thorne as though she was searching his face for signs that he was convinced, but seeing none.
‘I fucked up,’ she said.
‘How?’
She took a few steps away from the lifts, and Thorne followed her. ‘Ever since Holland came to me with this, I’d been thinking how strange it was that Farrell hadn’t been looked at before. The E-fit that Amin Latif’s friend came up with at the time isn’t exactly a portrait – the hair’s different for a kick-off – but it’s very bloody close, you know? As close as I’ve ever seen. You look at this kid, Tom, and if you’ve got a good picture of that E-fit in your head, there’s no question it’s him.’
‘Right.’ Thorne had seen the picture, of course, but he hadn’t been near to the case. It was one of those that the team had picked up while he was still working on the rough-sleeper murders.
‘So I kept asking myself, “If it’s so bloody obvious, why did no one call up and suggest we should be interested in Adrian Farrell?” That picture was in the Standard, it went out on Crimewatch…’
‘And?’
‘And I checked… Someone did. There were two calls logged in October last year saying that we ought to take a look at him, but we never did. He wasn’t mentioned by name. It was more: “there’s a kid in my son’s class who looks like the picture I saw on the TV” sort of thing. But the school was named, and for some reason the tip was never acted on, the calls were never followed up. They got buried in the file and ignored, and ultimately, that’s down to me.’
‘Hang on, you weren’t the one who ignored them. You never even knew about them.’
‘I’ll find out who did ignore them, but that’s not the point. Whoever it was, they looked at that piece of information and dismissed it, presumably because it sounded like bollocks. Within the general framework of the case, the direction we were moving in, they looked like crank calls.’
‘The obvious route is usually the right one, Yvonne.’
‘Well, it wasn’t this time.’ Kitson had lowered her voice, but now it was growing louder, more strident. ‘We had our heads up our arses, and when a posh public school four or five miles away was mentioned, it was ignored because we thought we were looking in the right place. Because we were far too busy talking to kids at the comprehensives in the shittier parts of Edgware and Burnt Oak. Knocking on every door on the Deansbrook estate, and on the Wallgrove…’
Andy Stone came round the corner and Kitson trailed off. Stone nodded at the two of them, non-committal, and walked away again after a second or two. Thorne thought that Stone wasn’t the greatest copper he’d ever known, but every so often his instincts were spot on.
Kitson spoke quietly again. ‘Now that kid can afford to be a cocky little sod, because he knows he’s got away with it. Because we let him. He can swan around, wearing the same earring he wore on the night he killed Amin Latif, because he thinks he’s bulletproof.’
An officer by the lift kicked the doors, then walked briskly past them towards the stairs, announcing that he couldn’t be bothered to wait, that he was desperate for a fag.
‘I know all about fucking up,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ve done stuff that makes this look trivial.’
That got something to soften around Kitson’s eyes. ‘I’m not arguing,’ she said.
‘There wouldn’t be any point.’
‘I just want to put this right.’
‘Well, that’s the good part. Unlike most of the times I’ve fucked up, it sounds like you’ve got the chance.’
Now that they were out of the more dangerous territory, they returned to the lifts.
‘Bearing in mind how we came across Farrell in the first place, are we chasing up a possible link to this case?’ Kitson pressed the button. ‘We’re sure that he knows Mullen at least.’
Considering the strange turn that the case had taken in the previous twelve hours, Thorne now thought it even less likely that there could be a connection between the kidnapping of Luke Mullen and a six-month-old racially motivated murder. But he also remembered what he’d just said to Kitson about the most obvious route. ‘It can’t hurt to talk to him when you get the chance,’ he said.
The lift arrived and they stepped inside.
‘I certainly plan on getting the chance,’ Kitson said. ‘But he’s not the easiest kid to talk to.’
‘How are your three, anyway?’
The doors slid across as an officer from Serious and Organised slipped quickly inside. Kitson answered Thorne as though she were measuring her own children against others she might recently have met.
‘Fucking gorgeous.’
On the ground floor, Thorne’s phone rang as he moved gingerly through the revolving doors.
‘This is Graham Hoolihan. You left a message…’
Hoolihan was the DCI whose details had been passed on by Carol Chamberlain. He had led the investigation five years earlier into the murder of Sarah Hanley, believed to have been killed by her boyfriend, Grant Freestone. Thorne had left H
oolihan a message the previous afternoon.
‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t know if Carol Chamberlain explained why we’re interested in Grant Freestone…’
She had, but evidently it hadn’t been to Hoolihan’s satisfaction. So Thorne went over it again. Outside Scotland Yard, the pavement was thick with people on their way to work, hurrying towards Parliament Square and Buckingham Gate. Though the rain had as good as gone, there were still one or two umbrellas up, as it looked like it hadn’t gone very far.
Hoolihan did not know Tony Mullen, and was unaware of any threats that might have been made against him by Grant Freestone. He was sure about one thing, though: ‘Freestone’s not a kidnapper.’
Thorne was consistently surprised by how ready people were to put criminals into boxes. Lazy or just unimaginative, it seemed strange to him. If a seemingly respectable doctor could be a serial killer in his spare time, why was it so difficult to conceive of a paedophile and suspected murderer kidnapping someone? ‘Did you know him?’ Thorne asked.
‘I never met him,’ Hoolihan said. ‘Though I hope to have that pleasure one day.’
‘I hope you do, too.’ Thorne marked down the man on the phone as one of those who hated to fail, but guessed that it was the result – or the lack of one – more than any sense of injustice that needled him. Points or passion; it usually came down to one or the other.
‘You could try talking to one of the people on Freestone’s MAPPA panel. They ought to have known the bastard. They watched him for six months after he came out, didn’t they?’
‘Thanks, I’ll do that.’
‘I can’t tell you who they were, mind you, except for the copper who was involved. I dug his name out before I called.’
Thorne reached into his jacket pocket and scribbled down the details on the back of a used Travelcard. ‘He’d have the names of the others on the panel, would he?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ Hoolihan said. ‘We certainly didn’t have anything to do with them at the time. We just wanted to find Freestone. Once he’d buggered off, a bunch of social workers, or what have you, was no use to anyone. The whole thing was a waste of bloody time, if you want my honest opinion. Do-gooders who didn’t really do a fat lot of good!’
‘Why “do-gooders”?’
‘They decide to tell Sarah Hanley about Freestone. About what he’s like. They then tell Freestone what they’re going to do, so he goes marching round there, him and Hanley argue, and he throws the poor cow through a coffee table.’
‘You think it was the MAPPA panel’s fault that Sarah Hanley was killed?’
Hoolihan paused, unwilling perhaps to go quite that far. ‘The “PP” is supposed to stand for “Public Protection”…’
The chat didn’t last much longer, with both men keen to get on with their days. Afterwards, Thorne sat on one of the concrete bollards and made four phone calls trying to get hold of DCI Callum Roper. Once he’d tracked down his quarry, he made an appointment to see him later that morning. During their brief conversation he outlined the Mullen case, taking care to drop the names Hignett, Brigstocke and Jesmond, and to stress the urgency of the situation. He never mentioned Grant Freestone.
Then he began heading towards Westminster tube station, exchanging nods with an armed officer he knew by sight. He watched as a kid with a Mohican posed next to the officer while his mate took a photo. The copper smiled politely and put a hand on the kid’s shoulder. The kid grinned like an idiot and pointed towards the copper’s machine-gun. Thorne turned at the clatter of heels on the pavement behind him.
‘Hold on…’
Porter caught up, fell into step beside Thorne, and the two of them carried on walking. They had not spoken since the cursory exchanges the night before, at the crime scene.
‘You move pretty fast for a short-arse,’ she said.
They carried on in silence past Christchurch Gardens, originally part of St Margaret’s, Westminster and burial site of the seventeenth-century Irish adventurer Thomas ‘Colonel’ Blood, who stole the Crown Jewels. In point of fact, Blood was buried twice, his body having been dug up by those keen to make sure that he was really dead before being interred again. Thorne had known one or two villains himself, happily no longer walking around, who it might have been worth checking up on…
‘Thanks for speaking up at the briefing,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘What you said about Luke. About him not being able to get in touch. It’s ridiculous, this idea that he killed anyone.’
‘I’m not sure what I think, if I’m honest.’
Thorne looked surprised, and wasn’t shy about letting her know just how sure he was. ‘It’s bollocks. Somebody’s holding him.’
‘Who?’
Thorne almost smiled. ‘I don’t have all the bloody answers.’
At the north end of Victoria Street the view improved, with the London Eye becoming visible through the grey, and the monstrous Department of Trade and Industry building giving way to the splendour of Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster beyond. It was not much after eight o’clock, and the weather still looked like it could turn at any moment, but there were already plenty of snap-happy visitors being led around on overpriced walking tours by guides waving umbrellas.
‘Why don’t we just keep going up to Embankment?’ Porter said. ‘We can get the Northern Line straight up to Colindale. You can give me the tourist bit round Becke House.’
Thorne stopped, waited for a chance to cross the road. ‘I’m not heading back there just yet. There’s bugger-all else to do, so I’m going to chase up this Freestone thing.’
‘Sounds reasonable.’
‘Talk to someone who knew him.’
Porter stepped back from the kerb as a lorry overtook a car on the inside. ‘Want some company?’
‘Why don’t I give you a shout a bit later?’ Thorne said.
‘OK.’ Porter looked like she had a lot more to say than that.
Thorne saw a gap in the traffic and stepped into it. ‘See where we both are after lunch?’
The rain had come again before he’d reached the other side of the road. He picked up speed as he turned towards the river and made for the tube station, feeling wetter, and more of a miserable shit, with every step.
NINE
If the fixtures and fittings at Central 3000 had made Thorne’s shared cupboard at Becke House feel shabby, DCI Callum Roper’s office on the twelfth floor of the Empress made it seem downright medieval.
Roper had read the look on Thorne’s face as he was shown in. ‘It’s only because we’re new,’ he’d said.
When it had been built in 1961, the Empress State Building – a thirty-storey tower block in Hammersmith – had been impressive enough to be named after a world-famous skyscraper across the Atlantic. Back then, its distinctive triangular footprint had seemed radical and interesting, but forty years on it had been in dire need of the eighty-million-pound refurbishment that had won several major awards and restored much of its former glory. Though not quite as swish as the glass-and-steel Ark just up the road, its fabulous new facilities had proved hugely popular, with almost half of the office space behind the shiny, blue, solar-controlled double glazing being snapped up by the Metropolitan Police Service.
Thorne had stood in the vast atrium, gazed around as his ID card was swiped at the first of three separate security checkpoints. He’d been a little depressed by the fact that a building a year younger than he was had needed such a comprehensive facelift. How long before his own frame and superstructure would be in need of serious attention? He’d taken back his wallet and felt a spasm of pain as he’d reached round to tuck it into his back pocket.
What do you mean ‘how long’?
Though he worked at a desk that Donald Trump might have killed for, Roper had chosen to lead Thorne to the other end of his office, where four oatmeal-coloured armchairs sat around a low, glass table. Roper pushed aside a green
file, watched as a young woman with lipstick on her teeth laid down a tray of coffee, and biscuits wrapped in cellophane. ‘You know what coppers are like,’ he said. ‘This place’ll be a shit-hole inside a month.’
Thorne smiled and nodded, but seriously doubted it. He’d taken in the man as quickly as the surroundings and decided that Roper was probably the type who liked to keep everything tidy. He was tall, and looked pretty fit for a man Thorne put in his early to mid-fifties, with hair that had been subtly coloured, and cut every bit as nicely as his dark blue suit. Not a man to let things slip, if he could help it.
When he’d said ‘new’, Roper had been talking about he and his team, just as much as the facilities they occupied. The Special Enquiries team was an offshoot of what had once been the Fraud Squad, part of the SO unit that had become SCD6. Those on its roster had been brought together to tackle any case where the victim – or perpetrator – was deemed to be in the public eye. The SE team handled cases involving corrupt MPs, blackmailed TV personalities, drug-fucked pop stars and royalty behaving badly. It was widely thought of as a prestigious gig, and Callum Roper, for one, looked as though he thoroughly enjoyed being part of it.
The ‘Sexy Enquiries Team’, Holland had called it once.
Thorne had pointed out that he and Holland spent their days dragging bloated bodies from dirty rivers, or trying to ID corpses so badly burned that they looked like Coco Krispies with legs. In comparison, issuing parking tickets sounded sexy…
‘You’ll have spoken to Graham Hoolihan then?’ Roper had already helped himself to a biscuit and asked the question with his mouth full, like he’d suddenly remembered it.
‘That’s right.’ Thorne was more than a little thrown, but hoped it didn’t show. He tried to work backwards, to work out how Roper had made the connection to Freestone so quickly.
Roper leaned forward for his coffee and provided the answer before Thorne had had a chance to figure it out. ‘I made a couple of calls. Found out you were thinking that your kidnapper might have previously made threats against Mr Mullen.’
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