‘He’s just covering his bases,’ Porter said. ‘It’s a straightforward appeal for witnesses; plus there’s a message for the kid if he’s just hiding out somewhere, afraid to come home. Until we get evidence confirming that someone’s taken him, Hignett’s shit scared about ignoring the other possibility. It could seriously bite him in the bollocks if it turns out to be what happened.’
‘It isn’t what happened.’
‘We can afford to be that sure. The DCI has to be more cautious, consider the unlikely scenarios as well. He’s safe that way.’
‘Safe, until the kidnapper sees tomorrow’s paper and sends us a few of Luke Mullen’s fingers wrapped up in it.’
Porter stared at him, her open mouth eventually creasing into a grin as she snorted in comic derision. Thorne was unable to maintain the over-earnest expression and laughed along with her. They drank, worked their way through four packets of crisps between them, and Thorne realised that Porter was probably right. As far as the newspaper coverage went, what Hignett was doing made political sense; and besides, apart from backing out of one dead end after another, there wasn’t a fat lot else they could do.
Harry Cotterill had been on his way back from a booze cruise, his Transit stuffed with cheap Belgian lager, when Conrad Allen and Amanda Tickell were being carved up. No one had yet managed to track down Philip Quinn, but his girlfriend swore blind he was somewhere in Newcastle. She’d been pissed off enough with him to tell the police exactly how many different laws he was breaking while he was up there, giving her story, and his alibi, the depressing ring of truth.
As far as the murder victims went, nothing the team had discovered was helping a great deal. They’d put together a sketchy outline of Amanda Tickell’s life: well-heeled parents; a car accident that killed her father when she was a child; adolescent rebellion spiralling out of control and into addiction. With what they already knew about Conrad Allen, a clear enough picture had developed of a third-division Bonnie and Clyde, but nothing pointed towards any figure for whom they might have been working. They’d spoken to a few likely dealers, working on the theory that Allen and Tickell had got into the kidnapping business to pay off a drug debt. From there, a more elaborate theory had emerged, in which the drug dealer, aware of what was happening, had seen a way to take all the money for himself and had muscled in by killing Allen and Tickell and taking Luke. But where was the ransom demand?
It was only the second-stupidest idea that anyone had come up with, and there was no point getting too stressed about ‘what the brass were thinking’. Some coppers were just genetically programmed to hedge their bets, men like Hignett and Jesmond with fence-friendly arse-cracks who never left their Airwaves in a drawer.
‘I need to say sorry to you,’ Porter said.
‘For what?’
‘For playing silly buggers when we went into Allen’s flat. Cutting you out of that was nobody’s decision but mine. It was just about territory, and I was a complete tosser about it. So, sorry.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘And you had every right to sulk.’
‘I should have kept it up for longer.’
‘And I wanted to say sorry for that comment the other day. For making that stupid joke about Alzheimer’s.’
Thorne had to think back for a second or two. ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not a problem.’ He meant it, but, all the same, he wondered who Porter had been speaking to. He glanced towards the table where Holland, Karim and Stone were sitting.
‘It’s about a year, isn’t it?’
‘Just coming up.’
‘It was a fire, someone said.’
Thorne took a mouthful of Guinness, licked froth from his top lip. ‘A fire, yeah.’
‘I lost my mum a couple of years ago. So…’
‘Right.’
‘I read somewhere it takes seven years to get over losing a parent. Seven years, like the itch. I don’t know how they worked that out.’
‘They probably didn’t. It’s just a number.’
Porter said she was sure he was right, then nodded towards him, asked where he’d got the scar.
Thorne instinctively traced a finger along the straight line that ran across his chin, paler than the flesh around it and stubble free. ‘Shark-bite,’ he said. The way things were shaping up, he was sure she’d find out soon enough.
Porter rubbed her own chin back and forth against the edge of her glass. She seemed happy enough with the only answer she looked like getting.
‘I’m going to fetch another half,’ Thorne said. He pushed back his chair. ‘Do you want another of those?’
Porter handed him the glass.
On his way across, Thorne caught a glimpse of his father, propping up the bar at a family wedding a year or two before. Holding court, full of it, pissing himself laughing. Telling anyone too polite to walk away that the best thing about losing your marbles was that you could keep forgetting to buy anybody else a drink.
Thorne blinked slowly, and thought about what Porter had said. It sounded like a very long time to be stuck with the old bugger.
He ordered the drinks and moved along the bar to speak to Yvonne Kitson. She looked a lot happier than the last time he’d seen her, but then a few large glasses of wine could do that to people. ‘How did it go?’ he asked.
‘I’d rather not get too far into it,’ she said. She held a ten-pound note between her fingers and fluttered it in front of her face as though she were hot. ‘But I’m hoping for some good news.’
‘What did you do?’
She argued silently with herself for a few seconds. ‘No, I don’t want to jinx it. I’ll know a lot more first thing in the morning. Can we just talk shit for a while?’
So they did, until Kitson’s drinks arrived, and she turned away from the bar.
Thorne wondered just how much sleep his back would cost him later on. Deciding that he’d need some help, he changed his order from a half to a pint, then leaned on the bar and let his mind go walkabout.
Seven years of grief.
Seven years until you fell out of love and started looking elsewhere.
Could these emotions have sell-by dates? He knew as well as anyone that love was perishable and understood that grief might shrink to a half-remembered taste or smell. Hate, though, he imagined would outlast them all. It could be put away for later, like something frozen in a bag, to be thawed out, fresh and full-sized when it was needed.
He remembered a poem he’d had to learn at school, something about the world ending in fire and ice. A line about ‘knowing enough of hate’. Then he thought again about his old teacher, and in turn about Lardner the probation officer, and there was all manner of crap bouncing around inside his head by the time he carried the drinks back to the table.
Tony Mullen wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying there in the dark. Five minutes? Maybe fifteen? How long had it been since he’d lowered himself on to the bed and slid across next to his wife and daughter?
Maggie and Juliet were lying together, curled up like spoons, same as he and his wife had used to do. He’d snuggled in close, fully dressed still, on top of the duvet, lifted an arm right across the pair of them, squeezed them both when Juliet had briefly started to cry again.
The argument had not gone on for too long after Thorne and the others had left. It had run out of steam fast when he’d pointed out that the way he’d spoken to her wasn’t really what they were fighting about; when she’d stopped screaming at him, and remembered, and gone very quiet.
Like she’d been looking the wrong way and had fallen down the hole where Luke used to be.
When she murmured to him from the other side of the bed, he had to ask her to repeat it, the pair of them speaking quietly across the body of their sleeping daughter.
‘Why don’t you go next door?’ she said.
He was fairly sure they weren’t going to start at each other again, but, still, he didn’t want to ask her what she meant. If she didn’t want to be lyi
ng there close to him, or if she just thought that things were a bit cramped with the three of them, that he’d have more chance of a decent night’s sleep in the spare room.
It was academic, either way.
‘I don’t reckon I’m going to sleep anyway,’ he said. ‘I was thinking I might just go for a run.’
He waited another few minutes before lifting his arm and rolling away. By the low, green light of the digital clock, he could see that though his wife’s eyes were closed, there was a tightness around her mouth; that sleep was a distant possibility for her, too.
He padded across to the fitted wardrobes, opened the door and bent down for his training shoes.
When Thorne got back to his flat just before two, he was surprised to walk into the living room and find a man asleep on his sofa-bed.
Hendricks opened his eyes and sat up. Elvis, who’d been curled against his chest, jumped to the floor and slunk away, yowling. ‘It’s late,’ Hendricks said. ‘I was getting so worried I almost called the police.’
Thorne walked around the bed towards the kitchen. ‘I knew I should have asked for that key back.’
‘You sound like you’re about to break into “I Will Survive”. You should probably have changed that stupid lock as well.’
‘Do you want tea?’
Hendricks had spent a few weeks staying at the flat the previous year and Thorne had never bothered to get the spare key from him once he’d returned to his own place. He’d used it a couple of times since, but Thorne was fairly sure that Hendricks hadn’t come over to feed the cat tonight.
‘How long do you want to stay?’
Hendricks spoke a little louder, turning towards the kitchen. ‘This is just a one-off,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to stay overnight, but once it got late I just thought, Fuck it, and got the bed out.’
‘It’s fine.’ Thorne walked back in, and headed over to the stereo. He put on a CD by Iris DeMent, a singer/songwriter from Arkansas he’d first heard on Radio 2’s Bob Harris Country. These were mountain songs, about blessings and blood; simple and honest and suited to the hour. Thorne waited for the first few notes picked out on an acoustic guitar, adjusted the volume and went back to get his tea.
‘I didn’t argue with Brendan about “nothing”,’ Hendricks said.
Thorne sat down gently and pulled up his knee. ‘I never thought you did.’
‘The other day, I said I couldn’t remember what we’d fallen out about, that it wasn’t anything important, remember?’
‘I remember you being a bit cagey…’
‘We were arguing about kids.’
‘What, did you finally get round to telling him that you couldn’t have any?’
Hendricks smiled, but it was just punctuation. ‘I want to have them. That’s exactly the point. I know it’s a fucking nightmare and we probably wouldn’t stand a chance in hell anyway, but I wanted to talk about adoption. Brendan wasn’t interested. He thinks I’m being selfish, that I should have told him when we first got together, but I didn’t know I wanted them then, did I?’
The springs of the sofa-bed creaked beneath Hendricks as he shifted position. The guitar had been joined by a piano, and the voice, a rich Ozark twang, snaked between the two of them.
‘So, when did you know?’ Thorne asked.
Hendricks let his head fall all the way back, and spoke to the ceiling. ‘I went to that conference in Seattle last year, remember?’
‘Round Easter, wasn’t it? You were saying how cold it was.’
‘There was a demonstration of some fantastic new mortuary facilities one of the days, and they had these viewing suites. Specifically, for viewing children’s bodies, you know?’ Hendricks cleared his throat. ‘Anything from stillbirths to pre-teens in gangland shootings. We’re starting to get these here now, but back then I’d never seen anything like it. Basically, it’s about trying to minimise the trauma for the parent, to make the process less impersonal… less shocking. So they lay the body out on a refrigerated bed. The whole suite’s done up to look like a kid’s bedroom, yeah? There’s teddies and dolls and what have you for the very young ones, and there’s music if you want it, and it’s all geared towards making it seem like the dead child’s asleep. Creating something peaceful, just for those few minutes, or whatever.
‘Nobody’s kidding anyone, you need to understand that. It’s not cheesy and plastic. It really isn’t like that at all, even if I’m making it sound like it is.
‘So, they’re showing us round, right? Giving us the tour. There’s a bunch of us from the UK, from Germany, Australia, whatever and everyone’s making notes and asking questions. “How is the temperature of the bed regulated? What are the set-up costs?” All sorts. And I’m just looking at the empty bed, at the racing cars on the duvet, at the soft toys, at the curtains… And I’m seeing a child on the bed.
‘A boy…
‘I’m seeing his face in real detail. How long his eyelashes are, and the hands crossed on top of the duvet and the perfect crescents of his fingernails. I’m seeing every strand of his hair, and I can see exactly how much colour they’ve put on his lips, and I think that maybe I can see an inch or so of the PM scar, red against his chest where the button’s come undone on his pyjamas. I’m seeing all that, I’m recognising it, because for some reason I’m seeing through a parent’s eyes and not a pathologist’s.
‘Does that make any fucking sense at all?
‘That was all it took really; that was what changed. The child I’d imagined on that bed wasn’t anonymous, wasn’t a body I’d worked on. He was mine. I’d bought him those pyjamas with rockets and stars on them. I was the one who was going to have to bury him. I suddenly knew how much, I could suddenly admit how much I wanted a child. Because I knew how terrible it would feel to lose one…’
Hendricks sniffed and cursed under his breath, but from low in his armchair there was no way for Thorne to see if that meant there were tears. He would have needed to stand up; and, truthfully, he had no idea what he would have been expected to do then. With Hendricks lying down in bed, it was hard. It was awkward. So he stayed where he was and felt bad, because he didn’t know how to make his friend feel better.
And they both listened to Iris DeMent singing about God walking in dark hills, and Jesus reaching, reaching, reaching down to touch her pain.
It was the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan Police history: the ongoing search for a serial rapist who had broken into nearly a hundred homes in south London since the early nineties, sexually assaulting more than thirty elderly women and raping at least four. The man, dubbed the ‘Night Stalker’, always worked in the same way. After breaking in, he would cut the victim’s phone line and switch off the electricity before making his way to the bedroom.
She’d read extensively about the case over a number of years, disturbed by it yet fascinated. She’d had some experience of dealing with deviancy, with those in its grip and with those who had been its victims, so part of her was engaged on a professional level. But, more than that, she’d read about what this man’s victims had been through, she’d watched the reconstructions on the television and she’d felt their terror as if it had been her own. The old women, many in their eighties and above, all described that same dreadful moment of waking, of seeing a dark figure at the end of the bed, and she couldn’t help but ask herself what she would do in the same situation. How might she react?
She lived in a different part of London, of course, and she wasn’t quite as old, yet, as this man seemed to like them, but still she’d sat and asked herself the question…
‘I said don’t move.’
She froze, her arm outstretched. ‘I just wanted to put on the light. I wouldn’t be as frightened if it wasn’t so dark.’
‘I like it dark,’ he said.
Her heart was making the thin material of her nightdress dance against her chest, but she felt amazingly calm; clear-headed enough. There were ideas, pictures, words flying around inside her head like firewo
rks – rape, scream, weapon, pain – but there was still a strong, focused train of thought.
This was the way to deal with him. He needed to be engaged. She had to make him care about her.
‘I’m sorry if you’re frightened,’ he said, ‘I can’t help that.’
‘Don’t be so silly, of course you can.’
‘No…’
‘You could just leave. I wouldn’t tell anyone.’
She saw him lower his head, as though he were considering what she’d said, feeling guilty about it. She was doing very well, doing what the women who’d been confronted by this man in the past and had not been attacked had done. Those women had spoken afterwards about their appeal to something in him – to his conscience, perhaps – as being the moment when he’d changed his mind and decided to leave them be.
‘What would your mother think?’ one old woman had asked him.
He started to walk around the bed and she felt a surge of panic. He must have seen it in her, or perhaps she made a noise, because he told her to shush.
‘I know you don’t want to hurt me,’ she said.
He moved closer.
‘I can tell that you’re caring.’
‘Shut up now…’
‘You’ve made me wet the bed.’ She tried to keep her voice steady, as though she were scolding a child, but trying not to scare them. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ But she was the one who was ashamed, then suddenly angry, and reaching across for the chain that dangled from the bedside lamp.
He swore when the light came on, started shouting, and in a second he was on her.
Her fingers dug into his forearms as he tried to reach behind her, but the strength went from them when she saw his face. It took her a second or two to place him. Then confusion took hold, and the fireworks in her head flew faster and hotter, but before she could formulate a ‘what?’ or a ‘why?’ her head was dropping back, and the soft shadow was rushing down at her.
She spoke his name twice into the pillow, but it was just a silly noise.
He was woken by the pain in his leg as he shifted across the mattress to make room for his father.
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