Buried

LUKE

‘I suppose all I’m really saying is try not to worry. OK, Mum? That you don’t have to, I mean. Even sitting here saying that, I know how pointless it is, because it’s something you’ve always done. Juliet and me reckon that if you weren’t worried about something, you’d probably feel odd, or under the weather, like part of you wasn’t working properly. You’d be disconcerted. Like when you know there’s something important you’ve forgotten to do, or when you can’t remember where you’ve put your keys, you know? If you weren’t worried, we’d be worried that you weren’t!

‘It’s all right, though. I’m doing pretty well. Better than “pretty well” actually. I’m not saying it’s five-star or anything, but the food could be a damn sight worse, and they’re being fairly nice to me. And it’s only the second most uncomfortable bed I’ve ever slept in. Remember when we stayed in that shitty guest house in Eastbourne that time, when Juliet had her hockey tournament, and the bed felt like it had rocks in it? I’m even managing to get some sleep, amazingly enough.

‘I don’t really know what else to say. What else I’m supposed to say…

‘Except… If you want to video the comedy shows I like, that’d be cool. And don’t rent my room out straight away, and please tell everyone at school not to be too devastated. See? Well fed, sleeping OK, and I’ve still got my sense of humour. So, really, there’s nothing to get yourself worked up about, all right, Mum? I’m fine. Tell you what – when this is all finally sorted out, how about that PS2 game I’ve been going on about? Can’t blame a lad for trying, can you?

‘Look, there’s loads of other things to say, but I’d better not go on too long, and you know the stuff I mean anyway. Mum? You know what I’m trying to say, yeah?

‘Right. That’s it…’

The boy’s eyes slide away from the camera, and a man carrying a syringe steps quickly towards him. He sits up, tenses as the man reaches across, driving the bag down over the boy’s head in the few seconds before the picture disappears.

TUESDAY
ONE

There was humour, of course there was; off colour usually, and downright black when the occasion demanded it. Still, the jokes had not exactly been flying thick and fast of late, and none had flown in Tom Thorne’s direction.

But this was as good a laugh as he’d had in a while.

‘Jesmond asked for me?’ he said.

Russell Brigstocke leaned back in his chair, enjoying the surprise that his shock announcement had certainly merited. It was an uncertain world. The Metropolitan Police Service was in a permanent state of flux, and, while precious little could be relied upon, the less than harmonious relationship between DI Tom Thorne and the Chief Superintendent of the Area West Murder Squad was a reassuring constant. ‘He was very insistent.’

‘The pressure must be getting to him,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s losing the plot.’

Now it was Brigstocke’s turn to see the funny side. ‘Why am I suddenly thinking about pots and kettles?’

‘I’ve no idea. Maybe you’ve got a thing about kitchenware.’

‘You’ve been going on about wanting something to get stuck into. So-’

‘With bloody good reason.’

Brigstocke sighed, nudged at the frames of his thick, black glasses.

It was warm in the office, with spring kicking in but the radiators still chucking out heat at December levels. Thorne stood and slipped off his brown leather jacket. ‘Come on, Russell, you know damn well that I haven’t been given anything worth talking about for near enough six months.’

Six months since he’d worked undercover on the streets of London, trying to catch the man responsible for kicking three of the city’s homeless to death. Six months spent writing up domestics, protecting the integrity of evidence chains, and double-checking pre-trial paperwork. Six months kept out of harm’s way.

‘This is something that needs getting stuck into,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Quickly.’

Thorne sat back down and waited for the DCI to elaborate.

‘It’s a kidnapping-’ Brigstocke held up a hand as soon as Thorne began to shake his head; ploughed on over the groaning from the other side of his desk. ‘A sixteen-yearold boy, taken from outside a school in north London three days ago.’

The shake of the head became a knowing nod. ‘Jesmond doesn’t want me on this at all, does he? It’s sod all to do with what I can do, or what I might be good at. He’s just been asked to lend the Kidnap Unit a few bodies, right? So he does what he’s told like a good team player, and he gets me out of the way at the same time. Two birds with one stone.’

A spider plant stood on one corner of Brigstocke’s desk, its dead leaves drooping across a photograph of his kids. He snapped off a handful of the browned and brittle stalks and began crushing them between his hands. ‘Look, I know you’ve been pissed off and I know you’ve had good reason to be…’

‘Bloody good reason,’ Thorne said. ‘I’m feeling much better than I was, you know that. I’m… up for it.’

‘Right. But until the decision gets taken to give you a more active role on the team here, I thought you might appreciate the chance to get yourself “out of the way”. And it wouldn’t just be you, either. Holland’s been assigned to this as well…’

Thorne stared out of the window, across the grounds of the Peel Centre towards Hendon and the grey ribbon of the North Circular beyond. He’d seen prettier views, but not for some time.

‘Sixteen?’

‘His name’s Luke Mullen.’

‘So the kid was taken… Friday, right? What’s been happening for the last three days?’

‘You’ll be fully briefed at the Yard.’ Brigstocke glanced down at a sheet of paper on the desktop. ‘Your contact on the Kidnap Unit is DI Porter. Louise Porter.’

Thorne knew that Brigstocke was on his side; that he was caught between a loyalty to his team and a responsibility to the brass above him. These days, anyone of his rank was one part copper to nine parts politician. Many at Thorne’s own level worked in much the same way, and Thorne would fight tooth and nail to avoid going down the same dreary route…

‘Tom?’

Brigstocke had certainly said the right things. The boy’s age in itself was enough to spark Thorne’s interest. The victims of those who preyed on children for sexual gratification were usually far younger. It wasn’t that older children were not targeted, of course, but such abuse was often institutionalised or, most tragically of all, took place within the home itself. For a sixteen-year-old to be taken off the street was unusual.

‘Trevor Jesmond getting involved means there’s pressure to get a result,’ Thorne said. If a shrug and a half smile could be signs of enthusiasm, then he looked mustard-keen. ‘I reckon I could do with a bit of pressure at the minute.’

‘You haven’t heard all of it yet.’

‘I’m listening.’

So Brigstocke enlightened him, and when it was finished and Thorne got up to leave, he looked out of the window one last time. The buildings sat opposite, brown and black and dirty-white; office blocks and warehouses, with pools of dark water gathered on their flat roofs. Thorne thought they looked like the teeth in an old man’s mouth.

Before the car had reached the gates on its way out of the car park, Thorne had slotted a Bobby Bare CD into the player, taken one look at Holland’s face and swiftly ejected it again. ‘I should make sure there’s always a Simply Red album in the car,’ Thorne said. ‘So as not to offend your sensibilities.’

‘I don’t like Simply Red.’

‘Whoever.’

Holland gestured towards the CD panel on the dash. ‘I don’t mind some of your stuff. It’s just all that twangy guitar shit…’

Thorne turned the car on to Aerodrome Road and accelerated towards Colindale tube. Once they hit the A5 it would be a straight run through Cricklewood, Kilburn and south into town.

Having criticised Thorne’s choice of music, Holland proceeded to score two out of two by turning his sarcastic attentions to the car itself. The yellow BMW – a 1971 three-litre CS – gave Thorne a good deal of pride and pleasure, but to DS Dave Holland it was little more than the starting point for an endless series of ‘old banger’ jokes.

For once, though, Thorne did not rise to the bait. There was little anyone could have done to make his mood much worse. ‘The boy’s old man is an ex-copper,’ he said. He jabbed at the horn as a scooter swerved in front of him, spoke as if he were describing something extremely distasteful. ‘Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent Anthony Mullen.’

Holland’s dirty-blond hair was longer than it had been for a while. He pushed it back from his forehead. ‘So?’

‘So, it’s a bloody secret-handshake job, isn’t it? He’s calling in favours from his old mates. Next thing you know, we’re getting shunted across to another unit.’

‘It’s not like there was anything better to do, though, is it?’ Holland said.

The look from Thorne was momentary, but it made its point firmly enough.

‘For either of us, I mean. Not a lot of bodies on the books at the moment.’

‘Right. At the moment. You never know when something major’s going to come in though.’

‘Sounds almost like you’re hoping.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Like you don’t want to miss out…’

Thorne said nothing. His eyes drifted to the wing mirror, stayed there as he flicked up the indicator and waited to pull out.

Neither spoke again for several minutes. Rain had begun to streak the windows, through which Kilburn was giving way to the rather more gentrified environment of Maida Vale.

‘Did you get any more from the DCI?’ Holland asked.

Thorne shook his head. ‘He knows as much as we do. We find out the rest when we get there.’

‘You had much to do with SO7 before?’

Like many officers, Holland had not yet got used to the fact that SO units had officially been renamed SCD units, now that they were part of what had become known as the Specialist Crime Directorate. Most people still used the old abbreviations, knowing full well that the brass would change the name again soon enough, next time they were short of something to do. SO7 was the Specialist Operations department whose component command units dealt with everything from contract killings to serious drug crime. Aside from the Kidnap Unit, these OCUs included the Flying Squad, the Hostage and Extortion Team, and the Projects Team, with whom Thorne had worked on the joint gangland operation that had ended so badly the previous year.

‘Not the Kidnap Unit, mercifully. They’re high-flyers; they don’t like to mingle with the likes of us. They like to stay a bit mysterious.’

‘Well, I suppose there has to be an element of secrecy, bearing in mind what they do. They have to be a bit more discreet than the rest of us.’

Thorne looked unconvinced. ‘They fancy themselves.’ He leaned across and turned on the radio, tuned it in to Talk Sport.

‘So this bloke Mullen knows Jesmond, does he?’

‘Known him for years.’

‘Same sort of age, then?’

‘I think Mullen’s a few years older,’ Thorne said. ‘They worked together on an old AMIP unit south of the river somewhere. The DCI reckons Mullen was the one responsible for bringing Jesmond on. Pulled our Trevor up through the ranks.’

‘Right…’

‘Remind me to punch the fucker, would you?’

Holland smiled, but looked uncomfortable.

‘What?’

‘Someone’s kidnapped his son…’ Holland said.

On the final stretch of the Edgware Road, approaching Marble Arch, the traffic began to snarl up. Thorne grew increasingly frustrated, thinking that if the congestion charge had made a difference, it was only to people’s wallets. On the radio, they were talking about the game Spurs were due to play the following evening. The studio expert said they were favourites to take three points off Fulham, after three wins on the bounce.

‘That’s the kiss of bloody death,’ Thorne said.

Holland was clearly still thinking about what had been said a few minutes earlier. ‘I think you just see these things differently,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve got kids, you know?’

Thorne grunted.

‘If something happens to somebody else’s-’

‘You think I was being insensitive?’ Thorne asked. ‘What I said.’

‘Just a bit.’

‘If I was really being insensitive, I’d say it was divine retribution.’ He glanced across and raised an eyebrow. This time, the smile he received in return was genuine, but it still seemed to sit less easily on Holland’s face than Thorne might once have expected.

Holland had never been quite as fresh-faced, as green and keen, as Thorne remembered; but when he’d been drafted on to Thorne’s team six years before as a twenty-five-year-old DC, there had certainly been a little more enthusiasm. And there had been belief. Of course, he and his girlfriend had been through domestic upheavals since then: there’d been the affair with a fellow officer who’d later been murdered on duty; then the birth of his daughter, who would be two years old later in the year.

And there’d been a good many bodies.

An ever-expanding gallery of those you only ever got to know once their lives had been taken from them. People whose darkest intimacies might be revealed to you, but whose voices you would never hear, whose thoughts you could never be privy to. An exhibition of the dead, running alongside another of the murderous living. And of those left behind; the pickers-up of lives.

Thorne and Holland, and others who came into contact with such things, were not defined by violence and grief. They did not walk and wake with it, but neither were they immune. It changed everything, eventually.

The belief became blunted…

‘How’s everything at home, Dave?’

For a second or two, Holland looked surprised, then pleased, before he closed up, just a little. ‘It’s good.’

‘Chloe must be getting big.’

Holland nodded, relaxing. ‘She’s changing every five minutes. Discovering stuff, you know? Doing something different every time I get home. She’s really into music at the moment, singing along with whatever’s on.’

‘Nothing with twangy guitars, though.’

‘I keep thinking I’m missing it all. Doing this…’

Thorne guessed there was little point in asking about Holland’s girlfriend. Sophie was not exactly Thorne’s greatest fan. He knew very well that his name was far more likely to be shouted than spoken in the small flat Holland and Sophie shared in Elephant & Castle; that he might well have caused a fair number of the arguments in the first place.

The BMW finally hit thirty again on Park Lane. From here, they would continue down to Victoria, then cut across to St James’s and the Yard.

Holland turned to Thorne as they slowed at Hyde Park Corner. ‘Oh, by the way, Sophie told me to say “hello”,’ he said.

Thorne nodded, and nosed the car into the stream of traffic that was rushing around the roundabout.

This was not his favourite place.

It was here that he’d spent a few hideous weeks the year before; perhaps the most miserable he’d ever endured. Back then, when he’d been taken off the team, and given what was euphemistically called ‘gardening leave’, Thorne had known very well that he wasn’t being himself, that he hadn’t been coping since the death of his father. But hearing it from the likes of Trevor Jesmond had been something else; being told he was ‘dead wood’ and casually wafted away like a bad smell. It was the undercover job that had thankfully provided a means of escape, and the subsequent weeks spent sleeping on the streets had been infinitely preferable to those he’d spent stewing in a windowless cupboard at New Scotland Yard.

As they walked towards the entrance, Thorne scowled at a group of tourists taking photographs of each other in front of the famous revolving sign.

‘What did you do when you were here?’ Holland asked.

Thorne took out his warrant card and showed it to one of the officers on duty at the door. ‘I tried to work out how many bottles would constitute a fatal dose of Tippex…’

Kidnapping and Specialist Investigations was one of a number of SO units based in Central 3000, a huge, open-plan office that took up half of the fifth floor. Each unit’s area was colour-coded, its territory marked out by a rectangular flag suspended from the low ceiling: the Tactical Firearms Unit was black; the Surveillance Unit was green; the Kidnap Unit was red. Elsewhere, other colours indicated the presence of the Technical Support and Intelligence units, either of which could make use of an enormous bank of TV monitors, each one able to tap into any CCTV camera in the metropolitan area or broadcast live pictures directly from any Met helicopter.

Thorne and Holland took it all in. ‘And we were wondering why we couldn’t afford a new kettle at our place,’ Holland said.

A short, dark-haired woman rose from a desk in the red area and introduced herself as DI Louise Porter. Holland ran the kettle line past her during the minute or two of small talk. He looked pleased that she seemed to find it funny. Thorne was impressed with the effort she put in to pretending.

Porter quickly ran through the set-up of the team, one of three on the unit. It was a more or less standard structure. She was one of two DIs heading things up, with a dozen or so other officers, all working to a detective chief inspector. ‘DCI Hignett told me to apologise for not being here to meet you himself,’ Porter said, ‘but he’ll catch up with you later. And it’s three DIs now, of course.’ She nodded towards Thorne. ‘Thanks for mucking in.’

‘No problem,’ Thorne said.

‘Not that you had any choice though, right?’

‘None at all.’

‘Sorry about that, but we can always do with the help.’ She glanced down. ‘Are you OK?’

Thorne stopped moving from foot to foot, realised that he was grimacing. ‘Dodgy back,’ he said. ‘Must have twisted something.’ The truth was that he’d been suffering badly for some time, the pain down his left leg far worse after any period spent sitting in a car or, God forbid, at a desk. At first he’d put it down to something muscular – a hangover from the nights spent sleeping outdoors, perhaps – but now he suspected that there was a more deep-seated problem. It would sort itself out, but in the meantime he was getting through a lot of painkillers.

Porter introduced Thorne and Holland to those members of the team who were around. Most of them seemed friendly enough. They all looked busy.

‘Obviously a lot of the lads are out and about,’ Porter said. ‘Chasing up what we laughably call “leads”.’

Holland leaned back against an empty desk. ‘At least you’ve got some.’

‘Just the one, really. A couple of witnesses saw Luke Mullen get into a car on the afternoon he disappeared.’

‘Number plate?’ Thorne asked.

‘Bits of it. Blue or black. And it might be a Passat. This is from the other kids at the school, all just finished for the day, too busy talking about music or skateboards or whatever the hell they do.’

Holland grinned. ‘Not got any yourself, then?’

‘“Get into a car”,’ Thorne said. ‘So it didn’t look like he was being forced?’

‘He got into the car with a young woman. Attractive. I think the other boys were too busy eyeing her up to pay much attention to the car.’

‘Maybe Luke had a new girlfriend,’ Holland suggested.

‘That’s what some of the boys think, certainly. They’d seen him with her before.’

‘So, isn’t it possible?’ Thorne asked. ‘He’s a sixteen-year-old boy. Maybe he’s just buggered off to a hotel somewhere with a glamorous older woman.’

‘It’s possible.’ Porter began to gather a few things from her desk, then grabbed a handbag from the back of a chair. ‘But this was last Friday. Why hasn’t he been in touch?’

‘He’s probably got better things to do.’

Porter cocked her head, acknowledging a theory that she had clearly dismissed. ‘Who goes away for a dirty weekend with nothing but a school blazer and a sweaty games kit?’ She let it sink in, then walked past Thorne and Holland towards the door, leaving them in little doubt that they were expected to follow.

Holland waited until she was out of earshot. ‘Well, she doesn’t seem to fancy herself too much…’

Outside, in the lobby, another member of the team stepped out of the lift. Porter introduced the woman to Thorne and Holland before the three of them took her place. Porter exchanged a few quick words with her colleague, then punched a button and glanced round at Thorne as the doors closed. ‘She’s one of two family liaison officers who’ve been at the house on rotation since we were brought in. You’ll meet the other one when we get there.’

‘Right.’

Porter’s eyes shifted to the display of illuminated numbers above the doors. Thorne wondered if she was always this anxious; in this much of a hurry.

‘I want to get a good couple of hours with the Mullens today if I can. These first few conversations with the family are the important ones, obviously.’

It took a second or two to sink in. ‘“First few”?’ Thorne said.

Porter turned to look at him.

‘I’m not clear about-’

‘We only got brought into this yesterday afternoon,’ she said. ‘The kidnap wasn’t reported straight away.’

Thorne caught a look from Holland, who was obviously every bit as confused as he was. ‘Was there some kind of threat?’ he asked. ‘Were the family told not to involve the police?’

‘Whoever took Luke has made no contact with the family whatsoever.’

The lift reached the ground floor and the doors opened, but Thorne made no move to go anywhere.

‘At the moment, your guess is as good as mine,’ Porter said.

‘And what would that be?’

‘What’s the point in guessing? The simple fact is that Luke Mullen was kidnapped on Friday afternoon, but for reasons best known to themselves, his parents decided to wait a couple of days before telling anybody.’

CONRAD

Say you’re a dwarf, OK?

It doesn’t mean that you only fancy other dwarves, does it? That you can’t be excited about a fumble with someone you might have to stand on a chair to have a proper snog with? Actually, it’s normal to want to be with someone different, isn’t it? Just to see what it would be like.

He knew damn well that he was meant to be with a woman who worked on the till in Asda and wore fake Burberry and knock-off perfume, so when Amanda had come sniffing round, deliberately dropping her aitches and knocking back the alcopops like there was no tomorrow, he’d been in there like a rat up a drainpipe. Why wouldn’t he? He’d always fantasised about a bit of posh, and even though he knew deep down she was only slumming it, everything had seemed to be working out very nicely.

Recently, though, he’d started to feel like something was missing, and it wasn’t just the sex falling off a bit, which it always did anyway a few months in. It was more than that. He’d started to feel like everything was a bit unreal. She could call herself Mandy all she liked, and dress down, but she would always be an ‘Amanda’ and he would never really be in her league when it came to breeding or brains. Not that he was stupid; far from it. He knew what was what, pretty much. But when it came to doing stuff, to making a living and all the rest of it, he tended to go where other people took him. That was fine, though, because he knew his limitations. Which made him clever enough, he reckoned.

Now, though, he’d started to think about other women. Nobody specific; just other types of woman. His types. He’d started to drift off, even in the middle of bloody important stuff like what to do with the kid and what have you, and imagine himself with women who had dirty bra straps and read crappy magazines. He thought about women who made a bit more noise in bed and treated him properly and didn’t tell him where to put his fingers. It made him feel guilty at first, but lately he’d been telling himself that she probably felt exactly the same way. She probably dreamed about rugger-buggers called Giles or Nigel when they were doing it and maybe his accent was starting to put her teeth on edge as much as hers was doing to his…

Maybe it was all down to this business with the kid. It had seemed like easy money at the time and it hadn’t taken long to agree to it, but, Christ, it was a damn sight more stressful than knocking over some old duffer or talking your way into a pensioner’s flat. Both of them were acting a bit funny, and maybe, when this was all over and they had some real cash to play with, he’d start to feel more like himself again. Maybe they could get away somewhere.

What was he thinking? It would make bloody good sense to get away somewhere. And maybe then he’d stop thinking about those other girls…

When Amanda came into the room five minutes later, he thought for one horrible minute that she could see what he’d been thinking. That it was as obvious as the semi in his lap that he’d swiftly covered up with a Daily Star. But everything was cool. She asked him if he was OK and kissed him on the top of his head when he asked her the same thing. She walked over and helped herself to one of his fags, then had a quick look to see if there was anything decent on the box.

Then she sat on the edge of the bed and began to talk about what they were going to do with the boy.

TWO

‘He’s not exactly a baby, is he?’ Holland leaned forward, dropped a hand on to each of the front headrests. ‘They were probably just waiting for him to come waltzing back home again.’

‘That’s more or less how they explained it.’

‘He might have done this sort of thing before.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Porter said. She took the unmarked Saab Turbo past a silver 4×4, glared hard at the driver, who was talking animatedly into her mobile phone. ‘But like I said, we haven’t spoken to the parents that much yet. Hopefully we’ll find out a bit more over the next couple of hours.’

‘Presuming we get there in one piece.’ Thorne was sitting a little stiffly in the passenger seat, unnerved to discover that Porter was just as impatient behind the wheel as she had been back in the office. Her frequent glances into the rear-view mirror had more to do with the purpose of their journey than it did with road safety.

‘Obviously, any kind of threat and we wouldn’t be interviewing the family at home. We’d stay well clear; find some way of talking to them on neutral territory.’

‘That can’t always be easy,’ Holland said.

‘It isn’t, but if you have to visit the home address, there are ways and means. You just need to be a bit inventive.’

‘What, like disguises and stuff?’

Thorne turned, and pulled a face at Holland. ‘Disguises? How old are you, six?’

‘Right,’ Porter said. ‘We’ve got a big dressing-up box back at the office. Gas Board uniforms and postmen’s outfits.’ She took a long look at the rear-view. ‘There’s no reason to believe that visiting the Mullens at home places Luke in any kind of extra danger, but there are procedures you follow whatever the circumstances. You make sure the lid stays on. You make sure there’s no uniformed involvement.’ Another check in the mirror. ‘And you keep your bloody eyes open.’

The crash course in kidnap investigation techniques had lasted from the car park at the Yard as far as Arkley – a leafy Hertfordshire suburb a dozen or so miles north of the centre of London. It had become clear that the unit’s protocols were infinitely flexible and that everything happened much faster than elsewhere. Though kidnapping was little different from murder – in that the unit would never have any such thing as a ‘typical’ case – Thorne was surprised at the enormous range of crimes that fell within its remit. Though the majority of kidnaps were subject to a press blackout and so never became public knowledge, there could be no doubt that it was a growth industry.

‘And a relatively safe one for the kidnappers,’ Porter said. She told them that over half of all her cases involved hardcore foreign drug gangs, distributors and smugglers; that fewer than one in five ever resulted in a conviction. ‘Most of the victims never testify, the ungrateful fuckers. We rescued an old guy last year who’d been tied up in a loft and tortured for a couple of weeks. They cut both the poor bastard’s ears off and he still wouldn’t give evidence in case others in the gang came after him.’

‘You can understand him being scared,’ Holland said. ‘He wouldn’t hear them coming.’

Thorne sighed, shifted in his seat. ‘Sounds like you’re all getting plenty of overtime,’ he said.

Porter grunted her agreement. ‘Heavy-duty dealers are getting lifted every other week. Yardies, Russians, Albanians, whatever. It’s a quick way of scoring cash or merchandise – putting the shits up a rival. We’re not short of jobs, but maybe the wheels don’t turn quite so quickly when it comes to some of our less than law-abiding kidnap victims.’

Thorne knew very well what she meant. He’d worked on a case the year before; the case during which his father had died. The squad, and Thorne in particular, had found themselves caught in the middle of a vicious gang war. He explained to Porter that one side had been involved in a people-smuggling racket; that though a fair number of gang members had died, few could bring themselves to care a great deal, or argue that the city wasn’t a better place without them.

‘That stuff’s down to us, too,’Porter said. ‘If people are brought here and then used as slave labour, they’ve basically become hostages. They’re held against their will and usually there’s an implied threat to their families back at home.’ She slowed the car to a stop a hundred yards from a driveway. ‘It’s also the main reason why people are queuing up to work on the unit,’ she continued. ‘So far this year I’ve been to China, Turkey, the Ukraine. It’s all business class, and we get the air miles.’

Holland sucked his teeth. ‘I went to Aberdeen to interview a rapist once…’

Porter took a good look at a Jag that drove past, waited a minute or two after it had disappeared around a corner, before moving the Saab slowly forward and turning it on to the driveway.

‘This kind of case isn’t common, though, is it?’ Thorne asked. ‘Snatching civilians?’

She shook her head. ‘You can get the family of a bank employee being held until the safe’s opened, but even that’s pretty rare. You might get one like this in Spain and Italy every so often, but it’s like rocking-horse shit here. Thank God.’

‘So why no ransom with Luke Mullen?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘I still don’t see why it has to be a kidnap.’

‘It doesn’t. There are other possibilities.’

‘Like Luke going off voluntarily with the woman in the blue car?’

‘Or just running away,’ Porter said. ‘But parents never like to admit that their precious kid might do that.’

Holland released his seatbelt. ‘Like no parent ever thinks their kids are stupid, or ugly.’

‘You’ve got kids?’

‘I’ve got a little girl.’ Holland grinned. ‘She’s gorgeous and very bright.’

‘Maybe this isn’t about money at all,’ Thorne said.

Porter appeared to think about it as she killed the engine. ‘It’s certainly… unusual.’

‘Who knows…’ – Thorne opened the door and swung his legs out, let out a groan of pain as he lifted himself upright – ‘if there had been a ransom demand, maybe the parents might have got on the phone a bit quicker.’

Holland got out and walked towards him, looking up at the detached, mock-Tudor house where Tony Mullen and his wife lived. ‘It’s a big place,’ he said.

Porter locked the car and the three of them began moving together towards the front door. ‘It’s probably feeling that little bit bigger just at the moment,’ she said.

A few minutes earlier, Thorne had seen the relief flood into Tony Mullen’s face, but it had been purely temporary. Already, sitting across from Thorne in an uncomfortable-looking armchair, a damp pallor of desperation was smearing itself back across his features; the look of a man bracing himself.

He’d been at the front door before they were, staring out at the three of them as if he were urgently trying to read something in how they walked; to work out what they had come to tell him by the way they approached the house. Porter had shaken her head. A small movement, but it had been enough.

Mullen had let out a long breath and closed his eyes for a second or two. There was something approaching a smile when he opened them again, when he moved the hand that had been flat and white against the door frame and held it out, palm skyward, towards them.

‘Your guts just go into your boots,’ he said. ‘Whenever the phone goes or the bloody doorbell rings, especially if it’s you lot. It’s like feeling the punch coming. You know?’

The introductions were made there on the doorstep.

‘Trevor Jesmond said he’d sort out a few extra pairs of hands,’ Mullen said. He touched Thorne’s arm. ‘Make sure you say “thanks” to him, will you?’

Thorne wondered if Jesmond had told Mullen what he really thought about the man those extra hands belonged to. If he had, Thorne guessed it was probably a less than honest assessment. If the request for help had come directly from Mullen himself, Jesmond would hardly want his old friend thinking he was palming him off with damaged goods. Thorne decided it was a subject best left alone; that he should keep things light for as long as it was appropriate.

He looked at Mullen. The man had less grey in his hair than Thorne himself did, and, though the circumstances had clearly taken their toll, the rest of him looked in pretty good shape, too. ‘Well, either you’re a lot older than you look or you retired early,’ he said.

Mullen seemed taken aback for a second, but his tone was friendly enough as he led the three of them into a gloomy hallway. ‘Can’t you be both?’

‘It’s certainly what I’m aiming for,’ Porter said, hanging up her coat.

‘You’re right, though. I did bow out early,’ Mullen said. He looked Thorne up and down. ‘What are you? Forty-seven, forty-eight?’

Thorne tried not to react. ‘I’m forty-five in a few months.’

‘Right, well, I’ll be fifty this year, and I know I’d look a damn sight older than that if I’d stayed in the job. You know what it’s like. I was starting to forget what Maggie and the kids looked like.’

Thorne nodded. There hadn’t been anyone to forget for a fair few years, but he understood what Mullen meant well enough.

‘I’d managed to squirrel a bit away, and it seemed as good a time as any. I fancied a move and Maggie was pretty keen for me to get out. She even got used to having me under her feet after a while.’

On cue, Maggie Mullen came down the stairs, with every one of the fifty-odd years Thorne guessed were behind her, showing on her face. The lines had become cracks. The freshly applied make-up had done precious little for eyes that were puffy and red-rimmed. ‘I was catching up on some sleep,’ she said.

It was Holland who prevented the pause becoming a silence. He nodded towards Mullen, picking up the thread of the previous exchange. ‘It’s what politicians always say, isn’t it?’

Mullen looked at him. ‘Sorry?’

‘Whenever they leave the job, for whatever reason, they say they want to spend more time with their family.’

They stood around a little awkwardly, almost as though they were not the parents of a kidnapped child and those entrusted with finding him; as though they were waiting politely for someone to announce that dinner was served.

Now, in the living room, something of that odd formality lingered, not helped by the seating arrangements. It was a large room and the sofas and chairs had been positioned around a rectangular, Chinese-style rug. Thorne and Porter sat on a cream leather sofa with Mullen and his wife fifteen or more feet away on uncomfortable-looking armchairs, which were themselves a fair distance from each other. There was music playing somewhere upstairs, and noise too from the kitchen, where Holland and DC Kenny Parsons – the on-duty family liaison officer – had gone to make coffee.

Thorne looked out of the French windows at the garden. It was enormous compared with the postage-stamp-sized plots that graced most London properties. He turned back to Mrs Mullen. ‘I can see why you moved here. I wouldn’t fancy mowing it, mind you.’

It was Tony Mullen that responded. ‘This place was a compromise, really. I was all for upping sticks completely and getting out into the country, but Maggie didn’t really want to leave London. It feels like you’re in the country here, but you’ve got High Barnet tube a few minutes away, or you’re twenty minutes from King’s Cross on the overground.’

Thorne made the right noises, thinking: This is a world away from King’s Cross.

‘And the schools,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘We moved because of the schools.’

Then, with that one meaningful word, the terrible reason for them all being there was finally in the room with them, and the small talk was well and truly done with.

Tony Mullen slapped his palms against his legs, the noise causing his wife to start slightly. ‘We know it’s not bad news, thank God, but I presume that there isn’t any good news, either.’

Porter edged forward on the sofa. ‘We’re doing everything we can, but-’

‘Don’t.’ Mullen raised a hand. ‘I’m really not interested in the pat speeches. I know the game, remember. So let’s not waste anyone’s time, all right, Louise?’

Thorne could see that Porter was more than a little irked at the familiarity, but he thought she was probably not the type to react. Not the first time, anyway. Instead, she let her eyes drift across to Mullen’s wife and spoke softly to her. ‘It wasn’t a speech.’

‘I’m the new boy,’ Thorne said, ‘so you’ll have to forgive me if we go over some old ground, but I was wondering about the delay.’

Mullen stared right back at him. It was a grudging invitation for Thorne to elaborate.

‘Luke went missing on Friday after school, but the first call to the police was made at a little after nine yesterday morning. Why the wait?’

‘We’ve already explained all this,’ Mullen said. The edge to his voice revealed traces of a Midlands accent. Thorne remembered Porter telling him that Mullen was originally from Wolverhampton. ‘We just thought Luke was out and about somewhere.’

‘Only on Friday evening, surely?’

‘He could have gone to a club, then stayed over at a mate’s or something. There was usually a certain amount of leeway on a Friday night.’

‘It was me.’ Maggie Mullen cleared her throat. ‘I was the one who thought there was nothing to worry about. I was the one who persuaded Tony that we should just wait for Luke to come home.’

‘Why didn’t you say this yesterday?’ Porter asked.

‘Is it really important?’ she said.

‘I’m sure it isn’t, but-’

‘We waited. That’s all that matters. We waited when we shouldn’t have and I’ll have to live with that.’

‘There was an argument,’ Mullen said.

Thorne’s eyes stayed on Maggie Mullen. He watched her drop her head and stare at her feet.

Mullen sat up straight in his chair and continued. ‘Luke and I had a stupid row that morning. There was a lot of shouting and swearing, the usual kind of stuff.’

‘What did you argue about?’ Thorne asked.

‘School,’ Mullen said. ‘I think maybe we were putting him under a bit of pressure. I was putting him under pressure.’

‘Luke and his dad usually get on so well.’ Maggie Mullen looked at Porter, spoke as though her husband were no longer in the room. ‘Really well. It’s not normal for them to argue like that.’

Porter smiled. ‘The fights I used to have with my mum and dad…’

‘Sometimes I think Luke’s closer to his dad than he is to me, you know?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Mullen said.

‘I get jealous sometimes, if I’m honest.’

‘Come on, love…’

Maggie Mullen was staring straight ahead.

Thorne followed her gaze to the elaborate fireplace; to the flame-effect gas fire and the half-life-sized ceramic cheetah sitting to one side of it. ‘Was this row really that serious?’ he asked. ‘Serious enough for Luke to leave without a word?’

‘No way.’ Mullen was categorical. Said it again to ensure that Thorne and Porter got the message.

‘Mrs Mullen?’

The drum and bass coming through the ceiling seemed louder for a few seconds. Still staring towards the fireplace, Maggie Mullen shook her head.

‘Whether it’s got anything to do with this argument or not, Luke’s disappearance may still have a simple explanation.’ Porter waited until all faces were turned to her before carrying on. ‘We’ve at least got to accept that possibility.’

Maggie Mullen stood up and smoothed down the back of her skirt. ‘I’m happy to accept it, love. I’m praying for it.’ She walked across to the fireplace, reached for a packet of Silk Cut on the mantelpiece.

‘Obviously, we’ve checked out all his friends,’ Porter said. ‘But in the absence of any sort of communication from anyone who might be holding Luke, there has to be a possibility that he’s gone away with someone.’

‘You mean this woman?’ Mullen said.

‘He’d been spotted with “this woman” on other occasions.’ Thorne stood up too and walked behind the sofa, the relief from the pain in his leg almost instantaneous. ‘If Luke’s seeing an older woman, he might have thought better about telling you.’

The boy’s mother was clearly not convinced. ‘I can’t see it.’ She fumbled for a cigarette. ‘I can’t imagine Luke with a girl his own age, let alone someone older. He isn’t confident with girls. He’s a bit awkward.’

‘Come on, Maggie,’ Mullen said. ‘He could have been into all sorts of things. I don’t mean drugs or anything like that, but kids have secrets, don’t they?’

‘Your husband’s got a point,’ Thorne said. ‘How well does any parent know an adolescent?’

Maggie Mullen lit her cigarette, took in the first lungful like it was oxygen. ‘I’ve been asking myself that quite a lot,’ she said. ‘Ever since I started to wonder if I was ever going to see my son again.’

In the kitchen, DC Kenny Parsons opened another cupboard and peered inside. ‘Maybe we should just leave it.’

Holland was sitting at the table, idly turning the pages of a Daily Express. ‘Don’t be nervous, mate. As family liaison officer, you definitely get biscuit privileges.’

‘Result. Here you go.’ Parsons produced an unopened packet and placed it on a tray next to the mugs. Coffee had already been spooned into each. The kettle had boiled minutes ago, but been ignored.

‘So how d’you reckon things are between them?’ Holland asked, nodding towards the living room. ‘Normally, I mean.’

Parsons flicked the kettle on again and carried the tray to the table. He was in his mid-thirties, Holland guessed, a dark-skinned black man with hair cut almost to the scalp, and the trick of looking untidy in a perfectly presentable suit. ‘You know they split up for a while a few years back?’

Holland nodded; Porter had told them as much. The team were looking at the family, of course, but not as closely as they might have, had Luke been a bit younger; or if it had been more obviously an abduction rather than a kidnap. The family were certainly not under any suspicion, not this early on at any rate, but a few discreet enquiries had been made all the same.

‘She was the one that walked out, right?’ Holland asked.

‘Yeah, but she wasn’t gone for very long.’

‘Old man playing away from home, d’you reckon?’

‘Usually the way, isn’t it?’

‘So what about now?’

Parsons considered it. ‘Things are pretty good, I think.’

Holland had discovered quickly that his new colleague was not short of opinions. He had plenty to say about those on his own team, and was far more relaxed when it came to talking about the Mullen family than he was about helping himself to their digestives.

Holland was happy enough to get another perspective on the case.

‘Bear in mind that even splitting the shifts, we’re not here twenty-four hours a day,’ Parsons said. ‘Mullen was fairly adamant early on that he didn’t want anyone stopping overnight. Based on what I have seen, though, I reckon he rules the roost, give or take. He’s used to people doing what he tells them to do, for obvious reasons.’

‘And do they do what he tells them? The wife doesn’t come across as any sort of doormat.’

‘Oh no, she’s not. Definitely.’

‘She seems nice enough,’ Holland said. ‘I mean, she’s obviously a bit shell-shocked just now…’

‘She’s tougher than she looks, if you ask me.’ Parsons moved the mugs around on the tray, lining them up, making room for milk and sugar. ‘Ex-teacher, right?’ He held up his hands, as if the point were self-evident.

‘Right.’

‘So I reckon she can give as good as she gets. I bet there are times she tells him exactly what to do.’ He waited in vain for a reaction to the vaguely lewd suggestion before continuing. ‘I think the family’s learned how to look like they do what the old man tells them, know what I mean? They’re good at making him feel like he’s in charge. Probably no different to when he was on the Job, right?’

Notwithstanding Parsons’ obvious taste for gossip and speculation, Holland could see the sense in what he was saying. His own father had been a police officer. In the few short years between retirement and an early death, his relationship with Holland’s mother had fallen into exactly the pattern that Parsons was talking about.

‘What about the kid?’

‘You seen his room?’

‘Not yet.’

‘It’s a lot different to my lad’s, I can tell you that. I don’t think we’re talking about your average sixteen-year-old.’

‘The average sixteen-year-old doesn’t get kidnapped,’ Holland said.

‘It’s all a touch too neat and tidy.’ Parsons made a face, as if the very notion were somehow distasteful. ‘And I wouldn’t put a lot of money on finding any wank-mags under the bed.’ He stopped as he saw Holland’s expression change, and turned to see the girl standing in the doorway. ‘Juliet…’

Holland had no way of knowing how long Juliet Mullen had been standing outside the door, how much of their conversation she’d overheard. He couldn’t tell if her manner and the tone of her voice were because she was angry with them or upset about what had happened to her brother, or simply down to the fact that she was an average fourteen-year-old.

The girl half turned to go, then nodded towards the tray and spoke casually, as if she were insulting them in code: ‘I’ll have tea. Milk and two.’

‘What time does your post come?’ Thorne asked.

‘Excuse me?’

‘What time in the morning? Mine’s all over the bloody place. It’s any time before lunchtime, really, and stuff gets lost right, left and centre.’

If Tony Mullen knew where Thorne was going, he showed no sign of it. ‘Between eight and nine, usually. I don’t see-’

‘Your wife said that she stopped you from phoning the police straight away.’

‘She didn’t stop me…’

‘That she didn’t think there was anything to worry about.’

‘I wouldn’t have called immediately anyway. There was no reason to.’

Thorne strolled around the sofa, walked to the opposite side of the fireplace to where Maggie Mullen was crushing her cigarette butt into an ashtray. ‘Sorry, I may have got the wrong end of the stick, but your wife certainly implied that you were worried; or at least concerned. That’s why I was asking about what time your post arrived.’ Thorne caught Porter’s eye; saw that she understood. ‘I think you were expecting a ransom demand. I think you presumed that someone had snatched Luke and that you’d hear from them yesterday morning. I think you were probably waiting to find out exactly what they wanted and that you were planning to handle it yourself. When you didn’t get anything in the post, that’s when you really started to worry, when you started to wonder what might have happened. That’s when you called us.’

Maggie Mullen walked across the room and sat down on the arm of her husband’s chair. Her hand moved very briefly to his, then back into her lap. ‘Tony tends to look on the blacker side of things a lot of the time.’

‘The Job does that to most of us,’ Porter said.

‘Look, it’s understandable.’ Thorne was still trying to connect with Tony Mullen. ‘I’m sure I would have thought the same thing.’

‘I knew he’d been kidnapped before I went to bed on Friday night,’ Mullen said. He looked up at Thorne, something like relief on his face. ‘I was brushing my teeth and Maggie was sorting the dog out downstairs, and I knew someone had taken him. Was holding him. Luke wasn’t the type to just go off, certainly not without letting us know where he was.’

‘Like I said, it’s understandable. In light of your career, you’ve got every reason to believe there might be people who would want to hurt you. Or hurt those close to you.’

Mullen said something, but Thorne couldn’t make it out.

He couldn’t hear much for a second or two.

He was straining to make out the voice of his father above the roar and hot spit of long-dead flames…

‘We’ll need a list,’ he said, finally. ‘Anyone who might bear a grudge. Anyone who issued threats.’

Mullen nodded. ‘I’ve been trying to work on one over the weekend.’ His tone and the look he gave his wife were guilty, confessional, as though the fact that he’d been thinking about such things at all meant he’d been assuming the worst. ‘But I don’t think it’ll be much help. Either my memory’s going or I didn’t make as many enemies as I thought.’

‘Well, that makes our job easier,’ Porter said.

‘Right. Good.’ Thorne was trying to sound equally positive, but he must have looked every bit as dubious as he felt.

Mullen’s expression hardened. ‘Would you remember every one?’

Thorne tried to stay composed and encouraging, tried to put the edge in Mullen’s voice down to stress, to blame the aggression on guilt and panic. ‘Probably not.’

‘How many people have you seriously pissed off, Detective Inspector Thorne? You needn’t include the ones you were supposed to be working with.’

Thorne thought then that perhaps Jesmond had been a little more candid in his description of him after all. Or perhaps Tony Mullen was just a good judge of character. He said nothing; just considered what Mullen had told him about putting a list together. Thorne himself would have much less trouble, and doubted that he was unique. When it came to those who might have posed a serious threat to him, or to anyone he cared about, Thorne had no problem recalling every last one of them.

Holland and Parsons appeared in the doorway at the same moment that the phone rang. Everyone, Thorne included, jumped slightly, and Maggie Mullen was first to her feet.

‘It’s important to try and stay calm…’

‘Love…’

If she heard what either Porter or her husband said, Maggie Mullen chose to ignore it. Her eyes were fixed only on the phone as she crossed to where it sat on a low table near the window.

A trace/intercept had, of course, been set up on the Mullens’ home number as soon as the Kidnap Unit had been scrambled, with all incoming calls monitored by Technical Support back at the Yard. If, as was most likely, the all-important call were to come from an unregistered mobile, the Telephone Unit would immediately begin working on cell-site location, moving from place to place where required in a vehicle equipped with the necessary, state-of-the-art gadgetry.

When she reached the phone, Mrs Mullen held out a hand; she turned and looked first at her husband, then across at Porter and Thorne.

Porter nodded.

Mrs Mullen took a deep breath and picked up the phone. She spoke the number quickly, waited, then shook her head. Her eyes closed and she turned away, muttering into the mouthpiece, fingers dragging through her long brown hair for the few seconds before she hung up.

‘Mags?’

She walked slowly towards her husband’s chair, her voice splintering as she spoke, and Thorne could see relief and disappointment, inseparable, fighting it out in the fall of her face, and of her shoulders. He saw how well-matched, how brutal, the two feelings could be.

‘Hannah. One of Juliet’s friends.’

‘It’s OK, love.’ Mullen was on his feet, moving to meet her.

‘Obviously we told everyone we could not to call,’ she said. ‘We wanted to make sure the line stayed clear, you know, in case Luke got in touch. In case anyone who had him tried to contact us. We tried to think of everyone, but there are a few people we must have forgotten…’

Then Mullen’s arms were around her and pulling her close. Her own hung at her sides, as though she suddenly lacked the strength to lift them. Her head bowed as she sobbed hard into his neck.

Thorne beckoned Holland and Parsons into the room with the coffee tray, then glanced at Porter, who raised her eyes from the floor to meet his. He was heartened to see that she found watching the embrace just as difficult as he did.

AMANDA

Everything changed the first time Conrad put a gun to her head in that petrol station in Tooting.

The set-up had certainly looked real, and she’d made a convincing enough hostage, so he hadn’t needed to go such a long way over the top: to pull her hair quite so much, to press the barrel of the toy gun so hard into the side of her head. Later that night, after they’d counted the money and got completely wrecked, she’d read him the Riot Act. Yes, obviously they had to be convincing, but they weren’t fucking method actors! He hadn’t known exactly what she meant, of course, so she’d explained it to him in simpler terms until he did. He was terribly sorry and upset, and only too happy to listen when she told him how they could do things better the next time.

That was when she’d fully understood that she was the one in charge.

All she’d wanted in the beginning was someone to get heavy with a dealer she owed money to. Conrad had managed that easily enough, then they’d just carried on seeing each other. It helped that he was OK looking, that he knew his way around and that he seemed to like looking after her. He’d racked his brains for ways to come up with cash, to pay for what she needed. She was touched and relieved, happy to have found the first man who would really take care of her since her father. The fake robbery idea had been Conrad’s, as it happened, but everything since had come from her.

To get your own way, of course, it helped if you knew what the other person was thinking. If you could predict which way they were liable to jump. Conrad had never been particularly good at pretending he was feeling one thing when what was really in his heart and head was written all over his face. She liked that about him. She’d always been wary of men who were better liars than she was.

Her daddy hadn’t been a good liar, either. Didn’t have it in him. Of course, he may have had some sordid secret life that he’d kept hidden from Amanda and her mother. He may have visited rent boys, or kept a string of mistresses – and, with the marriage he had, who could have blamed him? – but she preferred to imagine him as she remembered him: perfect, right until the day he left. As handsome as he’d been the moment before he went through the windscreen of his Mercedes.

Conrad hadn’t gone for the kidnap idea straight away. He’d needed a little convincing. She’d told him that it would be easy money; that, more importantly, it would be far bigger money than they could get from any branch of Threshers or a BP station. She promised him that afterwards they could make a fresh start somewhere, that she could afford to get some proper help and maybe get herself cleaned up. That had sorted him out; those promises, and the ones she’d made in the dark with her skinny little body.

And now there was the boy. Their overgrown baby hostage.

He’d responded to promises, same as any other man: that he wouldn’t be hurt if he behaved himself; that he would be home soon; that everything was going to be all right.

She looked across to where he lay sleeping, his head on the hands that she’d tied at the wrists with crêpe bandage. She wondered if she should give him another dose to keep him asleep, or let him wake up and see if he’d learned his lesson. The knife seemed to have calmed him down a bit, scared him into being a good lad. Like most blokes she’d ever known, if promises weren’t enough, threats would usually do the trick.

He was a good-looking boy, she decided. His personality wasn’t easy to read, given the circumstances, but he seemed nice enough. She thought he would probably break a heart or two, if he ever got the chance.

THREE

‘Shouldn’t we be doing this in summer?’ Hendricks suggested. ‘I’m freezing my cobs off.’

‘Put your coat on then.’

Whatever the Job euphemistically chose to call a sudden and inexplicable leave of absence, such as that imposed upon him the previous year, this had been about as close to ‘gardening’ as Thorne had come. Or was ever likely to. Half an hour in B & Q one Saturday afternoon and a weekend of self-assembly hell had been all the time necessary to work a small miracle on the few square feet of cracked and manky paving slabs behind his kitchen.

‘I wanted a bit of sympathy, obviously,’ Hendricks said. ‘I mean, that’s why I came. And beer’s always a bonus. But I hadn’t banked on double pneumonia.’

Thorne drank the last from a can of Sainsbury’s own-label Belgian lager and looked across what any self-respecting estate agent – if that were not a contradiction in terms – would now describe as ‘a small but well-appointed patio area’. A couple of plants in plastic pots, a wonky barbecue on wheels, a heater on a stand.

And a weeping pathologist…

In fact, Hendricks seemed to be past the worst of it, but his bloodshot eyes still looked as though they might brim and leak at any moment, and the tremble at the centre of his chin hadn’t quite disappeared. Thorne had seen his friend cry before, and, though it was always uncomfortable, he could never help but be struck by the painful incongruity of the spectacle. He knew better than anyone how strongly the Mancunian could take things to heart, yet Phil Hendricks remained – in appearance at least – an imposing, even aggressive, figure. He was a shaven-headed Goth, with dark clothes and tattoos; with rings, studs and spikes through assorted areas of flesh. Watching him in genuine distress was like seeing pensioners touch tongues, or a Hell’s Angel cradle a mewling newborn. It was disconcerting. It was like staring at an arty postcard.

‘So, have I been sympathetic enough?’ Thorne asked.

‘Well, not straight away, no.’

‘That’s because I know what a bloody drama queen you are. You turn up on the doorstep wailing and it could mean anything. I don’t know whether someone’s died, or if you’ve just lost one of your George Michael CDs.’

Thorne got the smile he was aiming for. Hendricks was certainly no drama queen, but when he’d arrived an hour before it had taken a while for Thorne to realise how serious it was. Hendricks had told him that he and his boyfriend Brendan had had a major argument, that this was definitely the end, but Thorne had known both of them long enough to take such pronouncements of doom with a fistful of salt.

Thorne’s first tactic had worked a time or two before: beer and distraction. Once the initial crying jag had abated and Thorne had got Hendricks settled down in the living room with a drink, he tried talking to him about work. Hendricks was a civilian member of Russell Brigstocke’s Major Investigation Team at Homicide Command (West), and the pathologist Thorne had worked with most regularly in recent years. He had also become a close friend; probably the only person Thorne could think of who might donate a kidney should he ever need one. Certainly the only one who might actually have the odd one or two knocking around.

Their cosy chats about death and dismemberment were often perversely enjoyable, but this was one work conversation that was never destined to go anywhere. Though the two shared plenty of ancient history, Thorne’s position on the sidelines in recent weeks meant that they hadn’t a single ongoing investigation in common. Besides, the only dead thing Hendricks had seemed keen to talk about was his own relationship. ‘It’s not like the times before,’ he’d said. ‘He really fucking means it this time.’

Thorne had begun to see that the situation was more serious than he’d first thought; that this was more than just a spat. He’d done his best to calm down his friend. He’d phoned out for pizza and dragged a couple of kitchen chairs into the garden.

‘I can’t feel my feet,’ Hendricks said.

‘Stop bloody moaning.’ It was chilly, no question, and Thorne had never got around to buying a gas bottle for the heater, but he was enjoying being outside. ‘I’m starting to see why Brendan’s done a bunk.’

Hendricks didn’t appear to find that crack quite so funny. He lifted his feet up on to the seat of his chair, wrapped his hands around his ankles.

‘Maybe he just needs a bit of space to cool off,’ Thorne said.

‘I was the one doing most of the shouting.’ When Hendricks sighed the breath hung in front of his face. ‘He stayed pretty calm a lot of the time.’

‘Maybe a day or two apart isn’t such a bad idea, you know?’

Hendricks looked like he thought it was just about the worst idea anyone had ever come up with. ‘He took a lot of his stuff. Said he’s coming back for the rest tomorrow.’

In recent months, the couple had been living at Hendricks’ place in Islington, but Brendan had kept his own flat. ‘So he’s got somewhere to fuck off back to when we split up,’ Hendricks had joked once.

Up to this point it had all been about the fact of the argument, the ferocity and finality of it. Hendricks remained adamant that it had been terminal, yet did not seem particularly keen to talk about what had triggered the fight in the first place.

Thorne asked the question, then immediately wished he hadn’t when he watched his friend turn his head away and lie to him.

‘I can’t even remember, to be honest, but I can tell you it was nothing important. It never really is, is it? You end up falling out over the stupidest things.’

‘Right…’

‘I think it’s probably been brewing for a few weeks. We’re both stressed at work, you know?’

Though Thorne guessed there was still something he wasn’t being told, he knew that Hendricks was probably right about the stress. He’d seen what the work could take out of Hendricks on any number of occasions, and knew that his partner’s job was far from being a walk in the park, either. Brendan Maxwell worked for the London Lift, an organisation that provided much-needed services for the city’s homeless. Thorne had got to know him well during his investigations into the rough-sleeper killings the year before.

Thorne looked at his watch. ‘What time did we order that pizza?’

‘I’m not going to do much better, am I?’ Hendricks stood up and leaned back against the wall next to the kitchen door. ‘Better than Brendan, I mean.’

‘Come on, Phil…’

‘I’m not, though. There’s no point kidding myself. I’m just trying to be realistic, that’s all.’

‘I give it a fortnight,’ Thorne said. ‘A tenner says you’ve got a new piercing within two weeks. You up for it?’ This was one of their jokes: that Hendricks commemorated each new boyfriend with a piercing. A unique, if painful way of putting notches on his bedpost. It had been a running joke, until Brendan had come along.

‘It’s just the thought of being single again.’

‘You aren’t single yet.’

‘Back on the scene. How depressing is that?’

‘It’s not going to happen, I’m telling you.’

‘We were so grateful that we’d saved each other from that, you know? That we’d found each other. Fuck.’

Thorne watched Hendricks repeatedly drive the heel of his biker boot into the brick behind him. He saw the tears come again. It suddenly seemed like all he’d done that day was watch people trying, and failing, not to cry.

The powerful hit of relief he felt when he heard the phone ringing in the kitchen was quickly cancelled out by an equally strong pang of shame. He wondered if he should let it ring; what Hendricks would think of him if he got up and answered it; how much longer whoever was calling would bother hanging on.

When Hendricks gestured towards the kitchen, Thorne shrugged a what-can-you-do? and hurried inside.

There must have been something in his voice when he picked up.

‘Not a good time?’ Brigstocke asked.

Thorne’s answer might have sounded vague, but was about as honest as he could be. ‘Yes and no.’

‘I just wanted to see how life on the Kidnap Unit was treating you.’

Thorne took the phone through to the living room. ‘You just wanted to see if I fucked up on my first day, you mean.’

‘Oh, I know you didn’t fuck up. I’ve already spoken to the DCI.’

‘And?’

‘Gold stars all round, I reckon. You impressed DI Porter, by the sound of it. What did you make of her?’

Thorne dropped into the armchair, swiftly followed by his terminally confused cat, who jumped on to his lap and began digging in her claws. Thorne lifted Elvis up until she let go and tossed her back to the floor. ‘She seemed OK,’ he said. ‘She certainly knows what she’s doing.’ He couldn’t be sure why he was so reluctant to say what he really thought, especially when she’d obviously said such good things about him. The fact was that he’d been very impressed with Louise Porter. In every sense.

‘Exciting enough for you?’

‘Well, I’m not stuck behind a desk,’ Thorne said. ‘But I’m not sitting here waiting for my pulse to return to normal, either.’ He could hear one of Brigstocke’s kids in the background. The tone of the silence changed as a hand went over the mouthpiece, and he heard Brigstocke’s muffled voice telling the child that he’d be with him in a few minutes.

‘Sorry…’

‘I’m not even sure we’re looking at a kidnap,’ Thorne said. ‘This business with the woman’s bloody odd. And if someone is holding the kid, it doesn’t make any sense that they haven’t got in touch.’

‘What does Porter think?’

‘She thinks it’s strange, too. We were talking about motivation, you know? About why anybody takes a hostage. There’s always a reason. It might be drugs, or money, or some kind of political statement. But they always want something.’

‘You think the boy’s just left home?’

‘God knows. I think we might be wasting a lot of time and effort, though.’

The doorbell rang, but almost as soon as Thorne was on his feet, Hendricks had come inside and was making his way to the door. Thorne reached into his leather jacket for his wallet but Hendricks waved him away.

‘So I’d be right in thinking you wouldn’t be keen on me making this transfer permanent, then?’

‘This is going to sound weird, and I know that, whatever the reason turns out to be, there’s still a missing kid, but I find it hard to get… excited about it. There’s an element of going through the motions. Does that make sense?’

‘You’re happier when there’s a body, aren’t you?’ Brigstocke said. ‘You want a killer to go after.’

Thorne thought about what Holland had said to him in the car that morning: ‘Sounds almost like you’re hoping.’ He wondered if the pair of them might have a point; if perhaps there were a part of him that could only be described as ‘ghoulish’. ‘I just think we should do what we’re good at,’ he said. He knew, even as he spoke, that he was sounding sulky and defensive.

Brigstocke sniffed. ‘I could say something deep and meaningful here, about how some people care more about the dead than they do about the living, but I’m not sure I can be arsed.’

‘I think you’d be doing the pair of us a favour if you didn’t,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke said nothing. Just hummed, like he was thinking about it.

The front door slammed and Hendricks walked back towards the kitchen with the boxes. Thorne was eager to follow him. ‘I need to go. I’m about to eat my dinner.’

‘I know. I heard the doorbell,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Curry or pizza?’

Thorne laughed. ‘You haven’t lost it.’

A minute later he was taking two fresh cans of beer from the fridge, glad that the call from Brigstocke had ended on an upbeat note. It could easily have gone the other way. So many conversations he’d had of late had seemed dangerously poised, while Holland, Hendricks and a number of others had all used the phrase ‘walking on eggshells’ more than once. When Thorne got snappy, told them in no uncertain terms that they were being oversensitive, they just looked at him like he’d proved their point.

‘Shall we eat this outside?’ Thorne asked.

Hendricks was already picking at pepperoni slices. ‘Are you kidding? It’s even colder now. I’m young, free and single, mate, and if I’m going out on the pull, the last thing I need is my knob shrinking to the size of an acorn.’ He picked up his pizza box and wandered into the living room.

Thorne was about to shout after him, ask if he fancied putting some music on, then thought better of it. Hendricks might have been gagging it up, but the pain hadn’t gone anywhere. He would almost certainly pull out an album with at least one unsuitable track on it; the makeup of Thorne’s collection would make it hard not to. It was, as people never seemed to tire of telling him, the problem with country music: too many songs about dead dogs and lost love.

‘Stick the TV on,’ he shouted as an alternative. ‘See if there’s a game on Sky.’

He stepped back outside to bring in the kitchen chairs. It was a clear night, but there was no guarantee it wouldn’t piss down before morning. He thought through what he’d said to Brigstocke about not feeling excited, and about what it might take to start the blood pumping that little bit faster. He wondered how bad he’d really feel if the body so many people accused him of wishing for turned up. He just hoped to Christ that if it did, it wasn’t Luke Mullen’s.

He looked up as a plane passed, winking and droning overhead. The sky was the colour of a dusty plum, and spattered with stars. He carried the chairs inside and shut the door. Hendricks was already shouting at the television.

In spite of his bad back, of the boredom and the morbid thoughts, Thorne was feeling pretty good. Relative to the recent past, at any rate. All the same, it was a welcome diversion to spend a few hours with someone who – if only for the time being – was in worse shape than he was.

CONRAD

The kid was clever, no doubt about that. A bit of a smartarse, in fact, but it didn’t matter how brainy you were if you weren’t the one in the driving seat. The kid had probably passed a ton more exams than he ever had, but it didn’t count for much now, did it? Clever didn’t mean a lot with a bag over your head.

Because he was the one calling the shots.

Even as the words formed in his mind, it struck him as a smart way of putting things. ‘Shots’ as in guns, and ‘shots’ like when you give someone an injection.

He’d always been tall and well built, and he’d always looked after himself, but he’d never been given any real respect. Not when he was younger, anyway. Back then he’d lacked the ‘necessary’, the something in the eyes or whatever, that made people take you seriously; that made them back off, try to smile, and say, ‘All right, mate, whatever you want.’ He’d wanted to make someone react like that ever since his balls had dropped, and he could still remember when it had happened for the first time. It was a few years ago now, but he could remember every single detail of it. It was like watching a film that he was starring in.

A poxy red Fiesta.

The spiky-haired ponce behind the wheel had cut in front of him at the lights, swerved across into his lane instead of turning right like he should have done. Then, to top it off, the arsehole had given him the finger when he’d leaned on his horn, as he’d every bloody right to do!

So he’s chased the fucker. He’s right up his arse, doing fifty and sixty through Dalston and Hackney, all the way to Bow. There’s big puddles on the streets and precious little traffic around that time of the morning; just night buses and the odd dodgy minicab getting out of the way seriously fast.

The Fiesta pulls up hard and sharp somewhere round the back of Victoria Park, and the bloke gets out and starts waving a baseball bat around. Shaking his head and pointing a finger. Shouting his mouth off as he walks towards the car.

The next bit’s in slow motion and the sound’s really pumped up loud. He can feel his heart going mental underneath his Puffa, but it’s excitement, not fear, and when he gets out of the car he gets the look he’s been dreaming about for so long.

It’s the moment when power shifts.

The tosser with the bat has obviously fancied it right up to that moment, because the bat gives him the edge, and he probably isn’t afraid to use it either. It’s made him braver than he’s got any right to be. But then he sees the gun, and he shits himself.

He shits himself. Or he might just as well have done, judging by the look on his face as he walks away. As he puts down the bat, and puts up his hands, and says, ‘All right, mate, no harm done.’

Of course, the gun was only a replica and, real or not, maybe it was the gun that was getting the respect rather than him, but still. It didn’t matter. The feeling as he climbed back into his car was amazing, like nothing he’d known before, and it had stayed with him. Singing in his blood as he tore past the buses and ripped through the puddles, right up until the moment when everything had gone very tits up twenty minutes later…

Across the room, the boy was awake beneath the hood. He could tell by the position of him, by the way his head turned and his face pressed against the material.

‘You hungry?’

They’d had a long discussion about whether to use a gag and Amanda had decided against it in the end. It was maybe a bit over the top. Anyway, the kid was drugged up most of the time and, even when he wasn’t, they’d be on him like a rash if he tried screaming.

‘You want something to eat?’

The boy said nothing, even though he could. Just ignored the question. He chose to keep quiet for some reason, like he was protesting or something; like he was playing a game with them.

Trying to be clever.

WEDNESDAY
FOUR

His father had taken to coming by in the early hours of the morning.

Since the back problems, Thorne had been waking anywhere from 5 a.m. onwards. He’d lie there in the dark, in the only comfortable position he’d been able to find – his knees up to his chest – and think about his old man. Occasionally, he’d manage to drift back to sleep again, and then their encounters would be stranger, richer, as, in that hour or two before he would need to get up, he invariably dreamed.

In the dreams, Jim Thorne would appear as he had been in the final stages of the Alzheimer’s; in the six months or so before the fire that had killed him. It was typical of his father, Thorne thought, to be so perverse, so bloody-minded. Why couldn’t he have moved through the dreams as a younger man? Or a man whose mind was at least firing on the right cylinders? Instead, his father came to him belligerent and foul-mouthed, stumbling through their conversations, distracted, furious and lost.

Helpless…

Often, the old man would do nothing but sit on the edge of Thorne’s bed, eager to ask questions. This was how it had been towards the end. The disregard for social niceties had gone hand in hand with an obsession for trivia, lists and quizzes.

‘Name ten World War Two fighter planes. Which are the three biggest lakes in the world? That’s freshwater lakes.’

Since passing on, he’d introduced the element of multiple choice.

‘Was the cause of the fire that killed me: (A) accidental or (B) started deliberately?’

Often this would be followed by a question Thorne found a little easier to answer: ‘Whose fault was it: (A) yours or (B) yours?’

This was usually when Thorne would wake, and for a while the question would stay with him. The feelings it stirred were unmistakable, yet hard to name or pin down. Not quite shame, but a shade of it. Like the relationship which ‘coming down with something’ has to the illness itself; to the symptoms that will eventually appear. He would move robotically through the rituals of the morning – ablutions, breakfast, getting dressed – until the memory of the dream began to dissolve. Feeling the water sizzle against his skin as he shaved, and the cereal turning to charcoal in his mouth.

He’d put Phil Hendricks into a minicab late the previous night. As always, the sofa-bed had been on offer, but Hendricks had wanted to get home. The big talk about cruising for someone to take his boyfriend’s place had not lasted long. The beer had washed away the pretence of acceptance, and by the end of a long evening he was tearful again, and desperate to return to the flat in case Brendan had decided to come back.

In his kitchen, Thorne ate toast and marmalade standing up, listening to Greater London Radio and waiting for the early morning dose of painkillers to kick in.

It was five weeks until the first anniversary of his father’s death.

Outside, it had started to rain gently, and on GLR the host was trying to get a word in as some woman ranted about the disgusting state of the capital’s rail network.

He decided that he would call his Auntie Eileen – his father’s younger sister – and Victor, the old man’s best friend. Maybe they could all get together on the day. Have a drink or something.

His was not, had never been, a close family, and it was all so terribly British, this cleaving together after a loss. Yet, while he saw it for the gesture that in many ways it was, he still craved it; he needed the chance to measure his grief against that of others. He wanted to be with people who could talk to him without feeling like they were walking on eggshells.

On the radio, a man was saying that the previous caller had been rude and overbearing, but that she’d been right about how crap the railways were.

Thorne wondered how the Mullens were doing. To lose someone but not know for sure if they were really gone was arguably the worst kind of loss, and they certainly seemed to be cleaving together. It was odd, he thought, that a word could have such opposite definitions: to cling together, and to split violently apart.

He was scooping food into a bowl for Elvis when the phone rang, and though the codeine hadn’t quite taken effect, Porter’s call was enough to make him forget the pain pulsing down his leg and into his foot.

They could now be certain that Luke Mullen had been kidnapped. Whoever was holding him had finally decided to get in touch.

At Central 3000, chairs had been hastily put out and a screen set up in a corner beneath the red flag. Officers from other departments cut their conversation, stood still or just worked in silence, as the team from the Kidnap Unit gathered round and watched the video that had come through the Mullens’ front door first thing that morning.

When it had finished, Porter rewound the tape without a word and they watched it through again.

‘Obviously the original’s gone to the FSS,’ she said when they’d finished. ‘They’ll fast-track it, along with the envelope it came in.’

The Forensic Science Service handled enquiries from all forty-three police forces in England and Wales, testing firearms and fibres, running toxicology screens, minutely analysing blood, drug or tissue samples. Their labs in Victoria would normally take a week or more to turn round comprehensive fingerprint or DNA results. A fast-track request could reduce that time significantly: with luck, they would hear back within a day, on the prints at least.

‘Not that I can see us getting a great deal,’ Porter said. She gestured towards the screen. The image was frozen at the point where, seen from behind with his face hidden from view, a man carrying a bag in one hand and a syringe in the other is moving purposefully towards Luke Mullen. ‘It looks very much like they know what they’re doing.’

‘What do we think’s in the syringe?’ Holland asked.

A DS in front of him – a tall Scotsman with a mullet – turned around. ‘Rohypnol maybe, or diazepam. Any benzodiazepine, really.’

‘How’s he get hold of that kind of stuff?’

‘With a computer and a credit card. It’s pretty bloody simple these days. They shut down a site a couple of weeks ago that was selling a vial of ketamine and a couple of syringes in a smart leather case. Knocking them out at £19.99 as “date-rape kits”.’

‘Doesn’t he need to know what he’s doing, though? If he’s going to keep the kid sedated all the time?’

Thorne listened to the exchange, but kept his eyes fixed on the television screen; on the frozen, flickering image of the boy and the man who was holding him. There was terror in the boy’s eyes. It had been there throughout, of course, albeit partially hidden by the brave face he’d been putting on for his parents. But the mask had fallen quickly away when the man began walking towards him with the needle.

The Scottish officer shook his head. ‘You can also find out how to do it on the Net. Plenty of teach-yourself guides out there. What size doses to use or whatever.’

‘Or you learn from experience,’ Thorne said.

There was a sizeable pause after that.

Then the ACTIONS were outlined and allocated. There was little of substance to work on other than the partial number plate of the blue or black car, and talking to a few more witnesses who’d seen Luke getting into it.

Porter waited until most of her team had been given tasks and those few who hadn’t were clearing away chairs or paperwork before she talked to Thorne and Holland about their roles. ‘I’m going back to the school this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which of you is better at talking to teenage boys…’

Holland was the first to speak up, aware of a good, long look from Thorne as he answered. ‘Yeah, I’ll tag along.’

‘Tom?’

‘I thought I might have a word with one or two people Tony Mullen used to work with,’ Thorne said. ‘Show them the list. See if their memory’s any better than his.’

At the end of the previous day, Mullen had handed over the list of all those who might have held a grudge against him.

‘He has got quite a lot to think about,’ Porter said.

Thorne could see she had a point, but he was not completely convinced. ‘That’s exactly why I thought it might be more… comprehensive, I suppose. If my son was taken and there was no obvious reason why, I’d be sticking down the name of anyone who’d so much as looked at me funny.’

Mullen had come up with just five names. Five men who might, at one time, have had cause to wish or do him harm. Each had been run through the CRIMINT database within minutes, and once those traced to Australia, HMP Parkhurst and Kensal Green cemetery had been eliminated, they were down to two.

Porter was pulling papers from her desktop, bits and pieces from a drawer and sweeping them into her handbag. ‘I’m going over to the house for an hour or two first. I’ll probably head straight to the school from there. You never know, he’s had a bit more time to think, he might have come up with another name or two overnight.’

She picked up her mobile phone and clipped it to her belt, then dropped a second handset into her handbag. The Airwave had been rolled out across the force over the previous year and a half, one handset issued to every officer. It was certainly an ingenious piece of kit: a phone and a radio, with a range that, for the first time, would allow the user to talk to a fellow officer anywhere in the UK at the touch of a button. Still, in spite of a blizzard of memos, some officers preferred to stick with their own phones. These were less flashy perhaps, but they were generally smaller, lighter and, most importantly, didn’t have GPS capability built in. Mysteriously, a large number of these state-of-the-art Airwave handsets were getting lost, or left at home by officers who were none too keen on Control-room staff knowing exactly where they were at all times.

Thorne was interested to note that, as far as he could see, Porter’s Airwave had not been switched on when she’d dropped it into her bag.

The team’s DCI, a quietly spoken Geordie who needed to lose a few pounds, appeared at Porter’s shoulder, brandishing a sheaf of papers and telling her that he needed five minutes with her before she disappeared. Though Barry Hignett had met Thorne and Holland briefly first thing, he took the chance to welcome them again, explaining that there was bugger-all room for niceties on the teeth of a case such as this one.

Hignett walked Porter to a nearby desk and spread out the papers in front of her. Holland watched for a minute, then turned around, his back to them, and spoke low to Thorne: ‘Did you want to go to the school?’

Thorne looked at him as though he were speaking Chinese. ‘What?’

‘With Porter, I mean.’ He lowered his voice further still. ‘Only I thought you looked a bit pissed off before, when I said that I’d go.’

‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ Thorne said.

When Porter had finished with Hignett, she arranged to meet Holland later at the school. Then Thorne took the stairs with her down to ground level.

‘They’re being fairly nice to me.’ Thorne said it quietly, nodding as an officer he’d spoken to once or twice moved past him, coming up. ‘That’s what Luke said on the tape.’ It had been a dramatic moment when the figure with the syringe had emerged from behind the camera. The picture had remained unsteady, the camera clearly handheld rather than mounted on a tripod. Whatever Luke had said or not said, that was when it had become clear that he was being held by more than one person. That they were looking at a conspiracy to kidnap. ‘Two of them, d’you reckon? Or more?’

‘If it’s just two, I’d put money on the other one being the woman Luke was seen with.’

‘Is that common? A man and a woman working as a team?’

‘I’ve come across it a few times,’ Porter said. ‘For obvious reasons, the woman’s most often the one involved in the abduction itself. The trust figure.’

‘Right.’

For obvious reasons.

Thorne wondered why, in the light of so many highprofile cases, those reasons remained obvious, but clearly they did. Hindley was always more hated than Brady. Maxine Carr, despite being found not guilty of even knowing that her boyfriend had murdered two young girls, was, if anything, the more vilified of the two.

‘A couple of the kids reckoned they’d spotted them together before, didn’t they?’ Thorne said. ‘Luke and this woman. She obviously took her time to get close to him.’

‘It paid off,’ Porter said. ‘Talking of which, there’s still no sign of a ransom demand. No talk of anyone getting paid off.’

‘Maybe that’ll be on the next tape.’ But as they came out into the lobby on the ground floor, and moved towards the revolving doors, Thorne was still thinking about the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’. Imagining a woman getting close to her victim; smiling and touching and always attentive. Thinking that trust was nurtured, like bodies and minds; that it was abused at the same time that they were. He remembered the smile that faltered a little as the boy on the screen had done his best to crack jokes. He remembered the emptiness in the stare. He wondered if Luke Mullen would ever trust anyone again.

The drizzle hadn’t stopped all morning, but there were still plenty of people milling around outside the entrance. A couple sat eating sandwiches, perched on adjacent concrete stumps. Rows of these bollards, installed to deter car-bombers, had sprung up outside most of the city’s public buildings, and Thorne often wondered if cement companies might be secretly funding some of the terrorist groups. He shared the theory with Porter and they paused for a minute, enjoying the joke; Thorne, on his way towards the tube station at St James’s Park and Porter headed for the Yard’s underground garage.

‘How much does it bother you?’ Thorne asked. ‘That nobody’s asking the Mullens for any money. That nobody’s asking for anything.’

‘These cases are never predictable, I’ve learned that much. But yeah, it’s bloody odd.’

‘They’ve had Luke four days already.’

‘Four days, five nights. Mind you, we were worried that they hadn’t got in touch, and then they did.’

Thorne began to do up the buttons on his leather jacket. ‘Something bothers me,’ he said. ‘Something on the tape.’

‘What?’

‘I wish I could tell you. Something’s not right, though; something that he said, or maybe just the way he said it.’

‘It’ll come to you.’

‘Maybe.’

‘It’s old age, mate. That’s Alzheimer’s kicking in.’

Thorne dug down deep for a smile.

‘I’ll catch up with you later on at Arkley,’ she said. ‘See how they’re doing, OK?’

‘Right.’ He took a step backwards, half turned, on his way. ‘What do you make of Mullen?’

‘I think he needs to remember he’s not a copper any more.’

Thorne fastened the top button of his jacket and stuffed his hands into the pockets. Thinking about memory, perfect and fucked-up. Thinking that his memories of the time before he was a copper were getting pushed for space; shunted aside by less pleasant recollections. ‘You ever thought about getting out early?’ he asked.

‘Now and again. What about you?’

‘There’s times I think about it a fair bit.’

‘What sort of times?’ Porter asked.

‘When I’m awake…’

Tony Mullen reached into the fridge for the wine bottle, pulled the glass across the counter-top and poured himself a decent measure. He moved over to where his daughter was making herself a sandwich. Stroked the back of her head as he drank.

Neither had spoken since he’d come into the kitchen a few minutes before, and they continued to stand, each busy in their own way, sharing the space in silence until Juliet Mullen picked up her plate and walked out.

He listened to his daughter’s footsteps on the stairs, to the creak and click of her bedroom door, and to the music which escaped in the few seconds between those final two sounds. He strained to hear the murmur of Maggie’s voice, and, though he could hear nothing, he knew very well that in some room or other of the house his wife would be deep in conversation. She’d been keeping the landline clear for obvious reasons, but somewhere she’d be sitting or lying down with the mobile pressed to her ear; talking it out and talking it through to her family, her friends, anyone willing to listen and pretend they understood what was happening.

He’d spoken when he’d had to. He’d given the necessary information when it had been required of him, but aside from that, he’d said next to nothing. That had always been the way between them if ever there was trouble, if ever the family unit had been threatened in any way. He’d always be the one to go into himself, bottle things up; the one to turn the problem every which way without saying a word while others did the screaming and shouting. Luke was like that, too: never one to get hysterical. Maggie was usually the one that wore her heart on her sleeve and it was never easy to tell what was going on inside Juliet’s head.

It wasn’t very inclusive or touchy-feely, he knew that. It was old fashioned and out of step. He guessed that in some ways it might have been better if they’d all sat around and opened up, if they’d shared, but it wasn’t the way he or his family operated, and you couldn’t help the way you were.

He moved his fingers back and forth across the smooth, cold surface of the counter-top and thought about DI Tom Thorne. The cheeky bastard had given him a hard time the day before, badgered him, even though only one person in that room had made DCI, and only one was ever likely to. He was grateful to Jesmond for laying on the extra men, but Thorne was one he’d have to watch. That type of copper – the ‘bull in a china shop’ type – didn’t solve cases like this one. His son would be freed by doing what was simple and sound, and not by refusing to accept what you’d been told and banging on about how many names were on a fucking list.

Mullen emptied his glass and thought about the name he hadn’t written down. He told himself that it was unimportant; that it was acceptable within the scheme of things; that he’d done it for the right reason. A silly reason perhaps, but one worth the very smallest of lies.

He would have loved to forget the man to whom that name belonged, but it would never slip his mind. It was a name with unhappy connotations, after all. But it was a name – and this was all that really counted – that he knew damn well had nothing to do with his son’s disappearance. With who was holding Luke, or where, or what they wanted. So why did it matter, and what harm could come from leaving one name out of it?

He listened for a minute or two more, then moved back to the fridge.

What harm?

AMANDA

It was a bag. Just a plastic bag, that had done all the damage; was still doing it if assorted shrinks and social workers knew what they were talking about.

Probably one of those really cheap, stripy ones that you picked up at late-night supermarkets and shitty corner shops. The driver of the second car had never gone so far as to describe the bag in court, but that was how she always imagined it. Fluttering across the street and up on to the windscreen, held there by the wind, blinding the driver for that crucial second or two and causing him to swerve. A shapeless piece of jetsam that made him drive into the silver Mercedes coming the other way. That floated up like smoke at the impact, and sent her daddy through the glass.

Cheap and insubstantial. Virtually weightless. Something so terrible coming from nothing…

The boy was dosed-up now and out of it, and Conrad was getting a bit of sleep in the next room. It was the middle of the day, but both their body clocks had gone haywire. The curtains were closed all the time; it could have been morning, noon or night. It didn’t really matter one way or the other. It was boring, that was all. They just had to stay where they were for as long as the whole thing took; until they knew what was happening next.

When she dwelled on what had happened to her father, which was often, she never really thought about the other driver: unsighted and screaming behind the wheel; giving his evidence in a neck-brace; limping away down the steps outside the court while her mother shouted after him. She thought instead – and she knew how irrational it was – about the person who had sold the plastic bag. About the person who had filled it with fruit, or fish, or fuck-all worth talking about, and about all the hands the bag had passed through before it was finally tossed into the gutter. She thought about the people who would never know the part they had played in her father’s death. She imagined all their faces. She gave each one a life, and a family to fill it. And in her darkest moments, of which there were many, she’d take a member of that family away, and watch the life she’d made for someone fall apart.

She walked across to the portable CD player in the corner of the bedroom, turned the music up just a little to drown out the boy’s breathing. She took what she needed from her handbag and sat back down on the floor.

They’d argued again about the usual thing, Conrad doing that low, disappointed voice he saved up for the drug conversations. He told her that she needed to keep a clear head. She pointed out that it was precisely because the situation they were in was so stressful that she needed the lift. He got angrier then, reminded her that she always needed it, and she told him that the last thing she needed was for him to be so self-righteous, and that she’d sort herself out afterwards, when they had the money.

Nodding her head to the music, she tipped out the powder; measured and scraped and cut. She rolled up the note and stared at the lines, at the flyaway grains that dotted the tabletop around their edges. Insubstantial. Virtually weightless.

Something so wonderful coming from nothing.

FIVE

Fifteen minutes from the Mullen house, in the largely affluent suburb of Stanmore, Butler’s Hall School had occupied its hundred-plus acres of lush parkland for a little under a century.

Holland read a potted history of the place, flicking through the school’s lavish prospectus as he waited in a car at the end of a mile-long driveway. Of its 250-plus pupils – most of whom were fed in from a nearby prep school in the same foundation – almost a third were boarders. Of the total number, around 40 per cent were girls, first admitted as sixth-formers in the early eighties, then into the main body of the school ten years after that.

Kenny Parsons, who had gone in search of a toilet fifteen minutes earlier, knocked on the window. Holland looked up, wound down the window.

‘It’s a fair bet that if you can afford to send your kids here, you can afford to cough up a decent ransom,’ Parsons said. ‘These kids might as well have targets on their backs.’

‘Wouldn’t be allowed,’ Holland said, lifting the brochure. ‘There’s a very strict uniform code.’

Parsons looked back towards the school. ‘There’s a very strict everything code.’

Holland got out of the car, tossed the brochure on to the back seat. He and Parsons began walking towards the school building. ‘“Falsehood dishonours me”,’ he said.

‘Come again?’

‘That’s the translation from the Latin, apparently. “Lies shame me”, or whatever. The school motto.’

Parsons nodded, vacant. ‘The lower sixth should be out in a minute,’ he said.

The end of the school day was staggered, with pupils from upper and lower years coming out at twenty-minute intervals. Porter and three colleagues, working in teams of two, were already elsewhere on the school premises, talking to children from the fourth and fifth forms in the presence of teachers or parents. As Holland and Parsons moved towards the school’s main exit, they joined another pair of SO7 officers, falling in behind them as they walked across the car park, cutting through the massed ranks of silver or black people carriers: Porsche Cayennes, Volvos and BMW X5s. One of the officers, a skinny Essex boy with bad skin, put his face close to the tinted window of a Lexus as he passed, tried to see inside. ‘What do these people do?’ he said.

Holland, Parsons and the others stopped in the school quad, loitering outside a pair of vast wooden doors, which slammed open as the first of the students began to emerge. Like all those officers working on site, the four were smartly, though informally, dressed: khakis and casual jackets; suits over polo shirts. They could easily have been teachers, or even, in one or two cases, students out of uniform.

Parsons was clearly still thinking about his colleague’s question as he watched the first wave of pupils emerge, and spoke above their chatter. ‘Well, I don’t think many of them are coppers. And I can’t see any of their kids becoming coppers, either.’

‘They do have scholarship places,’ Holland said. ‘Not everyone’s dad’s an oil billionaire or a footballer, you know.’

‘That’s a fair point,’ the Essex boy said. ‘Take Mullen for a kick-off. Unless he was seriously bent, I can’t see how he’d be rolling in it.’

Parsons said something about a DCI’s pension, about Mullen making seriously good money as a security consultant, but Holland had stopped listening. He was watching two girls, aged fifteen or so, heads together, whispering. He was thinking about Chloe. Deciding that, even though it was a long way off, he wouldn’t argue if there was so much as a chance of her getting into a place like this. That he would argue until his last breath with the idea of her ever becoming a copper.

Officers had travelled to Butler’s Hall late on the Monday – the first day the unit had become involved – and taken more statements the day after that, but it was understandable that Barry Hignett was keen to speak to everyone who might have anything to add. Understandable in that, until the people holding Luke Mullen decided to let the police or his parents know exactly what they wanted, there was little else that could usefully be done.

Pupils had been spoken to in school. They were told that Luke Mullen was still missing and that there would be police officers waiting to talk to them if they felt they had anything useful to report. The headmaster had been at pains to remind them that neglecting to do so would be as good as falsehood, and every bit as dishonourable. They were urged to pass on any information they had, however trivial it might seem, about the Friday afternoon when Luke had been driven away.

The Essex boy and his partner paired off, taking up a position at the other end of the quad, but neither they nor Holland and Parsons were exactly swamped by the rush of eager young informants.

Those few pupils Holland and Parsons did speak to all told just about the same story. It became clear that over the previous few days the school jungle drums had been working overtime and that it would not be easy to sort out the fact from the hearsay.

One boy assured Holland that Luke Mullen had run off with a sexy older woman. Several sixth-form girls swore blind that they’d seen Luke and the mystery woman kissing two or three days earlier. One of Luke’s classmates said that he thought Luke had a secret girlfriend; that he’d been dropping hints about going away somewhere with her. Spain, maybe, or France.

Nothing they were told took them any closer to identifying the car. It was still probably a Passat, and more likely dark blue than black, but the partial number plate had now become all but useless, with another dozen different letters and numbers passed on by those who swore they’d seen it drive away with Luke Mullen inside.

The descriptions they were given of the woman were much the same as they already had, though, again, such statements became less credible once it became clear that those giving them had been talking to each other. She was in her late twenties. She was dirty blonde. She was very skinny. ‘Tasty, though,’ one of Luke’s classmates had said. ‘Luke reckoned she was fit. Mind you, he hadn’t got much to compare her to, had he?’

The emphasis in this, as in all similar dealings with the public, was on the search for a missing teenager. It was certainly not talked of as an abduction; and, in line with standard practice, the word ‘kidnap’ was never used by officers outside of Central 3000 or the Mullen house.

A school, however, was as perfect a breeding ground for conjecture as it was for stomach bugs or cold sores.

‘This woman’s the one who kidnapped Mullen, yes?’ The boy was fifteen, a year below Luke, but his manner was that of a pupil three or four years older.

‘I can’t go into too many details, I’m afraid,’ Holland said. The boy had neatly parted hair and was carrying a small briefcase. Holland guessed that he was probably not a big star on the rugby field.

‘I understand.’

Holland saw straight away that it was best to speak to the boy as if he were genuinely as mature as he appeared. ‘But she’s certainly someone we’re interested in tracing.’

‘How much of a description do you have?’ the boy asked.

Holland exchanged a look with Kenny Parsons, then gave the boy the basic facts. ‘Obviously, if there’s anything more you can add…’

‘I’m doing S-level art,’ the boy said. ‘I’m one of the best in the year.’

Holland stared at him.

‘I got a pretty good look at the woman with Luke. I could probably draw her, if you’d like.’

‘We’ll get that arranged as soon as we can,’ Holland said.

Parsons made a note of the boy’s name and address. They asked him a few more questions: ascertained exactly where he’d been standing the previous Friday afternoon; how far away he’d been; if there was anyone with him at the time.

‘People have been saying that she was Luke’s girlfriend or something,’ the boy said out of the blue, ‘but I can’t say I’m convinced.’

‘Why not?’ Holland found it hard to believe that the boy could be an expert on such matters; that he was much beyond a crush on the dinner ladies.

‘Body language.’ He said it as though it were obvious, and as if he were becoming slightly bored with the conversation. Yet there was an authority and a confidence about him, which, to Holland at least, made what he said oddly credible.

‘What about Luke? What did he seem like?’

‘Happy enough, I suppose. They walked straight past me at one point and he was talking to her.’

‘Did you-?’

‘I didn’t catch any of what was said I’m afraid, but he seemed… content.’

‘It didn’t look like he was going anywhere under duress, then? He didn’t seem frightened or apprehensive?’

‘No, but she did.’ The boy swung his briefcase distractedly. Stared past Holland and Parsons towards the school gates, as if he were looking for a friend. ‘She looked scared to death.’

Thorne had certainly made good use of his Travelcard.

He’d been across to Barking to talk to a DI on the Intel Unit based there, then spent an hour and a half travelling up to Finchley to interview a DCI on the Flying Squad. Both men had told him what a great bloke Tony Mullen was, what a loss it had been when he’d retired so early, how terrible it was that his family had been targeted. One of them said he’d started a collection at the station, but then stopped and given the money back when he’d realised he didn’t know what it was for.

They had looked at Mullen’s already truncated list. Neither had made much comment, but each had told a war story or two, remembering the part they’d played alongside Tony Mullen in catching and putting away the individuals named. Thorne had listened, laughed in all the right places, and encouraged each officer in turn to consider any other of Mullen’s past cases that they felt might have a bearing on what was happening. To give him the name of any person they felt should be checked out, if only to be eliminated from any enquiry. Between them, another two names had been suggested; four altogether now on the list Thorne carried with him on the short journey to Colindale. To the meeting he had scheduled at the Peel Centre.

In the Major Incident Room on the third floor of Becke House, Thorne spent fifteen minutes catching up with a few of those he would normally have been working with: he shared a quick cup of coffee with Yvonne Kitson, who seemed a little preoccupied; he traded jokes with Samir Karim and Andy Stone, who assured him that no one had even noticed he was gone; and he stuck his head round Russell Brigstocke’s door in the vain hope of some moral support.

Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond made it clear from the second Thorne stepped across his threshold that they were not going to be talking for long.

‘It shouldn’t take long, Sir.’

‘Good. I’m up to my bloody eyeballs.’

Thorne brought Jesmond up to speed on the Luke Mullen case as briskly as he could. He explained that they had to seriously consider revenge as the motive for kidnapping Tony Mullen’s son; that they were looking at anyone who might be holding a grudge. As Jesmond knew Mullen better than anyone, Thorne said, and had worked closely with him over a number of years, nobody was better placed, or better qualified, to cast an expert eye across a list of the candidates. He laid it on good and thick, and though Thorne could see that Jesmond knew he was being flattered, it seemed to work.

‘Naturally I’m keen to do anything I can to help,’ Jesmond said.

Thorne reached into his pocket for the list. ‘Of course…’

‘Tony and Maggie are going through hell.’

‘A couple more names have been added since we spoke on the phone…’

Jesmond stood and walked past Thorne to the door. He lifted an overcoat from a metal hat-stand. ‘We’ll continue this outside. Then I can be doing other things at the same time.’

‘It’s still not a long list-’

‘What is it women like to say? That we blokes can’t multi-task?’

Thorne said nothing, alarmed to see Jesmond’s thin lips sliding back across his teeth in something approaching a smile.

One of the ‘other things’ turned out to involve trudging across to the centre’s driving school, where, for no obviously good reason, they stood and watched those on the advanced driving course take cars around the track or turn inwards to career across a skid-pan.

Jesmond waved to one of the instructors, then shouted above the roar of an engine: ‘Do you like motor sport, Thorne?’

Thorne pretended he hadn’t heard, and asked Jesmond to repeat the question while he thought about whether to lie. He watched an Audi squealing between a series of bollards. ‘Only the crashes,’ he said.

And that was the end of that.

The driving school was directly opposite the athletics arena. When not captivated by the sight of cars swerving or being driven at high speed, Thorne could glance across and watch a gaggle of recruits jogging slowly around the asphalt perimeter. Each wore a pristine blue tracksuit, but several looked anything but athletic. Most looked as though they’d have preferred a nice riot, or maybe an armed siege.

‘Tony Mullen had a decent strike rate,’ Jesmond said. ‘As good as anyone I can think of, as it happens. But you know as well as I do that most of the lowlife we put away treat being caught as part of the job. They don’t take it personally. If they were going to try and get their own back on every copper who’d ever nicked them, they’d be far too fucking busy to reoffend.’

Thorne knew it was true, by and large, but he also knew better than most that there were some to whom the rules did not, could not, apply. When it came to the ones that killed, there were some for whom the offence was far from occupational; whose reactions when they were caught – when they were no longer able to act on their compulsions – were anything but predictable.

It was clear when Jesmond spoke again that, as usual, the expression on Thorne’s face had made it obvious what he was thinking.

‘Of course, there are always going to be headcases,’ Jesmond said, ‘and I know you’ve had your fair share of those over the last few years. But they can usually be discounted, because the majority of them end up in places they’re never coming out of again.’

The majority of them.

A few names and faces flashed through Thorne’s mind: Nicklin, Foley, Zarif…

‘Thorne?’

Thorne nodded, not quite sure what he was being asked. To his right, a mud-spattered meat wagon moved slowly through the car wash. Three more brooded in line behind it.

‘Let’s have a look at this list, then,’ Jesmond said.

Thorne passed the slip of paper across, waited.

‘I wouldn’t even think about Billy Campbell.’ Jesmond jabbed at the paper. ‘He was just a gobshite. Told just about every copper, judge and prison officer he ever ran across that he’d come after them. Liked to shout his mouth off, that’s all, same as a lot of them.’

Campbell’s was one of the two names added that morning. Thorne hadn’t had a chance to run it through the system. ‘What about the others?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never heard of Wayne Anthony Barber.’

The other new name. ‘Went down on two counts of rape in 1994. Liked to threaten his victims with a screwdriver. Went for Mullen in the interview room, by all accounts.’

Jesmond shrugged and pointed to the two names at the top of the list. ‘These the ones Tony Mullen gave you?’

Thorne grunted a yes.

‘Fair enough, I suppose. Cotterill and Quinn are both nasty pieces of work.’ He stretched out an arm, waved the paper for Thorne to take. ‘This case doesn’t fit either of them, though.’

‘Harry Cotterill took a building-society teller hostage in 1989…’

‘It’s not the same thing. These two aren’t kidnappers.’

‘They’ll know people, though.’

‘I can’t see it.’

‘They’re both around, at any rate,’ Thorne took the paper, folded it and put it back in his pocket. ‘Worth having a look at, surely?’

‘You asked me what I thought,’ Jesmond said. ‘It’s an SO7 job, so it’s Barry Hignett’s call anyway.’

Thorne took a breath of diesel and burning rubber. Used it to say thank you, though it was very much for nothing.

Later, when Holland had seen him as one of a very different group, it became clear to him that the boy stood out, that he was the one you focused on, whomever he was with. There was a physicality that drew the eye; a look-at me-if-you-want-to swagger. A confidence. A lot of them had that, of course; it went with the uniform, and the accent, and the knowledge that, barring disaster, they were going to do fairly well for themselves. This boy was different, though; he looked like he knew it and he couldn’t care less.

Holland and Parsons had been talking to a group of girls. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, confident in a different way still from their male counterparts. They answered questions succinctly and then posed a few of their own. They flirted and laughed. Holland had laughed right back, well aware that some of the girls were highly attractive and that they knew it. He watched them walking away, then turned to see Parsons staring at him, mock-stern, an eyebrow raised.

‘Easy, tiger…’

‘Don’t be so bloody silly!’ As Holland snapped, he remembered Thorne saying exactly the same thing, in exactly the same way, when certain veiled suggestions had been made about DI Louise Porter. Then he turned back towards the door to the school and saw the boy.

He was with three others; not the tallest, nor the one at the front as they came out into the quad, but he was still the focal point. He made some comment and the others laughed, and Holland could see straight away that he was the leader. The one around whom the other boys moved.

As the group approached, Holland watched the boy make subtle alterations to his appearance: the daily change from classroom to street. The tie was loosened and lowered, fingers pushed the blond hair into spikes, and when the hand had finished working at the side of the head a gold cross was dangling from the boy’s left ear.

Holland stared at the earring. There was something familiar about it; something important.

Parsons held out a hand, beckoned the group towards them. ‘We’re talking to anyone who might have seen what happened to Luke Mullen last Friday afternoon.’

There was a good deal of shrugging and shuffling of feet. More than one pair of eyes settled on the boy with the earring.

‘Presumably that’s when you’d have been coming out of school,’ Parsons said. ‘Perhaps one of you saw Luke Mullen getting into a car.’

There was a pause before answers began to tumble out, clumsily, one on top of the other.

‘Loads of kids are getting into cars…’

‘I was playing rugby last Friday…’

‘There was a meeting for next year’s skiing trip…’

‘I don’t think we can help you.’

Answering last, the boy with the earring spoke with that odd, almost mid-Atlantic accent that Holland had heard in many of the pupils already: an upward intonation at the end of every sentence, as if everything were a nice, easy question being asked of someone who really ought to know the answer. The boy spoke for the other three, and Holland could see that they were happy to let him do so. He was the one each of them was keen to hang around with and to emulate; the friend they wanted. Holland remembered the boy with the briefcase, the young artist they’d spoken to earlier. This boy was everything that one was not, and probably most wanted to be.

Holland, if he was honest, had been as neither boy himself. At secondary school in Kingston twenty years before, he’d slogged it out somewhere between the two extremes. Head down; unhappily anonymous.

The four boys were already starting to amble away, but Kenny Parsons walked quickly after them, moved ahead and halted their progress. ‘Hang on, lads, we haven’t finished.’

‘Haven’t we?’ the boy with the earring asked.

‘One of your friends is missing.’

‘I barely know him.’ One of the others laughed. The boy with the earring shot him a look, shut him up instantly.

‘So you’re not in the same class?’

‘Correct. We’re not.’

‘Same year?’

‘Also correct. I don’t see how any of this is really helping, though, do you?’ He was already on the move again, hitching his bag across his shoulder and walking towards the main road.

Holland watched the boy and his friends depart. Something familiar about the boy’s face, too; something important. Thinking about the way he’d spoken to Parsons; the way he’d looked at a police officer.

A black police officer…

‘Cheeky little fucker,’ Parsons said.

It was a jolt, like the gut-lurch you feel driving over a humpback bridge, when Holland finally dragged the picture into focus. The cross dangling from the ear. A face he’d seen before.

‘I thought these posh kids had better manners than that.’

Holland nodded, knowing that this was exactly the point; that, if he was right, ‘cheeky’ was not the half of it.

The boy with the earring could afford to be sure of himself. It went with the uniform and the accent, for sure, but it also went with the fact that people made judgements about character on the strength of how you looked and sounded. Most people believed what such things had always told them.

Holland collared the next kid who passed and pointed towards the boy with the spiky hair. He asked the question and was given a name. Then he watched the boy called Adrian Farrell turn to look at them and walk slowly backwards down the drive, the blond hair still visible as he was absorbed, uniform by uniform, into the exodus of blue and grey.

The boy could well afford to be confident, because appearances were just that. And police officers, just like everybody else, made stupid assumptions.

Thorne, though usually more likely to brood than complain, was not beyond a decent moan every so often; and Carol Chamberlain, if she was in the right mood, could be a good listener. He grumbled into the phone about his back, about being shifted to the Kidnap Unit, about the fact that his only real avenue of investigation was rapidly turning into a cul-de-sac.

Carol Chamberlain was not in the right mood. ‘You should go and see someone,’ she said.

‘What, like a psychiatrist?’

‘That as well, but I’m talking about your back. Shut up about it and go and see a doctor.’

After the chat with Jesmond, Thorne had walked back to Becke House and run the two newest names on the list through CRIMINT. Billy Campbell was reported to be attending a drug and alcohol rehab centre in Scotland. Wayne Barber had finally got round to using that screwdriver and was serving life with a twenty-five-year tariff in Wakefield Prison. That left only Mullen’s original two, and Jesmond had made it clear he thought they were both a waste of time.

Thorne had started to feel like he was wading through treacle. He’d grabbed a sandwich from the canteen and walked back up to the Major Incident Room. Wondered whom he could possibly call up and complain to while he ate his lunch.

He’d known ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain for a couple of years. She’d been brought out of retirement in her early fifties and recruited for the Area Major Review Unit, a small team comprising previously retired officers, put together to take a fresh look at cold cases. They were known – not always affectionately – as the Crinkly Squad.

Chamberlain was anything but crinkly.

Thorne had always known that she could be spiky, that she was not a woman to get on the wrong side of, but the year before he’d seen a blackness seep and spill from her; a slick of poisonous rage every bit the equal of anything bubbling and slopping inside himself, which had threatened to envelop them both. Once its acrid shadow had lifted, there had been enough light for them both to see clearly, to get what was needed, but there had been a price to pay. If it hadn’t been for those few terrible minutes of madness – never spoken of since – they would not have found the man responsible for setting fire to a young girl. And, though Chamberlain would never know it, Thorne’s father might still be alive.

She was a friend, but like most people whom Tom Thorne respected, she frightened him a little.

‘Maybe I should call back later,’ Thorne said. ‘Obviously you’re busy worming the cat or doing a crossword or something.’

‘Cheeky bastard. Just because I don’t want to listen to you whingeing.’

‘I called because occasionally you have some decent advice.’

‘Right, and because I know Tony Mullen.’

‘Sorry?’ Thorne put down his sandwich.

‘Didn’t you know that?’

‘If I had, I would have called you straight away. How long have you known him?’

‘I worked with him in CID at Golders Green, twelve or thirteen years ago, something like that. He’d’ve been a DS then, probably, or maybe he was about to be made up. He was being bumped up to chief inspector round about the time I retired, I think.’

Thorne grabbed a scrap of paper, began to scribble notes. ‘So?’

‘So… he was decent enough, I suppose. Straight, as far as I could tell, but that doesn’t mean a great deal. I’ve got a lot of people wrong one way or another over the years.’

‘What about these two names then? Cotterill and Quinn.’ Thorne could hear classical music in the background. Chamberlain’s husband, Jack, was a keen listener.

‘I know it’s not what you want to hear, but I think Jesmond might be right. I can’t see either of those two as kidnappers.’ She paused. ‘I don’t suppose anybody mentioned Grant Freestone, did they?’

‘Should they have?’ Thorne wrote down the name.

‘Well, not everyone maybe, but I’m surprised his name hasn’t come up at all.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Freestone sexually assaulted a number of kids, 1993 or ’94, round there. Boys and girls, I don’t think he was fussy. He kept them in a garage behind his flat.’

Kept them…

Thorne tried to blink away the image of a bag coming down over a boy’s face.

‘I was only on it briefly,’ Chamberlain said. ‘But Tony Mullen was very much involved, might even have been the arresting officer. It was common knowledge that things got nasty, that Freestone was making threats more or less from the moment he was nicked until he got sent down.’

‘Threats against Mullen?’

‘He might well have threatened others, but it’s Mullen I remember. I was in court one of the days and I can still see the look Freestone gave him: not aggressive exactly, but… Well, I can still remember it, so…’

‘Thanks, Carol. I’ll check it out.’

She said nothing for a second or two, then the music was turned down. ‘Let me do it.’

Slowly, Thorne underlined Grant Freestone’s name. ‘I thought, you know, there were cats to worm.’

‘I’m ignoring you. Seriously, Tom, why don’t you let me do some asking around and get back to you?’

Thorne could hear the change in Chamberlain’s voice immediately. The work she did for AMRU was irregular, and frustrating more often than not. He knew how much she relished feeling useful; how keen she was to get her teeth into something, into anything. He also knew that she still had a broad network of contacts and that she was bloody good at what she did. She might come up with a damn sight more than could be gleaned from any computer search.

‘Also, Jack’s had a dodgy back for years,’ she said. ‘He’s got some fantastic stuff he rubs on at night. I can bring it next time I see you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So you’ve had a double result.’

Thorne thought about the video, the man with the syringe. He wondered if this could possibly be the same man whose face Carol Chamberlain still remembered from a courtroom a dozen years earlier. A man who’d taken children before.

With one hand, he reached for his discarded sandwich. The other put pen back to paper and began to scrawl.

Drew box after box after box around the man’s name.

CONRAD

He’d come to realise a long time ago that nearly everything came down to fish and ponds. To how big a fish you were and the size of the pond you swam around in. That and time, of course. He’d decided that time was a very weird thing to get your head round.

Obviously, he’d never read that book about it by the bloke in the wheelchair; the one who spoke through some machine he’d invented and sounded like a Dalek. He wouldn’t have understood it if he had, he knew that much, but he was pretty bloody sure that it would have been interesting. Time never ceased to amaze him, the way it messed you around. How you always got back from somewhere quicker than you got there. How the first week of your summer holiday seemed to last for ages and then the second week flew by and was all over before your skin had started peeling. How time dragged on and on when you were waiting for something to happen.

It didn’t seem like five minutes since Amanda had danced across and stuck her tits out at him. Since she’d been happy to let him get his end away for a few Bacardi Breezers and the promise of a favour. Five minutes… six months… whatever… and now they were shooting a kid full of drugs and sitting and waiting for something to happen.

To be honest, he’d been happier doing what they’d done before. It was easy – in and out – and if anyone got hurt it was only because they really asked for it. People who were stupid enough to get all heroic – with money that belonged to fucking Esso or whoever – deserved a kicking, as far as he was concerned. This was different, though. There was no guts in it, nothing to make you feel like you’d earned what you’d made. It felt shameful, like something only a pussy or a wanker would do. It was a weakling’s crime.

Maybe he’d feel different when the two of them were sitting somewhere warm, spending the money. Maybe then he could forget how they’d come by it. He hoped so, anyway.

Amanda was in the kitchen. Cheese on toast, probably; baked beans or something. She kept telling him that they’d splash out on somewhere flashy, go to a place with a doorman and photographers outside when the money came through. He’d asked when that was likely to be; told her that he was getting fed up sitting around with his thumb up his arse. That he wanted it finished. She’d told him that it wouldn’t be much longer. That it would be over and done with soon enough, one way or another. He’d thought that sounded a bit fucking ominous. He’d looked across at the boy then, slumped in a corner of the bedroom, and thought that it sounded very fucking scary…

That had been a while ago. Hours and hours. Days, even. Time dragging its feet like some poor bastard who knows he’s got a beating coming.

He knew it was all his own fault. That he’d had the chance to say ‘no’ early on, to say that it was a stupid idea. He couldn’t lay all this at Amanda’s door; but still, he hated it.

Waiting and not knowing.

And feeling like a very small fish.

SIX

There were posters covering almost every inch of the pale green Anaglypta: the Spurs team of 1975, with Steve Perryman in front holding the ball; a futuristic Roger Dean landscape; the female tennis player walking away from camera scratching at a bare buttock. In the corner of the room, a music centre sat on a shelf supported by house-bricks, Bowie and Deep Purple gatefolds spread out across its Perspex lid and leaning against its speakers. Books and piles of magazines were strewn across an old dining table, carried up from downstairs to be used as a desk: Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Shoot!, Jaws, Chariots of the Gods, a couple of tattered Sven Hassel paperbacks. A Jilly Johnson calendar and a Woolworth’s dartboard on the wall next to the window…

Thorne blinked and looked again at these newer walls. Smooth and orchid pale.

There were reproductions of ancient maps, architectural blueprints with elaborate French calligraphy, posters for exhibitions at the V & A and Tate Modern. Some had been mounted in simple clip-frames while others were stuck to the wall with Blu-Tack. Standing in the centre of a very different bedroom from the one that had once been his own, Thorne decided that what Parsons had said the day before was about right: Luke Mullen was hardly a typical sixteen-year-old.

He walked across to the metal and glass workstation, surprised to see an Arsenal diary on top of the papers stacked to one side. He reached for it, curious, and somewhat relieved that the boy – though clearly misguided in his choice of team – had at least one passion with which Thorne was able to identify. He flicked through the first few pages, saw immediately that it was no more than a homework diary.

There was a rectangular patch of dust on the glass, where Luke’s laptop had sat. The tech boys were still working on the hard drive, digging around for anything that might have been well hidden by anyone who knew what they were doing. But from what they’d been able to establish thus far, there was no significant email correspondence, nothing on any computerised diary to suggest that Luke had been planning to go anywhere. He hadn’t spent time in chat rooms, and it didn’t appear that he’d struck up a recent relationship with anyone online.

Little more had been gleaned from the details of his mobile-phone activity. The phone itself had been in Luke’s possession when he’d gone missing, so it had not been possible to check his contacts list, but records of calls and text messages provided by the phone company had yet to reveal anything that looked important. Luke had called his sister more than anybody else.

Thorne stared at the dust, at the shape of it, marking the absence of something, and found himself holding his breath. He imagined a young, alert mind racing, and fighting hard as the drug took hold, as eyelids dropped and thoughts slipped into the wet. Sopping and inky-black…

He pulled down the sleeve of his jacket, gripped it between fingers and palm and leaned down to wipe away the marks from the glass.

‘You won’t find him in here.’

Thorne turned to see Juliet Mullen standing in the doorway of her brother’s room. He slapped the grey dust marks from his sleeve. ‘Actually, I’ve found quite a lot of him,’ he said.

The girl rolled her eyes and walked past him into the room, clearly unimpressed, and unwilling to discuss anything as tedious as an abstract concept. She leaned back against a wall and slid slowly down it until she was sitting on the grey carpet. ‘So…?’

Thorne looked around, then back at Juliet. ‘Well, Luke was certainly tidy.’

‘Nothing gets past you, does it?’

‘I am a detective.’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘I’ve taken exams.’

‘They must have lowered the pass rate.’

She wasn’t smiling, but Thorne sensed that behind the studied air of boredom and irritation, it was a struggle not to; that she was enjoying the banter. Her hair was long, the same charcoal as the make-up around her eyes and the hooded top she wore over baggy jeans. Skateboarder chic, Thorne thought it might be called. Or grunge, or something. He thought about asking her, then decided it wasn’t such a great idea.

‘What was on the video?’ she said suddenly.

It took Thorne a moment to work out what she was talking about; a moment before deciding he would not answer.

‘Mum and Dad watched it this morning, before they called Porter. Just the once, I think, but it was enough. Obviously they wouldn’t let me see it. And they didn’t want to talk about it afterwards, so…’

‘So?’

‘So… I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.’

Thorne watched her draw her knees up, shrinking into the corner of the room. He couldn’t help but be reminded of the previous evening with Phil Hendricks. Now, as then, he could see the pain and the longing beneath the pose; the anguish, raw behind the flippant remark. It couldn’t hurt to tell her.

‘It was Luke. Just Luke on the tape.’

She nodded quickly, as though something she already knew had been confirmed. It was a mature gesture, self-possessed, but in the next instant a tremor in the soft flesh around her mouth turned her back into a child again. ‘What did he say? Did he say anything?’

‘Juliet, I can’t-’

‘They were crying after they’d watched it, the pair of them. They pretended they weren’t, which was a bit bloody pointless, if you ask me. I mean, I knew what it was, you know? I didn’t think they were watching porno at nine o’clock in the morning.’

‘They didn’t want you to get upset,’ Thorne said.

‘Right, that’s brilliant. So now all I can think about is what might have been on the tape. What whoever’s got Luke might have been doing to him. How much pain he might have been in.’

‘He’s doing OK. Honestly.’

‘Define “OK”.’

Thorne took a deep breath.

‘“OK” as in having a whale of a time?’ She began plucking at the pile of the carpet. ‘Or “OK” as in still breathing?’

It was as tough a question as had been thrown at Thorne in a long time. ‘Nobody’s hurting him.’

Her head dropped to her knees. When she heaved it up again fifteen or twenty seconds later, the eyeliner was beginning to run. ‘He’s got a year and a bit on me, but sometimes it’s like I’m the older sister.’ Her eyes roamed from one part of the room to another, like she was searching to prove her point. ‘I have to look after him in loads of ways. You know what I mean?’

Thorne stepped across and sat down on the edge of the bed. The duvet was dark blue and neatly squared away. He guessed that Luke had probably made the bed himself before leaving for school on Friday. ‘Yeah, I think I do,’ he said.

She sniffed. ‘Pain in the fucking arse…’

The silence that followed was probably more uncomfortable for the girl than it was for Thorne. It was less than half a minute before she pulled herself to her feet. ‘Right…’ Like she had a lot to be getting on with.

Thorne stood, too. He cocked his head towards the doorway, towards the rest of the house. ‘It’s good that you’re all so… close. At a time like this, you know?’

Juliet Mullen nodded, pushed her hair back behind her ears.

‘What did they argue about?’ Thorne walked back to the workstation and looked at the photograph pinned to a corkboard above it: Luke on his father’s shoulders, eyes wide behind orange swimming goggles; the pair of them grinning like idiots and the sun bouncing off the blue water around them. ‘Luke and your dad, last Friday morning.’

‘Stupid stuff about school.’

‘Work stuff?’

‘About Luke not making the rugby team or something. It wasn’t a big deal.’

‘Your dad seems to think it was.’

‘That’s just because of what’s happened. Because he’s feeling guilty. Because the last time he saw Luke, the two of them were shouting at each other.’ She took a pace towards the bed and leaned down to smooth out the duvet where Thorne had been sitting. ‘Luke was already feeling bad about it by the time we got to school. He told me he was going to say “sorry” when he got home, that it was all his fault for being cheeky or whatever.’

‘Was it?’ Thorne asked.

‘I can’t even remember. It was just bloody silly because those two never argue, you know? They’re really close. It’s that whole father-son thing?’ It sounded like a question at the end, as though she were making sure Thorne knew what she meant.

‘Right.’

‘See you later.’

Thorne watched her leave. He knew exactly what she’d meant and, more importantly, he now also knew what had bothered him about the video.

What it was that Luke had said… or hadn’t said.

He stopped on his way out, seeing that the corner of a poster near the door had come unstuck, and when he reached across to press it back in place, he noticed the writing beneath. He peered at the words, at the small, neat letters written in black ink on the wallpaper. A stark and secret litany of frustration, impatience or rage.

Fuck off

Fuck off

Fuck off!

From the school, Holland had gone straight back to Central 3000 and found himself a desk out of the way. He needed ten or fifteen minutes to gather his thoughts, to get into the Police National Computer system and to go over the relevant material. It was only when he’d done both, when he was as certain as he could be that he had something worth shouting about, that he called Becke House and spoke to Yvonne Kitson.

‘How’s your kidnap going, Dave?’

‘Fine.’

‘Missing us?’

‘Listen, Guv, I need to talk to you about the Amin Latif murder.’

It was a little over six months since the eighteen-year-old Asian, an engineering student at a local sixth-form college, had been beaten to death by three white youths at a bus stop in Edgware. It had been, for all the obvious reasons, a high-profile investigation, but despite the media coverage, an extensive enquiry and even a witness who had provided a detailed description of the main attacker, the case had quickly gone cold.

Cold, but still tender. Still embarrassing.

Russell Brigstocke had been the nominal senior investigating officer, but, day to day, Yvonne Kitson had run things. To all intents and purposes, it had been her case, and – at least as far as she was concerned – her failure. She’d known from the moment she’d first looked at the boy’s body – at a bloodied hand, knuckles down in a puddle across double yellow lines – that his death would stay with her, irrespective of whether she caught those responsible. Hate crimes tended to do that. And the Amin Latif murder was about as hateful as they came.

Holland had her attention immediately.

He told her that he’d seen a seventeen-year-old, spoken to a seventeen-year-old, whose resemblance to her chief murder suspect was simply too close to be ignored. As he described the boy he and Parsons had interviewed an hour or two earlier, he stared at the picture which he’d called up and printed out from the PNC. The E-fit had been based on the description given by a friend of Amin Latif, a fellow student who had been present at the time of the attack but had escaped with a few broken bones and six months of nightmares. The picture wasn’t identical to the image in his mind’s eye: the blond hair was lank and lay flat against the head, much as it would have done on a night in October when it had been pissing down with rain. But below the hairline, everything else was spot on.

The face was Adrian Farrell’s.

‘Shit… shit!’ The exclamation of surprise had quickly been followed by a far harsher one. By annoyance aimed at no one but herself. ‘Butler’s Hall?’

‘I know. Who’d’ve thought?’

‘We should,’ Kitson snapped. ‘We fucking-well should have thought.’

Butler’s Hall was several miles from the street where Amin Latif had died, but it was certainly close enough; well within the thick red circle that had been drawn on the map in the Major Incident Room. Well within the scheme of things. There would probably have been ‘Can You Help?’ posters near by, and perhaps a number of its pupils lived at addresses that were canvassed during the house-to-house enquiries. Of course, it would have been impossible to question every student at every school and college in the area, but plenty had been, and Yvonne Kitson would not have bet on too many of them being pupils at Butler’s Hall.

Assumptions, by their very nature, went unspoken. And racist thugs did not go to public school.

‘What was he like, Dave? I don’t mean physically…’

‘Arrogant, aggressive. Full of himself.’

‘You sure you weren’t just seeing that? Projecting it? Are you positive you weren’t making this boy’s behaviour fit because of what you thought?’

‘It wasn’t until afterwards that I thought anything,’ Holland said. ‘I was watching the little fucker walk away from us, and when he turned round I knew he was the kid in the picture. The kid with the earring.’

Kitson said nothing for a few moments. Holland could hear her slurping her coffee, swallowing, deciding. There was a flutter of panic as he realised that, in the past, he’d watched her, Brigstocke and others judging similar pronouncements of certainty from Tom Thorne. He’d also seen the fallout later, when such certainty had proved to be horribly misguided.

‘Fair enough,’ Kitson said.

Holland let out the breath he’d been unconciously holding. ‘What should we do?’

‘You’re still working on a kidnap, as far as I know, but I want to have a look at him.’

‘You going to bring him in?’

‘I want to see him first, just to double-check you’re right to be so worked up about it.’

Holland had been afraid that talking to Kitson, or anybody else, might shake his conviction a little, but it had done the opposite. As he ran through each detail of the conversation with Adrian Farrell, as he described the look the boy had given Kenny Parsons, he could feel his certainty settling into determination. And now that her initial anger had worn off, he could hear the exhilaration in Kitson’s voice too.

And she had every right to be excited.

Finding a murderer was one thing of course, and convicting him was quite another, but what had made this particular killing so uniquely barbaric was also what gave them their best chance of doing just that.

Before he’d been kicked to death, Amin Latif had been the victim of a serious sexual assault. Semen samples had been taken from his body, had given up the gift of their DNA. Now, on a frozen slide in an FSS lab in Victoria, curled the double helix that might identify a killer; the sequence of letters on every rung of its elegantly twisting ladder just waiting for a match.

Downstairs, it felt like a bad wake after a good funeral; there was a sense of that sort of desperation.

In many of the rooms, bright against the darkness that was descending outside, a decent enough effort was being made to generate a degree of conversation and activity; of ordinariness. To keep at bay the tide of gloom that threatened to rush through the house at any moment, as if a black and swollen river were about to burst its banks.

There were perhaps a dozen people in the Mullens’ home, split fairly evenly between family and friends on the one hand, and police officers on the other. Thorne spoke through a cloud of cigarette smoke to Maggie Mullen and to a DS with a big mouth who drivelled on about a ‘gang snatch in Harlesden that had gone monumentally tits up’. He had to spend five minutes talking football with Tony Mullen’s brother, and fuck-all with the second family liaison officer, before he finally got the chance to speak privately to Louise Porter. He’d collared her as soon as he’d arrived back at the house and passed on what Carol Chamberlain had told him about Grant Freestone. That was half an hour ago, before he’d wandered upstairs and run into Juliet Mullen.

As soon as he saw the opportunity, he ushered Porter into a good-sized utility room that ran off the kitchen.

She grinned. ‘This is all a bit sudden…’

‘I know what was wrong with the video,’ Thorne said. ‘What was bothering me.’

Porter leaned back against a large chest freezer and waited to be told.

‘It’s all to his mum.’

‘What is?’

‘Everything Luke says on the tape is aimed at his mum. He says nothing at all to his dad. I’ve got a transcript in my bag and I checked. Have a look if you like-’

‘I believe you. Go on…’

‘Try not to worry, Mum. Nothing to get yourself worked up about, Mum. You know the stuff I mean, Mum. Everything’s for her. It’s like Mullen’s being cut out.’

Porter thought about it. Behind him, Thorne could hear the boiler clicking and then the rush as the pilot ignited the gas. ‘Maybe Luke was punishing his father,’ Porter said. ‘For the argument they’d had.’

‘It must have been one hell of a row, then, don’t you think? If the kid’s still bearing a grudge while he’s being held hostage. While he’s being tied up and drugged.’ Thorne moved across and settled in against the freezer next to Porter. She shuffled along to give him room. ‘Anyway, I talked to Luke’s sister, and she’s positive the row wasn’t that serious.’

‘I think you’re reading too much into it.’

Thorne shrugged, acknowledging the possibility.

‘Like you say, the boy’s in trouble. So you’re probably right – he’s not likely to be thinking about whether he’s fallen out with his dad – but it’s perfectly natural for him to be thinking more about his mum, isn’t it? He’s only a kid.’

‘Maybe. He’s obviously trying to be brave for his mum because he doesn’t want her to worry. But shouldn’t there have been something, some message, for his dad? Everyone keeps banging on about how close they are.’

‘He didn’t mention his sister, either.’

That was a good point. Porter had a disconcerting habit of making them. ‘It feels strange, that’s all,’ Thorne said.

‘Maybe he didn’t have a lot of choice about what he said.’

This was something Thorne hadn’t considered. ‘Are you saying it was scripted? You think he was told what to say? It certainly didn’t feel like that.’

‘Just thinking aloud,’ Porter said.

They stopped at the sound of footsteps on the other side of the door. They listened, heard the fridge door swing open, and Thorne waited for whoever was helping them-self to leave before he spoke in a whisper. ‘Let’s keep thinking,’ he said.

Porter’s mobile began ringing as they stepped out of the utility room; just when Tony Mullen walked into the kitchen. Mullen stared, his face giving nothing away, while, for reasons he couldn’t immediately fathom, Thorne felt himself redden.

Mullen nodded towards the phone in Porter’s hand. ‘I think you’d better get that,’ he said.

Porter answered, said nothing for a few seconds, but Thorne could see that whatever she was hearing was important. He glanced across at Mullen and could see that he knew it, too.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘When?’

Thorne stared until he’d made eye contact, and saw nothing but concentration.

‘I’ll get back as soon as I can.’

Mullen stepped forward, asking the question calmly as soon as she’d ended the call. ‘Have they found him?’

‘Mr Mullen…’ Porter glanced at Thorne, then hesitated further when she saw Mullen’s wife appear at her husband’s shoulder. ‘I’m sure you understand-’

Maggie Mullen clutched at her husband’s sleeve, asked him what had happened. He didn’t take his eyes off Porter, and when he spoke his voice was no longer quite so calm. ‘And I’m sure you understand. So let’s hear it.’

Porter took a second or two, then spoke quickly. ‘It’s good news,’ she said. ‘Apparently the people holding Luke aren’t as clever as we thought they were.’ Her eyes flicked to the screen on her phone, as if searching for more information, before she dropped the handset back into her pocket. ‘We got a good set of prints off the videotape.’

‘You’ve got a match?’ Mullen said.

Porter nodded. ‘We’ve got a name, yes.’ She turned to Thorne. ‘And we’re working on an address.’

Investigating a murder rarely allowed those involved much of a private life, but the hours devoted to a kidnap case were even more brutal. For those few he’d been given to get his head down, Thorne was offered a room at a small hotel in Victoria where the Met had a permanent block booking, but he decided to make the trip back to Kentish Town instead. The travelling would cut down his free time between shifts, but he wasn’t sleeping much anyway. He preferred lying awake at home to wearing out the thin carpet of an anonymous hotel room; to dunking teabags on strings, listening as the city coughed itself awake, and worrying about the fact that he hadn’t fed the cat.

Perhaps if it had been a slightly nicer hotel…

He arrived home just after midnight, still early enough to call Phil Hendricks. Five minutes into their conversation and the last can of Sainsbury’s lager, he was starting to relax. To enjoy telling his friend about the celebrated criminal history of a man named Conrad Allen.

‘So he waves this plastic Magnum around…’

‘I presume we’re talking handgun here as opposed to ice-cream…’

‘I’m not listening,’ Thorne said. ‘He waves it around, comes on like a hard case or whatever, thinks that’s an end to it. But, unfortunately for Conrad, the other bloke’s a little bit pissed off. He gets straight back in his car, dials 999, and fifteen minutes later an armed response unit’s squealing up and Dirty Harry’s face down on the Mile End Road, trying to convince some very pumped-up coppers that he was only having a laugh.’

‘So how come he never got done for it?’

‘Ask the CPS, mate. He was charged, but when it came to taking it any further, I suppose they just decided it wasn’t worth the effort. But, luckily for us, he was fingerprinted and this was back in 2002 before they changed the law, so the prints never got destroyed after the charge was dropped.’

‘What, and the silly bastard just forgot you had them?’

‘Forgot that, forgot to wear gloves when he was handling the videotape…’

‘Not the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer.’

‘I don’t think this is his usual line of work, you know?’ Thorne thought about another tape he’d seen a few hours before, back at Central 3000. ‘Some of the boys on the Flying Squad are fairly sure Allen’s the bloke who turned over half a dozen petrol stations and off-licences in Hackney and Dalston last year. Him, another gun that’s probably plastic, and a woman, pretending to be a hostage. A lot of shouting and shit acting.’

‘Sounds like an episode of EastEnders,’ Hendricks said.

‘It’s a jump from that to kidnapping kids, though, don’t you reckon?’

The tape of in-store CCTV footage had been biked over to the Yard from Finchley. As he’d watched, Thorne had struggled to equate its images with those on the tape that had been sent to the Mullen family. The picture of the big man in the ski-mask – the violence in his movements and language – failed to gel with that of the figure who’d walked towards Luke Mullen with a syringe. That action was equally violent, every bit as brutal, in its own way, but Thorne simply couldn’t see Conrad Allen moving so easily on to something so clinical.

Something so quietly vicious.

Instead, he’d found himself watching the woman: staring at the screen as she screamed and begged for her life, pleading first with the robber and then with each terrified cashier and shop assistant to hand over the money before she was killed. If the man with the gun to her head was Conrad Allen, then the chances were that she was the woman who’d charmed a sixteen-year-old boy into her car. She might not be the greatest actress in the world, but Thorne had little trouble believing what she might be capable of. It was easier to imagine her as the driving force, as the one who’d come up with a way to make a lot more money than could be grabbed from the average till. Why she’d targeted Luke Mullen was a totally different matter…

Thorne became aware of what sounded suspiciously like chuckling on the line. ‘Is this the EastEnders crack? Are you laughing at your own jokes again, Hendricks?’

‘One of us has to.’

‘Good. I was hoping this would cheer you up a bit. I presume you do still need cheering up. You’ve not really given much away.’

Back when Thorne had first called, Hendricks had sounded reluctant to say a great deal about the Brendan situation. Now, as then, he seemed keen to talk about almost anything else. Just a grunt or two. A muted ‘y’know’ before a grinding change of subject.

‘How’s the back holding up?’

Thorne rubbed his calf. ‘If anything, it’s my bloody leg more than my back.’

‘I’ve told you, it sounds like you’ve herniated the disc. You really need to get it sorted.’

‘Not a lot of time at the minute.’

‘It’s a phantom pain in the leg, you know that, don’t you? Where the disc’s pressing on the sciatic nerve. Your brain’s being told your leg hurts, but there’s nothing really wrong with it.’

‘Hang on…’ Thorne took a fast mouthful of lager. As time wore on, it was finally starting to taste of something. ‘I thought it was the brain that did the telling.’

‘Some parts of the body shout a bit louder than others,’ Hendricks said. ‘And of course, there’s one or two with minds of their own.’

The cat wandered in from the kitchen, grumbled and was ignored.

Thorne sat there, thinking that although the ‘part’ Hendricks was talking about – Thorne’s part at any rate – had been fairly subdued for a while, it had started speaking up for itself rather more than usual in the last couple of days.

AMANDA

She was happy enough about it herself, but she knew Conrad would be utterly thrilled that things were finally moving. That it would all be sorted very soon. He was in the bedroom talking to the boy, but she’d tell him as soon as he came out. They’d need to get themselves together, get ready to make a move.

The spoonful she’d been cooking up when the phone had started to ring would balance her out a little…

She’d screened the call, just as she’d been doing ever since they’d got back to the flat on Friday after the pick-up. All part of keeping their heads down, quiet as mice, and it was mostly people phoning up trying to sell shit, anyway. They’d given the kid enough stuff to knock out a horse as soon as they’d had the chance: the minute she’d driven far enough away from the school, pulled over and let Conrad in. Then they’d waited until it was dark and carried him inside, wrapped in the cheap picnic blanket they’d bought from Halford’s and stashed in the boot. They’d made sure there was lots of food and booze in, so there was no need to go out, no need to talk to anybody. All they’d had to do was sit and wait it out, and now they were on the last leg.

She’d screened the call… then, as soon as she’d recognised the voice, she’d grabbed at the phone, picked up and listened.

She was relieved, and pleased, that it looked like working out, looked like nobody was going to get hurt. She’d always insisted on that, even when they were pulling the hold-up thing. Nobody should get badly hurt if it could be avoided. She thought that this side of her, the side that wanted everyone to come out of a situation OK, said something good about her character. Something to be proud of. After all, with everything she’d been through, the shitty stuff she’d had to deal with when she was a girl, it would have been understandable if she’d turned into a vicious, vindictive cow; if she’d wanted others to feel pain just to make herself feel better. She knew people like that, and she despised them. No, she just wanted to have a good time and get enough of whatever she needed; to forget about all the bad stuff. And, while she was doing that, she was always happier when no one else was suffering. Not through any fault of hers, anyway. There’d been the odd idiot who hadn’t played along, of course; there were always accidents. And there was that dealer she’d asked Conrad to sort out, but lowlife like him didn’t count and deserved everything they got.

When bad things happened to bad people, she thought, there wasn’t a whole lot to get upset about.

The boy, Luke, wasn’t a bad person, and he didn’t deserve any of what was happening to him, she was aware of that. He was just the means to make the money; he was their fake gun. She thanked God that, all being well, he would come out of it in one piece, none the worse.

Conrad had not been so certain, had said, ‘Yes, but don’t forget what he might go through later on. Don’t forget about what could happen mentally’.

She’d turned, inched her body away from his, and pointed out that she was hardly likely to forget that.

Now, she was feeling a lot mellower, more forgiving. She sensed that she was starting to roll and relax, wondered if maybe she should tie the boy’s hands again as things were going to start happening soon. Get him ready to go. Then, from nowhere, as the drug took her down, she began to imagine herself and Luke meeting up in ten years or so. They would run into each other at some trendy party or club and it would all be really nice. He’d be relaxed and pleased to see her. He’d be keen to tell her that it was all right, that, as it happened, he’d had a bit of a crush on her back then in that flat, and that a few sweaty nightmares were a small price to pay for a whole lot of perspective. She’d tell whoever she was with that Luke and her were old friends, and it would be cool as they shared a slow dance…

She was only dimly aware of Conrad coming into the room as she drifted away, Luke’s arms around her neck, and his voice in her ear, thanking her for passing on her gift to him, for giving him a skin that little bit thicker than other people’s.

THURSDAY
SEVEN

Half-past stupid in the morning, his third day into it, and the sun had struggled up just a little later than Tom Thorne…

Its overnight absence had slowed things down, had seriously reduced the rate at which much-needed information could efficiently be gathered. It didn’t matter how important your case was, how many bodies had been discovered, how imminent the threat to life and limb, who had been kidnapped. The simple fact was that most people, most civilians, at any rate, tended to knock off at five o’clock. Obtaining crucial intelligence outside office hours was always difficult. Gaining vital access to any secure or private database – at a local authority housing association, the DSS, Barclay’s Bank or Virgin Mobile – was pretty much a lottery for as long as the M25 remained empty. It was often a question of tracking down a contact number for the person unlucky enough to be manning a twenty-four-hour emergency desk. Or the name of the really poor bastard who was going to get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.

Finding an address for their main suspect had taken the Kidnap Unit four hours, and had come down in the end to Conrad Allen’s love of cars.

Via M-CRAC, the remote-access search facility, officers had been able to access the CRIMINT system at Mile End and pull up all the details of Allen’s original arrest in 2002. Running the number plate of his car through the national computer revealed that the vehicle had been sold the year before. The student who’d bought it – and who was still awake, honing his PlayStation skills – remembered Conrad Allen; remembered him describing in great detail the type of car he’d be buying next. An hour later, the owner of a small dealership in Wood Green was being asked to get up, get dressed and accompany the police to his less than organised office, where he grudgingly waded through a pile of less-than-kosher sales receipts. The dealer was naturally keen to help and go back to bed and, when prompted by a picture, he vaguely remembered Allen and the ‘fit-looking blonde bird’ who had been with him when he’d strolled on to the car lot. His memory of the car itself was better: he was able to give virtually every detail of the diamond-white Ford Scorpio 2.9i, its 24-valve Cosworth V6 engine and, rather more importantly, the address he’d delivered it to, after he’d banked the £1,200 in cash.

The dealer knew nothing about any Passat, black, blue or otherwise, so the team decided that the car seen near the school was probably the girlfriend’s. Or maybe Conrad had decided that his boy-racer days were over, and had traded in the Scorpio for something a little more sedate.

Once the information had been obtained, Porter’s team had shifted into top gear pretty bloody quickly. The first step was the establishment of an observation post. In the early hours – grateful for the cover of darkness as far as this part of the operation went – a dedicated Intel Unit had mounted one small camera on a lamp-post opposite an estate agent’s just off the Bow Road, and another at the back of the building to monitor what looked like a rear entrance/exit. These immediately began feeding live pictures back to Central 3000, as well as to a mobile tech team which was cutting up and broadcasting the images from inside a fully equipped van two streets away. A dozen or more officers from the Kidnap Unit were scattered around the area: in empty buildings and unmarked cars and on the street; waiting alongside a Special Events team, a hostage negotiator, paramedics and a group from SO19, the Firearms Unit.

All waiting for word of one sort or another.

By the time he managed to slip into a nearby sandwich bar for an early lunch, Thorne had been stuck for the best part of four hours in a car with the same SO7 officer who’d bored his arse off the evening before…

He carried the tray over to the table; pushed a mug of coffee and a plate across to the woman sitting opposite him.

‘What do I owe you?’ she asked.

Thorne took the top slice from a bacon and egg sandwich and reached for the ketchup. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve come up with first.’

He’d been surprised when Carol Chamberlain had rung up first thing, asking if they could meet. When she wasn’t at the Yard working an AMRU case, it was all but impossible to prise her away from her husband and her home in Worthing, which Thorne took great delight in calling Euthanasia-on-Sea. She’d explained that after she and Thorne had spoken the day before, she’d spent the whole afternoon making calls and then caught the evening train up. She’d told him that she’d had dinner with one old friend and stayed overnight with another.

‘Old friends?’ Thorne had asked on the phone.

‘A DCI I worked with on the Murder Squad for a few years, and a DS who retired same time as me. Both good blokes. Both useful.’

Thorne watched Chamberlain bite into a roll with rather more delicacy than he’d displayed himself. He was impressed by how quickly she’d got to work after they’d spoken. ‘You don’t waste any time,’ he said.

‘I didn’t think we had any time.’

Thorne brought her up to speed, told her about the surveillance operation on Conrad Allen’s flat. With the possibility of a child’s life at stake, he knew that she was right to think that time was not on their side, yet, that morning, every minute spent sitting and waiting for something to happen had seemed to warp and stretch until urgency had turned to inertia. The silence from radios had become deafening, and staring at the drawn curtains of the flat above that estate agent’s had been like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

‘So, go on then,’ Thorne said.

Chamberlain wiped crumbs from her fingers. ‘I was right,’ she said. ‘Somebody should definitely have mentioned Grant Freestone.’

‘Because of the threat he made to Mullen?’

‘Because of that… and because he’s still wanted for murder.’

Thorne just looked, and waited for her to carry on. He could see that she was enjoying the moment of drama, that she relished the telling.

‘In 1995 Freestone got ten years for child-sex offences. He served just over half his time, was paroled in 2000 and became one of the first ex-cons to be dealt with by a MAPPA panel.’

Thorne nodded. Though he had never been directly involved, he was well aware of the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements. The scheme had been established as ‘a statutory framework for inter-agency co-operation in assessing the most dangerous ex-offenders’. It was designed for those individuals who posed a serious threat to the public, ‘to manage and monitor their reintroduction into the community’.

To keep a watchful eye on the bogeyman.

‘Sounds like he was an ideal candidate,’ Thorne said.

‘He was, but I’m not so sure about the people who were supposed to be watching him. I don’t know exactly how it all happened, but it’s a wonder the scheme wasn’t shut down there and then.’

‘Teething troubles?’

‘Ever so slightly. Freestone was given a flat in Crystal Palace, which is why Bromley Borough Council helped put this MAPPA panel together. Then he got involved with a woman called Sarah Hanley a few months after his release; a single mother with two young kids.’

‘Ah. That would be a problem.’

‘It would have been if a slightly bigger problem hadn’t come along. In April 2001, Grant Freestone chucked her through a glass coffee table.’

‘Nice.’

‘She bled to death, and by the time anybody found her…’

‘Freestone was long gone.’

‘And still is,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Likely to stay that way, too, I would have thought. He’s certainly the nearest thing to a prime suspect anyone ever came up with, but it’s been so long I don’t think anyone’s looking for him very hard any more, or very often at any rate. He gets circulated once in a while, and the case notes are reviewed annually, but basically it’s even colder than most of the shit I get given to try and warm up.’

A waitress came alongside, gathered up the plates, asked if either of them wanted more tea or coffee. Thorne told Chamberlain he’d need to get back as quickly as he could, and handed over a five-pound note to cover the bill.

‘Was Tony Mullen involved with this second case at all?’ he asked. ‘With the Sarah Hanley murder?’

Chamberlain said that he wasn’t, that she’d spoken to the detective who’d headed that investigation and the subsequent hunt for Grant Freestone; the officer who, theoretically at least, still had the case. But Thorne was only half listening, having realised that he’d asked a redundant question. He knew that Tony Mullen could not have been involved, and he knew why.

‘I’ve written down all this bloke’s details,’ Chamberlain said. She slid an envelope across the table. ‘He seemed nice enough, though he was a damn sight more interested in finding out why I was asking than in telling me an awful lot.’

‘Par for the course,’ Thorne said.

‘I suppose.’

‘Aren’t you still a bit touchy about the ones that got away?’

Chamberlain took a compact from her handbag and flicked it open. ‘The older I get, the touchier I am about everything.’

‘Thanks for this.’

‘No problem, and I still owe you.’ Her eyes darted momentarily from her mirror. ‘I don’t mean for the tea and a ham roll, either.’

Thorne picked up the envelope and pushed back his chair. He knew she was talking about the incident a year before, when their questioning of a suspect had got horribly out of hand. He reckoned that each of them owed more than could ever be repaid. ‘I’ll let you know how everything turns out,’ he said.

Carol Chamberlain nodded and went back to reapplying her lipstick as Thorne turned from the table. As he left, she shouted after him. Apologised for forgetting the stuff for his back, told him that she’d stick some in the post.

He walked quickly back towards the car. He stopped off at a newsagent’s, bought two cans of Coke and a copy of Uncut without speaking a word. Thinking all the time, as he made his way back to the car, that Chamberlain had been right when she’d said that someone should have mentioned Grant Freestone. Someone… One of the several coppers he’d spoken to, probably. Jesmond, almost certainly. And why hadn’t Tony Mullen said anything?

His mind focused on Luke Mullen’s father as he walked. On how – Thorne would double-check the month to be sure – he couldn’t have been involved in the 2001 murder case and the hunt for Grant Freestone; the man he’d previously put away for twelve years; the man who had so publicly threatened him.

Because 2001 was the year that DCI Tony Mullen had resigned from the force.

The red Skoda was parked just south of the Bow Road, on a side street below the Blackwall Tunnel approach. Thorne was delighted to see that Dave Holland had arrived in his absence, and, ignoring the DS sitting behind the wheel, he climbed into the back seat alongside him.

The officer in the front seat turned round in a rustle of polyester. ‘Please your fucking selves…’

Though Thorne had talked to Holland from the Mullen house the evening before, they hadn’t seen each other since Holland’s trip to Butler’s Hall. Sitting in the back of the car, they talked about Adrian Farrell, about Holland’s call to Yvonne Kitson and about whether there might be a connection between Luke’s kidnap and the Latif murder.

‘It’s worth thinking about, certainly.’

‘Not for too long though, right?’ Holland said.

Thorne opened one of his cans. ‘I can’t see it to be honest.’

They sat in silence for five minutes after that. Thorne flicked through his magazine while Holland stared out of the window at a view Thorne had already decided was up there with the most depressing he’d ever seen. That said, he wasn’t certain he could stomach the Taj Mahal for four hours at a stretch.

‘It’s fucking lovely round here, isn’t it?’ Holland said eventually.

‘If you like concrete.’

The SO7 man took the chance to jump in, and pointed towards the Bow flyover. The permanently gridlocked slab of granite rose a few hundred yards to the north of them, lifting the A11 above the A12 and carrying traffic across the River Lea, towards Essex and away from the capital. ‘They reckon that’s where the Krays buried Frank Mitchell, you know? Inside one of the supports.’

‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘1966.’ He knew all about what the twins were supposed to have done with ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell, having made the somewhat rash decision to spring him from Dartmoor Prison. Though the Axeman’s final whereabouts remained uncertain, with some claiming that the body had been dumped at sea, it was nevertheless slightly odd that, thirty years after Mitchell’s disappearance, Ronnie Kray’s funeral cortège should have crossed the Bow flyover. It was hardly the most direct route to Chingford cemetery.

The DS looked a little deflated. ‘How come you’re such an expert?’

‘Too much time on his hands,’ Holland explained.

‘At least you knew where you were with those guys,’ Thorne said.

Holland let his head drop back. ‘Nice simple nicknames for a kick-off.’

‘Right. Nobody got confused.’

‘He’s mad, he’s got an axe. What shall we call him?’

‘Er…’

And as they carried on, they could see the man from the Kidnap Unit clocking them in the rear-view mirror, desperately trying to work out if they were taking the piss.

At lunchtime, the Butler’s Hall sixth-formers were allowed to leave the premises for one hour. Some took sandwiches into a nearby park, but most wandered towards the modest parade of shops on the Broadway. They browsed in the small branches of Game and HMV, or hung around outside the fish-and-chip/kebab shop, trying their best not to look like kids from a public school; to avoid getting caught doing anything that might reflect badly on the uniform they wore.

Yvonne Kitson sat in her car at the end of a road opposite the school entrance, watching the kids come out and waiting to get her first look at Adrian Farrell.

Next to her, DC Andy Stone flicked through the Daily Mirror. ‘I still don’t see why you didn’t get DS Holland to come with you, Guv. To point out this little tosser.’

‘Bored, Andy?’

Stone shook his head without looking up from the paper.

‘Dave’s a bit tied up with other things; and, anyway, I don’t want him pointed out. I want to see if I can spot him. Fair enough?’ She moved her thumb back to her mouth, chewed on the nail and stared out of the window.

Most of the time, it seemed to Kitson that you couldn’t have it all; that if your life outside of work was going well, then the job itself would turn to shit. And vice-bloodyversa. A couple of years before, she’d been a high-flyer and she’d known it; the cases had been high profile, just as she’d been when she’d solved them. Then she’d been stupid enough to get involved with a senior officer, and while he had been forgiven by wife and top brass, she had watched both her career and her family life tumble into freefall. Now things were back on an even keel domestically – her kids were doing well, relations with her ex-husband were civil and she was seeing somebody – but work was another matter. Though she was grafting as hard as ever, the job just seemed to grow more maddening with each failure, each compromise. She’d begun to wonder if it might be down to her; if she’d lost the capacity to be satisfied.

Stone stopped whistling between his teeth for a few seconds. ‘This is funny,’ he said. ‘They’re dropping hints in here about some “popular daytime TV presenter” who’s having it away with his male researcher. Who d’you reckon that is, then?’

The Latif enquiry had been as frustrating as any Kitson had known, and every murder case she’d caught since seemed to involve her running headlong into a series of brick walls. The wall she was supposed to be trying to get over that morning had built up around a disturbing rite of initiation into a Tottenham drugs gang. New members would drive around the streets in a car with no headlights on, and in order to prove they were worthy they would have to fire a gun into the first car that flashed its lights at them. It was brutal in its simplicity, in the casually random way that the unsuspecting victim was selected.

The first driver unlucky enough to try and be helpful.

Five days before, having been shot at for no obvious reason, the man behind the wheel of a Toyota Landcruiser had mounted a pavement on the Seven Sisters Road, killing himself and a young woman waiting at a bus stop. One of the city’s newest gang members had moved straight from low-grade crack dealer to double murderer, and though Kitson and the team knew very well which gang was responsible, had spoken to half a dozen young men who knew equally well who had pulled the trigger, nobody was saying anything.

Sometimes the brick walls had wide smiles, and gold teeth, and enough attitude to make Yvonne Kitson want more than anything to punch them into the middle of next week.

She badly needed a result. For the way it would feel, far more than for the way it would look. And now, if Dave Holland’s eyesight and instinct weren’t both seriously screwed, she might achieve one.

Stone turned to the back page of his paper. ‘No real surprise, though,’ he said. ‘I reckon a lot of those TV presenters are batting for the other side, don’t you?’

Kitson mumbled something that could have been ‘yes’ or ‘no’, every committed part of her brain focusing on the group that was crossing the road, and on her first glimpse of Adrian Farrell. On the fact that she owed Dave Holland a very big drink.

‘Is that him?’

Kitson held up a hand to silence Andy Stone, as though the boy they were talking about were no more than a few feet away; as though his hearing were as well developed as his arrogance. She watched him walk slowly down the main road, every bit as hard to miss as she had been led to believe. He was chatting idly with two other pupils, a boy and a girl. Although he would be off the premises for no more than an hour, Kitson watched as he, along with most of those around him, went through the transformation that Holland had described. She watched as Farrell took off his blazer and tossed it over his shoulder; as he loosened his tie.

She watched, holding her breath, as he put in the earring. From school to cool.

A hundred yards or so from the entrance, Farrell eased away from his schoolmates and joined up with two new boys who were crossing the road fast towards him. These boys wore uniforms of their own: Nike caps; New Balance trainers; Kappa casuals. They moved like men but looked young enough to make Kitson question why they weren’t in school themselves.

The three hailed each other, though it was impossible to make out the words being shouted. Fists were clenched and proffered. Kitson was reaching for the door handle as the knuckles kissed in greeting and the trio moved off together towards the shops.

‘We on the move?’ Stone asked.

Kitson opened the door. Stepped out, buzzing as she thought about Adrian Farrell’s interesting new mates. His nice, white friends.

‘Let’s get some air,’ she said.

Porter came through on the radio. She suggested to Thorne that they should meet somewhere between their two vehicles. Put their heads together.

They walked up Fairfield Road, crossing over the Docklands Light Railway towards Old Ford. ‘Barry Hignett came down about half an hour ago,’ Porter said. ‘He was keen to get cracking.’

‘Like the rest of us aren’t?’

‘I mean really on the hurry-up. So we sent a couple of the lads in to see if there might be any help around. See if we can get a bit closer.’

They stopped to let a lorry back out of a goods yard. The driver scraped a wall, pulled forward a yard or two and tried again. This time, they walked around, ignoring the exhaust fumes and the beeping of the reversing alarm.

‘Thanks for telling me.’ Thorne’s tone made it clear that he wasn’t the slightest bit grateful; that, in his opinion, he should have been told half an hour earlier.

‘I’m telling you now, so there’s no point getting snotty.’

‘Hignett getting shit from your detective super, you reckon?’

‘For definite,’ Porter said. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if Tony Mullen had been on at him, too. Poor sod’s got it coming from everywhere.’

‘Is he still here?’

‘Gone back to base.’

‘Makes sense,’ Thorne said. Which it did. As SIO, Barry Hignett would need to stay close to Central 3000. From there, he could monitor all events, could communicate with every member of his team, while staying within easy reach of the top brass. There was a buck in this case, same as in any other. It just flew around that little bit faster before it stopped.

Porter slowed outside a swanky-looking development of flats. A map on the gate showed the location of the swimming pool, the sauna, the private shops. ‘I could do with somewhere like this,’ she said. ‘My place is a shithole.’

‘This is the old Bryant & May factory,’ Thorne said, staring through the gates. ‘Where the matchgirls’ strike was.’

Porter shook her head.

‘End of the nineteenth century.’ He pointed towards the building. ‘The girls in there went on strike for better pay and conditions. Turned into a national story. Kicked off the trade union movement, more or less.’

‘Lit a match under it.’

Thorne was already thinking ahead and missed the joke. He turned around, pointed back towards the Bow Road like a tourist guide. ‘You’ve got Sylvia Pankhurst’s original campaign headquarters over there. Votes for Women and all that.’ He tried to keep a straight face, but couldn’t resist the crack. ‘And now look where we are.’

‘You asking for a slap?’ Porter leaned into him as she stepped past and kept walking.

‘So where’s this flat of yours?’

Her mobile had barely begun to ring when Porter snatched at it. Thorne knew that the phone had a ringtone he would probably recognise, but he’d never heard enough of it to place the tune.

When the call had finished, they started back towards Conrad Allen’s flat. ‘Sounds like you got that help you were looking for,’ Thorne said.

‘We’ve got an old girl in the flat next door who’s a major fan of ours. She got her front door kicked in a couple of weeks ago, and apparently the uniforms were extremely helpful. One of the tech boys is up there now setting some gear up.’

‘Reckon they’re in there?’ Thorne asked.

Porter’s look made it plain she hadn’t the slightest idea. ‘There’s been fuck-all to see, so it’s glass-against-the-wall time.’

They didn’t say a great deal else after that. They just picked their feet up, jogged back around the lorry that was still trying to back out.

Andy Stone got the formalities out of the way. Made the introductions, waved the warrant cards around.

It was a very pleasant smile. Kitson wondered how much more of it she might be seeing in the days to come. ‘We’ve already done this,’ Adrian Farrell said. ‘We spoke to a couple of officers yesterday after school.’

Kitson took a step closer, flashing a pretty decent smile of her own. ‘It’s not about Luke Mullen,’ she said. ‘We’re investigating another matter.’

They were gathered outside a bakery and sandwich bar in a small, pedestrianised precinct off the Broadway. The place was busy, with workers from local shops and offices zigzagging between pushchairs to grab lunch or do a quick bit of shopping. Farrell and his two friends leaned against the window, eating sausage rolls from paper bags. They’d stopped talking, elbowed each other and stared as Kitson and Stone had walked up the gentle slope of a long wheelchair ramp towards them.

One of the boys in the baseball caps nudged his companion, nodding towards Farrell. ‘They’ve finally come to get you, guy.’

‘Yeah, the cops is well on to you for sure.’ His friend spluttered the words through a mouthful of hot food and started to laugh.

Farrell grimaced at the pair of them. ‘Shut it.’ Then, back to Kitson: ‘Sorry about them. Bloody rabble.’

‘A student was murdered a couple of miles from here,’ Kitson said. ‘Last October, in Edgware, you probably saw it on the news.’ Farrell’s expression scrunched up, like maybe he thought he had. ‘Ring a bell?’ Kitson watched his eyes drop for half a second to her tits, then back up again. ‘His name was Amin Latif.’

Farrell certainly looked as though the name meant nothing to him.

‘You don’t remember it? I’m quite surprised.’

‘I remember our chaplain leading a special prayer in assembly. Right before the hymn. He does that, you know, for disaster victims, stuff like that. Yes, there was definitely one for some poor bugger who’d been murdered. It would probably have been around that time.’

There was loud music coming from the record shop opposite. Something cheery and pointless.

‘So?’

‘So what?’

Kitson tried hard to meet his eyes. ‘Did you say a prayer for Amin Latif?’

Farrell sniffed and looked away from her, stepping aside as a group of teenage girls came out of the bakery. One of his friends made a comment under his breath. A girl told him to piss off.

‘Should you be talking to me?’ Farrell asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘Without the presence of any legal representation. Without my parents.’

There was an impressed whistle from beneath one of the baseball caps.

‘It’s just an informal chat, Adrian.’

For the first time the boy looked slightly alarmed, though only for a second or two. ‘How d’you know my name?’

‘The police know everything,’ one of his friends said.

The other pointed at Farrell, mock-serious. ‘They know when you last had a wank, guy.’

Andy Stone stepped forward, corralled the designer-clad double act into an adjacent doorway. ‘Why don’t I get your names? Just so we don’t feel like strangers.’

‘You’re seventeen,’ Kitson said. ‘Which makes you legally responsible.’

Farrell watched his friends, nodding his head to the rhythm of the pop song.

‘Anyway, there’s really no need to get worked up.’

‘Who’s worked up?’ Farrell said.

‘That’s all right, then.’

‘It’s not true, though, is it?’ He leaned towards her, conspiratorial. ‘You don’t really know the last time I shook hands with my best friend?’

She smiled, not quite so easily thrown. ‘As it goes, we’d be delighted to fix you up with whoever would make you more comfortable. A lawyer, if you want; your mum and dad. Maybe that nice chaplain of yours, if it would help. We could all reconvene at the station, do everything properly.’

‘I don’t actually have to do anything, though, do I?’

‘No, absolutely not. We’re just talking.’

‘Fine then.’ He put all his weight on one foot, preparing to leave. ‘Nice to talk to you.’

‘But when that happens, we just sit around and start asking questions. Of ourselves, I mean. We wonder why you don’t like us. Why you’re so reluctant to help. What you might be trying to hide.’

Farrell started to shake his head, grinning like he thought her efforts were clumsy and amateurish. ‘I’m going back to school now,’ he said. ‘It’s double history this afternoon, and that’s my favourite.’

Kitson wanted to slap him stupid.

‘Come on, wankers.’ Farrell shouted across to his friends and started to walk away. Once there was breathing space between themselves and Stone, the other boys puffed out their chests, fell into step with each other and quickly caught Farrell up.

Stone moved across to Kitson. ‘They’re not afraid of very much, are they?’ he said.

They watched the boys swagger down the ramp. As they reached the bottom, one of Farrell’s friends tossed his empty bag towards a litter bin. The others jeered at the miss and the three kept on walking.

‘It’s easy when there’s a few of you,’ Kitson said.

Farrell glanced back, a couple of steps before he turned the corner; looked round as though he’d forgotten something, just for a second or two before he disappeared.

His hand was slapping the side of his leg in time to the music.

Kidnap or not, as operation posts went, the security was fairly relaxed. Thorne had taken part in plenty of intelligence operations – usually involving the Serious and Organised boys – where a steady stream of visitors to the target address had meant days on end in the back of a stinking van, pissing in plastic bottles and living on biscuits. In this instance, the surveillance provided by the cameras meant that there was no need for any vehicle to be located within direct sight of Conrad Allen’s flat. So there was a degree of flexibility in terms of individual movements, and conditions within the team vehicles themselves were not quite as spartan.

Less than a minute on foot from Allen’s flat, Porter had spent most of her morning south of the Bow Road, on a one-way street between Tower Hamlets cemetery and the tube station. After their brief meeting on Fairfield Road, Thorne had joined her in the back of a dirty Transit, its panels boasting the logo and contact details of a local roofing contractor.

That had been just after three o’clock. Nearly an hour before.

A trestle table ran down one side of the van. Two small monitors displayed the black-and-white shots from the cameras front and back, while a scarred metal speaker broadcast communications from the assortment of unit vehicles in the vicinity. A strip of grubby brown carpet had been laid on the floor, and a plastic bag was wedged into one corner, bulging with Styrofoam containers, newspapers, empty cans and cartons.

‘So what do we think?’

‘It’s been forty-five minutes since we went into the old woman’s flat.’

‘Longer,’ Porter said.

Two other officers were sharing the space with Porter and Thorne. Kenny Parsons sat in one of two folding canvas chairs, with the other taken by a fat DS named Heeney – a gobby Midlander with a lazy eye and an attitude to match. Porter looked less than delighted at being harassed by either of them. She brought the radio handset to her mouth. ‘How are we doing, Bob?’

There was a pause.

‘I’m sure he’ll let you know,’ Thorne said.

Porter gave him a look like he wasn’t helping a hell of a lot, either.

Then, from the speaker, with a hint of annoyance: ‘Still nothing.’

‘You’ve checked the equipment?’

‘Twice. The equipment’s fine.’

‘Sorry…’

It had been a stupid question. The microphones were about as high tech as they could ask for, and she knew that the technical operator had done his homework. They’d established that the flat was rented, had guessed correctly that the firm below it would have handled the letting and had gone in bright and early to acquire a diagram of the layout. A kitchen-diner, two small bedrooms and a bathroom, all leading off the single corridor. The listening equipment that had been set up in the premises next door would be more than adequate: nowhere in a flat that size would be out of range.

‘Someone’s going to have to make a decision here,’ Heeney said. His accent turned ‘make’ into ‘mek’; turned his opinion into complaint.

Thorne sat with his back to the van’s doors and stared across at Porter, perched on the wheel-arch directly behind the driver’s seat. She looked right back at him and raised an eyebrow. He thought she might be asking what he thought, but he couldn’t be sure, and he was even less sure how she’d react if he told her. So he said nothing; failing to offer any opinion, because he didn’t want to risk a row in front of the others. And because he didn’t really have one to offer.

There were far too many questions that needed to be answered, boxes to be ticked, with no option to pass.

Were Conrad Allen and his girlfriend in the flat?

Was that where they were holding Luke Mullen?

Had they graduated from plastic guns to real ones, and how were they likely to react if a team of armed police officers smashed through their front door?

‘If I had final say, I’d go in,’ Porter said.

Thorne pulled up one knee, then the other, but he was unable to find any position that wasn’t painful. ‘Would you want it?’

‘The final say? Probably not.’

‘Good call, I reckon. With great power comes great responsibility.’

‘I didn’t have you down as a philosopher.’

‘It’s from Spiderman,’ Thorne said.

She lifted the handset. ‘I need an opinion, Bob.’

From the speaker: ‘There’s nothing moving in there.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Sorry, but there it is.’

‘Maybe the kid’s drugged and they’re both asleep.’

‘What don’t you understand? Nothing’s moving. I can hear a clock ticking, and I can tell you which room it’s in, if you want. I’ve got water moving through the radiators, and the rattle of pipes expanding, but I don’t hear anyone snoring or turning over in bed. These mikes can pick up the sound of breathing, and I can’t hear any.’

There was a snap of static, and another voice cut in: ‘This is DCI Hignett.’

‘Sir…’

‘It’s time to go in, Louise.’

It was suddenly as though the Transit had been wired up to the National Grid. Everyone jumped, looked hard at one another, and Thorne crouched straight back down by the doors as Porter gave all units the order to move in.

Thorne threw open the doors and jumped down on to the road. He felt Porter’s hand on his shoulder; felt it dig in, and pull him back.

‘Hang about, Tom. I don’t want a crowd of us going in there behind the guns.’

‘Are you joking?’

Porter wiped a fleck of Thorne’s spittle from her lip. ‘Look, Heeney’s staying put as well, so don’t get stupid about it.’

‘Who’s making these decisions?’

‘You’re only supposed to be helping out, remember. I haven’t got time for this. Get back in the van and stay by the radio.’

Thorne watched her and Parsons sprint towards the Bow Road and climbed back into the van. Heeney was sitting again and looked at his feet as Thorne moved past him to take up Porter’s place next to the monitors. The big DS mumbled something about Porter being ‘on the rag’. Thorne turned away and tuned him out. He sat on one of the chairs, leaned closer and stared at the small screen, at the fixed and flickering picture of a black, metal fire-escape.

With only one door to get through, as opposed to a pair of them coming at the property from the front, the rear entrance was favourite. More importantly, when firearms were being deployed, keeping the action well away from the street was always desirable.

Thorne didn’t blink.

For twenty, twenty-five seconds, the image was constant, then suddenly it filled with movement as a dozen or more figures began crowding in. Moving into the picture from the back and sides of a scrubby, unloved garden; over and along the line of a crumbling wall towards the bottom of the steps.

Then a flurry of hand signals, and up; speed less important than stealth.

The team gathered around the door, and Thorne picked out what details he could, imagining those that were too indistinct to make out: the butt of an MP5 carbine; the MET POLICE logo on a chest thick with body armour; the dead geraniums in a plastic window-box…

In the van, a few murmured instructions came over the speaker.

Thorne could make out Porter and Parsons, and several heads he thought he recognised. He watched two figures move into the picture and knew – though he couldn’t see it – that they would be fixing the rubberised teeth of a hydraulic jack to either side of the door frame. These were members of the Special Events team – the Ghostbusters – a civilian unit on call to any branch of the Met that needed to gain rapid entry to premises but wanted something rather more subtle than a ram or a size-nine boot.

The SE boys stepped away from the door, trailed the cables back to a small generator and signalled that they were set.

They looked towards Porter for the nod.

Got it straight away.

There was no sound from the monitor, but Thorne had worked with similar forced-entry equipment before. He imagined the sharp hiss of compressed air and the slap of the cables jumping against the metal floor. The crack as the frame was shunted wide, leaving the door with nowhere to go but in and down, forced hard to the floor by the feet of the SO19 officers who streamed across it into Conrad Allen’s flat.

In a matter of seconds the shot was empty again, a flat shadow beyond the doorway, while its chaotic soundtrack was broadcast from half a dozen radios, exploding like bursts of gunfire from the speaker. Bouncing between the metal walls of the van: a collision and a curse; an order given to get out of the way; and an instruction to anyone on the premises to make themselves fucking visible very fucking quickly. A cacophany of grunts and shouts:

‘Kitchen clear!’

‘Armed police!’

‘First bedroom and corridor clear.’

Thorne winced at each distorted spatter of voices and volley of breath, focused through every crackle of static. He pictured the officers running, freezing, pressing themselves against walls; sweeping the space through rifle-sights, moving sharply aside as other figures passed through shadows, barrelled in and out of rooms.

‘Clear!’

‘Clear and secure!’

Heeney muttered at Thorne’s shoulder: ‘The place is empty.’

‘Shut up,’ Thorne said.

A shout then, audible above the others. Just one word. Just the crucial word.

‘Body.’

‘Say again?’

‘We’ve got a body.’

Thorne stands up, crouches, pushes his hands against the roof. He strains to hear more, to hear anything through the hiss, through elastic seconds of dead air.

‘Where?’

‘In here.’

‘Where the fuck’s “here”?’

‘Back bedroom.’

And Thorne can see it when he closes his eyes. He’s seen it before, or close enough: the sole of a training shoe, a mop of dark hair, a great deal of blood.

‘Jesus,’ Heeney whispers behind him, but Thorne is already moving towards the doors, putting a shoulder against them, and tearing across the road in the same direction Porter had gone just a few minutes before.

Pain blooming in his back and chest as he runs, and more pictures he could do without: fingers and thumbs, grubby on the barrel of a syringe; the tremble around Juliet Mullen’s mouth.

A pair of armed response vehicles, three squad cars and an ambulance are already parked up on the track that runs along the back of the building, and the garden is thick with the Job by the time Thorne drops on to the other side of the low wall. Body armour is laid down, sweaty on the grass; stepped across by scene-of-crime officers, scrambling into full-body suits and hurrying towards the fire escape. There is conversation and clatter as a constant stream of Met personnel shuttle up and down the metal staircase. A necklace of cigarette smoke curling past them towards a clear sky, and Holland at the bottom, turning to Thorne, his arms raised, asking:

What the fuck’s going on?

‘Tom…’

Thorne spun round and saw Porter moving towards him across the grass. Breathless and none too polite, he asked Holland’s unspoken question for him, then asked another before she’d had a chance to answer the first.

‘What about Luke?’

Porter shook her head.

‘Alive? Dead? What?’

‘We’ve got two bodies up there,’ Porter said. ‘Almost certainly those of Conrad Allen and his girlfriend. Both look like they’ve had their throats cut; to start with, at any rate. There’s a knife.’

‘So where’s the boy?’ Thorne asked.

In a hurry, or sick of being barked at, Porter turned and started to walk back towards the cluster of vehicles. She answered without bothering to look round. ‘Right now it’s impossible to say, and I can’t see any point in speculating. I do know we’ve got a pair of dead kidnappers and a hostage who’s nowhere to be found.’