Bloodline

Sally puts down the phone for the third time that day and walks slowly back to her armchair. Buzz is asleep in front of the gas fire, twitching like he’s dreaming of chasing cats or something, and she has to step across him to get to the chair. She reaches down to tug at his soft brown ears, which he loves, before she sits down.

She’s been ringing every day since it happened, trying to get some information. ‘Wasting my time,’ she told her friend Betty. ‘Nobody wants to tell me anything.’ She talked to the police on several occasions in the days immediately afterwards and gave a full statement in the end, but now they speak to her as though she were annoying them. Like they have far better things to do, which always makes her laugh.

It wasn’t like she was asking for anything they weren’t allowed to tell her, not as far as she knows. She just wants to know what’s happening. If there is going to be a court case of some sort, because somebody has to be to blamed for what happened, surely?

They just fobbed her off. Trotted out the same old line about enquiries being ongoing. She could almost hear the sigh in the voice of whichever policeman happened to be manning the phones that day.

‘Oh Christ, it’s that silly old woman from the park again…’

A car door slams somewhere outside and Buzz is up, tearing across to the door, barking while she flicks through the TV channels and tells him not to be so silly. Afterwards, he comes back and lays his head on her leg, his tail going ten to the dozen.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, Buzzy-Boy. Not just yet, eh?’

The dog is getting fatter, she can see that, and it’s her fault. She hasn’t been out of the house since it happened, and Betty can’t walk him, not with her legs. Sally’s daughter has taken him out a couple of times, but Buzz misses the daily visit to the park. They both miss it.

She’s got as far as the front gate a couple of times, but her legs have started to tremble and she’s had to go back inside.

‘It’s hardly surprising,’ Betty says. ‘It’s a hell of a shock, getting caught up in something like that.’

But Betty’s wrong. It isn’t shock. It’s guilt.

The woman had been in a hurry, that was obvious, hadn’t wanted to hang about and chat, but Sally thought there must have been something she could have done to keep them there. If she had only talked to the boy for a bit longer, just a few minutes would have done it. Got him to throw a stick for Buzz, maybe. At the time she’d thought he was quiet, that was all. It wasn’t until she read the papers afterwards that she’d found out there was anything wrong with him.

Lord, just thinking about that poor boy keeps her awake most of the night.

The stupidest thing of all was, a few minutes after she’d watched the pair of them hurry away, that policeman’s identification card was being waved in her face and she’d been jabbering away ten to the dozen like the silly old cow she was. Telling him he’d just missed them and showing him which way they’d gone.

She should have known something wasn’t right as soon as he started running.

Sally gets up and goes to the kitchen, makes herself some tea and takes a packet of digestives from the cupboard. She brings them back to the chair on a small tray that Betty picked up for her in Southend, looks through the TV listings magazine to see if there’s one of her quiz shows on.

She’ll try to take Buzz out tomorrow, she tells herself, or failing that the next day. The weather forecast isn’t too good anyway.

She settles down in her chair. Watches an old episode of Catchphrase and drinks her tea. She can still feel it in her legs and in her chest, and the tremor in her hand makes the cup shake a little against the saucer.

TWELVE

As the car turned on to the hospital approach road, Holland said, ‘I still think we’re ahead of the game.’ It was the continuation of a conversation they had begun in the queue for a taxi, which had itself sprung from a discussion that had started just as the train was pulling into Cambridge station.

‘The game being?’

‘Catching him.’

‘Got it,’ Thorne said. ‘So, not knowing who he is, where he is or why the hell he’s doing this puts us ahead, does it?’

‘We do know who the other victims are going to be, though. That’s a decent result, surely?’

‘Half decent.’

The cab was crawling over speed bumps towards the hospital’s main entrance and Holland began digging into his wallet for cash to pay the driver. ‘At the very least we can make sure there aren’t any more killings.’

‘If we can find them,’ Thorne said. ‘I mean, it’s not looking too clever so far, is it?’

They had quickly established that there were four more likely candidates: the children of those victims of Raymond Garvey whose offspring had not already been successfully targeted. As of that morning, the team had only been able to track down and talk to one out of the four, and had only been able to trace her that quickly because of a criminal record.

‘One out of four?’ Thorne had been as angry as he was incredulous. ‘That’s piss-poor, Russell. We need to find the other three, fast.’

‘You think so?’ Brigstocke’s tone had been every bit as sharp as Thorne’s. ‘Maybe you should be sitting on this side of the desk.’

‘I’m just saying, we need to concentrate on finding them, getting them into protective custody or whatever.’

‘Nobody’s arguing.’

‘That needs to be our top priority.’

‘I’m well aware of that, Tom, which is why I’ve got everyone except the cleaner working on it.’

Thorne had stood in the doorway of Brigstocke’s office and nodded, suddenly aware that he might have been coming across as a little self-righteous. ‘It wasn’t a criticism-’

‘So, why don’t you stop going on like you’re the only one who gives a shit and get out there and do your job?’

The cab stopped and Holland passed the money forward, gave a reasonable tip and asked for a receipt. The driver kept one eye on the rear-view mirror as he scribbled. He had clearly been ear-wigging all the way from the station, and when he had torn off the slip of paper and handed it across, he asked Holland if he and his friend were there to arrest anyone.

Thorne climbed out and slammed the door.

‘Got anybody in mind?’ Holland asked, one foot already outside the car.

The driver grinned. ‘I could tell you some bloody stories and that’s the truth.’

Holland slammed his own door then and followed Thorne, caught up with him by a small cluster of smokers gathered outside the entrance. ‘Is your glass ever half full?’ he asked.

They strolled through the automatic doors, walked past a small shop selling magazines and chocolates, soft toys and bunches of flowers that made the average garage look like a Kensington florist’s. ‘You think I should look on the bright side a bit more?’

‘Just admitting that there is one might be a start,’ Holland said.

Once they had passed through the A and E Department’s reception area, they stopped to ask directions. Eventually they picked up signs for the Neurological Department and a few minutes later were walking towards the lifts that would take them up to the right floor.

‘You got any mints or anything?’ Thorne asked.

Holland shook his head. ‘We could nip back to that shop.’

Thorne said it didn’t matter. He was not a big fan of the smell, that was all. Bleach and whatever else. He had glanced up at the signs as they’d walked.

Oncology. Dementia Unit. Antenatal Suite.

‘It’s a bloody stupid expression anyway,’ he said. He tried to keep his voice level. ‘Surely what’s in your glass is a bit more important.’

‘I suppose.’

‘What if it’s a dirty glass and it’s half full of hot piss?’

They finally found the room they were looking for behind a busy ward, at the far end of a corridor with a shiny grey floor and paintings on the wall that looked as though they had been done by patients still recovering from head injuries. The sign on the door said ‘Neurosurgical Secretaries’ and, on entering, Thorne and Holland were confronted by three women who turned in unison and stared. Holland let them know, in a quieter voice than Thorne was used to, that they had an appointment. The eldest of the women stood up and walked past him to a door that was all but hidden by an enormous filing cabinet. She knocked, and after a few seconds’ muttered conversation, Thorne and Holland were shown into Doctor Pavesh Kambar’s office.

Thorne nodded back towards the secretaries’ room. ‘They all yours?’ he asked.

‘I share them,’ Kambar said. He spoke like a newsreader on Radio 4. ‘There’s something of a pecking order.’

‘Are you talking about the doctors or the secretaries?’

‘Both.’ Kambar nodded the same way that Thorne had. ‘But it’s rather more fierce out there.’

Kambar was a fit-looking man in his mid-fifties. His hair was thick, silvering, like his well-trimmed moustache, and the dark suit and polished brogues, though understated, were clearly expensive. By contrast, his office was windowless, no more than a quarter the size of the one shared by the secretaries, and there was only one chair other than his own. Thorne took it, leaving Holland to lean back a little awkwardly against the door. A year planner was mounted on the wall, while Holland ’s head rested at the same level as a model of the human brain that sat at the end of a bookshelf, its different sections moulded in brightly coloured plastic: blue, white and pink.

Thorne turned and looked from Holland to the model. ‘It’s probably a damn sight bigger than yours,’ he said.

While Thorne told Kambar about their journey up, and the doctor bemoaned the vicissitudes of the London to Cambridge rail service, Holland dug into his briefcase for a photocopy of the pieced-together X-ray fragments. He handed it over. ‘What we talked about on the phone.’

Kambar nodded, studied the picture for a few seconds. He turned to his computer and punched at the keyboard. ‘And this is where it comes from…’

Thorne shifted his chair a little closer and peered at the screen. There were three images which, at first glance, appeared identical: a cross-section of a brain, grey against a black background, with a white, almost perfectly round mass towards the bottom.

‘I printed one out for you,’ Kambar said. He opened a drawer and took out what looked like a large X-ray. ‘These days all the images are digital, stored on disc, but we still occasionally use film if we need to.’ He fastened the X-ray to the light box that ran the length of the wall above his desk and studied it, as though he had never seen it before.

‘So what happened to the original?’ Thorne asked.

‘There was no original as such,’ Kambar said. ‘As I explained, the scans are stored on computer.’

Thorne pointed to the photocopy lying on Kambar’s desk. ‘So where did they come from?’

‘Well, nobody would have had any reason to print one of these things out before I did,’ Kambar said. ‘So, my guess is that they’re from one of the series I printed out and gave to Raymond Garvey a few weeks before he died. Every patient is fully entitled to keep copies of all their medical records.’ He pointed as Thorne stared at the images. ‘The white mass is the tumour, obviously.’

Holland had moved forward. ‘Looks enormous,’ he said.

Kambar made a fist. ‘That big.’

‘How long did you treat him?’ Thorne asked.

Kambar fiddled with a pencil as he took them through a potted history of Garvey’s diagnosis, treatment and, ultimately, his death. Holland made notes and Thorne listened, his eyes drifting occasionally to the pictures, stark against the light box. The simple white shadow, round and smooth, looked like nothing.

‘About three and a half years ago, Garvey had what looked like an epileptic fit in his cell at Whitemoor, gashed his head open on the side of his bunk. Turns out he’d had a few similar episodes, so they took him to the district hospital in Peterborough and did a CT scan. They would only have had the vaguest idea of what they were looking at, but we’re image-linked to most of the other hospitals, so they were able to ask us to have a look. We had… more than a vague idea. He came here a few weeks later for an MRI.’

Kambar stood up and took the plastic brain from the shelf. ‘He had a massive tumour at the base of the frontal lobe. What’s called a benign meningioma.’

‘Benign?’ Holland said. ‘I thought it was the malignant ones that killed you.’

Kambar was turning the plastic brain over in his hands. ‘They’ll kill you slightly quicker, that’s all. If a benign tumour grows big enough, the inter-cranial pressure will almost certainly be fatal. That’s why we needed to operate. Here…’ He lifted the model with one hand and pointed with the other to a pair of narrow parallel strips at the back. ‘These are the olfactory grooves.’

‘That’s smell, right?’ Holland asked.

Kambar nodded. ‘Garvey’s tumour was sitting right there. A whopping great olfactory-groove meningioma.’ He looked at Holland. ‘In fact, issues with the patient’s sense of smell are often among the earliest symptoms. Garvey claimed he had been having problems for many years. Smelling burning or petrol for no reason. Smelling nothing at all, more often than not. Sadly for him, his tumour did not present fully until long after these problems began, by which time it was far too late.’

Thorne took the model from Kambar and held it for a few seconds until he started to feel a little foolish, then passed it over for Holland to put back on the shelf. ‘So, you operated?’

‘Not for several months,’ Kambar said. ‘The inter-cranial pressure was building, no question, but there was no reason to think he was in any immediate danger. Anyway, it took him a few weeks to make up his mind. It was a high-risk procedure.’

‘But he still decided to go ahead.’

‘He did a good deal of hard thinking,’ Kambar said. ‘Took advice from some of the people he was close to. Not that there were lots of them, of course.’

‘Not too many likely to miss him,’ Holland said.

‘Quite.’

‘So he died on the table?’ Thorne asked.

‘Shortly afterwards,’ Kambar said. ‘An extradural haemorrhage. He never really woke up.’ He switched off the light box, took down the X-ray and handed it to Thorne. ‘You can keep this, if it will be useful.’

Thorne looked at the three pictures of Raymond Garvey’s brain, the tumour that had grown within it. Garvey had brutally murdered seven women and, though it had happened earlier than he might have liked, he had been granted a relatively peaceful death. Now, three years on, someone was killing again. But why? On his behalf? In his name? Someone had left pieces of this very picture for the police to find and they still had no idea how it had come to be in his possession, nor what connected him to Raymond Garvey.

‘Any idea who he might have spoken to?’ Thorne asked. ‘Those people you said he was close to.’

Kambar thought for a few moments, chewed the end of his pencil. ‘There were a couple of other prisoners, I think. Other vulnerable ones, like him.’

‘I don’t suppose you can you remember any names?’

‘I’m sorry.’

Thorne turned to Holland. ‘Maybe we should get over to Whitemoor this afternoon.’

Holland smiled. ‘You angling for another overnight?’

‘And the son, obviously,’ Kambar said.

‘We’ll make it back tonight-’ Thorne stopped. He watched Holland ’s eyes go to Kambar, saw the confusion on his face, then spun around in his chair. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘Yes, thinking about it, his son probably ended up with all Garvey’s things,’ Kambar said. ‘The X-rays and so on, after the funeral.’

‘Garvey had no relatives,’ Thorne said. ‘Well, there’s an elderly uncle somewhere, but certainly no son.’

Kambar pulled a face, as if he were struggling with a particularly cryptic crossword clue. ‘Well, there was definitely someone claiming to be his son. Someone who made my life rather a misery for a number of weeks after Garvey died. Leaving all sorts of messages, ranting on my answering machine. I’m pretty sure the same went for the governor at Whitemoor. Pestered the poor chap for ages.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Anthony Garvey.’

‘“Anthony” was Ray Garvey’s middle name,’ Thorne said. ‘Sounds iffy to me.’ He sat back, shaking his head. ‘No… can’t be.’ He looked at Holland, who could do no more than throw up his hands.

‘Well, Garvey thought he was his son,’ Kambar said. ‘This man visited him several times a week for years. He had hundreds of letters from Garvey, too.’

‘What do you mean he made your life a misery?’ Holland asked. ‘Did he blame you for what happened to his father?’

‘Not so much that,’ Kambar said. ‘Although he obviously wasn’t happy about the consequences of the operation. No, he thought there should be a retrial-’

Thorne sat up very straight. ‘What?’

‘He wanted me to give evidence on his father’s behalf.’

‘Why on earth would there be a retrial? There was never the slightest doubt that Garvey was guilty.’

‘Never the slightest doubt that he committed the murders, certainly. ’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘Anthony Garvey was convinced that, were there to be a retrial, his father’s conviction would be overturned. They had been talking about it ever since Garvey was first diagnosed.’ He jabbed the tip of his pencil at the X-ray in Thorne’s lap. ‘They were convinced that the tumour had altered his personality; that effectively he had not been himself when he had killed those women. He wanted me to clear his father’s name.’

Thorne looked again at Holland, who was scribbling furiously. He glanced up, shrugged and returned to his notebook. Thorne turned back to Kambar, but could not think of anything to say. The information was still settling, the different strands becoming tangled as quickly as he tried to tease them out.

‘You still haven’t said what this is all about,’ Kambar said. ‘Raymond Garvey has been dead for over three years.’

Holland stopped writing. ‘I’m sure you understand that we’re not really at liberty to go into details.’

‘Of course.’ Kambar looked a little embarrassed, began to straighten some papers. ‘Just curious, that’s all. It would be nice to know what was going on.’

‘You’re at the back of a very long queue,’ Thorne said.

THIRTEEN

The Addenbrooke’s staff canteen was no more pleasant a place to eat lunch than its equivalent at Becke House. The food was probably a little better, as was the standard of conversation at the tables, but even on the top floor, which was dedicated to administration, there was no escaping that hospital smell.

Bleach and whatever else.

They carried their trays to a table in the corner, put down plates and cutlery, a bottle of still water and a can of Diet Coke. Both had plumped for the lasagne, though the doctor had chosen to accompany it with a green salad, which had almost, but not quite, prompted his visitor to put back his chips.

‘What will your colleague do for lunch?’ Kambar asked.

‘Not sure,’ Thorne said. They had rung through to make an emergency appointment with the governor at Whitemoor and, once it was confirmed, Holland had taken a cab back to Cambridge station. From there, it was a thirty-minute train journey to the small station at March, which was a short taxi ride from the prison.

‘He might get there in time to eat with the governor.’

‘Maybe,’ Thorne said. He guessed that Holland would prefer to make other arrangements. As far as smells that stayed with you long after you’d left the premises went, there wasn’t much to choose between a hospital and a prison. ‘He’ll probably just grab a sandwich on the train.’

Thorne and Kambar began to eat.

‘Is it possible?’ Thorne asked. ‘This change of personality business.’

‘Oh, personality change is certainly possible. I’ve dealt with a number of cases. But to the degree where you might murder someone? ’

‘Where you might murder seven someones.’

‘This is almost a Jekyll and Hyde thing we’re talking about.’

‘So?’

‘I was… dubious.’

‘You’re not saying it isn’t feasible, then?’

‘Almost nothing is hard and fast where the brain is concerned,’ Kambar said. ‘It’s nigh-on impossible to rule out anything completely, but there was no way I would have been willing to say that in a court of law.’

Thorne began picking up chips with his fingers. ‘I think I get it,’ he said.

‘Good. The lasagne’s better than normal today. It’s usually solid.’

Thorne knew plenty of doctors and scientists who would have trotted happily up to the witness stand in search of notoriety or a hefty fee. Who would have said that, although such a thing were unlikely, they could not say for certain that it had not happened. People of that sort – many of whom were virtually professional expert witnesses – were gifts to defence barristers seeking to get the likes of Raymond Garvey off the hook. Such testimony was almost designed to plant the seed of reasonable doubt within the mind of even the most sceptical juror.

The relatives of those murdered by Garvey should have been very grateful to Pavesh Kambar.

‘These cases you’ve dealt with,’ Thorne said, ‘how do these changes happen?’

Kambar raised his hand to demonstrate and it looked as though he might stab himself in the forehead, until he remembered and put down his fork. ‘The frontal lobe is what controls our cognition,’ he said. ‘It’s where the brain’s natural inhibitors are, where all the levels are set. It’s what makes us who we are.’

‘And a tumour can change that?’

‘Any foreign body, or any injury that affects that area. If the brain gets damaged, the personality can be affected. Altered.’

‘I read something in a paper once,’ Thorne said. ‘This woman suffered a massive head injury in a car accident and when she woke up she was speaking in a completely different language.’

Kambar nodded. ‘I’ve seen similar cases reported,’ he said. ‘But I’m not convinced. I think those kinds of things make good stories.’

‘So, what sorts of changes have you seen?’

‘Shy people who can suddenly become extremely gregarious. It’s usually a question of inhibition, of barriers coming down. Alcohol works in the same way in that it disinhibits the frontal lobe. Imagine someone who is very drunk, but without the falling over and the slurred speech. There are no… niceties, you know? Social graces go out of the window, the mark is overstepped.’

‘I’ve seen that,’ Thorne said.

Kambar shoved the last forkful of pasta into his mouth and waited.

Ignoring what was left of his lunch, Thorne found himself telling this man he had known for only an hour about the Alzheimer’s that had blighted his father’s final years and a few of his own. About the old man’s bizarre obsessions and the lifestyle that had grown increasingly erratic and disturbing. Kambar told him that the disease acted on the brain in precisely the way he had been describing.

‘People think it’s all about forgetting people’s names or where you’ve left your keys,’ Kambar said. ‘But the worst thing is that you forget how to behave.’

Thorne laid down his cutlery. Straightened it. ‘What about the whole genetic thing?’

Kambar nodded, understanding what he was being asked. ‘Look, it’s far from being definitive, but only something like fifteen per cent of patients with Alzheimer’s had parents who suffered from it; and even then the strongest genetic link is with the rarest forms, like early onset. We’re not talking about that, right?’

Thorne shook his head.

‘The fact that your father had it might increase your own susceptibility a little, but no more than that.’ Kambar smiled. ‘Dementia is very common, though, and chances are you’ll get it anyway, so I’d stop worrying. ’

‘Sometimes it was good,’ Thorne said. ‘With my dad, you know? There was this one afternoon we were all playing bingo on the pier and he just lost it. Started swearing and shouting, proper filth, and everyone was upset, but I was pissing myself. And he knew it was funny. I could see it in his face.’

‘I’m glad it wasn’t all gloom and doom,’ Kambar said. ‘How was it at the end?’

Thorne suddenly found his appetite again. He had discovered only recently how the fire in which Jim Thorne perished had started; the part he had played in the death of his own father. He had not even felt able to share the truth with Louise. He heard Kambar from the other side of the table telling him that it wasn’t a problem, that he had not meant to pry.

Thorne started slightly when Kambar’s beeper went off. He got up and shook the doctor’s hand when it was offered. ‘You’ve been a great help. Thank you.’

‘I wish I could tell you I was off to perform some vital brain surgery,’ Kambar said. ‘But the truth is I’ve got a squash game.’ He reached inside his jacket and rubbed his stomach. ‘Should have eaten lunch a bit earlier.’

‘That was my fault.’

‘It’s not a problem.’

‘Someone’s killing the children of his victims,’ Thorne said suddenly.

‘Sorry?’ Kambar pulled his cryptic crossword face again.

Thorne could see a small blob of sauce at the edge of the doctor’s moustache, a thin streak of it just below his collar. ‘The children of the women that Raymond Garvey murdered.’ Thorne suddenly felt a little dizzy and guessed he’d stood up too quickly. He took a couple of seconds, hoping that Kambar would think the pause was for his benefit. ‘Whoever had those fragments of Garvey’s brain scan has already killed four people.’

Kambar looked as though he wished he had never asked. He puffed out his cheeks, said, ‘Fuck.’

The surprise was clearly evident on Thorne’s face.

‘It’s a medical term,’ Kambar said. ‘One you reserve for when you hear something that makes you feel like a hopeless quack with a pocketful of leeches.’

‘I use it pretty much the same way,’ Thorne said. ‘Just more often.’

‘There are so many things that can mess up the brain, but most of them we can do nothing about.’ Kambar shook his head, the resignation etched in lines around his mouth. ‘Sometimes the damage is… invisible.’

‘Enjoy your game,’ Thorne said.

When the doctor had gone, Thorne walked over to the counter again. He bought a coffee and a thick slice of cheesecake, took them back to the table. From the window, there was a spectacular view across the flat, green fenland: Grantchester huddled a little to the north; the spires of Cambridge just visible a few miles away to the east; and the pulsing grey vein of the M11 halfway to the horizon.

Thorne looked out, savoured his dessert and tried to remember exactly what his father had shouted that day on the pier. Based on what Kambar had told him, his father could probably have committed murder with a fair chance of getting away with it. It’s a shame his dad had never known that. He was a crotchety and unforgiving old sod sometimes, especially in the last few years. He’d probably have drawn up a decent-sized hit list.

‘Garvey’s son thinks his father was wrongly imprisoned, and that the tumour might have been found earlier if he hadn’t been in prison. So he blames the world and his wife for his father’s death.’

‘I’m still not convinced this nutcase is Garvey’s son,’ Thorne said.

‘Sounds like Garvey was, though.’

‘OK, for the sake of argument…’

‘So, the child of the killer starts killing the children of the victims. It makes a kind of sense when you think about it.’

‘Sense?’ Thorne said.

‘You know what I mean.’

Thorne was walking slowly around the small branch of WH Smith at Cambridge station, waiting for the 15.28 to King’s Cross and driven back inside by the wind knifing along the platform. He kept the phone close to his mouth as he talked, so he could whisper when he and Brigstocke got to the meat of it.

‘Twenty-six Anthony Garveys in the UK,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Could be better, but could be a hell of a lot worse.’

Thorne had spoken to Brigstocke earlier in the day, after the initial meeting with Kambar. Holland had also checked in with the DCI, having met with the governor at Whitemoor, so now it was Thorne who needed bringing up to speed.

‘I think we’re wasting our time,’ Thorne said.

‘You’re not convinced. Yeah, you said.’

‘Even if he is Garvey’s son, I think the name is dodgy. If it was genuine, there’d be records. We would have known about it.’

‘Still got to check them out, Tom.’

‘I know,’ Thorne said. He was sure that, whoever this man was and whatever his parentage, he himself had chosen the name he had used when visiting Whitemoor and pestering Pavesh Kambar. But he also understood that, as far as the investigation went, arses always had to be covered, and it was easy to criticise when you weren’t the senior investigating officer.

‘We’ve discounted half of them since you and I spoke earlier,’ Brigstocke said. ‘So it shouldn’t take too long.’

‘What about the potential victims?’

‘Not doing quite so well there. Still missing those three.’

‘Missing?’

‘One is apparently on a walking holiday, but his wife can’t tell us much more than that, or doesn’t want to, for some reason. The other two have both slipped off the radar thanks to one thing and another. We’ll find them, though.’

‘As long as we find them first,’ Thorne said.

There was a pause, voices in the background. Thorne had stopped in front of the men’s magazines, and his eyes drifted from Mojo and Uncut, past Four Four Two, to the covers of Forum and Adult DVD Review on the higher shelves.

‘What do you think about this personality change business?’

‘Have a guess,’ Thorne said.

‘But Kambar didn’t deny that it was possible?’

‘Anything’s possible.’

‘Right.’

‘Right, and we shouldn’t discount the possibility that Garvey was actually a werewolf, or maybe the unwitting victim of a gypsy’s curse. For Christ’s sake, Russell…’

‘Look, a man who’s already murdered four people believes it, so what we think doesn’t really matter.’

‘You haven’t said what you think.’

‘I’m keeping an open mind,’ Brigstocke said. ‘You should try it some time.’

‘It wasn’t you that put Garvey away, so I don’t know why you think you’ve got to sit on the fence.’

‘Steady, mate.’

‘Sorry-’

‘It’s our motive, Tom, so we need to take it seriously. OK?’

Thorne picked up a copy of Uncut and wandered towards the till. There was a small queue, but he still had five minutes before the train was due. ‘I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,’ he said.

‘What time do you get into King’s Cross?’

‘Half four-ish.’

‘Go straight home,’ Brigstocke said. ‘You had an early start and you wouldn’t get back here until after five anyway. Just make sure you’re the first one in tomorrow.’

‘You sure?’

‘It’s up to you. I mean, if you want to spend a couple of hours ringing up our dozen remaining Anthony Garveys…’

‘See you in the morning.’

‘I’ll call if anything turns up.’

Right, Thorne thought. Like the body of one of the three missing victims-in-waiting.

Thorne took another swig from the can of beer which, thanks to Brigstocke, he had been free to purchase and enjoy. Opposite him, a young woman, blonde with bad skin, was leafing through a copy of heat. Every so often she looked up from the glossy pages and stared at the beer in Thorne’s hand, as though the consumption of alcohol on a train was right up there with smoking crack or getting your dick out on a list of unacceptable public behaviour.

They were sitting in the train’s ‘quiet’ carriage, but it wasn’t as if he was drinking particularly noisily.

Raising the can to his lips, Thorne caught another dirty look and toyed with offering her a drink. Or belching as loudly as he could. Or letting her know just what he thought about every stick-thin brain-dead waste of DNA in her magazine, and that any moron who enjoyed gawping at photos of paparazzi fodder stumbling out of nightclubs or climbing out of limos with no knickers on was in no position to pass judgement on anybody. Then he thought about what Louise would say. He remembered that she occasionally flicked happily through OK and heat, albeit while she was having her hair done or sitting in a doctor’s waiting room.

He waited until the woman glanced up again, then smiled until she quickly dropped her eyes back to the magazine.

Makes a kind of sense.

People dying because of who their mothers were; killing because of who their fathers might have been. Thorne swallowed his piss-weak lager and supposed that it made as much sense as anything else in a world where being famous counted for so much. Where what you were famous for didn’t matter at all. A world where couples who weren’t fit to look after hamsters dragged six kids round the supermarket. Where some women popped out babies like they were shelling peas, while others didn’t find it quite so straightforward.

‘Any more tickets from Cambridge?’

Thorne had missed the inspector first time round while he’d been busy at the buffet. As soon as his ticket was punched, he stood up to make a return trip, crushing his empty can as noisily as possible as he squeezed out of his seat. Then tossing it back on to the table.

At the end of the carriage, a man was jabbering into his mobile. He was laughing, a hissy half cough, and telling someone how something was ‘just typical’ of someone else. It wasn’t loud so much as annoying.

Thorne stopped at the man’s table and snatched the phone from his hand, nodding up at the sign: a picture of a mobile with a red line through it. He pushed the button to end the man’s call, and reached round quickly with his other hand to take out his wallet. The man said, ‘What the fuck do you-?’ then stopped when he saw the warrant card.

Thorne walked on towards the buffet car in a far better mood.

Louise didn’t get home until an hour after Thorne.

‘You know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘You take a couple of days off and there’s shed-loads to catch up on.’ She told him she was enjoying getting stuck into things, having something else to think about. She was in a good mood.

Thorne suggested that she should put in for some overtime, as work was so obviously agreeing with her.

‘It’s about getting things in perspective,’ she said.

Louise made them spaghetti with bacon, onions and pesto and afterwards they sat in front of the TV for a while. She said, ‘I do want to talk about what happened, you know. I think we should.’

‘We have talked about it.’

‘No, we haven’t. Not how we feel about it.’ She smiled. ‘It’s been bloody deafening, tell you the truth.’

‘What?’

‘The sound of you walking on eggshells.’

Thorne stared at the television.

‘How do you feel?’ Louise said.

‘I don’t know,’ Thorne said. ‘How you’d expect. Upset.’

‘You’ve not said anything.’

Thorne felt uncomfortably warm. ‘I don’t think I’ve had enough time to… process things.’

‘Fine. Good. That’s OK.’

They watched a little more television, then went to bed. They lay and cuddled, and when Louise fell asleep Thorne read for a while; a few more chapters from one of the true-crime books he’d bought online.

Raymond Garvey had supported Crystal Palace and kept pet rabbits as a boy. He had enjoyed tinkering with motorbikes and had battered his first victim to death with half a house-brick.

When Thorne had switched the light out, he turned on to his side, feeling Louise come with him, pressed soft into his back, and the guilt bubbling up in him like acid reflux.

FOURTEEN

H.M.P. Whitemoor

‘I can’t get over how hard they make it getting in here.’

‘It’s a damn sight harder getting out.’

‘They take everything off you, check your stuff. All these doors you have to go through.’

‘So you don’t smuggle anything in.’

‘Like what?’

‘Cigarettes is the main thing. Drugs. People still manage it, though.’

‘OK.’

‘Sorry for… staring. I can’t believe you’re really here.’

‘Did you not believe me, when I said I was coming?’

‘It’s just so out of the blue, you know? I never expected… I never thought you’d find out.’

‘I wasn’t meant to. Nobody would have told me.’

‘So, how-?’

‘There were some old letters in the loft, some official stuff, at my auntie’s place. I asked her and she started to cry, so I knew it was true.’

‘And how did you feel when you found out?’

‘Pissed off. With her, I mean… with Mum, for not telling me.’

‘She never told me, either. About you.’

‘I know. I found the letter you wrote to my auntie. I know why you did what you did.’

‘Oh, Jesus…’

‘It’s fine, really. I know how it made you feel, Christ-’

‘It’s not fine.’

‘I think I’d have done the same thing.’

‘I always presumed you’d hate my guts. That’s why I never tried to get in touch or anything.’

‘From when I was six or seven or whatever, she said you were dead. That my “father” was dead. Told me he was an engineer. How could she do that?’

‘I was an engineer, for British Telecom. Before…’

‘I’m not sorry she’s dead. You don’t have to worry.’

‘You look different to the photos you sent.’

‘God, they’re ancient. From when I was at school. I’ll send you some more recent ones, if you want.’

‘You not at school any more?’

‘What’s the point?’

‘Long as it’s not got anything to do with me, with finding out who I was, I mean. If you’ve got exams, anything like that, you should probably finish them.’

‘You look different, too. I saw a few pictures on the internet, some old newspapers. There’s that one they use in all the books.’

‘Everybody piles on the weight in here. I don’t get as much exercise as other prisoners… normal prisoners.’

‘That’s really unfair.’

‘They keep the special ones apart from the rest. Ex-coppers, nonces, all that sort.’

‘You’re not that sort.’

‘It’s fine, I’m used to it.’

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘It’s funny, she never told you about me, then she goes and gives you my middle name.’

‘No, she didn’t. She gave me a stupid name. I changed it as soon as I found those letters. Not legally or anything, but I’ll probably get round to that.’

‘Up to you.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I’m Anthony from now on, whatever.’

‘It’s nice.’

‘Second name too: Anthony Garvey.’

‘That’s got a ring, definitely.’

‘Tony’s all right, I don’t mind that.’

‘Sounds good. Younger, like.’

‘So, you don’t mind if I visit again?’

‘Are you going already?’

‘No, don’t worry, there’s ages yet. I was just checking it would be OK.’

‘Better than OK.’

‘For me too.’

‘Yeah… Tony sounds really good…’

FIFTEEN

Brigstocke was upbeat at the morning briefing, but then he did not have a great deal of choice. Progress – unspectacular yet tangible – was being made, but the DCI’s mood would have been much the same even if it were not. As senior investigating officer and team leader, he could never be seen banging his head against the wall, telling the troops that the investigation was going nowhere and that everything was turning to shit.

It was one of the reasons why Thorne had resisted the step up; why, despite Louise’s encouragement, he had not taken the chief inspector’s exams. The extra money would have been welcome, of course, and there was a much better parking space attached to the rank, but the putting on of a brave face, however much the circumstances might demand it, was not something he was good at.

‘You learn all that stuff,’ Louise had said.

But Thorne had not been persuaded. ‘I don’t want to learn it,’ he had said. And I’d most likely punch the first tosser to give me a funny handshake.’

After the briefing, Thorne walked back into the Incident Room with Holland. He waited while Holland made them both coffee and let his eyes drift across to the large whiteboard that dominated one wall. Below photographs of the four victims to date, the board was divided in half, with a thick, not-quite-straight line of black felt-tip running down the middle. On the left-hand side were listed the seven women murdered by Raymond Garvey; and opposite, their children. Red lines linked the mothers’ names with those of their sons and daughters.

Thorne looked at the list of names on the right-hand side of the board, their ages and the dates on which they had died, where relevant. A roll-call of those already killed and those they had to presume would be targeted by the killer:

Catherine Burke (23 yrs) 9 Sept. (Brother, Martin, killed in RTA)

Emily Walker (33 yrs) 24 Sept.

Gregory and Alexandra Macken (20 yrs/18 yrs) 27 Sept.

Andrew Dowd (31 yrs)

Deborah Mitchell (29 yrs)

Graham Fowler (30 yrs)

Simon Walsh (27 yrs)

Along the bottom of the board were three E-fits, based on the descriptions given by Emily Walker’s neighbour, the witness who had seen a man talking to Catherine Burke and the students who had watched Greg Macken get picked up in the Rocket Club. Under each was the name ‘Anthony Garvey’. Whether Thorne was right to doubt its authenticity or not, it was the only name they had to go on when it came to the identity of their prime suspect.

Holland appeared at Thorne’s shoulder and handed him his coffee. Thorne stared into the plastic cup.

‘No milk in the fridge, so I had to use the powdered stuff.’

‘We’re going to have to start leaving notes on the cartons,’ Thorne said. ‘Like those students.’

Holland nodded towards the whiteboard. Said, ‘What d’you reckon it is with Dowd and his wife, then?’

Andrew Dowd was the man Brigstocke had mentioned the day before; someone who, according to his wife, had set out to go walking in the Lake District a few days before and with whom she had had minimal contact since. She claimed not to know the place he had been headed, the names of any hotels or B &Bs he had been intending to stay in or even how long he had planned to be away. There had been predictable concern for Dowd’s safety, until officers had spoken to his wife, after which they decided it was only his marriage that was almost certainly dead. She had told them that Andrew had gone with very little notice, that he had taken his mobile phone but not his charger and that he had called only once, the evening of the day he went, to let her know he had arrived safely. Using cell-site technology, the team had confirmed that the call was made from Keswick, which was where local searches were now focused. A text message had been sent to Dowd’s phone asking him to contact the police urgently, but since that first call either the handset had been switched off or the battery was dead.

‘They’ve obviously had some kind of enormous row,’ Thorne said. ‘She doesn’t want to admit he’s just walked out, so she’s making out like it’s no big deal, like he does this regularly. Cuts himself off for a few days, so he can find himself, whatever.’

‘He wants to find himself a new wife,’ Holland said. ‘The one he’s got sounds like a nightmare.’

‘No one knows what goes on behind closed doors.’ Thorne saw the sideways look from Holland. ‘Charlie Rich. 1973.’

‘What about the other two?’ Holland asked.

If either of the two men whose names were below Dowd’s on the list possessed mobile phones, then they were pay-as-you-go, as there was no trace of any contracts. No trace of anything.

Simon Walsh had lived at seven addresses in the previous eighteen months, signing on at half a dozen different benefit offices before dropping out of the system. His only existing relative, an aunt, claimed not to have heard from him in ten years; and a friend who had last seen him six months previously said he thought Walsh might have become addicted to anti-depressants. Without being told why they were looking for him, the friend added, somewhat ironically, that he was always expecting to hear that Simon had been found dead somewhere.

According to Graham Fowler’s estranged wife, he had been sleeping rough somewhere in south-east London for at least two years, after an increasingly severe alcohol problem had cost him first his job, then his family. There was nobody of that name registered at any of the established day centres or night shelters.

‘Well, I can’t see us finding either of them through credit-card receipts,’ Thorne said. A few years before, he had spent a period undercover, living on the streets of the West End in an effort to find the man who was killing rough sleepers. He had met plenty like Simon Walsh and Graham Fowler, men who had slipped through the cracks by accident or design. ‘They both sound like people who don’t particularly want to be found.’

‘That might be what saves their lives,’ Holland said. ‘I mean, if we can’t find them…’

Thorne looked at the remaining name, which had been circled again and again in red felt-tip, as if in exasperation. ‘Not that finding them is the end of the problem.’

The one person on the list of potential victims that they had been able to track down was proving to be something of a handful. Despite repeated conversations and visits from family liaison officers, Debbie Mitchell was refusing to so much as consider the possibility of entering protective custody.

‘Well, she’s not all there, is she?’ Holland said.

‘She’s got problems.’

‘And there’s this business with her kid.’

Debbie Mitchell was the single mother of a child with severe learning difficulties. She had been arrested on three occasions for soliciting and on several more for possession of Class A drugs.

‘It’s weird, this drug thing,’ Holland said.

‘What thing?’

‘Catherine Burke did a few; now Debbie Mitchell. I should think there’s every chance with Walsh and Fowler, too.’

‘Not weird really,’ Thorne said. ‘Not when you think about what they’ve all got in common. You ask me, the weirdos are the ones who aren’t drug addicts or alcoholics.’

The office moved all around them, while they drank their coffees and stared at the board, as though the marker-pen lines and scribbles were symbols in some complex equation, the answer to which might suddenly present itself if they looked hard enough.

Three hours later, Thorne was standing in front of another board, looking at the list of lunchtime specials on the menu at the Royal Oak. Until recently, in what passed for the team’s local, ‘special’ might have applied to almost any food that was vaguely edible, but a new landlord had radically improved standards. An ex-copper himself, he knew that even police officers demanded more than shit and chips at lunchtime. It was still far from being a gastropub, but it had finally become something more than a last resort.

Thorne placed his order and took a Diet Coke and a bitter lemon back to a table by the fruit machine. He slid in next to Yvonne Kitson. They touched glasses and drank, their expressions making it clear that they would prefer a pint of strong lager and a cold white wine, respectively.

‘Later,’ Kitson said.

Thorne picked up a beer-mat and began methodically tearing it into tiny pieces. ‘This case is breaking new ground,’ he said. ‘It’s a “who-didn’t-do-it”.’

Kitson smiled, happy to play along. ‘Go on then, who didn’t do it?’

‘Well, since you ask… It wasn’t a primary school teacher in Doncaster, it wasn’t a photocopier repairman and keen amateur boxer from Wrexham, and it certainly wasn’t a seventy-eight-year-old ex-merchant seaman who’s retired with his wife to Portugal. It’s lovely weather there today, by the way, he told me so several times. He and his wife were planning to have lunch out by the pool.’

‘Three of your Anthony Garveys?’

‘My morning so far.’

‘Got to be done.’

‘Oh, I know,’ Thorne said. ‘And I’m loving every vitally important minute of it. I’ve been eliminating people from my enquiries like there’s no tomorrow. Putting lines through their names and ticking them off, just to be on the safe side, you know? Eliminating all day long. I am… the Eliminator!’

Kitson sipped her drink. ‘Fine, but I didn’t hear you coming up with any bright ideas this morning.’

Thorne finished ripping up the beer-mat and nudged the pieces into a nice, neat pile. He had nothing much to say and even if he had, seeing Russell Brigstocke turn from the bar and wave at them, he would probably have kept it to himself. Using basic mime techniques, he and Kitson were able to transmit their desire for more drinks, and once Brigstocke had bought them, he joined them at the table.

‘Have you already ordered?’

Two nods.

Brigstocke took a long drink of sparkling water and sat back. ‘I just lost fifteen minutes of my lunch-hour thanks to Debbie Dozy-Bollocks. ’

‘Still being difficult?’ Kitson asked.

‘You know an FLO named Adam Strang?’

Thorne nodded, remembering the Scotsman from the Macken crime scene.

‘Well, he spent most of this morning trying to talk sense into her, but she’s not having any of it. She’s just point-blank refusing to go anywhere. ’

‘How much has she been told?’

‘Not everything, obviously. Enough, though, or at least it should be.’

‘What are the other options?’ Kitson asked.

Brigstocke shook his head, like he was sick of thinking about it. ‘I’m reluctant to stick a car outside twenty-four hours a day just because she’s being stupid.’

‘Can we install a panic button?’

‘Not enough,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t think Emily Walker or Greg Macken would have had time to push one.’

‘So, what else can we do?’ Brigstocke asked. ‘Arrest her?’

Kitson flicked a bright red fingernail against the edge of her glass. ‘That shouldn’t take too long, looking at her record.’

A waitress arrived with the food: lamb casserole for Thorne and fish pie for Kitson. Brigstocke stared down unenthusiastically at the bowl of pasta he was given, then pointed at Thorne’s plate.

‘I fancied that, but somebody had just ordered the last one.’

‘The quick and the dead,’ Thorne said.

They ate for a minute or so without talking, until Thorne said, ‘Why aren’t we involving the press with this?’

Brigstocke swallowed quickly. ‘I thought we went through this earlier on.’ He looked to Kitson for validation.

She nodded. ‘Keeping quiet about the serial thing.’

‘Right,’ Brigstocke said.

‘I’m not talking about that,’ Thorne said. ‘Why aren’t we getting photos of Dowd and the others in the papers, on the box, whatever? We can get something out of them for a change.’

This time Brigstocke took his time swallowing and answered quietly. ‘That’s… tricky.’ He looked around. Many of the team were eating at nearby tables.

Thorne pushed his plate aside and leaned closer to Brigstocke, just as one of the trainee detectives chose that moment to come over and spend five minutes pumping all his loose change into the fruit machine. There was nothing more said about the case until he had finished. Thorne made a comment about the machine being tight and watched the trainee walk away. Then turned back to Brigstocke.

‘Tricky, you said?’

‘I was talking to Jesmond,’ Brigstocke said.

Thorne winced theatrically at the mention of the superintendent’s name. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Somebody has to. Anyway, there appears to be a strong feeling that using the press in the way you’re suggesting might not be a good idea.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it may alert the killer to the fact that we’re on to him.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘They think it might be, if we want to catch him.’

‘So, we want to catch him more than we want to protect the people he’s trying to kill?’

Brigstocke sighed. ‘Listen, I know.’

‘That’s mental,’ Thorne said. ‘He must already know we’re on to him. He left the bits of X-ray, for Christ’s sake. He wants us to put it all together.’

‘I’m just letting you know what I was told, all right?’

‘On top of which, I can’t see this bloke just packing his bags and buggering off because he sees a few photos in the paper.’

‘Point taken.’

‘I don’t think he’s the type to stop.’

‘Look, there’s no point getting arsy with me. I’m just telling you, there’s a… tension, between the different… priorities.’

‘Surely the first priority has to be protecting the potential victims?’ Kitson said.

‘Tell that to Debbie Mitchell.’ Brigstocke turned to Thorne. ‘In fact, you can tell the superintendent, seeing as you feel so strongly about it. They’re talking about putting a critical incident panel together.’

‘I’d rather stick needles in my eyes,’ Thorne said. He had sat on such a panel a couple of times before, struggling to look interested while diplomats in uniform droned on about media strategy, and had sworn that he would never do so again.

‘Right, in which case you should get off your high horse and stop giving me grief.’ Brigstocke took one last mouthful of pasta and pushed back his chair. ‘Fair enough?’

Neither Thorne nor Kitson ate too much more after Brigstocke had left and let the waitress take away the plates the next time she was passing.

‘High horse?’

‘High-ish,’ Kitson said.

‘Come on, I’m right though, aren’t I?’

‘I don’t think he disagrees with you, but there’s not a great deal he can do about it. Rock and a hard place, all that.’

There was still fifteen minutes before either of them was due back at Becke House. Thorne drained his glass. ‘So, do you really fancy spending the rest of the afternoon ringing up people you know haven’t killed anyone and asking them if they’ve killed anyone?’

‘You finally had a bright idea?’

‘What you said about arresting Debbie Mitchell.’

‘I was only half joking.’

‘Let’s take a drive over there. You never know, if we push it, we might get her to assault one of us.’

Kitson took a compact from her handbag and reapplied her lipstick. ‘I’ll toss you for it in the car,’ she said.

SIXTEEN

Totteridge was a leafy north London suburb with a bona fide village at its heart, where men who owned or played for football clubs lived with their suspiciously expressionless wives. A few minutes away towards Barnet, however, you would find yourself in a noticeably less well-heeled area just shy of the Great North Road, where most of the footballers were the sort who kicked lumps out of one another on Sunday mornings, smoking in the centre circle at half time and heading straight for a fry-up at the final whistle.

Debbie Mitchell lived on the top floor of a three-storey block on the Dollis Park Estate, a sprawl of sixties and seventies mixed-tenure housing in the shadow of Barnet FC’s ground. From the window of the small, smoke-filled living room, Thorne could just make out the floodlights of Underhill, the corner of the stadium’s main stand.

‘It must get pretty busy on match days,’ Kitson said.

‘Hang on a minute, this is Barnet we’re talking about,’ Thorne said. ‘They’d probably think the four of us was a pretty decent crowd.’

Only Kitson smiled as Thorne turned back to the window. Looking the other way, he could see the main road, the green belt rolling away beyond a petrol station and an enormous branch of Carpet Express.

‘Vision Express I can just about understand,’ he said, pointing. ‘Even Shoe Express, at a push. You know, you lose a shoe, you’re late for a party, whatever. But who could possibly need a carpet… really fast?’

‘What’s he on about?’

‘I mean, in how much of a hurry does someone have to be?’

One of the two women sitting close together on the sofa nodded towards Thorne, then turned to address Kitson who was perched on the edge of a dining chair near the door. ‘I get it,’ she said. ‘They’ve not got anywhere with the sensitive ones, or the ones who marched in here shouting the odds, so now they’ve sent the copper who thinks he’s a bloody comedian.’

Nina Collins was a good few years older than Debbie Mitchell, early forties, probably, and she had done most of the talking since Thorne and Kitson had arrived. She had opened the door, told them she was a friend of Debbie, her best friend, and that Debbie was inside, trying to get some rest and keep Jason calm. That she was frazzled, and who the hell wouldn’t be, with coppers ringing up every ten minutes telling her she had to get out of her home?

‘I suppose you’ve come to have another bash,’ she’d said, blowing cigarette smoke at them, before turning and walking back inside.

In the living room, Thorne turned from the window again and shrugged. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘quite a few people tell me I’m pretty funny.’

Collins stubbed out her cigarette. ‘They’re wrong,’ she said.

Thorne dragged a footstool across and sat down on it in front of the television. He looked at the two women. Collins was short and large-breasted, with black hair tousled into spikes, red at the tips when it caught the light. She wore a tight, striped rugby shirt that showed off her chest and there was a softness in her face, at odds with the body language and the brittle, Benson & Hedges voice. (Later, when there were new cases to worry about, Thorne would confess to Kitson, after a couple of pints, that he’d secretly quite fancied Nina Collins.)

‘He’s got a point,’ the woman next to Collins said. ‘It is a bloody stupid name. The carpets are seriously cheap, though, I’ll give them that.’

Debbie Mitchell was taller and skinnier than her friend. Her hair was long and dirty-blond, cut very straight on either side of a face that was drawn and blotchy, the foundation failing to hide an angry cluster of whiteheads around one nostril. She was barefoot, with her legs pulled up beneath her and one arm trailing over the edge of the sofa, in almost permanent contact with the boy playing on the carpet at her side.

‘He seems happy,’ Kitson said.

Collins turned as though she’d forgotten Kitson was there. ‘He is happy. He’s always happiest when he’s with his mum.’

‘Does he have any kind of… carer?’

‘Just me,’ Mitchell said. ‘There’s just us.’

Jason was tall for his age – eight, according to his mother’s file – and the pyjamas he was wearing looked a year or two too small for him. He pushed a large plastic train – the sort a slightly younger child might ride around on – up and down in a straight line along the side of the sofa. It was obviously a game he played a lot. There were track marks worn into the brown carpet.

‘What about school?’ Thorne asked.

‘He goes to a special place three days a week,’ Mitchell said. ‘Up in Hatfield. I have to stay with him, though, because he screams the place down if I’m not there.’

Collins held up two fingers. ‘Twice social services have taken Jason away from her and every time it’s been a nightmare for him.’ Mitchell shook her head, eyes down, as though she didn’t want her friend to continue, but Collins raised her hand again, determined to have her say. ‘Supposed to be for his own good, being separated from his mum, and of course he bloody hates it.’ She reached across and squeezed Mitchell’s hand. ‘Every time she’s cleaned herself up and sorted her life out, though, haven’t you, darling?’

‘We’re fine now,’ Mitchell said.

‘Three bloody buses and a train to get out to Hatfield,’ Collins said. She shook her head, disgusted. ‘You’d think the council would lay on some sort of transport, wouldn’t you? But they’re too busy funding lesbian play centres and that sort of shit.’

‘We don’t mind,’ Mitchell said. ‘It’s always an adventure, providing the weather’s OK.’ She looked round at Kitson. ‘He doesn’t get bored like other kids, you know?’

‘Is it autism?’ Kitson asked.

Mitchell shrugged. ‘They don’t think so. I don’t think they know what it is, tell you the truth, and we’ve given up worrying about it. Whatever it is, nobody can do anything about it, so we just get on with things.’

Thorne watched as the boy pushed his train back and forth, his chin quivering as he made barely audible ‘chuffing’ noises. He had the same wide blue eyes as his mother, though his lips were fuller, redder. When he smiled, which for no reason that was obvious he did every minute or so, his front teeth slid down over his bottom lip and he moved them quickly from side to side. There was no way of knowing if Debbie Mitchell did the same thing, as Thorne had yet to see her smile.

‘How much does he understand?’ Thorne asked.

Nina Collins was lighting up again. ‘Bloody hell, are you pair coppers or social workers?’

‘I just don’t want to upset him,’ Thorne said. ‘When we get started.’

Mitchell shook her head, like it was OK, but her hand drifted across to her son’s head, moved through his hair.

‘You going to tell us about this man again?’ Collins said.

Thorne nodded. ‘What have they told you so far, the sensitive coppers and the shouty ones?’

Mitchell took a deep breath. ‘They talked about this weirdo who might want to hurt me because of what happened to my mum.’

Thorne nodded again. ‘Right, and they probably said stuff like, “We have reason to believe that you might be in danger.”’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well, here’s the thing. There’s no might about it, OK? Not if you stay where you are.’

Kitson moved her chair forward. ‘You mustn’t underestimate the man we’re talking about here, Debbie.’

‘She’s had weirdos like this floating around all her life,’ Collins said. ‘Wanting to know about what happened to her mum, getting some cheap thrill out of it or something.’

‘This particular weirdo has already killed four people, Debbie,’ Thorne said. ‘Four people whose mothers died the same way yours did.’

Collins’ hand was in her hair, pulling at the spikes. ‘They never said four…’

‘A couple, I thought,’ Mitchell said. ‘You know, that might have been by this same man.’

Thorne looked at Kitson. He wondered who had taken the decision about what this woman should be told. Had they deliberated over how many previous murders they could mention? Was two deemed to be OK and three unacceptable? It seemed ridiculous, not least because one should have been enough to send anyone scurrying for cover without looking back. But whatever was preventing Debbie Mitchell from doing the sensible thing, and however much trouble he might be in for taking a unilateral decision, Thorne could see no point in pussyfooting around.

‘Would you like to know how he did it?’ Thorne asked.

‘No.’ Collins had gone noticeably pale.

‘Exactly how he stalked and murdered four people, what he used to kill them. Would that make you take this seriously? Get you off your arse and make you start packing?’

‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchell said, raising her voice. ‘We need to stay here.’

The women had moved even closer together. Thorne could see that Jason had stopped playing with his train and was on his knees by the side of the sofa, pulling at his mother’s hand, trying to rub it against his cheek.

‘Are you worried about Jason?’ Kitson said. ‘Is that the problem? Because you wouldn’t be separated.’

Mitchell started shaking her head, but it wasn’t clear if she was answering the question or just didn’t believe what Kitson was telling her.

‘We have special accommodation designed for families.’

‘No.’

‘You need to get out-’

‘He got into their houses,’ Thorne said. ‘Don’t you understand? They all thought they were safe and he got inside and murdered them.’

‘I’ll look after them,’ Collins said.

Thorne flicked his eyes to her. ‘What, even at night, Nina? You’ll be working, won’t you?’ Thorne had checked Collins’ record and seen that she’d had more arrests for soliciting than Debbie Mitchell. He watched her blink, glanced across in time to see something pass across Kitson’s face, and felt a stab of guilt; felt the wind leak out of him. However stupid and stubborn these women were being, it was clear that Nina Collins was hugely attached to Debbie Mitchell and her son; that her affection for them was fierce and unconditional. ‘Look, I’m just saying…’

When Collins came back at him, her voice had dropped a little. The nerves were evident in the staccato drags on her cigarette and the stutter as she blew out the smoke. ‘Can’t you look after us?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to do,’ Thorne said.

‘We can’t go,’ Mitchell said. She was staring at Jason, watching the teeth move across his bottom lip as he squeezed her hand. ‘You don’t understand. He needs routine. We both do. It’s the only way we can manage to keep everything on an even keel, you know? The only thing that stops it all going to pieces.’

In the desperation that had masked her face, Thorne caught a glimpse of what was driving her. He could see that her terror in acknowledging the threat – the crippling fear of change that could see a spiral back into drugs and might conceivably cost her custody of her child again – was even greater than her fear of the man who wanted to kill her.

‘He would be so unhappy,’ she said.

Thorne understood, just, but it didn’t matter. ‘How happy would he be if you were dead?’

Mitchell suddenly cried out in pain and yanked her hand away from Jason’s mouth, her knuckles having caught on the boy’s teeth as he squeezed and kissed it. His face was frozen for a few seconds in shock and she quickly got off the sofa to comfort him, but he was already starting to whimper and turn back to his plastic train.

Collins stood up too. ‘That’s enough, I reckon,’ she said. She waited for Thorne and Kitson to get up, then ushered them towards the front door.

Kitson stopped and turned at the end of the hallway. ‘Please try and talk some sense into her, Nina.’

Collins reached past her and opened the door. ‘What would make sense is for you lot to stop pissing about and catch this nutter. All right, love? Then we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation, would we?’

‘For Jason’s sake,’ Thorne said.

Collins all but pushed them both out on to the front step and stared Thorne down, her swagger returned. She said, ‘I liked you better when you were telling your shit jokes.’

Then she slammed the door in their faces.

‘Looks like it’s got to be an arrest then,’ Kitson said, as they walked towards the car.

Thorne shook his head and moved quickly ahead of her. ‘Last chance,’ he said. He opened the door of the BMW, reached inside for a large brown envelope and walked back past Kitson, towards Debbie Mitchell’s front door.

‘Tom…?’

He said nothing when Nina Collins opened the door. Just pushed the envelope into her hand and wheeled away. He was halfway back to the car when he heard the door close behind him.

Kitson stared at him as he turned the ignition over. ‘Was that what I think it was?’

‘Impossible to answer that,’ Thorne said. He held up his hand to stop her speaking again, as if it might help the engine catch. ‘I have no idea what you think it was.’

SEVENTEEN

Back at the office there were still a few Anthony Garveys to trace and eliminate. There was paperwork for the DVLA and assorted credit-reference agencies to be completed as part of the hunt for Graham Fowler and Simon Walsh; liaison with forces in the north in an effort to track down Andrew Dowd. So, in terms of excitement, there was nothing to match the small wager that Thorne and Kitson had made with each other on the way back from Whetstone.

‘By the end of the day, I reckon,’ Kitson had said.

‘No chance.’

‘I’m telling you. Collins is the type who likes to have her say.’

There was every chance Kitson was right, but Thorne was in the mood to argue that white was black. ‘Tomorrow,’ he’d said. ‘Earliest, if at all.’

‘Tenner?’

Being of a mind to argue – ‘chopsy’, his father used to call it – was one thing, but this was cold, hard cash. Thorne had read somewhere that the buzz of gambling lay in the fear of losing far more than in the possibility of winning, and having recently kicked an online poker habit, he’d been looking for something to make his heart beat a little bit faster. ‘You’re on,’ he’d said.

With fifteen minutes until going-home time, Sam Karim put his head round the door to say that Brigstocke wanted a word, and Thorne’s heart-rate increased for all the wrong reasons. ‘How are you going to spend the money?’ he asked on his way to the door.

‘I’m saving up for shoes,’ Kitson said. ‘Do you want to go double or quits?’

‘On what?’

‘Another tenner says Spurs lose tomorrow.’

At home against Aston Villa. Should be guaranteed at least a point. It was Spurs, though…

‘I think somebody’s bottle’s gone,’ Kitson said.

Karim was still standing in the doorway. ‘The guv’nor did say now.’

‘Stick it up your arse,’ Thorne said. ‘Both of you.’

‘I think maybe you should make another appointment to see that brain doctor,’ Brigstocke said. He leaned back against the edge of his desk, arms folded.

Thorne said nothing. It was usually best just to sit there and take it.

‘Tell him to have a look, see if he can find one.’

Brigstocke had moved on from the straightforward, high-volume bollocking – he had done that while recounting his fifteen-minute phone conversation with Nina Collins – and was now on to the sarcasm. Before long he would be into the last phase, which Thorne enjoyed the least: the one where the pitch dropped and the tone became one of sadness and disappointment, as though the offence for which he was dishing out the dressing down had actually wounded him. Thorne knew that Brigstocke had learned this ‘you’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let the whole school down’ approach from Trevor Jesmond, who considered himself a master of it. Thorne had been on the receiving end many times, had looked suitably chastened at the slowly shaking head and the puppy-in-need-of-a-home expression, but in Jesmond’s case he always relished it, working on the principle that if he was upsetting the superintendent, he was clearly doing something right.

‘Mitchell was terrified,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Poor woman’s shitting herself, according to her friend.’

‘That was the idea.’

‘Oh, thank Christ for that. There I was thinking you were showing her confidential photographs of all the murder victims because you were an insensitive idiot who was gagging to get back into uniform. Have you still got a pointed hat?’

‘Not all the victims,’ Thorne said.

‘What?’

‘It wasn’t all the victims. Just the Mackens.’

‘Well, that’s OK then.’

Thorne couldn’t prevent the faintest of smirks washing across his face. ‘Just a sample.’

‘Jesus, Tom…’

‘Did it work?’

Brigstocke stared at him for a few seconds, as though toying with one last cathartic bout of shouting, before walking behind his desk and sitting down. ‘Debbie Mitchell’s moving in with Nina Collins,’ he said. ‘It’s only a couple of streets away-’

‘Doesn’t matter, as long as she moves.’

‘She wants to stay close to the park, she says. It’s the kid’s favourite place, apparently.’

‘Well, she can forget about that for a while.’

‘Plus, the kid knows Nina, so there shouldn’t be too much disruption. I understand he doesn’t respond well to… upheaval.’

Thorne told Brigstocke he was right. He remembered the boy’s smile, how easily it appeared and how astounding it was, considering that upheaval was something he had lived with for a long time. ‘So, I’m not in the shit then?’

It was Brigstocke’s turn to smirk. ‘Oh, don’t worry, if Collins or Mitchell decides to make any sort of official complaint, I’ll give you up like a shot.’

‘You’re a pal,’ Thorne said.

‘Yes, I am.’ Brigstocke looked down to the papers on his desk, as though he were good and ready for Thorne to leave. ‘Or I would have given you up already.’

Thorne recognised a cue and turned for the door, but Brigstocke called him back.

‘You were wrong about Anthony Garvey,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t know about the name, but we can be pretty sure he’s Raymond Garvey’s son.’

Thorne nodded. ‘The DNA…’

‘We had Garvey senior’s on file, obviously, so we ran a match with the sample we got from under Catherine Burke’s fingernails. We can be ninety-nine per cent sure they’re father and son.’

‘Ninety-nine per cent?’

Brigstocke knew that Thorne understood why they could not declare it a 100 per cent match, but he said it anyway, enjoying the moment. ‘To be certain, we need to know who the mother was.’ The look, before Brigstocke dropped his eyes back to his paperwork, said, ‘Now we’re done.’

Walking out into the car-park, Kitson – ten pounds richer – said, ‘You remember the argument with Brigstocke in the pub? That stuff about the “tension” between the need to catch the killer and the need to protect the potential victims.’

‘I think that’s when his bad mood started,’ Thorne said. ‘That, or the fact that I got the last lamb casserole.’

‘Seriously.’

‘What?’

‘I was thinking. Didn’t it seem like nobody was trying very hard to get Debbie Mitchell out of that house?’

‘Well, she certainly took some shifting.’

‘You managed it, though. How come nobody else did?’

It was cold and starting to rain. They waited under the concrete overhang outside the rear entrance to Becke House, Thorne’s car fifty yards to his left and Kitson’s further away in the other direction.

‘You saying they were happy to let her stay there as some kind of bait?’ Thorne asked.

‘Well, it wasn’t like they had to plan it or anything. I mean, she didn’t want to leave, so maybe someone thought, Let’s use this to our advantage.’

‘Then we can’t be blamed if it all goes tits up.’

‘Right,’ Kitson said. ‘They stick a few unmarked cars around the place, set up an observation point, cameras, whatever.’

Thorne was nodding, going with it. ‘And the brass are pissed off with me, not because of this business with the crime-scene photos, but because they had their next victim sitting there waiting for the killer on a plate, and I went and ballsed it up.’

‘Maybe.’ Kitson was wearing a grey hooded top under a leather jacket. She raised the hood, stared out into the drizzle. ‘I’m just thinking out loud. It’s been a long day.’

‘You’ve had sillier ideas,’ Thorne said.

‘You think so?’

‘For sure.’ Thorne turned to her and held the look to let her know that he meant it, before allowing the smile to come. ‘We’re definitely worth a point against Villa tomorrow.’

‘You should have taken the bet then,’ Kitson said.

The alert tone on Thorne’s mobile sounded. He fished the handset from his pocket. The text was from Louise: celebration drink with team after work. won’t be 2 late. X.

‘Fancy grabbing a drink?’ Thorne asked. Kitson looked at her watch, but he could see it was a gesture as much as anything. ‘Quick one in the Oak?’

‘I’d better not. The kids, you know.’

‘Why are you still talking to me?’

‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Not sure I’ll be in,’ Thorne said. He was pressing buttons on his phone, deleting the message from Louise. ‘Got a meeting in the centre of town mid-morning, so we’ll see how it goes.’

‘Monday, then…’

Thorne grunted a ‘yes’ and watched Kitson jog away towards her car. After a few moments, he stepped out into the rain and began to walk towards his.

Later, sinking into the sofa, his eyes scanned the living room, taking in the patch of damp by the side of the window and the bits on the carpet that were not the fleck in its weave. Not for the first time, he contemplated getting a cleaner. He listened to Charlie Rich singing ‘A Sunday Kind of Woman’ and ‘Nothing in the World’, letting his eyes close and his mind wander, the music fading into a mix that included the less tuneful voices of Russell Brigstocke and Yvonne Kitson, the hectoring rasp of Nina Collins and the scream of Martin Macken, howling like feedback against the sugary strings and soft waves of pedal-steel.

Thorne thought about Jason Mitchell, the concentration and the quiet ‘chuff-chuff ’ as he pushed his train back and forth. The smile, sudden as a slap. He couldn’t tell if the boy even knew he was smiling and wondered where in his brain the problem lay.

White, pink or blue?

Would somebody like Pavesh Kambar be able to point to his handy multi-coloured plastic model and say, There, that’s where the trouble is, that’s where the wiring is faulty? Or perhaps he would say that it wasn’t faulty at all, that it was a different kind of wiring he hadn’t been trained to deal with, one that he simply couldn’t fathom. A feeling-useless moment, maybe. Time to pull out that rarely used F-word.

White, pink or blue.

Pillar-box red against black-and-white squares. Brown specks on the carpet and wallpaper by the window yellowing and greasy, like the business side of a sticking plaster when you’ve torn it off.

The CD finished, so Thorne got up, removed the disc from the player and put it away. The phone was on its cradle near the front door. He picked up his wallet from the table, took out a card and dialled the number scribbled on it.

‘Hello?’ The voice was wary, cracked.

He checked his watch: just after nine, not too late to call. He wondered if she was alone. ‘It’s Tom Thorne.’

‘What do you want?’

The words sounded as if they’d taken some effort, like she’d just woken up or been drinking. He looked at the can of lager in his own hand and pushed the thought from his mind. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ he said. ‘With the pictures.’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘All right, but just enough to make you leave.’

‘Just enough? Like you can measure it?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘They made me feel sick. What if Jason had seen them? Have you any idea…?’

‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ Thorne said. ‘I got into trouble for it, if that makes you feel any better.’

There was a pause. ‘It does a bit.’

Thorne laughed, expecting her to join in, but she didn’t. ‘When are you going to Nina’s?’

‘First thing tomorrow,’ Mitchell said. ‘I’m trying to pack.’

‘It’s a bloody nightmare, isn’t it?’

‘This isn’t a fortnight in Majorca, though, is it?’

Thorne was starting to wish he hadn’t called, wondering what on earth had possessed him. Not that he had imagined Debbie Mitchell would give him an easy ride. ‘You on your own?’

‘Yeah. Nina’s… at work.’

‘He will come, you know?’ Thorne took a sip of beer. ‘If we don’t catch him. You’ve done the right thing.’ He heard the click of a lighter, the pause as she inhaled.

‘I suppose.’

‘Listen, you can always call if-’

‘Are you going to catch him?’ Her voice no longer sounded tired. ‘“If we don’t catch him,” you said. How likely is that, d’you reckon, this bloke getting away with it?’

‘We’re doing everything we can.’

‘On a scale of one to ten?’

Thorne thought about it. Five? More? Said, ‘How’s your hand?’

‘Sorry?’

‘It was bleeding earlier.’ Thorne looked up at the sound of keys in the front door. ‘I think you caught it on Jason’s teeth.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘I was trying to say you can call if you’re worried about anything.’

‘What? You, or just 999?’

‘Me. If you’re… anxious, whatever.’ He could hear the inner door opening as he gave Debbie Mitchell his mobile number, then heard it close while he waited for her to write it down and read it back to him.

‘Anyway…’

‘Right, I’ll leave you to your packing,’ Thorne said.

‘OK.’

Louise came through the lounge door. Thorne raised a finger, mouthed, ‘One minute,’ as she walked past him towards the kitchen. He thought about saying something like, ‘Say hello to Jason,’ but decided it would sound cheesy and insincere, so he just said, ‘Bye, Debbie.’

He followed Louise into the kitchen and was about to say, ‘You caught me on the phone to my girlfriend’ when she turned from the fridge with a bottle in her hand and he saw her expression.

‘What?’

‘Nothing, it’s fine.’

‘I thought you’d be a bit later,’ Thorne said. ‘Obviously not much of a celebration.’

She poured herself a large glass of wine and leaned back against the worktop. ‘Obviously.’ She held out the bottle towards him, asking the question.

He raised his can, answering it. ‘That snotty DCI turned forty again, did she?’

Louise took a drink, like she needed it. ‘It wasn’t a birthday.’

Thorne shook his head. ‘I just presumed…’

‘Lucy Freeman’s pregnant,’ Louise said. Another drink, the swallow giving way to a wobbly kind of smile. ‘She kept it very quiet. Like you’re supposed to.’

‘Shit.’

‘No, really, it’s OK. I’m happy for her.’ She stared past him, swilled the piss-coloured wine around in her glass. ‘I need to be happy for her.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘I mean it. I just need to crack on, you know? I can’t get stupid every time I see a pushchair outside a shop or feel upset if I run into someone who’s up the duff.’

‘I know,’ Thorne said, not knowing at all.

‘It’s just… hard. It’s like when you’re a teenager and you get dumped and every song on the radio feels like it’s about you.’

Thorne nodded. ‘All By Myself ’ by Eric Carmen had torn his heart out when he was fifteen. ‘I Know It’s Over’ by the Smiths did it again ten years later. Hank Williams singing ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ could still do it.

‘I’ll deal with it,’ Louise said. ‘I’ll have to, won’t I? She sits at the next desk, for God’s sake. I’ve got a big pile of baby magazines I can take in for her.’

‘Don’t.’

‘A pack of three newborn Babygros she can have as well. Shouldn’t have bought them really, but I couldn’t resist.’

Thorne stepped across to her and took the glass from her hand. ‘Come here.’

A few seconds later, she lifted her face from his neck when a phone started to ring in the next room. She started to pull away, but Thorne held her close.

‘It’s your mobile.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

‘Answer it.’

‘It’s fine.’

Louise broke the embrace and walked into the living room. Thorne lobbed his empty beer can into the bin. He heard her answer and say, ‘Just a minute.’ They crossed in the kitchen doorway, Thorne taking the phone as Louise held it out to him.

He recognised the caller’s voice, the precision in it. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ he said.

Pavesh Kambar laughed. ‘Well, obviously you were in my thoughts too, Inspector. Hence the call. Great minds and all that.’

Thorne waited. The only other person he knew who used the word ‘hence’ was Trevor Jesmond. ‘Hence the importance of correct procedure. ’ ‘Hence the fact that I’m suspending you from duty…’

‘I thought of somebody you should speak to,’ Kambar said. ‘A writer.’

‘OK.’

‘The name is Nicholas Maier.’

‘Let me grab a pen…’ He found one on the table near the door, pulled a scrap of paper from inside his wallet.

Kambar repeated the name, spelling it out, and Thorne scribbled it down. Kambar told him that the writer had contacted him two years previously, a year or so after the death of Raymond Garvey, claiming to be doing research.

Another searing, true-crime masterpiece, Thorne thought. He didn’t recognise the name. Though he couldn’t remember who had written the two books he had sent away for and was currently reading, he was sure neither author was Nicholas Maier.

‘This chap was writing a book, or updating one he’d already written, something like that. He called me several times, came to the hospital on more than one occasion. He certainly knew everything there was to know about Raymond Garvey’s condition and wanted to get my take on it.’

‘Your take?’

‘Did I think the tumour might have changed his personality?’

‘Same thing the son was banging on about?’

‘That’s why I’m calling really,’ Kambar said. ‘He claimed to have got his information from the son.’

‘He’d been in contact with him?’

‘So he said. He talked as though he’d been commissioned as Raymond Garvey’s official biographer or something.’

Thorne was drawing a line under the name, going back and forth over it. ‘So, you refused to speak to him?’

‘Of course.’ Pavesh answered as though it was a particularly stupid question. ‘Once I knew what he wanted, yes, of course. He made substantial offers, but I told him what he could do with his money. He was sure I would come round eventually. That sort always are, aren’t they? He left me his card. Would you like the details?’

Thorne took down phone numbers and an email address, then thanked Kambar for taking the trouble to call.

‘It’s not a problem,’ Kambar said. ‘When we met, you seemed convinced that this man claiming to be the son was very important. Might well be the man you are looking for.’

‘It certainly looks that way.’

‘In which case this writer is definitely someone you should be talking to.’

‘Maier told you he knew him?’ Thorne asked. ‘That they’d spoken?’

‘Oh yes, very definitely,’ Kambar said. ‘The way Mr Maier told it to me, he was more or less Anthony Garvey’s best friend.’

MY JOURNAL

3 October

It’s not always easy, certainly not in a city like London, where almost anyone can get lost without even knowing it, can become anonymous, but most people want contact with others. They crave intimacy. I probably crave it just as much as anyone else, but I gave up on all that a long time ago. The fact that everyone else seems to need it makes my job easier, that’s all I’m saying. It makes it simple to get close to other people’s lives. You just have to watch and figure out the best way in. If someone’s a nurse, for example, you can pretty much bet that they care. So you run into them a couple of times. Maybe you’re a junkie who’s trying to kick the habit and you know that they’ll sympathise. You become a face they know, someone they trust, right until the moment they see the rock coming down or whatever. You watch. You get to know routines, patterns. What time Hubby comes home from school to have his lunch. When the time comes to pay a call on the wife, you’re just that bloke who she’s spoken to in the supermarket or wherever a couple of times. She isn’t wary, like she should be. You’re a face across a busy student bar, or a man who cleans the family car once a week. Eventually you’re invited in for a coffee and you get familiar. You can figure out timings, habits, the fact that the man you’re after and his wife are fighting like cat and dog. You find your angle.

It’s starting to get trickier now, but I always knew it would. I found the easy ones, got them out of the way first; geared myself up. Obviously, the police will have put the pieces together by now (literally, I should imagine) and will have worked out what’s happening. That’s all fine, though. Now they can do the hard work for me. They can find the ones I still haven’t been able to track down. Hopefully, that’s the bit they haven’t worked out yet.

Dug into the cash again and moved into a new place, a fairly tidy one-room flat, near a station, same as the others, which makes it easier to travel. King’s Cross this time. Even though it’s only for a few weeks at a stretch, I like walking around each area, getting to know the streets a bit. King’s Cross is supposed to be pretty rough, with the prossies and the drugs, but so far I like it. Nobody gives you a second look, which is fine by me. It’s like what I said before about people becoming anonymous. That’s what everyone seems like round here. It’s another thing which makes my life easier.

The newsagent was banging on about the Macken murders this morning, when I went in for fags. Still loads of stuff in the paper. Family snapshots, all that. Nothing connecting it with the others, though, which is probably just the police playing their cards close to their chests. The bloke in the shop was getting all worked up. He didn’t quite get as far as saying they should bring back hanging, but near enough. They were so young, he kept saying, their whole lives ahead of them. Why does it matter how old they were? I just don’t get that. Like the young have any more right to life than anyone else. Like it’s more tragic than if some pensioner tumbles down the stairs.

‘Bright futures’, that’s what it said in the paper. The newsagent kept stabbing at the Sun or the Mirror or whatever it was and shaking his head at how sad it was. How unfair. All that’s been taken away from them, he said.

Stolen.

Like years spent in prison for something that wasn’t your fault. Like a normal life. Like the right to walk around without being spat at or beaten up and not spending twenty hours a day trying to deal with the headaches, going quietly mental in your cell.

In the end I just nodded and took my cigarettes and walked out of there. Thinking that he had no bloody idea what ‘fair’ was. Thinking about my part in other people’s futures, bright or otherwise.

Thinking all sorts of lives can be stolen.

EIGHTEEN

Thorne had arranged to meet Carol Chamberlain at the Starbucks near Oxford Circus, having taken care to specify which of the umpteen branches in the area he meant. Thanks to the Northern Line, he was fifteen minutes late, and as Chamberlain had already finished her coffee by the time he arrived, they decided to walk. It was a bright, dry Saturday morning and Oxford Street was teeming. Four days into October and many people were obviously keen to get their Christmas shopping done nice and early. The shops were already tinselled-up and piled high with tat, the predictable music spilling out of the doorways.

Slade, Wizzard, the Pogues. Cliff bloody Richard.

‘It’s utterly ridiculous,’ Chamberlain said.

‘Don’t get me started,’ Thorne said.

Thorne had first met Carol Chamberlain four years previously, when her intervention in an inquiry that had been going backwards had provided the much-needed breakthrough. She had been out of the Force five years by then but working for the Area Major Review Unit, a new team that was utilising the invaluable know-how and experience of retired officers to take a fresh look at cold cases. The Crinkly Squad, many had called it, Thorne included, until he’d met Chamberlain. Decked out with a blue rinse and furry slippers and pulling a tartan shopping trolley through the streets of Worthing, where she lived, she might have looked harmless, but he had seen her work. He had seen her extract information from a man half her age in a way that had sickened him. Sickened him almost as much as the fact that he had watched and said nothing, because even as he had smelled the man’s flesh burning, he had known it needed to be done.

They had not spoken about the incident since.

Much had changed for both of them since a case that had taken its toll on each in different ways and had ultimately cost Thorne’s father his life. They did not speak about that, either. Though it was always there, a shadow between them, they just got on with taking the piss, same as any other two coppers, despite the differences in age and experience.

Negotiating the crowds, Thorne talked her through the inquiry; the link between two series of murders fifteen years apart. She remembered the Garvey case very well, she told him, having worked for a number of years with the SIO. She had been close enough to have watched a few of the early interviews.

‘He never said why he did it, did he?’ Chamberlain said. ‘Like Shipman. Never gave any reason for it. They’re always the worst.’

‘Maybe there wasn’t a reason. Maybe he just liked it.’

‘There’s usually something, though, isn’t there? With most of them. The voice of God telling them to do it. A message from the devil in a Britney Spears song. Something.’

‘Well, this one’s certainly got a motive,’ Thorne said. ‘Or thinks he has. He wants us to know exactly why he’s doing it.’

‘OK, forget what I said. They’re the worst.’

They carried on towards Tottenham Court Road, crossing Oxford Street at Chamberlain’s insistence so they could walk in the sunshine. He told her about the search for the three missing sons of Raymond Garvey’s original victims, and about the phone call from Pavesh Kambar.

Thorne had done some checking and discovered that Nicholas Maier had written a book about the Garvey case that was published a year before Garvey’s death. He had picked up a copy of Battered – The Raymond Garvey Killings from his local Waterstone’s in Camden before catching the Tube. On first glance, it looked much the same as the ones he had bought online. The same pictures, the same semi-salacious blurb on the back of the jacket. He fished the book from his bag and showed it to Chamberlain.

‘When are you seeing him?’ she asked.

‘Monday,’ Thorne said. ‘He emailed me back from his “lecture tour” in America. He gets back tomorrow.’

Chamberlain pulled a face.

‘I know. They teach this stuff in universities over there. Serial Killers 101, whatever. Said something in his email about it paying for his next holiday. Also said he’d be happy to meet me.’

‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

Thorne laughed, knowing very well what she meant. He was always suspicious of anyone who seemed overly pleased to see a police officer. It wasn’t his job to be popular.

‘I mean, I know you,’ Chamberlain said, ‘and even I’m not happy to see you.’

They crossed back over the road and cut down into Soho Square. Though it wasn’t exactly warm, there were plenty of people gathered on benches or sprawled on the grass with books. They squeezed on to a bench next to a cycle courier who was finishing a sandwich. He got up and left before he’d swallowed the last mouthful.

‘So, what do you need?’ Chamberlain asked.

‘We need to know where this bloke comes from. It’s looking very much like he’s Garvey’s son, so let’s start with trying to find out who his mother is. It doesn’t sound like she was in contact with Garvey.’

Chamberlain was still holding the book. She lifted it up. ‘Why don’t you ask your new best friend?’

Thorne took it back. ‘I’ve skimmed through and there’s nothing about any son in there. I think Anthony Garvey made contact with him after his father had died.’

‘You think he wants Maier to write another book? Go into all this brain tumour stuff?’

‘I’ll find out on Monday,’ Thorne said. ‘Meanwhile, you can start digging around, see what you can come up with. All the descriptions put him at thirty-ish, so he was born fifteen years or so before Garvey started killing. You up for it?’

Chamberlain nodded. ‘Well, this or the gardening? It’s a tough choice.’

‘AMRU not keeping you busy, then?’

‘They couldn’t afford me and the hypnotherapist.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The brass thought it would be a nice idea to try some regression therapy on a few witnesses, see what they could remember.’

‘Right. “I think I used to be Marie Antoinette”, all that.’

‘They reckon this bloke got some witness to come up with a number plate she’d forgotten. I don’t know…’

‘Jesus.’ Thorne never ceased to be amazed at what people could waste resources on in an effort to make a splash. ‘Things are rough when you get bumped off a case for Paul McKenna.’

Chamberlain smiled. For a while they sat in silence, watched the comings and goings. A skinny, rat-faced teenager was moving among the groups on the grass, asking for money, meeting each refusal with a glare. A chancer. He looked at Thorne, but showed no inclination to try his luck.

‘Someone who’s definitely not happy to see you,’ Chamberlain said.

She asked about the hunt for Andrew Dowd, Simon Walsh and Graham Fowler, and why they had not turned to the media for help. Thorne told her what Brigstocke had said about the emphasis being on catching their man, and Kitson’s theory that they were using Debbie Mitchell as bait.

‘Nothing surprises me,’ Chamberlain said. ‘It’s all about the result, right?’

‘They’ll get one they really don’t like if they’re not careful,’ Thorne said. He explained that they were doing their best to trace the missing men through conventional channels – credit cards, mobile-phone records, good old-fashioned donkey-work – and getting nowhere. ‘Dowd’s away trying to find himself, if his wife is to be believed. The other two are off the radar altogether. Homeless, maybe; drifting for sure. All of them have got… problems.’

‘Sounds like they’ve all got one very big problem.’

Thorne nodded, watched the rat-faced kid arguing with a community support officer who was trying to move him on. ‘It’s not really a shock, though, is it? That they’re all screwed up in one way or another.’

‘We all carry our pasts with us,’ Chamberlain said.

‘Yeah, well, maybe that hypnotherapist’s on to something.’

‘Carry them around like bits of crap in our pockets.’ She sat very still, patted the handbag on her lap. ‘We know that better than most, don’t we?’

Thorne didn’t look at her. The skinny teenager was wandering away now, shouting and waving his arms. The CPSO laughed, said something to one of the people lying on the grass. ‘How’s Jack?’ Thorne asked.

‘We had a cancer scare,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Looks like we’re OK, though.’ She glanced across at Thorne and spoke again, seeing that he was struggling for the right thing to say. ‘What about Louise? You know, I’m not convinced you haven’t been making her up.’

Chamberlain and Louise had never met. Thorne himself had not seen Chamberlain in over a year, although he made a point of trying to call her as often as he could. He felt oddly guilty.

‘She’s busy,’ Thorne said. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Two coppers together. Always a big mistake.’

It suddenly struck Thorne that he had no idea what Chamberlain’s husband did; or used to do, before he retired. There was no way to ask without making it obvious. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said.

They sat for another minute or two and then, with a nod to each other, got up and moved through the square, walking out towards Greek Street and into the heart of Soho.

‘I’ll send over all the stuff later,’ Thorne said. ‘And a copy of the original Garvey file.’

‘A nice bit of bedtime reading.’

‘What is it normally, then, Catherine Cookson?’

She flashed Thorne a sarcastic grin, then slowed to stare through the window of an arty-looking jeweller’s. She leaned in close, trying to make out the prices on the labels, then turned to Thorne and said, ‘Thanks for this, by the way.’

‘It’s not a problem.’

‘I know you could have found someone closer to home.’

‘I couldn’t think of anyone better.’

‘I presume you mean that the nice way,’ she said.

‘Do you want me to walk you back?’

‘Don’t be daft.’

Chamberlain was staying at a small hotel in Bloomsbury at which the Met maintained a constant block-booking of half a dozen rooms. It was used for visiting officers from other forces, relatives of victims who had nowhere else to stay, and occasionally a high-ranking officer who, for one reason or another, did not fancy going home.

‘Be nice staying in a hotel for a while,’ Chamberlain said.

‘Make the most of it,’ Thorne said. He felt himself redden slightly, remembering the last night he had spent in a hotel; the misunderstanding at the bar.

‘I’ll get some sleep at least,’ Chamberlain said.

‘You never know, you might pull.’

‘Jack’s snoring’s been driving me batty.’

‘With a bit of luck there might be some Ovaltine in the mini-bar.’

‘Shut up.’

It was ‘winner stays on’ at the pool table in the upstairs room of the Grafton Arms, and it took the best part of an hour before Thorne and Hendricks got a game against each other. The table was being dominated by an oikish type in a rugby shirt, who beat both of them easily before losing to Hendricks by knocking in the black halfway through the frame. Hendricks beat the rugby player’s mate, then showed no mercy to a teenage Goth, who stared admiringly at the pathologist’s piercings and looked as though she didn’t know one end of a pool cue from the other.

‘You’re ruthless,’ Thorne said, as Hendricks fed in the coins.

‘I think she fancied me,’ Hendricks said. ‘It clearly put her off her game.’

‘Pool’s not the only thing she knows sod all about, then.’

‘Fiver on this, fair enough?’

Thorne fetched a couple more pints of Guinness from downstairs while Hendricks racked the balls. The bar was rammed, even for a Saturday night, but it was only two minutes’ walk from Thorne’s flat and the familiarity was comforting. The Oak was a Job watering-hole, and, as such, would never be somewhere he could completely relax. It wasn’t as though anybody in the Grafton knew his name, and there were no wry philosophical types propping up the bar, but Thorne enjoyed the nod from the barman and his step towards the Guinness tap without having to be told.

‘I’m in the wrong job,’ Hendricks said, bending down to break. ‘A bloody lecture tour?’

Thorne had told him about the email from Nicholas Maier. ‘You teach, don’t you?’

‘Yeah, and what I make in a month wouldn’t pay for a weekend in Weston-Super-Mare.’

‘You do it for the love.’

Hendricks had knocked in a spot. He moved around the table, chalking his cue. ‘Maybe I should write this one up as an academic study: “Man kills children of his father’s victims, the pathological implications then and now”, that kind of thing. I could get something like that published anywhere, I reckon. America, definitely.’

‘Go for it,’ Thorne said. He knew Hendricks didn’t mean it. He looked down at his friend’s heavily tattooed forearm as Hendricks lined up a shot and remembered it pressed across the throat of that insensitive CSI. ‘If you need someone to carry your bags on the lecture tour, you know…’

It was Thorne’s turn at the table. Hendricks took a drink, smiled across the room at the Goth girl, who was sitting in the corner with two friends. ‘The bloke’s book any good?’

Thorne had spent the afternoon reading Battered, with one ear on the radio’s football coverage. ‘Nothing that isn’t in any of the others, as far as I can make out. Nobody interviewed that hasn’t said their piece plenty of times before. Usual pictures: Garvey and his bloody rabbits. That’s what most of these books do, just rehash old material. Money for jam.’

‘Not going to trouble the Booker Prize judges, then?’

Thorne missed a sitter and went back to his drink. ‘Why do people read this stuff?’

Hendricks knocked in a couple of balls. ‘Same as all these misery memoirs,’ he said, without taking his eyes off the table. ‘You go into Smith’s, it’s wall-to-wall books about kids who’ve been locked in cellars, people who’ve had eighteen types of cancer or whatever.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘People enjoy knowing there’s someone worse off than they are. Maybe it makes them feel… safer, or something.’

‘It’s cheap thrills, if you ask me,’ Thorne said. He watched as Hendricks fluked his penultimate ball. ‘You jammy bastard.’

‘Pure skill, mate.’

Hendricks left the final spot over a pocket with the black placed nicely in the middle of the table. With four balls still to pot, Thorne tried to do something clever and nudge the black on to the cushion. He made a mess of it, leaving Hendricks with a simple clearance.

‘Maybe people read these books to find out why,’ Hendricks said. ‘The ones about Garvey and Shipman and the rest of them. They want to know why those things happened.’

‘You’re giving them way too much credit.’

‘I’m not saying they know that’s what they’re doing, but it makes sense if you think about it. It’s the same reason they turn these people into monsters, talk about “evil” or whatever. It makes it easier to forget they’re just builders and doctors and the bloke next door. It’s not the killers themselves anyone’s really frightened of. It’s not knowing why they did it, where the next one’s coming from, that terrifies people.’

Hendricks had yet to play his shot. Thorne was aware that the next player up, a spiky-haired kid sitting on the Goth girl’s table, was looking daggers from the corner, waiting for them to finish talking and wrap up the game. ‘They can read about Ray Garvey all they want,’ Thorne said. He was remembering the conversation with Carol Chamberlain. ‘No “why” with him. He didn’t even kill any of his pet rabbits.’

When Hendricks had polished off the frame, the spiky-haired kid stepped forward and picked up his coins from the edge of the table. Hendricks laid down his cue, told the kid he was taking a break, and followed Thorne back to their table, leaving the next player in the queue to take his place.

‘So, maybe there’s something in this tumour business? The personality change.’

‘Kambar says not.’

‘Hypothetically, though,’ Hendricks said.

‘It’s rubbish.’

‘Let’s say you’ve got some severe tic or whatever, something that makes you thrash around.’

‘I think you’ve finally lost it, mate.’

‘You accidentally hit someone in a crowded bar. They smash their head open, die from a severe bleed on the brain. That can’t be your fault, can it?’

‘It’s not the same thing.’

‘I know, I’m just saying. It would be… interesting, legally.’

‘If by “interesting” you mean it would make a lot of smart briefs a shitload of money, then yes, probably. Like they don’t make our lives hard enough as it is.’ Thorne drank and watched the pool for half a minute. ‘Anyway, like I told you, Kambar reckons it’s rubbish.’

‘Well, he’s the brain man,’ Hendricks said.

The spiky-haired kid cleared the table. The rugby player came forward, took the cue from the loser and fed his money in without a word.

‘Even if there was anything in it, Garvey’s son hasn’t got a sodding tumour.’

‘Maybe he thinks he has,’ Hendricks said.

‘Sorry?’

‘There’s plenty of research suggesting that some of the factors contributing towards the development of certain tumours can be inherited.’

‘You’re winding me up.’

Hendricks shook his head, drained the last of his pint. ‘Mind you, there was also a study that said being left-handed might be a factor, so…’

‘That’s all we bloody need,’ Thorne said. ‘Some slimy brief requesting that his client’s murder charge be thrown out on the grounds that he’s cack-handed.’

Hendricks bought another round, after insisting that Thorne hand over the money he’d just won off him. They shared crisps and pork scratchings, watched the rugby player sink two long balls in succession.

‘I used to be good at this game,’ Thorne said.

‘You’ve lost your edge, mate. That’s what domestic contentment does for you.’

It was the first time that anything pertaining to Louise had entered their conversation. Hendricks had spent the afternoon with her, wandering around the shops in Hampstead and Highgate before lunch at Pizza Express. Thorne had stayed at home with Maier’s book and Five Live for company. Spurs had lost to a needless, last-minute penalty and Thorne’s frustration had been only marginally tempered by the smug message he had been able to leave on Yvonne Kitson’s answering machine, about the bet he had wisely failed to take.

‘You and Lou have a good time today?’ Thorne asked.

Hendricks stared at him. ‘Didn’t you ask Lou?’

‘Yeah, she said she enjoyed herself.’

‘So, why-?’

‘There wasn’t much chance to talk when she got back, you know. Not in any detail. She said she was tired, just wanted to crash out.’

‘We did do a fair bit of walking,’ Hendricks said.

‘How’s she doing?’

Hendricks stared again.

‘Jesus.’ Thorne banged his almost empty glass down on the table. ‘I can’t believe I’ve got to sit here asking you how Lou is.’

‘You don’t have to. You could go mad and ask her.’

‘I have.’

‘And…?’

‘She says she’s fine, but I’m not sure I believe her. This woman at work getting pregnant must have really cut her up, but she’s making out like it’s not a big deal.’

‘Maybe it isn’t,’ Hendricks said. ‘She’s tough as old boots is Lou. Well, you know.’

‘I’m not sure I know anything,’ Thorne said. He finished his beer. ‘What do you think, Phil?’

‘I think… it’s only been, what, a week and a bit? I think she probably wants a bit of space. For you to stop treating her like she’s got a terminal illness.’

‘Did she say something?’

‘Yeah… that, basically.’

‘Christ.’

‘And she said the same thing about you. That you say you’re fine, but she doesn’t know whether to believe it.’

The spiky-haired kid potted the cue-ball. The rugby player pumped his fist, bent to retrieve the white and lined up the first of his free shots.

‘Sorry you’re getting caught in the middle of this,’ Thorne said.

‘Not a problem, mate.’ Hendricks handed the empty glasses to a passing member of the bar staff. He turned back to Thorne. ‘Are you fine?’

Thorne nodded, said that he was, but the look he received in return suggested that he’d been a little too quick about it. He could not be honest, not completely. He could not tell Hendricks, or anyone else, how he felt; that it tasted burned and bitter in his mouth. ‘You just get on with it, don’t you?’

‘I suppose,’ Hendricks said.

‘What about you? Any new piercings on the horizon?’

It took Hendricks a few seconds. Things had been edgy between them – as far as this kind of conversation was concerned – for a while, since a case the previous year had driven a wedge between them. Hendricks had been targeted by the man Thorne was trying to catch and had almost been killed while cruising a series of gay bars. With Louise’s help, they had got back on a more or less even keel quickly enough, but Hendricks’ sex life had remained a touchy subject. ‘I’m doing all right,’ he said, eventually. ‘No permanent piercings.’ He smiled. ‘Just the odd clip-on.’

He asked if they were going to get any more drinks and Thorne said he was about ready for the off. ‘You stay and have another one if you want,’ he said. ‘I’ll go back and get the sofa-bed ready. Louise might still be up, so…’

Hendricks eyed the pool table again, where the game had finished and the winner was looking for anyone willing to take him on. He told Thorne he wouldn’t be long. ‘I can’t go without trying to beat that arsehole in the rugby shirt again,’ he said.

‘Don’t bother playing pool,’ Thorne said. ‘Just stick a couple of the balls in a sock and twat him.’

‘I’m seriously thinking about it,’ Hendricks said, getting to his feet. ‘Listen, if I’m not back in an hour, I’ve gone home with that girl who looks like Marilyn Manson, all right?’

NINETEEN

Nicholas Maier lived in Islington, on the ground floor of a terraced Georgian house in a quiet square behind Upper Street. Thorne parked in a residents’ bay and stuck a ‘police business’ badge on the dash of the BMW. The spell of good weather was holding.

Thorne and Holland were shown through to a large sitting room while Maier went to fetch coffee. The carpet was gaudy but clearly expensive, and the bookshelves either side of the fireplace were well stocked, though on closer inspection several contained nothing but multiple copies of Maier’s own books. The room was immaculate. There were elaborate flower arrangements in matching Chinese vases on two corner tables and the vast plasma screen above the fireplace was gleaming and dust-free. Aside from a large ginger cat asleep on a chair next to the door, there was no sign that Maier shared the flat with anyone else.

‘And he had a pot of coffee on,’ Holland said. ‘I like it when people make an effort.’

‘No effort at all,’ Maier said, nudging the door open and carrying a tray across to a low table. His voice was deep and perfectly modulated, like a late-night radio host. ‘I only got back from the States last night, so I haven’t had a lot of time to run around tidying up. My office is probably a bit more cluttered than this, but I’m not generally a big fan of mess.’

‘It’s a nice place,’ Holland said.

Maier pointed them both towards the sofa, began pouring the coffee. ‘Scribbling keeps the wolf from the door,’ he said.

‘Obviously.’ Thorne nodded, impressed, but shared a knowing look with Holland. He’d done some checking and knew very well that Nick Maier had inherited the property from his father, a wealthy businessman who had died while Maier was still taking his journalism degree.

Maier asked them both how they took their coffee and slid a plate of biscuits across the table. He was wearing khakis and an open-necked salmon-pink shirt, brown suede moccasins without socks and a touch too much gold jewellery. He looks like an upmarket estate agent, Thorne thought.

‘You’ve got a decent colour on you,’ Holland said.

‘Weather was very nice over there, when I wasn’t stuck inside bloody lecture theatres.’

‘Where?’

‘The West Coast,’ Maier said. ‘LA, Santa Barbara, San Diego. Have you been?’

Holland shook his head.

‘Thanks for seeing us so quickly,’ Thorne said.

Maier reached for a biscuit and sat back. ‘You could hardly expect someone who does what I do not to be curious.’ He looked from Thorne to Holland and held up his hands. ‘So…?’

Thorne told him about his conversation with Pavesh Kambar, the phone calls and visits the doctor had described. The relationship Maier had suggested he’d had with Anthony Garvey.

‘I hardly think I pestered him,’ Maier said. ‘But in terms of what I was trying to write, Doctor Kambar was an important person to talk to, so I… persisted. That’s the kind of job I have. The kind of job you have, too, I should imagine.’

‘Tell us about Garvey,’ Thorne said. ‘Junior.’

‘My grand folly, you mean.’

‘Sorry?’

Maier held up a hand again, as though to say he’d get there in his own time. He finished eating his biscuit, brushed crumbs from the front of his shirt. ‘Well, I’d written a book about the Raymond Garvey murders.’

Thorne pointed at his briefcase. ‘I’ve got a copy.’

‘I can sign it for you if you’d like, though I’m guessing that isn’t the main reason why you’re here. Worth at least a fiver on eBay.’ Maier laughed, but his attempt at self-deprecation was about as convincing as Thorne’s fake smile. ‘The man I later learned was Raymond Garvey’s son read it and got in touch with me.’

‘And this would have been when?’

‘Perhaps six months after Garvey died, so about two and a half years ago, I think.’

‘How did he contact you?’

‘He emailed my website. From an internet café, if you’d like to know. I checked. We exchanged a few emails and he told me there was something he thought I’d be interested in, so I gave him my home number. He called and, after a while, he told me what he wanted. He was right, of course. I was very interested.’

‘Did you meet him?’

‘Sadly not. It was all done by phone and email.’

‘He gave you all this guff about the brain tumour, did he?’ Holland said. ‘The personality change stuff.’

Maier nodded, like he’d been expecting the question. ‘Look, Anthony believed it, which was the important thing.’

‘Doesn’t matter if you don’t?’ Thorne asked.

‘I’m just there to tell the story,’ Maier said. ‘And whatever you think, it was a hell of a story. The possibility that one of the most notorious killers of the last fifty years had not been responsible, in the strictest sense of the word, for what he did. How could I ignore that?’

‘I presume you asked for proof?’ Thorne said. ‘That Anthony was who he claimed to be.’

‘He sent me some letters, or copies of letters that he’d received from Raymond Garvey over the years he’d been visiting him in Whitemoor.’ Maier saw the look on Thorne’s face. ‘You’re more than welcome to see them. As far as Ray Garvey was concerned, Anthony was his own flesh and blood.’

Holland leaned forward and placed his coffee cup on the table, careful to use the coaster provided. ‘So, he asked you to write another book, bringing this new… development to light?’

‘Correct.’

‘Did he seriously think they’d reopen the investigation? With his father dead?’

‘All he told me was that he wanted to get the truth out there.’

Holland shook his head. ‘I’m sure you were planning to talk to some of the relatives of the women Garvey killed. You know, seeing as the truth was so important.’

‘It never got that far,’ Maier said.

Thorne threw a look across at Holland; the signal that he wanted to take over. ‘What happened after you agreed to write the book?’

‘Well, I went to a publisher, obviously. Never has the phrase “they bit my hand off” been more appropriate. They were more than happy to stump up the money.’

‘Money?’

‘Anthony wanted forty-five thousand pounds for the story. For the use of his father’s prison letters, interviews with him, that sort of thing. All sadly premature, of course, since Doctor Kambar refused to play ball. He would not even go as far as to say that the tumour might have changed Garvey’s personality. Without any medical evidence, we had nowhere to go. It all fell apart rather quickly after that and, needless to say, I was no longer flavour of the month with the publisher.’

‘Sorry.’ Thorne did his best to look as though he meant it.

Maier shrugged. ‘Had to make do with ghosting for a while after that. Did a couple of senior coppers’ autobiographies as it happens. Everyone’s got a story or two to tell. I should imagine you’ve got more than a few, Inspector.’

‘Did you not think to talk to Kambar before you handed over the money?’

Another shrug. ‘It wasn’t my money, was it? Besides, we needed to strike while the iron was hot. He might well have gone to somebody else.’

Thorne saw a possibility. ‘I’m guessing you paid the money into some account or other?’

‘Sorry, no. It was paid in cash.’

‘What? Used notes in a brown paper bag?’

‘A holdall, actually, in the ticket office at Paddington station. If you ask me, I think the publisher quite enjoyed all the cloak and dagger. On top of which, everybody knew that it would make the most fantastic opening to the book: photographs of the illicit pick-up, the shadowy son of a serial killer, all that sort of thing.’

‘You took pictures?’

‘They sent a photographer along, yes, lurking among the commuters. I’ve got them in the office somewhere, if you want to have a look.’

‘Could you…?’

‘Yes, of course.’ Maier got up and walked towards the door. He smiled as he passed Thorne. ‘I dug them out before you came.’

Thorne said nothing.

‘Don’t get too excited, though. It wasn’t Anthony Garvey who picked the money up.’

Holland waited until Maier had left the room and said, ‘He loves himself, doesn’t he?’

‘If he’d already got the photos out,’ Thorne said, ‘he knew what we wanted to see him about.’

‘You didn’t give him any hints?’

Thorne shook his head. ‘Just said we wanted a word with him in his professional capacity. Help with an ongoing investigation. Usual old shit.’

They helped themselves to a couple more biscuits while they waited for Maier to return. He was talking as he re-entered the room.

‘Of course, we couldn’t do anything while the money was being picked up. Like I said, we didn’t want him to go running off to someone else. I asked him who the girl was afterwards, obviously.’

Thorne took the photographs that Maier was brandishing. Half a dozen black-and-white ten-by-eights. A woman in her early twenties, jeans and a puffer jacket. She looked distinctly nervous. The photographer had caught her full-on as she looked around, approaching the bag that had been left by the counter. More shots: a final check that nobody was paying too much attention; bending to pick up the holdall; side-on as she walked towards the exit.

‘Who did he say she was?’ Thorne asked.

Maier was standing behind the chair, staring at the photographs over Thorne’s shoulder. ‘Some girl he’d been seeing. Said he paid her a hundred pounds to pick up the bag, that he guessed we’d want some “coverage” and that he preferred to remain anonymous. A shame, but I wasn’t too disappointed, the shots were still usable. I asked him for a name and he said it didn’t matter. That she was already out of the picture. ’

Thorne handed the photographs to Holland. ‘What happened after you’d got nowhere with Kambar?’

Maier returned to his own chair. ‘Well, even though we knew it was second best, we tried a number of other neurologists, but we got very much the same result. We couldn’t get any kind of… authentication. So, in the end, I had to tell Anthony that, without it, the publisher was refusing to go ahead with the book.’

‘How did he take that?’

‘Not well,’ Maier said. ‘There was a lot of shouting, a few very abusive emails, which was rich, considering that I’d been every bit as shafted as he had. I’d already done a fair amount of background work, started mapping out the book, working. All a waste of bloody time in the end.’

‘How did you leave it?’

‘Well, the last time I spoke to him he was a damn sight calmer. I think perhaps his mood had been tempered slightly by the fact that he knew there was no way they could get the cash back off him. He said he was considering other options. All very mysterious, but I wished him luck with whatever they were. What else could I say?’ Maier adjusted the crease in his khakis and twisted his cuffs until they were as he wanted them.

‘Jesus.’ Thorne could only shake his head in disbelief, and watch as the author raised his arms again, like it was a funny old world.

Maier leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, a knowing expression creeping across his face. ‘So… how many has Anthony killed so far? Four, is it?’

Thorne was stunned. He struggled to respond quickly, his difficulty compounded by the pleasure Maier clearly gained from the hesitation.

‘Look, it’s no big mystery,’ Maier said. ‘I spent long enough studying the Raymond Garvey killings, so the names of the victims did rather jump out of the newspaper at me, even though they were all reported as separate murders. Now, Catherine Burke’s brother died years ago in a car accident, if my memory serves, so, by my reckoning’ – he counted off his fingers – ‘that means Anthony has another four to go. I presume you’ve warned them all?’

‘I’m not sure what you’re expecting me to say.’ Thorne shrugged as though it were no big deal. ‘You’ll understand I can’t tell you any more than you already know.’

‘If there is any more.’

‘On top of which, we’d be very grateful if you kept what you know to yourself.’

‘Not go running to the press, you mean?’

‘Not go running to anyone.’

‘I appreciate why you’re keeping the media in the dark on this one,’ Maier said. ‘As far as the link between the murders is concerned. But someone will get wind of it eventually, you do know that? A good serial-killer story will sell a lot of papers.’

‘And books,’ Holland said.

Maier seemed to enjoy the dig. ‘Hopefully.’

‘So, we understand each other?’ Thorne asked.

‘Well, I understand you, certainly, but you need to bear in mind that I have a living to make.’

Thorne waited, hoped that the sound of his teeth grinding wasn’t carrying.

‘All I’m saying is that when you are in a position to talk a bit more freely, or if there are any major developments as far as what Anthony’s up to, I would hope that I’d be the first person you’d talk to. The first person without a warrant card, at any rate.’ He leaned forward for the final biscuit. ‘How’s that sound?’

Thorne watched Maier chew, the weak chin working, thinking that he had the sort of face you could not be satisfied with punching just the once. He said, ‘Sounds fine.’

Maier nodded and reached towards the tray again. ‘There’s plenty more coffee in the pot.’

Ten minutes later, creeping slowly north along the Holloway Road, Holland said, ‘I was thinking about how Anthony Garvey lives, you know?’

Thorne swore in frustration at the traffic, then glanced across.

‘I mean, he can’t be holding down any sort of proper job, can he? Not without leaving traces and certainly not if he needs to move about, tracking his victims. I reckon that cash he screwed out of Maier is exactly what he needs to do this.’

‘That phrase Maier used,’ Thorne said. ‘Garvey was “considering other options”.’

‘Shit, they as good as funded him.’ Holland stared out of the side window for half a minute. ‘And that tosser’s going to end up getting a book deal out of it.’

Thorne was only half listening. He was thinking about the girl in the photographs and something else Maier had said. The precise words Garvey had used.

Out of the picture.

TWENTY

H.M.P. Whitemoor

‘What’s that mark on your face?’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Christ, I thought you were… protected in here. A vulnerable prisoner. ’

‘Unfortunately, it’s not just nonces I’m stuck on the wing with. All sorts are vulnerable in here, need to be kept separate. An ex-police officer gave me this. Made him feel better for a few days, I suppose. Got a few people off his back.’

‘It’s a fucking zoo!’

‘It’s not supposed to be pleasant. Mind you, we have got a PlayStation now…’

‘I was thinking, you know, about what it’s going to be like when you come out.’

‘That’s not happening, Tony, I’ve said.’

‘No harm in thinking about stuff we could do.’

‘What, you and me in the park, kicking a sodding ball about?’

‘You’ve got to be optimistic.’

‘You’re talking stupid.’

‘I’m not going anywhere, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘Good. That’s good.’

‘There must be places you fancy going, though, things you want to see.’

‘Oh, yeah. Inside of a pub would be nice. A decent pair of tits that aren’t on an eighteen-stone armed robber.’

‘I don’t know how you can laugh.’

‘You’ve got to.’

‘I certainly didn’t get that from you. A sense of humour, I mean. I can’t remember the last time I found anything very funny. I see people watching TV, pissing themselves at some stupid sitcom or whatever, and I just don’t… see it.’

‘You’ve had a hard time of it, that’s all.’

‘Did I laugh when I was little?’

‘I wouldn’t know, would I?’

‘Not really little, I mean, but when you saw me?’

‘I can’t remember. It was only a couple of times.’

‘We all know whose fault that was.’

‘Don’t start all that.’

‘What?’

‘Gives me a headache when you talk about your mother. I’m serious. Last time I puked up after you’d gone.’

‘I’ve told you, I’m fine about it. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘’Course it was my fault. All those women. No excuses.’

‘It’s what you get for keeping secrets.’

‘Can we talk about something else?’

‘I don’t mind.’

‘You seeing anyone?’

‘What, like girls?’

‘Girls, boys, I don’t know.’

‘Fuck off, Dad.’

‘So?’

‘On and off. Nothing serious. What’s the matter?’

‘Still does my head in. When you call me that. Dad.’

TWENTY-ONE

If a sliding scale of news was topped by being told you’d won the lottery, with a diagnosis of cancer at the bottom, the phone call Thorne received the previous evening would run the cancer diagnosis a pretty close second. Brigstocke had spoken quickly and without hesitation, not wanting to give Thorne a chance to start shouting, or crying, until he had finished.

‘Remember I mentioned they might convene a critical incident panel? Well, it’s tomorrow at ten o’clock. They’d like you to be there, so you might want to dig out a suit. Sorry, the suit…’

‘Like me to be there as in I have a choice?’

‘Like you to be there as in what do you think?’

‘You don’t reckon I could be spending my morning a bit more productively? Trying to find the girl in Maier’s photo, maybe? It’s just a thought.’

‘Tom-’

‘Having a wank?’

‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’

‘I was thinking more “strangle”.’

‘Just don’t piss too many of them off, OK?’

‘Now you’re really pushing it.’

‘Have a nice evening.’

‘I was,’ Thorne said.

Now, twelve hours later, Thorne was sitting at a highly polished, blond-wood table in an overheated conference room at Scotland Yard. There were six other people around the table, each with a notepad and a pair of freshly sharpened pencils in front of them. There were water jugs and glasses near either end. Thorne smiled through the minute or two of small talk, wondering how people would react if he let his head drop on to the table or asked for a cold beer, and waiting for the powerful smell of bullshit to start rising on the thermal of hot air.

The Association of Chief Police Officers was responsible for bringing such panels together, and its representative, the Area Homicide Commander, was chairing the meeting. Alistair Johns was a short, stocky man in his early fifties, with a permanently pinched expression, as though he were always walking through heavy rain. He brought the meeting to order, making sure that everyone around the table knew one another. Aside from Trevor Jesmond and Russell Brigstocke, there was a surly-looking DS named Proctor from the Community Relations Unit and a woman named Paula Hughes, who Thorne gathered was a civilian press officer. Another woman, a WPC whose name he failed to catch during a stifled yawn, was taking the minutes. Thorne caught her eye. She looked as though she’d had enough already, or perhaps she was thinking about the work that lay ahead: typing up her notes, circulating endless emails and preparing a bound report for everyone from the Commissioner to the Mayor.

‘We need to crack on,’ Johns said. ‘Obviously this is an ongoing inquiry and I’m grateful to DCI Brigstocke and DI Thorne for taking the time to be here.’

Thorne looked across at Brigstocke, who suddenly appeared to find the tabletop uniquely fascinating.

‘But we may well be looking at problems down the line, as far as the public perception of our handling of the case goes, so we need to take a few decisions now. Start preparing answers for some of the questions that are bound to be asked, whether we get a result or not.’

‘We’ll get a result,’ Jesmond said. He nodded towards Brigstocke, whose interest in the tabletop seemed only to increase. Jesmond’s confidence was to be expected, of course; the last thing Johns wanted to hear was doubt or uncertainty. A bit of gung-ho positivity always went a long way with the brass.

The smell of bullshit was kicking in nice and early.

When Thorne had first heard about critical incident panels, he had presumed that they were convened as a result of terrorist incidents and the like, but he had quickly discovered that they were little more than forums for the mitigation of bad publicity; to discuss cases that were likely to attract criticism from the press or community groups. They were little more than damage-limitation exercises. Often, they were all about getting your retaliation in first.

‘We need to talk about the media,’ Johns said. ‘How we use, or don’t use them as the inquiry moves forward. Obviously, we’ve kept our powder dry as far as the serial elements of these killings is concerned.’

‘Dry-ish.’ Thorne spoke instinctively and held the stare when he caught a look from Jesmond that suggested he should have kept his mouth shut. ‘At least one journalist has already put it together.’

Johns glanced down at his notes. ‘Nicholas Maier. But he’s assured you he understands the importance of discretion.’

‘He understands that we’ll feed him information about the case to keep him quiet. If he’s lucky, maybe enough to get a book out of it.’

‘Not much we can do about it,’ Brigstocke said.

Jesmond launched into a tirade about Nicholas Maier and his ‘ilk’ making a living out of the suffering of others. He called them ‘hacks’ and ‘leeches’, said that they were no more than a few links up the food chain from the killers themselves. There were nods and appreciative murmurs from all but one person around the table. Jesmond’s comments had sounded heartfelt, but Thorne knew that the only thing the Superintendent was really passionate about was his own progress up the greasy pole. The two men exchanged glances again, and Thorne smiled like a good boy. He could not help wondering which hack would be ghost-writing Jesmond’s autobiography a few years down the line.

‘We will be keeping a close eye on Mr Maier,’ Johns said. ‘But obviously our main focus this morning is on the hunt for our three potential victims.’ He glanced down at his papers. ‘Andrew Dowd, Simon Walsh and Graham Fowler.’

‘As far as that goes, we feel the time might have come to start circulating pictures,’ Brigstocke said.

Thorne looked across at his DCI and felt a surge of admiration for the man. He had been worryingly non-committal on the way into the meeting and Thorne would not have put money on which way he was liable to jump.

‘You’d be ready to move quickly on that?’ Johns asked.

Brigstocke nodded. ‘The photos of Fowler and Walsh are long out of date, but they’re the best we’ve got: an old driving licence shot of Walsh from the DVLA and the most recent photo that Fowler’s father was able to find. We should be able to get some good ones of Andrew Dowd from his wife as soon as we’re given the word.’

‘If she hasn’t cut them all up,’ Jesmond said. ‘Sounds like a bit of a bitch.’

Johns looked towards Paula Hughes. She had a mop of brown curls and, for Thorne’s money, showed a few too many teeth when she smiled.

‘We can get them into all the nationals by tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And the six o’clock news tonight, if we’re quick.’

Johns nodded, scribbled a note or two.

‘We’re still… concerned,’ Jesmond said. ‘About alerting Garvey to the fact that we’re on to him.’

Thorne’s sigh was clearly audible to everyone at the table. Heads turned. ‘I think he’s well aware of that,’ he said. ‘I think that suits him just fine. Why else would he be leaving the X-ray fragments?’

Jesmond’s eyes hardened. ‘It’s extremely dangerous to make any kind of presumption about a man like Anthony Garvey. We’re not exactly dealing with a rational mind.’

‘All the more reason to take no chances.’

‘I agree completely. So why broadcast pictures of the very people he intends to kill?’

‘So we can find them.’ You fucking idiot. The words sounded so loud in Thorne’s head that, for a second or two, he wondered if he’d spoken them out loud. He caught the eye of the WPC taking notes. Clearly, he hadn’t needed to.

‘We have to at least consider the possibility that we might be helping him.’

‘I think he knows who he’s after.’ Thorne fought to keep the sarcasm from his voice. ‘And if we don’t do everything we can now, he’s likely to find them before we do.’

‘Why should he be able to do that?’

‘He’s been searching a damn sight longer than we have.’ Thorne made sure he had Johns’ attention. ‘And if we don’t use these photos, it’s going to start looking like he’s trying a damn sight harder, too.’

Jesmond reddened and tapped his pencil against the edge of the table. It heartened Thorne enormously to see that the sandy hair was a little more wispy than the last time he had seen him, the face a little more veined.

‘I’m sorry,’ Thorne said. ‘I really don’t understand why you’re so worried.’

‘What if we use these pictures in the press and Garvey kills someone?’

‘What if we don’t and he kills someone anyway?’

‘Well, obviously, either scenario is one we’ll try to avoid. But we do need to think about which is the least… problematic.’

‘Problematic?’ As Thorne stared at Jesmond, he remembered reading about an American car company that had discovered a potentially dangerous fault on one of its models. After considering their options, the management decided not to alert the public. They had calculated that it would be more expensive to organise a national recall of the affected vehicles than to pay damages to the injured and the relatives of those killed.

More problematic…

‘This is what we need to talk about,’ Johns said. ‘We don’t want to be accused of not doing all we could have done, should this information come to light.’

‘Which it will,’ Thorne said.

Jesmond shook his head. ‘As long as we keep the link between the victims quiet, it’s not a criticism that can be levelled.’

‘The papers will get hold of it,’ Thorne said. ‘There are far too many gobshites around, and too many journalists waving chequebooks. And the whole story’s going to come out anyway when Maier’s next book’s published.’

Thorne thought he saw concern pass across Jesmond’s face, but it was no more than momentary. Jesmond knew that, in all probability, he would have moved on by the time anything damaging emerged. His successor would have to deal with the fallout. Thorne guessed that Johns was thinking the same thing.

Thorne would still be where he was though, as would the families of Catherine Burke, Emily Walker and the Mackens.

Jesmond removed his glasses, began rubbing at the lenses with a handkerchief. ‘We have allocated another dozen officers to the search for Andrew Dowd and the others. We’re liaising closely with all the relevant local forces, whose missing persons units have pretty much dropped all other cases.’ He slid his glasses back on and looked around the table, making eye contact with everyone but Thorne. ‘We’ll get there.’

‘I’m giving you another dozen, Trevor,’ Johns said. He glanced over at the woman from the Press Office, who quickly scribbled it down. Thorne knew that this was information they were only too happy to see in the papers.

‘On top of which, we do have another avenue of investigation,’ Jesmond said.

Johns turned a page. ‘The young woman in Maier’s photograph?’

‘Correct.’ Jesmond turned towards Brigstocke. ‘Sounds like a very strong lead to me, Russell. If we can track her down, we might get to Garvey before he can get anywhere near Dowd or the others.’

‘I’ve got officers on it,’ Brigstocke said.

‘Can we at least run her picture?’ Thorne asked. He reached for the water jug, but moved back when he couldn’t quite reach it and nobody seemed inclined to help. He looked over at Proctor, the community relations representative who had not spoken at all. Said, ‘What is it you actually do?’

Johns leaned forward. ‘Listen, nobody’s saying we can’t run the other pictures at some point. We’re weighing up the options, that’s all.’ He looked hard at Thorne. ‘I’m sure you understand our position well enough, Inspector. You’re not naïve. So, I’ll put your tone down to a genuine concern for the missing men rather than pure bolshiness.’

‘It’s probably a bit of both,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke cleared his throat. ‘Tom…’

Jesmond held up a hand and nudged the water jug towards Thorne. ‘I can’t see too much of a problem with running the girl’s picture,’ he said. ‘Sounds like a good compromise.’

There it was. One of the superintendent’s favourite words. Thorne was amazed it had taken so long to hear it.

‘Right, we’ll go that way,’ Johns said. ‘And keep an open mind as far as the other photographs are concerned.’

‘Absolutely,’ Jesmond said. His eyes closed as he smiled, same as always.

Thorne poured then sipped his water. It was warm and tasted faintly metallic. ‘If things should change…?’

‘We can move quickly,’ the Press Officer said.

Thorne did not doubt it. He knew that, when it came to shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, there was nobody quicker.

Brigstocke had been kept back for a one-to-one with Jesmond, but Thorne wasn’t complaining. He was happy to get out of that room and back on to the street, to take a few decent-sized breaths of gorgeous, dirty air.

Sitting on the Tube back to Colindale, his eyes fixed on the ads above the heads of the passengers opposite, Thorne felt the tension ease a little. He let the images drift and sputter in his mind and the ideas raise their voices above the noise of the train; let his imagination run amok.

He imagined Jesmond’s face as the contents of the water jug ran down it, and the look on the face of the WPC – equal parts lust and admiration – as she unbuttoned her crisp white shirt and begged him to take her, right there across the blond-wood table.

He imagined telling Martin Macken that the man who had murdered both his children was sitting in a cell, or breaking news of an altogether more terrible kind to a father he had yet to meet.

He imagined Louise, smiling at him across the dinner table, across the bed, across a room in some wonderful house, with paintings on the walls and flowers he could not name in matching Chinese vases.

He imagined her starting to show.

Taking a life seemed a little easier if the person it belonged to was drunk; same as lifting a wallet. It had certainly been the case with Greg Macken – the responses sufficiently dulled and the defences down, something not quite there in the eyes even before the light had started to fade from them. Watching the man walk away from the pub now, he couldn’t say if he was pissed or not, but even a pint or two would blunt the reflexes. He crossed the road and began to follow. Once someone had poured enough alcohol down their necks, you could take almost anything you liked from them with nothing more deadly than a kebab.

That was not to say of course, that everyone became easier to deal with when alcohol was involved and he knew that as well as anybody. Had his father not been the kind of drunk more liable to throw a punch than blow a kiss, he might never have kicked off in that Finsbury Park boozer, might never have got himself arrested.

Might, arguably, still be alive.

Walking past a crumbling stretch of wall, he bent quickly to pick up a fist-sized rock. He kept his eyes on the figure fifty yards in front of him, watching as the man stepped on to the road when such pavement as there was gave way to muddy verge. He picked up his pace a little, checked his pockets one last time to make sure the bag was there, and the other bits he needed.

When he was no more than a few yards away, he reached into his jacket for his cigarettes, smiling like an idiot when the man looked over his shoulder and miming the striking of a match; thanking him when he saw the nod, then jogging the last few feet between them so as not to hold him up.

‘Swap you a light for a fag?’ the man said.

Even better…

He thought about his father in those few seconds before he swung the rock, about the yellow fingers knitting themselves together on the metal tabletop and the way his cheeks caved in with every draw on one of those pin-thin roll-ups. The fucked-up teeth showing when he said, ‘Banning this almost everywhere on the out, aren’t they? Banging people up for it. Bloody stupid, considering this is about the only place you can still smoke.’

The rock bounced off the man’s arm – broke it, more than likely – when he lifted it to protect his face, but the cry of pain was quickly silenced by the second blow. He followed the man down on to the grass and rolled him over, knelt across his chest and hit him several times more, until there was no resistance.

No, not drunk, he thought, but he looked for that dying light anyway, staring at the point where the man’s eyes should have been as he reached for the plastic bag.

It was impossible to tell. The face was no more than blood and meat by then.

He drove the rock down into the mess again, a few more times, until it became too slippery to hold.

When headlights began creeping towards him, he rolled the body over the brow of the verge and waited there with it, his heart starting to slow and the damp grass tickling his face as the lorry rumbled past. He picked himself up and wiped the worst of the mud from his jeans. The man’s book of matches was lying near the edge of the road and he used one to light a cigarette as he walked back to where he’d parked the car.

TWENTY-TWO

Wednesday morning: two weeks since a schoolteacher had come home from work and found the body of his wife; since a man calling himself Anthony Garvey had begun to make himself known.

Carol Chamberlain wondered if it was too early to pour herself a glass of wine. Despite Thorne’s crack about Ovaltine, it was not the kind of hotel where the rooms were furnished with mini-bars, but over the last few nights she had got through a bottle and a half of the Pinot Grigio she’d bought at the local Threshers and kept cool in the bathroom sink.

Knowing what Jack would have to say about it, she decided to wait until dinner, and went back to her notes on the Anthony Garvey case.

Bloody wild-goose chase, by the sound of it, Jack had said. She’d given him a general picture of what she’d been asked to do, not deeming it necessary to mention Ray Garvey’s name, and he had still struggled to share her enthusiasm.

‘Why should you be able to get anywhere if the cops can’t?’ he had said.

Because I am a cop, she’d wanted to say. Inside. And I’m bloody good at this stuff.

‘How long are you going to be away?’

It was the kind of job that might have suited a private detective – a career move she had considered a few years back, when she’d left the Force. Been pushed out. But she knew she’d hate sitting in cars for hours on end, clogging up the footwell with empty crisp packets and watching nondescript houses in the hope of getting a picture or two of an unfaithful wife or husband.

She’d made light of the hypnotherapist business, but it had not been funny at the time, and she was stupidly grateful to Tom Thorne for the helping hand. It had pulled her back from a cosy future of dog-walking and crosswords. That was a pace of life she might be ready to embrace five or ten years down the line, but not now.

Christ, she wasn’t even sixty yet.

Thorne had seemed a little distracted, she’d thought, when they’d met on Saturday. It was hard to tell if there was anything really wrong, though, because, if she were being honest, she could not say that she knew him well enough to discern what was normal. There were too many things they never spoke about, and she always sensed a reaction if she as much as alluded to them.

Sometimes, watching the dog tear along the seafront, or pottering about with Jack in their tiny garden, those events seemed as if they had happened to somebody else. But she was not ashamed of what she’d done. Back then, the need to get a result had overshadowed everything – a single good one being enough to compensate for a dozen cases’ worth of frustration and failure. It drove her – something she knew she had in common with Tom Thorne – and even now, staring at the mess of paperwork and Post-its spread out on the bed in front of her, she felt an excitement she had feared had all but bled out of her.

I need to get out of the sodding house a bit more, she thought.

She had spent the day after she’d met up with Thorne going through the case notes from the original Garvey inquiry. She hadn’t expected any great revelation, but she had been shocked all over again by the casual brutality of the murders. Like Thorne, she found it hard to swallow that they had been carried out by a man whose personality had been horribly altered; one for whom such terrible actions were wildly out of character.

She had filled her time subsequently on the phone or working at her laptop, making contact with old colleagues, many of whom had been closely involved with the inquiry. She had picked brains and called in favours, telling those who were interested enough to ask what she had been up to since they’d last been in touch.

‘You know, keeping my hand in,’ her stock reply.

At the time of his arrest, Raymond Garvey had been married for seventeen years to his childhood sweetheart. In the wake of the predictable press hounding and after one too many turds through her letterbox, Jenny Garvey had left London and gone to ground, waiting for the man she thought she knew to go to prison, and, later, for her divorce to come through. Chamberlain had traced her to a flat in Southampton. The woman had sounded understandably wary on the phone, but had softened a little when Chamberlain had assured her that she would not be picking at too many old scabs.

She would catch the train down to the South Coast first thing the following morning and see what a chat with the ex-wife threw up. She knew, of course, that Anthony Garvey was not Jenny’s child, but without too much else to go on, she had little choice but to see where the conversation led. If she could catch so much as a glimpse of Jack’s wild goose.

He would be calling again in a couple of hours. They spoke three times a day, sometimes even more. Often, he would call if she was taking a little longer than usual at the supermarket, but she rarely resented it.

It would be the usual conversation later on.

The night before, she’d asked how he was holding up and he’d told her he was trying to make the best of it, despite the fact that his hip was playing up and he missed her cooking. She made sympathetic noises, but knew damned well that he was living the life of Riley, walking about the house in his vest and living on takeaways and tinned bitter. It was a little lie, a lovely one. But she’d been spending a lot more time lately thinking about the less than lovely lies they told themselves and each other every day. The years they still had together and the cancer not returning.

‘It’s strange, love, that’s all,’ he’d said. ‘With you being away.’

Chamberlain did her best to organise the paperwork, made some room on the bed to lie down. Yes, she was away, she decided, so there was no reason why she should not behave a bit differently, too. She picked up the glass from the table next to the TV and carried it into the bathroom.

Despite the scope and scale of the Anthony Garvey inquiry, Thorne, like every detective on the Murder Investigation Team, had other cases on his books. Those inclined to murder a spouse or take a knife to someone who disrespected their training shoes did not hold back simply because there was a serial killer taking up everybody’s time. There were also many cases going through the post-arrest stage. There was evidence to be carefully checked and prepared where court proceedings were imminent, and time-consuming liaison with the Crown Prosecution Service. As the trial date neared, a CPS rep might call the detective on an hourly basis to pass on the thoughts and wishes of those trying to keep their clients out of prison.

With little he could do to help in the search for Dowd, Fowler and Walsh, and with Kitson working on the Maier photograph, Thorne had spent much of the morning dealing with his backlog: the beating to death of a thirteen-year-old boy by a gang of older girls in a park in Walthamstow; a couple who had died in an arson attack on a block of flats in Hammersmith. Just after lunch, a CPS lawyer named Hobbs called with depressing news. Eight months earlier, a young woman had been killed during an attempted car-jacking in Chiswick. She had got into her car after shopping, then stopped when she’d noticed a large piece of paper stuck to her rear windscreen. When she’d pulled over and got out to remove it, a man had jumped from the vehicle behind and attempted to steal her car. In trying to stop him, she had been dragged beneath the wheels and, a week after the incident, her husband had taken the decision to turn off the life-support machine.

‘It’s Patrick Jennings defending,’ Hobbs said. ‘And he’s confident he can get this reduced to manslaughter.’

‘No chance,’ Thorne said.

‘Claims he’s got a decent crack at it. Reckons it was the woman’s fault. He intends to present a heap of Met Police campaign material which urges victims not to struggle, to hand over their property when threatened.’

‘You’re winding me up.’

‘He’s getting bloody good at this. Last month he was defending a kid who tried to take a woman’s car by climbing into the back seat while she was paying for petrol.’

‘Shit, that was Jennings?’

‘You see what I’m getting at?’

The trial had caused something of a stir in the papers, not to mention a nasty scuffle on the courtroom steps. The petrol station attendant had seen the boy getting into the car and kept the woman inside while he called the police. It emerged afterwards that the boy had a history of sexual assault, but, with no weapon found, the defence had been able to get the charge knocked down to trespass and he had walked away with a two-hundred-pound fine.

‘We need to be careful, that’s all,’ Hobbs said. ‘Don’t give the bugger anything he can use.’

‘It’s not happening.’

‘Let’s make sure it doesn’t,’ Hobbs said. ‘They’re starting to call him Jack-off Jennings.’

Despite the work this entailed, along with establishing base-camp at a fearsome mountain of paperwork, Thorne could not get the Anthony Garvey case out of his mind. Not for more than a few minutes, at any rate. Its dark beats, the twisted melody of it. Like the first song you hear on the radio in the morning that stays in your head all day.

Martin Macken’s mouth like a ragged wound, howling blood.

A note stuck to Emily Walker’s fridge.

Debbie Mitchell’s kid, pushing his train up and down the carpet.

And all the time, as he and the rest of the team flapped and fidgeted and waited for something to happen, the nagging worry that they were dancing to Anthony Garvey’s tune.

Towards the end of a nine-hour shift, with going home at a reasonable hour starting to look like a real possibility, Thorne ran into Yvonne Kitson on his way back from the toilet.

‘I think I’ve found the girl in the photograph,’ Kitson said.

His first thought was that Louise had been right, that dinner together was probably optimistic. This was good news, nevertheless. Then he saw the look on Kitson’s face. ‘Fuck…’

‘I went through all the missing-persons reports for the six months after the date when the picture was taken. Found a girl who fits the description. She turned up two weeks later. Was… discovered.’

‘Where?’

‘Same place she’d been sent to pick up the money, near as damn it,’ Kitson said. ‘Back of Paddington station. Looks like Garvey’s got a sense of humour.’

‘I’m pissing myself.’

‘I’ve put a call into the SIO. Got an address for the parents.’

‘You told Brigstocke?’

‘He’s out, so-’

‘Let me.’ He took out his phone as Kitson turned back towards the Incident Room, said, ‘Well done,’ as he dialled.

Got Russell Brigstocke’s voicemail.

‘It’s me. Just in case you’re playing golf with Trevor Jesmond, I thought you could pass on a message. Tell him that his nice, useful avenue of enquiry has just become a cul-de-sac.’

TWENTY-THREE

All at once, Alec Sinclair, a large man in his late fifties with thinning hair and restless hands, fell silent. He had been talking about his daughter Chloe, whose body had been found in a disused tool shed behind Paddington station almost three years earlier.

Struggling for words, he turned to his wife, who was seated next to him, in the cluttered living room of a terraced house in Balham. Miriam Sinclair was probably a few years younger than her husband, but there was grey bleeding through a dye job above her forehead and Thorne guessed the make-up was a little more thickly applied than it might once have been.

‘It’s nice to talk about her,’ she said. She smiled at Thorne and Kitson. ‘But then it all sort of rushes up at you. It’s not like you forget what happened or anything.’

‘I dream about her sometimes,’ Alec said. ‘And there are those few seconds when you wake up… before you remember she’s dead.’

‘You sure I can’t get you anything to drink?’

‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Thorne said.

The couple had asked, of course, as soon as Kitson had called the previous afternoon. Shocked to get the call, so long after the investigation into their daughter’s murder had petered out, but as eager as they had ever been to find out if there had been any progress. Kitson had told them that Chloe’s murder might well be connected to an ongoing inquiry; then she had checked herself, stressed that the inquiry into Chloe’s murder was still ongoing itself, would continue to be until an arrest was made.

‘It’s fine, love,’ Miriam had said on the phone. ‘I know how stretched you lot are, and, I mean, you’ve only got to open a paper to see there are plenty of other murders. Other families who haven’t been grieving quite as long as we have.’

‘Have you found him?’ Alec asked now.

‘We don’t have anyone in custody,’ Kitson said. ‘But we have a number of useful leads, and-’

‘The boyfriend.’ Miriam looked at her husband. ‘We know it’s the boyfriend.’

‘Right,’ Kitson said. The officer leading the hunt for Chloe’s killer three years before had confirmed that their prime suspect had been the man she’d been reported as seeing at the time of her death. Despite their best efforts, they had never been able to trace him.

‘We’ve got a name,’ Thorne said. ‘A description.’ He didn’t say that neither was exactly reliable. ‘We’re doing everything we can to follow these up and obviously we’ve passed all this information on to DCI Spedding.’ The man who had been in charge of the original investigation had been delighted to hear from Kitson; happy, he said, to share any intelligence that might take the Chloe Sinclair murder off his books.

Alec Sinclair turned to his wife. ‘Dave Spedding still gets in touch from time to time, doesn’t he?’

‘A card every Christmas,’ Miriam said. ‘A phone call on Chloe’s birthday. That sort of thing.’

‘I mean, he was very close to us by the end. Close to Chloe, too, in a funny sort of way.’

‘Hard for him as well, I would have thought,’ Miriam said.

Thorne nodded. It should be, he thought. The day it stops being hard is the day to get out, to up-sticks and find yourself a nice little pub to run. He said that Spedding seemed like a good man, and a good copper.

‘It might sound stupid,’ Kitson said, ‘but is there anything you might have remembered since the original investigation? Something that’s come back to you?’

‘We would have told Dave Spedding,’ Miriam said.

‘I know, and we really don’t want to dredge it all up again.’

‘Would you mind just going over it?’ Thorne asked. On the cupboard against the far wall, he could see a collection of photographs in metal frames: the Sinclairs on a beach with two small children; Chloe and her brother cradling a baby monkey at the gates of a safari park; a young man posing proudly next to what was probably his first car. The brother who had lost a sister, the son who had become an only child.

‘She was on her gap year,’ Alec said. ‘Saving up to go travelling before university. She did some stuff for me at my office for a while, but she was bored to death, so she got the job in the pub. That’s where she met this Tony.’

‘Did she tell you much about him?’ Kitson asked.

Miriam shook her head. ‘She told us he was a good few years older and I think she could tell we didn’t really approve.’

‘Maybe if we’d been a bit more… liberal or what have you, things might have been different.’ Alec stared into space for a few seconds. ‘I just didn’t want her getting too attached to anyone, not with university and everything round the corner. As it turned out, she started talking about not going at all, about going travelling with this Tony, or moving in with him.’

‘There were a lot of arguments,’ Miriam said.

Thorne said it was understandable, that he could see their first concern had been for their daughter. ‘But you never met him?’

It was a warm morning, but Miriam pulled her cardigan a little tighter around her chest as she shook her head. ‘She got very secretive about it, told us that it was her life, all that kind of thing.’ Her smile was regretful, a tremble in her bottom lip. ‘I could see that in the end there was a danger we’d drive her away, so I asked her to bring him round.’

‘She told us it was too late for all that,’ Alec said. ‘That Tony knew how we felt and she didn’t want to put him through the whole trial-by-parents thing.’

‘It’s stupid, looking back,’ Miriam said. ‘It was only a few months, but she was completely smitten with him. One day she was talking to us about all the places she wanted to visit and the next thing we wouldn’t see her for days on end.’

Alec’s face darkened. ‘That’s why we didn’t even know anything had happened for a few days.’

‘Can you tell us…?’ Thorne asked.

Alec cleared his throat, but it was his wife who spoke. ‘She’d taken to stopping over at his place more and more.’

‘Where was that?’ Kitson asked.

‘Hanwell, I think. At least Hanwell was somewhere she mentioned a few times, and I remember she needed to get a travel-card for Zone Four. We never had the address, though. Obviously, we would have passed it on to the police.’ She picked at a loose thread on the arm of the sofa. ‘So, when she didn’t come home on the Thursday night, we just presumed, you know…’

‘We started to get worried by the Saturday morning,’ Alec said. ‘I mean, I know we’ve said there were arguments, but she’d always phone after a day or two. She knew we’d worry.’

Miriam tugged at the loose thread until it broke, then balled it up in her palm and closed her fist. ‘We called the police on the Saturday,’ she said. ‘Then, three weeks later, we had the visit.’

‘There were two of them on the doorstep,’ Alec said. ‘I knew it, when the woman tried to smile and couldn’t quite manage it.’

‘Do you know why?’ Miriam asked suddenly. ‘I know you’ve got a name now, so maybe you’ve got some idea why he did what he did.’

Because Anthony Garvey already had a plan. Because he needed your daughter to get the money to fund it. And once she’d done what he wanted, he had to get her out of the way. He could not afford to have loose ends lying around once his grand scheme of killing was under way, so he stuffed your daughter behind a pile of rusted metal and dusty sacking, curled up among the shit and the silverfish with the back of her skull caved in and a plastic bag tied around her head.

Because he needed to practise on someone.

‘It’s a bit too early to say,’ Thorne said, hoping that it didn’t sound as piss-weak and pathetic as he felt while saying it.

Kitson glanced at him, but couldn’t meet his eye. ‘We’ll come back to you as soon as we know any more.’

Thorne could see that the couple had had enough. He thanked them for their time and apologised for making them talk about something that was so painful. Miriam said that it was no trouble, that nothing was too much trouble if it might help find the man who had murdered her daughter. She said she was the one who should apologise for not being a better hostess.

‘Did Chloe have a diary?’

‘Yes, but only for appointments and things,’ Miriam said. ‘I looked through it afterwards… hoping she might have said something. The police had a good look, of course, but it’s just “meeting T”, “having a drink with T”, that kind of thing. You’re welcome to take it, if you want.’

‘It might be useful for checking dates,’ Thorne said. ‘What about a mobile phone?’

‘Police looked at that, too,’ Alec said. ‘They found it in her bag.’

‘Do you still have it?’

Miriam shook her head. ‘Once the police had returned all Chloe’s things, Alec took it to one of those recycling places.’

‘I can’t bear waste.’ Alec reached across and fumbled for his wife’s hand. ‘Can’t bear it.’

Thorne nodded and looked down for his briefcase. He knew the man was not talking about mobile phones any more.

Jenny Duggan, formerly Jenny Garvey, had not been comfortable with the idea of Carol Chamberlain visiting her at home, so they met outside a small pub in the city centre. Chamberlain was the second to arrive, her train from Waterloo having got in fifteen minutes late, and once she had visited the toilet and got some drinks in, she walked back outside to join Duggan at a table in the sunshine. They were no more than a hundred yards from the Bargate, the ancient monument at the northern end of the old medieval wall. It had served as police headquarters during the Second World War and now housed a contemporary art gallery, but eight hundred years earlier it had been the main gateway to the city of Southampton.

‘All very nice,’ Duggan said, as Chamberlain drew back a chair. ‘But it’s still rough as you like round here on a Friday night.’

Chamberlain took a pair of sunglasses from her bag, smaller than the rather oversized pair Jenny Duggan was wearing. Chamberlain found herself wondering if, even now, fifteen years on and in a different city, the woman worried about being recognised.

‘I didn’t think you were allowed to drink on duty,’ Duggan said. ‘Or is that just something they say on TV?’

‘I’m not on duty, strictly speaking,’ Chamberlain said. ‘I’m retired, actually. Just helping with an inquiry.’

‘Like a cold-case thing? Like on Waking the Dead?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I’ve always quite fancied the main bloke in that,’ Duggan said. ‘Do you know any coppers like him?’

‘Not many,’ Chamberlain said.

They sat there for ten minutes or more, talking about television, the weather, the job doing the accounts for a local furniture firm that Duggan had recently found for herself. Chamberlain knew she was ten years or so older than her drinking companion, but guessed that an impartial observer would have put it closer to fifteen. Duggan had looked after herself, maintaining a good figure and with her hair kept in the kind of shaggy bob that women a lot younger seemed to favour. Chamberlain was a little ashamed at wondering if the sunglasses might also be hiding the signs of having a bit of work done.

Duggan was talkative and relaxed. Chamberlain knew that she ought to be steering the conversation towards Garvey, but she was reluctant to push it, and not only because it was always useful to establish a rapport. She was enjoying their chat about nothing in particular. The sun was warm and the wine wasn’t too bad, and any passer-by would have taken them for two friends having lunch or gearing up for an afternoon at the shops.

‘So, you didn’t get married again?’ Chamberlain asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘You’re still using your maiden name.’

Duggan laughed. ‘It’s a bloody good job you retired. Married again and divorced again.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Don’t worry, this one wasn’t a serial killer or anything.’ She took a slug of wine, swallowed it fast. ‘Just a selfish pig.’

Chamberlain did not know how to react, so said nothing and they stared at the traffic and the shoppers for a minute or more until Duggan said, ‘Ray never laid a hand on me, do you know that?’

Once again, Chamberlain had no reply.

‘Surprising, isn’t it, considering what happened later? He was a good husband, more or less. Good at his job, too.’ She looked away. ‘Good at killing, as it turned out.’

Chamberlain thought about the tumour, about the notion that it had changed Raymond Garvey’s personality. Could she and Thorne be wrong in dismissing the possibility so easily? ‘So, would you say that what he did was out of character?’

‘Well, I wasn’t… shocked,’ Duggan said. ‘When these things happen, they talk to people, neighbours, whatever, and they always say, “I’d never have believed it” and “He seemed like such a normal bloke” and all that stuff. But when they told me what Ray had done, I just nodded. I remember the coppers’ faces, how they looked at each other, and for a while I’m sure they thought I’d known what he was doing, you know? Looking back, I think there was just something in him… a dark side, which I knew was there but wasn’t willing to face up to. Not that I had any bloody idea where it would lead, mind you.’

‘You couldn’t have known that.’

Duggan smiled, grateful. ‘Like I said, there were plenty who thought I did, but how much do you ever really know? I mean, you hear about these cases, horrible stuff, men hiding children underneath the house and what have you, and I’m as bad as anyone, thinking the wives must have known what was going on. No smoke without fire, you know?’

‘Did you know he had a son?’

It took Duggan a while to say anything. Chamberlain stared at her, saw an expression of surprise that was no more than fleeting, and knew she was seeing an echo of the reaction from fifteen years before, when Jenny Duggan had been told that her husband had brutally murdered seven women. She could understand why officers at the time had been suspicious.

‘I knew there were always other women,’ Duggan said, finally. ‘I knew… but I pretended I didn’t. Told myself I was just being stupid.’ She removed her sunglasses and laid them on the table. ‘You can understand that, right?’

Chamberlain nodded. The less than lovely lies they told themselves and each other.

‘He kept all that out of the house, at least. He always came home.’

‘We’re looking for someone who would have been born around thirty years ago,’ Chamberlain said. ‘So…’

‘Just after we got married.’

‘Yes.’

Duggan nodded, thinking back, staring down at the last of the wine in her glass. ‘When we were trying for kids ourselves.’

Chamberlain waited.

‘There was a group of women he worked with at British Telecom,’ Duggan said. ‘A couple of them were married themselves, but they were a right bunch of slags. I went to a few nights out early on, but it was obvious partners weren’t really welcome. I wondered back then if he might be knocking around with any of them.’

‘Can you remember any names?’

Duggan said she couldn’t, even when Chamberlain pressed her. But she said that she knew someone who might be able to help and told Chamberlain about a friend of Raymond Garvey from when he’d first joined BT. ‘Malcolm Reece was a wanker,’ she said. ‘He used to come round and sit there while I waited on him and Ray, making sandwiches and fetching them beer from the fridge. Sometimes I’d catch him smirking, like he knew something I didn’t, and once I got so angry I deliberately spilled tea in his lap.’ She smiled, enjoying the memory, but not for long. ‘Even then I told myself I was imagining it, you know, about there being other women. Convinced myself that it was only Malcolm who was up to that kind of thing. He really fancied himself. I remember one time he grabbed my arse when Ray wasn’t looking.’

‘Sounds like a charmer,’ Chamberlain said.

Duggan nodded and drained her glass. ‘Malcolm never went short of female company, that’s for certain.’ She sat back, leaned back and let the sun wash over her face. ‘If anyone knows what Ray was up to back then, who with, I mean, he will.’

Chamberlain wrote down the name, along with the name of the street where Malcolm Reece had been living in the 1980s. She thanked Duggan for her time, especially as it had involved her taking the morning off work.

‘I told them I’d got someone coming round to fix the boiler,’ Duggan said. ‘I’ve got used to telling lies over the years.’

As she put her notebook back in her bag, Chamberlain said, ‘Why didn’t you and Ray have kids?’

‘We wanted to. I couldn’t.’ Duggan’s tone was matter of fact, but Chamberlain could see the pain slide into her eyes before she let her gaze drop to the tabletop. Even after so many years, hearing that Raymond Garvey had fathered a child with someone else had obviously hurt. Chamberlain neglected to say that others had paid a far higher price for her ex-husband’s infidelity.

‘Do you fancy getting some lunch?’ Duggan asked. She pointed across the road to a small Italian restaurant. ‘I mean, you probably need to get back.’

‘Well, I’m not in a mad rush.’ Chamberlain was hungry, and she had thought to buy an open return. And, insignificant as it was in the scheme of things, the pain had not quite left Jenny Duggan’s eyes.

Kitson had made an appointment to see Dave Spedding, the DCI on the Chloe Sinclair murder. He was now a superintendent based in Victoria, so after leaving the Sinclair house in Balham, Thorne dropped Kitson off, then carried on towards the Peel Centre.

Driving north through the centre of town, he could not stop thinking about the horribly mixed emotions with which Miriam and Alec Sinclair had discussed their daughter. He’d seen enough grief to know that time would eventually tip the balance, that the good memories would one day outweigh the dreadful ones. Slow but steady, it had been like that – was still like that – with his father. There would come a day – though with the man responsible for her death still at large, he had not felt able to tell her parents – when Chloe’s name need not be whispered and when mention of her would not drive the air from their lungs like a sucker punch.

When cardigans would not need to be pulled tight on warm days.

In slow traffic on the Euston Road, Thorne flicked through the radio channels, looking for something that would not annoy him too much. He stopped at a classical station, let his finger hover above the button, then moved it away. He could barely tell Beethoven from Black Sabbath, but the music was pleasant, and, despite the car’s stop-start progress, his mind began to drift.

But not very far…

He considered Emily Walker’s husband, and Catherine Burke’s good-for-nothing boyfriend. The father of Greg and Alex Macken and the parents of Chloe Sinclair.

Anthony Garvey’s other victims.

For reasons he could not fathom, Thorne imagined them strung along a rope, like life-sized beads on a living necklace. Stuck fast and twisting in the cold and dark, the bodies of their loved ones bloodless alongside them. One dead, one as good as, one dead, one as good as… the vast necklace straining with the weight of them, yet plenty of room still on the creaking rope.

Thorne turned up the music, put his foot down when the road opened up a little.

However their loss had caused each of them to behave – absurdly polite or obstreperous; howling or struck dumb – Thorne knew that the relatives of those Anthony Garvey had murdered were looking in his direction for a particular sort of comfort. Strong arms and warm words were easy enough to come by, but finding the man who was responsible for their pain was down to him and his sort. It would be one step, no more than that, but the first step to easing them from the knotted thread of grief.

He drove through Camden and Archway, up into Highgate as the rain started, then down into Finchley, passing within a few streets of where Emily Walker’s body had been found a little over two weeks before. Ten minutes later, approaching Barnet, he turned off the Great North Road, and shortly after that, on to the street where Nina Collins lived.

Thorne showed his ID to the officers in the patrol car that had been stationed outside since Debbie Mitchell had moved in with her friend, and rang the bell.

Collins came to the door and stared at him. ‘Well?’

‘Everything OK?’

She nodded towards the patrol car, flicked her cigarette into the bush at the side of the narrow path. ‘Apart from having to check with Starsky and Hutch every time I want to go and buy a packet of fags, yeah.’

‘It’s all right, Nina.’ Debbie Mitchell appeared behind Collins, who sighed and let her past before disappearing back inside.

‘I was just passing,’ Thorne said.

‘Good of you.’

‘Thought I’d check, you know… see how you were getting on.’

‘Well, I can’t go anywhere, and Jason’s missing school. Can’t be helped, though, right?’

‘I’m sorry, but you’ve always got the option to come into protective custody. It would probably be the best thing.’

She shook her head.

‘OK, well you can call if you’re worried about anything, you know that?’

Debbie Mitchell nodded and folded her arms. ‘Any joy?’

Thorne took a second or two. ‘We’ll let you know, I promise.’

Plenty of room still on the creaking rope.

Thorne’s mobile rang in his pocket. ‘Sorry.’ He saw the caller ID and walked a few steps away from the front door. ‘I need to take this.’

Holland was a little breathless, speaking from inside a fast car, raising his voice when necessary above those of the other officers travelling with him.

‘Where?’ Thorne asked, when Holland had said his piece. Listening, he glanced back towards Debbie Mitchell and saw the look on her face reacting to the expression on his own, saw her arms fall to her sides. ‘Sorry, Dave, say again.’

The rain was getting heavier, and as Thorne opened his mouth to talk, he heard her say, ‘There’s been another one, hasn’t there?’

He turned to look at her, with Holland still passing on the details, and spotted Jason Mitchell creeping through a doorway down the hall, peering past his mum to see what was happening.

Holland said, ‘Sir?’ and Debbie Mitchell said something else before taking a step back, out of the rain. For a few seconds Thorne remained silent. He could not tear his eyes away from the boy in the hall, wide-eyed and shiny-lipped in red-and-white pyjamas, his teeth sliding back and forth across his bottom lip.

MY JOURNAL

10 October

Not sure if they’ve found him yet, but if they haven’t, it can’t be very far away. My money’s on someone walking a dog. How many times do you read that? Or kids, playing where they shouldn’t. I was thinking that, if I had the chance, if I could somehow find out when it was going to happen, I might pop down to have a look at the fun and games. Mind you, unless you don’t have a television or you’re living in a cave, it’s not hard to imagine what it would be like. Dozens of them swarming about in their plastic masks and paper suits, lights and tents and tape, and some chain-smoking detective standing off to one side, shouting at his sidekick or moaning about his boss.

I can’t help thinking that if they’d made that sort of effort fifteen years ago, they might have figured out what was really happening a lot quicker. They might have saved a few women’s lives and might even have worked out that their ‘vicious killer’ was a man who could not help himself. Who was as much a victim as any of them.

They might have prevented all this.

Even if I did have the chance to get down there and join the gawkers, I’d almost certainly not get to see the body being brought out, but I bet they have an easier job shifting it than I did. It’s only when you’ve tried to move one that you discover why they call it a ‘dead weight’. Lugging him into and out of the car was a nightmare, so it was amazing to watch him slip into the water a bit later, when I’d found the right spot. Then, he looked almost weightless, drifting down into the murk. Graceful.

I’m not really sure why I’d like to go, if I’m honest. It certainly wouldn’t be about gloating, nothing like that. I suppose I just want to feel that I’m part of it. That might sound odd, considering that none of this would be happening were it not for me, but it’s easy to feel… removed from what’s going on. Stating the bloody obvious, I know, but I have to be one step ahead of the game and I can hardly pour my heart out to some stranger in the pub, can I?

It always makes me laugh, reading about ‘crazed loners’. Well, yes, and there’s usually a pretty good reason for it! Not that it isn’t a major drawback when it comes to humping those ‘dead weights’ around, mind you.

It’s not like I’m desperate for attention. I know, so what am I putting all this down on paper for? Well, I suppose that when everything’s finally wrapped up, I just want there to be some basic understanding of the whys and wherefores. Not that I’m expecting a great deal on that score, to be honest. There’s always the ghouls and the academics, I suppose, and the odd religious nutcase who comes on side with blather about forgiveness. But apart from them, the reaction will be so hysterical that almost nobody will give a toss about the reasoning.

All the more reason for me to get it down in black and white then, yes? Besides which, when the Nick Maiers of this world sit down to write their blockbusters, they’ll have a little more to go on than usual.

Hopefully they’ll make a better job of it than they did last time.

Shock, horror: it’s all gone very quiet in the newsagent’s these days. He’s too worried about keeping children out of his shop and it doesn’t take much to knock a story off the front page. Too many kids stabbing each other, too much sleaze. A celebrity scandal or a decent terrorist story will trump an honest-to-goodness murder every time.

Once they find this latest one, though, he’s bound to kick off again, waving his rolled-up tabloid like some sword of justice and ranting about how the streets aren’t safe. I’d better make a point of going in as soon as I can. With a bit of luck, the self-righteous old bugger might burst a blood vessel while he’s handing over my Bensons.

TWENTY-FOUR

‘On top of which, the victim appears to have had a sex change quite recently, and been murdered with a priceless, jewel-encrusted cross-bow. ’

‘What?’

‘Good, so you’re still with us, then?’

‘Sorry, Phil.’

Thorne was feeling the ill effects of sleep deprivation. He had not got home from the crime scene until late the night before, Louise dead to the world when he got in and dead to the world when he’d crept out again, into a street no less dark and damp than it had been four hours earlier.

By eleven in the morning he was ready to go back to bed, a heaviness having settled in his arms and legs. The cold, metal slabs of Hornsey Mortuary were looking every bit as inviting as the comfiest Slumberdown.

‘Pro-Plus is good,’ Hendricks said. ‘Or Red Bull, though I wouldn’t recommend the two together.’

‘Unless you’ve got a few cans stashed in one of your fridges, you’re not helping.’

‘It’s illegal in France, did you know that?’

‘What is?’

‘Red Bull. And in Norway and Denmark.’

‘The French drink absinthe. Doesn’t that stuff kill you?’

‘God knows, but it makes the heart grow fonder.’

It took Thorne a second or two to get it; even then, a sarcastic smirk used up a lot less energy than laughing.

Outside the post-mortem suite, Thorne studied the health and safety posters on the wall. A yawn provided the cover for an unusually delicate fart, as he read up on the ways to avoid AIDS and MRSA, while Hendricks stripped off his protective gown and surgical scrubs and tossed them into a communal bin. Then they walked along the narrow corridor towards the coroner’s office, which the pathologist on call could use whenever he was in the building.

‘Silent but deadly,’ Hendricks said.

For a few seconds, Thorne thought that his friend was talking about MRSA, but then he saw the grin. ‘Sorry.’

‘Dirty bastard…’

The office was fractionally larger than Pavesh Kambar’s but a lot more chaotic. A stack of green lever files was piled up on one of the three desks, and there were sticky notes on each computer screen. Hendricks pulled out a chair for Thorne, then dropped into his own. The Arsenal ‘Seventies Legends’ calendar above the desk was the sole demarcation of territory in the shared space, and Thorne could see that a fortnight from now Hendricks would be attending a seminar on ‘gene regulation’. The date was highlighted in red, beneath a picture of Charlie George, flat out after scoring the winner in the 1971 Cup Final.

Hendricks gestured towards the other desks. ‘Most of the people who work in here have pet hates as far as the “customers” go, and it’s always been water for me. What it does to the body. I’d take a jumper or a decent car accident any day.’

Thorne could not remember too many lovely murder scenes, but on arriving at the canal bank the previous afternoon even he had been grateful that he had not found time for lunch.

They had pulled the body out of the water near Camden Lock, within spitting distance of the shops and bars of the sprawling market, though as yet it was impossible to tell where it had gone in. It lay on the bank beneath a hastily erected tent: one hand formed into a fist, stiff around the expected sliver of X-ray; the other, pale palm upwards and purplish fingertips, as though the victim were black but wearing white fingerless gloves; a shoe missing, a bracelet of weed around the foot; and the belly straining with gas against a waterlogged denim jacket.

There was still a little water trapped inside the plastic bag, which now lay plastered to the man’s face, distorting what was left of it even further. Thorne thought it looked like an old cushion. The sodden stuffing leaking out, the material ragged and rotten.

‘Somewhere around thirty-six hours in the water,’ Hendricks said now. ‘Not that it would have been very pretty beforehand.’

‘Definitely dead before he went in, then?’

‘You saw his face, mate. That wasn’t the fish.’ Hendricks sat back in his chair. ‘And dead for a few hours before that, I reckon. Four or five at least.’

‘So he was killed somewhere else?’

‘Well, I don’t think the killer battered him, stuck a bag over his head and then stood around on the canal bank waving at passers-by.’

Thorne acknowledged the inanity of his question with a nod, already thinking that their best chance of working out where he was killed would normally have been provided by forensics. But that was virtually a dead end, those thirty-six hours in the water having ruined more than just the victim’s good looks. He blinked away an image of the tattered flesh inside the plastic bag. ‘Doesn’t seem much point in a personal ID,’ he said. ‘No birthmarks or anything, and I can’t see anyone recognising him.’

Hendricks shook his head. ‘Good job we don’t need one.’

‘First piece of luck we’ve had,’ Thorne said. ‘Mind you, he was only ever going to be one of three people.’

The treatment meted out to the dead man’s face made even a check of dental records tricky to say the least and the chances of getting any fingerprint or DNA samples from a reliable source to match with his corpse were almost non-existent. So, the items found on the body itself were liable to be as close as they would come to identify Anthony Garvey’s latest victim as Simon Walsh: an old driving licence in the back pocket of his jeans; a barely decipherable letter from his aunt tucked inside the protective wallet.

‘The aunt’s the next of kin, right?’

Thorne nodded.

‘How did she take it?’

‘Brigstocke got the shitty end of the stick on that one.’

‘I still don’t know how you lot do that,’ Hendricks said. ‘Cutting ’em up’s a doddle by comparison.’

‘I’d take a room full of widows and grieving parents any day.’

Hendricks shook his head, adamant. ‘I always know how the dead ones are going to react.’

Thorne was about to say, ‘You get used to it,’ but Hendricks knew him too well. Knew otherwise. ‘I think his aunt was pleased that Walsh still had her letter. That he thought about her, you know?’

There was a sudden clatter, and the squeak of rubber wheels outside the door as a trolley was pushed past. It faded quickly, lost beneath the echoing conversation of the mortuary attendants; an everyday cadence.

Hendricks turned to his computer, opened his email browser and scanned his inbox. Thorne watched him, the elaborate Celtic band tattooed around his biceps moving as he pushed the mouse around. ‘Fancy a couple of days in Gothenburg?’ Hendricks asked, peering at the screen. ‘A seminar on “image analysis in toxicological pathology” and all the pickled herring you can eat?’

‘Why change his method?’ Thorne asked. ‘Why did Walsh get it from the front? And why was he so violent this time?’

Hendricks spun around on his chair. ‘That’s a “no” to the pickled herring, then, is it?’

‘Come on.’

‘Maybe he’s getting cocky, thinks he’s good at it.’

‘Nobody’s arguing.’

‘So, he doesn’t feel like he’s got to sneak up. I don’t know. Maybe he was in a hurry, or didn’t have time to get to know this one, like he did with Macken.’ Hendricks thought for a few seconds. ‘Maybe he’s just getting angrier.’

‘Why kill him somewhere else, then dump him, though?’ Thorne said. ‘He’s never worried about the body being found before.’

‘Nobody said he didn’t want the body found. If he killed him outdoors, he’s pretty much got to dump him outdoors, I would have thought. Where else is he going to stick him?’

‘Yeah…’

‘Even if he’d wanted to use the same MO as before and kill him indoors, it sounds like Walsh might not have been living anywhere Garvey could have done it.’

‘Yeah… you’re probably right,’ Thorne said. He puffed out his cheeks and let the air go slowly, forcing himself to his feet, though he would have been happy to stay in his chair for a few more hours. Walking towards the door, saying he’d phone later and asking for the report to be faxed across as soon as it was ready, he was aware that Hendricks was still looking at him. Thorne knew that expression well enough – the eyes narrowed behind the glasses – and that Hendricks was concerned about him. Him and the case, him and Louise, he couldn’t be sure which, but he was certainly not going to ask.

In the end, Hendricks just said, ‘You’re positive about the Gothenburg trip? They do seriously good vodka in Sweden, you know. And they haven’t banned Red Bull.’

Back at Becke House, the atmosphere in the Incident Room was strange, as though the workforce at a call centre – which today it resembled even more than usual – had been incentivised with a mystery prize that everyone suspected would not be worth winning. The discovery of a body would always light a fire under a team, even one that was becoming used to it, but the urgency seemed somehow perfunctory. The sense of futility was there if you looked hard enough – in each glance from colleague to colleague, in every stab at a keyboard and snatch of a phone from its cradle.

As office manager, DS Samir Karim had been rallying the troops since the call out to Camden the previous afternoon. He found Thorne by the coffee machine, hunting fruitlessly for biscuits.

‘Headless chickens,’ Karim said.

Thorne slammed the door of the cupboard above the fridge. ‘Not a lot else we can do.’

As expected, the wizards at the FSS were twiddling their thumbs, any forensic evidence having been destroyed in the water. There was always the chance that a call might come in from a member of the public who had seen something, either at Camden Lock or at the murder scene – wherever that was – and there were plenty of officers out conducting a house-to-house, but save for the handful of trendy apartments a few hundred yards from where the body was found, it was not a residential area.

‘There was a chicken in America who lived for eighteen months without a head,’ Karim said.

‘What?’

‘Straight up. Fifty-odd years ago. One of my kids showed me on the internet. “Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken”. They used to feed it with an eyedropper straight down its neck and it went round fairs and circuses and stuff. A year and a half, running around with no head.’

‘We haven’t got that long,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke appeared on the far side of the Incident Room and beckoned him over. Thorne left Karim to continue the search for biscuits and followed the DCI into his office.

‘Just had a lovely chat on the phone with Simon Walsh’s aunt,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Usual bullshit and diplomacy. Telling her that her nephew was the victim of a random attack and trying to convince her that she really doesn’t want to come and have a look at him just yet.’

‘I’ve been talking about miraculous chickens,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke blinked and Thorne gave a small shake of the head to let him know that it wasn’t important. Brigstocke walked round and sat behind his desk. ‘So, as soon as we can find a piece of this poor sod’s jaw with any teeth left in it, we’ll be looking at dental records to confirm the ID. Got to find his dentist first, of course, so I’m not holding my breath.’ He suddenly seemed to notice Thorne’s appearance for the first time. ‘Bloody hell, I’m the one with three kids. How come you look so knackered?’

‘Mental exhaustion,’ Thorne said. ‘Exercising a brain the size of mine takes it out of you, not that you would know. It’s a bit harder than helping with the geography homework and making sure your kids have got the right packed lunches.’

Brigstocke laughed. ‘You wait until you’ve got one, mate.’

Thorne studied the dents along the metal edge of the desk, the dust on the shelves of the plastic in-tray. When he looked up again, Brigstocke was pushing a pile of newspapers towards him. ‘What?’

‘We’ve finally got pictures,’ Brigstocke said. He pointed as Thorne flicked through the early edition of the Evening Standard. ‘Page five… and they’ve gone into all the nationals as well. Working on London Tonight as we speak.’

Thorne looked at the black-and-white pictures of Graham Fowler and Andrew Dowd. Above, a headline read ‘POLICE HUNT FOR MISSING MEN’, while below were a few deliberately vague words about an ‘ongoing inquiry’ and a contact telephone number. The first picture was blurry and long out of date and the second, though it had been provided that day by Dowd’s wife, was hardly a definitive portrait. Thorne wondered if they would be of any use at all. Then again, he knew that, barring weddings, few people ever had professional photographs taken and that, if Louise were ever asked to provide a picture of him, there would be not much more than passport shots and a few holiday snaps.

He tossed the newspaper back on to the desk. ‘Nice that the superintendent finally saw sense. Bit late for Simon Walsh, mind.’

‘As a matter of fact, Jesmond was still against it.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘And a couple of the others who are always up his arse. Way he saw it, to run the pictures now, after Walsh has been killed, is almost an admission that we screwed up. Something people might focus on once everything’s done and dusted.’

‘We screwed up?’

Brigstocke raised a hand. ‘Luckily, Johns overruled him, so now we can all relax and keep our fingers crossed.’

‘Is that the best we can do?’

‘It’s not like we’ve got leads coming out of our ears, is it? We’re no further on after the Walsh murder, and I can’t see it panning out with your mate Carol.’

Chamberlain had called an hour earlier. Once Thorne had told her about the discovery of the latest body, she’d described her meeting with Ray Garvey’s ex-wife and told him about Malcolm Reece, the old friend she was already trying to track down. Thorne had said he would come to the hotel and catch up in person if he could find the time. He had encouraged her, as gently as he could, to work a little quicker.

‘Maybe you should pay me a bit more.’ Chamberlain had sounded miffed. ‘Or get me an assistant.’

‘We’re stretched for cash as it is,’ Thorne had said. ‘It was you or the hypnotherapist…’

Brigstocke stood and walked around his desk. He gestured towards the pile of newspapers. ‘I reckon those phones are going to go mad this afternoon.’

‘Let’s just hope we don’t have too many nutters ringing.’

‘We should get a decent lunch inside us,’ Brigstocke said. ‘It might be a long day.’

Thorne nodded. He had not eaten breakfast and needed something to soak up all the coffee he had been pouring down his throat.

‘With any luck, the Oak might have that lamb casserole on again.’ Brigstocke opened the door. ‘The one you snaffled the other day.’

Thorne said that sounded good, but thought they should probably be eating something a little less solid. Something that could be taken through an eyedropper, straight down the neck.

There had been plenty of calls that afternoon; and, despite Thorne’s worst fears, a few had sounded promising. There had been more than one sighting of Graham Fowler, two within half a mile of each other in the area between Piccadilly and Covent Garden. A woman who ran a bed and breakfast in Ambleside, a market town ten miles south of Keswick in the Lake District, claimed that a man who might have been Andrew Dowd had been staying with her for a few days earlier that week, before moving on suddenly. She seemed more interested in the as-yet-unsettled bill than anything else.

There had been no shortage of work, the mood in the office a little more positive, but Thorne still managed to get back to Kentish Town before seven and was pleased that Louise had managed to do the same. She was brighter and more talkative than she had been all week. She told him about the latest developments in the case she was working, while he made them both poached eggs and opened the bottle of wine he’d picked up on the way home.

They watched half an old episode of The Professionals on G.O.L.D. while they ate, then listened to The Essential George Jones – her choice – while Thorne cleared up and Louise leafed through a couple of reports for the following day. If she was still feeling fragile, she was showing no sign of it. She hummed along to ‘Why Baby Why’ and ‘White Lightning’ and seemed happy enough during ‘The Door’ – one of several George Jones numbers that Thorne himself could rarely listen to without swallowing down the lump in his throat.

When they were getting ready for bed, she said, ‘I had a long chat with Lucy Freeman today.’

The pregnant woman in Louise’s office. Thorne threw his dirty shirt into the laundry basket, sat on the edge of the bed to remove his trousers.

‘I told her I’d got a friend who’s just lost a baby.’

‘What did you do that for?’

Louise shrugged; she didn’t know or it didn’t matter. She sat in front of the small mirror on the dressing-table in just knickers and a T-shirt. ‘Lucy was really… nice, actually.’

‘That’s good.’ Good that the other woman was nice. Good that Louise had the conversation and that it went well.

‘Your hormones get all mixed up afterwards, which is why I’ve been getting upset, moody, whatever.’

‘You’ve every reason to be upset.’

‘I’m just saying. That’s what Lucy was talking about. She’s also got a friend who lost a baby-’

‘One in four pregnancies, that’s what it said in your leaflet.’

‘And she didn’t feel right again until her due date.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Not properly, anyway. Lucy said that it only really changes once the date you were due to have the baby comes and goes. Said it was just like a switch being thrown. That’s when you can… move on.’

Thorne nodded, doing the maths as he removed his underpants.

‘Thirty-one weeks and I’ll be right as rain.’

Thorne heard something in her laugh; enough to know that he should go to her. ‘Come here…’

She got up and turned into his arms, pressed her face into him. He could feel the tension in her, the effort to keep it together.

‘It’s my fault,’ she said. Her mouth moved against his chest. ‘She was only trying to help.’

‘She didn’t though, did she?’

‘Not a lot, no.’ The half laugh again, and then her face was open and moving towards Thorne’s, and by the time they were on the bed she was already pulling the T-shirt up over her head.

‘Things are still a bit… delicate downstairs,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to find other things to do.’

Thorne grinned.

‘Not that,’ Louise said.

There was nothing too soft or subtle about the things they did to please each other, and despite the emotion that had been crackling between them, it still felt closer to sex than making love.

Like something they both needed.

The ringing of Thorne’s mobile pulled him from a dream in which he was moving fast across the surface of very blue water. He looked at his watch in the light from the small screen: 6.12 a.m. It was Russell Brigstocke’s name on the display.

‘You’re up early.’

‘Some things are worth getting out of bed for,’ Brigstocke said. ‘I’m in such a good mood I might pop back between the sheets, start Mrs Brigstocke’s day off with a bang.’

Thorne thought about the night before and felt himself start to stiffen. He had hoped that the guilt might have gone, but it was still there, solid and stubborn in his chest.

‘Let’s have it then.’

‘Graham Fowler walked into Charing Cross station at eleven o’clock last night with a copy of the Standard he’d been planning to sleep on.’

‘Bloody hell!’

‘It gets better,’ Brigstocke said. ‘About half an hour ago, they took a call from Andrew Dowd in the Incident Room. Looks like he finally turned on his phone and picked up our message.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Kendal,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Where the mint cake comes from. Someone’s on the way up there to get him.’

Careful not to wake Louise, Thorne pushed back the duvet and stood naked by the side of the bed in the dark. ‘So, Jesmond and his cronies might get away with it after all.’

‘We all might.’

‘Jammy bastards.’

Brigstocke laughed. ‘Us or them?’

‘I was talking about Fowler and Dowd,’ Thorne said.