Buried

SUNDAY
LUKE

There’d been a kid, when Luke was a few years younger, who’d picked on him at school. He’d stolen things – a fountain pen, a watch – handed out punches to the shoulder and kicks to the ankle, and threatened to do a lot worse if Luke told anyone. Luke hadn’t been the only one this boy had targeted. He’d watched the bully with others sometimes, and saw the same technique as had been used on him. The boy would smile, be nice, make out that he wanted to be friends, before dishing out the painful stuff. As though the pretend gentleness made the twisting and slapping that came afterwards more enjoyable for him.

Luke hadn’t told anyone, had suffered until the boy had left the school, but he’d learned to recognise the smile that came before the pain, and he saw it with the man in the cellar. It sounded silly. It was obvious really, with what was going on, but there was something wrong with the man. Something out of control, lost, which made Luke feel as though the man himself didn’t have much idea what he was going to do next.

The friendlier the man was – the more freedom he gave Luke, the more he told Luke how much he thought of him – the more frightening he became. And the more determined Luke became to try to help himself.

It was hard, trying to make himself concentrate on doing something when all he wanted to do was curl up and lie still, sleep until it was over. He’d spent hours since the man had last left, reciting poems in his head, lyrics to songs… anything to avoid having to think about what the man had told him; what he’d kept on telling him. It was poisonous shit, he knew that; like the lies that bully at school had once told him in a soft voice. The man was enjoying coming down with his torch and his filth. Spewing it out and messing with his head. Weakening him.

So Luke filled his head with as much other stuff as he could, trying to squeeze out the man’s lies.

And he focused hard on the sting from a dozen cuts and bruises. He drove a fingernail across the graze on his knuckles until that pain became more important than the deep, dull ache that the man’s words had left spreading through his body.

He climbed to his feet, feeling the pieces of discarded gaffer tape around him as his hands moved across the dirt floor. He tried to concentrate on the map of the cellar he had created in his mind: the low corners; the damp crannies and musty alcoves; the shelves thick with dirt; tins of paint, bags of cement and picture frames…

If the man was still in the house, he would probably be down to see him again before too long. With more stories to tell… or worse.

Luke stared into the thick, gritty darkness and made a decision.

He needed a weapon.

EIGHTEEN

There was never a good time, of course. But when it came to working with a body, working on a body, the early hours of the morning were probably the least bad. During the day, a murder scene felt blatant and unashamed. There was something about the way daylight fell across a body that served to reinforce the brutality of the act; to hammer home the shocking truth that such things happened while the rest of the world went about its business. Walked around, shopped, sat bored at tills or desks, while others a few feet away bled, bloated and stiffened.

At night, Thorne could do what needed to be done and could extract a little comfort from the fact that he was performing a necessary, if ugly, public service by cleaning up the mess before dawn. In a bad mood he might consider such a night’s labours as akin to shovelling shit uphill. But tonight, standing over the body of an old woman while her neighbours slept, he felt like he was doing his bit to maintain a little of the bliss that ignorance afforded.

He’d already exchanged a few words with Hendricks as they’d climbed into the plastic full-body suits. It was a runof-the-mill conversation, such as anyone might have before getting down to work:

‘How’re you doing?’

‘Good. Didn’t you get my note?’

‘Yeah, but you’d probably say that anyway.’

‘No, really. I saw Brendan.’

‘How was that?’

‘Well, there was no screaming, and I didn’t try to smash his face in, so pretty good, I think…’

Now, forty minutes or so into it, the dialogue had taken on a more businesslike tone. The talk was of lividity and core body temperature; of traumatic asphyxia and cadaveric spasm. As Hendricks dictated a few notes into a small digital recorder, Thorne watched the team of scene-ofcrime officers move around Kathleen Bristow’s small bedroom. As always, seeing them work, he felt something nagging at him; irritating, like a rough seam scratching his skin inside the plastic suit. He had come to realise over the years that it was envy: of their certainty; of the scientific boundaries which he imagined must give them the kind of reassurance he had rarely felt himself.

Theirs would be the evidence for the likes of him to label and box up and get to court. Without it, the best he had to offer was guesswork and speculation.

‘So, when are we talking, Phil?’

Hendricks took one of the woman’s dead hands in his own. The flesh was mottled, bluish against the cream of his surgical glove. ‘Rigor’s just starting to fade, so I think we’re talking a little over twenty-four hours. The early hours of yesterday morning, probably. Maybe late the night before.’

The night before they’d nicked Grant Freestone.

But Freestone couldn’t be the killer, could he? They’d already established that he hadn’t kidnapped anyone, and it would have been too much of a coincidence for Kathleen Bristow’s death not to be connected to the abduction of Luke Mullen.

‘I reckon he broke a rib or two as well,’ Hendricks said. ‘Pressing down on top of her. Kneeling on her chest, maybe.’

When Hendricks reached forward to push a finger inside Kathleen Bristow’s mouth, to rub a cotton bud across the tears inside her lip, Thorne turned away. He walked out of the room, and downstairs. A SOCO he knew well was working in the dining room, moving methodically around the small table on top of which sat a telephone and answering machine. It was from here that a DI from the on-call Murder Team had phoned Dave Holland, having listened to the message he’d left for Kathleen Bristow. As Thorne headed towards the back door, he exchanged a joke with the officer, but he was thinking of how the old woman’s face had seemed to collapse when Hendricks had removed her false teeth.

Outside, Thorne pushed back the hood of the plastic suit, walked over to where Dave Holland, similarly attired, was leaning against the wall next to the kitchen window. A generator hummed at the front of the house and a powerful arc light brightened the half of the garden nearest the kitchen door.

Holland took two quick drags of a cigarette, held it up to show Thorne, raised his eyes towards the top floor of the house. ‘All this seems a good enough reason to give in and have one, you know? But then you feel guilty for enjoying it.’

In direct contrast to most people, Holland had taken up smoking after his child was born. He’d smoked secretly, at work, until his girlfriend had found out and gone ballistic, since when he’d done his best to knock it on the head. But, like he said, there were times when it seemed reasonable to weaken.

‘Doesn’t Sophie smell it on you?’

Holland nodded. ‘But she understands that nine times out of ten, there’s a bloody good reason, so she doesn’t usually give me a hard time.’

Thorne pushed himself away from the wall and strolled to the rear of the garden. Holland followed him into the shadow, beyond the arc light’s reach. They sat on a small, ornamental bench.

‘You reckon our kidnapper did this?’ Holland asked.

‘If he didn’t, I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on. Not that I’ve got much of an idea anyway.’

‘Maybe we’re getting close to him.’

Thorne looked back towards the house, stared at the SOCOs inside, moving back and forth past the bedroom window. ‘It’s hard to feel too excited about that,’ he said, ‘right at this minute.’ He stretched his feet out in front of him. The grass smelled as though it had been mown only a day or two before. It looked grey against the white of the plastic overshoes.

‘I haven’t seen DI Porter for a while,’ Holland said.

‘And…?’

‘Nothing. I just wondered where she was.’

‘Right. She was talking to the photographer, last time I saw her.’ Thorne leaned forward, looked at Holland, daring him to give anything away.

‘What?’

‘Don’t even think about smirking,’ Thorne said. ‘Just shut up and finish your fag…’

‘I was only asking.’

‘Or I’ll call your girlfriend and tell her you’re back on twenty a day.’

Holland did as he was told, and they sat in silence for a few minutes. The smoke drifted away from them towards the light, disappearing at its edge, where moths and midges danced in and out of the beam. When he’d finished, Holland stubbed out his fag-end on the bottom of the bench and stood up. ‘Best get back in there,’ he said. ‘I reckon they’ll be bringing her out in a minute.’

This was the other advantage of working a murder scene at this hour: save for the occasional insomniac dog-walker or crazed jogger, Kathleen Bristow could leave her home for the last time without an audience. During the day, there would be no shortage of gawpers, standing silently, shifting from foot to foot, formulating the story they would tell later around the dinner table or in the pub. Whenever Thorne listened to traffic updates on the motorway, he wondered why the announcer didn’t just tell the truth; why they didn’t come clean and say that the tailback was the result of drivers slowing down to get a good look at the accident.

He raised his head at the rustle of plastic trouser-legs moving against each other and shifted across to let Porter sit down.

‘Holland giving you a hard time?’ she asked.

‘He knows better.’

Thorne thought Porter probably had more to say about what had nearly gone on at his flat, but he made it obvious that he wasn’t too keen to get into it. He couldn’t help but wonder how he’d feel about discussing it if anything had actually happened.

‘I spoke to Hendricks,’ she said. ‘So I suppose we should at least ask Freestone where he was on Friday night.’

‘Can’t see the point.’

‘Well, how about because we haven’t got anyone else even resembling a suspect?’

Thorne shrugged. ‘We can ask.’

‘A tenner says he was with his sister anyway, right?’

‘Probably. But whether Freestone’s got an alibi or not, this is the same man that killed Allen and Tickell. Has to be. The same man who’s holding Luke.’

A light came on in an upstairs window of the house next door. Looking across, Thorne saw that there were downstairs lights burning on the other side, too. So much for the absence of an audience. In London, he supposed, there was usually someone watching. There would probably be a house-to-house later that morning, and they could only hope that someone had been equally watchful twenty-four hours earlier.

‘OK, seeing as who is pretty much a non-starter, any bright ideas about why?’

Bright ideas? More like guesswork and speculation…

‘Did you look in the spare room?’ Thorne asked.

He had noticed the three battered, metal filing cabinets in the second bedroom and remembered something Callum Roper had said about who was most likely to have kept any records of the MAPPA meetings back in 2001. He ran the idea that had begun to form in his mind past Porter.

Her response suggested that, as pieces of speculation went, it wasn’t the most outlandish she’d ever heard. ‘You think she was killed because of something she knew?’

‘Or something she had. Perhaps without even knowing she had it. It’s just a thought…’

‘The problem is that without us knowing what was in those filing cabinets, I don’t see how we’re going to work out what might have been taken.’

‘I had a quick look in one of them. There’s a ton of stuff in there, going back years. We can go through it all later, when scene of crime’s finished. If there’s nothing there about Freestone, or the MAPPA project in 2001, I think we should try and find out if there ever was.’

‘We’ll need to get back on to whichever social services department she was working for then.’ Porter winced, like she’d just remembered what day it was. ‘Won’t have a lot of luck on a Sunday, mind.’

‘I wouldn’t bank on them having copies of these records themselves,’ Thorne said. ‘Not if what Roper said is true. But they might know what Bristow took with her when she retired, or at least confirm that she kept her own records.’ Even as Thorne said it, the idea was starting to sound vague and flabby; time-consuming at the very least. Though they now had three murders to investigate, there was still a missing boy whose safety, whose quick recovery was, theoretically, their prime concern.

A boy who, theoretically, was still alive.

Porter, though, seemed energised by Thorne’s idea. While Thorne himself could only hope that he didn’t look as bad as he felt, her face showed no sign of the fact that she was approaching what must have been twenty-four hours without sleep.

‘Maybe it’s Freestone’s connection to this MAPPA business that’s important,’ she suggested. ‘Not the threats he made before he went to prison.’

Three murders…

‘Well, something’s seriously important to someone,’ Thorne said.

‘What about Luke?’

There was guesswork and there was speculation. And there were some things that just became horribly obvious. ‘He’ll kill Luke if he has to,’ Thorne said.

Porter nodded, like Thorne had confirmed what she already knew. She lifted her feet on to the bench, wrapped her arms around her knees, and said, ‘I’ve only ever lost two.’

For a minute or more, Thorne searched for something to say, but before anything suitable could come to him Porter had chased away the need for reassurance and was getting to her feet.

‘We need to get a fucking shift on,’ she said. ‘Maybe coming at it from this new angle might help.’

‘Maybe.’ Thorne hauled himself upright, hoping that her optimism would prove justified. There was no doubt that the map of the case was being freshly laid out on memos and whiteboards; was redrawing itself in Thorne’s head. But as lines snaked in new directions and intersected for the first time with others, one name – whatever else was happening – kept drifting towards an area where it should not, by rights, belong. It kept floating away from that part of the map reserved for victims and witnesses and heading towards an altogether murkier, unlabelled zone.

Tony Mullen.

A wave from just inside the kitchen door indicated that the body of Kathleen Bristow was being brought out. Porter started walking back towards the house, with Thorne a few paces behind her.

The joking always stopped at this point, for a few minutes at least, until the mortuary vehicle had driven away. Then the bagging and the scraping, and the banter, could resume; with the volume cranked up a notch or two.

Once the body had gone, the murder scene could let out the breath it had been holding.

Thorne watched as the stretcher was lifted over the step at the back door and into the garden. Holland came out after it, then Hendricks, who began to clamber out of his plastic suit in readiness for following the body to the mortuary. The stretcher was taken through the gate, the arc light illuminating its path along the side of the house towards the road.

Thorne walked back into the house, thinking that cigarette smoke wasn’t the worst thing you could go home stinking of.

Custody reviews took place six and fifteen hours into the twenty-four. Thirty minutes earlier, at 8 a.m., Kitson and Brigstocke had reviewed the ongoing custody of Adrian Farrell for the second time. Now, she was cheerfully passing on the news to the prisoner himself: that should matters not proceed to her satisfaction, she and her DCI would be going to the superintendent to seek a six-hour extension.

Smartarse, the solicitor – who preferred the name Wilson – was less than impressed. ‘And this is on the basis of a video parade, is it?’

‘A positive identification from an eyewitness who says he watched Mr Farrell and two others murder Amin Latif on October 17th, last year. Sorry… I should say, “murder Mr Latif after seriously sexually assaulting him”, if we’re being accurate. Although, that said, I think the murder will probably be enough, don’t you?’

Wilson began scribbling something, then casually slid his forearm across the top of his notepad, like a schoolboy protecting his answers.

Kitson watched him write, thinking that it might just as well have been a shopping list, for all the help it was going to be to his client. Next to her, Andy Stone did up the buttons on his jacket. Stone was just there to make up the numbers, and seemed happy enough with his role.

‘You warm enough, Adrian?’ he asked.

The interview room was cold, which was probably a good thing, as someone brought in overnight after a knife attack outside a bar had thrown up in the corner. Heating would almost certainly have made the stench of stale puke and disinfectant unbearable.

Judging by the expression on Adrian Farrell’s face, the smell was bad enough as it was.

He looked very different out of uniform; away from school and everything that went with it. He wore jeans, and a red hooded top with ‘NEW YORK’ emblazoned across the chest. The blond hair was messy, but had certainly not been styled that way, and the face it framed showed every sign of having spent a night as uncomfortable as those in the cells were supposed to be. He was trying to look bored and mildly irritated, but lack of sleep was obviously affecting his ability to keep up the act. Where previously she had caught only glimpses, Kitson was starting to get a better look at the fear, and at the dark, quiet anger which settled across his features, like scum on the surface of still water.

‘I know what’ll cheer you up,’ she said. ‘A bit of a history quiz.’

A laminated list of prisoner’s rights had been fixed to the desk. Farrell was picking at an edge of it. He looked up, shrugged. ‘Fine.’

‘History’s your favourite, isn’t it?’

‘I said fine.’

‘Good on dates? What about February 28th, 1953?’

Farrell tapped a finger against his lips. ‘Battle of Hastings?’

‘Why don’t we ask the audience?’ Kitson said. ‘Mr Wilson?’

Wilson did a little more scribbling. ‘I doubt you’ll get any kind of extension if you waste the time you’ve got playing silly games.’

‘It was the day that Francis Crick and James Watson worked out the structure of DNA.’ Kitson slowly drew a figure of eight on the desktop in front of her. ‘The double helix.’

Farrell looked as though he found this genuinely funny. ‘I won’t forget it now,’ he said.

‘I bet you won’t. We should have a preliminary result by the end of the day, and I know it’s going to be a match.’

This time, Kitson was talking about the result of tests carried out on an authorised DNA sample, taken the previous day at the station. Farrell had refused to give permission for this, so Kitson – as she had every right to do in the case of a non-intimate sample – had taken it without consent. As several strands of hair were removed by the attending medical officer, with Stone and another DC providing the necessary restraint, Kitson had seen flashes of an anger a lot less quiet than the one she sensed, simmering inside Adrian Farrell now.

She stared across the table, turning up the heat. ‘And you know it’s going to be a match, too, don’t you?’

‘I know all sorts of things.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘I know that you can’t decide how best to talk to me so as to get what you want. I know that you’re either patronising me or pretending that you think I’m really clever and really mature, but all the time you’re steering a clumsy course between the two you’re just sitting there hating my guts.’ He cocked his head towards Stone. ‘And I know that he just wants to climb across this table and get his hands on me.’

Stone returned the stare, like he wasn’t about to argue.

Kitson caught the look, like a poker player spotting a tell. The puff of the cheeks from Wilson told her he was resigned to the fact that whichever way he’d advised Farrell to behave, the boy thought he knew better. That the fat fee he was doubtless being paid by his client’s parents would be earned without a great deal of effort. Kitson turned back to Farrell, convinced that his solicitor was already thinking about future, fatter fees. Those that might be earned appealing against a guilty verdict.

‘You’re not walking away from this,’ she said.

‘You seem very sure of yourself, but you’re still not charging me, are you?’

‘Who were the two other boys with you when you attacked Amin Latif?’

‘When I what?’

‘Give me the names, Adrian.’

‘Now, you say you can’t promise anything, right? But if I help you, you’ll see what you can do about getting my sentence reduced. Or maybe you’ll just try to appeal to my conscience, because you’re sure I’ve got one somewhere, and that deep down I want to do the right thing.’

‘What about Damien Herbert and Michael Nelson?’ Kitson asked. ‘Shall we talk to them? You can bet they’d give you up in a second.’

It was as though Farrell simply hadn’t heard her. ‘Isn’t this where you slide a few pictures of the dead boy across the table?’

Kitson looked to Wilson, then to Stone. The pause was less for effect than to suck up saliva into a mouth that had suddenly gone dry. It was coppery with adrenalin. ‘You’ve got a lot of confidence, Adrian,’ she said. ‘A lot of charm. I’m sure you’re a big hit with young girls and old ladies. But all the charm in the world won’t sway a jury if it’s looking at an eyewitness ID and a DNA match.’

‘I’m confident? If you ask me, you’re the one who’s counting all the chickens. It’s an eyewitness ID six months after the fact. And you keep talking about this DNA match like you’ve already got it.’

Kitson couldn’t resist a smile, remembering the one Farrell had given her, just before he’d spat on to the pavement.

Stone shuffled forward on his chair. ‘I’ll tell you who else you’ll be a big hit with,’ he said. ‘One or two of the lads you’re likely to find yourself banged up with.’

Wilson groaned in distaste.

‘Are you serious?’ Farrell asked. He held up a hand, apologising for finding what Stone had said so funny. ‘Sorry, I swear I’m not trying to wind you up…’

‘It’s a last resort,’ Wilson said. ‘Sordid scare tactics of that nature are only ever made when a case is nowhere near as strong as is being made out.’ He looked over at Kitson, pleased with himself. ‘It’s barrel-scraping.’

‘It’s quite appropriate, I would have thought,’ she said. ‘Bearing in mind what happened to Amin Latif.’

A bubble of fear, or fury, rose to the surface and broke across the boy’s features. He reached for Wilson’s notebook, tore back a page and jabbed a finger at something the solicitor had jotted down earlier.

‘My client is unhappy about the confiscation of some of his property.’

‘My training shoes.’

‘They’ve been taken away for forensic tests,’ Kitson said. There had been no footwear prints or casts taken at the Latif murder scene, but it was standard practice nonetheless. ‘It’s a routine procedure.’

Farrell pushed his chair away from the table, stuck out his feet. ‘These are bloody ridiculous.’ He raised one of the black, elasticated plimsolls with which almost all prisoners were issued. ‘They don’t even fit.’

‘Everyone gets them,’ Stone said.

‘Why can’t I have another pair of my own brought in?’

‘Sorry. It’s part of the uniform. There’s no Latin motto, but-’

‘Those trainers cost a lot of money. They were customised.’

Wilson raised his pen. ‘Can you assure us that they won’t be damaged during any chemical examination?’

Kitson decided there and then to end the interview. She stood up and instructed Stone to complete the formalities: to stop the recording and seal the cassette within sight of the prisoner. Looking back from the door, she could tell that both Farrell and Wilson were taken aback by the abruptness with which she’d brought proceedings to a halt.

‘I’m investigating the sexual assault and murder of a seventeen-year-old-boy,’ she said. ‘And I will do whatever it takes to get the names of the people who were there with you when it happened. To make sure that all three of you stand trial for brutalising Amin Latif, then kicking him to death.’ She reached behind her, aware of the slightest tremor in her hand as it closed around the door handle. ‘But I will not sit here and argue with you about fucking shoes.’

Ten minutes later, standing just inside the cage, Kitson saw Farrell’s solicitor in the backyard, enjoying a cigarette. She walked out to join him.

He offered her the packet but she shook her head: ‘Got anything stronger?’

‘You seemed a little wound up in there,’ Wilson said.

‘Well, he’s quite a lad, isn’t he?’

The solicitor didn’t bite. He took one last, deep drag, then flicked the butt towards a pair of police motorbikes. ‘Any thoughts on when you might be bringing him up again?’

‘Not specifically, but I wouldn’t go too far away.’

‘I was wondering if that pub up the road does a traditional Sunday lunch later.’

‘The Oak? It does lunch, but I’m not sure their definition of “traditional” is the same as yours.’

She walked back inside, deciding that once she’d sorted out the paperwork with the custody skipper, she’d grab some breakfast. Then she’d try to track down Tom Thorne. Everyone had heard about the overnight development on the Mullen case, and Kitson could only guess that Thorne had not yet had a chance to pick up the memo she’d left in his pigeonhole, or return the message she’d left on his mobile.

Compared to the discovery of a body, what she had to tell him was hardly particularly urgent.

NINETEEN

That was why people stopped to look at accidents: the vicarious thrill without the inconvenience of being doused in blood or dressed in twisted metal. It was almost certainly the same principle that made watching three senior officers arguing with one another so exhilarating.

It was the row that Hignett had predicted, and it was only surprising that Graham Hoolihan had taken as long as he had before coming down and throwing around some of his considerable weight.

‘I was cooperative when DI Thorne first contacted me. I was more than helpful. And, unlike anyone on this case, I showed a bit of common fucking courtesy.’

‘There’s no point chucking insults at people.’

‘Why not? You clearly don’t understand how the proper channels work.’

Thorne had decided not to get involved, but just to stand there at the back of Brigstocke’s office and watch. Maybe chip in every now and again.

‘I found out about this in the pub, for crying out loud,’ Hoolihan said. ‘Because your chief superintendent was at some function or other with mine, and just happened to mention it over the gin and tonics.’

Thorne pictured Trevor Jesmond with one trouser-leg rolled up, clutching a tumbler and talking shop over the clinking of ice cubes.

‘Look,’ Hignett said, ‘we’d certainly have been making contact with you today. But then we picked up a murder in the early hours and other things became somewhat more important.’

It sounded convincing enough. Brigstocke picked up the baton. ‘As it was, we’d only had Freestone in custody a little over twelve hours anyway.’

‘And there was every reason to believe he could help us with an ongoing enquiry into a kidnap and double murder. So…’

‘So it wasn’t as though we were trying to keep the fact that we had him a secret.’

Brigstocke and Hignett were making a decent job of putting on a united front. Thorne was impressed by Hignett’s stance in particular. Under the circumstances, the DCI from the Kidnap Unit could have been forgiven for jumping up and down, pointing the finger elsewhere and telling everyone that he’d wanted to hand Grant Freestone over straight away.

‘Why didn’t anyone call me when he was brought in?’ Hoolihan asked. ‘Just as a common courtesy.’

Brigstocke and Hignett looked at one another, each trying to formulate a nice, polite answer.

It had all kicked off towards the end of the morning’s briefing, which had naturally concentrated on the discovery of the body in Shepherd’s Bush. As ever, the first twenty-four hours were the most crucial, so all efforts would now be channelled into investigating the murder of Kathleen Bristow. Though this was clearly the best chance they had of making progress on the main case, too, the kidnap itself had barely been talked about.

It had not escaped Thorne’s attention that Luke Mullen’s name was being mentioned less and less as the days went by. Spoken more quietly, when it was. There were the murders to work on now, he understood that; other angles that might prove more productive. But Thorne knew that wasn’t the only reason.

As the briefing had broken up, Graham Hoolihan had appeared, and a heated discussion had rapidly reached boiling point, until a sergeant from another squad had ushered them all towards Brigstocke’s office, like an irate landlord escorting drunks from the premises.

‘You should know that I’ve got written authority to take Freestone back with me to Lewisham.’

Lewisham, Sutton, Earlsfield. The three places Homicide South were based on the other side of the river.

Hoolihan reached down for a briefcase, then swung it on to Brigstocke’s desk. ‘My guvnor got it signed by Commander Walker first thing this morning.’

From where Thorne was standing, it looked as though Hignett and Brigstocke couldn’t quite decide whether to bristle or shudder. Clive Walker was head of Homicide Command, London-wide. He was one of the few men who could make Trevor Jesmond seem like one of the lads.

‘So let’s not waste any more time,’ Hoolihan said. ‘Do you still have every reason to believe Freestone can assist with your enquiries?’

There seemed little point pretending there was any reason whatsoever. Freestone had been questioned earlier that morning, and had claimed to have been tucked up in bed at his sister’s flat when Kathleen Bristow was having a pillow put across her face. Predictably, Jane Freestone had confirmed her brother’s story, and, though she was hardly the world’s most reliable witness, the alibi would be tough to dispute.

Not that Thorne could see any reason to even bother trying. He knew that Freestone had no more murdered Kathleen Bristow than he had Amanda Tickell or Conrad Allen; any more than he was behind the kidnapping of Luke Mullen. He thought back to when he and Porter had nicked Freestone in the park the morning before. He hadn’t looked happy, of course, why would he? But he certainly hadn’t looked like a man being arrested for a murder he’d committed only a few hours earlier.

The hesitation that followed his question seemed to give Hoolihan the answer he desired. ‘Right, well, let’s get a move on, then.’ He tapped the lid of his briefcase. ‘We’ll have plenty of paperwork to push at each other.’

Thorne felt himself stepping forward, then heard himself speaking. ‘For someone who obviously sets so much store by courtesy, I was thinking that maybe a “thank you” might be in order.’ Brigstocke threw him a look, but Thorne ploughed on, making a mental note to adjust his definition of ‘chipping in’. ‘OK, we may not have handled things exactly as you’d have liked them, but the fact remains we did you a bloody big favour.’

Hoolihan pulled his briefcase to his chest, folded his arms around it and waited for Thorne to continue.

‘You’d taken your eye off the ball as far as Grant Freestone was concerned, or given it up as not being worth the effort. Somebody rubber-stamped the review paperwork once a year, but you weren’t doing much of anything, as far as I can make out. The fact that you’re going to get a nice, fat feather in your cap is down to us. We may not have been as courteous as we should have been, but I still think you should be fucking grateful.’

It was the F-word that did it; that caused the colour to rise to Hoolihan’s face. Though he pointedly refused to respond to what had been said, it was clear that Thorne would no longer be getting any favours from anyone at Homicide South.

After losing what was only a half-arsed staring contest, Hoolihan turned back to Brigstocke and Hignett. ‘It’s not like I’ll be taking Freestone very far,’ he said. ‘We’ll get him up in front of a magistrate within a day or two, so he’ll be on remand somewhere, if you need to speak to him after that.’

There was some shouting once Hoolihan had left, but not too much. Hignett once again showed restraint in his decision not to gloat or say, ‘I told you so.’

There were more important things to be discussed.

‘We got a preliminary PM report from Phil Hendricks,’ Brigstocke said. He picked up a piece of paper from his desk, and read: ‘Asphyxia due to suffocation, obviously… three broken ribs… a broken nose. That’s from where he’s put his weight on the pillow, Phil reckons…’

A second or two of looking at feet, and walls, and a sky that couldn’t make its mind up.

‘You still think he was after something?’ Hignett asked.

‘It’s a possibility,’ Thorne said. ‘Porter’s going to have a good look through those filing cabinets later. I think she’ll be at the mortuary for a while yet.’

‘Whatever it was, he obviously wanted it badly.’ Brigstocke took a last look at the PM report. ‘Or else he’s just rattled.’

‘Not too rattled, I hope,’ Hignett said.

Thorne knew what Hignett was saying, the dreadful possibility it would be stupid to ignore. He noted that, yet again, the point had been made without any mention of the boy’s name.

The Major Incident Room seemed just a little busier than it had the day before. Conversations were less likely to go round the houses. People moved from desk to desk, from phone to fax machine, with greater urgency. It was not even twelve hours since Kathleen Bristow’s body had been discovered, but Thorne knew that unless those doing the chasing were quick enough, murder cases could be away and out of sight long before that. He exchanged quick words with Andy Stone and a couple of the Kidnap boys, then spent a few unwelcome, but necessary, minutes talking admin with DS Samir Karim, who was also office manager. Thorne liked Karim, an overweight, gregarious Asian with a shock of prematurely greying hair and a thick London accent. But the smile that was normally hard to shift was not much in evidence this morning.

‘Everything’s fucked up,’ he said.

Thorne nodded, without really needing to know exactly what Karim was talking about.

Dave Holland seemed as focused as anyone, but up close his eyes betrayed a man who hadn’t slept the night before.

‘Pissholes in the snow,’ he said, ‘I know, but still slightly bigger pissholes than yours.’

Thorne looked down at Holland’s computer screen: a page from the Borough of Bromley website displaying various contact telephone numbers and email addresses.

‘There’s an out-of-hours contact service,’ Holland said, ‘which is fine if a water main bursts or you see someone fly-tipping, but not much use for anything else. I’ve spoken to a couple of people at home, but I’m not getting anywhere. As far as any records Kathleen Bristow might have kept, I think we’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning, talk to someone at social services who’s got access to the files. Even then, I’m not sure it’ll be a five-minute job.’

‘Get hold of the other people who were on the panel with her,’ Thorne said. ‘Roper and the rest of them…’

Holland left the website and quickly accessed the Crime Reporting Information System. CRIS was updated constantly, with every detail of the case to that point logged and catalogued for the entire team. He entered the case number, searched the files, then called up the names and contact details of those on Grant Freestone’s MAPPA panel:

Roper, Warren, Lardner, Stringer, Bristow.

Holland tapped a finger against the screen. ‘I never managed to track Stringer down first time round.’

‘See what you can do,’ Thorne said.

‘Right. It’ll be interesting to see how they react to the news about Kathleen Bristow. Maybe one of them can confirm she had the records.’

‘Roper thought she probably did,’ Thorne said. ‘But that’s not why I was suggesting it.’ He looked at the list on Holland’s screen, the cursor blinking beneath the final name. ‘While we’re still not sure exactly why Kathleen Bristow was killed, it can’t hurt to make sure each of the other people on that panel is still walking around.’

Thorne had been in the backyard when they’d eventually brought out the prisoner. He’d been leaning against the van that was waiting to take Freestone south, talking about a recent Spurs-Crystal Palace game to one of the DCs sent to fetch him.

Hoolihan had walked past Thorne without a word and climbed into an unmarked BMW, ready to follow the van down to Lewisham.

Freestone himself had been considerably keener to chat.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘It’s time to answer for Sarah Hanley, Grant.’

‘I didn’t kill her.’

‘Keep telling them that,’ Thorne said.

‘You’re a fucking genius…’

Freestone was cuffed, an officer on each side marching him purposefully towards the open doors at the back of the van.

Thorne ambled after them. ‘I’ll give your best to Tony Mullen.’

‘You should get him down here,’ Freestone said.

‘Can’t see any point now,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s got nothing to do with the Hanley case.’

‘I saw him.’

‘What?’ Thorne picked up his pace. ‘When did you see him?’

But Freestone was already being bundled into the back of the van, and pushed on to a bench between his two escorts. He turned to look at Thorne, but there was no time to register the expression before the doors were slammed shut. The Crystal Palace fan shrugged an apology and walked round to the driver’s side.

Thorne took a step back as the van started up. Parked alongside it, Hoolihan raced the BMW’s engine; impatient probably, but perhaps also hoping to send a fatal dose of carbon monoxide Thorne’s way.

As he walked back in through the cage, Thorne saw Danny Donovan loitering near the custody skipper’s platform. A uniformed PC was leading a young woman by the arm. As Thorne approached, he watched Donovan engage the woman in conversation, then hand her something just before she was led towards the cells.

‘Still here, Danny?’

‘Can’t seem to tear myself away.’

‘Someone else going to be looking after Freestone now, then? One of those people with qualifications?’ Thorne held out a hand. Waited until Donovan handed over one of the business cards he was cradling in his fist. ‘Touting for business? You cheeky fucker.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘The problem for you is that you’ve run into me. And that this’ – he held up the thin, cheaply produced card – ‘really pisses me off.’

‘Fuck’s sake.’

‘Away you go…’

Thorne was already moving towards the exit, arms wide, shepherding Donovan in the direction of the metal doorway.

‘You want to get out of this game sharpish, Thorne.’ Donovan stepped backwards into the cage, half turned as if to leave. ‘It’s sending you a bit mental.’

Thorne approached Donovan fast, backed him against the side of the cage. ‘You really should fuck off now,’ he said. ‘And next time you’re in here, if I so much as see you helping yourself to a teabag, I’ll nick you for theft.’

Donovan waited for Thorne to step back. ‘Things carry on as they have been, you’ll probably be desperate for any sort of result by then.’

When the ex-copper moved to walk past him, Thorne reached out both arms and pushed him hard against the wall. Donovan slammed into the metal, which gave a little, then bounced back, dropping the handful of business cards as he reached out to retain his balance.

There was a shout from inside the custody suite and Thorne yelled back that everything was fine. Donovan squatted and tried to pick up the cards, but Thorne was quicker. Breathing heavily, he slapped away the other man’s hand, grabbed as many cards as he could, and threw them, fluttering out into the backyard.

A pair of uniformed beat officers appeared at the doorway on their way into the station. They watched for a few seconds, then stepped around the two men scrabbling around on the floor.

Thorne’s heart was still beating faster than normal when Kitson found him in one of the CID offices on the first floor.

‘Did you not get my message?’ she asked.

Thorne gulped down his tea. It wasn’t quite twelve yet, and he was wondering if it was too early to get some lunch. ‘Sorry, it’s been a pig of a morning.’

‘I heard.’

‘Actually, the murder scene was a doddle,’ Thorne said. ‘There wasn’t any blood spilled until we got back here.’

Kitson’s shoes were new. She kicked them off when she sat down next to Thorne. Began to rub at tender heels and toes through her tights. ‘Listen, I’ve got Adrian Farrell’s phone records.’

‘Any help?’

‘Not yet. But there are plenty of numbers to check out, so we might get lucky. There was something, though. Remember I said I’d look for any connection to Luke Mullen…?’

‘What have you got?’

‘There was nothing on Farrell’s mobile, but when I checked the landline the Mullen number came up. More than once.’

Thorne’s heartbeat accelerated even more. ‘Why not the mobile? I thought these kids were never off their bloody phones, sending text messages or whatever.’

‘He’s got a pay-as-you-go, right? But he’s also got a phone in his bedroom. I reckon he was just trying to save money. He can use the landline from his room and make private calls whenever he likes on Mum and Dad’s bill.’

‘When you say more than once…?’

‘Half a dozen calls in the three weeks before Luke was taken. More before that.’

Thorne sat back, trying to take in what Kitson was saying. ‘When Dave talked to the kids at the school, Farrell told him he hardly knew Luke Mullen. He knew he’d gone missing, but that was about it, right?’

‘Right, but I don’t have to tell you that he’s a very good liar.’

‘Hang on. Are we sure this was Adrian Farrell making the calls? Maybe Mrs Farrell and Luke Mullen’s mum both work on the PTA committee or something.’

Kitson shook her head. ‘I checked with his mother, and the parents hardly know each other. A few words over coffee at a school concert, nods at the school gates, no more than that.’

‘OK…’

Thorne’s mind, dulled by fatigue and hunger, tossed around possibilities like a tumble dryer on its last legs. Could Luke Mullen’s kidnapping be connected with Farrell, or some of Farrell’s friends? Was he taken because of something he knew about them? If that were the case, why was the video sent to Luke’s parents? And what the hell could any of it have to do with the murder of Kathleen Bristow?

‘These are not quick calls either, Tom,’ Kitson said. ‘Ten, fifteen minutes.’

‘What does Farrell say?’

‘I haven’t gone at him with any of this yet. I wondered if you fancied coming into the bin with me and having a bash yourself.’

Thorne grunted a yes as ideas continued to tumble and tangle.

‘One more thing.’ Kitson said it as though it were an afterthought, an irrelevance. ‘When you’re talking to Farrell, if you could squeeze out the names of the other two who helped him kill Amin Latif, there’s half a shandy in it for you.’

They enjoyed the moment, and sat there, and took a minute. Rubbing at sore feet and cradling paper cups of tea, like any other pair of workers on a break. Catching their breaths.

Thorne sensed that it might be their last chance to do so for a while. There had been times, on previous cases, when it had felt as if he were on a collision course with whoever he was trying to catch. As though the speed had increased until in the end it had just been a question of where the crash was going to happen.

This case felt different.

There was the same inevitability, like something rising from the guts into the mouth, the same sense that the end was coming. But it wasn’t a question of getting closer, or even of something gaining on them.

Thorne simply felt like they were running out of time.

He hadn’t meant to hurt the boy.

That didn’t excuse the fact that he had; that he’d known his words were like slaps, like punches. But he genuinely hadn’t wanted to. Everything was more complicated than that, of course; and more simple. It was someone else he wanted to hurt. Someone who would see how much a child they loved had suffered and would feel that pain a thousandfold.

That would make them see sense, wouldn’t it? Would make them look at things a little differently.

It had been such a straightforward idea, but from the moment he’d started to put it into pracice he’d felt it going away from him. Now he honestly didn’t know if things were going to work out as they’d been supposed to. It had all got out of control. He was out of control.

But at least he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognise what was happening. He was still aware. He’d seen it too many times himself: car accidents on two legs who had ruined lives – their own and those of everyone around them; fuck-ups and hard-luck merchants whose tears were real enough, whose anguish could suck the air out of a room, but who couldn’t seem to grasp that it was not an excuse.

I didn’t mean to hurt anyone…

He knew very well that he’d done terrible things. That good intentions counted for nothing with blood on his hands and the noise from the cellar. And that, although he had no idea how, it would end.

There were bells ringing across the field.

He sat and thought about engineering some sort of resolution himself. If he just opened the door and stood back, things would sort themselves out quickly enough. The boy would run towards the sound of the bells, towards a place where there was a phone, and it would all be over.

But that was hypothetical nonsense, because too much had happened now for everything to finish as simply as that. The slate could no longer be wiped clean. But it felt good to know that he wouldn’t be the only one paying the price.

When the bells finally stopped, he could hear the sobbing again. Coming up through the floor: a stutter, a desperate beat; rising every few breaths to something cracked and sore.

He closed his eyes, tried to forget how stupid he’d been, until he could almost believe that what he heard was only the sound of water and rust, and the pipes expanding.

LUKE

The religious stuff was sort of taken for granted at Butler’s Hall. It wasn’t a church school, as such, but there were hymns in assembly every day, and, even though it wasn’t forced down your throat in RE lessons, the presumption was that anyone whose parents had not stated otherwise was C of E.

He knew that the chaplain would have made speeches. Something about lost sheep, most likely. That teachers would have lined up on stage and bowed their heads, and that prayers would have been said for him every morning.

Now he’d started saying them himself.

He’d been filling his head with all manner of rubbish, trying to force out the stuff he couldn’t bear to have in there. Thinking about whatever else he could while the man was talking to him; and later, when it had finished and the man had gone. Sequences of streets and underground stations; rules of games he’d played with Juliet when they were younger; the names of his old soft toys… Anything.

Now God had elbowed His way in there as well.

Neither his mum nor his dad was big on church, save for the odd nativity play or whatever, and Juliet seemed actively drawn to Satanism, if anything. But he’d always liked the basic idea of it, of what it stood for. It was hard to argue that love and compassion were bad ideas. And some of the stuff in the Bible stood up OK, as long as you took it as nothing more than a cracking story.

He’d seen a programme on TV once, about why bad things happened to good people; about a bloke who did tons of work for charity then got some horrible disease, and a couple who went to church every five minutes and whose daughter had disappeared. They all said that suffering was part of being a Christian, and that everything they were going through was just a test of their faith. He’d watched it, thinking that they probably had to say something like that. He’d decided that if he believed in God, and was ever tested to the same extent, that he’d fail miserably.

But he didn’t believe, not really. And anyway, he knew what he was going through was nobody’s fault but that of the man on the other side of the cellar door. So a prayer couldn’t hurt, could it?

He guessed that the school chaplain might have something to say about praying at the same time as harbouring such violent thoughts; while clutching the carefully prepared means to put those thoughts into practice, if need be. But he also remembered that some of the stories he’d read in the Old Testament made Grand Theft Auto look tame. He knew that God had no problem with blood and thunderbolts, and striking down those who deserved it.

Thinking about it, perhaps the most appropriate thing he could ask God for was to be given the chance.

So he prayed for a while, because he knew that’s what people did as a last resort. Then he wiped away the tears and the snot. Went back to the distraction of memories and mental gymnastics.

The names of every child in his class, alphabetically, forwards and backwards. Planets and moons. Stars and satellites. His toys.

A dinosaur. A Bugs Bunny. A brown bear named Grizzle…

TWENTY

She made it a rule never to look at the faces.

It wasn’t about the pain. Porter was used to seeing the rifts and fissures that pain could gouge across a face; she worked with it most days. But there was hope in those faces, too: that the nightmare would soon be over, that she or someone like her would do a good job and bring their loved ones home again. There were times, if that hope were misplaced, when it was terrible to see, but nothing was as dreadful as its absence.

When it came to identifying a body, the hope was often there right until the very last second. Hope that there had been a terrible mistake; that the police had got it wrong; that their wife/husband/child was still alive somewhere. On occasions, of course, when there was a genuine element of doubt as to identity, it was her job to look. But not once, even then, had she ever seen that hope rewarded. She’d watched it die and seen it buried in a blink; gone before the breath had been fully caught.

So Louise Porter didn’t look any more. She dropped her eyes for that moment when hope was extinguished.

Afterwards, she sat with them on a brown plastic bench near the mortuary entrance. Francis Bristow and his wife had caught the early train from Glasgow. Clutching tight to overnight bags, they looked like bemused tourists who’d taken a wrong turn.

‘Have you got anywhere to stay?’ Porter asked. ‘Any other family?’

Joan Bristow was sitting on the far end. She looked to her husband, who was seated in the middle, then leaned forward slightly to look along at Porter. ‘We didn’t really know what we’d be doing. How long we’d be here, or anything.’

‘I’ll see if we can get something sorted out for you,’ Porter said.

‘We didn’t know, you see…’

The woman had a smart woollen coat folded across her knees. Next to her, Kathleen Bristow’s brother sat stiff-backed, staring straight ahead, as if studying every bump and crack in the primrose-yellow walls. He wore polished brogues and a jacket and tie. His hair was thick, creamcoloured, and his eyes were the same blue as his wife’s, wide and watery behind his glasses. He was probably in his early seventies, a few years older than his sister, but it was impossible for Porter to say if there was any family resemblance. She hadn’t had a good look at the photographs in the bedroom and she could not compare any living face with the one she’d seen on Kathleen Bristow.

The old man spoke suddenly, as if he’d been able to follow Porter’s thoughts. ‘I don’t understand why there was all that bruising across her nose,’ he said. ‘All black, like someone had hit her.’ The voice was quiet, and the Glaswegian accent strong, so Porter had to listen hard. He began to wave a finger in front of his face, pointing towards it. ‘And there was something else going on here… something not right with her mouth.’

The couple had been told how Kathleen Bristow had died and had been warned before the identification that her face was marked. Porter hesitated, unwilling for a variety of reasons to explain to Francis Bristow exactly what had been done to his sister’s face during her murder.

Joan Bristow’s accent was less pronounced than her husband’s. ‘They can’t tell us that kind of thing, Frank.’ She squeezed his hand and looked at Porter. ‘Am I not right, love?’

Porter nodded, grateful for the escape route, and stared at the finger, which still circled slowly in front of the man’s face. ‘What I was saying about family? We called you first because you were the one who reported her missing. We’re presuming there were no children…’

‘No children,’ Bristow said.

The words were then spoken a third time by his wife. She shook her head and talked softly, as if this were another, smaller tragedy. ‘Kath was never married, you see? She lived with a “friend” for many years.’ She looked at Porter, in case the understated inverted commas she’d put around the word ‘friend’ had not been obvious enough.

Porter had understood perfectly well. ‘Right, well, maybe we can get those details from you later, if you’d like us to inform this friend of hers.’

‘I don’t think we’ve got them, to tell you the truth.’

‘Kath kept herself to herself,’ the old man added. ‘She was very private about things.’ He picked at something on his lapel, remembering. ‘She’d come home once a year or so; or maybe we’d get the train down here for the weekend.’

‘It’s hard when you live so far away,’ Porter said.

‘Right enough. But still, there were things we didn’t really talk about, you know?’

‘Shush, don’t think about all that now, love.’

‘Bloody stupid, when you stop and think about it.’

‘Spent all her time at work getting involved in other people’s lives and kept her own very quiet, you see?’ Joan Bristow leaned close to her husband, trying hard to elicit something like a smile, concern for him bleeding through the powder and thick foundation.

They sat and watched a woman with an electric floor-polisher; listened to the vague buzz of a one-way phone conversation, and, incongruously, to gales of laughter coming from a room down the corridor. Porter opened her mouth, desperate to say something and disguise the noise, but Joan beat her to it.

‘Was it one of those nutters, then?’ she asked. There was a pained expression on her face, and pity in her voice. ‘One of them as gets released from somewhere when they’re still poorly. You read about that sort of thing all the time.’

‘It’s too early to say.’

‘Kath dealt with her fair share of headcases over the years. Could it have been one of them, d’you think?’

Genuinely, Porter had no idea. Whoever had murdered Kathleen Bristow and the others was certainly a headcase, as far as she was concerned, though others would determine later whether he was suffering from an ‘abnormality of mind’. She found the procedures for deciding such things bizarre to say the least. A solicitor had once tried to explain the rules for establishing mental competence by telling her that if a man threw a baby on to a fire believing it to be a log then he was insane and could not be criminally responsible. This, according to the law, would not be the case if he threw the baby on to the fire knowing it was a baby. Porter had found this preposterous, and had said so. To her mind, the man who knew the baby was a baby was more insane; was obviously as mad as a box of frogs. The solicitor had merely smiled, as though that was exactly what made the whole issue so complex… and so fascinating.

She remembered what the probation officer, Peter Lardner, had said about intent. If that were a grey area, then diminished responsibility came in a thousand different shades.

‘You’ve still got to ask why, though, haven’t you?’ Bristow said.

‘What’s the point, love? It’s bad luck, that’s all it is.’

The old man shook his head. His voice was suddenly thin, and falling away. ‘Whether he’s a nutter or no, you still want to know what was going on inside his head.’ He rubbed a hand across his chin, rasping against the silvery stubble. ‘What made him choose our Kathleen.’

Porter didn’t look at their faces when they saw the body, and she didn’t make speeches. She said no more than she had to. She told Francis Bristow that, as things stood, they were all wrestling with that question, but she would do her very best for them, and keep them informed.

She also made a promise to herself; the sort of promise the likes of Tom Thorne made, broke and lived with.

Getting Luke Mullen back remained her first priority, of course. When there was still a life to be saved, that was a given. But however the kidnap investigation turned out, she would do whatever she could to give the man sitting next to her a definitive answer. She would tell him exactly why his sister had died, and she would find that out from the man responsible.

Porter was just about to start making noises about needing to get on and making sure that someone would be along to take care of them when she felt the hand slip into hers. When she looked, Francis Bristow was staring straight ahead again, blinking away the tears.

She followed his gaze, and all three of them sat and looked at the woman with the floor-polisher for a while.

‘DC Holland?’

‘Speaking…’

‘DCI Roper at Special Enquiries. You left a message.’

Holland put down the sandwich, ‘That’s right,’ took a swig from a bottle of water to clear his mouth out. ‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, sir.’

‘I’ve only got five minutes.’

‘We just wanted to let you know that the body of Kathleen Bristow was discovered in the early hours of this morning.’

The pause might just have been the time it took Roper to recall the name. Holland couldn’t know for sure.

‘Poor woman,’ Roper said, finally. ‘Christ…’

‘She was murdered, sir.’

Another pause. This one definitely for effect. ‘Well, I hardly thought you’d be calling to let me know that she’d popped off peacefully in front of The Antiques Roadshow.’

‘Right.’

‘How was she killed?’

‘Someone broke in and suffocated her.’

‘Nice.’

‘It looks like she held on to a lot of records,’ Holland said. ‘Filing cabinets full of stuff from her old cases and what have you.’ Holland took another small bite of his sandwich while he was waiting for a response. He could hear classical music playing softly from another room.

‘So you think this is connected to your kidnap, do you? To Grant Freestone? To Sarah Hanley, maybe?’

‘We’re keeping an open mind at the moment.’

‘And you just called to keep me informed, did you?’

‘Sir…?’

With the music in the background, it was like being put on hold.

‘Not even going to tell me to make sure my doors and windows are locked?’

‘I would’ve presumed you’d do that anyway, sir,’ Holland said.

‘Present for you…’ Thorne dropped the plastic bag on to the table in front of Adrian Farrell.

‘Your twenty-four’s up in a little over ninety minutes,’ Wilson said.

Kitson glanced up at the clock. ‘At four thirty-eight.’

Farrell looked weary, suspicious. He reached forward and dragged the bag towards him as Thorne and Kitson took their seats.

‘As it happens, I’ve already spoken to my superintendent,’ Kitson said. ‘Assured him I’m carrying out my duties in regard to this case diligently and expeditiously…’

The solicitor made a winding gesture with his finger, urging her to get on with it.

‘Basically, I’ve got a six-hour extension.’ She smiled at Farrell. ‘He’s here until twenty to eleven, if I fancy it.’

Farrell’s face darkened as he pulled out the contents of the bag.

‘Don’t say we never do anything for you,’ Thorne said.

The boy pushed Thorne’s ‘present’ back across the table. ‘You’re hysterical.’

Thorne picked up one of the cheap, black plimsolls and examined it. Each had had a Nike-style tick drawn on the side in Tippex. ‘Suit yourself.’ He put the shoes back in the bag.

The interview room was one that had recently been upgraded to CD-ROM. Kitson unwrapped and loaded the fresh discs, made the speech and began the recording.

Thorne didn’t waste any more time. ‘How well do you know Luke Mullen?’ he asked.

Farrell appeared to be genuinely confused. ‘The kid who disappeared?’

‘You told officers that you barely knew him when they spoke to you at your school.’

‘So what are you asking me again for?’

‘Well, let’s just say that as you haven’t been entirely honest with us about other matters, we’re thinking that you may have been full of shit about this as well.’

Farrell was chewing gum. He held it between his top and bottom teeth, pushed at it with his tongue.

‘This is relevant to your murder enquiry, is it?’ Wilson looked at Kitson. ‘I certainly hope so.’

‘Perhaps you know him a little better than you told us you did,’ Thorne said.

Wilson began writing in his notebook. ‘I think it might be best to say nothing, Adrian.’

Farrell lifted a hand. He pushed a comb of stiff fingers through his hair and began tugging strands up into spikes. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘He was the year below me, so we never had much to do with each other. We weren’t in any teams together; not even in the same house. Maybe exchanged a word in the playground, but that’s about it.’

‘You never phoned him at home?’

‘No.’ He looked horrified, as if he’d been accused of something terminally uncool.

‘You might want to think about this, Adrian.’

It looked as though Farrell were doing exactly what Thorne had advised. He blinked and fidgeted, and though the expression stayed defiant, there was much less confidence in his voice when he spoke again. ‘Maybe I called him once or twice, yeah.’

‘Why would you do that?’

‘He was a clever kid, wasn’t he? Maybe I just needed a bit of help with some homework, or something.’

‘I thought you were a clever kid.’

‘It was just once or twice.’

Kitson took the printed phone logs from her bag, traced a finger down to the items marked with a highlighter, and read: ‘November 23rd, last year: 8.17 until 8.44 p.m; November 30th: 9.05 until 9.22. January 14th this year, February 12th. Then a call lasting nearly an hour on February the seventeenth…’

‘You must have needed a lot of help,’ Thorne said.

Farrell’s expression started to catch up with his voice. He leaned away from the table, reddening, the desperate smile looking ready to slide off his face at any moment. ‘This is bollocks,’ he said. He turned to Wilson. ‘I’m not saying anything else.’

‘It seems a very odd thing to lie about, that’s all.’

Farrell studied the tabletop.

Thorne glanced at Kitson and understood at once from her expression that this was as rattled as she’d ever seen Adrian Farrell.

‘Maybe we’ll come back to that,’ Thorne said. ‘We wouldn’t want Mr Wilson saying that we bullied you.’

Wilson just sat back and clicked the top of his expensive ballpoint.

‘Is there much bullying at your school?’ Thorne asked. He didn’t wait long for an answer. It was already clear he would be having a more-or-less one-sided conversation. ‘There’s always some, isn’t there? Can’t get rid of it completely, because one or two kids are never going to like themselves very much.

‘They reckon that’s why bullies do it, don’t they? Because of how they feel about themselves. Same for those who take it outside school, if you ask me. The ones who try and make themselves feel better by giving people a kicking on the street. The ones who attack complete strangers because they’ve been looked at the wrong way or imagine they’ve been “disrespected”; who maim, or cripple, or kill someone for no other reason than they’re black, or gay, or wearing the wrong kind of shoes. Then tell themselves they’re being honourable by refusing to grass anyone up when they get caught.’

‘Just tell us their names,’ Kitson said. ‘Tell us and we can stop all this pissing about.’

‘The thing is, I can even understand it, up to a point,’ Thorne said. ‘You can call these crimes “wicked’ or “evil” or whatever you want, but it usually comes down to plain ignorance in the end, and none of us is immune to that, right? There’s a scale, though, isn’t there?’ He traced a line along the tabletop with his finger. ‘I think I’m tolerant, of course I do. Most of us do. But every now and again stuff comes into my head I wouldn’t dream of saying out loud. I don’t know where it’s come from, how it got in there, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t put my hand up to it. I’d never do anything, and I think the people who perpetrate these crimes are shit, scum, whatever… but I know why it happens. I understand that they’re just more ignorant than I am.’

He paused for a few seconds. Watched the red numbers change on the digital clock above the door.

43… 44 … 45…

‘What happened to Amin Latif, though?’ Thorne shook his head. ‘That’s about something else. It’s got to be. I’m not even sure I want to understand why anyone could do that. The first bit’s not too hard to fathom: it’s the sort of thing I’ve just been talking about. It’s ignorance, and trying to make yourself feel better, plain and simple. Amin and his friend are standing at that bus stop and not looking away when you and your mates try to stare them down. Saying something maybe. So they get a kicking, right? Or at least Amin does, because his friend manages to get away, which leaves three against one. Good odds for hard men like you and your mates, right?’

Farrell was bent forward in his chair. He mumbled something. His hands were fists, hanging at his sides.

Kitson leaned in, her head low, trying to catch Farrell’s eye. ‘Just the names, Adrian. Get it over with.’

‘You’re not a virgin, are you?’ Another rhetorical question. Thorne cracked on immediately. ‘Christ, I presume you’re not; not at seventeen. You know what sex is supposed to be about, right? Love, in an ideal world, course it is. Lust, more often than not, if we’re being honest. And habit, and booze, and boredom now and again… But what happened to Amin Latif wasn’t any of those things, was it?’

36… 37 … 38…

‘Let’s imagine for a minute that you weren’t there that night, in the rain, at that bus stop. I’ll tell you what happened, what we know happened from Nabeel Khan’s statement and from the other evidence. I’ll tell you, and you tell me if you’ve got any idea at all what it was about. OK? You see, the job’s done, that’s the strange thing. The Paki bastard’s half-dead in the gutter, right, so why don’t the three of them just piss off? Maybe one or two of them are ready to go, but someone else is calling the shots and he’s got other ideas. He really wants to teach the cheeky fucker a lesson. So he drags him back on to the pavement and turns him over on to his belly. He undoes Amin Latif’s belt and pulls down his jeans. Are you following this OK?’

Farrell’s breathing was heavier, wetter…

‘Then he pulls down his own trousers, and pants, and by this time I’m guessing that his two mates have backed right off. They want nothing to do with any of this. Maybe they’re shouting at him to leave it, telling him he’s a fucking perv, but he doesn’t care by this point. He’s not thinking about anything else. He’s got carried away and he’s already getting his tiny little dick out… He’s already dropping down to his knees…’

‘You’re being stupid for no reason…’ Kitson said.

‘Trying to stick it into Amin Latif.’

‘If we pull in Damien Herbert and Michael Nelson, and it turns out to be them, they’re going to think it was down to you anyway.’

12… 13 … 14…

‘But the Paki bastard – which was how he was described during the initial attack – he puts up a fight. At this point, all he’s got are a couple of broken bones. At this point, the shitbag kneeling behind him can walk away and be looking at a lot less than life imprisonment. But he chooses not to. And Amin Latif makes his own choice: he struggles, and refuses to raise his arse up off the pavement; refuses to submit to this animal who’s trying to rape him, who’s trying to prove how much of a man he is. So the animal eventually gives up. He gets back to his feet and takes hold of himself. And, while his mates laugh, he masturbates. And even before he’s finished coming, he’s begun kicking his victim in the side and in the head, and he doesn’t stop until Amin Latif is completely still. Lying in the gutter. Covered in rain and blood and cum…’

When Farrell looked up suddenly, it was clear that he’d been crying for a while without making any sound. The neck of his sweatshirt was already darkened with tears. The sobs exploded from him as he began to curse and thrash in his chair like someone burning. He called them bitches and cunts, and pulled away violently when Wilson reached over and tried to put a hand on his arm.

Neither Kitson nor Thorne could be sure if the hatred was aimed solely at them; for what was happening, for the state they’d reduced him to. The tears that flew off his face as he jerked and spat out his insults certainly pointed to something aimed at least partly at himself, for what he’d done.

For what he was.

Kitson had to raise her voice to terminate the interview.

Farrell was still swearing, hoarse and red-faced, when they sealed up the discs and called the jailer into the room.

It was pleasant enough for people to be enjoying a late afternoon pint outside the Oak, or pottering in the tiny front gardens of the estate next door.

Thorne and Kitson made their way back towards the Peel Centre, in silence for the first couple of minutes. Thorne could see that Kitson was smarting at the continued failure to get the names she was after. He, too, was thinking about the extreme manner in which the interview had ended, but also about the boy’s even stranger reaction to being questioned about the calls to Luke Mullen.

‘Where does all that come from?’ Kitson asked. ‘What he did to Latif. What he tried to do.’

‘You thinking he might have been abused?’

‘I don’t know. You just look for something that makes sense, don’t you?’

‘What about the father?’

‘I didn’t exactly take to him, but I wouldn’t know beyond that.’

They crossed the road, taking out IDs as they approached the security barrier.

‘What you said in the interview, about stuff in your head.’ Kitson looked at him. ‘Were you just making that up?’

‘I suppose so, yeah, for the most part. But none of us are saints, are we?’ He showed his card and walked on. ‘If I see someone with a scar on his face, I think about where he might have got it, and I tell myself he’s probably aggressive, violent. I never see him as a victim. Is that really any different from a woman seeing a young black man coming towards her at night and worrying that he’s going to mug her?’

‘The job makes you see the worst in people,’ Kitson said.

‘It’s still a sort of prejudice though, right?’

They stopped for a few seconds before they walked into Becke House, watched a group of recruits in gym kit kicking a ball around on the sports field. All of them full of piss and vinegar. All up for it.

He caught Porter in her car, on her way back to the Bristow murder scene in Shepherd’s Bush.

‘Hang on, I’m not hands-free…’

Thorne could hear a siren. He guessed that she’d lowered the phone, knowing that to nick a DI for driving without due care and attention would make the average uniformed copper’s afternoon.

‘Right, I’m all yours again.’

He told her about the interview with Adrian Farrell, about the boy’s cagey response when he’d been confronted with the phone records. ‘It was cock and bull,’ Thorne said. ‘I just wish I had a fucking clue what any of it means.’

Porter said something, but the signal broke up and Thorne caught only fragments. He asked her to say it again.

‘Maybe it wasn’t Luke he was calling.’

‘We already looked at the parents-’

‘What if the racist thing runs in the family? Maybe Tony Mullen’s a closet BNP member and Farrell’s old man is calling him up to organise meetings or whatever.’

‘Kitson checked. They hardly know each other.’

‘He might have been calling the sister, of course: Juliet.’

Thorne sat a little straighter at his desk. They hadn’t considered that. ‘OK… but why would he bother lying about it? He’s been cocky as fuck about being accused of murder, even now he must know we’ve got him. Why react like he did in the bin? Why start making shit up, just to avoid us finding out he’s seeing Juliet Mullen?’

‘Because she’s fourteen,’ Porter said. ‘If he’s having sex with her, that’s exactly how he would react. It’s a machismo thing, about respect or whatever. If he gets sent down for the Latif murder, he goes down all guns blazing, doesn’t he? He keeps quiet, he’s a hero to his mates, to the other idiots who think the same way he does. Sleeping with an underage girl doesn’t exactly fit in with that image.’

There was a twisted logic that made as much sense as anything else in the case so far. Thorne told Porter that he’d talk to Juliet Mullen. Porter suggested that he do so in person, so he said that he’d try to get over to the Mullen place later on. Then he asked her what she was going to be doing, if they would see each other.

‘I’m not sure how long I’m going to be at Kathleen Bristow’s. I’m hoping SOCO will be about done, and I want to have a good go at those filing cabinets. Maybe what’s in there can give us a clue about what might have been taken.’

‘How did it go with the brother and his wife?’

It took no more than the sigh and the traffic noise, a second or two of the pause before she began to answer, for Thorne to realise that he’d asked cleverer questions.

TWENTY-ONE

A makeshift stage had been set up in his old man’s front room.

Sitting on the solitary chair, Thorne could hear the voices from behind the hastily rigged-up curtain, as his father and his father’s friend Victor got themselves ready. Thorne glanced over at his mum’s old clock on the mantelpiece. He needed to get back to work and didn’t really have time for this.

‘Are you going to be much longer?’

His father yelled back from behind the curtain, ‘Keep your fucking wig on!’

Thorne froze as he saw the smoke curling underneath the thick, black material. He got up and ran for the curtain, but found himself unable to reach it. He clawed at fresh air and shouted to his father on the other side, screaming at him to get out.

‘Relax,’ his father said. ‘Sit down. We’ll be ready in a minute.’

‘There’s smoke…’

‘No, there fucking isn’t.’

‘Stop swearing.’

‘I can’t fucking help it.’

The curtain rose and Thorne fell back in his chair as his father and Victor stepped forward through waist-high dry ice.

Jim Thorne grinned and winked. ‘Told you it wasn’t smoke, you big cock!’

The show itself wasn’t bad.

Victor walked across to a piano and started to play. Thorne’s father began to sing, but the cheesy rendition of ‘Memories’ fell apart when he forgot the words almost straight away, mugging furiously as he gave it up as a waste of time. Then they went into the patter…

‘Do you know they’ve spent more money on developing Viagra than they have on research into Alzheimer’s?’

‘That’s terrible,’ Victor said.

‘You’re telling me. I’m walking around with a permanent stiffy and I can’t remember what I’m supposed to do with it!’

Then more of the same. All the usual jokes, reeled off one after the other, with Victor playing straight man and cheerily feeding the set-ups to his old friend. Stuff from Thorne’s father about how Alzheimer’s wasn’t all bad: how at least he never had to watch repeats on TV, and how he could hide his own Easter eggs, and how he was always meeting new friends.

‘As long as you don’t forget your old ones,’ Victor said.

‘Of course not.’ Beat. Look. ‘Who are you again?’

Thorne enjoyed every minute of it, thrilled to see his father so happy. He forgot about the time and about the work he should be doing as those expressions of loss and confusion he had always dreaded seeing were transformed into something comical, as his father stared out at him in mock-bewilderment, his eyes bright.

Thorne laughed, and applauded another badly timed gag. The noise of his clapping faded on cue as his father turned to Victor and stage-whispered from the side of his mouth: ‘I’m killing ’em.’

‘You’re on fire, Jim.’

‘Too bloody true I am!’

Thorne whistled as the old man turned, revealing the elaborate and colourful flame design that had been embroidered on to the back of his jacket. He stamped his feet as Jim Thorne began to dance, as he moved his hips and rolled his shoulders, so the flames appeared to be climbing slowly up his back.

‘Dad…’

His father turned to look at him. ‘Don’t panic, Son. It’s not what it looks like.’

But, suddenly, Thorne knew that the flames were real; that they were burning through his father’s polyester suit and eating away at the flesh beneath.

He could smell exactly how real it was.

He reached across to slam down the large red button by the side of his chair and a bell began to ring; deafeningly loud, but fading, just as his applause had done, each time his father said something.

‘That is so rude.’

‘What is?’ Victor asked.

‘Fancy not turning off your mobile phone during a show!’

Thorne’s hands were over his ears. He couldn’t hear himself screaming at his father to shut up and get out, or begging Victor for help.

‘Bloody funny-sounding ice-cream van,’ Jim Thorne said.

‘It’s a fire alarm, you stupid old bastard.’

‘Don’t jump to conclusions.’

‘We need to leave now. It’s a fire alarm.’

His father’s smile was visible in flashes through the crown of flames. The mischief in his voice was clearly audible above the spatter, and the crackle of burning hair.

‘Is it, Tom? Are you sure?’

Thorne lifted his head and reached for the phone, wiped away the string of drool that hung between his cheek and the desktop.

‘Were you asleep?’

‘No…’

‘You’re such a shit liar,’ Hendricks said. He recognised something in Thorne’s tone, or in the silence. ‘Same dream?’

Thorne sat up straight, then rose slowly to his feet. ‘More or less,’ he said. He groaned, rolling his head around. His back was complaining and he felt as if someone had been standing on his neck.

‘I wish I had time to take naps,’ Hendricks said.

‘It’s been a very long day.’

‘For you and me both, mate.’

‘Yeah, sorry. I almost forgot you were there this morning.’

‘Trust me, I’d rather not have been. There’s times I wish I’d never gone into medicine. When I think I should have listened to my parents and studied hard to be a ballerina, like they wanted.’

Spoken in Hendricks’ flat, Mancunian accent, such comments rarely failed to improve Thorne’s mood. The dream was already fading, though the smell was still strong enough…

‘No surprises on the PM?’

‘None at all in terms of cause of death. I found a large tumour in Kathleen Bristow’s stomach, though. I’ve no idea if she even knew about it.’

The woman was dead, so there was no real reason for Thorne to find this as depressing as he did.

‘What time d’you think you might be getting away?’ Hendricks asked.

Thorne looked at his watch. It was nearly half past seven. He’d slept for around half an hour, but it had been light outside when he’d closed his eyes and now it was starting to get dark. He’d check with Brigstocke, but bearing in mind he’d racked up back-to-back eighteen-hour shifts, he didn’t think there’d be much objection to him heading off. ‘I’ve got to shoot up to Arkley, but that shouldn’t take too long. Home by nine-thirty, ten o’clock, I would have thought.’

‘Fancy a late one in the Prince? Couple of games of pool?’

Thorne still didn’t know if he’d be seeing Porter later, but he reckoned Hendricks wouldn’t mind being stood up if it came to it. ‘Yeah, why not? I won’t sleep much anyway…’

‘As long as you don’t use the bad back as an excuse when I thrash you. Fiver a frame?’

The door opened, and Yvonne Kitson marched across to her desk with a face that said she was an inch from chucking it all in. She dropped her bag, switched on the light, then walked over and leaned against the wall. She looked like she wanted to talk; like she wanted Thorne to know about it.

‘I’d better go, Phil. I’ll call when I’m nearly home.’

‘Right. See you later.’

‘Everything OK?’

‘Yeah, I’m great,’ Hendricks said.

As a liar, he was no better than Thorne.

‘You’re getting far too worked up about this whole case, because you think you fucked it up last time,’ Thorne said as he replaced the receiver.

‘Wrong,’ Kitson said.

‘Which bit?’

‘I know I fucked it up last time.’

Kitson was wired; pacing the small office as though she couldn’t decide whether she’d prefer a shoulder to cry on or a face to punch.

‘You’ll get the other two,’ Thorne said. ‘You will. If Farrell won’t cough, you’ll just have to do it the hard way, that’s all.’

She stopped, looked hard at him, as though he hadn’t heard a word. ‘I really want these two, Tom. I know Farrell killed him, but the others just stood there and watched him do it. The DPS are telling me they can stick all three of the fuckers in the dock for murder. It might get knocked down to GBH in court, but we can have a bloody good try.’

‘So bring in Farrell’s mates, Nelson and Herbert, like you told him you would. It’s probably them anyway.’

‘I’ve had another idea,’ Kitson said.

‘If it’s early retirement, I might join you.’

‘I fancy stopping the clock, bailing Farrell to return tomorrow. We could get some surveillance organised and see if he gets in touch with anybody. He just might contact the other two to let them know he hasn’t said anything.’

Thorne thought it sounded like a reasonable enough idea and told her so. Then he repeated himself, as he wasn’t sure she’d believed him the first time. ‘You’ve done a good job on this, Yvonne.’

‘I went round to see Amin Latif’s parents,’ she said, ‘to tell them about Farrell.’

‘I bet that felt good.’

‘I didn’t tell them how we found him.’ Shame and resignation passed across her face in quick succession. ‘That we should have found him six months ago. I know it’ll come out and we’ll have to deal with it then, but sitting there with Mrs Latif in her living room, I didn’t want to spoil that moment. For them, I mean. Really, for them.’

Thorne just nodded, and straightened one or two things on his desk.

‘I’d better go and talk to Brigstocke about setting up the surveillance.’ She started towards the door. ‘Getting the bail paperwork together…’

After Kitson had gone, Thorne watched as rain fell through the darkness. He was grateful for a minute or two alone; for the chance to let what was left of his father’s performance roll around in his head for a while.

Don’t panic, Son. It’s not what it looks like.

Smoke that wasn’t smoke, and a fire alarm that was really a telephone.

Don’t jump to conclusions.

He walked to the doorway of his office, from where he could see Kitson talking to Karim and Stone in the Major Incident Room. As he watched, an idea sparked and flared, took hold as quickly as flames on polyester.

His father’s face was smothered in red and gold as Thorne stepped out into the corridor.

‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say how she died, sir.’

‘Don’t you think that’s a bit ridiculous?’ Lardner asked. ‘You call to tell me a woman’s been murdered, but then I have to sit here wondering if she was shot, stabbed or drowned in the bath.’

‘It’s probably a bit ridiculous, yeah,’ Holland said. ‘But that is the procedure, so…’

‘She was a nice enough woman, as far as I can remember. Fond of sticking her nose in a bit, but I suppose that went with her job. Like journalists drinking… or coppers and probation officers being cynical.’

Holland sipped his tea and grunted.

‘Right, well, not a lot else to say, I suppose.’

‘We were just concerned that you should know about Mrs Bristow’s death.’

‘Should I be?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Concerned. Are we being targeted, do you think?’ Lardner barked a humourless laugh. ‘Perhaps Grant Freestone’s come back out of hiding and is going to slaughter us all one by one.’

‘I don’t think you need to be concerned about that…’

With lunch having been just as piss-poor as Kitson had promised it would be, Wilson had scuttled away to dinner as soon as he was informed that Farrell was being bailed, having agreed to meet his client back at the station the following day.

Kitson stood with Farrell in front of the platform as the custody skipper took him through the release procedure. The sergeant was a wily old sod, and he’d looked sideways at Kitson when she’d presented herself and Farrell, being well aware that she’d been ready to charge the boy a few hours earlier. He knew she was up to something, but knew enough to keep it to himself.

After first checking the next day’s ‘Bailed to Return’ schedule, Farrell was informed that bail had been authorised conditional upon his return at four o’clock the next afternoon. That he was being released into the custody of his parents.

Farrell seemed to have recovered himself, to have put what happened in the interview room behind him. He just nodded each time he was asked if he understood what was being said to him. Then he asked again when they were going to return his three-figure Nikes.

‘You should shut your mouth before we change our minds,’ the custody sergeant said.

Farrell signed for the return of the property that was handed back to him. He made a great deal of slipping on his designer watch and checking there was nothing missing from his wallet. Then he signed to confirm that he’d been shown his custody record and that it was complete and accurate. He signed the release form and the declaration that he fully intended to return at the specified time.

‘I presume you’ll be keeping an eye on me,’ Farrell said.

Kitson said nothing, just glanced up from her paperwork.

‘You must think I’m stupid.’

‘I know you’re not,’ Kitson said.

‘You know nothing about me.’ Farrell turned his face from hers, concentrated on finishing the procedure.

‘These copies are for you to keep.’

Farrell took a sheaf of papers from the custody sergeant.

‘Shall we phone your mum and dad? Get them to come and fetch you?’

Farrell looked away and shook his head, snorted like it was a ridiculous idea.

‘Right, I’ll call you a cab. Be a couple of minutes. If you haven’t got enough cash, they can take it from your parents at the other end. Will that be a problem?’

‘I think they’ll manage…’

As the sergeant picked up the phone, Kitson thanked him for his help. He nodded, a look on his face like he hoped she knew what she was doing. Kitson escorted Farrell out of the custody suite, and led him through the station towards the main entrance.

She briefed the officer on the front desk before she left Farrell to wait for his taxi. She swiped her pass and yanked open the door to go back in. Then she turned back to Farrell. ‘You’re sure there isn’t anything you’d like to tell me before you leave?’

Farrell’s smile was still engaging enough, but his eyes were slits. ‘Nothing you’d want to hear,’ he said.

When Kitson had gone, Farrell took a step towards the automatic doors, which opened as he approached. The desk officer suggested that he should wait inside. Pointed out that it was pissing down. Told him he could suit his fucking self when Farrell said he’d rather get wet.

Outside, Farrell stood beneath the overhang and stared out at the road.

It hadn’t been much more than a day, but it felt like a lot longer: like ten years’ worth of change, of major fucking upheaval. And he knew that it hadn’t really started yet.

His mind and his heart were racing, but he knew he needed to stay calm, that he should breeze back through the door as though nothing had happened. Despite the way he’d played it with the twat on the custody desk, he wanted to get home and see his mum and dad more than anything. He wanted to be back where it was warm and safe, and where he knew that, whatever happened, there was only ever one side they were going to be on.

He stared through the rain. Still able to recall the taste of it as he and the others had walked towards that bus stop six months before. It had been a little colder than this, maybe, but otherwise exactly the same sort of night…

A dark Cavalier drew up and a thickset Asian man climbed out, leaving the engine running.

‘Minicab?’ Farrell shouted.

The man turned back towards the car.

Adrian Farrell pulled up his hood and jogged after him.

TWENTY-TWO

‘Sunday’s a pretty busy day round here,’ Neil Warren said. ‘It’s changeover day, so it’s always a bit bloody frantic if there are new tenants coming in or anyone going out. Plus I’ve got family business and church stuff, and I organise a small service here in the house for anyone who’s interested…’

‘It’s really not a problem,’ Holland said. There was a block of multicoloured Post-its on his desk. He scratched a tick next to Neil Warren’s name.

‘I just wanted to explain why I hadn’t returned your call sooner.’

‘I understand.’

‘Now, of course, I feel fucking dreadful.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Holland said.

‘You meet people, they drift into your orbit, and then… life moves on, you know? You go in different directions or whatever, and most of the time you never give them another thought. Kathleen Bristow hadn’t crossed my mind in five years until you came round here talking about Grant Freestone, and now she’s dead. And I think I should probably feel more upset than I do…’

‘Like you said, you hadn’t thought about her in a long time.’

‘I’ll ask people here to remember her in their prayers.’

Holland looked at his watch: it was five past nine. Once this was done with, he’d see about getting away. Chloe would be in bed, but it would be good to have an hour or so with Sophie before one or both of them flaked out.

‘I take it you don’t think it’s a coincidence,’ Warren said.

‘Sir?’

‘That you start asking people about what happened back then, about Freestone and all that, and someone on the panel gets killed.’

‘I think it’s probably unlikely.’

‘Have you spoken to the others?’

‘Most of them, yes.’

Warren said nothing for ten or fifteen seconds. When Holland heard the click of a lighter, he guessed that Warren had been rolling a cigarette. There was a long exhalation, another pause. Then Warren said, ‘Did she suffer very much?’

Holland would normally have said something pat, something reassuring, at this point. Beyond knowing that Warren was plain-speaking himself, that he didn’t seem enamoured of bullshit, Holland couldn’t really say where his answer came from.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think she probably did.’

It was only twenty minutes from Hendon to Arkley. Half a dozen Gram and Emmylou tracks had done wonders for Thorne’s mood, but all their sterling work was undone with one glance at Tony Mullen’s face.

After their last encounter, Thorne hadn’t been anticipating the warmest of welcomes, but there was more to this than a predictable antipathy. There was resignation in the man’s expression, and in his posture as he stood aside to let Thorne in without a word. Tony Mullen looked like a man who was no longer expecting good news.

As a parent, there would always be hope until there was a body to bury, but as an ex-police officer, Thorne knew that Mullen would be painfully aware of how the timescales worked. How quickly realistic chances became slim ones. How quickly they faded away to nothing.

It was now nine days since Luke had first gone missing; almost five since the video had been sent; seventy-two hours since Luke had been taken a second time, without word of any kind from whoever was holding him.

Thorne could still see rage in Mullen’s eyes, but there was next to no fight left in him.

‘Whatever you want, I hope it’s quick,’ Mullen said. ‘We’re all tired.’

‘Actually, I’ve come to have a word with Juliet.’

‘Why?’

Thorne took a second and decided it couldn’t hurt; that it might even build a bridge or two. ‘We’ve been talking to a boy from Butler’s Hall about a completely different case. It’s almost certainly unconnected with this one. With Luke…’

‘Almost certainly?’

‘We think he’s lying about knowing Luke, for some reason. We know he phoned here on several occasions and we want to make doubly sure it was Luke he was calling. I just came to check that he wasn’t calling your daughter. I don’t think I’ll be more than ten minutes.’

‘What’s this boy’s name?’

Thorne took a little longer this time. ‘Farrell.’

There was no obvious reaction, but Thorne wondered if he’d seen a flicker of something before Mullen turned his head, looked away and spoke to his wife.

Thorne hadn’t noticed Maggie Mullen. She was sitting ten or so feet above them at the top of the stairs, on a small landing before further flights curved up to the second and third floors. She was wearing dark tracksuit bottoms and a brown sweater. Her hair was tied back, much of it the same grey as her face, and as the cigarette ash that Thorne presumed filled the saucer between her feet.

‘You’d better give Jules a call,’ Mullen said.

His wife stared, as though she hadn’t heard him, then glanced at Thorne. He smiled and nodded. Both gestures were small and both felt slightly patronising even as he made them; as though he were reassuring someone very old or very sick.

‘Has she done something wrong?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ Thorne said. ‘It’ll just be a couple of questions.’

Mullen stepped past Thorne, leaned against the banister at the foot of the stairs. ‘Just give her a shout, will you, love?’

Maggie Mullen picked up the saucer and got to her feet. She brushed a few stray ashes from her lap, turned and walked up and out of sight towards Juliet’s room. After half a minute, Thorne heard the faintest of knocks, then a muffled exchange, one voice raised above the other. He heard a door shut and the tread of four feet moving down the stairs.

As he waited in the hall, Thorne studied the family photographs on a table by the front door, then looked at the wallpaper instead when he became uncomfortable. Next to him, he heard Mullen’s head bump gently against the wall as he let his head drop back; heard him say, ‘fuck’ quietly, to no one in particular.

Farrell presumed that the cab firm had been given the address by the custody sergeant when the car had been booked. The driver certainly seemed to know where he was going. The miserable bastard said nothing as they drove, but that suited Farrell well enough. He didn’t want to chat. He wanted to close his eyes and gather his thoughts.

He leaned his head against the window and listened to the rain slapping on the roof and to the squeak of the wipers. It stank of oil in the back, and one of those pine air-fresheners shaped like a tree. Piece of shit probably didn’t even have insurance; the Asians always tried to avoid paying anything if they thought they could get away with it. It was like the joke a few of them had about the Asian kids at school. They used to say that their dads were the ones who owned chains of newsagents’, and posh curry houses, but still went to the headmaster’s office to try and haggle over the fees…

When the car pulled over, Farrell thought that he must have nodded off and slept through most of the journey. It seemed like only five minutes since they’d driven away from the station.

A door opened on either side of him. When they’d closed again, he was sitting between two Asian men.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ But even as he was asking the question, the answer was settling in his stomach and starting to boil.

They didn’t speak to him.

They didn’t look at him, or at each other.

The driver flicked his indicator up and eased slowly into the stream of traffic. He turned on the radio, tuned it into a bhangra station. Moved ahead nice and steadily.

Farrell was still pretty certain that the police had bailed him just so they could watch him for a while; see if he got in touch with either of the others. Wedged tight between the men on either side, he wasn’t able to turn round fully, but he craned his neck as much as he could, desperately hoping that he might be proved right and see a panda behind them. But all he saw was rain, anonymous headlights, and, when he turned round again, the eyes of the driver in the rear-view mirror. They were cold and flat, and yellowed for a second as the Cavalier passed below a street light.

The digital clock on the chrome range read 21.14. Juliet Mullen sat perched on the black, granite worktop with a can of Diet Coke. Her Converse Allstars bounced gently against the cupboard beneath.

‘He’s the twatty sixth-former with the spiky hair, right?’

‘That’s a good description,’ Thorne said.

‘Fancies himself.’

‘Not a friend of yours, then?’

‘No…’

Thorne sat at the kitchen table. Fresh coffee had been made and he’d helped himself. ‘He’s a good-looking boy, though, to be serious. Wouldn’t you say? I bet some of the girls in your year like him, don’t they?’

‘Maybe some of the sad ones.’

‘But not you?’

She threw him a look drenched in pity. Thorne was convinced. He knew precisely the reaction he’d get were he to ask Juliet Mullen if she’d ever spoken to Adrian Farrell on the phone. ‘What about your brother?’

‘What about him?’

‘Is he a friend of Farrell?’

She took a swig from her can, swallowed the belch. ‘I don’t know all his friends – not that he’s got too many, to be honest – but I seriously doubt it.’

‘Why?’

‘Like I said, Farrell’s a wanker. He’s a poser and Luke’s really good at seeing through all that shit. If someone like Farrell was being matey with Luke, it would probably just be so he could take the piss. Or because he wanted something.’

‘Any idea what that might be?’

‘Not a clue. Help with homework, maybe?’

Thorne nodded. It was the first thing she’d thought of, the most obvious explanation. It was the first thing Farrell himself had thought of, too, when he’d been groping for a lie to explain the phone calls.

Juliet squashed the empty can, dropped down from the worktop and opened a cupboard where there was a recycling bin. ‘Is this to do with what’s happened to Luke?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure…’

‘Do you think Luke’s still alive?’

Thorne looked up at the girl. Her image was designed to project a generalised angst and tension, frustration and despair at nothing in particular. In that moment, though, brightly lit and brutal, there was only a pudgy-faced child whose breathing was suddenly ragged above the low hum of the fridge. Thorne could see beyond the dark make-up and the bitten nails to the consuming pain beneath.

And he could see that lying would not ease it.

‘I’m not sure about that, either.’

Juliet nodded, like she appreciated the honesty. ‘I am,’ she said.

TWENTY-THREE

‘Amin Latif was my nephew,’ the driver said. He nodded towards the men in the back seat. ‘And these are my sons: Amin’s cousins.’

Finally the men on either side of Farrell looked at him. One had a goatee and wore a leather jacket. The other was clean-shaven, with small, round glasses and hair that flopped down across his forehead. Neither of them looked like hard men, Farrell thought. But they both looked hard enough, and intense, like they had something burning in their bellies, too.

‘You look like you’re going to shit yourself,’ the one with the goatee said.

Farrell had spent the ten minutes since they’d climbed in next to him imagining the worst. He’d pictured the car pulling off the road, driving on to some deserted industrial estate. He knew for certain that the men would be carrying knives.

‘How does it feel?’ the one with the glasses asked.

In fact, the driver had steered the Cavalier into the large car park of an entertainment complex. Farrell thought he recognised the place; that maybe he’d been bowling here one night or gone to the pictures. The car had eventually stopped in a far corner behind a Pizza Hut, away from any other vehicles. Out of the light.

‘I could have such a good time using a blade on you.’ The man with the glasses was inches from Farrell’s face. Farrell could smell the chewing gum on his breath. ‘Not quick, either. There are halal butchers in our family. You understand what that is?’

‘He knows how to bleed an animal properly.’

‘And you still wouldn’t have paid for what you did to Amin… nowhere near. For what you did before you killed him.’

Farrell heard himself say, ‘please’. Felt the heat that was rising inside him spread out and bubble across every inch of his skin.

The driver, a big man, heaved himself further round in his seat. ‘OK, let’s calm down. Nobody’s using knives on anyone.’ He pointed a finger at Farrell. ‘You’re going to prison, don’t be in any doubt about that. That’s how you’re going to pay for Amin. With years and years of stale air, and shitting where you eat. Of worrying what might happen every time an Asian face stares at you in the canteen or across the exercise yard. You clear about that?’

Farrell nodded. Ahead of him, through the rain-streaked windscreen, he could see a small crowd of people two hundred yards away, milling around outside the cinema.

‘But there is a choice you have to make: you can go to prison, or you can go to prison after you’ve had the shit kicked out of you.’ He looked to the men on either side of Farrell, then back to the teenager. ‘Because I will let them beat you. In fact, I will probably help them beat you. So there you go… It’s not really much of a choice, if you ask me.’

Hearing the tremor in his voice as he started to speak only made it worse for Farrell. The fear was growing fat inside him, feeding on itself. ‘What do you want?’

‘There were others with you,’ the driver said. ‘Two others, the night you killed my nephew. They could have stopped you but they chose to stand by and watch. The police will probably catch them eventually, but even if they do, those two bastards won’t get what they deserve. If they get clever lawyers, maybe even clever Asian lawyers, to go down well with the jury, they won’t be sent to prison for murder. They may get a few years, but it’s not enough.’

‘They’re as guilty as you are,’ the man with the glasses said.

‘Fucking worse than you, man.’

The driver waved his hand until there was quiet. ‘We want to see them before they’re arrested, that’s all. If the law won’t deal with them properly, then we’ll sort things out ourselves. So, obviously, we need to know who they are.’ He stared at Farrell, brought a thumb to his mouth and chewed at a nail. ‘You can say nothing, that’s up to you, but why the hell would you want to take a beating for them? You get prison and a good kicking, and what do they get? That seems stupid to me. What thanks do you get for protecting these fuckers?’

‘If you’re stupid, whatever happens to you tonight can happen again, many times, once you’re in prison.’ The man with the floppy hair took off his glasses. He untucked his T-shirt and wiped the lenses. ‘We can get to you in there. If we want you hurt, we can make it happen, any time we like.’

‘Tell us their names,’ the driver said, ‘we drop you off near a police station and that’s it.’

Farrell wanted to be sick. And to shit, and to cry. If he told them what they wanted, how did he know that they wouldn’t hurt him anyway? He knew that if he asked the question, the beating would probably begin.

‘Two names. Say them quickly and it’s finished.’

Farrell closed his eyes and shook his head. For a wild, unthinking second or two he wanted them to hurt him. He wanted it over and done with, and being beaten seemed better than waiting.

Than not knowing…

‘I won’t allow any weapons,’ the driver said. ‘And it will be over quickly enough. But if you make the wrong choice, and it comes down to it, you need to understand that violence is never precise. It’s hard to keep things… reined in. You must know better than anyone what damage can be done with a kick or two, right?’

‘Amin tried to protect his head and it didn’t help.’

‘And there was only one person doing the kicking.’

‘Swings and roundabouts, though.’ The driver stuck the key back in the ignition, turned it some of the way. ‘If things get out of hand, I mean. If you end up damaged in some way and in a unit that’s designed for prisoners with special needs, it’ll probably be harder for us to get to you later on.’

‘Tell us their names. Last chance.’

Farrell’s mouth felt dead and scorched inside. He prised open his lips and panted, gulped and choked as he tried to dry swallow.

‘Silly,’ the driver said. ‘Very silly.’ He swung himself around again and started the car.

Farrell screamed over the radio and, once the music had been turned down, he started to gabble, breathless, in a whisper that struggled not to become a sob. He said the names over and over until they ran into one another and became meaningless; babbling until he felt hands on his face, closing his mouth, and voices telling him to shush.

Telling him that he was still scum, still a prick and still a murderer. But at least he was not a completely stupid one.

Porter knew that she should knock it on the head. There was little point in ploughing on when she was so tired that she might well be overlooking stuff anyway. But she really wanted to get it done.

There were hundreds of files, each containing sometimes dozens of reports and assessments. There was clearly no need to read all of them, or even the majority, but it had quickly become apparent that even skimming through Kathleen Bristow’s records wasn’t going to be a five-minute job.

Client files had been organised alphabetically, and while searching under ‘F’ for Freestone, Porter had found herself reading case notes that she knew were of no real interest. She supposed that even though these were ex-clients of a dead woman, there were still issues of confidentiality. But that didn’t stop her. She was fascinated, and, on occasion, appalled. Francis Bristow had been right when he’d said that his sister had worked with more than a few ‘headcases’.

The documents relating to Grant Freestone put a little unpleasant meat on the bones of what she knew already, but there was nothing that seemed significant. There were transcripts of interviews conducted in prison, and statements from a number of healthcare professionals who’d treated him during his sentence, but there was nothing in the file relating to the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements that came into force after he was released.

Porter was alone in the house. She’d brought a radio upstairs from the kitchen and tuned it to Magic FM. When the songs had become a little too soporific, she’d retuned it to Radio 1, nodding her head in time to the music as she’d hauled out batch after batch of brown and green suspension files.

She hummed along with a dance track she recognised and wondered if Thorne had managed to get away yet. Earlier, on the phone, when he’d asked her what she would be doing, it had sounded like more than just a casual work enquiry, but she’d decided not to push it. She sensed he wasn’t completely relaxed about what had nearly happened, but in that respect he was probably just an average bloke: happy enough to get into her pants but not very comfortable talking about it, or, God forbid, what might happen afterwards.

Porter finally found the MAPPA stuff in the section of files that was organised by year. There were half a dozen well-stuffed folders relating to Grant Freestone’s 2001 panel. She squatted down and sorted them into piles: ‘Risk Management’; ‘Domestic Arrangements’; ‘Community Sex-Offender Treatment Programme’; ‘Drugs & Alcohol’. She picked up the folder marked ‘Minutes’ and took out a sheaf of papers held together with a bulldog clip. Kathleen Bristow had been as meticulous as always, and the documents, most of which were handwritten, had been filed in strict chronological order. Porter flicked through to the last sheet: the minutes of the meeting that had taken place on 29 March 2001.

She recognised the names under ‘In Attendance’. There were none listed under ‘Apologies for Absence’…

Porter stared at the date.

Sarah Hanley had been killed on 7 April, nine days after the meeting. The panel had met weekly until this point and there was no record in these minutes of the decision to tell Hanley about Freestone’s past; the decision that was widely regarded as the reason she had ended up dead. Porter went through the sheets again, sensing that there should have been one more, checking that she hadn’t missed it.

Of course, after what had happened, Kathleen Bristow might have decided that the final meeting was one for which she wanted no record.

It might also have been what her killer had been after.

Porter made a mental note to check with Roper, Lardner and the others, to confirm that a meeting had taken place on 5 April, two days before Sarah Hanley’s death.

Energised suddenly, but still as knackered as she’d felt in a long time, Porter sat back against a filing cabinet. She reached for the folder marked ‘Drugs & Alcohol’, thinking that either would be more than welcome.

Farrell felt a jolt of something like hope when the car drew close to Colindale station. He’d held his breath for most of the journey back, but suddenly started to believe that his ordeal would soon be over.

The place he’d been so happy to walk out of an hour or so before now seemed like a sanctuary.

But the driver slowed, crept past the front entrance, then took a sharp left.

‘Please,’ Farrell said. ‘Here is OK.’

The driver ignored him, moving along the side of the station and stopping at a security barrier. He wound down the window, leaned out and punched at some buttons.

‘I don’t understand…’

The barrier started to rise.

Farrell finally thought he saw what was happening. Anger spread and hardened, cracked into a series of low curses, which grew harsher as the Cavalier turned into the backyard and he saw the officers waiting.

Saw Kitson exchanging nods with the driver as they drew to a halt.

Samir Karim slammed the car door and pulled on his jacket. He let out a long, slow breath as he walked towards Kitson. She put a hand on his arm and left it there as they exchanged a few words; watching as the two young men in the back seat moved away from the car, and uniformed officers leaned in to drag out Adrian Farrell.

Farrell struggled and swore as the handcuffs were put on, his body straining towards where Kitson and Karim were huddled, twenty feet away, near the back entrance. ‘You told me you were a cab driver, you fucker. You told me.’

Karim turned, equally angry, but marshalling it. ‘That’s bollocks. I said nothing. You took one look at me and you presumed I was your driver.’

‘Nobody made you get into the car,’ Kitson said. ‘You jumped to conclusions.’

Just like Thorne had said he would.

‘They threatened me.’ Farrell looked from face to face, repeated the accusation, making sure every copper within earshot was under no misconception. ‘They fucking threatened me.’

Backs were still being patted, hands shaken, as Kitson walked across to the prisoner and stood, waiting for him to stop shouting. After a few moments she gave up and got on with it, spoke the words she had no real need to think about.

Charged Adrian Farrell with the murder of Amin Latif.

As she made the speech, she thought about how much persuasion Thorne had needed to employ on her. He’d reminded her about her ‘acquisition’ of Farrell’s DNA; pointed out that, as she’d already taken several steps in an unorthodox direction, it couldn’t really hurt to take a few more. ‘Welcome to the slippery slope,’ he’d said.

‘… but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on…’

She knew that there would be fallout: questions raised, evidence discounted. Thorne had mentioned Farrell’s solicitor and Trevor Jesmond. He’d offered to open a book on which of them would be the more apoplectic.

But she didn’t care.

She looked at Farrell and she knew she’d got him, that, whatever happened, there was more than enough to put him and both his friends away. She pictured the face of Amin Latif’s mother, and decided that she could live with a slap on the wrist.

She followed a step or two behind as officers escorted Farrell through the cage. When she entered the custody suite she watched as they led him towards the skipper, walking slowly, deliberately slowly, past Samir Karim and his ‘sons’ – the two Asian DCs Kitson had ‘borrowed’ from CID.

Farrell glared, and got it back in spades.

The DC with the goatee sucked his teeth. ‘And they reckon you don’t see white dog-shit any more…’

Thorne was being shown to the door by Juliet Mullen when his phone rang. She walked back towards the kitchen once he’d answered; when he turned away and lowered his voice.

‘Dave?’

‘Where are you?’ Holland asked.

‘I’m at the Mullens’.’

‘Jesus-’

‘How did it go with Farrell?’

Holland sounded flustered, thrown, spluttered an answer: ‘Kitson got the names. Sir, this is important.’

Thorne listened. Holland didn’t call him ‘sir’ very often.

‘I thought I was going mad,’ Holland said. ‘Thought I was just overtired, that I’d looked at the wrong list or something.’ He explained that he’d finally been able to track down the missing member of the MAPPA panel; that the people living at Margaret Stringer’s old address had finally got back to him. They’d been away, but had dug out a phone number they’d been left when they’d bought the place five years before. ‘When I called, I just presumed I’d got confused and dialled the wrong number…’

‘What’s the matter, Dave?’

‘How long have you been at Tony Mullen’s place?’

‘I don’t know… half an hour or so.’

‘You must have heard the phone go, then,’ Holland said. ‘A couple of times in the last fifteen minutes?’

Thorne had heard it, when he was with Juliet in the kitchen. Both times the call had been answered from the sitting room next door.

‘First time, when I realised who I was talking to, I didn’t know what to say. I just talked some shit about a courtesy call. Second time, when I rang again to check, I just hung up.’

‘OK.’ Thorne was only half listening now; trying to put it together.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’

Thorne had no idea, but he was in the right place to find out. He had already worked out that a lot of women worked under their maiden names. And he knew what Margaret shortened to…

When he’d hung up, Thorne went back to the kitchen and told Juliet Mullen to go back to her room. Then he walked into the sitting room and sat down without being invited.

Maggie Mullen put down the book she was reading and her husband, somewhat reluctantly, turned off the television.

‘Have you finished?’

‘I haven’t even started,’ Thorne said.

TWENTY-FOUR

‘Did it not occur to you for one minute that this was going to come out?’ Thorne spoke to them, and looked at them, as if they were children. ‘How could you think we wouldn’t find out about this?’

‘It’s not a big deal,’ Mullen said.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘It was an affair, that’s all. People have them. You’ll just have to forgive us for trying to keep some tiny part of our fucked-up lives private.’

But Thorne was in no mood to forgive anyone. He’d listened with a growing sense of disbelief and anger as Tony Mullen had explained why he’d taken the decision not to mention Grant Freestone. How they’d jointly decided that there would be little point in revealing the affair that his wife had had while serving as an officer of the local education authority on Freestone’s MAPPA panel in 2001.

‘You lied because of this?’ Thorne said. ‘We’re trying to find your son and you lie because of a bit of screwing around? Whose embarrassment were you trying to save? Your wife’s or your own?’

‘Both,’ Mullen said. ‘Either. Does it really fucking matter?’

‘You messed us around-’

‘Does any of it matter?’ Mullen looked ready to scream, with frustration, exhaustion, rage. ‘Christ, my wife made a mistake years ago. One mistake…’

Mullen was sitting on the sofa, facing the fireplace and the TV. Thorne and Maggie Mullen were opposite each other in the armchairs to either side. Thorne stared at the woman across the Chinese rug, her feet curled underneath her, same as he’d seen her daughter do. She was still, and had spoken barely a word since Thorne had entered the room.

He was unable to tell if she wore a stunned expression or a defiant one.

‘So who did you make this mistake with, then?’

She shook her head slowly, as if she were being asked to submit to something unspeakable.

Mullen groaned. ‘Does it matter?’

‘No more secrets,’ Thorne said.

So Maggie Mullen named the man with whom she’d had her affair. Thorne thought about it for a moment. He could see why it would have upset Tony Mullen so much.

‘You’re obviously enjoying this, Thorne,’ Mullen said. ‘Enjoying our… discomfort.’

‘You think you can claw back one single bloody inch of the moral high ground?’ Thorne asked.

Mullen said nothing, looked across at his wife.

‘You should feel uncomfortable. Jesus. You’re ex-Job, for crying out loud, and your son is missing. You withheld information.’

‘Irrelevant information.’

‘You sure?’

‘Considering everything that’s going on, do you really think that who my wife slept with five years ago is remotely important?’

‘That depends,’ Thorne said. ‘Does “everything” include another member of the MAPPA panel being murdered this morning?’ He looked from one to the other. It was clear from Tony Mullen’s expression that he hadn’t known. That, despite his connections, this development in the case hadn’t been relayed to him five minutes after it had happened. ‘Someone broke into Kathleen Bristow’s house and killed her, and nobody’s going to convince me that it wasn’t the same person who took your son, so…’

Maggie Mullen began to cry.

‘I wonder if you still think the fact that your wife was on that panel is unimportant. If it’s irrelevant.’

Mullen stood up, held out his arms towards his wife, but she didn’t move. She sat and wept and looked anywhere but at Thorne or her husband, until Mullen moved across to her. He gathered her up and pulled her back with him on to the sofa, pressing her head to his chest until she had to break free to suck in a breath.

‘I don’t understand how you could have been on that panel in the first place,’ Thorne said. ‘Wasn’t there a conflict of interest, with your husband having put Freestone behind bars in the first place?’

Mullen looked at his wife. She was in no fit state to answer. ‘She didn’t know,’ he said. ‘Not to start with at least. We didn’t discuss cases and she’d never even heard of Grant Freestone until she joined that panel.’

‘So what happened? “Not to start with”, you said.’

‘She saw my name on Freestone’s probation report, the stuff about the threats he’d made, so then she told me and we discussed it. She talked about resigning, but there was really no need. What had happened in the past was of no concern to Maggie and the others on that panel, so there was no conflict.’

‘Of course not. Still, it must have been handy to have someone who could keep a close eye on Freestone for you. Someone who had a nice professional reason to know exactly what he was doing.’

Mullen shook his head. ‘You’re talking crap. My wife just did her job.’

‘Right, and plenty of overtime, by the sound of it.’

It was a cheap shot, and it got the reaction it deserved. Mullen sat up straight, clutched his wife’s hand and spoke quietly, each word clearly intended to be definitive; weighted with loathing for both subject and listener.

‘This man was someone Maggie worked with closely, only because she believed in doing things properly. She trusted everyone on that panel, had every reason to think they had the same dedication to the work that she had.’

Next to him, Maggie Mullen sat, stiff and shaking, the tears coming more slowly now. Her face reacted to the jolt of each sob, and twisted as her husband spoke, as though in distaste, in horror at this woman he was discussing that she did not recognise.

‘Men like him can mistake a close working relationship for affection. They look for it, desperate, and search for any way to exploit it, to turn it into something sordid it was never intended to be. They’re leeches. That’s what he was.’

Next to him, Maggie Mullen spoke her husband’s name quietly. It sounded like a plea to stop.

‘He was needy,’ Mullen said, ‘terminally needy, and he twisted my wife’s sympathy into something different. He took advantage of her.’

Maggie Mullen was shaking her head, insistent now, her words spoken and repeated in tandem with the movement. ‘That’s not what happened. That’s not what happened…’

‘Calm down, love-’

‘Don’t be so fucking stupid,’ she shouted. She turned to Thorne, focused, spoke quietly. ‘He’s got Luke.’

Thorne felt the prickle at the nape of his neck, a buzz that began to build and creep…

‘Who’s got Luke?’

She said his name again. The name of the man with whom she’d had the affair.

Mullen took hold of her other hand and put his face close to hers. ‘Sorry, love, I don’t-’

She screamed the name into his face, scored it in spittle across his cheek and into his eyes.

‘He took Luke,’ she said. ‘He got those people, that couple, to take him as a warning. To convince me, I suppose. The affair didn’t finish when I told you it did. I tried to end it, but he wouldn’t let me.’ Mullen tried to say something, but she continued over the top of him, quickly, as though, if she stopped, she might fall to pieces. ‘We carried on, but I was dying every time I looked at Luke or Juliet. I was dying with the guilt. So, a few months ago, I decided I was going to end it and I told him that this time I wasn’t going to change my mind.’ She paused, remembering. ‘He took it badly…’

Thorne was out of his seat. He couldn’t keep the astonishment and the disgust from his voice. ‘So he kidnapped your son?’

‘I was stupid,’ she said, clutching at her husband. ‘I was so stupid to do it when I did. He’d just lost his mother and he was in pieces, and I thought it would be a good time, you know… to tell him, because he would have other things on his mind. But he went completely off the rails.’

Thorne stared, thinking, You’re telling me. He waited for the rest.

‘And, God help me, I mentioned Sarah Hanley.’

‘What?’

‘We never talked about what happened. It was just like a film we’d seen or something. But I wanted him to accept that it was over and leave me alone, and I said something about how terrible it would be if anyone ever found out. It was just something I said, because I was desperate and I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t trying to threaten him.’

‘What was it that happened?’ Thorne asked.

Mullen just gasped out his wife’s name.

‘I was there when Sarah Hanley died,’ she said.

Tony Mullen got slowly to his feet and, as both of his wife’s hands were in his, she rose with him. Their fingers twisted, whitened, and the tension grew in their arms until they were pushing at each other, standing in front of the sofa, straining and searching for some leverage, a low moan somewhere in the throat of one of them…

Thorne was out of his chair, fearing violence, but the moment passed and Mullen dropped back on to the sofa as if he’d been gutted. Thorne stared at the two of them. Took a few deep breaths as a hundred questions careered through his mind.

Knowing that he could wait for the answers, he took out his phone and began to dial.

Maggie Mullen saw what was happening. She stepped towards him and reached out a hand. ‘Please, not like last time,’ she said. ‘Don’t go in there like you did at that flat. Don’t charge in there with guns. I don’t know how he’ll react. I’ve no idea what he’ll do.’

Thorne nodded and raised the phone. ‘I need a home address.’

She gave it to him without a second thought. ‘Please,’ she said again. ‘Luke’s unharmed… so far. He’s fine. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid, that you won’t go in there with guns…’

The number Thorne was calling began to ring. He looked at Tony Mullen and followed the man’s wide eyes to those of the woman who was pawing at his sleeve. ‘How do you know Luke’s unharmed?’

Her eyes left his. ‘I’ve spoken to him.’

Mullen’s voice was hoarse. ‘You’ve spoken to Luke?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not to Luke. I haven’t spoken to Luke.’

Porter answered her phone.

She’d just started driving back from Kathleen Bristow’s house in Shepherd’s Bush. She pulled over to take down details as soon as Thorne had her attention and began to take her through it. He gave her an address in Catford, the other side of the city from him, and still a good distance south-east of where Porter was.

‘How soon do you think you can get a team there?’ He asked.

‘They’ll be there before I am,’ Porter said. ‘Almost certainly.’

Thorne passed on Maggie Mullen’s concerns: her belief that the kidnapper’s reaction to an armed entry was highly unpredictable; her plea for them to be cautious.

Porter sounded dubious. ‘I can’t make any promises,’ she said.

When Thorne hung up, he told her Porter had assured him that she’d do her best.

He didn’t feel bad about lying to her.

TWENTY-FIVE

You think about the kids.

First and last, in that sort of situation, in that sort of state; when you can’t decide if it’s anger or agony that’s all but doubling you up, and making it so hard for you to spit the words across the room. First and last, you think about them…

‘Why the hell, why the fuck, didn’t you tell me this earlier?’

‘It wasn’t the right time. It seemed best to wait.’

‘Best?’ She took a step towards the man and woman standing on the far side of her living room.

‘I think you should try to calm down,’ the man said.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ she said. ‘I’d really be interested to know.’

‘I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your decision…’

‘You think I’ve got a choice?’

The other woman spoke gently. ‘We need to sit down and talk about the best way forward-’

‘Christ Almighty. You just march in here and tell me this. Casually, like it’s just something you forgot to mention. You walk in here and tell me all this… shit!’

‘Sarah-’

‘I don’t know you. I don’t even fucking know you…’

For a few seconds there was just the ticking, and the distant traffic, and the noise bleeding in from a radio in the kitchen…

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re what?’ Sarah Hanley smiled, then laughed. She gathered the material of her dress between her fingers as her fists clenched at her sides. ‘I need to get to the school.’

‘The kids’ll be fine,’ the man said. He looked at the woman who was with him and she nodded her head in complete agreement. ‘Honestly, love. Absolutely fine.’

‘… that’s when she came at him,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘When she came at both of us, scratching and spitting and swearing her head off. He only raised his hands to protect his face, because she was out of control. He didn’t mean to push her.’

‘She was thinking of her children,’ Thorne said.

‘So were we. That’s why we were there, why the decision was made to tell her about Grant Freestone’s past.’

‘And it never occurred to anyone that she might not take the news very calmly?’

Maggie Mullen had slunk back to the armchair. Her arms were wrapped around each other at the waist as she spoke. From the sofa, her husband watched, ashen-faced, as though all but the smallest breath he needed to stay alive had been punched out of him.

‘We were trained to have these conversations,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘We tried to be sensitive. Everything just… got out of hand.’

‘What happened afterwards?’

‘We panicked. There was such a lot of blood. We didn’t know what the hell to do, and in the end we just decided to leave.’ She looked at Thorne. ‘I can’t remember whose idea it was, really I can’t, but it was all such a mess. It was just a stupid accident.’

‘An accident for which you knew Grant Freestone would probably get blamed.’

‘We never thought about that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t anyway, I swear. When he did get blamed, we talked about it, but we didn’t know what to do for the best. It was too late to come forward by then, to try and explain.’

Thorne moved slowly around to the back of her chair. ‘Was she still alive when you left?’ he asked.

Maggie Mullen lowered her head, shook it.

Thorne stared down at hair that had gone unwashed for days. Only she and the man she’d been with in Sarah Hanley’s house that day knew if she was telling the truth. ‘You know that her children discovered the body, don’t you?’

‘Yes…’

Tony Mullen’s hands were trembling in his lap. He swallowed hard, then muttered, ‘Christ…’

‘So, you just walked out,’ Thorne said.

She nodded, but kept her eyes down. ‘Yes, we walked out, and we hoped nobody had seen us.’ She looked up. ‘And nobody had. We went to Kathleen Bristow, who’d assigned us the job of making the visit, and told her that we’d had to cancel it, that we’d never gone. We made up some story about me being poorly. Then, when the body was discovered, it all got forgotten anyway, and it looked like we were safe.’

‘Is that why he killed Bristow?’ Thorne asked. ‘Did she keep a record of the fact that you were due to have visited Sarah Hanley?’

‘I suppose so. She certainly knew that he and I were involved with each other. She caught us together in a pub once after one of the meetings. Maybe her knowing that was enough to scare him.’

‘But why now?’

She shifted in her chair, let her head fall back and talked to the ceiling. ‘I don’t know what’s in his mind. I can’t pretend to know why he’s done any of this.’

‘Maybe you should have asked him,’ Mullen said. ‘During one of your cosy little chats on the phone.’

‘Please, Tony…’

‘I can’t believe that you knew he had Luke, but you said nothing. He had our son and you said nothing.’

Thorne looked at what was left of Mullen, and despite everything he’d felt about him until this point, he was overwhelmed by sympathy for the man. He’d lied by omission, thinking only that he was covering up simple adultery, unaware that there was so much more at stake.

‘At the beginning I thought he was just trying to frighten me, you know? Because I’d told him we were finished, and I’d talked about the Sarah Hanley business. He knew this woman from somewhere, paid her to take Luke from the school, and I thought it would just be for a day or something, that he was just making sure I got the message.’

Thorne knew then that he’d been right about the video; about how strange it was that nothing had been addressed to Luke’s father. The boy had been told what to say. The words had been aimed solely at his mother because the message was meant for her and no one else.

‘What did he say?’ Mullen asked. ‘After he’d taken Luke, what did he say when you spoke to him?’

She looked as though this was the hardest answer she’d had to provide so far. ‘He said he was doing it because he loved me so much.’

‘Sweet Jesus!’

‘It’s what he believes. He’s not well.’

‘Why didn’t you sort this out straight away?’ Mullen was reddening, breathing noisily. ‘Why didn’t you agree to everything, anything, whatever he wanted, so that he’d let Luke go? You saw that video, you saw what they were doing to Luke.’

‘He said he didn’t want to make it easy. He promised not to hurt him, told me that the drugs weren’t doing him any harm. He told me he wanted to be sure I knew how serious he was.’

‘Serious?’ Thorne said.

‘Then, after the first few days, there was nothing I could do. I was terrified because everything had escalated.’

Mullen bucked in his seat, punching at the chair around him, swinging at nothing. ‘He killed people. He started fucking killing people.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ she shouted. ‘I knew that he’d lost control, that I couldn’t predict what he was going to do or how he was going to react. He said he wouldn’t hurt Luke, but I didn’t know what would happen if I told the police.’ She glanced at the telephone. ‘I still don’t. All I could do was keep talking to him, make sure that Luke was still all right.’ Her hand rose to her head, closed around a clump of hair and began to pull. ‘I fucked it all up, I know I did, but it went so completely mad that I didn’t know what to do.’ She looked wildly from her husband to Thorne and back again. ‘I was thinking of Luke all the time. But…’

Thorne nodded. He did not want to listen to any more. There were no more tears left, but Maggie Mullen’s face looked as though it were made of cracked plaster. He remembered the words she’d used when she’d described what had happened on the day Sarah Hanley died. ‘Everything just got out of hand,’ he said.

An hour or more passed as slowly as any Thorne could remember. The minutes crawled by on their bellies, each through the glistening, greasy trail of the one before, as he watched Tony and Maggie Mullen damage themselves and each other. Screams that sliced and flayed. Accusations swung like bludgeons, and the silences burning away the flesh from the little that was left between them.

Drawn from the top of the house by the noise, Juliet had appeared in the doorway. Demanding to know what was happening, and understandably reluctant to go upstairs again, she had begun a shouting match with her mother that was just starting to get nasty when Thorne’s mobile rang. Tony Mullen moved quickly to manhandle his daughter from the room as Thorne took the call.

When it was over, Thorne turned back to them. He raised a hand quickly, a gesture to reassure them that the news was not the worst they could have been expecting. ‘Nobody there,’ he said. ‘They went in five minutes ago and the flat’s empty.’

Mullen’s expression was one Thorne had seen several times since he’d first got involved with the case: relief that washed briefly across a mask of panic, then unthinkable fury.

Maggie Mullen was breathing heavily. ‘They went in there very quickly. How could they be sure it was safe?’

‘They decided that they couldn’t afford to wait,’ Thorne said. ‘Going in fast is always iffy, but waiting might have been riskier, and it certainly didn’t help last time. There was an armed response vehicle close by and they took the chance.’

‘You said there’d be no guns.’ She pointed a shaking finger, spat out the words. ‘You promised.’

‘No,’ Mullen said, cold. ‘No, he fucking didn’t.’

‘Is there anywhere else?’ Thorne asked. ‘Anywhere else he might have taken him?’

Thorne could see that as soon as the idea presented itself to her, she knew it was the right one.

‘His mother’s house. She had a cottage somewhere near Luton, in the middle of bloody nowhere.’ She couldn’t look at her husband. ‘I went there once.’

‘Call him,’ Thorne said.

She closed her eyes and clamped a hand across her mouth, which muffled the end of her refusal.

‘Call him…’

It took a few minutes before Mullen and Thorne saw her walk across to her bag, take out her phone. Watched her gather herself, and dial.

Then speak to the man who had kidnapped her son.

She told him that she needed to talk; that she knew it was late but that she was coming to see him. She insisted. She said she knew where he was and swore that she would be coming alone.

She pressed back fresh tears and took a deep breath before she asked how Luke was.

Then she hung up.

Nodded…

Mullen was face to face with Thorne before he had completed a step. ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Just try and fucking stop me.’

Thorne looked into Mullen’s eyes and knew that if he did, and it got physical, he would be in serious trouble. ‘It’s really not a good idea,’ he said, brandishing his mobile. ‘Don’t make me get a uniform over here.’

Mullen took a few seconds, but finally stepped away. When Thorne asked where his car keys were, Mullen handed them over. Looking at him, Thorne suddenly remembered what Hendricks had told him about seeing the child on the bed that was really a mortuary slab. Thorne saw a man who knew that his son’s life was in somebody else’s hands; and that his own pride and stupidity might have helped put it there.

He led Maggie Mullen to the front door and opened it. She walked out without looking back and moved towards the car. Thorne turned to see Juliet Mullen sitting halfway up the stairs and her father climbing towards her.

‘It’ll be all right, sir,’ Thorne said.

TWENTY-SIX

Thorne drove, glancing down every now and again at the road atlas open in his lap. At the square of countryside between Luton and Stevenage that Maggie Mullen had identified as their destination. Swallowing up the tarmac in Tony Mullen’s Mercedes, the A1 almost empty as it neared eleven o’clock, it wouldn’t take much more than another twenty minutes to get there.

If they could find it.

He spoke to Porter again as he pushed the car north. Telling her where he was heading, talking her through his likeliest route. Porter sounded tense, knowing she could do little but take her team in the same direction and wait for more specific instructions.

‘Goes without saying that you keep me up to speed, right?’

‘So why say it, then?’

‘Tom-’

‘You’ll know where as soon as I know,’ Thorne said. ‘If I know…’

Another glance down, once he’d hung up, and one more at the woman in the passenger seat. They’d barely spoken since they’d left the house in Arkley. Maggie Mullen had spent most of the time staring hard out of the window, not wanting to risk making any kind of contact until she had to, unwilling, or afraid, to catch Thorne’s eye. To engage.

They drove on in silence, save for the low hum of the big engine and the hiss of the tyres against a still slick road, though the rain had stopped. It would have been wrong, of course, horribly inappropriate, but just for a second or two Thorne had considered reaching for the stereo, as the atmosphere in the car grew more uncomfortable with every minute and every mile.

He wondered what Tony Mullen’s taste in music might be. The trivial nature of the thought was a welcome relief from the darker ones that sloshed around in his brain. The blackness spreading, discolouring the contents. He thought about Tony Mullen waiting back at the house. Had he got on the phone to Jesmond or any of his other friends in high places yet? What on earth would he have said to them if he had?

Thorne touched 110 in the outside lane. Hoped the Hertfordshire traffic boys were a long way away.

‘You think I should have spoken up?’ she said suddenly.

Thorne focused on the tail-lights ahead of him. ‘Fuck, yes.’

‘I was trying to protect Luke.’

‘You’re well aware how ridiculous that sounds, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t care.’

‘That’s obvious…’

‘I knew he wouldn’t hurt him.’

‘You still sure?’

She hesitated.

‘And are you sure that keeping all this to yourself had nothing to do with Sarah Hanley? With the fact that you’d be in just as much trouble as he was if it came out?’

Her answer wasn’t quick in coming. ‘He said we’d both go to prison for it.’

‘Right. Turned your stupid threat back on you, didn’t he?’

She closed her eyes. ‘Yes.’

Thorne grunted, satisfied. ‘You didn’t want to go to prison…’

‘He asked me what it felt like, being without my son,’ she said. There was an edge to her voice, and a hardness in her expression when Thorne glanced across. ‘He asked me how I thought I’d feel if I lost both of them. If I spent however many years it might be inside, while they grew up without me.’ She straightened out the seat belt across her chest. ‘No, I didn’t want to go to prison.’

‘It’s no excuse,’ Thorne said. ‘You said yourself that you didn’t know what was going on in this man’s head. That you were scared, that he was out of control.’

‘I talked to him,’ she said. ‘I tried to keep him calm, to reassure him, if you like, but it was all for Luke…’

The thought struck Thorne with such force that Maggie Mullen slid away from him, inching towards the passenger door when he turned and looked at her again. ‘What did you tell him about the case?’

The silence was answer enough.

‘You told him that we had the fingerprints, didn’t you? That we got Conrad Allen’s prints off the videotape. That we were close to an address.’

‘I thought he’d stop it if he knew the police were coming. I wanted him to give up.’

‘What about Kathleen Bristow?’ Thorne was asking himself as much as he was asking her, working through the chronology in his head, putting the pieces in the correct order. Had Kathleen Bristow died before or after her killer had been interviewed? ‘He knew we were coming to see him, didn’t he? You told him we were asking about Grant Freestone, that we’d be talking to members of the panel…’

‘It was all going to come out anyway,’ she said. ‘What had happened, I mean. I thought if I could make him understand that, he would let me have Luke back.’

‘You thought wrong.’ Thorne was forcing the accelerator to the floor, squeezing the wheel. ‘He killed her, same as he killed Conrad Allen and Amanda Tickell. It sounds to me like those three deaths are down to you.’

‘Please…’

‘Three more deaths.’

She turned away. Leaned her forehead against the window.

‘Whatever you thought you were doing, you were just pushing all the buttons.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘I hope Luke’s alive, that he hasn’t been hurt; more than anything, I hope that. But if he isn’t…’

She moaned, her head sliding against the glass.

‘It’s probably no more than you deserve.’

Thorne drove on, past signs for Welham Green and Hatfield, past the turn-off to St Albans that he’d taken so many times when his father was alive.

The water on the road was like a long, lonely shush beneath them.

Without turning, Maggie Mullen said, ‘She was dead when we left. Sarah. She’d lost such a lot of blood.’

Thorne thought she sounded pathetic. He felt numb, cold, without anything even close to sympathy. Knowing what might be waiting for him when they arrived at their destination, he thought it was probably the best way to be. ‘Right. And you watched her die.’

They turned off the A1 just past Welwyn Garden City. That much she could remember. But from there on it was hit and hope. There were some fragmented memories of the village they were looking for – a large house on its outskirts, a church – but no more than that.

Within five minutes, it was a different world.

The overhead lighting had gone, and even the catseyes disappeared at the end of the slip road, which quickly narrowed as A route became B, with high hedges on both sides and barely room enough for one vehicle to pass another.

Thorne drove as quickly as he was able, full beam cutting through the black, which twisted away ahead of him.

They moved slowly through a village called Codicote: Tudor houses, pubs, a village green; Maggie Mullen searching desperately for some clue that they might be in the right place. Thorne sped out the other side, past the sign that thanked him for driving carefully, back into the dark necklace of lanes that strung these villages together, a mile or two apart.

He swore and dipped the headlights as another car came around a corner, braking too hard and wrestling the Mercedes into the verge. He tried to look at the other driver as the car went past, but he could see nothing. Back on full beam, the lights caught yellow eyes, low in the undergrowth, and something flashing across the road fifty yards ahead of them.

‘All these roads look the bloody same,’ Maggie Mullen said.

They drove through Kimpton and Peter’s Green. Stopped and turned the car round when they got within a mile of Luton airport and a sign told them they were entering Bedfordshire. Heading north again, they passed through Whitwell, crossed over the River Maran and entered the village of St Paul’s Walden.

‘Stop…’

Thorne jumped on the pedal and put out his arm as Maggie Mullen shot forward in her seat. ‘What?’

‘That’s the big house.’ She nodded towards a pair of wrought-iron gates. The outline of a grand mansion was just visible in the distance. ‘We visited it once. Something to do with the Queen Mother. Keep going…’

At the other end of the High Street she told Thorne to stop again. Pointed to a church. A spike rising up from a turreted tower, vivid against the night sky.

‘You can see that tower from the cottage,’ she said. ‘Across the fields.’

‘There are fields everywhere,’ Thorne said. ‘Which direction?’

She looked around, unsure.

Thorne picked one.

Driving out of the village, they both started when Maggie Mullen’s phone rang. She looked at the display. The phone was shaking in her hand.

‘It’s him…’

She said, ‘yes’ a lot; told the caller that she was nearly there and that she just wanted to talk. She asked how Luke was, begged the man on the other end of the phone not to hurt him.

‘What did he want?’ Thorne asked when she’d hung up.

‘He wanted to know where I was. If I was close.’

‘You said, Yes I am; it’s fine. What was that?’

‘He was worried,’ she said. ‘Told me that if I was driving, he hoped I was hands-free.’

Thorne accelerated into the countryside again and smiled grimly. ‘He knows you’re not alone…’

Five minutes later he turned on to a narrow track. It was overgrown and pitted with puddles. The car rattled across a cattle-grid, then followed the track down and to the right, until its lights picked out the house a few hundred yards away.

‘That’s it…’

It wasn’t what Thorne had expected. Not a cottage in any usual sense of the word. It wasn’t particularly small, and didn’t even look that old. But it was certainly isolated. Not exactly chocolate-box, but in the ideal position for some purposes.

Thorne slowed to a crawl as he approached. There were lights on in two rooms downstairs, at the front.

‘What are we going to do?’ Maggie Mullen asked.

‘Well, you are going to knock on the door. Go and say hello to your boyfriend.’

‘What about you?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Thorne said. He stopped the car, climbed out and moved away without shutting the door. From the shadows fifty feet from the house, he watched Maggie Mullen go to the front door. Saw it open and watched her walk inside, slow and stiff.

Then he moved quickly towards the back of the building.

He was in virtual darkness almost immediately. He pushed slowly through a low wooden gate whose top edge felt damp, rotten beneath his fingers. It opened into a knot of bramble. Stepping across, there was coarse, wet grass around his knees. As his eyes adjusted, Thorne could just make out the wall – higher in some places than others – that separated the garden from the fields beyond.

He kept close to the side of the house, moving away from it only when he needed to step around a long metal trough and what looked like an old butler sink full of earth and stones. He caught his hand on something as he edged along the wall, sucked in air fast, and wiped away the thickening beads of blood on his damp trouser-leg.

At the back of the cottage was a rusted table and chairs. An arrangement of bird tables. A rotary washing line that barely protruded above four feet of couch grass and thistle below it.

Thorne pressed his face against the window of a small extension. He could make out plates and pans on a drainer, the digital display on a microwave oven. There was a sliver of light at floor level from somewhere inside the house.

The back door was open.

He thought about Porter waiting for his call. About the phone sitting on the front seat of the car…

In the second or two between feeling the handle give and pushing, he considered all those times when he’d faced a similar decision. When he’d been torn between doing the sensible thing or saying, ‘Fuck it.’ When, on almost every occasion, he’d made the wrong choice.

He pushed.

And he stepped into the dark kitchen. Moved quickly to the door beneath which the light was coming. And listened. Though he could not hear voices, there was something about the quality of the silence from the other side of the door that told him there were people in the next room.

He waited.

Five seconds… ten.

Then a voice he’d heard before: ‘For heaven’s sake, stop pissing about and come in.’

Thorne did as he’d been invited, slowly. His pace slowed even further once he saw what was waiting for him. One step at a time, though his mind was racing, processing the visual information, asking questions.

Where’s the boy?

Man, woman, rope, knife…

Where’s the fucking boy?

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘I knew she was lying.’

‘Peter…’

‘About coming on her own.’ Lardner nudged his glasses with a knuckle. ‘I could hear it in her voice, clear as a bell.’ Laughing. ‘I mean, I’ve heard her lying often enough, haven’t I? Stretched out next to me, naked, telling her old man she’s tied up in a meeting…’

The buzzing in Thorne’s head had faded enough for him to formulate a response. ‘She’s lied to a lot of people,’ he said. He glanced towards a dustsheet-covered armchair in which Maggie Mullen sat directly ahead of him, beneath a small window. She didn’t return Thorne’s look. Her eyes moved back and forth every few seconds between Lardner and the brown panelled door a few feet away.

Lardner was sitting on the floor against a covered sofa that had been on Thorne’s right as he’d entered the small living room. He was wearing jeans and a rust-coloured shirt, and his legs were drawn up to his chest. His hands dangled between his knees, a carving knife held loosely in one of them. The other clutched the end of a rope which ran away from him, straight and taut, disappearing around the edge of a door beneath the stairs.

Cellar. Had to be.

Thorne asked the question even though he’d known the answer a second after stepping in from the kitchen: ‘Where’s the boy?’

There was a noise from somewhere beneath them. The rope shifted against the white painted floorboards.

Luke Mullen was alive.

Lardner turned his head towards the door and shouted, ‘Come on now, son, I told you I want to see this rope stay taut. You stay where you are, and come up here when I’m good and ready.’

Maggie Mullen leaned forward in her chair. Her fists were tight around the material of her sweater, pulling at it, wrenching. ‘For pity’s sake, Peter…’

‘You need to shush… really,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve talked about this.’ He sounded tired but relaxed. He looked back to Thorne and rolled his eyes, as though another man would understand how exasperating all this nagging was.

Thorne nodded gently, tried to smile.

Lardner raised the hand that held the knife, rubbed it across the top of his head. The few wisps of dark hair were all over the place and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. ‘Silly,’ Lardner said. ‘All so bloody silly.’

A board moaned beneath Thorne’s feet as he shifted his weight, and he saw Lardner’s eyes fly to him, target him, in a second.

Not relaxed at all…

‘You should sit.’ Lardner nodded towards a low pine trunk next to the fireplace.

Thorne moved back until his calves met the edge of the box and dropped down slowly. He looked around, like someone who might be considering renting the place. The ceiling was Artexed: stiff spikes and whorls like hardened icing. A small landscape in a lacquered frame; a wooden barometer; a row of hardback books without jackets on shelves to one side of the front door. In the hearth, an arrangement of dried flowers poking from a stone vase, thick with dust.

‘Why are we here?’ Thorne said.

Lardner looked a little confused. ‘I don’t remember inviting anybody.’

‘You know what I mean. Why any of this?’

‘Well it’s a fair question. Because it is all senseless, all of it, but I’m not really the right person to ask.’ He drew a foot of the rope towards him and twisted it around his wrist. ‘I don’t want to sound childish, really I don’t, but I’m not the one who started this.’

‘Oh Jesus, Peter.’ There was suddenly anger in Maggie Mullen’s voice. ‘You can’t lay any of this madness at my door. All I wanted to do was get out of a relationship. I didn’t do anything wrong.’

It was as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘She made a mistake. And everything went haywire from that point, I suppose. I couldn’t believe she was trying to hurt me as much as she had. I convinced myself she didn’t know what she was doing…’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did know.’

‘Losing a parent isn’t easy, we all know that. You can understand how hard it is.’ He looked at Thorne, wanting a response. ‘Yes?’

Thorne nodded.

Lardner’s tone was chatty again, conversational. ‘So to do what she did when I was still suffering the loss of my mother was… an error. That’s what I’m going to call it. And, yes, I was desperate, I don’t mind admitting that to you. I don’t think that means I’m weak or less of a man or whatever. I didn’t want to lose her, I still don’t want to lose her, so I clung on for dear life. Which was when she started talking about the Sarah Hanley business, dredged all that up and made stupid suggestions, and I decided something needed to be done.’

‘I just wanted to get out,’ Maggie Mullen shouted. ‘I was the one who was desperate.’

Thorne looked at the rope. At the knife. It felt as though the skin was tightening across every inch of his body.

Lardner continued to address Thorne; to ignore the woman who, for one reason or another, had caused so much to happen. ‘I should really have taken the boy myself,’ he said. ‘But it was difficult, with work and what have you. It cost me every penny I had to pay those two, I can tell you that. Maybe if I’d sold this place after Mum died, but that was never going to happen.’

Thorne knew most of it, but he was still curious. They’d thought Neil Warren’s professional relationship to Amanda Tickell was the link to Grant Freestone. But now Thorne remembered what Callum Roper had said about Warren and Lardner knowing each other. ‘Did Neil Warren introduce you to the woman?’

Lardner smiled. ‘Neil’s very conscientious,’ he said. ‘He has regular get-togethers for some of his old clients, even though most of them have long since gone back on the smack or the coke or the booze. He gives them a few nibbles, talks about God, that sort of thing. All very jolly…’

The rope was frayed and dirty, an old tow rope, by the look of it. Thorne tried hard not to think of the boy on the other end. Of the state he might be in.

‘I met Amanda and her boyfriend at one of Neil’s parties,’ Lardner said. ‘And when I was working out how best to snatch the boy, I knew she had it in her. She was always desperate for money.’

The knife swung slowly back and forth, its handle gripped between Lardner’s thumb and index finger. It looked as though it came from the same set as the one he’d used to kill Allen and Tickell.

‘Why did anyone have to die?’ Thorne asked.

‘I shan’t say that it seemed like a good idea at the time, as that would be flippant. In fact, it seemed like a very bad idea. I’ve no wish to be disrespectful, and I’m very sorry about Kathleen, but same as with the other two, there wasn’t a great deal else I could do.’ For the first time in a few minutes he looked across at Maggie Mullen. ‘Mags was telling me what I needed to do…’

Maggie Mullen was almost out of her chair. ‘What?’

‘There were hints,’ Lardner said. ‘We talked on the phone, talked in secret… and when she told me about what the police were doing, about Freestone and so on…’

‘I wanted you to finish it, to know it was pointless-’

‘I knew she was really telling me that I needed to take steps to protect myself.’

‘No!’

The wash of a warm smile. ‘That’s when I knew her feelings for me were still as strong as they’d ever been.’

‘You’re fucking mental, Peter.’ She’d known it before, obviously. But here, seeing it acted out in front of her, the shock and the sadness were evident on Maggie Mullen’s face. ‘You’ve completely lost it…’

Lardner looked at Thorne, shrugged and smiled. Then wound in another foot or so of the rope.

There was a thump from the cellar: a shoe against a wooden stair.

‘Let the boy go,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ll stay.’

Lardner looked at him.

‘We’ll both stay. But you could just let Luke walk out of here.’

Another tug, and more rope dancing in. Another thump from behind the door, and a voice; indistinguishable, but clearly that of someone in pain.

An equally agonised sound broke from Maggie Mullen. She spluttered, ‘please’ and ‘don’t’, then her head dropped forward until her knees muffled her voice, and the terrible sound of her begging became something grunted, animalistic.

Lardner stared at the woman he claimed to love, as though something else, something he didn’t understand, was responsible for her pain.

She lifted her head, held her breath and searched for some compassion in his face.

Thorne didn’t look away from Lardner. He wondered how much of his attention was really focused on the woman. Then he glanced down at the knife in the man’s left hand. Was Lardner left-handed? He thought about making a move but did nothing.

‘Right… come on.’

As soon as Lardner stood and began hauling in the rope, all three were on their feet: Lardner dragging the rope towards himself with one hand, twisting the arm quickly, coiling the rope between elbow and fist, while the other hand continued to point the kitchen knife; Thorne and Maggie Mullen staring – hopeful, terrified – at the small, brown door.

The silence between the bumps and cracks of feet on the stairs felt like hands over Thorne’s ears, and his skin continued to shrink; to feel as though it were constricting across his bones. He imagined pressure building on the muscle and the creamy layers of fat as they were squeezed; the blood rushing, searching for the easiest way to burst through the flesh that stretched and thinned. For one strange, disconnected moment he thought he felt it gathering, about to gush from the small wound in his hand, and he pressed the palm hard against the side of his leg.

The rope was high off the ground now, and taut.

The noise on the stairs grew louder…

Maggie Mullen’s hands were steepled in front of her face. They had flattened, been pressed tight across her mouth, by the time the door to the cellar was shouldered open, crashed back against the wall, and her son stumbled into the room.

She screamed when she saw that his face had gone.

TWENTY-EIGHT

‘Yes, I’m sorry about that,’ Lardner said. ‘But he got a bit excited when I told him you were coming. Got very noisy.’ He pointed the knife at Maggie Mullen when she took a step towards her son, then twisted the blade to point out his handiwork. ‘I did it in a bit of a hurry, but I made sure he could breathe, obviously…’

The black gaffer tape had been wrapped clumsily, round and round Luke Mullen’s face, and in such haste that what remained on the roll hung down, knocking awkwardly against the boy’s shoulder as he moved; against the rope that had been looped around his neck and now stretched tightly to where Lardner stood next to the sofa.

Luke stood, swaying on the spot.

Brick-dust streaked his hair, and the navy-blue Butler’s Hall blazer was torn at the pocket and ghost-grey with dirt. One hand stayed stiff against his side while the other clutched at the rope around his neck. Thorne could see that the backs of his hands were almost black with filth, and bloodied.

The boy strained instinctively towards his mother, his neck pulling forward against the rope, moaning, growling, when Lardner dragged him back. The word had sounded sung almost, from behind the tape. It was impossible to make out clearly, but easy enough to guess at.

Two syllables, definitely.

‘Mummy…’

Maggie Mullen tried to say her son’s name but lost it in the sob. She mouthed it as she moved across to Thorne, reached out a hand and took a handful of his leather jacket at the elbow.

Thorne remained still. Whatever she had done, or been responsible for, it had become impossible not to feel something for this woman. Seeing what she was seeing; watching the misery carve itself deeper into her face.

Luke swayed and shouted again.

His nose looked obscenely pink and fleshy through a gap in the thick mask of tape. The crooked line of gaffer stopped below his eyes, which had been blinking furiously, widening since he’d stepped from the dark of the cellar into the living room.

Lardner hauled the boy closer to him, more brutally this time.

He pointed with the knife again, first to Luke’s face, then to the cellar door. ‘It’s stupid, really,’ he said. ‘There’s a perfectly good light down there, but the bulb needs replacing. Actually, it went just before Mum died and she asked me to change it for her. I said I would, but you know how you never get round to doing these things. So…’ He saw something in Thorne’s face. ‘Now you think there’s some kind of Norman Bates thing going on, and I’m trying to keep everything the way it was, don’t you?’ He smiled. ‘I haven’t got my mother stashed upstairs, you know.’ He reached out a foot towards the sofa, flicked it against the edge of the dustsheet. ‘These things are purely practical, I promise you…’

‘I lost my father a year ago,’ Thorne said. ‘Almost exactly a year.’

Relief flooded into Lardner’s face. ‘So you know.’

‘I know it’s hard. But nobody else has to pay for it.’

‘She’s not paying for that.’

‘What then?’

‘You can’t treat people the way she did. Not the people who love you.’

‘She ended it because she felt guilty,’ Thorne said. ‘She was thinking about her family.’

Lardner found this funny. ‘She never thought about them before.’

Next to him, Thorne felt Maggie Mullen’s grip on his arm tighten. She spoke softly to Luke, told him that it was going to be all right. That it would soon be over.

Luke nodded, then staggered as he was pulled to one side. He took a step and regained his balance, his hand scrabbling where the rope was biting into his throat.

‘Whatever else happens,’ Lardner said, ‘she’ll be thinking about them a damn sight more from now on.’

Thorne looked at the distance between himself and Lardner.

No more than eight feet. At the end of the rope, Luke was another five or six away, to Lardner’s right.

‘It sounds to me like it was just about shitty timing,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s all. Probably nobody’s fault…’

Lardner held the knife out hard in front of him. His arm was tense, shaking with the effort and the intent, but his tone when he spoke was tender, regretful.

‘I’ve thought of little else but her for five years, and it was instant, you know? Well, it was with me, at any rate. Maybe what happened with Sarah Hanley bound us together, made what we already had stronger.’ He turned the grip of the knife slowly in his fist. ‘She tried to end it once, back when her husband found out, but I knew she was only doing what he wanted. So I didn’t know she meant it this time, either. I didn’t know how serious she was… serious enough to do it when she did. I didn’t know she could be so completely fucking heartless.’

Maggie Mullen’s eyes stayed on her son, but she shook her head.

‘And I didn’t know how hard it was going to hit me. You don’t, do you, even if you see these things coming? And I didn’t see either of them coming. Mags or Mum. They were like car crashes, both of them right out of the blue. You kid yourself that you’ve walked away unscathed, but there’s a delayed reaction.

‘It was like everything was happening to someone else, and all I could do was watch this other person’s life slide away, out of control. Even while I was contemplating terrible things – even while I was doing them – I couldn’t get hold of anything… I couldn’t reach it. There was no way to pull back.’

The knife turned faster in his fist as his speech slowed. ‘Everything just gets away from you. Can you understand that? Your grip, your respect for yourself, for other people’s lives. Everything. Changing a bloody light bulb…’

His lips were still moving, just a little, and he stared along the blade of the knife as if he were trying to work out what it was for. Suddenly, he looked lost.

Thorne was the only person in the room not crying. He looked at Lardner and willed away any hint of compassion.

He focused on the boy.

Thought of Kathleen Bristow’s body. Her stained nightdress. Her sparrow’s legs, twisted…

‘Let Luke go,’ he said.

Lardner shook his head. Thorne could not be sure if it was a refusal or the gesture of a man who was unsure, distracted. There were no more than a couple of paces between them…

He tensed. A heartbeat away. Lardner had not been afraid to use the knife before.

Thorne knew he would be lucky to come away unscathed.

He had no idea what Lardner’s response would be to an attack. Would he lay down his weapon and throw in the towel? Or would he take a child’s life as easily as he’d taken that of an old woman? Whatever his appearance, however beaten and confused he seemed, the unpredictability of the man opposite made him as dangerous as any gangland enforcer or flat-eyed psychopath Thorne had ever faced.

A few years earlier, in a similar position, he’d frozen while a man had held a knife to the neck of a female officer. He had done it by the book, afraid that heroics would cost the officer her life.

Then he’d watched her die anyway.

The boy himself had become completely still and silent. His eyes had closed. Then the words of Luke’s mother – calling his name, asking him repeatedly if he was all right – seemed to snap Lardner back into the moment.

‘He’s fine, really,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve become good mates, haven’t we, Luke?’

The boy opened his eyes.

‘We’ve had some good old chats down there, I reckon.’

‘No…’

Thorne saw the spasm of panic around Maggie Mullen’s eyes.

‘Talked about all sorts.’

‘Like what?’

A shrug. ‘Family, you know. The important things in life…’

‘Don’t.’

Luke Mullen moaned, a long, desperate ‘no…’ from behind the tape.

‘I wasn’t planning on bringing any of it up here,’ Lardner said, ‘but now that you mention it…’

It was no more than a couple of paces, but Thorne knew Lardner could have the knife at Luke’s throat before he reached him.

‘What did you tell my son?’

‘Want me to repeat it? Even police officers can be shocked, you know. But he looks up to it.’

‘Stop it!’

‘Should I tell him what the pair of us got up to in bed? Or how about why you started having an affair with me in the first place?’

If she rushed towards her son, if she could distract Lardner for just a second, he’d have a chance. There was just no way to let her know what to do.

‘Luke, listen to me. I don’t know what he’s been telling you.’

‘We’d better not pretend it was my looks.’

‘He’s sick. You know that, darling, don’t you? You know he’s sick.’

Thorne would need to go for the left hand, for the knife. Maybe if Luke was quick and moved away at the same time, Lardner could be caught off balance…

‘Driven into my arms,’ Lardner said. ‘I think that’s a fair description.’

‘Twisted. What he’s been saying.’

‘Certainly driven out of her husband’s.’

‘Please look at me, Luke.’

‘I think we all know each other pretty well by now. A home truth or two can’t hurt, can it?’

‘Luke. Please!’

There would be no perfect moment. He just needed to pick one…

‘Why don’t you tell the inspector all about it?’ Lardner’s mouth was firm, grim, but there was gentleness in his eyes. ‘Why you can’t bear to let him touch you…’

The sound was unearthly, as the howl of rage and horror vibrated against the gaffer tape. Luke lurched towards his mother, and, as he was hauled back, he let his momentum carry him fast and hard into Lardner, taking the two of them down on to the sofa.

Thorne saw what was happening too late.

Saw the hand that the boy had kept pressed against his leg come up high. Saw the light catch something in his fist. Heard the sigh as the flesh was pierced, and the snap.

Then everything was happening at double speed. Crowded with screams and coloured red.

Thorne found himself at Lardner’s feet, staring at the broken shard that Luke had dropped. Its edge was bloodied, and the gaffer tape, wrapped around one end as a makeshift handle, was slick with sweat.

Picture-glass, it looked like. Thin, easily snapped.

He looked up for the piece he knew was embedded in Peter Lardner’s neck, saw that it was already lost beneath a bubbling spring of scarlet.

Maggie Mullen was on her knees, whispering, one arm wrapped tight around Lardner’s neck, both of them slick with blood. Her other arm was reaching desperately for Luke, the hand flapping, trying to grab the son who stood a few feet away, still screaming as though it were a language he had just mastered. The boy’s eyes were saucers, wild with horror and exhilaration.

And with something else Thorne could not name, something more shocking than all the blood that flowed into the cracks between the chipped and flaking boards.

MONDAY
TWENTY-NINE

They’d had wine and a glass of whisky each before getting back to Thorne’s flat. A fair amount of lager since. And their first kiss.

It was a little after six in the morning, and getting light outside.

They lounged, laughing on the sofa, arms and legs moving against each other, and bed clearly on the cards at some point, once a different sort of excitement had burned itself out.

‘I wonder if Hignett and Brigstocke have started arguing about credit yet?’ Porter said. ‘Worked out how this is going to get divvied up.’

Thorne was grinning like an idiot, same as Porter, but he pulled a mock-thoughtful face. ‘Well, we get the three murders, obviously. Four, if you count Sarah Hanley. Your lot can have the kidnap. How’s that?’

‘Oh, can we?

‘Plus any little extras that come up: out-of-date tax discs, that sort of thing…’

‘Very generous of you.’

‘Bloody generous, if you ask me.’

Porter raised her eyebrows.

‘If Lardner had been at that flat in Catford and your lot had collared him, I bet you’d be claiming the bloody set.’

‘Fair point.’

‘Too right it is,’ Thorne said. ‘Now shut your face.’

She smiled, the pissed kind of smile that spread a little slower, and wider. ‘So… You charging into that cottage then, not bothering to let me, or anybody else, know…’

‘Hardly “charging”.’

‘How would you describe it, then?’

‘There wasn’t time to call. I didn’t know how close you were…’

‘You didn’t bother to find out.’

‘I took a decision, same as you did when you went into the flat.’

‘I didn’t go in on my own!’

‘Look, she was terrified about a firearms unit going in there, after what happened in Bow. I was just…’ Thorne puffed out his cheeks, gave up. He knew she had him.

‘Maybe you were getting your own back for being left in the van when we went into Allen’s place?’

Thorne looked shocked. ‘You really think I’m that bloody petty, do you?’

‘It crossed my mind.’

‘You’re right, obviously. I’m very petty.’ He leaned across. ‘Vindictive. Vengeful. I’m a nasty piece of work…’

They kissed again. Longer, the second time.

‘Sorry about the smell,’ Thorne said. ‘They only had that soap, you know? The medicated shit. Little green slivers.’ Thorne had showered at the hospital.

‘It’s five murders,’ Porter said. ‘You said “four”.’

He nodded.

Picture glass. Thin, easily snapped…

Peter Lardner had died in an ambulance which had taken twenty-five minutes to reach the cottage.

‘One more reason not to live in the countryside,’ Thorne had said.

Porter reached down, felt for the lager can on the floor. ‘So what about Luke?’

Thorne could not shift the picture of the boy’s face when they’d finally unwrapped the tape. Red from the adhesive, and wet with tears and sweat, but still that crazed expression around his eyes.

Crazed, just like words scrawled in rage on the wall behind a poster.

‘He’s alive, which I suppose is the main thing. But he won’t be able to wake up tomorrow and just get on with it, will he? That’s going to be who he is now. Getting over that kind of thing’s all about support, and there’s not much of a family for him to go back to.’ He clocked Porter’s expression. ‘What?’

‘I meant what about the case against him?’

Thorne shrugged, picked up his own can. ‘Fuck knows. They’ll have to charge him…’

They each took a drink. Thorne asked Porter if she was hungry, and she told him that she wished she’d eaten something before they’d started celebrating. Thorne got up and went into the kitchen to make them both toast.

They talked easily about nothing through the open door, letting the dirt settle. Like they’d been out all night dancing, or at a party.

Like nobody had bled to death.

Thorne turned from monitoring the grill when he heard Porter get up and watched her walking across the room towards the stereo. He told her to put on some music, apologised for the absence of any Shania Twain. He checked on the toast, flipped over the slices of bread on the grill-pan, then felt her fingers against his shoulder.

She was leaning into him as he turned round, one hand on his face and the other fumbling with the buttons on his shirt.

‘We’ll leave the toast then, shall we?’ Thorne said.

Her tongue tasted sweet and boozy in his mouth. He bent his knees to press his groin against hers, and they staggered away from the cooker, lips pressed back hard against gums and teeth banging together.

She leaned back against the kitchen table and he went with her. Then he felt the pull and the pop, and the dizzying rush of pain, slicing deep from thigh to ankle.

He waited until they’d broken the kiss before he cried out.