Death Message

Jennings had led him into the pub where Squire was already waiting, then gone off to get the drinks in.

He toyed with getting bolshie, maybe asking to see warrant cards, but there was really no need. He knew the Old Bill when he saw them, and these two had the look. Had the chat.

It was lunchtime and there weren’t too many other customers about. They sat around a large wooden table next to the gents’ toilets; the smell of piss and bleach-blocks wafting out whenever the door was opened. Jennings came back with beers for himself and his mate, water for him; tossed a couple of bags of peanuts across, and they got down to it.

‘Keeping busy, Marcus?’

‘You know…’

‘Yeah, course we know. Nice little racket you and your old woman have got going.’

It was nice, had been working out a treat, as a matter of fact. He’d been looking for something ever since he’d got out of the game. Had tried and failed to hold down any number of ordinary jobs, but he wasn’t cut out for life on the up and up. Then Angie had started doing some cleaning work, making a decent job of it, doing more houses on word of mouth and what have you. Bigger houses, where people were that much better off and didn’t seem bothered about the cleaner having a set of keys; letting herself in while the owners were out having long lunches and getting their nails done.

It had been Angie’s idea and it had worked out right from the off.

Once she was in there, trusted enough, and knowing all the family’s comings and goings, he’d turn the place over. Go in with the keys, put a window through when he was finished, maybe kick a back door in or whatever to make it look kosher. Usually Angie would leave a few weeks afterwards, start in a new area, although there were a couple of houses he’d robbed where she was still cleaning. Because she liked the people, and the money was so bloody good…

‘Very nice,’ Jennings said. He licked his lips. ‘Sweet as you like and, you know, I’d hate to be the one to fuck it up for you. But I will.’

Squire threw a fistful of peanuts into his fat mouth. ‘You’ve got a job to do, and so have we.’

‘Livings to make.’

‘Not sure how good Angie’s going to look after a few months in Holloway.’

‘Tasty enough for most of the slags in there, mind you…’

He wasn’t stupid. He’d come across plenty of coppers like these two before, when he was working with other people. The sort who’d tip you the wink about a raid; come in and help themselves to a bundle of twenties when a take was being divvied up.

‘How much are we talking?’ he asked.

Squire finished the nuts, wiped his palms against his jeans. ‘It’s not about money. We just need a favour.’

‘Something up your street,’ Jennings said.

‘Be a real shame if things went tits-up for you now. Especially with a kid and all that.’

Then they explained about the job, Jennings getting excited and licking his lips all the bloody time, some kind of nervous habit; Squire leaning across the table, quieter and scarier. They told him where the house was, when the owner was likely to be out; that they just needed him to go in there and grab whatever paperwork he could find.

He asked them whose place it was and they told him that he didn’t need to know. That it was just a favour. That they really didn’t like to ask, but they hoped he might see his way clear. They gave him a phone number and told him to think about it, and that was about the lot.

He didn’t have a great deal to think about, and a week later he was stepping across broken glass into a darkened kitchen. The place smelled strange. Oily. The house wasn’t overlooked from the back and they’d assured him that the man of the house would be away, so he wasn’t too worried about being seen or making a lot of noise.

He turned on the light. Stared at the stripped-down engine on the kitchen table…

Then he heard voices, and was about to head straight out the way he’d come in when the music told him there was a television on somewhere. It still wasn’t right: the place should have been empty. He’d only done somewhere that was occupied once before, and he wasn’t thrilled about doing it again. But it wasn’t like he had a lot of choice.

Even then, creeping towards the front, there was no way of knowing there was anything wrong. There was no sign of a struggle until he slowly opened the door to the lounge, where they’d told him all the papers would be.

That was when he started to panic.

There was blood, just fucking everywhere. The armchair was on its back, and there was crap scattered about, and the bloke who wasn’t supposed to be there at all was dead as mutton. Lying on his face in front of Coronation Street. The back of his head all wet and shapeless.

He didn’t see any papers; guessed that whoever had done the bloke in had taken them. He didn’t see an empty glass on the floor behind the settee. But then he didn’t see too much of anything; he was far more bothered about getting the hell out of there.

In retrospect, it was probably thick of him, but he didn’t grasp it all straight away. Quite how dodgy it was. He tried calling the number they’d given him, but couldn’t get hold of Jennings and Squire. It was only later, after he’d been nicked and they brought in the glass with his prints on, that it finally clicked. Then he saw just how seriously he’d been stitched up.

The glass he’d been drinking water from in the pub…

Brooks was amazed how much of the detail he could still remember from that night: what was on the television; the design on the back of the dead man’s leather jacket; the material of the armchair and the blood on one of its castors. It was odd, because the idea of revenge had faded during the years he’d spent inside. At first he’d been obsessed with it, with making them pay for fitting him up, but eventually he’d let it go. There had been other things to think about. Angie and Rob. Stuff that made him feel better.

The two men who’d taken six years of his life had as good as got away with it. But then the Black Dogs had gone after his family. And now, all bets were off.

Jennings and Squire. One down and one to go. But there were others he needed to settle up with first, and as he walked back towards the flat, he remembered the piece of paper and the number that he’d scribbled; the message he’d been sent by the man who by all accounts should be trying to catch him.

He’d thought a fair bit about Thorne, asking himself why Nicklin should have had such a thing about him. He was a bloke to be taken seriously, that’s what Nicklin had said. Had to be, if he’d managed to put Nicklin away.

Now the copper they’d lined up to be on the receiving end was sending messages of his own. Like an invitation.

Exhausted, he watched the sky beginning to turn pink beyond Hammersmith Bridge, and wondered what the hell Tom Thorne was up to.

FIFTEEN

‘There’s one by us, lit up like sodding Disneyland. Big, fuck-off sleigh on the garage roof and a flashing Santa climbing up a ladder on the outside of the house.’

‘Some people actually take their kids. Get out of their cars to look at this shit.’

‘The electric bills must be a fortune.’

‘Have you noticed that the more of this tat anyone’s got, the cheaper the fucking house is?’

Halfway through November, and already Christmas was giving the team plenty of things to get worked up about. Plenty to take minds off the job for a minute or two, when the work was frustrating.

The chain of days, and deaths.

Stone looked up from his desk, saw Tom Thorne at the photocopier, and shouted across: ‘Tipped your dustmen yet this year?’

Big laughs all round.

A few years before, Thorne had handed over a tenner to men in fluorescent tabards and woolly hats, knocking on his door and wishing him ‘Merry Christmas from your dustmen.’ When Thorne had discovered that they weren’t in fact his or anyone else’s dustmen, he’d stormed into work, blood boiling. Told anybody who would listen about the scam and how he’d uncovered it, as though he’d pieced together the Jack the Ripper killings.

‘You can’t exactly ask for a fucking ID, can you? And you can pick up one of those fluorescent jackets anywhere…’

His indignation had only increased the hilarity of his colleagues.

‘Bit early for that one, isn’t it?’ Thorne said, lifting the lid of the copier and gathering his papers.

Karim grinned. ‘I don’t know. I reckon once they switch on the lights in town we should be allowed to start taking the piss.’

That suggestion met with general approval, and when, a minute or two later, Stone started whistling ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, there was scattered applause to go with the laughter. Thorne smiled, but found himself heading out of the Incident Room shortly afterwards.

Tuesday morning, thirty-six hours since they’d gathered as a team, as a force, at the scene of Paul Skinner’s murder, and Thorne was finding it hard to see too much humour in anything. Along with everyone else, he’d thrown himself into the work, but that hadn’t proved an especially helpful distraction. Brooks was still making a good job of keeping himself hidden, and their best bet – until such time as he popped up on some credit-card check or CCTV camera – remained the cell-sites.

Another message might help; might narrow down his location from several square miles of west London to a few streets in which to concentrate their efforts.

Another message like the one Thorne had chosen to keep to himself.

He had taken a step which might open up a channel of communication between himself and a man who had killed at least twice. The implications of his actions were growing more terrible as time passed, but it was too late to do anything about it. He couldn’t go back and admit what he’d done. Try to explain why he’d done it.

Killed at least twice…

If Brooks hadn’t killed Skinner, then who had? The same man who had killed Simon Tipper? The same police officer?

Ever since he’d sent the text to Brooks, the repercussions had begun to gather at the back of his mind. Elbowing their way forward and crowding out the good stuff. Fucking up any moment when he began to look forward to something; any encounter that should have been pleasant.

Louise had finally called the morning before. Early, when he was still thick-headed, when what had happened at Skinner’s place had seemed, for a few precious seconds, like a dream that was refusing to fade.

‘You’re not a nutter.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You sound like shit, though. Were you on the piss last night?’

It felt like it. Except that he could remember exactly what he’d been doing. ‘I wish,’ he said.

‘We going to see each other later?’

‘Can I call you in a bit?’

‘Oh, OK.’

‘I’m just on my way out the door.’

He’d been standing in the kitchen wearing nothing but underpants, waiting for the kettle to boil; on his way nowhere. His only thought had been to keep the conversation short. He could hardly say, ‘This phone’s being monitored, so for Christ’s sake don’t say anything embarrassing. Anything that might drop me in the shit…’

He’d decided that he’d tell her later on, in person.

Not that he would tell her everything.

As it was, Louise had been the one to cry off the previous evening, when the wife of an Albanian gangster had been hauled into a car outside Waitrose just before the end of the day.

Now, in his office, Thorne thought about Louise; about the look on her face when she stared at him and unhooked her bra. He decided that was definitely something worth looking forward to. And that unless Marcus Brooks decided to step up his game and slaughtered the Mayor, the Commissioner and their families, he was going to see her, and that look, later.

The look on Marcus Brooks’ face was harder to read. For the umpteenth time, Thorne opened the file on his desk and stared down at the man who’d received the shocking message that had started it all – the death message – five months before. Who had come out of prison, made his plans and begun sending messages of his own.

The hair was dark, short. The eyes were darker; ‘brown’, according to the information printed below the picture. This was all that Thorne could tell for certain. It wasn’t just the blank expression that might equally have been masking simple boredom or murderous fury. Or that the picture itself was six years old, and that prison, as Thorne had seen only too well with Nicklin, could change a person’s appearance as radically as any surgery.

Thorne was simply unable to get a handle on who Marcus Brooks was, and his picture did not tell the whole story. Common sense told him he was dealing with a man who knew how to take care of himself; who might watch a man die and not blink. But the man Nicklin had described, the man Thorne had heard in the silence down a phone line, had also been destroyed by grief. Had been hollowed out by it.

He thought that most faces gave it all away. Was sure that almost anyone presented with a photograph of him would not have needed more than one quick look. Would say: Copper. Lives alone. Doesn’t mix too well with others.

But Marcus Brooks’ picture was a lot less revealing. Thorne could only hope that if and when it came to it, he could look into the man’s eyes and understand what they were telling him. Lives, his own included, had depended on a lot less.

Meantime, try as he might, he couldn’t see the person behind the picture.

It was like looking at one of the cartoons around his online poker table.

DS Adrian Nunn had called earlier in the day for a quick chat. He’d moaned about his workload, about caps on overtime, and had asked Thorne what time his shift was ending.

When Thorne walked out of Becke House a little after six, Nunn was waiting for him. He was wearing his Gestapo coat again.

‘Tube or car?’ Nunn asked.

‘I’m on the Tube.’

Nunn fell into step with him. ‘Suits me. I can get the Northern Line straight down to Embankment. District from there all the way to Putney.’

‘Going back to work?’

‘No, but I only live round the corner from the office. It’s pretty handy.’

‘That’s still a three-hour round trip,’ Thorne said. ‘I’m guessing you want more than just a quick chat. Mind you, you wanted more than that when you rang, didn’t you?’

They walked quickly through drizzle up Aerodrome Road, and left towards the Tube station. Past Colindale Park and the British Newspaper Library. Thorne had used the place several times, trawling through the back copies and the microfiche in search of some crucial piece of information. He’d always ended up spending longer in there than he’d needed. Losing himself in stories and pictures that had no relevance to the case he was working; enjoying the feel of the crisp, yellowing pages of the old editions. Pre-Page Three. When Spurs had a team, and celebrities were famous for doing something.

‘I just wanted to stress that everything we talked about the other day remains confidential,’ Nunn said.

‘Go on then.’

Nunn smiled, but only with his mouth.

‘It seems a bit bloody odd,’ Thorne said, ‘that you should be so adamant about it. Considering Skinner’s dead, I mean.’

‘Nothing’s changed.’

‘Try telling that to Mrs Skinner.’

‘Things don’t just stop, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘“T”s to cross and “i”s to dot, right?’

‘Little things like whether Mrs Skinner gets her husband’s police pension if it turns out there would have been sufficient evidence to press charges against him.’

Thorne almost laughed for the first time in a day or more. ‘Is that what this is all about?’

‘I’m just making a point. This has got to run its course.’

‘Look, I know you lot love all this cloak-and-dagger shit,’ Thorne said. ‘But the fact that Skinner may not have been completely kosher has probably got quite a lot to do with why he’s dead. Why several people are dead. So it’s not like we can keep this a secret. I’ve already spoken to my DCI about it. It’s part of our case.’

Nunn looked up at the information board; thinking about it. ‘As long as you really try to keep out of our way,’ he said.

They didn’t have to wait long for a southbound train, and Thorne was grateful. Standing on the platform was conducive to nothing more than small talk and he was fresh out of it. The train was more or less empty: they had a carriage to themselves. It was surprisingly hot once the doors had shut and they were moving, and Nunn stood to take off his coat; folded it across his knees.

‘Is that really true?’ Thorne asked. ‘That nothing’s changed?’ He was desperate to know exactly what Nunn had meant. Was the status of the investigation still active for such prosaic reasons as Nunn had suggested, or was there something else going on? Were they actively pursuing a second officer?

‘Nothing substantial,’ Nunn said.

‘Well, thanks for sorting that one out for me.’ Thorne wondered if DPS recruits did courses in remaining amicably non-committal. If they shared classroom space with politicians and certain women he’d been involved with. ‘Good result, or bad?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘Skinner being murdered.’

‘Hang on a minute…’

‘I’m serious. We both know Skinner was as bent as a nine-bob note, even though nobody’s come out and said it, so what do the powers-that-be make of his getting knocked off? Are they happy enough to be rid of a corrupt officer without having to go to the trouble of actually doing it themselves? Saves embarrassment, I would have thought.’

‘Nobody’s embarrassed.’

‘And what about you? You’ve lost the chance to nick him. Don’t you feel a bit… robbed?’

‘More than a bit,’ Nunn said, enjoying how much his answer took Thorne aback. ‘That’s a shock, right? Don’t you think that getting shot of a seriously corrupt officer is every bit as rewarding as catching a killer, or a gang of armed robbers, or nicking a drug dealer? I’ve done all those things, and I can promise you that it is. Every bit.’

Thorne could only shrug, but he wasn’t sure he believed Nunn. At least, he wasn’t certain he would feel the same way; would get the same satisfaction from nabbing a bent copper as he would from catching a murderer.

Until he remembered they could be one and the same thing.

There wasn’t too much conversation from then on. People joined the train at Brent Cross and Golders Green, and it was full by the time they pulled away from Hampstead. Thorne and Nunn had been raising their voices to be heard above the noise of the train, but with passengers sitting around and standing above them, lurching as the train rocked and juddered, neither man was very keen to talk any more.

‘This is me,’ Thorne said as the train approached Camden.

Nunn had been sitting on the flap of Thorne’s jacket, shifted slightly to let him stand up. ‘You know where I am if anything else comes up.’

‘Right. Same here, for what it’s worth.’

Nunn looked at his watch. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy a quick drink?’

The invitation seemed genuine enough and it took Thorne completely by surprise. He looked at his own watch while he thought about what to say, but Nunn’s expression as he’d asked the question had revealed a thumbnail snap of the man that he hadn’t expected to see. That was sad, for all manner of reasons.

Copper. Lives alone. Doesn’t mix too well with others…

‘Sounds like a great idea,’ Thorne said. ‘But my girlfriend’s cooking me dinner…’

The Bengal Lancer’s home delivery was as reliable as always, and the two of them made short work of rogan gosht and chicken tikka, with mutter paneer and a sag bhaji, pilau rice and nan bread. Thorne fetched two more bottles of Kingfisher from the fridge, then carried the plates out to the kitchen.

He shouted through to the living room: ‘I meant to say, about my mobile…’

Louise called back, asked him to say it again. His words had been lost in noise from the TV as she flicked through the channels.

Thorne came to the doorway and Louise turned down the volume. ‘Just about my mobile,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing important, but you need to call me on the prepay phone from now on.’

‘I thought you had your old Nokia back.’

‘I do, but that line is being… monitored. You know, in case Brooks sends another message, in case he decides to call, whatever. So best if you use the prepay. You’ve got the number, right?’

She told him that she had. He said he could go to prison for what he’d just told her. She promised to visit.

‘You think he might, then? Get in touch again?’

‘God knows.’

‘I presume they’ve set up a trace on it, right? Silly fucker rings, you’ve got him. Simple as that.’

‘Yeah, be nice,’ Thorne said. He drifted back into the kitchen and Louise turned the sound back up on the TV. He finished loading the dishwasher then leaned back against the draining board. From where he was standing he could see her in the living room. She had found some cable channel showing eighties music videos and began humming along with an old Depeche Mode track.

Thorne glanced over at his leather jacket, hung across the back of a kitchen chair. His Nokia was in one of the inside pockets; the prepay phone was in the other. He’d programmed distinctive ringtones into each, so there would be no confusion.

He polished off his beer and started an argument with himself.

He’d been straight with Louise about the phone being monitored when she didn’t strictly need to know, hadn’t he? So, maybe that excused his not telling her about the message he’d sent to Marcus Brooks. Or went some way towards excusing it, at least. Wasn’t she better off not knowing about it? Not being involved? Not getting dragged through the steaming trail of shit he was busy creating?

He knew she wouldn’t buy that for a minute.

It came from the same well-worn bag of tricks as, ‘I didn’t tell you I was sleeping with someone else because I knew you’d be upset, and I didn’t want to hurt you’. Thorne knew, deep down, that it had more to do with cowardice than it did with compassion. That the lie by omission was usually worse in the long run than the terrible truth.

He still wasn’t going to tell her, though. Not if he could avoid it…

When Thorne went back into the living room, they made themselves comfortable. They sat together on the floor in front of the sofa; broke up the last of the poppadoms and watched Yvonne Kitson do her turn on Crimewatch.

In a five-minute round-up slot at the end of the programme, Kitson fronted an appeal for more information about the murder of Deniz Sedat. Wearing a well-chosen, charcoal business suit, she said that the incident had ‘shocked a community’ and urged anyone with information to get in touch. Assured them that calls would be treated in confidence. She finished with a special plea to the young woman who had called once already; who had seemed eager to tell them something and whom they were extremely keen to talk to again.

‘Knowing that lovely part of north London as I do,’ Louise said afterwards, ‘I think it would take more than some gangster getting knifed to shock anybody.’

Thorne smiled. ‘We can’t let anyone know that though, can we?’

With millions lavished each year on improving the city’s image, it wasn’t clever to highlight those places where policing came close to warfare. The Olympic Games were only a few years away and already there were jokes. About how well Great Britain would do in the shooting this time round, and the marathon runners straying into parts of Hackney and Tottenham and never being seen again.

Louise began searching through the channels again. ‘She came across well, I thought. Kitson,’ she said.

Thorne shrugged, like he hadn’t really thought about it.

Louise and Yvonne had got on well enough when they’d met; for the few weeks when they’d been working together. But Thorne had sensed a problem developing since, had heard it in Louise’s tone just then, when she was seemingly being complimentary. He’d suggested to her, once, that she might be jealous, and she’d bitten his head off, told him not to flatter himself. He hadn’t been sure what she’d meant. Was he flattering himself to think that Kitson would be interested? Or that Louise would give a shit? He certainly wasn’t going to push his luck by asking.

‘Is there anything else on?’ Louise asked. Thorne leaned over and snatched Time Out from the low table in the window. ‘Anything worth staying out of bed for?’

Thorne flicked through to the TV pages. There were Champions League highlights on ITV after the news. They were showing The Usual Suspects, which he never missed, on Channel Four. There was late-night poker on at least three different cable stations.

‘Absolutely fuck all,’ he said.

There was very little light. Barely enough to see faces thirty feet away, and he couldn’t move too much for fear of making a noise. This was hardly going to be winning any Oscars.

He only had fifteen seconds to play with anyway. But he did what he could to make the clip more interesting: started on the canal and moved across until he had the bloke in the middle of the picture; until he had both of them. ‘Developing the shot’, that’s what it was called.

He lowered the phone, looked at the woman on her knees. His big hands on the top of her head. The grunting and the sucking noises.

There was plenty to develop to…

Him and Angie hadn’t been big on the cinema before; just once or twice probably, before Robbie’d come along. But he’d seen a lot of films over the years inside, got quite a taste for them. Once a week on the big screen and DVDs from the prison library. Nothing like this, of course, they wouldn’t allow that, but there’d been the occasional flash of tit to get excited about now and again. Plenty of prison movies, obviously; they were fond of showing those to wind everybody up. Stir Crazy, Escape from Alcatraz, he’d seen all of them more than once. The Shawshank Redemption when the screws really wanted to take the piss…

He tried to shift his leg an inch or two, could hear something moving in the long grass behind him. It was uncomfortable, crouching in the shadows to keep out of sight, but it wasn’t like he’d planned it this way. He’d had no idea where the fucker was going when he’d started following him. What he’d got planned for the evening.

He’d followed the big van past Southall Park, along the Broadway and down along the route of the canal between the school and the retail park. He’d slowed and turned in when he’d seen the van do the same. Watched the girl walk up to the window and realised that the driver had known exactly what he was looking for.

And what he wanted for his money…

Brooks had got what he needed. Invisible behind a row of recycling bins, he put the phone away. Disgusted with the man leaning back against the dirty, wet wall. Disgusted with himself for being excited.

He watched as the man pushed; the tom’s ponytail swinging as her head moved back and forth. Remembering the feeling – Christ… trying to remember it, years ago – when Angie had done the same thing to him.

Closed his eyes, but could remember only that he would never touch her again. Feel her again.

He took one more good look at the man’s face. Then he lowered his head, and waited for them to finish.

They lay in the dark afterwards, Thorne pressed up against her, sucking in mouthfuls of hair. The breath coming back. They’d finished with Louise on top, and when he’d told her he was coming, she’d pushed herself down in an effort to hold him inside her. He’d rolled from beneath her in the nick of time and she’d groaned and dropped on to her side.

‘I thought it wasn’t safe,’ he said finally.

‘No.’

‘So, why…?’

She grabbed his hand, pulled his arm tighter around her waist.

‘Do you want to get pregnant?’

‘No. Just at that moment, you know? I wanted you to stay inside me.’

A cat – Thorne couldn’t be sure that it was Elvis – was yowling in the garden. The old lady who lived upstairs had some TV quiz show on stupidly loud.

‘I should probably wear something next time.’

‘What, like a fireman’s helmet and wellies?’

‘A condom.’

She snorted. ‘Yes, I know. It just makes me laugh to hear you say it. That you find some things hard to say. You’re weird.’

‘I’m weird?’

They both laughed and rolled over together. Thorne brought his knees up as Louise curled against him. Her breath was on his back and he could feel her eyelashes against his shoulder when she blinked.

He listened to the applause from the television upstairs. And when it had been switched off, he lay there thinking: I don’t know this woman at all.

Remember that time I missed Robbie’s birthday party? The last one before I went inside, the one in the burger place. I know you will, because we had a steaming row about it. You telling me that Robbie was in tears and me shouting all the more because I felt like such an arsehole about it. I’d been doing some stupid favour for Wayne. Poxy driving job down on the coast. Waiting around, wondering what I was involved in and thinking about Robbie running around with his mates and trying his new football shirt on.

It was a favour I owed the bloke, that was the thing.

Thing about it is, I know sometimes people have taken the piss, made me look like a right mug, whatever, but I’ve always tried to be as good as my word, to be reliable. You say you’ll do something, you do it. You understand that, don’t you, Ange?

Same as this business with Nicklin. Liking someone, not liking them’s got fuck all to do with it. When someone does you a favour, you owe them and, whatever else, I’ve always settled my debts. Simple as that.

From what Nicklin told me inside, I reckon this bloke Thorne is pretty much the same. The sort who follows things through, you know? He’ll feel as if he owes something to these fuckers, to their nearest and dearest at any rate. That’s exactly what Nicklin wants, if you ask me. Thorne won’t leave it alone, he’ll get right deep into it. Once he’s made a promise he’ll keep it, or at least he’ll try to keep it, and I’ve always respected that.

I’ve not learned much. I know, fuck all probably.

Except how important it is to know you’re doing the right thing, even if it doesn’t always feel like it.

Funny fucking pair, the two of us. Me and this copper. Sitting here, filling up these pages, trying to work things out in this poky shithole, I can’t help wondering what he thinks about what I’m doing. I don’t really care, but all the same, it’s on my mind.

Which one of us is going to end up looking like a mug.

Maybe both of us…

SIXTEEN

The sun was just coming up, and Thorne scraped a thin crust of frost from his windscreen with the edge of a CD case. The trees on his road – he had no idea what sort they were – were completely bare, and all had been severely cut back for the winter. Looking along the pavement, there was an almost perfect line of them. Bleached and stumpy in the half-light.

The message had woken him half an hour before. The tone he’d set up on the prepay handset.

He’d stood there in his dressing-gown, the cat pushing at his shins, and watched the clip. If he hadn’t recognised the man, he might have thought he’d been sent some random snippet of amateur porno. But dark and fuzzy as the image was, there was no mistaking the face; the punter being serviced by a woman who was almost certainly a hooker and was definitely not the man’s wife.

Not Mrs Bin-bag.

Thorne had stared at his other phone, at the mobile that was being monitored, and waited anxiously to see if the message would be sent to that handset too. He had given it a couple of minutes: felt colder and more uncertain with every few seconds that passed.

Louise had staggered through, pulling on a robe and asking who his message had been from.

‘Some fucking upgrade offer…’

‘What?’

‘Do I want an upgrade?’

She mumbled something, still half asleep, then turned and walked back into the bedroom.

Brigstocke had sounded only barely more awake when he’d answered the phone. ‘Fucking hell, Tom…’

‘How much surveillance have we got on Martin Cowans?’

‘What? Er… there’s an officer at his home address.’

‘What about the clubhouse?’

‘Can’t we do this later?’

Thorne had heard a woman’s voice; a muffled question as a hand was placed over the mouthpiece; children shouting somewhere. The Brigstockes had three kids to get ready for school every morning. ‘Russell?’

‘Yeah, there’s someone at the clubhouse. And I think S &O have got people on the place as well.’

‘How many?’

‘Fucked if I know. Nobody’s breaking into there though, are they? You said it was like Fort Knox.’

‘We thought we’d got Skinner’s place covered, remember?’

Brigstocke was wide awake now, and irritated. ‘We’ll talk about this at work, OK? I’ve got a meeting at nine…’

Thorne tossed the CD case back into the boot and climbed into the car. He had already started the engine, giving the BMW’s ancient heating system a chance to take the chill off, but the steering wheel was still freezing to the touch and he couldn’t be arsed to go back inside for his gloves. He looked at his watch; it was a good time to be driving. All being well he’d get in before seven-thirty.

Pulling the car round into a three-point turn, his eye was caught by movement above him, and he glanced at the tree opposite; at a fat, wet pigeon, perched awkwardly, halfway up. Its movements – the umbrella-shakes of its feathers – made it seem as if it were shivering.

Cold and pissed off; naked as the tree.

He didn’t quite have the place to himself, but for half an hour or so he was able to sit in relative peace and quiet. To eat toast and drink tea, and worry about the health and safety of a drug dealing, heavily tattooed gangster. To reflect on a course of action that meant he was the only one who knew Martin Cowans was in immediate danger.

To wonder if it was the stupidest thing he’d ever done.

It was a tough chart to top…

From his window, he watched officer after officer coming through the Peel Centre gates. Some he knew well; some he didn’t know from Adam; others he’d no more than smiled at when they’d passed on the stairs or in the canteen. Somewhere, there was a police officer who, in league with a friend or colleague, had killed a gang leader and sent an innocent man to prison for it. And who, six years later, according to Marcus Brooks, had battered his partner in crime to death rather than risk seeing their criminal history exposed.

Thorne wanted to find that man. Wanted him every bit as much as he wanted Marcus Brooks.

‘Bright and early, Tom,’ Karim said, marching straight across to the kettle. He held up the teabags, asking if Thorne was ready for another.

Thorne nodded. ‘Plenty of fucking worms to catch.’

He wasn’t the only one making an early start. Richard Rawlings was on the phone before Thorne had finished his second mug of tea.

‘Any news?’

‘The PM confirms that the cause of death was blunt trauma to the head, and puts the time of death somewhere between three and five on Saturday afternoon.’

‘You know that’s not what I meant.’

‘I’m not sure what else I can tell you,’ Thorne said.

‘Any news about Brooks? Any progress…?’

Nobody had spoken officially to Rawlings about Marcus Brooks, but Thorne was not surprised that he knew the name of their prime suspect. He could have found out through any number of sources: jungle drums; friends or friends of friends on the squad. Or even Skinner himself, who had probably told him all about the video clip he’d been shown, and what it meant.

And there was another possibility: a simple explanation for Rawlings knowing all about Marcus Brooks; for knowing more about the case than anybody else.

‘Is there anything you can tell us?’ Thorne said.

There was a pause. ‘Such as?’

‘Such as why Marcus Brooks, or anyone else, would want to smash your friend’s head in with a hammer.’

‘No fucking idea.’

‘That’s your first “fucking” of the conversation. I’m pleased you’re making an effort.’

Thorne was surprised to hear Rawlings laughing. ‘Well, I like to start off slowly, build up during the day, you know?’

Afterwards, Thorne failed to return several messages: one from Keith Bannard, the DCI from S &O: another from a CPS clerk, wanting to talk about a bloodstained training shoe that had ‘gone walkabout’ from an evidence locker; and a rambling message from his Auntie Eileen, who never got round to saying why she was calling. Thorne guessed she wanted to have the ‘What are you doing at Christmas?’ conversation.

He heard someone outside the door telling Kitson how good she’d been on TV the previous night. When she came in, Thorne added his own congratulations.

‘Anything?’

‘A few people ringing in to say they saw someone dropping something into the litter bin that could have been a knife, but I don’t think that gets us very far. The woman hasn’t called back.’

‘There’s time yet.’

Kitson was something of a closet football fan and they talked about the previous night’s European results. Arsenal were now at the bottom of their group having lost at home to Hamburg. Thorne hadn’t had a chance to talk to Hendricks yet, who he knew would be devastated.

‘Did you see the highlights?’ Kitson asked.

‘Better things to do,’ Thorne said.

He walked around to Colindale station; waited for Brigstocke to emerge from his meeting with the borough commander.

‘Sorry I called so early.’

‘Why the sudden urgency?’ Brigstocke asked.

‘No urgency. I just thought we should cover our arses.’

‘Like I said on the phone, I think they’re covered.’

‘It’s understandable that we’re focusing on the Skinner killing,’ Thorne said. ‘But there’s no reason to presume that Brooks has finished with the Black Dogs.’

‘We’re not presuming anything.’

‘That he shouldn’t want to hit them again.’

‘No, you’re right.’

‘You said there are people on the home address and the clubhouse?’

They walked into the station’s reception area, and out. Began to walk back across to Becke House. The sky was a grey wash, but here and there were glimpses of sun, like streaks of milky flesh seen through thin and frayed material.

Brigstocke smiled as he buttoned his overcoat. ‘It’s good to know you’re taking the welfare of the city’s biker gangs so seriously.’

‘I understand some of them do a lot of work for charity,’ Thorne said.

They crossed the road in front of a Met minivan which had just turned out of the main gates. The driver leaned on his horn and, recognising him as someone he knew, Thorne gave him a friendly finger.

Brigstocke was taller, with a longer stride, but had to jog a step or two to match Thorne’s pace. ‘Slow down, for fuck’s sake.’

‘I’m too bloody cold to dawdle,’ Thorne lied.

They showed their passes at the Driving School entrance as it was closer, and walked towards Becke House, which rose, less than majestically, brown and grey on the other side of the parade square. They passed the gym, and Brigstocke put a hand on Thorne’s arm. ‘Listen, I wanted to say sorry.’

‘For what?’

‘For being a twat.’

‘Which particular time?’

Brigstocke looked at the floor as they walked. ‘You know there’s been something going on.’

‘The Dark Side, you mean?’

‘Right. I don’t want to go into it, OK?’

Thorne had raised it three days before with Nunn. As they’d driven hell for leather towards Skinner’s house, Thorne had asked the DPS man what he knew about an investigation into his own team; about the Regulation Nines that appeared to be flying about in Russell Brigstocke’s Incident Room. Nunn had been as forthcoming as usual. He said that it was an Internal Investigation Command matter, that his was a separate department, that he couldn’t comment in any case. Seeing no point in another ‘couldn’t’ meaning ‘don’t want to’ conversation, Thorne had let it drop.

But he still wanted to know; now more than ever.

‘I told you before,’ Thorne said. ‘If you want to talk about it…’

‘Cheers.’

‘We can go and get hammered somewhere. Sit and slag the fuckers off.’

Brigstocke nodded. ‘It’s tempting, but I just wanted to explain why I’ve been walking around with a face like a smacked arse, that’s all.’

‘I couldn’t tell the difference,’ Thorne said.

They walked into Becke House and straight into a waiting lift. They rode up in silence, each staring ahead at his own reflection in the steel doors. Stepping out on the third floor, Thorne made straight for the Incident Room, watching Brigstocke head the other way along the corridor and close his office door.

He loitered for a minute, then went to find Holland. ‘How busy are you?’

‘Up to my tits in phone-company correspondence and CCTV requisition orders,’ Holland said. ‘Have you got a better offer?’

Ten minutes later they were arguing about which CD to listen to as Thorne drove towards Southall.

SEVENTEEN

A quick glance at the Police National Computer had revealed not only a couple of fines for shoplifting and a suspended sentence for possession of a Class A drug, but the rather more surprising fact that Martin Cowans’ ‘old lady’ was actually a nice posh girl called Philippa. That she’d been brought up in Guildford and privately educated.

‘How the fuck should I know where he is?’

Standing on the doorstep of Martin Cowans’ semi, Thorne couldn’t help but admire the degree to which the young woman doing the shouting had reinvented herself. There was no hint of anything remotely genteel; not the slightest trace of a ‘Pimm’s and ponies’ accent.

‘And why would I tell you? Even if I did fucking know?’

Thorne wondered if her parents had ever met their prospective son-in-law. He imagined two jaws dropping and the hasty redrafting of wills.

‘Have you called him on his mobile?’ Holland asked.

Bin-bag’s girlfriend almost smiled, but caught herself in time. She took the cigarette from her mouth and flicked it past Holland’s shoulder on to the path. ‘Call him your-fucking-selves,’ she said. She tightened the dressing-gown across her black T-shirt. ‘I’m going back to bed.’

‘Thanks for your help, Pippa,’ Thorne said.

Her eyes widened, furious for just a second before she slammed the door.

Holland left a beat, cleared his throat. ‘Have we got his mobile number?’

Thorne shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen it listed anywhere. He didn’t give us a business card, did he?’

‘Maybe your mate at S &O’s got it.’

Thorne owed Keith Bannard a call anyway. He fished out the number as they were walking back towards the patrol car parked opposite the house. He got Bannard’s voicemail and left a message.

Coming off the back of twelve hours in the front seat of a Ford Focus, the uniformed officer on surveillance had been a tad surly when Thorne and Holland had first arrived. He seemed cheerier now, having obviously enjoyed watching them get Cowans’ front door slammed in their faces.

‘Silly bitch,’ he said. ‘Probably just pissed off because he didn’t come home all night.’

Thorne felt a bubble of panic rise and burst in his stomach. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘He’d already gone out by the time I came on last night. He stays out quite a lot, mind you. Crashes round at other bikers’ places, one of the lads was saying.’

Holland looked at Thorne. ‘We’ve got people watching all the known addresses for Black Dogs members. Shouldn’t be too hard to track him down.’

The officer in the car grinned, tossed his newspaper into the back seat. ‘I reckon he’s got a couple of other women on the go, an’ all.’

‘Jammy sod,’ Holland said.

Thinking about the video clip he’d seen a few hours earlier, Thorne wondered how many of those women Martin Cowans had to pay for.

Kitson carried the cassette player through to her office and closed the door. She’d listened to the most recent batch of calls in the Incident Room, leaning close to the speaker to hear above the chatter; had jabbed at the buttons, pressed REWIND, and listened again to one call in particular.

One that was exciting and confusing in equal measure.

In her office, she played the tape again, studying the transcript of the call as she listened. It was no more than twenty seconds long. Then she went back out and helped herself to the headphones from Andy Stone’s iPod, came back and listened one more time, to make sure.

The voice had sounded familiar to Kitson immediately, but not because she’d heard it when the woman had called before. That first time, when she had obviously rung from a mobile on the street, the voice had been competing with the noise of traffic. The words had been muffled; hesitant and choked with nerves.

This time, there was only the sound of her voice. This time, the woman had been braver. Clearer.

‘I know who killed Deniz.’

And Kitson recognised the voice. The woman had still not been quite brave enough to mention a name, and Kitson could not be sure she was telling the truth. But she knew for certain who the caller was.

From Cowans’ house they drove up on to the main drag and east along the Broadway. The traffic moved slowly through the densely populated half-mile of Asian shops and markets – the Punjabi Bazaar, Rita’s Samosa Centre, the Sikh Bridal Gallery – before they turned into a small road that ran alongside the canal and parked just below the bridge.

Thorne got out and walked back up to lean on a low wall a dozen or so feet above the water. To his right, razor-wire coiled along the top of a fence separating the towpath from a huge B &Q warehouse, its windows dull and its red metal siding streaked brown with dirt and rust.

Holland took a pack of ten Marlboro Lights from his pocket. He pushed at the wrapping with a fingernail for a few seconds, then put it back. ‘What are we doing here?’

It was a perfectly fair question, and Thorne could do no better than duck it. ‘Would you rather be back at the office filling those forms in?’

Dotted along the edge of the black water, overflowing rubbish bags hung from fence-posts every twenty feet or so. The banks were littered with cans and plastic bottles, but Thorne was amazed to see, concentrated in one small spot next to the water, upwards of two dozen swans, gathered as if for a meeting. Most were all white, but a number had darker bills and feathers, seemingly covered in dust. The grass around them was thick with small, white feathers.

It was the sort of surprise that Thorne enjoyed. That London provided now and again.

‘One of them went for me when I was a kid,’ Holland said. ‘Vicious fuckers.’

Thorne moved a few feet along the wall, towards the warehouse. There was a track down to a small area of accessible wasteland, canal-side of the huge metal skips and stacks of wooden pallets. Twenty feet further on, the scrub became the car park of a squat, grey pub; a sign below the flag of St George advertised ‘Food and Live Premiership Football’.

He replayed the video in his head.

It was here, or somewhere very like here, that Brooks had hidden, to film Martin Cowans’ sordid encounter. Had he followed them? Maybe Brooks had set up Cowans in advance, had paid the hooker himself. Thorne tried to remember the fuzzy image of the man with the woman kneeling in front of him; to picture the outlines of the buildings just visible against the black sky behind them. He stared around in the vain hope of seeing something familiar.

‘Are we looking for something?’ Holland asked.

Thorne saw only a distant gasometer, and, emerging from a house in the terrace below them, an Asian woman waving a stick, sending a clump of pigeons rising from her front garden.

He wasn’t sure what he would have done if he had recognised something.

‘What’s that?’ Holland asked, pointing.

Thorne looked down and saw something football-sized and almost round in the water. It bobbed against the black brick, catching the light. ‘It’s a coconut,’ he said. ‘Wrapped in plastic.’

‘Come again?’

‘Some of the local Hindus chuck them in during religious festivals, as a sacrifice. It’s the closest they can get to a sacred river.’

‘The Grand Union Canal?’

‘Well, in theory, the coconuts can float all the way out to sea. Maybe find their way into the Ganges one day.’

‘That’s fucking ridiculous. They’ll be washed up in Southend, if they’re lucky.’

‘It’s just a gesture, Dave.’

Holland shook his head, carried on staring. ‘Is it even possible?’

‘Nothing wrong with being optimistic,’ Thorne said.

Especially when it was just about all you had left…

They wandered for a few minutes along the main road, resisting the temptation of the food on offer at the pub, and opting instead for lunch at a Burger King. Thorne felt a twinge of altogether more manageable guilt as they carried Whoppers, fries and onion rings to a table near the window and tucked in.

‘Sophie still smelling the fags on you?’ Thorne asked.

Holland nodded, grunting through a mouthful of food, but Thorne could see a wariness around his eyes at the mention of his girlfriend’s name. She had never been Thorne’s biggest fan. He couldn’t remember ever falling out with her, had not even met her that many times, but she had some idea that he was the sort of copper she never wanted Holland to turn into. Whatever she might think of him, it was clear to Thorne that the woman only had Holland’s best interests at heart. And that she was a pretty good judge of character.

‘I bet the baby keeps her busy.’

‘Chloe’s three,’ Holland said.

‘You know what I mean.’

Holland looked like he hadn’t the faintest idea. He went to the toilet, and stopped at the counter on his way back to get them both tea.

‘Christ, you’ll be thinking about schools any minute.’

‘Already started, mate.’

‘Anywhere decent round your place?’

‘Sophie wants to get out of London.’ Holland looked down, stirred his tea.

‘OK.’ Thorne wondered how long that idea had been floating around; if it was more than just an idea. ‘You not keen?’

Holland shrugged, certainly not keen on talking about it.

‘Well, hopefully she’s less pissed off with me these days,’ Thorne said. Holland was about to reply, but Thorne stopped him. ‘It’s fine, I know what she thinks. It doesn’t matter.’

‘Why “these days”?’

‘Well, I’m not leading you into quite so much trouble.’ Holland’s face darkened a little, so Thorne tried to lighten things, beckoning with a finger across the table. ‘Not luring you towards the shadows…’

They said nothing else until they got up to leave, when Holland stood waiting for Thorne to get his jacket on, and said: ‘What makes you think you were leading me anywhere?’

With no further news of any sort, Thorne was tense and jumpy by the end of the day. Unaware of quite how much he needed a drink until it was suggested. He happily joined Stone, Holland and Karim on their way across to The Oak, but when Kitson caught up with him in the pub’s car park he let the others go on ahead.

‘Where’ve you been all day?’ she asked.

‘Trying to stay invisible,’ Thorne said. ‘Why are you so horribly full of yourself?’

‘My mystery woman called again.’

‘Told you she would.’

‘And she’s not a mystery any more…’

‘Go on then.’

‘Harika Kemal.’

Thorne took a second. ‘Sedat’s girlfriend? The one who was in the toilet?’ Kitson nodded. Thorne twisted his face into a parody of confusion.

‘Fuck knows,’ Kitson said. ‘I’m bringing her in for a chat tomorrow and we’ll find out.’

‘Sounds like something to celebrate, though.’

‘God, yes.’ They walked towards the entrance. ‘What about you?’

‘Let’s stick with good news…’

Inside, The Oak was busy for a midweek evening with the noisiest and smokiest pockets indicating the presence of the men and women from the Peel Centre and Colindale, the majority of the pub’s regular clientele. The ‘traditional’ atmosphere and drab decor had remained unchanged for as long as Thorne could remember, thanks to a landlord who now understood that his customers’ tastes did not run far beyond beer and simple pub grub. He had occasionally tried to ring the changes, but usually with little success. A quiz night had ended in a brawl. Two weeks earlier there had been a karaoke evening in the back bar, but two rat-arsed constables caterwauling their way through ‘I Fought the Law’ had forced several of the most hardened drinkers to make an early night of it.

Thorne and Kitson got in their drinks and joined Holland and the others. They congratulated Kitson on the break in her case, wished her luck with her interview, but nobody raised a glass just yet. That would have to wait until she’d made an arrest.

‘What’s it been, then?’ Kitson said. ‘Four, five days, since the last message from Brooks?’

Thorne took a healthy gulp of beer. ‘Five. The Skinner clip.’

‘That might be the lot. He’s got a couple of the bikers, a copper he thinks is responsible for fitting him up. Maybe he’s called it a day.’

‘Maybe…’

‘How much revenge can anyone want?’

‘Depends how much they’ve suffered.’

‘It’s not going to bring back his girlfriend, is it? Or his kid.’

‘Imagine they were your kids,’ Thorne said.

When Brigstocke arrived, the group shuffled around the table to make room, and began to let off steam. They joked about a recent court case which had seen a man prosecuted, having taken payment from a mentally disturbed woman in return for promising to kill her, and then failing to honour the contract.

Karim said it was a waste of money, that somebody in the CPS needed shooting. Stone wondered, while they were on the subject, how much it was costing to play nursemaid to a bunch of ‘hairy-arsed drug dealers’. Holland said that if they really wanted to talk about waste, they should do something about the time and energy he’d had to spend over the past two days filling in mandates and fucking requisition forms. That it was small wonder they weren’t solving more cases…

Stone raised his glass. ‘Here’s your answer, matey. They’ve done research proving that alcohol – in moderation, obviously – can help you think more clearly. I swear. They should just let us all have a drink or two during the day.’ There was laughter, a couple of small cheers from around the table. ‘I’m telling you… stick a beer barrel in the Incident Room, a few optics by the coffee machine, and watch the clear-up rates go through the fucking roof.’

Next to him, Thorne felt Kitson jump when Brigstocke banged his glass down on the table. ‘Don’t talk like a cunt, Andy. Fuck’s sake…’

Everyone watched, dumbstruck, as Brigstocke stood up and stalked away towards the bar. Stone sniggered awkwardly, Karim raised his eyebrows at Holland, and the others shrugged or stared into their drinks.

Thorne got up to follow Brigstocke, but thought better of it halfway there, and made for the exit instead. Outside, in the doorway, he used his prepay phone to call Louise. Told her he was having just the one more, and that he wouldn’t be back too late.

The bell had rung half an hour earlier to clear out the civilians, and Thorne had decided that one more drink couldn’t hurt. He guessed Louise would be in bed now anyway; hoped she wouldn’t think he was avoiding her, after what had happened the night before.

Was he avoiding her?

Kitson had left well before last orders. She wanted to say goodnight to her kids, and sort out the next day’s interview with Harika Kemal. Brigstocke was ensconced in a corner with Stone. Thorne hoped everything was OK, but the conversation looked pretty animated. He had drunk three pints of Guinness but had taken them slowly, in halves. He knew he’d be OK to drive home.

He heard his mobile ringing, reached for his jacket, dug around, but missed the call. He was looking at the details when it rang again in his hand: Bannard.

‘You got Cowans’ mobile number for me?’ Thorne asked.

‘I don’t think that phone’s working any more,’ Bannard said. ‘It got a bit wet…’

Thorne listened, and when the call was finished, he walked across to the bar. Holland was already there, reaching for a fresh pint. ‘They found Martin Cowans,’ he said. ‘Pulled him out of the canal, a few miles up from where we were this morning.’

‘Fuck.’ Holland pushed himself away from the bar. ‘Are we on?’

Thorne was already turning for the door. ‘Poor sod didn’t even make it as far as the coconuts,’ he said.

Hello babe,

Am I in trouble? I feel guilty enough…

I could always tell, the second I’d walked through the door, when I’d pissed you off about something. You had that look, you know? The one that told me I was in the shit, but wanted me to start guessing exactly what it was I’d done wrong.

Seriously, I do feel strange about last night, about what I felt, watching that twisted little fucker. What he was getting. It sounds like something you’d hear someone say in one of those soap operas you always had on, but afterwards, I felt dirty for what I’d been thinking. Really fucking hated myself… still feel like I let you down.

Like it was disrespectful, I don’t know, to your memory, or something.

I don’t think you’d really believe that. I reckon you’d probably think there was something wrong with me if I hadn’t been turned on watching that. That maybe I’d gone queer in prison or whatever.

Anyway, while it was happening, it was only ever you I was thinking about.

It’s always you…

Walked a long way again tonight, seven or eight miles maybe, thinking all this crap through and trying to work out what to write. I suppose what’s odd is that I can feel you and Robbie with me, which is fucking fantastic, but there’s things I don’t want you to see. Stuff that’s… not fit, you know?

And I feel bad because you do see it, and there’s that thing in your voice when you don’t approve, like when I’d had a few too many. I can hear you trying to explain to Robbie about me, about some of the things I’m doing.

And then there’s other times, the worst times, when what I’ve got of you is nowhere near enough. When all I can think of is how much better everything could be, if we could just have a few more minutes. Half a fucking hour.

Like knowing, if you were there to hold me, that I might be able to sleep.

I’ll take what there is, don’t get me wrong. Why wouldn’t I? Having you there how you are, feeling you there, is the best thing I’ve got, and I know I’d be totally lost without it.

There’d be less of me left than you…

Gone round the houses same as usual, I know, but forgive me?

Marcus xxx

EIGHTEEN

The area bordering the canal towards Greenford was somewhat different to the one Thorne and Holland had seen earlier. The towpath was cleaner and wider; designated, according to a sign, as part of something called the Hillingdon Trail. On one side, the bank sloped up to a row of sleek, modern houses. Thorne could see residents behind many of the full-length windows, standing in dressing-gowns and staring down on the action at the waterside below.

It was a complicated set-up: lights, noise, a tent around the body. With the added pleasures for those working of muck and drizzle.

From a manning point of view, the timing presented certain ‘logistical dilemmas’. The Homicide Assessment Team had been and gone, having passed the job to the on-call Murder Team. As part of an ongoing investigation, however, it was now being handed back to Russell Brigstocke’s MIT, several of whom had had to sober up very bloody quickly.

‘Coffee’s good,’ Holland had said. ‘But a body does it quicker every time…’

This particular body had been spotted a couple of hours earlier, but had only been out of the water fifteen minutes or so by the time Thorne arrived. It had been wedged in tight between the bank and a narrowboat which was moored in front of the houses. Nothing could be done until the owner had been traced and the boat moved so that the body could be extracted.

Now it was laid out on the towpath, brown water running off the plastic sheeting beneath it.

Hendricks was already busy, as were a team of frustrated SOCOs, doing their best to preserve a scene that was compromised at best; the slimy bank dotted with cigarette ends and dog-shit, and the towpath a muddy confusion of footprints.

DCI Keith Bannard stared down the length of the canal, then turned and looked in the other direction. ‘Your man can’t have killed him too far away,’ he said, after he’d introduced himself.

Thorne had been right to think that the S &O man’s accent belied something grittier. He was tall and shithousesolid. He had a shock of greying, curly hair, with more sprouting from the neck of his white shirt. His face was weathered and fleshy, with watery eyes that all but disappeared when he smiled.

‘Doesn’t seem bothered about hiding the bodies, does he?’ Bannard continued. ‘So we can assume he dumped Cowans more or less where he killed him.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’

‘So, what the fuck was Bin-bag doing by the canal? Night-fishing?’

Thorne said nothing.

Whistling something to himself, Bannard started to stroll away down the towpath. Thorne followed. They walked for fifty yards or so and stopped under a low bridge. The banks and the water were black where they weren’t lit by orange lights fixed to the walls on either side.

‘Very artistic,’ Bannard said. He nodded towards a bizarre, three-dimensional mural on the far wall: a heron, a line of ducks, starfish and leaping rabbits, all created from pieces of coloured glass and shards of pottery.

Thorne presumed it was there for the benefit of those whose narrowboats passed beneath the bridge. Guessed it had also given the kids something nice to look at while they’d been spraying their graffiti tags on every spare inch of wall around it.

‘Well, I’ve had a good chat with your guvnor.’

‘That’s nice,’ Thorne said.

Bannard looked happy. ‘I think we can safely say none of this is gang-related, so I can probably get out of your way now.’

‘Whatever you think.’

‘That’s right. Try not to let on how delighted you are.’

‘Doing you a favour this, I would have thought.’

‘A few less arseholes like Martin Cowans does everyone a favour, don’t you reckon? But I can’t see it doing a lot for my workload, if that’s what you mean.’

Their voices echoed under the bridge. As Bannard spoke, he illustrated his words with elaborate gestures, and Thorne had trouble keeping his eyes off the man’s hands. They were enormous. His own had been virtually lost inside one of Bannard’s when they’d met over the body.

‘Will that be it for the Black Dogs, then?’ Thorne asked.

Bannard shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t think so.’

‘Three of the longest-serving members gone. That must shake things up, surely?’

‘They’ll reorganise, bring other members through the ranks. There’ll be a new leadership sorted by tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Same as happened when Cowans took over from Simon Tipper.’

‘Right.’

They stopped, hearing movement on the far side of the water, stared into one of the pools of shadow opposite, but could see nothing. ‘Who might have wanted Simon Tipper out of the way six years ago?’

Bannard was about to light a cigarette. He stared across at Thorne for a few seconds; sounded almost amused when he finally replied. ‘Tipper was killed by Marcus Brooks, when he caught him turning his house over. That’s what the woman who nicked him told you, right? Lilley?’

‘That’s what she told me.’

Bannard lit his cigarette. ‘Which, as far as I’m aware, is why all this shit’s happening in the first place. Yes?’

‘Hypothetically, then,’ Thorne said. ‘Who would have been happy about it?’

‘Christ, hypothetically it could have been anyone. One of the other biker gangs, most likely. One of his own lot who didn’t think he was getting a fair shake. Someone whose bike he’d borrowed without asking. A bloke whose girlfriend he’d shafted…’

‘The Black Dogs? The other gangs? Many of them have coppers on the payroll?’

Bannard grinned, hissed smoke through his teeth. ‘You doing a spot of DPS work on the side, Inspector?’

Thorne dropped his voice, mock-conspiratorial. ‘Every little helps, doesn’t it?’

‘Listen, all these gangs try to buy themselves an edge,’ Bannard said. ‘Unless they’re stupid, they know it’s a good investment, long term.’ He started to whistle again; louder this time, enjoying the echo. He took two fast drags on his cigarette, then flicked it into the water.

Back at the crime scene, the body was being prepared for removal to the mortuary, and Brigstocke was already talking about how they’d be proceeding, and how quickly, the next morning. They would conduct a house-to-house, early, before any of the residents had left for work. All members of the Black Dogs who may have seen or spoken to the victim would also be interviewed, to piece together a picture of Martin Cowans’ movements. They’d request footage from the two CCTV cameras mounted on lampposts near by.

Thorne listened, and knew it was all a perfectly proper and well-thought-out waste of time.

With what he knew, he considered other things they might do if he had not painted himself, and the whole investigation, into a dark corner. They could try to trace the hooker. It couldn’t be that difficult. She might have spotted something, and was almost certainly the last person, bar Marcus Brooks, to have seen Martin Cowans alive.

But that wouldn’t happen – couldn’t – not while Thorne kept his information to himself.

He kept on telling himself it didn’t matter. They knew who the killer was, after all. The details might matter later, but right now, knowing exactly how Brooks had gone about this latest murder wasn’t likely to help catch him.

‘We’re concentrating on the Premiership this year anyway. Champions League doesn’t matter.’

Thorne turned round. ‘You’re gutted. Admit it.’

‘We’ll put all our effort into stuffing you lot when we come to your place in a fortnight,’ Hendricks said.

They watched as the body was carried past.

‘Time of death would be good,’ Thorne said.

‘I’d like to get naked with Justin Timberlake, but, you know…’

‘Approximately?’

Hendricks watched the stretcher-bearers trying to keep the body level as they struggled up the grass bank. ‘He’d been in the water a good while. Plenty of bloating. Twenty-four hours, I reckon; maybe a bit more.’

‘So, late last night?’

‘Probably some time yesterday evening.’

Thorne knew that the worry had been for himself, for his own career, rather than for the man who had authorised the murders of a young woman and her son. But all the same, he felt the anxiety lift in a rush: Cowans had been dead by the time he’d received the message. There was nothing Thorne could have done to save him.

‘That any use to you?’ Hendricks asked.

‘Yeah, thanks.’ But the relief was short-lived. There had been no pattern to the sending of the messages: Brooks had waited over a week before sending the image of Tucker; but he had sent the picture of Hodson from the hospital moments after he’d killed him; then the clip of Skinner had arrived the day before his murder. Brooks would probably do it differently next time, too, and Thorne knew that he might not be so lucky.

Andy Stone jogged across to join them, looking thoroughly pleased with himself. ‘Well, at least we know Cowans wasn’t killed by a woman,’ he said.

Thorne could see, by Stone’s expression, that it was a set-up. He raised his eyebrows at Hendricks. ‘Yeah, go on then…’

Stone threw it away nicely. ‘Well, when was the last time any woman you know took out a bin-bag?’

It was a good joke, and got an appropriate response. Thorne laughed harder than he might have done normally, seizing on the chance.

It was a straightforward journey back, west to Hanger Lane, straight into town along the A40. He would cut down through Knightsbridge and Belgravia to Louise’s place in Pimlico. With Holland needing to get home to Elephant and Castle, no more than ten minutes further on at this hour, Thorne offered to drop him off first.

The roads were almost deserted and the rain had stopped. Watching for the cameras, easing off when he needed to, Thorne drove quickly past Ealing golf course and the Hoover factory. He turned the radio down, spoke as if it were the middle of a conversation they’d been having. ‘Brooks was just unlucky. He was an ideal candidate when it came to setting someone up for Tipper’s murder. The fall-guy.’

‘For Skinner?’

‘For Skinner, almost certainly, and whoever his mate is: “Jennings” or “Squire”. Why did they want Tipper dead, though?’

‘Maybe they were being paid by another gang. Why bother paying someone to do it, when you’ve got a couple of tame coppers who can get it organised for you?’

Thorne nodded. ‘What if it was the Black Dogs they were working for?’

Holland considered it. ‘Someone in Tipper’s own gang wanted shot of him?’

‘Possibly,’ Thorne said. ‘Or these two coppers just wanted rid of him themselves. Maybe Tipper was getting greedy. Not paying them enough, threatening to expose them or whatever.’

The idea struck a chord with Holland, who turned to face Thorne. ‘The crime report said the place was completely trashed, and Brooks always said that the two coppers had told him to take “paperwork”. If they were on Tipper’s payroll, maybe there were records of bribes, or photos or something. Stuff they needed back.’ He nodded as though telling himself that he’d had worse ideas.

Thorne saw that it made good sense and said as much to Holland. He pushed the car on past Wormwood Scrubs, brooding on their left, then across the flyover at White City. He veered slightly, to avoid taking the wheels over something wet and flattened in the middle lane. A fox or a cat…

‘What if Skinner was still working for the Black Dogs?’ Holland said.

It was something Thorne had started to wonder himself. If Skinner and his partner had killed Tipper, they might have struck up a new and improved deal with his successor – Martin Cowans. If that was the case, had they known about the plan to exact a terrible revenge on Marcus Brooks? It had been hard to tell much from talking to Skinner because he’d been too busy lying about knowing Marcus Brooks at all.

All the same, Thorne had sensed when they had spoken that Skinner was scared. That Brooks’ name was one he hadn’t thought about in a long time.

When Thorne dropped Holland off, the DS mumbled something about what he’d said in the Burger King at lunchtime; about how he hadn’t meant it to sound so aggressive. Thorne mumbled something back about how it didn’t matter.

It was after three when Thorne arrived at the flat in Pimlico. Louise was dead to the world, but Thorne, despite the hour and the day he’d had, felt strangely wide awake. Louise’s laptop was sitting open on a desk in the corner of the sitting room. He toyed with logging on and playing some poker, but settled in the end for tea and some low-volume Hank Williams. He had brought a selection of CDs across a few weeks before. Williams, Cash and a couple of newer bands. Had lined them up on a separate shelf as a small, alphabetically arranged alternative to the David Gray and Diana Krall in Louise’s collection.

While Hank complained about a world he would never get out of alive, Thorne sat flicking through one of Louise’s magazines. He ran over their conversation in bed the night before. The nervous whispering. He thought about Kitson leaving the pub so that she could say goodnight to her kids, and Brigstocke trying to get three of them ready for school before work every morning, and decided that he was probably not cut out to be a father.

It had been Thorne’s mum who had done the shouting when he’d been a kid. Who’d thrown a hairbrush with painful accuracy when he’d grown too big to chase. As far as he could remember, his father had always been patient, and though he was turning into his old man in all sorts of ways he wasn’t grateful for, Thorne didn’t think he’d inherited the tolerance.

He saw young white boys with bum-fluff, in hoodies and bling, talking like rap stars and swearing at shop assistants. He saw pre-pubescent girls scowling in belly tops. He saw kids dropping litter, and barging onto buses, and talking on their phones in the cinema. And he felt like grabbing the nearest hairbrush.

Definitely not cut out for it…

When his prepay started to beep and buzz on the table, Thorne jumped up and rushed across to grab it before the noise woke Louise.

It was a text message from Marcus Brooks:

if u r awake, maybe u r as messed up as me. or maybe I’m just keeping u busy, in which case, sorry. just think about the overtime though.

Thorne clicked on REPLY. Typed in: I’m here.

Sent the message, and waited.

NINETEEN

Thorne knew that, as far as public perception went, it was all horribly simple. Certainly, for the victims of crime, and for the relatives of the dead, it was cut and dried. If police caught a killer they’d done a good job. If they didn’t, they’d fucked up. But few understood or appreciated the importance of luck.

Good and bad. Blind…

The bad luck you lived with, but the good you grabbed with both hands and tried to hold on to. It had played a major part in putting Sutcliffe away, and Shipman. And when beaming chief constables stood before the cameras and talked about a ‘job well done’, there was every chance they were inwardly thanking God, or whatever came closest, for a healthy portion of good fortune. Were praying for more of the same next time.

Following the discovery of Skinner’s body, the press office had released a story for inclusion in the late edition of Monday’s Standard. It had been deliberately low key: no mad, staring eyes or lurid ‘Cop-killer Sought’ headlines. Just a couple of columns on an inside page: a picture of Marcus Brooks; a few lines explaining that this man, whom police were looking for in connection with an ‘ongoing inquiry’, may well have changed his appearance since the photograph had been taken; the assertion, italicised, that he was considered to be dangerous and must not be approached.

The calls had trickled in over the next two days: names; sightings; at least two people claiming that they were Marcus Brooks. All reports were followed up, with particular attention paid to any sightings in the west London area, and overnight a call had come in that looked very much like a solid lead.

Something to be grabbed with both hands.

The caller worked as a night-shift security guard at the London Ark – the spectacular copper and glass office complex in the centre of Hammersmith. He’d reported that on two separate occasions, coming home from work at just before 6 a.m., he’d seen an individual who might have been the man he’d read about in the Standard article. The man had been going into a house opposite his own. They had even nodded to one another the second time their paths had crossed.

The security guard lived three streets away from one of the confirmed cell-sites.

The house he identified was divided into three flats, and while it was being watched, front and back, the landlord was traced and questioned at his home by Andy Stone and another officer. It quickly emerged that the man who may have been Marcus Brooks was the tenant of the one-bedroom flat on the top floor. He had moved into the flat two weeks before, giving the name Robert Georgiou, and had paid three months’ rent in advance, in cash. When questioned, the landlord told Stone that, yes, thinking about it, he had thought his new tenant was a little odd. ‘Quiet, you know? Intense.’ But the man had said something about being separated from his wife, so the landlord had put it down to that and left him alone.

‘We all need privacy sometimes,’ he had said to Stone.

Not to mention cash, Thorne had thought, when Stone had reported back to him.

They’d set up an observation post in a house opposite at 7 a.m., and watched the flat for four hours. An armed unit had been put on standby near by. Adjacent houses had been evacuated as quickly and discreetly as possible.

With no sign of movement, and reliable intelligence that the man had been seen entering the building just before 6 a.m., the assumption that the target was inside, and probably asleep, became official just before midday.

Brigstocke conferred with his commander, then gave the order to go in.

Kitson leaned a little closer to the twin-CD recorder that was built into the wall of the interview room. There was no need, as the microphones were highly sensitive, but it was an automatic movement; like ducking beneath the blades of a helicopter.

‘Miss Kemal has once again declined the offer of legal representation.’

The young woman sitting in the chair opposite frowned and tugged at her hair. ‘I don’t need anyone, do I? I’m not in any trouble.’ Her voice was soft, with no more than a hint of a London accent.

‘I don’t think so,’ Kitson said.

‘So…’ She shrugged.

‘It’s just procedure, Harika. Not a problem.’

The girl was in her early twenties, an accountancy student at North London University. Kitson could see how attractive she was; could see it in Stone’s reaction when they’d collected her from the foyer of Colindale station. He had not seen her before; had not been present when Harika Kemal had initially been questioned, on the night Deniz Sedat had been stabbed to death. She had not been at her best then, anyway.

She had green eyes with absurdly long lashes, and brown hair streaked with honey-coloured highlights. Kitson guessed these were probably not the features Stone had noticed first.

‘We need to know why you called,’ Kitson said.

The girl said nothing.

‘Twice,’ Stone said.

‘Look, we know you’re scared.’ As she spoke, Kitson realised that she was using the same tone she used with her kids when they didn’t want to go to the dentist or revise for an exam. ‘I could hear it in your voice, and I swear we’ll do everything we can to make sure you have nothing to be scared about.’

‘I didn’t call anybody.’

‘Harika, you said you knew who had killed Deniz. We have recordings of those phone calls.’

‘Not from me.’

‘I recognised your voice.’

‘You’ve made a mistake.’

‘We can trace the call,’ Stone said.

Kitson could see the dilemma in the girl’s eyes. Could see she wanted to tell Stone that he was talking rubbish, but was unable to. She had withheld her number on both occasions but dare not admit it. Instead, she dropped her gaze to the tabletop; picked at its edge with a plum-coloured fingernail.

‘We can, if we need to,’ Kitson said. ‘It’s a pain in the arse when a number’s been withheld, and obviously we’d like you to save us the trouble, but we can do it.’

Stone turned on the charm, such as it was. ‘Come on, help us out, Harika. If you know something, if you know who was responsible for killing Deniz, don’t you owe it to him to tell us?’

‘It’s a big deal, I know,’ Kitson said. ‘But there’s no need to be scared. We’ll take care of everything.’

When she finally looked up, the girl’s eyes were wide and wet. ‘I thought I knew something, but I didn’t.’ She managed to produce a wobbly smile. ‘That’s all. Stupid…’

‘Fine, but why don’t you let us check it out?’ Kitson said. ‘If you’re wrong, there’s no harm done, is there?’

Harika shook her head: twisted fingers into her hair.

‘There are two types of people who make these kinds of calls,’ Stone said, suddenly harder. ‘Some people really want to help. They tell us what they know, and if we follow it up and it comes to nothing, it doesn’t matter, because that’s part of the job.’ The girl shook her head, held up a hand. ‘But then there’s always a few who like to mess us about. Who send us in the wrong direction, or make out they know stuff when they don’t, and when you’re trying to catch a murderer that can cost lives. So, I really hope you’re not wasting our time.’

Stone’s aggression did nothing but bring out something similar in the girl. She blinked away the tears and stared back at him. ‘Well, why don’t we all stop wasting time, then? I’m under no obligation to stay here, am I?’

She pushed back her chair, but Kitson leaned across and took hold of her arm. ‘It was easier on the end of a phone,’ she said. ‘I can understand that, the anonymity. But this is every bit as confidential, Harika, really. If you know, even if you think you know, just tell us.’ Kitson looked hard, trying to reach whatever it was that had prompted the young woman to pick up the phone in the first place. ‘Just give us a name…’

The only sound for fifteen seconds was the faint hum of the recording equipment, and the creak of the girl’s short leather jacket as she twisted in her chair. She shook her head, kept shaking it. Whispered: ‘I can’t.’

They sat in silence for a minute more, but it was clear they would get nothing else out of the girl for the time being. Stone looked as though he could happily have stared at Harika Kemal for a good deal longer, but Kitson had better things to do.

Cheap flats anywhere in central London were hard to come by, but all the same, Thorne could see why the owner of this particular property would not have been snowed under with prospective tenants. Why he’d have been happy enough to pocket the cash and not ask too many questions.

Within shouting distance of the Talgarth flyover, the house stood at the grimmer end of an undistinguished terrace. The top-floor flat – one room and a toilet wedged into the eaves – looked out over the roof of Charing Cross Hospital from the front, with the green and grey of Hammersmith Cemetery the marginally more appealing view from the Velux window at the back.

‘No wonder Brooks is in a bad mood,’ Holland said.

Pretty much every expense had been spared to create a uniquely desperate atmosphere: three different patterns of carpet in one room; a two-bar electric death-trap mounted on one wall; a shit-streaked lavatory bowl, and a pink plastic shower tray that appeared to match.

‘Jesus.’

‘I’m surprised he didn’t top himself.’

‘When we’ve got a minute, can we come back and nick the thieving fucker that rented this place out…?’

Thorne walked very slowly from the bed to a chest of drawers. He wasn’t in any hurry, of course, was keen to miss nothing, but he couldn’t have moved much quicker if his life depended on it. He’d had no more than three hours’ sleep the night before. Three hours between drifting away on the sofa with one handset clutched to his chest and being woken by the ringing of the other, with news of the sighting in Hammersmith.

Louise had wandered into her living room just before he’d left, bewildered to see him fully dressed. He’d told her about the body being found the night before. About having to rush off again.

‘I’m really not trying to avoid you,’ he’d said, laughing.

She hadn’t seen the funny side. ‘Nobody said you were.’

As Thorne reached for the handle on the top drawer, he was called across to the far end of the room. A Trainee DC whose name he could never remember had discovered a Tupperware box stuffed with cash underneath a table. As Thorne took the box, he could feel its worn edges through the thin gloves. He flicked through the bundle of notes, then passed it across to the exhibits officer. While he was there, the officer carefully bagged up ballpoint pens, scraps of paper and a wrap of rolling tobacco from the cracked Formica surface of the table. It looked to Thorne as though it had been borrowed from a greasy spoon.

‘There’s a decent amount there,’ the TDC said. ‘All fifties and twenties, by the look of it.’

Thorne called Brigstocke in from the bathroom. They had found clothes scattered about, and personal items on a shelf above the sink. Seeing the cash, though, Brigstocke nodded, as though its discovery had confirmed what he was already thinking. ‘Well, either he left in a hell of a hurry or he’s coming back,’ he said. ‘We should get what we can as quickly as possible and get out. Put some surveillance at either end of the street, just in case.’

A crime scene unit never got out of anywhere quite as quickly as they went in, but Thorne suspected that they would be wasting their time anyway. ‘Yeah, worth a try,’ he said. He walked back to the chest of drawers, took a step past it and spent a few seconds at the dirty window. Remembering what had happened, how he’d felt in the garden at Skinner’s place, he instinctively glanced down at the street and across to the houses opposite, as though Marcus Brooks might be watching them from somewhere.

The drawer refused to slide out easily, and Thorne had to kneel down and wrench it an inch or so at a time. The TDC offered a helping hand and snorted when he looked down and saw what was inside. ‘Bugger me, he could open his own shop.’

There were perhaps a dozen assorted handsets. Spare batteries and chargers. SIM cards lying loose, in blister packs or mounted, unused, on plastic cards.

‘He doesn’t have anything else,’ Thorne said. ‘What he’s doing is everything to him.’ He nudged some of the hardware to one side with a gloved finger. ‘He’s spent time putting it all together.’

‘I hope there isn’t one of those for each message he’s planning to send.’

Thorne knew the young TDC was joking, but caught his breath nonetheless; poking around among the Nokias and Samsungs, as if they were knives or handguns. He remembered what Kitson had said in the pub.

‘How much revenge can anyone want?’

He reached for something at the back of the drawer and pulled out a sheaf of papers, bound with several elastic bands. He read the first page, then gently turned back the corner to look at the second.

The TDC was trying his best to read over Thorne’s shoulder. ‘What you got, old love letters?’

‘Not old,’ Thorne said, eventually. Now he knew for certain that Brooks hadn’t gone anywhere; that if they had missed him, it could not have been by very much. He beckoned the exhibits officer over and handed the letters across. ‘I want copies of those as soon as,’ he said.

‘You want what?’

Thorne repeated the request, his words lost the first time beneath those of Russell Brigstocke, who was walking up and down the room, clapping his hands and urging everyone to get a move on.

Brooks stood with half a dozen others at the end of the road, watching the comings and goings.

As soon as he’d seen the copper waving cars on, seen the tape strung between lamp-posts and the ‘Diversion’ sign, he’d known that something was up. He’d parked a few roads down and walked back to see what was happening.

‘There’s enough of them,’ the man next to him said. ‘Must be pretty serious.’

A woman behind him leaned forward. ‘Someone told me they saw coppers with machine-guns.’

He’d got back to the flat around six that morning, shaved and got changed, then headed out again straight away. There had been no point trying to sleep, he knew that, and with business on the other side of the river, he’d wanted to beat the traffic.

How had they found him? How close had they come to ending it all? He looked up at the window to the flat and found himself wondering if Tom Thorne was in there.

Thought about the text messages the night before.

Losing the flat was annoying, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

There were people he could count on to find him somewhere to crash until all this was over. That wouldn’t be a problem. Same thing with the cash: he was still owed plenty of favours. He could get himself some new clothes, a few new phones, whatever else he needed.

This wasn’t going to hold anything up.

He turned and walked back towards the car. Left the woman moaning about getting back into her house, needing to cook the kids’ tea.

The letters were the only thing that really mattered, of course. But all he’d lost were the bits of paper. Ink and scraps.

Every word was in his head.

TWENTY

It was like being stone-cold sober when everyone around you was three sheets to the wind.

The breakthrough in finding Brooks’ flat had lifted everyone’s mood, and back at Becke House Brigstocke and the rest of the team went about their business with a new enthusiasm, as though an imminent arrest were now a foregone conclusion. But Thorne felt as though he were watching it all from the outside, unable to share in the excitement, knowing that the isolation was of nobody’s making but his own.

It wasn’t as though he hadn’t fucked up before, but he couldn’t remember ever being this far out of his depth, with no other option than to keep kicking away from the shore.

Brigstocke led a briefing at four o’clock.

While most of the team had been busy in Hammersmith, others had followed up on the discovery of Cowans’ body the night before. Interviews with residents of the canal-side flats had so far proved unproductive, and the CCTV cameras had contained nothing but footage of a late-night drinker reeling around on the bank. The conclusion was that Cowans had been dumped in another part of the canal, near to where they’d found his van shortly after finding him. That his body had drifted and remained trapped behind the narrowboat for more than twenty-four hours until it had been discovered. A preliminary PM report indicated that Cowans had been killed by several blows to the head, in the same way as Tucker and Skinner.

The lack of progress on this front made the discovery in Hammersmith all the more important.

‘Obviously, we’ve yet to examine all the evidence taken from the house,’ Brigstocke said. ‘But by tomorrow morning, I reckon we’re going to have a decent number of leads to chase. We took a lot of stuff out of there.’

Thorne stood off to one side. It was possible that Brigstocke was right to be as bullish as he was. That they might get to Marcus Brooks quickly, before Thorne received any more messages. Thorne might still have some awkward questions to answer, but it would probably be the best outcome for everyone, himself included.

Whether the second copper – the man indirectly responsible for the deaths of Angela Georgiou and her son; the man who had probably killed both Tipper and Skinner – would ever be caught was another matter.

One that troubled Thorne deeply.

‘We took a notebook away which we’re hoping will be significant,’ Brigstocke said. ‘There are a couple of phone numbers scribbled in there which we’ll be chasing up.’

Thorne’s stomach clenched. He wondered if the number he’d texted to Brooks was one of them; if he’d be answering those awkward questions sooner rather than later. He stared out at the ranks gathered in the briefing room and hoped the worry wasn’t showing on his face.

Whatever Brigstocke’s problems were, he was showing no signs of them. In fact, he seemed newly focused; up for it. ‘You’ve all got copies of the E-fit which our helpful security guard came up with, and which has gone out to the press overnight. This is what Brooks looks like now.’

Thorne stared at the picture. Marcus Brooks had cut his hair very short and his face was thinner than it had been when he went into prison. A very different man, in every sense.

Brigstocke continued: ‘The security guard also reckons that Brooks might be driving a dark blue or black Ford Mondeo. An old one. It was parked outside the house several times and we certainly can’t trace it to anyone living in the street. It’s only a vague description, but it’s something we need to be aware of.’

Holland stuck a hand up. ‘Presuming it was bought for cash, we could start looking at the local used-car dealers.’

‘Got to be worth a shot,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Let’s check out the back copies of Loot and Auto Trader while we’re at it. We need a registration number.’ He turned to Thorne. ‘Anything to add, Tom?’

All sorts of things, Thorne thought, but instead he just echoed the DCI’s positive message. Said that they were getting close, and that they wouldn’t have a better chance of a result than they did at that moment. He assured them that the man they were after would try to kill again; reminded them that it didn’t matter who he was targeting. Whether it was a copper or a biker or a little old lady, they needed to catch Marcus Brooks before there was another victim.

Brigstocke stepped forward again. ‘We’ve worked a lot of hours over the last few days and most of you are fucked, I know. So anyone who isn’t on a late one tonight, stay out of the pub, OK? Go home, get eight hours, then get yourselves in here first thing and put this to bed. Then we can all go back to a few nice easy domestics and drug shootings.’

With the briefing over, the assembled officers scattered fast, moving back to phones and computers. There was a good deal of upbeat hubbub. Someone shouted, ‘Come on, let’s fucking have it.’

Thorne watched the inquiry shifting up a gear.

Stone-cold sober…

Later, Brigstocke called Thorne and Kitson into his office.

‘We need to get something out of today,’ he said. ‘There was no message before he killed Cowans, so it looks like he’s decided to stop making things so easy for us.’

Kitson nudged Thorne. ‘Or maybe he’s just gone off Tom.’

Thorne summoned a smile, or something close to it.

‘Maybe he thinks he’s cleared his debt,’ she said. ‘The whole message thing was just for Nicklin’s benefit, right? Doesn’t mean Brooks has to keep doing it.’

Brigstocke agreed that it made sense. ‘Any luck with Sedat’s girlfriend earlier?’

‘I was just writing it up,’ Kitson said. ‘A big, fat “fuck all”, I’m afraid.’

‘Could be there’s fuck all to get.’

‘She might just want some attention,’ Thorne suggested.

‘I’m going to have another crack at her tomorrow.’ Kitson looked as determined as Brigstocke had done at the briefing. ‘She’s scared, that’s all. Maybe she’s scared of whoever killed Sedat, because I think she knows who that is.’

‘Get it out of her then,’ Brigstocke said. ‘See if we can get both these jobs off the books by the end of the week.’

Kitson and Thorne walked slowly back down the corridor towards their office.

‘He seems happier,’ Thorne said.

‘Seems…’

‘Maybe whatever it was has gone away.’

‘Since when do the DPS “go away”?’

‘Serious, you reckon?’

‘That’s the thing with them,’ Kitson said. ‘You never know. He might have lost it and battered someone in an interview room or he might have nicked some paper clips. They still have the same look on their faces.’

They stopped at the door and Thorne offered to go and get them both coffee.

‘You OK?’ Kitson asked.

‘Like he said at the briefing. Fucked.’

‘Well, go and have a night in with Louise. Get your end away and forget about it until tomorrow.’

Thorne seriously doubted he would be doing both. ‘Listen, if Sedat’s girlfriend does know something, I’m sure you’ll get it.’

‘I’m going to give it a go.’

‘Take it easy with her, though. Talk to her somewhere she’s more relaxed. Everyone’s scared in the bin, even if they’ve got no reason to be.’ Kitson just nodded. ‘Sorry,’ Thorne said. ‘I’m not trying to tell you how to handle it.’

‘That’s fine,’ Kitson said. ‘I’ll take any advice you’ve got. As long as you remember to take mine.’

Thorne went to fetch the coffees, thinking about how easy it was to stick your oar in, to be objective, when it wasn’t your own case. Not that he felt like the Brooks case was his any more. Not his to work, at any rate.

Walking across to the kettle, he glanced at the whiteboard; at the job mapped out in numbers, names and black lines; times of death and photographs of wounds. He almost expected to see his own name right next to those of the dead and the prime suspect. In the middle of the board, among the list of those central to the inquiry, instead of scribbled in capitals at the top.

When Thorne had called Louise to say that he wouldn’t be back late, and to ask what time she was likely to get away, they’d talked about going to see a movie. She’d seemed in a good mood, certainly relative to the one she’d been in at half past six that morning. They’d argued good-naturedly for a few minutes about what to see before deciding not to bother.

When Thorne got home he suggested trying a new Thai place that had opened on Kentish Town Road, but Louise had other ideas. She had brought stuff round and seemed determined to cook. While she was sorting dinner, Thorne nipped out to fetch a bottle of wine.

Louise looked at the bottle when Thorne got back. Asked how much it had cost, and seemed pleased when he told her.

‘Cheap beer and expensive wine,’ she said. ‘That’s one of the things I liked about you first off.’

‘One of the things?’

‘OK, the only thing,’ she said. ‘Now I come to think about it.’

They ate pasta at the small table in Thorne’s living room. Got through the wine, and listened to a June Carter Cash compilation Thorne had picked up for next to nothing on eBay.

‘That stuff the other night.’ Louise reached across for an empty plate.

‘What stuff?’ Thorne said, knowing perfectly well.

‘It didn’t mean that I wanted anything, you know? That I want to have a baby, now, this minute. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong in talking about it.’

‘It’s fine…’

‘It isn’t fine, because it obviously freaked you out. So, I just want to make sure we understand each other.’

‘Does this mean we need to get into the cheap beer?’

‘I’m serious.’

Louise explained that despite what had happened in bed that night, she really did not want to get pregnant. That wasn’t to say she wouldn’t want to have a child one day, but she had a career to put first for a few more years.

‘I look at someone like Yvonne Kitson,’ she said, ‘see her trying to juggle work around three kids, and I’m not sure I’d ever be able to do it.’

Thorne thought about Louise’s reaction when they’d talked about Kitson and he’d accused her of being jealous. He wondered if he’d touched even more of a nerve than he’d realised.

‘I’d be stupid to have a kid now.’

‘It’s fine,’ Thorne repeated.

‘You keep saying that, but I don’t think it is. I’m worried that you think I’m desperate for you to knock me up or something. That I’m some sort of nutter who’s going to stick pins in all your condoms or nick a pram from outside Tesco’s. Really, I’m happy with the way things are.’

‘Good. So am I,’ Thorne said.

‘Great. So that’s fine then.’

They moved from the table to the sofa, and when the album had finished they put the TV on and tried to lose themselves in something mindless. After fifteen minutes of saying nothing, though, Thorne wasn’t convinced that Louise was succeeding any more than he was.

She hit the mute button on the remote and was about to say something when the phone rang.

Thorne recognised the voice immediately.

‘How did you get my home number?’ he said. He pictured a glorified cupboard stuffed with recording equipment. A bored technician wearing headphones, ears pricking up on hearing his question.

‘Come on,’ Rawlings said. ‘If you wanted to get mine, how long would it take you?’

‘What do you want?’ Next to him, Louise was mouthing, Who is it? ‘I’m in the middle of something.’

‘I could do with a chat. Just five minutes.’

‘Fine, but not this five.’

There was a pause. Thorne could hear Rawlings blowing out smoke; knew that he was swearing silently.

‘What about tomorrow?’

‘Fine. Call me then.’

‘Can we meet up?’

Louise was still asking. Thorne shook his head; he’d tell her in a minute. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow. A lot of stuff happened today, and-’

‘What stuff?’

‘Right, you’ve had your chat…’

‘Come on. We can meet wherever’s easiest for you, all right? Five fucking minutes…’

Later, when Thorne was in the kitchen making tea, Louise shouted through from the living room: ‘What about you? Did you never think about kids?’

Thorne almost scalded himself. ‘Thought about it, yeah. Not for a while, though.’

‘Why did you and Jan never have them?’

Thorne had split from his ex-wife twelve years before, after ten years of marriage. They hadn’t spoken in a long while, and as far as he knew she was still living with the teacher she’d left him for. ‘We didn’t decide not to. It just never happened.’

There was a pause from the living room.

‘Did you try to find out why it wasn’t happening?’

Thorne took his time stirring the tea. ‘No, we didn’t talk about it.’ He shrugged as he said it, asking himself, as he had when Jan had left, if it might have been one of the reasons why she’d gone. The not having kids. The not talking about not having kids. Both.

‘It’s crazy how some couples bottle shit up,’ Louise said.

Thorne carried the drinks through, settled down next to her. ‘Stupid,’ he said.

She looked at him. ‘It’s important we don’t do that. That we talk about things.’

‘We are talking about things.’

‘Right.’ She flicked the TV on again. ‘It’s just a conversation, that’s all. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to talk about it. Isn’t it part of getting to know the other person?’

‘I think we know each other pretty well,’ Thorne said.

‘I’m just saying it should be like finding out all the other stuff, likes and dislikes, whatever. Where did you go to school? Where do you like to go on holiday? Do you think you might want to have kids one day?’

‘The first two are easier to answer.’

‘One day.’ She squeezed his arm and said it nice and slow, making sure he got the point. ‘At some point in the future, maybe, so don’t panic, OK? I don’t even mean with me, necessarily. I’ll almost certainly have got pissed off with you and buggered off with someone else by then. It’s hypothetical, that’s all.’

‘OK.’

‘We’re just talking about the idea of kids, Tom. Why should that be scary?’

Thorne knew that she was right, in theory, but also knew it was not quite as simple as she was making out.

He wasn’t scared of vampires or zombies, in theory, but a well-made horror movie could still scare the shit out of him.

TWENTY-ONE

Davey Tindall looked up from his paper and eyed the two men at his window above off-the-shelf reading glasses.

‘Eight quid,’ he said, tearing off two tickets. He sighed when he saw the warrant cards; tossed the tickets into the bin and nodded towards the door that led through to the auditorium. ‘In you go then. Film’s already started, mind you.’

‘Does that really matter?’ Thorne asked. He peered at the poster taped below the box-office window. ‘I wouldn’t have thought Shy and Shaven has too much in the way of plot.’

Holland thanked Tindall for the offer, explaining that they weren’t from Clubs and Vice, looking for a freebie. Thorne told him where they were from and that they needed a word.

‘I was in with your lot the other day,’ Tindall said. ‘DC Stone and the other bloke, Asian…’

‘That was the other day. With two other officers. And before you spoke to Marcus Brooks.’

Tindall puffed out his cheeks, folded his paper.

‘Let’s go through to the back and put the kettle on,’ Thorne said.

The cinema was one of a string in Soho, all managed by a south London family who also owned clubs and massage parlours and ran a network of girls in and out of several of the city’s top hotels. Tindall had been on the payroll for years, doing a variety of jobs. He worked the box office, ferried girls around, collected the takings. He also passed a tip or two on to DCI Keith Bannard every once in a while, in exchange for cash and a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Tindall locked up the ticket booth and led Thorne and Holland to a small office that doubled as a storeroom. His skin looked as grey as it had on the tape Karim had shown to Thorne, although the eyes were blacker, darting around behind his glasses, as if desperately looking for a friend, or an exit. He had to be pushing sixty; short and whippet-thin, with hair that was silver, yellowing at the temples. He wore new-looking jeans with a sharp crease ironed down the legs, his top half lost inside a thin green cardigan.

‘No tea,’ he said.

‘It was just an expression,’ Thorne said. ‘We’re not stopping.’

There were newspapers and magazines scattered across what passed for a desk and piles of videotapes on the floor. A Jenna Jameson poster was stuck to the back of the door, and a calendar with a picture of a golden retriever was pinned to a cork board, surrounded by cards for cab firms and call girls. The place smelled of booze and bleach.

‘When did you talk to Brooks?’ Holland asked.

‘Who says I did?’

‘We got some of his stuff. We found your phone number.’

‘So? I’ve got lots of people’s numbers. Doesn’t mean I ring them all up every day.’

The Scottish accent was stronger than Thorne remembered from the tape. He wondered if Tindall thickened it when he didn’t feel like communicating; when it might be costly.

‘We can go through your phone records easily enough,’ Holland said. ‘We can go through all sorts of stuff; dredge up all manner of crap you’d rather we didn’t know about. That you’d rather the bloke you work for didn’t know about.’

Thorne flicked through the calendar. ‘He’s not talking about DCI Bannard, either.’ There was a different breed of dog for every month.

‘I hadn’t spoken to him when I came in on Sunday, I swear.’

‘So, when did you speak to him?’ Thorne said.

Tindall thought about it. ‘He called up the next day. I was here.’

‘And you never thought to tell us?’

‘Slipped my mind,’ Tindall said. He began digging around in drawers and cupboards. He asked Thorne and Holland if either of them had a cigarette. Holland had a packet of ten for emergencies, but kept his mouth shut.

‘Have you seen him?’ Holland asked.

Tindall shook his head. ‘I have not.’

‘You sure?’ Thorne shoved some papers aside and leaned back against the edge of the table. ‘Think really hard.’

‘He wanted a car, OK? Asked if I knew someone who could get him something quickly, for cash.’

Thorne and Holland exchanged a glance. Tindall was talking about the day before Cowans was killed. Thorne wondered if that was why Brooks had wanted the car. He would certainly have needed it to follow Cowans, if the biker had driven around in search of a hooker and headed down to the canal once he’d found one he liked the look of.

‘Did you help him?’

‘I had a few contacts in the motor trade years ago,’ Tindall said. ‘Back when I got to know the lad, when we were hanging about with some of the same people. But not any more. I told him he’d have to try someone else.’

‘And that was it?’

‘That was it, aye. Just a couple of minutes. A cough and a spit.’

‘You didn’t suggest anyone in particular?’ Holland said.

‘Told you, I’ve been out of that game a long time.’

‘No offence, Davey,’ Thorne said, ‘but you’re full of it.’

‘I swear-’

‘Swear all you like. I reckon you helped “the lad” out; for old time’s sake, because you feel sorry for him, who knows? Maybe you’ve been helping him ever since he came out of prison. Fixing him up with the right people…’

‘Have I fuck.’

‘None of your friends on the force can help you with this one. Not if you’ve been aiding and abetting a murderer, mate. Especially one who’s taken to killing coppers.’

‘Look, he called again yesterday, all right?’ Tindall looked quickly from one to the other; checking to see he’d provoked a reaction. ‘Late last night. Got me out of fucking bed, matter of fact.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He needs somewhere to stay,’ Tindall said. Thorne looked across at Holland again. Tindall had to be telling the truth. There was no way he could have known about the raid in Hammersmith. ‘Wanted to know if I could think of anywhere he could crash for a few days. Someone who’d put him up and leave him alone.’

‘And?’

‘We talked about one or two people he could try.’

‘Such as?’ Thorne asked.

Tindall looked pained. ‘Come on, you know the sort of people I’m talking about…’

Thorne grabbed a ballpoint from the table, tore a strip of newspaper off and passed them both across. ‘Write the names down.’

Tindall was starting to look like he needed that cigarette very badly. He cursed under his breath as he scribbled down a few names, pretending to dredge them up. From the cinema on the other side of the wall, the soundtrack of the main feature was all too audible.

‘Someone sounds out of breath,’ Holland said. He listened for a few more seconds. ‘That’s top-quality grunting.’

‘How many’s in there?’ Thorne asked.

Tindall sniffed. ‘Half a dozen…’

Thorne was amazed there were even that many enjoying Shy and Shaven at eleven o’clock in the morning. Why hadn’t they just stayed at home and watched something on DVD? With whatever kind of stuff you were into now available on disc or download, Thorne couldn’t understand why anyone went to porno cinemas any more, or picked magazines off the top shelf while pretending they were looking at What Hi-Fi? He could only presume they enjoyed the sleazy thrill of it; like movie stars getting caught with fifty-dollar whores when they could sleep with any woman they wanted.

Thorne took the piece of paper that Tindall thrust gracelessly at him. ‘Thanks, Davey,’ he said. ‘We’d best let you get back to work. Now, you will let us know if he calls again, won’t you?’

Tindall scoffed: ‘You think I need more of this shite?’

Thorne walked slowly past him towards the door. ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘I hope nothing else slips your mind. You know what Bannard’s like when you try to take him for an idiot?’ Thorne guessed that the S &O man could get fairly heavy, and the look on Davey Tindall’s face confirmed it. ‘Well, I’m a lot worse.’

Tindall blocked their way as they tried to leave. ‘Am I not getting something for this?’

Thorne just stared at him, waited for him to move.

‘I’m serious.’ The voice was thin and desperate. ‘Fifty notes, say, just for my time.’

Thorne took one more second of Tindall’s time, to tell him to fuck off.

Over the years, there had been periodic attempts to gentrify the Holloway Road. Delicatessens had come and gone. Idiots had opened antiquarian bookshops and sold their stock on a year later. As a hugely busy main road – the major route north out of the city – it was never going to be Highgate Hill or Hampstead High Street. But Yvonne Kitson thought it was the better for it: brash and unpretentious, with lively bars and restaurants, a few decent places to dance and hear music if you could be bothered to look. Certainly a place she wouldn’t have minded going to college.

She watched Harika Kemal coming out through the doors of the student union with two friends and digging into her bag for a scarf. Kitson saw the girl’s face fall when she caught sight of her approaching.

‘Can I just have five minutes, Harika?’

She shook her head. ‘Please…’

The man and the woman who had come out with Kemal were clearly a couple. The man took a step towards Kitson. ‘Is there a problem?’ Kitson thought he might be Turkish. Greek, maybe. He wore a shiny anorak with a fur-trimmed hood and glasses with thin, rectangular lenses.

Kitson reached into her bag for her warrant card.

‘Can’t you just leave her in peace for a bit?’ the student said.

His girlfriend was Asian; plump, with short hair and a nose-stud. ‘Maybe do something useful,’ she said. ‘Like trying to catch the animal that murdered her boyfriend?’ She spoke with the same mid-Atlantic sarcasm Kitson was already hearing from her nine-year-old daughter.

‘It’s OK,’ Kemal said to her friends. ‘I’ll catch you up.’

‘Is there somewhere we could go and grab a sandwich or something?’ Kitson asked.

The girl patted the bag that was slung across her shoulder. ‘I’ve got my lunch.’

They crossed the road and walked just a little way up the side street opposite. Found a bench on a small patch of muddied grass next to an Irish pub. Looking back, Kitson could see that the two students hadn’t moved; were staring from the doorway of the union building. Turning back to Kemal, she watched the girl take a plastic box from her bag. ‘What your friend said. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do.’

‘I know.’ Kemal peeled back tinfoil from her sandwiches.

‘And there’s no point bullshitting you: we’re getting nowhere. We’ve done all the things we’re supposed to do, you know? Everything we can think of. Spoken to everyone we could, put out an appeal on TV. I know you saw that.’

The girl said nothing. A cement lorry rumbled slowly past them, waited to turn left on to the main road.

‘The only lead we’ve got is you,’ Kitson said.

Kemal shook her head, but to Kitson it seemed more about resignation than denial. ‘It’s so hard,’ she said.

‘Of course it is.’ It was a knee-jerk response, but Kitson truly believed that it was difficult for the girl. Dealing with the loss of her boyfriend. With whatever knowledge she had, much as she might wish to be ignorant.

‘How can I face the family?’

Kitson leaned forward on the bench so she could look at the girl square on. ‘Whose family? Deniz’s?’

Another shake of the head, its meaning even more ambiguous than the last.

‘It’s OK, Harika. Really.’ Kitson watched the girl turning the sandwich over and over in her hand without taking a bite. Looking at her, Kitson found it hard to imagine how she’d become involved with a man like Deniz Sedat. She did not seem the type to be impressed by money and flash cars, and she was certainly sharp enough to have known where that money had come from. Kitson wondered if she was reading Harika Kemal all wrong. Or perhaps there had simply been a physical attraction between her and Sedat that had transcended everything else.

‘I would have nobody.’

Kitson nodded back towards the university. ‘You’ve got good friends, that’s obvious. People who care about you a lot. And I told you before, we’ll make sure that you’re protected. You and the people close to you.’

Kemal raised her head suddenly. ‘What if it’s the people I’m close to who I need to be protected from?’ There was anger and impatience in her face, but her voice had broken before she’d finished speaking.

Kitson reached for a tissue. She passed it across, but the girl had already found one of her own. Had been keeping them handy.

‘Whatever you need.’

‘I need Deniz to be alive.’

‘And I need to find the man who killed him,’ Kitson said. She thought about taking the girl’s hand but decided that would be too much. ‘Tell me who it was, Harika.’

The girl sniffed and wiped her eyes, then stuffed the tissue back into her pocket. ‘Hakan Kemal,’ she said.

‘Kemal?’

‘My older brother. My brother killed Deniz.’

Kitson nodded, as though she understood, but her mind was starting to race. She had many more questions. She wanted to tear back to the office and get things moving. But she knew that, for a few minutes at least, she needed to stay on the bench with Harika Kemal.

Kitson glanced back across at the two students, who were still watching from the other side of the Holloway Road. They both looked as though they would happily rip her head off.

… I was sitting in the park in the middle of the night, getting rained on, and thinking what a soft piece of shite I am. That I can get rid of everyone I blame for what happened, and feel next to nothing, but that I don’t have enough bottle to kill myself. It was my first thought back inside, when I got the news. Taking a blade to myself, I mean, and I’ll admit that it was a relief when I started to think about making other people pay instead. Once I had that, I didn’t have to think too hard about topping myself any more; facing up to the fact that I didn’t have the bottle to go through with it.

It might help if I believed in something, I suppose. In fucking anything. If I thought there was even a chance I might see you both again afterwards. I know this much, if I believed in God or whatever else to begin with, I certainly wouldn’t any more…

And look, I know this is never going to happen, not now anyway, but I’ve started to imagine what it might be like to be with someone else one day. To have another kid, even. Christ, I’m so sorry, baby, I can’t stop those stupid things popping into my head. I think about the sex, and going on holidays and Christ knows what, and the rows me and this woman would have. How she’d always be jealous of you, feel like she was competing with a dead woman, whatever. I imagine her flying off the handle big time, and saying something about you or cutting up an old picture, stuff like that. And then I’d just fucking lose it and want to hurt her. End up boozing, probably, messing up everybody’s life.

See? I’ve got far too much time to think about this sort of shit. All the time when I’m not writing letters to a ghost.

I was thinking, though. If it ever did happen, if someone else came along, I mean. Would you leave me then? Would that be when I lost you and Robbie for good? Thing is, I know you’d want me to be happy, to move on, but it’s really not on the cards.

Happy means forgetting…

Thorne stared at the last line for a few seconds, then slipped the photocopy of the letter back into his desk drawer with the others. He nodded to Sam Karim as the DS passed his office door, then sat back and slurped his tea, and thought about the terrible power of grief.

He understood what drove Marcus Brooks. The impulse. Looking again at the newest picture of the man, the one based on the description given by the security guard, he was starting to see behind it. To connect with someone anaesthetised by loss; aloof from the basic pain and pleasure of everyday life. Someone astonished all the time by their own capacity to walk, or to dress themselves, and functioning for no other reason than to hunt down those who had smashed their life into pieces and scattered them.

When that trainee DC had eventually grasped the nature of the letters Thorne had discovered in Hammersmith, he had rolled his eyes and said something about Brooks ‘losing it’. It was an understandable reaction, and Thorne had smiled and nodded. Had suppressed an urge to give the bumptious little prick a slap.

When I’m not writing letters to a ghost…

Thorne had done something similar; had spoken to his father for a while after the old man had died. Actually, his father had been the one doing the talking, but Thorne knew well enough that it amounted to the same thing.

It took a second to say ‘good-bye’, and a lifetime.

He looked up as Kitson bustled in, tossing her coat across the back of a chair, rattling on about how students looked even younger than policemen nowadays.

‘You should chuck the job in,’ Thorne said. ‘Go back to college as a mature student. Don’t you fancy three years of drinking and sleeping with eighteen-year-olds? Thinking about it, I’ll come with you…’

Kitson told him about her meeting with Harika Kemal. The name of the man she’d identified as her boyfriend’s killer.

‘How does she know for sure?’ Thorne asked. ‘She said before she didn’t see it happen.’

‘I’m not sure about that any more.’

‘Going to be iffy without a witness.’

‘I’ll worry about that later.’

‘Did she say why her brother did it?’

‘I wasn’t getting that out of her without thumbscrews,’ Kitson said.

‘There must be some knocking around somewhere.’

Kitson rummaged in her bag and took out a small jar. ‘Hakan runs a dry cleaner’s on Green Lanes.’ She pursed her lips, ran a dab of balm across each. ‘Up near Finsbury Park…’

Thorne knew that many businesses in that area paid local drug gangs for protection; that some operated as fronts for the dealers and heroin traffickers. Restaurants, minicab firms, supermarkets. He wondered if Hakan Kemal might be laundering more than shirts and blouses.

Kitson had obviously been thinking along the same lines. ‘Maybe S &O had it right all along, and it was gang-related.’

‘Not the smoothest hitman I’ve ever come across,’ Thorne said, ‘but what do I know?’

Kitson was happy to agree on both counts.

Thorne looked across at her, deadpan: ‘Have you ever seen a film called Shy and Shaven…?’

He was trying to give an accurate description of the smell in Davey Tindall’s office when his mobile rang. He looked at the caller display, thought about dropping the call, but felt immediately guilty. Sighing, he hit the green button.

‘Tom?’

‘Hello, Auntie Eileen, I was going to call you tonight.’

‘Sorry if you’re busy, love. I don’t like to phone when you’re at work.’

‘It’s OK…’

‘Only I’m trying to get numbers organised for Christmas, you know?’

‘Right.’ It was the conversation Thorne knew had been coming. He winced inwardly at the thought of that technician listening in his cupboard; pissing himself.

‘Obviously it’d be smashing to see you, love. We’ve asked Victor if he’d like to come over for Christmas lunch.’

‘That’s good of you,’ Thorne said. Eileen, his father’s sister, had semi-adopted the old man who had been her brother’s only friend in the last year of his life. ‘I’m sure he’ll like that.’

There was a long sigh. ‘Poor old bugger…’

Thorne wasn’t certain if she was talking about Victor or his father.

‘So, anyway, you have a think about it,’ Eileen said. ‘Only I’d hate to think you were sitting on your own, like you were last year.’

In fact, Thorne had spent the previous Christmas – the first since his father had died – with Hendricks and his then boyfriend, Brendan. Now that the boot was on the other foot, and Hendricks was the single one, Thorne had been wondering if he should offer to return the favour.

‘The first few Christmases are always the worst, love. That’s why I thought you might want family around.’

‘OK, thanks.’

‘You’re welcome to bring your new girlfriend, of course…’

Louise had already raised the idea of spending Christmas with her parents, which was problematic in itself. At the time, Thorne had attempted that trickiest of manoeuvres – appearing keen while hedging his bets – and he knew it hadn’t gone down too well. They’d agreed to talk about it properly later, which was another conversation he wasn’t much looking forward to. He’d never met Louise’s parents, but her father had been in the army and Thorne had already formed a daunting mental image of the man. He wasn’t sure he fancied a Christmas Day spent listening to war stories, or a long walk with the family dog after lunch. Much as he wanted to spend the time with Louise, he was starting to think that getting pissed with Hendricks and watching The Great Escape sounded pretty good. He needed to check and see who Spurs were playing on Boxing Day, come to that.

‘Everything’s up in the air, to be honest,’ he said. ‘They don’t sort the work rotas out until the last minute and even then, you know, if we catch a big job…’

‘That doesn’t matter. You turn up on the day and we’ll cope.’

‘I don’t want to mess you about.’

‘Don’t be silly, love. You know I always get too much in anyway.’

‘I can’t hear you very well, Eileen.’

‘Tom?’

‘Sorry… the signal’s terrible in here…’

‘Don’t worry, love. I’ll try you again next week-’

When Thorne put the phone away and looked up, Kitson was staring at him. She shook her head, and he couldn’t tell if she was shocked or impressed.

‘You are a frighteningly good liar,’ she said.

TWENTY-TWO

‘It’s better than digging a ditch.’

In his more lucid moments, Thorne’s father had been fond of trotting that old saw out, whenever Thorne had moaned about his particular lot being a far from happy one. There had been plenty of occasions when Thorne would have swapped places with any ditch-digger alive, but he knew what the old man had meant.

It was usually just a question of perspective.

On the Victoria Line rumbling south, Thorne had kept his head buried in the paper. He’d stared at the same page for twenty minutes, the story and the pictures becoming meaningless, and decided that he was better off than some. Even allowing for the situation he’d got himself into – ‘sticky’ or ‘career-threatening’ depending on his mood – he knew that life could be a damn sight worse.

And was for a great many people.

Russell Brigstocke, slowly collapsing beneath the weight of whatever he was keeping to himself; Harika Kemal, who was paying for giving it up; the families of Raymond Tucker, Ricky Hodson and Martin Cowans; Anne Skinner and her daughter…

And Marcus Brooks. Whether or not he spent it in a prison cell, Thorne guessed that the man responsible for most of the misery would probably suffer the most wretched Christmas of all.

It was a thin line, Thorne knew that; between counting your blessings and using the distress of others as a sticking plaster. But whichever side of the line he was on, he wasn’t alone in being altered. He knew that the things they saw and did every day affected how those he worked with behaved when they clocked off.

There were nights when Dave Holland got in and held his daughter that little bit tighter. When Phil Hendricks couldn’t get his hands clean enough. Hours when Louise had clung to Thorne, sweating and near to tears, after the only way she’d been able to get a traumatic day out of her system had been to come home and fuck his brains out. Drink, sex, jokes…

Coping mechanisms.

Thorne also knew very well that whatever you used to change the way you felt, it was only temporary. That you’d be back again the next day, moving through it and trying to keep clean; picking up dark bits on the soles of your shoes.

Digging in the shittiest ditch of all.

He stepped off the train smiling, thinking that, towards the end, his old man would not have bothered with homilies at all and would just have called him a moaning little fucker. He walked up and on to the street, checked his watch. It was a little after six-thirty, but in a city where the ‘rush hour’ was nearer three, the pavement was still thick with people hurrying to get home.

Thorne joined them.

There was someone he had to see first, just for a few minutes, but he would be keen to get back to Louise’s place as quickly as he could after that.

Part of him was hoping she’d had a traumatic day.

He’d arranged the meeting in an upmarket coffee bar behind Pimlico station. The sort of place with a loyal clientele of locals that clung on in one of the few streets in the city that didn’t have a Starbucks every twenty yards.

Thorne was a little taken aback to see Rawlings stand up when he walked in; almost as though they were on a date and he were trying to appear gentlemanly. Rawlings had an empty cup in front of him, so Thorne asked if he wanted another. Rawlings said he’d been hoping they might be going on to the pub opposite. Thorne told him he was pushed for time, and went to fetch his drink.

‘Why here?’ Rawlings asked when Thorne came back to the table.

Thorne spooned up the froth from his coffee. ‘You said anywhere that suited me.’

‘I just wondered. It’s not a problem.’

‘I’m stopping with a friend round the corner,’ Thorne said. Rawlings waited, but Thorne wasn’t about to say any more.

He was cagey enough when it came to discussing his private life with those he worked with every day. Kitson knew what was happening, more or less, and Holland, but Thorne wasn’t comfortable with the idea of too many people knowing his business. It was why he hated the thought of someone listening in on his phone conversations, whether he was talking dirty on chat lines or ordering pizza.

There were still gags and gossip, of course, however much he tried to keep a lid on it. Andy Stone had cut out a magazine article and put it on Thorne’s desk: a company that specialised in ‘unusual’ gifts and ‘once in a lifetime’ events was offering a service whereby women paid to be ‘kidnapped’. Anyone who fancied it, and was willing to cough up several hundred pounds, would be snatched from the street and bundled into a van. Their partner, who was tipped off as to their whereabouts, would then get to play the hero and rescue them. According to the company responsible, the excitement of this ‘uniquely thrilling’ scenario could reinvigorate the most mundane of love lives.

Stone had waited until he was sure Thorne had seen it. ‘Thought you might be interested. You and your missus, a bit of role-play, whatever.’

‘Why don’t you try playing the role of someone doing his job?’ Thorne had said.

He’d taken the article home that night and shown it to Louise. She hadn’t seen the funny side and was all for tracking down whoever ran the company and explaining exactly what kidnap was like. Giving them a uniquely thrilling experience of their own…

‘What’s so urgent?’ Thorne asked.

Rawlings was edgy. ‘I’ve got your mate Adrian Nunn on my fucking case.’

‘He’s not my mate.’

‘I saw you talking to him at Paul’s place, the night they found the body.’

‘I talked to a lot of people.’

‘Come on, I know he’s been cosying up to you. It’s how those fuckers work, isn’t it?’

‘Shit. I thought he really wanted to be my friend.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘What do you want?’

Rawlings waved to get a waitress’s attention, asked her for an ashtray. She told him there was no smoking and he shook his head as though the world had gone mad. ‘I want to make sure I know whose side you’re on,’ he said.

Thorne gave it a second. ‘I’m Spurs, you’re Millwall, I would have thought.’

Rawlings tensed and pointed a finger, angry at Thorne’s refusal to take him seriously. But then he softened, sat back, as though he’d realised that aggression wasn’t going to get him anywhere. ‘Come on, you know the game, same as I do. It’s us and them, always has been.’

‘It’s all about which is which though, right?’ Thorne said. ‘That’s the whole point.’

Rawlings grimaced; close enough to an acknowledgement. He looked around, glared at the waitress. ‘There’s hardly any fucker in here,’ he said. ‘Why can’t I smoke?’

‘What’s Nunn been saying?’

Rawlings pulled the face most coppers reserved for paedophiles. ‘He’s slick as fuck.’

‘Slicker.’

‘He’s giving it, “Is there anything you’d like to tell me, DS Rawlings?” Which you know as well as I do means, “We’ve got you by the knackers, so tell us what we already know and save us a lot of pissing about.”’

‘So, what do they know?’

‘Fuck all. He’s fishing. Whatever they think they’ve got is obviously not enough to do anything about, so he’s trying it on.’

‘Fine, so what’s your problem?’ Thorne asked.

‘He is. Nunn. I just want him to fuck off out of my face. I’ve got half a dozen jobs on the go, a twat of a guvnor who wants them sorted yesterday, and I’ve still got Paul’s widow calling me every half an hour in pieces. Fair enough? I really don’t need that smarmy strip of piss on top of everything else.’

If Rawlings was half as stressed out as he appeared, Thorne thought he needed a lot more than a cigarette. ‘What makes you think I can do anything about it?’

‘You’ve been working with him, haven’t you?’

‘That’s putting it a bit strong.’

Rawlings waved his hands, impatient. ‘Whatever. You’ve got some sort of a relationship with the bloke; as much as you can have with their sort.’

‘And?’

‘And maybe you can get him to ease off or something.’

‘Now who’s not being serious?’

‘I don’t know… find out what the fuck he’s after.’

‘Nunn wouldn’t tell me what he’d had for breakfast,’ Thorne said.

Rawlings just sat there, looking gutted, waiting for Thorne to stop laughing. When Thorne caught his eye, he saw a man trying hard to work something out. Trying to work him out, certainly.

‘Sounds to me like you’re stuck with it,’ Thorne said. ‘Sod all I can do, I know that much…’

The waitress stopped on her way past the table, asked if there was anything else they wanted. Rawlings said nothing, waved his cigarette packet at her. She reddened and walked away.

‘She’s just doing her job,’ Thorne said. ‘She doesn’t need wankers like you any more than you need wankers like Adrian Nunn.’

Rawlings nodded; muttered something. When he saw Thorne downing what was left of his coffee, he leaned forward. ‘Look, here it is. I’m starting to think that Paul… might have been into a few things.’

Thorne slid the empty cup to one side. ‘What sort of things?’

Rawlings looked down at the table, took a few seconds, then looked up. Lowered his voice, said it slowly: ‘All sorts.’

‘And you reckon Nunn wants you to help him build the DPS’s case?’

Rawlings nodded; solemn, but pleased to see that Thorne was finally getting it.

Thorne wasn’t certain what he was getting, but it was all useful. He hadn’t exactly dragged this information from the man sitting opposite him and wondered what Rawlings was up to. If he was up to anything. He knew that people reacted oddly when they were threatened, and Rawlings obviously felt under threat.

Thorne glanced at his watch.

‘You sure you don’t fancy nipping over the road?’ Rawlings asked.

Thorne was certainly warming to the idea of continuing their conversation. Not so much for what else he might glean about Paul Skinner – he already knew enough – but rather for what half an hour’s more chat might tell him about a man who was suddenly willing to grass up his dead friend.

He looked at his watch again.

Said: ‘Just the one.’

The nature of kidnap investigations meant that when Louise Porter caught a big case, it tended to be full on. There were no such things as ordinary working hours, and leaving the job in the office was never really an option. Simply leaving the office at all was hard enough. Happily, the case involving the drug dealer who had kidnapped himself had been judged unlikely to make it past the CPS and scaled down. The wife of the Albanian gangster had turned up with no more than cuts and bruises and with no one willing to press charges. With little else coming in, things had been mercifully quiet for the past few days, and she was feeling pretty relaxed.

She couldn’t say the same for the case Thorne was investigating. For Thorne himself, come to that.

There were some inquiries that drew you in further than others. They’d been working on one together when they’d first met and Porter knew the signs. The series of killings, the messages that had been sent directly to him; this was never going to be the kind of job that Thorne could do on autopilot, even if he had one.

She poured herself a glass of wine and looked at the TV for a while. It was almost eight-thirty and Thorne had called three hours before to say he was on his way.

He was a moody sod at the best of times, but then again so was she; so were most of the coppers she knew, even those who drifted through the day with smiles on their faces, then went home and whacked their kids or got shitfaced. She’d thought about it, and put his reaction to the baby discussion down to the case; to an involvement in it that, even by his standards, had become a little extreme. She hoped that was the reason, anyway. Decided that if she were the one being sent pictures of the dead and the soon-to-be-dead, she’d probably be behaving in exactly the same way.

When Hendricks called, she topped up her glass and carried the phone across to the sofa; glad of the chance to talk to someone who knew Tom Thorne even better than she did.

‘He’s probably off with some slapper,’ Hendricks said.

‘That’s OK, then.’

‘Can’t blame him though, can you? Poor old bugger just wants to shag someone who isn’t desperate to be heavy with his child.’

Porter almost spat her wine out. She’d spoken to Hendricks earlier and they’d laughed about the conversation she’d had with Thorne. She hadn’t told him about the incident that had sparked it off; those few seconds she couldn’t really explain. When she’d wanted so badly to hold on to him, to feel him come inside her, knowing full well what it could mean.

‘Honestly though, Phil. You should have seen his face.’

‘He always looks like that.’

‘I’ve got a good mind to buy a pregnancy testing kit,’ she said. ‘Hide it in the bathroom. Just to see the look on his face when he opens the cabinet looking for his Rennies.’

Hendricks spluttered out a laugh. Porter could hear that he was smoking; knew that a spliff was his particular way of winding down at the end of the day. Knew too that Thorne didn’t approve.

‘Do you fancy coming out clubbing tomorrow night?’ Hendricks asked.

‘God, I don’t know…’

She’d enjoyed the nights out she’d had with Hendricks; dancing and drinking in a variety of gay clubs and bars, watching Hendricks make his moves, or more often, get hit on. She was starting to worry, though, that she didn’t have more female friends. Any real ones, if she thought about it. There was the odd drink after work with a couple of the women in her squad, but it never went beyond that, and she’d lost touch with all the girls she’d known when she joined the force.

‘Come on,’ Hendricks said. ‘Saturday night, we’ll have a laugh. If you’re cramping my style, I’ll put you in a taxi, OK?’

Not that she had that many close friends who were men, either. Hendricks was about the closest, which was perhaps what was bothering her most. There was Jason, who she’d gone through Hendon with, but she hadn’t seen much of him since he’d been posted south. She was still matey with Jon, her ex-boyfriend, but hadn’t spoken to him lately; Thorne getting decidedly frosty whenever his name had come up in conversation.

‘Let me talk to Tom first,’ Porter said.

‘Well, he won’t mind, will he? It’s not as if you’re going to pull.’

She giggled. ‘I just want to find out if he’s likely to be working.’

‘You’ll have more fun with me.’

‘Definitely. But, you know, it might be a good idea for the two of us to spend some time together, if we can. We were talking about going to see a film or something.’ She reached across for Time Out, began flicking through the film section.

‘Just don’t go freaking him out again,’ Hendricks said. ‘Daft old bastard’s probably got a weak heart.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

‘I’m the one who’s supposed to be broody.’

Porter said nothing. Listened to Hendricks taking another drag, moaning with pleasure as he let it out.

‘Give me a shout if you’re up for it,’ he said. ‘OK, Lou…?’

Porter heard the outer door slam shut as she was saying her goodbyes. She waited, recognising the sounds of him – the shuffles and the sighs – as he rooted around for his key.

‘Sorry,’ he said, before he was halfway through the door. He stepped inside and watched her carrying the phone back to its cradle on top of a low pine chest. ‘Been talking to your boyfriend?’

‘No, yours,’ she said.

He was grinning as he took off his jacket. It was good to see; even if she knew, before she was close enough to smell it, that a couple of pints had helped.

TWENTY-THREE

There may have been more direct routes from Deptford back to his new place, but Marcus Brooks had fancied following the line of the river. It wouldn’t take him much more than an hour, hour and a half, and although it was cold, the sky looked clear enough. He’d walked up around the U-shape, the one off the EastEnders credits, with Docklands opposite; trying to stay as close as he could to the water, weaving his way around the dark, oily docks and wharves towards Wapping. The tower at Canary Wharf filled the sky ahead of him. The beacon on its roof was blinking away to his right, then eventually behind him as he moved on, where the river straightened at the Rotherhithe Tunnel.

He put one foot in front of the other time and again. Watching the river creep and sloosh alongside, and wanting nothing more than to drop where he was and curl up. Desperate for just a few hours’ sleep, but knowing it would be a waste of time to try.

Instead, he looked down and watched his shoes eat up the pavement. Hands in his pockets, humming any song that went with the rhythm of his footsteps. And he saw Angie’s face, and Robbie’s, as they must have been at the last minute; just before the car hit. Then he saw other faces, how they had been when they’d clapped eyes on the hammer. The plastic bag.

Tucker. Hodson. Cowans.

Their faces were as clear as anything now: frozen with their mouths open and eyes wide. But he hadn’t known all of them by sight; not at first, anyway.

Skinner, who’d called himself Jennings the last time they’d met, had been all-too familiar, of course; just older from a distance, and dead by the time Marcus had got close. Killed by somebody else before he’d had the chance.

And some of the bikers had been there at his trial; screaming and swearing at him from the balcony, until the judge had had them chucked out. They’d looked near enough the same when he’d come out of prison and tracked them down.

Ray Tucker had definitely been in court six years before, and Ricky Hodson. Although he hadn’t known their names back then. He wasn’t certain about Martin Cowans – they’d all had long hair and leathers and shit… but it didn’t matter either way. He’d been one of the gang – the leader, as far as he could work out – when Angie had been killed, and that was all that counted.

He had decided back in Long Lartin, when he and Nicklin were going over it, that everyone had to be treated the same. That they all had to share the responsibility equally. It would have been stupid to do it any other way; to say that the one who’d been driving the car had to die, or suffer before he died, while some of the others should just be crippled or whatever.

It was cleaner to blame them all.

He didn’t know this latest one from Adam, but he’d played his part, same as everyone else who’d fucked his life up. First time or second. Second wouldn’t have happened without the first, after all…

He didn’t know him, but now he’d had his first good look. Waited in the cold at the address he’d been given until he’d got back from work. He’d taken out the phone and grabbed his few seconds of video while the bloke was getting out of his car.

Done his bit for Nicklin.

He’d do his own bit tomorrow night.

It was busy coming around the big island at the end of Waterloo Bridge; cars and people. He stopped for a few seconds and watched figures moving north and south, leaning into the wind, lining up and chatting at bus stops on either side of the road, like fuck all mattered. He thought about where they might have been; knew there were cinemas and theatres under the bridge. Then he began to move his feet again; speeding up, because he couldn’t care less.

He walked around the back of Waterloo station and up past St Thomas’s Hospital. He’d spent a couple of hours in casualty there one Saturday, years back, when some idiot had nutted him outside a club. He remembered Angie having a right go when she caught up with him. Shouting at him, saying he probably asked for it. Kissing his stitches later on…

Just a few minutes away now; he’d do it in a little over an hour. Right above the river until the last possible moment, then cutting back and across four lanes of the Albert Embankment. Not running, not worrying about the lights and horns. Making the traffic slow down for him.

Imagining Angie’s face when she realised too late what was going to happen. And knowing she’d have been thinking about Robbie. That she would have done anything to save him.

Thinking about his boy; about what might have gone through Robbie’s mind at the end.

Hoping he had been in there, somewhere.

Louise had fallen asleep on the sofa, halfway through a documentary neither of them had been particularly interested in. Thorne had plugged in the headphones to Louise’s laptop and logged on; settled down to a few hands, playing as a glamorous blonde in a low-cut blouse. Fancying himself, in every sense.

An hour into it, he/she had been heads-up with PokerMom, a shifty-looking character in a cowboy hat. He had just raised sixty dollars when he saw the screen on his prepay come to life; watched the handset buzzing across the tabletop next to the computer. He had switched the phone to silent, so that any call or warning tone wouldn’t wake Louise up.

He scrolled down and looked at Brooks’ message.

Then he crept past Louise and took the phone with him into the bathroom, while, back at the virtual table, his bet was called and his kings and sixes lost out to three sevens.

were u at the flat?

It had been sent from another new number. Brooks was still using SIM cards once, then disposing of them. He could have no way of knowing that his messages were not being monitored; that Thorne was the only one seeing them and that no effort was being made to trace their source.

Thorne lowered the lid of the toilet seat. Sat down and typed into the reply screen.

Yes. Your letters are safe.

He waited. Watched as he was told that his message had been sent. And, more importantly, received.

His hands felt sticky, something between his fingers. His father’s wedding ring, which Thorne wore on his right hand, would not move smoothly when he tried to spin it. He got up and used the sink while he waited to see if Marcus Brooks had anything else to say; was drying his hands when he got his answer:

doesn’t matter

Thorne was trying to work out how to respond when another message arrived.

got another vid to send

When?

tomorrow

Thorne did not know what Brooks meant. Would he be sending the video the next day, or killing whoever was on it?

Alive or dead? Thorne waited.

tomorrow

He listened to water moving through the pipes. One of his old dressing-gowns was hanging on the back of the door, faded and pulled to pieces by the cat. He’d brought it over when Louise had treated him to a new one for his birthday. She had also taken a good deal of her stuff over to his place. His bathroom was starting to smell almost as nice as this one.

who killed skinner?

Thorne saw no reason to hesitate. Thinking it was ironic, as he typed, that he should be sharing his theory with the man everyone thought was guilty of the policeman’s murder.

Has to be the other copper.

It took a minute for Brooks to come back.

not really surprised

Who is he?

Thorne had got nothing useful from his hour and a half in the pub with Richard Rawlings. The DS had given a good performance, or at least that’s how it had seemed to Thorne. Maybe more so, thinking back…

‘It’s looking like Paul was into some nasty stuff.’ Rawlings had looked close to devastated, putting away a pint in three visits to his glass. ‘Seriously fucking nasty.’

‘That what Nunn told you?’

‘As good as.’

‘And you knew nothing about it?’

‘Maybe… I don’t know. I had suspicions, now and again, but you keep them to yourself, don’t you? We were mates, and I was probably kidding myself, but I never thought it was anything too heavy. Not in a million years. Fuck, you think you know people…’

The phone buzzed again in Thorne’s hand.

squire

Thorne kicked at the side of the bath in frustration. His hand was clammy again; sticky against the plastic of the phone.

What’s his real name?

i’ll send u a message

So, Skinner had been Jennings. It was obvious that Brooks thought both men were equally guilty, but Thorne hoped one day it might matter to a court which of them had been responsible for what.

Did he kill Tipper?

one of them did

Thorne was typing too fast now, making mistakes, not bothering to go back and correct them.

Tell me who sow e can findhim

no point Then: i’ve already found him

Thorne’s excitement was giving way to irritation, and anger at himself. The exchange with Brooks that he’d been hoping for, that he’d pinned so much on, was going nowhere. The other night he’d felt as though everything he and Louise had said to each other was loaded with meaning, but this was just words on a screen, and none of them were telling him anything he needed.

Contact was not the same thing as connection.

He typed: I meant it about the letters.

Thorne knew as soon as half a minute had come and gone that Brooks had nothing else to say. He imagined him on a dark street corner, cracking open the shell of a phone, tossing the tiny SIM into a drain.

He gave it another five minutes, then stood up and washed his hands again; drying them until they were sore, until he could spin the ring freely around his finger. He put the phone away and trudged into the living room to wake Louise.

Davey Tindall hopped off the night bus at Vauxhall Cross and started walking. Spitting feathers. A youngster stepped in front of him, some junkie with his hood up, and was told to fuck off before he’d even opened his mouth.

Tindall’s employer had a business to run; had overheads and profit margins and whatnot. Tindall understood that. So it wasn’t him he was pissed off with; it was that pair of shite-hawks with warrant cards.

A half-price minicab at the end of a night was one of the perks that Tindall’s boss put his way. He’d rather have had another tenner in the pay packet come the end of the week, but the bloke who paid his wages had interests in a cab firm, so that was that. There’d been no lift home tonight, though. Forty-five minutes on a bus full of nutters and winos. He’d be lucky enough to hang on to his job, he reckoned…

The Filth never took that kind of thing into account, did they?

Someone in one of those bargain bookshops opposite the cinema, the ones with wank-mags in the basement, had spotted that the ticket office was closed for fifteen fucking minutes. Nosey cunt mentions it to someone, and word gets passed same as it always does. Next thing, one of the cousins is popping in with his smart suit on, swaggering about and wanting to know what’s been happening.

‘It was ten minutes, no more.’

‘Yeah, ten minutes when our customers went somewhere else. Ten fucking minutes too long, Davey.’

He’d told the cocky little sod he’d had the shits: an iffy vindaloo the night before; had to shut up shop and get to a chemist’s. The cousin fucks off, then an hour later the boss calls up, so he has to tell him the same story.

‘I don’t give a toss. Your dodgy guts have cost me money. Next time use a fucking bucket whatever, just don’t stop taking the tickets.’

He’d laughed and said he was sorry. Thought he’d got away with it.

Then: ‘How you getting home tonight, Davey?’

Tindall walked back along the Embankment, then crossed underneath the railway line and took out his key. He was starving; started thinking about cheese on toast when he got indoors. He’d normally have nipped across the road for a sandwich at dinnertime, but he’d been scared to leave the booth for so much as a few minutes after the boss had rung. There’d only been kebab shops open by the time he knocked off and that crap really did give him the runs.

He shouted a ‘hello’ when he walked through the door; made a fuss of his Jack Russell, who came skittering across the lino to meet him. He followed her back into the kitchen and slopped some food into a bowl. Then he turned the grill on and wandered upstairs to the spare room.

There was no answer when he knocked, so he stuck his head round the door.

‘Sorry, son, I thought you were out.’

‘Why d’you come in, then?’

Brooks had spoken without looking up. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the phone in his hand, pressing buttons. His training shoes were scuffed and dirty. There were papers scattered about on the bed, and more phones. Plastic bags against the wall containing all his clothes, a dirty mug and plate on the carpet.

Tindall stepped in and picked up the empties. ‘I’m making a bit of cheese on toast if you want some.’

Brooks said nothing for a few seconds, then looked up and stared, as if the Scotsman’s voice had just reached him.

‘Anyway, there’ll be some downstairs if you fancy it, you know? And tea.’

Tindall looked away, glancing around the room as if checking that everything were to his guest’s satisfaction, or that nothing had been damaged. The door caught as he started to pull it to; hissing against the pile of the carpet. ‘Need to get an inch shaved off this fucking door,’ he said.

Brooks was looking at his phone again, studying the screen.

‘You need to get some sleep, son…’

Tindall closed the door without waiting for a reaction, and went back downstairs to his supper and his dog.

Thorne woke with his arm stretched across the cold side of the bed where Louise should have been. He walked naked and half asleep into the kitchen. Found Louise leaning back against the worktop in a dressing-gown, hands wrapped around her favourite mug.

‘You all right?’

‘I just wanted some tea,’ she said.

Thorne peered at the digital clock on the front of the cooker. ‘At half past four?’

‘Why do you never tell me anything?’

That woke him up fast enough. Fuck, was there any way she could have found out about the contact with Marcus Brooks? He tried to hide his alarm beneath confusion and lack of sleep. He breathed hard and blinked slowly. ‘Sorry… what? Is there some conversation I’m forgetting here?’

Louise shook her head. ‘That’s the point.’

It wasn’t about Brooks. It was something more general; something she’d been saving up. He felt relieved, then irritated, then cold. His hand drifted down to cup his shrinking tackle as he turned to head for the bathroom to fetch the ratty dressing-gown.

‘Night then,’ she said.

His shoulders dropped, and he took a second. ‘What don’t I tell you?’

Her eyes rolled up, as though she had plenty to choose from. ‘All sorts.’ Then, like she’d plucked one out of the air. ‘Your father…’

‘I’ve told you.’

‘I know what happened. More or less. The fire, the fact that it might not have been an accident.’

Thorne sighed. Said it as though she might be stupid, and he was saying it for the last time. ‘There was a fire, and he died, and I don’t know, will never fucking know if the stupid fucker left the stove on, or if someone came into the house and gave him a helping hand. Is that OK?’

She nodded, meaning that it wasn’t.

‘I don’t see what else you want to know.’

‘How you feel about it.’ She put down her tea. ‘Christ, I-’

‘How do you think I feel?’

‘I’m asking.’

‘I’d’ve thought it would be fucking obvious.’

‘It isn’t.’

Thorne raised his arms in a gesture of helplessness; like maybe it was more her fault than his.

‘What about the man you think might have done it?’

Thorne shook his head, would not even say the name.

‘How do you feel about him?’

He studied his bare feet against the tiles; spoke to them. ‘I’m stark-bollock naked and I’m half asleep. I can’t even think straight. This is stupid…’

She took a step towards him, thrust her hands into the pockets of her dressing-gown. ‘We’ve been together five months and sometimes it feels like I’ve barely known you ten minutes. Five months, and the other night in bed I did something really fucking stupid. I’ve thought about it and, whatever I said, there must have been some small part of me that wanted it. Even if it was only for a few seconds.’ Her right hand came out of the dressing-gown pocket, clutched at a handful of material around her belly. ‘Some part of me wanted it, which is why I’m making tea in the middle of the night, because if I’m honest, I don’t feel like you tell me any more, really tell me any more, than you tell Phil, or Dave Holland, or the bloke you buy the fucking newspaper off in the morning.’ She stopped, and waited for Thorne to raise his head; looked for something in his face. ‘You’re right,’ she said, moving towards the door. ‘This is stupid.’

‘Can we talk about it tomorrow?’

Pushing past him, she said, ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

TWENTY-FOUR

‘This job’s a fucking joke.’

‘You only just worked that out?’ Thorne asked.

Kitson walked past Thorne, who was waiting for toast, and dropped a herbal teabag into one of the small, metal teapots-for-one, which invariably dribbled your tea all over the table when you tried to use it. ‘A good-news, bad-news joke,’ she said. ‘A whole fucking series of them.’

Thorne reached for a foil-wrapped rectangle of butter and a sachet of jam, thinking that when Kitson was in a bad mood, she swore almost as much as Richard Rawlings did. His own language was industrial by any standards much of the time, but he’d started to notice it in others. Another hangover from his father’s final months, perhaps.

‘I take it you’ve got a joke for me, then…’

They carried their trays to a table; sat next to a group of detectives from another team who’d just come off the overnight shift. These officers ate their breakfasts in virtual silence; worn out, but relieved at having put a Friday allnighter behind them. Thorne had worked that shift enough to know that one or two would be having mixed feelings about a day ahead with their families; potentially tense and stressful after what was invariably the toughest eight hours of the week.

‘Good news: we’ve got the name of a man identified as our killer by the victim’s girlfriend.’ Kitson poured her tea. Used a paper serviette to mop up the spills. ‘Bad news: he’s disappeared.’

‘Kemal?’

‘The dry cleaner’s has been closed for a week and the neighbours haven’t clapped eyes on him. Done a bunk, by the look of it.’

Thorne spoke through a mouthful of toast. ‘Well, it’s certainly not great news if you need a shirt pressed, but it sounds like he’s your man.’

‘Right. Which is why it’s fucking bad news.’

One of the other detectives looked across, as though foul language from a woman this early in the day was putting him off his full English. Kitson stared back, leaving him in no doubt that there was plenty more where that came from.

‘He’ll turn up,’ Thorne said.

‘If he’s still in the country. Probably hiding out in some Turkish fishing village by now.’

‘You got people on the ports?’

‘It’s being “organised”.’ She put the word in inverted commas, as though to question the efficiency of those doing the organising. ‘But I reckon it’s too bloody late.’

‘Do you think he got wind that his sister knew? That she was likely to grass him up?’

‘Who knows?’

‘It would explain why she was so scared.’

‘Maybe she wasn’t the only one who was scared,’ Kitson said. ‘Deniz Sedat had some seriously unpleasant friends. If I was Hakan Kemal, it wouldn’t be the police I was most worried about.’

Thorne nodded, chewed his toast. Thinking that Kitson’s theory was all well and good, but that she hadn’t come across a certain sort of policeman as yet.

On his way to his office, Thorne walked past as Stone was running over his ‘women and bin-bags’ routine for an attractive admin officer. It seemed to be working for him.

This job’s a fucking joke…

Plenty of them flying around, and an unusually good atmosphere in the Incident Room. This in spite of the fact that most of those working would rather have been doing something else on a Saturday morning: having sex; watching Football Focus; having sex while watching Football Focus.

Just after breakfast, he’d received a text on his old mobile.

You were SO hot last night. You’re the best xxx

Hendricks. Thorne was smiling as he deleted the message. Thinking that a short stay in prison didn’t sound too bad as things stood, he’d told Hendricks about the live listening. He knew the cheeky bastard was doing it for the benefit of those intercepting the texts on that line; imagined the comments once they had traced the number.

Mid-morning, Thorne’s mood was taken down a notch or two by a call from Keith Bannard.

‘Been upsetting my snout?’

Tindall: a covert human information source, or CHIS, according to a thousand memos and expenses claims. But anyone wishing not to sound wholly ridiculous used the well-worn slang, beloved of every fictional cop from Jack Regan onwards.

‘Obviously he’s easily upset.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s me that gets the earache…’

Listening to him, Thorne imagined the man from S &O as a TV policeman: a no-nonsense country copper running amok in the big city; red face and big flapping hands, constantly outraged by the way people did things and by the price of everything. Sorting things out his way.

Thorne explained why he and Holland had made the trip to Soho. That though Mr Tindall was clearly a very sensitive individual, he was also a lying toerag.

‘Get anything?’ Bannard asked.

‘What, you mean apart from the grief and the offer of free tickets to a dirty film?’

‘Yeah, well, we all get those.’

‘I got a list of names.’ Thorne told Bannard about the conversation Tindall claimed to have had with Marcus Brooks; about the people he’d advised Brooks to go and speak to about accommodation. He read out the names.

‘You talked to any of them yet?’ Bannard asked.

‘Some are getting visits later today.’

‘Good luck.’

Thorne was hardly surprised that Bannard was pessimistic. ‘What the fuck is it with these people when it comes to talking to the police? I don’t mean incriminating themselves, or grassing someone up. I mean just saying anything. With the Black Dogs it’s like a badge of honour or something. With the boys in the suits it’s right up there with pie and mash, and boxing, and loving their mums.’

‘Maybe it’s just you,’ Bannard said. ‘They all talk to me.’

‘Only when you’ve got something on them.’

‘It helps.’

‘How did you get Tindall to start talking?’

‘Money, mate.’ Bannard was matter-of-fact. ‘Easiest way of all. His wife was ill, about to croak, I think. He needed money to help look after her.’

Thorne felt a twinge of guilt at his appraisal of Tindall. At the same time he thought that Bannard’s character would perhaps be too steely for even the most jaded of television viewers. ‘Anything you can put our way?’ he asked. ‘On any of these names?’

‘Not really.’

‘Thought you might have some… leverage.’

‘Listen, mate, if I had anything on any of those bastards, I’d have used it by now.’

‘Just a thought.’

‘No harm in asking.’

‘Haven’t you got anybody on the inside with any of these firms?’

Bannard sucked in a breath; answered like a taxi-driver being asked to drive south of the river at 4 a.m. ‘Can’t really go there, mate.’ He said he’d ask around, see if anyone else on his team had any bright ideas. Everyone had different contacts.

Thorne said that he’d be grateful. ‘What we were talking about the other night,’ he added. ‘Under the bridge. I was wondering if the Black Dogs had got themselves a new leader yet.’ He was thinking about who else Marcus Brooks might be planning on getting rid of. The message he was expecting some time that day.

Bannard sniffed. ‘Well, if they have, I don’t know who it is. I’ll get word eventually. It’ll be some long-haired fucker with tattoos, though, I can promise you that.’

Thorne knew what Bannard meant. He’d already been getting the three dead bikers mixed up in his head: a mass of dead white flesh and coloured ink.

‘I reckon that’s why they’ve got the nicknames,’ Bannard said. ‘So they can tell each other apart.’

‘Makes sense,’ Thorne said. Bannard had been joking, but it was what his old man had done when everything had started to short-circuit. Names had been the first things to go, replaced by simple – and usually unflattering – physical descriptions. Everyone from the man who ran the newsagent’s to Tom Thorne himself.

‘So, is that your best bet?’ Bannard asked. ‘The names you got from Tindall.’

‘Best bet?’

‘Trying to trace Brooks, I mean.’

Well, apart from the cosy text messages we send each other in the early hours, thought Thorne.

‘We’re chasing up a few other things,’ he said.

Actually, there were more than a few.

The so-called golden twenty-four hours after Martin Cowans’ corpse was hauled out of the canal had yielded nothing remotely precious, but there were still plenty of active leads to follow up: the property taken from the address in Hammersmith; the latest description of Marcus Brooks; the information provided by Davey Tindall. Though officers had been dispatched to question those on Tindall’s list, most of the inquiry team – which had now swelled to fifty-plus police and civilian staff – were busy where most modern detective work was done: at a desk, with phone, fax and computer keyboard all within easy reach.

These days, the majority of medical claims filed by Met employees were for bad backs or repetitive strain injury. Not even patrol officers – teamed up as often as not with CSO part-timers – suffered with their feet any more. Although Thorne thought he probably wore out a little more shoe-leather than most; certainly for someone of his rank.

‘Yeah, but that’s not because you’re chasing stuff up, is it? It’s because you’re usually running away from something.’ Holland, or Hendricks… someone taking the piss, had said that.

Once Thorne had got off the phone, still with no real idea why Bannard had called, he caught up with Holland.

‘Still haven’t learned to keep my big mouth shut, have I?’ the DS said. At Thursday’s briefing, he’d suggested that they might be able to find out where Brooks had bought his car. Aside from his trip into Soho with Thorne, he’d spent most of the time since regretting it.

He pushed a stack of papers across his desk, towards Thorne. ‘Used-car dealers in Acton, Brentford, Chiswick and Shepherd’s Bush. Hundreds of the buggers, and that’s without the dodgy ones.’ He reached for a Post-It on which he’d scribbled some notes. ‘Found a couple of decent second-hand BMWs you might be interested in. You know, whenever you fancy trading in the puke-mobile.’

‘Not listening,’ Thorne said.

Holland rolled back his chair, pointed at a thick pile of old newspapers and car magazines. ‘That’s been a treat, too. Calling up every low-life who might’ve flogged a dark Mondeo for cash a few days ago. You should hear the intake of breath when I tell them where I’m calling from. Like someone’s been killed because they’ve sold some poor sod a death-trap…’

‘Sounds like you’ve had fun,’ Thorne said. Holland had been joking, but as far as the cases they normally picked up went, the car was the murder weapon more often than the gun or the knife. Thorne handed the sheaf of papers back across, suddenly reminded that paperwork of his own was tucked away in his desk drawer.

Letters from a man to his dead wife and child.

‘The DCI was looking for you,’ Karim said, behind him.

Thorne turned. ‘Well, he wasn’t looking very hard. I’ve only been here and in the office.’

Karim pulled a what do I know? face, and followed it with one that suggested they continue the conversation somewhere else.

They walked into the corridor.

‘Brigstocke’s got some appointment or other.’

Karim had emphasised the word enough for Thorne to know that the DCI had not gone to see his dentist. Thorne asked the question with a look.

‘Solicitor,’ Karim said. ‘Sounds like this DPS business, whatever it is, has moved up a gear.’

Same as everything else, Thorne thought.

‘So, you’re acting DCI.’

‘What?’

‘Only until he gets back. Shouldn’t be more than a few hours.’

‘Why me? It isn’t usually me.’

‘You’re not usually around. Anyway, that’s what he said, and personally I reckon you could do with more responsibility.’

Karim was laughing as he wandered away, but Thorne’s mind was already elsewhere: thinking of something Sharon Lilley had said that night in the pub, when she’d told him that her DCI had stepped back to let her run the Tipper inquiry.

Had she mentioned a name?

She’d said that the idea had been for her to ‘try the shoes on for size’, get used to heading up a major investigation. But Thorne was thinking of less altruistic reasons why an officer might not want to be involved.

If he knew the prime suspect personally, for example. If he’d been one of the two men responsible for making him the prime suspect.

Thorne walked along the corridor towards his office. Lilley had said she was unsure where her DCI had ended up; something about him being the sort to land on his feet. Thorne made a mental note to try and find out where he had landed.

As he turned into the office, he almost bumped into Kitson coming out.

‘We’ve found Kemal,’ she said. ‘He’s in Bristol, or at least he was two days ago.’

‘Aren’t you even a bit disappointed?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I know you were angling for a trip to that Turkish fishing village.’

‘I’ll settle for a day out in Bristol,’ Kitson said. ‘It’s got good shops.’

They stood in the narrow corridor. There were posters behind glass promoting new initiatives: a crackdown on bail absconders; a campaign to keep hate crime out of sport. A bar-chart proudly trumpeting an increase in the clear-up rate of murders Met-wide to 87 per cent.

If they didn’t catch Marcus Brooks, Thorne thought, they’d need to redraw the chart.

‘There was a parking ticket issued two days ago in Bristol city centre. A Renault registered to Hakan Kemal.’

‘Has he paid it yet?’

‘I think he’s got bigger things to worry about.’

‘So what’s in Bristol?’

‘I’ve no idea. Somewhere to hide, I suppose.’

‘Are you going to talk to the sister again?’

From the office, Thorne became aware of a muffled beeping – the tone from his prepay, sounding in the pocket of his jacket. The sound of a message arriving. He walked casually past Kitson and across to the chair, trying to keep at least one ear on what she was saying.

‘… called earlier, and got her answering machine…’

Nodding, saying, ‘Go on,’ Thorne took out the phone and automatically angled his body away from Kitson, who had followed him inside, still talking.

‘I was thinking about having a word with the parents.’

A small envelope was flashing on the screen. Another number Thorne didn’t recognise.

‘But I think we should give Harika a chance to get back to me first.’

He clicked SHOW then scrolled down; pressed PLAY to begin the video clip.

At that moment everything they’d been talking about, everything that Thorne had been thinking, went out of his head in an instant. Kemal, the follow-up on Sharon Lilley’s DCI… everything. Kitson’s words faded, as though huge hands had been clamped hard across Thorne’s ears.

Like she was talking to him underwater.

The fifteen-second clip ended. Froze. A silver estate car; a man walking away from it.

Thorne was looking at a picture of Phil Hendricks.

TWENTY-FIVE

Hendricks laughed when Thorne told him. Nervous laughter perhaps, but he certainly sounded unconcerned. ‘He’s trying to wind you up, mate.’

‘Well, he’s fucking succeeded.’

‘That’s been the point all along, hasn’t it? Trying to get a reaction.’

Thorne could not remember what he’d blurted out at Kitson as he’d rushed from their office, carrying the prepay phone down to the far end of the corridor. He’d stepped into the stairwell, taken a large, unwelcome breath of apprehension from that new carpet, and dialled Hendricks’ mobile.

‘What are you doing today?’ Thorne asked.

‘Getting smashed over the head with a hammer, apparently.’

‘Don’t joke about it.’

‘It is a fucking joke.’

‘Listen, you should probably stay inside. And get somebody to stay with you-’

‘Just calm down…’

Thorne was trying his best, but it wasn’t easy. Hendricks’ refusal to be alarmed was only increasing his own agitation; his own panic. ‘For fuck’s sake, Phil. Have you not seen what’s been happening for the last couple of weeks? How many bodies have you worked on?’

‘Bikers and bent coppers, the lot of them. All people Brooks blamed for his girlfriend’s death. That’s the pattern, right?’

‘All people I got sent pictures of.’

‘It’s a wind-up, I’m telling you.’

‘Sorry, but you’re not the one who gets to make that decision.’

Hendricks laughed again, but to Thorne it felt like a finger jabbed into his chest. ‘Before you start playing the by-the-book copper, you should remember who you’re talking to, mate.’

‘Who gets to do your PM, Phil? Do you have to nominate someone?’

‘Now you’re being ridiculous.’

‘Seriously,’ Thorne said, ‘I’m interested.’

‘And I’m the one that’s supposed to be the drama queen. Christ…’

Thorne stared down over the narrow banister, listening to his friend breathe. This was how they argued. Politics or the Premiership, Thorne would be the one to lose it, to do most of the shouting, while Hendricks mocked him; blasé or sarcastic, then often seething for hours, even days afterwards.

‘What have I got to do with any of this?’ Hendricks said, eventually. ‘Just think about it for one minute, and you’ll see how ridiculous it is.’

‘You’re connected to me. That might be enough.’

‘Come on, this bloke doesn’t kill for kicks, does he? He’s doing it to settle scores.’

Thorne’s initial panic began to subside a little as he saw the sense in what his friend was saying. There was no good reason for Brooks to want Hendricks dead; certainly not the Brooks Thorne thought he’d been starting to understand. ‘I know that, and you’re probably right, but I’m just asking you to be careful. Stay where you are and watch TV or something. Get a pizza delivered. It won’t kill you.’

‘Do you want to rephrase that?’

‘Not really,’ Thorne said. ‘Where are you? At home?’

‘No…’

‘That’s good, now stay put.’ Thorne had not only recognised Hendricks’ car in the video clip. He had watched it pull up outside Hendricks’ home address. ‘Is there anybody with you?’

‘It’s not a problem,’ Hendricks said. ‘I’ve got a nice, tough police officer to look after me. Well, she’s in the shower at the minute, but I don’t think she was planning on going anywhere.’

He was at Louise’s place.

‘She’s got strange taste in blokes, but I think she can take care of herself.’

Thorne couldn’t argue with that, and he was growing more certain by the second that Hendricks was right – that there was no real cause for concern – but he couldn’t help asking himself, bearing in mind where Brooks had probably got his information from, if he knew where Louise lived as well.

He tried to put the thought out of his mind.

‘What does Brigstocke say?’

Suddenly, Thorne had an even tougher question to answer. ‘He doesn’t know.’

‘Because…?’

Because I’m a fucking idiot, Thorne thought.

He told Hendricks about the night he’d received the first text from Brooks, in the garden of Paul Skinner’s house. The moment when he’d realised there was a police officer at the centre of the case who had probably killed twice already and was responsible for many more deaths. When Thorne had realised that was not information he wanted to share. He told him that he’d been in contact with Brooks several times since, on a line that was not being monitored; that he’d known Cowans was dead before his body was ever discovered.

That he knew Brooks was planning to kill again.

‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Hendricks said, when Thorne had finished. ‘Lecturing me.’

‘Warning you.’

‘Well, thanks very much, I’ll consider myself warned.’

‘This doesn’t change what I said, Phil.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘Don’t be a twat.’ Thorne was shouting; losing it again. But deep down, he knew it was because he’d also lost any authority. ‘So, I’ve fucked up. It isn’t the first time.’

‘Might well be the last, though.’

‘It can’t hurt to be careful. All right?’

‘Why don’t you just ask your friend Brooks if he’s planning on doing me in? Might save us all a lot of trouble.’

‘It doesn’t work like that.’

Thorne could hear the anger in his friend’s silence. Imagined an expression he’d seen only once or twice and felt a flutter of relief that they were not talking face to face.

‘I’d better go and lock the doors,’ Hendricks said. ‘Like a good boy.’

‘Listen, Phil… don’t tell Louise.’

‘What? That someone might be trying to kill me? Or that you’ve been getting matey with him on the quiet?’

Thorne didn’t have a quick answer.

‘If you really wanted to play God, mate, you should have become a fucking doctor…’

Whatever his face was saying to the contrary, Thorne spent much of his lunch hour in the Royal Oak telling people that nothing was the matter. He found it hard to share Kitson’s excitement at the possibility of tracking down Hakan Kemal in Bristol. Or to react to news that, of those on Tindall’s list thus far interviewed, none had cooperated when questioned about helping Marcus Brooks find somewhere to stay.

‘Struck dumb as soon as they see a warrant card, those fuckers,’ Karim said.

Laughter and jeers when Stone added: ‘I wish it worked with some of the women I know.’

Thorne pushed lukewarm shepherd’s pie around his plate and thought about what Hendricks had said before hanging up on him.

Home truths and hard questions.

Had he chosen to go his own sweet and stupid way because it was his best chance of nailing Brooks and the corrupt officer who’d sparked off the killing spree? Because he’d begun to doubt which side anyone was on? Or was it really because he thought that his own judgement was sounder than anyone else’s? That a snap decision was smarter than the combined wisdom of a hard-working squad, every bit as experienced as he was?

God wasn’t part of a team, after all.

Hendricks had been trying to score a point, but Thorne was starting to think his friend had hit the bull’s-eye. His was one of the few opinions that Thorne respected. Which was, he concluded miserably, precisely the problem.

Depressing as these moments of self-realisation were, he was at least feeling more confident that Hendricks was in no immediate danger. But there had still been that nauseating jolt of alarm, when he’d wondered if Louse’s flat was any safer than Hendrick’s own.

Bearing in mind where Brooks had probably got his information from…

Hendricks had been right; it was almost certainly a wind-up. But it hadn’t been Marcus Brooks ratcheting up the torment. Thorne decided that he’d be paying another visit to Long Lartin as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

Walking out of the pub, Kitson put a hand on his arm, clearly less convinced than others by his assurances that all was well.

‘You’re going to get a result,’ she said. ‘We both are.’

Thorne thought about that bar-chart outside their office and did his best to smile.

‘Come on, Guv, it’s your job to motivate the rest of us.’

‘Guv?’

‘Acting DCI.’

Thorne pulled on his jacket. I’ve been acting for days, he thought.

The day was cold; a wind roaring into their faces as they stepped out into the car park. A horn sounded behind them and Thorne turned to look at a black Volvo parked alongside a row of wheelie-bins. He recognised the back of the driver’s head and told Kitson and the others he’d catch up.

The Volvo’s driver leaned across to push open the passenger door and Thorne climbed gingerly in; backing on to the leather seat first, then swinging his legs around and into the footwell before pulling the door to.

‘You OK?’ Nunn asked.

Thorne nodded. He’d had back surgery a few months previously and though the pain had gone, he was still cautious. A small part of him still fantasised about stepping in next time Spurs were going through a goal drought, but the more practical side told him not to get out of bed too quickly.

‘Nice car,’ Thorne said. The Volvo’s interior was immaculate; smelled new.

‘Thought you were more of a vintage bloke.’

‘Have you got Dave Holland working undercover?’

Nunn stared, not getting it. Thorne told him it didn’t matter.

It was warm in the car, and Nunn had been listening to the radio. He nudged down the volume. ‘How was your chat with Richard Rawlings?’

Thorne saw that the radio was tuned into Magic FM; an old Petula Clark song. ‘Was it me you were watching, or Rawlings?’

‘Maybe we were watching the pub and got lucky,’ Nunn said. ‘What did Rawlings want?’

So, Nunn knew that Rawlings had requested the meeting. It was the most likely scenario, but Thorne still wondered if the DPS were privy to the intercept on his home phone. He was past being surprised by anything.

‘He reckons you lot have got it in for him. Wanted me to use my “influence” to get you to ease off. Or something.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘That I don’t have any influence.’

‘That took you an hour and a half, did it?’

‘Mostly it was him, swearing.’ Nunn smiled. ‘I don’t have any influence, do I?’

‘It’s not the word I would use, but we’re working on cases that are hopefully going to cross over at some point. What you do will probably be influential.’

At some point. The moment when the identity of the man they were both after – although Thorne could still not be sure if they were chasing him for the same reason – was brought out into the open. Then it would be down to clout, pure and simple, and Thorne knew who was carrying the most.

‘Rawlings is an aggressive little bastard though, isn’t he?’ Nunn sucked his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t like to be around when he loses his temper.’

‘He’s scared.’

‘No point being scared if you haven’t done anything.’

‘That’s bollocks,’ Thorne said. ‘You know very well that you lot are there to scare people.’

‘To remind them, maybe.’

‘They give you special training, don’t they?’

‘You’re not scared, are you?’

‘Constantly.’

Nunn nodded. ‘Makes sense. We’ve got a good-sized file on you, so you’d be stupid not to worry a little.’

Thorne stared straight ahead. Petula had cross-faded into Glen Campbell singing ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’.

Three years before, Thorne had been indirectly responsible for the death of a prominent north London gangster. Few had mourned, but Thorne lived with the knowledge that the day might come when he would have to answer for it. He could not know if this event, or others that came close, was in a DPS file; but more worrying were the reasons why Nunn had chosen to tell him such a file existed at all. Thorne could sense that an offer of some kind was being made, but there had also been a threat thrown in for good measure.

He looked across, but Nunn had turned to peer out of his window at nothing in particular.

You’d be stupid not to worry a little…

Thorne didn’t like Richard Rawlings, and trusted him even less, but he’d been happy enough to remain noncommittal in an effort to get Nunn’s take on it. Suddenly, it seemed like there was no further point in going round the houses. Not when he was up against an expert. ‘When Skinner was killed, I asked if you felt disappointed, that you’d missed out on nicking him, remember?’

‘“Robbed” was the word you used,’ Nunn said. ‘And I told you that yes, I did.’

Thorne wondered if Nunn had a good memory or a tape recorder. Decided he was getting seriously paranoid. ‘“Robbed” because you’d lost the chance to put one bent copper away? Or two?’

‘Two’s always better than one. Always.’

‘Well, either you know who the other copper is and you were hoping Skinner would give you the evidence. Or you were banking on Skinner telling you who his partner was.’

‘Doesn’t really matter now he’s dead.’

‘Which is it?’

The advantage of playing virtual poker, especially when your face gave away as much as Thorne’s usually did, was that you could dance around with glee when your hole cards were revealed and only someone in the room with you would know you’d been dealt aces. Thorne looked at Nunn, hoping to see some sort of ‘tell’. Saw him nodding along with the song on the radio and decided that the DPS man was probably a far better poker player than he was.

‘Look, we both know what this man’s done,’ Thorne said. ‘“Squire”.’ That got a reaction. It was the first time the name had been mentioned between them. ‘We both want him put away, but it seems to me like one of us thinks it’s some sort of competition.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Am I? Way it’s going, we’ll only find out who this fucker is when he turns up with his skull smashed in.’

Nunn looked frightened suddenly. ‘That’s not going to happen.’ It certainly sounded as though he knew something.

‘So, is it Rawlings?’ Nothing. ‘Does Rawlings know?’

Thorne let out a long sigh, sucked it back in hard when Nunn turned in his seat to stare at him.

‘So, one of us thinks it’s a competition,’ Nunn said. ‘And I suppose only one of us is being totally honest. Gobbing off like he’s the only one playing straight, not keeping anything to himself…’

Try as he might, Thorne knew he was reddening. If Nunn knew that he’d been communicating secretly with Marcus Brooks, then Thorne was fucked, file or no file. He felt as cornered as Rawlings had claimed to feel; as he knew Brigstocke felt, whatever he had been accused of doing. ‘It’s not hard to see why you fuckers are so unpopular.’

Nunn smiled, as though it was a predictable response from someone on the back foot. Like it was something he’d heard plenty of times before. ‘You don’t think it’s worth doing? Making sure the shit gets flushed away?’

‘It’s not just the shit though, is it?’

‘I don’t do this because I enjoy the looks when people know which department you’re working for. I don’t love being called a scab and a fuck of a lot worse, hearing the conversation stop when you walk into the canteen. Do you honestly reckon I’d be doing it if I didn’t think it was important?’

On the train a few days before, Thorne had thought he’d sensed a vulnerability; something not quite hidden by the long coat and shaved head. He thought he caught another glimpse of weakness now, in the vehemence, but it had gone before he had even finished the thought.

‘We’re well aware what people think,’ Nunn said. ‘Most people…’

Neil Diamond, now: ‘Beautiful Noise’. A song Thorne loved, in spite of himself. ‘Well, if you’ve got the faintest idea what I think,’ he said, ‘I’d be happy to hear it. Because at the minute, I haven’t got a fucking clue.’

Nunn leaned forward and turned up the volume. Apparently, their conversation was over.

The Neil Diamond song was still in his head, becoming less of a favourite all the time, when Thorne called Louise, mid-afternoon. He could barely hear her when she picked up.

‘What the hell’s that?’

Louise had to raise her voice over some very uneasy listening in the background. ‘Some piece of thrash-metal Phil brought over with him.’

‘OK…’

Hendricks was still there.

Thorne heard Louise shouting at Hendricks to turn the music down; heard it stop completely a few seconds later. When Louise came back to the phone, she was almost whispering.

‘He’s in a seriously strange mood, by the way.’

So, Hendricks hadn’t mentioned their earlier conversation to Louise. That was probably no bad thing. Thorne toyed with telling her about the message, about Hendricks’ refusal to take it seriously, but decided against it. She was bound to ask the same question Hendricks had, about what Brigstocke thought, and Thorne did not want to get into any of that. He could always have told her that he was acting DCI, of course, but keeping his mouth shut felt slightly better than such near deceit. So he said nothing.

Enough people were thinking badly of him as it was.

‘How’s it been?’ Louise asked, flat.

‘Same as ever. However you feel at the start of the day, it’s downhill from breakfast.’

‘You must be knackered,’ she said. ‘Sorry…’

‘It’s fine.’ He could hear something being shouted in the background. Told her about the text he’d received from Hendricks that morning.

‘Did he? He never said anything.’

It was hardly a surprise. Even as Thorne recounted Hendricks’ you’re the best message, he couldn’t help but think it would be the last joke coming from that direction in a while.

‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘Inaccurate, but funny.’

Thorne was relieved to hear a smile in her voice.

‘When can you get over?’

‘Shouldn’t be too late. Eight, half eight.’

‘Maybe we can finally get to see this movie. There’s usually late shows on a Saturday.’

‘Or the three of us could do something together,’ Thorne said. ‘Might be easier to just get a DVD out.’

‘OK,’ Louise said, frosty again.

‘I’m booked out for the whole day tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, fine. Whatever.’

Thorne guessed that the ‘whatever’ meant anything but; that Louise had been banking on the two of them spending some time alone. But he hadn’t quite been able to forget about that video clip. Perhaps he should simply have told her, because by the time he’d hung up, after half a minute more of fuck all, he knew that Louise was thinking badly of him anyway.

He was on his way out of the door when the panic took hold…

Hurrying across the Incident Room, thinking about ways to get back in Louise’s good books. Pulling on his jacket and cheerfully telling those he wouldn’t see until Monday to enjoy their Sundays at work. Walking past the whiteboard, and glancing at the photographs; the bodies of the first two victims. Tucker and Hodson.

Dead white flesh and coloured ink.

Two thoughts, fragments of conversations, came together – smashed together – in his mind and started the wheels racing.

The feeble joke Bannard had cracked about all bikers looking the same: all long hair and tattoos. And something Hendricks had said at Tucker’s post-mortem, the one they’d watched together…

Thorne walked back to his office, pressed his body against the door after he’d closed it. Wondering, hoping that this was no more than cabin-fever. He used his prepay to call Louise’s flat, then Hendricks’ mobile.

Got no reply from either.

He thought hard, breathed hard for a minute or more, then dialled another number.

TWENTY-SIX

By the time he got off the phone, it was as sorted as it was ever going to be, but Brooks wasn’t happy. It didn’t feel right having to involve other people; having to rely on anybody. Each one should have been his alone, by rights.

This wasn’t the way he did things.

He sat up on the soft bed in Tindall’s spare room, looked at himself in the mirror on the dressing-table opposite.

It was almost beyond belief, this shit-house he’d become.

The way he did things.

Christ…

And it wasn’t like he was talking about the way he packed a suitcase or drove a car. These weren’t things he’d ever thought about, not seriously; even at the darkest moments, just after he’d gone inside. But everything changed you, big or small, didn’t it? Turned you into someone else. Every single thing you saw or thought, so that you were never the same person from one second to the next. How the fuck could you be? Maybe, eventually, good and bad, that made you into the person you were always meant to become.

Murder was now something he did, simple as that. And he was a damn sight happier doing it on his own.

Nobody made him take the advice, or accept the offer of help, on this one, but it made sense under the circumstances. It squared things. And this fucker clearly deserved it as much as anyone else.

He pulled faces at himself…

It wasn’t like he couldn’t work with other people. He’d really enjoyed those couple of years when him and Angie were doing the houses together; loved them. But you had to be working for the same thing, doing it for the same reasons. The two of them had nicked shit and sold it to put food on the table. To pay for clothes and holidays and stuff for Robbie. End of story. They both had the same attitude to the work, so they thought the same way when it came to whether a risk was worth taking, whether the payoff was worth it, whatever. They had the same boundaries.

Nobody else involved in what he was doing could feel the same way he did. Not when he was bringing the hammer down. There’d have to be a moment, some point, when any other person would think they’d had enough, and walk away. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to reach that point.

Nobody else could feel as much, or as little, as he did.

He shuffled forward and off the bed; moved across to the mirror on his knees and pressed his face up close to it. Fuck, he looked like he was pushing fifty. Like his dad had looked those couple of times in the visitors’ room.

Sorry, baby, he thought. I swear I was looking good right before it all happened; looking better than this, anyway. I’d even been working out for a few months, watching what I ate and all that. I didn’t want to come back to you flabby and fucked, like Nicklin and the rest of them, you know?

Everything changes you, big or small; changes your plans. Course, I didn’t know that when I was leaving my spuds at dinnertime and doing circuits in the gym at Long Lartin. Didn’t think you were going anywhere, did I?

That I’d be walking out of one prison and into another.

‘Mr Yashere? DI Thorne.’

A pause. ‘I left a message with you three days ago.’

‘The missing training shoe.’

‘Correct. The shoe that has gone walkabout. Do you have it?’

‘No…’

‘Losing such an important piece of evidence is causing something of a problem, to put it mildly.’ Yashere spoke slowly, with precision. A Nigerian accent.

‘I promise that I will find it,’ Thorne said. ‘And when I do, I will personally deliver it to you, in a box, with a fuckoff red ribbon round it. But right now I need a favour.’

‘I was just about to go home.’

The Crown Prosecution Service had a small office round the corner at Colindale station, but via the out-of-hours service Thorne had been put through to their Criminal Justice Unit at the main station in Edmonton. This was where Anthony Yashere and his fellow-caseworkers were based: collating exhibits; ensuring the integrity of evidence chains; firing off snippy emails and phone calls when blood stained training shoes disappeared.

Thorne explained what he needed.

Yashere took details, dates and names. Told Thorne that he could probably get him the trial transcript in a few days.

‘Not quick enough,’ Thorne said. ‘Sorry.’

Yashere began to think out loud, guiding Thorne through the process as he logged into his IT system. It provided a summary of all ongoing cases, but was not yet fully up to date with trials whose details had been on the system it had replaced three years before.

Thorne listened to the click of computer keys. To grunts and sighs of frustration.

‘We are going back quite a long way,’ Yashere said. ‘Perhaps I should ask a colleague who knows his way around the system better than I do.’

Thorne had a better idea. ‘Who was the prosecutor? You must have that on record.’

‘I think so.’

‘Do you have a number?’

Yashere logged out of one system and into another. More clicking, more waiting.

‘I think you will need a home number,’ Yashere said. ‘There are not too many fools like you and I still working at this time on a Saturday.’ He said that he’d try to get hold of Stuart Emery and have him call Thorne back.

Thorne gave Yashere his prepay phone number. ‘Can you tell him that it’s very urgent?’ he said.

‘Please don’t forget my missing training shoe, Inspector…’

Thorne tried Hendricks’ mobile again, and got no answer. He paced the office; told Kitson he’d see her on Monday when she stuck her head in to say goodnight; checked his watch every couple of minutes.

Ten minutes after Thorne had spoken to Yashere, Stuart Emery called.

Brooks climbed back up the bare wooden stairs from Tindall’s cellar. There was no electricity down there and he’d had to use a shitty little torch he’d dug out of a kitchen drawer. A kid’s thing with a thin, milky beam. He’d managed to find a couple of hammers, in a dusty canvas tool-bag, among the piles of damp magazines and boxes of videos, and he carried them both up to get a good look in the light.

He chose the smaller of the two: a claw hammer with green paint on the handle. Dropped it into a plastic bag which he carried down the hall and left by the front door.

There was plenty of time yet.

He wandered back into the kitchen and knelt to peer into the fridge. Tindall’s dog immediately climbed from her basket in the corner and scampered across to see what might be going. Milk, beer, onions. There were some tinned tomatoes in a dish, and Brooks thought about making some toast to go with them. In the end he settled for the plate of cooked sausages, set in fat under greasy cling-film.

He carried the plate to the small table against the wall and dropped half a sausage to the floor for the dog. It was chucking it down outside. He could see the rain bouncing off the felt on the shed roof.

He remembered Angie screaming at him one Sunday after he had taken Robbie over the field for a kick-about and they had both come home soaked, bouncing a muddy ball. Robbie thought it was funny, and shook his wet hair all over the kitchen before Angie could fetch a towel, which made her even angrier. The two of them pissing themselves. Angie shouting while she stripped off Robbie’s tiny West Ham shirt.

The dog was on its hind legs, pawing at his shins, so he lifted her up on to his lap. Let her lick the grease off the plate. He rubbed the dog’s bristly belly, and tried to stretch the memory out. In the end, he wasn’t sure if there were bits he was only imagining, but he had a clear enough picture of his son’s face; Robbie shaking his wet head, his two front teeth still coming through.

That would be the picture he’d try to hold on to when he was reaching into the plastic bag later on.

Stuart Emery was brisk, just the right side of surly, asking Thorne what he wanted the information for. Thorne tried to keep it quick and simple.

I want to be proved wrong, he thought.

For the second time, Thorne listened as someone at the end of a phone tried to call up the information that would confirm or assuage his worst fears.

‘Got twelve years of review notes on here somewhere,’ Emery said.

Thorne tried to stay calm while the wind threw rain against the window like tin-tacks.

‘Regina versus Brooks, yes?’

‘September 2000. Middlesex Crown Court.’ Thorne waited, willing each tap of a computer key to be the last.

‘Good job I’m organised,’ Emery said. ‘“Anal”, according to my wife.’

For pity’s sake…

‘Here we go… right. “Sentencing remarks”, “witness statements”, “pathology reports”, “grounds for appeal”… These are just my notes, you understand?’

Thorne stopped him, asked him to go back. Emery read, gave him a name. Then another.

His worst fears.

He spluttered out a ‘thank you’, then jerked the phone back to his mouth as he was about to hang up. He needed to move fast, but there was one more question he needed to ask: ‘Can anybody get hold of this stuff? Is it online?’

‘Well, by and large, it’s just specialist rulings,’ Emery said. ‘Judgements that pass into case law, that kind of thing. Mind you, I suppose most things are on the bloody Internet somewhere, if you can be bothered to look hard enough.’

If you’ve got the time, Thorne thought…

The panic fizzed in him, and anger tightened every muscle, every thought. Anger at Brooks, at the man Thorne knew was putting him up to this, and above all at himself. The procedure in this kind of emergency, this kind of nightmare, should have been straightforward. But Thorne knew too bloody well that he’d left himself no easy options.

He punched in Brigstocke’s mobile number.

Russell, I’ve been fucking stupid and I don’t care what happens when this is finished, but we’ve got a serious situation…

He changed his mind and tried Louise one more time.

‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling.’

‘I nipped out to the supermarket.’

‘Is Phil with you?’

‘No, he left about an hour ago. You OK?’

‘I’ve tried calling him. Shit…’

‘Tom, what’s the matter?’

So, Thorne told her what he’d discovered: about the message that was far from being a wind-up. And in a rush, garbled and guilty, he told her everything else. The evidence he’d kept to himself; the conversations that had gone unreported; the cracked and rotten limb he’d gone out on.

There wasn’t even a pause. ‘You’re a fucking idiot.’

‘I know, and I don’t have time,’ Thorne shouted. ‘You can call me everything under the sun later on. Now, I need to get hold of people. To find Phil.’

‘You said you’d tried to call him…’

‘His phone just kept ringing. He hasn’t got it with him, or he can’t hear it.’

‘I know where he is,’ Louise said. ‘There’s three or four places in town, could be any one of them. He asked me to go with him.’

‘Three or four?’

‘Some nights he calls in on all of them. Depends who he meets.’

‘Christ…’

‘Listen, I’ve been to these places. I know where they are.’

Thorne was finding it hard to concentrate. He was dizzy with the panic; with the increasing odds against everything turning out the right way.

Who gets to do your PM, Phil?

‘Tom…?’

‘I should call Brigstocke. Tell him everything.’

‘Wait.’ Louise’s voice was quiet, steel in it, suddenly. ‘You don’t have to call anyone.’

‘We need to get officers out there.’

‘You willing to fuck your career up?’

‘It doesn’t seem very important now.’

‘We can do this.’

Thorne leaned against his desk, thinking for a moment that he might be sick. There were pinpricks of sweat across his shoulders, in the small of his back. He felt murderous. Helpless. ‘How?’

‘Who do you trust?’ Louise asked.

‘I don’t know. Holland… Kitson…’

‘Just get Holland.’

Thorne felt the urge to argue, but said nothing. Louise had given him orders before, when they’d worked together. She was better at it than he was. ‘Right.’

She told him to stay calm and listen; gave him the addresses of two gay clubs in the West End. ‘You and Holland get to those. I’ll round a couple of my boys up and we’ll take the other two. They’ll do it for me if I tell them it’s important. No questions asked.’

‘It’s Saturday night.’

‘There are plenty of people I can trust, OK?’

Thorne hung up and flew along the corridor. He found Holland at his desk, his nose in a copy of Auto Trader.

‘Remember what I said about leading you into trouble?’

Holland took one look at Thorne’s face and stood up. Thorne began to talk, explaining and apologising, as he all but dragged Holland towards the exit; filling him in as best he could as they took the stairs two at a time and crashed out through the doors, into the rain.

TWENTY-SEVEN

They hit the top end of Tottenham Court Road inside fifteen minutes.

Holland had helped himself to a magnetic blue strobe-lamp and Thorne had stuck it to the roof of the car, running the cable in through the window and plugging it into the cigarette lighter. Neither had said much on the drive, and it wasn’t just a matter of necessary concentration, or Thorne’s use of the horn, or alarm at their speed on the wet roads, that had kept the conversation to a minimum.

There wasn’t really too much to say.

Holland had plenty of questions for Thorne, but he knew they would have to wait. In silence, braced against the dashboard, he asked himself a few questions that he didn’t have any answers for. Some of the ones Sophie would ask, if she knew.

Thorne had to pull over hard as an ambulance screamed up the wrong side of the road. He waited, revving the BMW’s engine and smacking his hand against the wheel.

‘Think about it,’ Holland said. ‘Brooks isn’t going to do anything in the middle of a club, is he? He’s probably followed him, same as he did with Cowans.’

Thorne nodded, yanked the wheel across and accelerated out in front of a bus. The driver flashed his lights and leaned on the horn.

‘Presuming Hendricks is still…’ Another nod. Alive. Holland didn’t need to say it. ‘We’ve probably got until the end of the night.’

Thorne looked at his watch: it wasn’t even nine o’clock.

‘There’s time,’ Holland said.

What Holland was saying made sense, but Thorne took precious little comfort from it. Driving like a maniac, thinking like one, he struggled to focus, to order this thoughts.

He didn’t have a picture of Hendricks; nothing to show to bouncers or bar-staff. He’d just have to use his eyes. He thought about the few times he’d been to places like these in the past. There was little enough light to read the label on your beer bottle.

He wondered if he could use the video clip that Brooks had sent…

What have I got to do with any of this?

You’re connected to me. That might be enough.

Thorne knew now that it was more than that, but he was also certain that he was the primary reason why Hendricks had been targeted. Chosen ahead of another biker, a police officer, anyone.

They crossed Oxford Street on a red light; slowed to weave through the traffic in front of them.

‘These two clubs are a couple of minutes’ walk from each other,’ Thorne said. ‘Which one do you want?’

Holland shook his head. ‘We do both of them together.’

‘No.’

‘Come on, aren’t we being stupid enough? Whatever you might think about Brooks, about why he’s been doing this…’

‘Fine. Together then.’

‘I’m shitting myself,’ Holland said, half smiling. ‘Don’t know about you.’

Thorne knew Holland was right and the last thing he needed was to put anybody else in danger. ‘We split up but try to stay in sight of each other.’ He knew that he should be afraid of a man who had killed three times, that it ought to make him careful, but it wasn’t the thought of confronting Marcus Brooks that was making his stomach jump.

Thorne turned right at Cambridge Circus and stopped the car on yellow lines outside the Spice of Life. They got out.

‘So, if I see Hendricks?’

Thorne’s fists clenched, and he felt something like relief that he was as angry at Phil Hendricks as he was at anybody else.

‘Jump on him,’ he said. ‘Jump on the fucker hard.’

It had only taken Porter ten minutes to find three officers willing to do as she asked without getting overly curious. She would have liked to put it down to respect, or even affection, but in a couple of cases she thought simple arselicking was closer to the truth.

It didn’t much matter.

On Thorne’s insistence she’d sent a DC to Hendrick’s place in Deptford, in case he decided to call it a night early. Another officer who lived south of the river was heading for New Cross – to a local place Hendricks used when he couldn’t be bothered to go all the way into town. Of all the venues Porter had mentioned to Thorne, she thought that one was the least likely. It was rather more sedate, less ‘scene’ than the others, and when Thorne had told her that Hendricks had not been answering his phone, she’d felt sure it was because he was somewhere noisy. She thought back to the mood he’d been in earlier, listening to the thrash-metal; guessed that he’d want to be somewhere he could dance, get off his face. Maybe fuck someone until he felt better.

More than anything, she wished she’d said ‘yes’ the day before, when he’d asked her to go out with him.

Of course, she knew now that Hendricks’ mood had been due to his conversation with Thorne. There hadn’t been time to get into that when Thorne had finally come clean, but once this was over, however it finished, she’d want to know why he hadn’t told her earlier; why he’d asked Hendricks not to tell her.

‘Guv…?’

Detective Sergeant Kenny Parsons pointed towards a small queue running back from a pair of high glass doors, along the front windows of a Pizza Express. Most of those waiting stood under umbrellas, but a few, like Porter and Parsons, didn’t seem awfully bothered by the rain.

The Adam was a members-only place, tucked away behind Charing Cross station. It was more bar than club most of the time, but once the dancing kicked off on a Friday or Saturday night, it could get pretty lively. Porter had been here a couple of times with Hendricks and she remembered that this was where he’d met his ex-boyfriend Brendan.

Parsons led the way to the front of the queue and flashed a warrant card at an immaculately dressed female bouncer. She leaned on the door and let them in.

It sounded like the club was in full swing.

Hurrying down the steep staircase, Porter checked her phone. The signal could get iffy below ground, and with Airwave units out of the question for obvious reasons, she and Thorne had agreed to keep in touch via their mobiles.

The music grew louder, and the thought smacked her in the face: if, wherever he was, Hendricks couldn’t hear his phone, what guarantee was there that she, Thorne or anyone else would hear theirs? If there was a signal, they’d need to keep the phones on vibrate.

She caught the look from the cloakroom girl as she and Parsons walked past, then pulled Parsons back as he was heading inside and raised her voice above the music. ‘Up for this, Kenny?’

Parsons said he was.

Porter had given him a pretty good description of Phil Hendricks, and a somewhat less detailed one of Marcus Brooks. ‘Don’t worry, he’s never used a gun or a knife,’ she said, looking through the doorway. ‘And look, it’s heaving in there. There isn’t room to swing a hammer.’ She leaned in close to his ear. ‘Seriously. If I tell you to take someone out, don’t fucking think about it twice.’

The club was called Crush, and it lived up to its name, though the place itself wasn’t huge, and Thorne didn’t think there were more than a hundred people in there. But it was tight and sweaty. The speakers pumped out hardcore soul and Motown, and the small dance floor was heaving with people, most of whom seemed to be dancing at each other.

It looked like a serious business.

Thorne took the left-hand side and, as he moved from one end of the main room to the other, he tried to keep Holland in view. The problem wasn’t so much the absence of light as the fact that it kept moving. The reds and greens swooped, the circles of white light spun and jumped, and none of it stayed in the same place long enough to get a good look at anyone.

Thorne knew he wouldn’t need a good look to recognise Hendricks, but Brooks was a different matter.

There was a narrow corridor running off from either side at the far end of the room. To Thorne’s left, men were sprawled across chairs, smoking and chatting; some just recovering. He took a long look, then walked back the other way and joined the steady stream of people heading into the toilets.

He put his head around the door; was checked out by several men at the mirror and ignored. He shouted, ‘Phil,’ and waited. Somebody muttered something and someone else laughed, and the metal hand-dryer rattled against the wall to the bass-beat from the dance floor.

Outside, he caught sight of Holland, who shook his head, and the two of them moved back down the centre of the room to the L-shaped bar by the entrance.

There was a cheer from the dance floor at the opening notes of ‘Band of Gold’ by Freda Payne. Some kind of remix.

The barman wore a tight black T-shirt with ‘Crush’ across the chest.

‘Yes, guys?’ Australian.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ Thorne said. He realised instantly that it was a foolish thing to say and was grateful that the barman didn’t bother with a waspish comeback. He launched into a description of Hendricks.

There was a smile this time. ‘Loads of people in here look like that.’

Thorne had seen all sorts since he’d walked through the door. There were soul boys and mods in Fred Perrys. Combats and leathers and expensive jeans with barely any arse in them. No more piercings and tattoos than you’d see in any other club on a Saturday night.

‘Not that fucking many,’ Thorne said.

The barman swallowed. ‘Sorry, mate.’

‘So?’

A nod towards bar-staff further down. ‘Ask some of the other boys.’

Thorne slid along the bar, and got luckier.

‘He got an Arsenal tattoo on his neck?’

Thorne said yes; held his breath.

‘Right, I know the guy you mean. Not seen him tonight, though. You want to leave a message in case he comes in later?’

Thorne was already on his way out.

The DJ in The Adam was trying and failing to be Fatboy Slim, but though the music wasn’t to Porter’s taste, she could see that the clientele were enjoying themselves. She noticed that Parsons was nodding his head in time as he moved among the crowd, clocking everyone. She also saw some of the looks Parsons was getting in return. He was a tall, good-looking black man, and though to Porter he looked every inch a copper, none of the men eyeing him up seemed to notice. Or perhaps they did, she thought. Maybe that was part of the attraction.

The club was spread over two floors and they took one each. It was less crowded than it had first appeared and they managed to sweep the place in fifteen minutes. They spotted a few people who matched the most recent description of Brooks, but no Phil Hendricks.

They began to question the staff, and, after only a few minutes, Porter glanced up to see Parsons beckoning her across to a corner. He continued to wave as she pushed her way across the dance floor. Next to him, a waitress was perched on a small leather cube. Porter wasn’t sure if it was a stool or a foot-rest. The girl’s ridiculously long legs were emphasised by stockings and a pink tutu. She had dark spiky hair and huge breasts.

Parsons nodded towards Porter. ‘Tell her what you told me.’

It was reasonably quiet where they’d gathered and the girl had no need to shout. Her voice was hoarse, though, as if she had been doing a good deal of shouting earlier. ‘The bloke he was asking about? He was in here a while ago. He comes in here a lot.’

‘Tonight?’

‘I didn’t see him leave, but, yeah, he was here an hour or so ago. Northern bloke, right?’

‘Was he with anyone?’ Porter asked.

She ran a hand through her hair; teased up the spikes. ‘He was talking to a couple of people, I think. A few of them left at the same time, so maybe he was with them.’ She looked harder at Porter. ‘I’ve seen you with him, haven’t I?’

‘Any idea where he might have gone?’

‘Sorry, love, not a clue.’ She pushed herself up, grabbed a silver tray which she’d dropped by the side of the chair. She had heels on, but even without them she’d have had a foot on Porter. ‘Right, tits and tips…’

‘Thanks,’ Porter said.

The girl’s image was as camp as Christmas, but Porter guessed that the tits were probably wasted on the majority of the club’s punters. She took a few steps, then came back. ‘I heard some people talking about this new place across the bridge,’ she said. ‘He could have gone there, I suppose.’

‘Where?’

‘Waterloo, just along from the Old Vic, I think. I don’t know, ten minutes’ walk?’

When they came back up on to the Strand, Porter checked her mobile for messages. Hendricks hadn’t shown up at home, and the second officer had struck out at the club in New Cross. He wanted to know if there was anywhere else she wanted him to visit. Porter called back as she walked, asked him to get across to Brixton. Hendricks had mentioned going to a gay night at The Fridge once, and, unlikely as it was, it seemed a shame to send any of her team home when he was still out there.

Saturday night, we’ll have a laugh, he’d said.

When they reached the car, Parsons suggested that it might be quicker to walk. ‘There’s no right turn on to the bridge. I’ll need to go round the Aldwych.’

Porter yanked at the door handle. ‘So, go round it fast.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

One of the things prison did was change the way you waited.

However long you were inside, and whatever you did while you got through your sentence, you were killing time. Which meant that you never did anything for its own sake. A game of pool was fun or it wasn’t, but it was always half an hour’s time done. Which meant that you looked forward to things in a different way, or at least he had. Being impatient, getting pissed off because a class got cancelled or whatever, was pointless because always, while you were waiting for something to pass the time, it was passing anyway.

Obviously, it depended on what you had on the outside. Some people were pretty calm as it went, but there were always blokes likely to kick off if you looked at them the wrong way. They were usually the ones who didn’t care how quick it went, because they had sod all waiting…

He waited differently now.

It made him irritable, same as everyone else, and the tiredness didn’t help. He’d snapped at Tindall the day before, which he knew was out of order, all things considered.

He’d never bothered with a watch inside; there were always plenty of bells and smells to tell you what time it was. Now he had one, he looked at the thing every few minutes. Feeling every second stagger by on its knees.

Rolling his neck, and swinging the plastic bag.

There were bigger clubs than Beware, Thorne knew that. G-A-Y and Heaven, with thousands of people and four or five different dance areas in the same club. But this was big enough as far as he was concerned. Big enough for Hendricks too, who had told him that the huge places freaked him out. ‘The music’s better in the smaller clubs,’ he’d said. ‘Plus, there’s not so much competition when it comes to eligible men.’

‘Not so much to choose from, either.’ Thorne had grinned. ‘Slimmer pickings.’

‘I only need to find one good one,’ Hendricks had said.

There were three, maybe four hundred people in the club, the strobe lighting making it hard to be any more precise. The sound level made the place he and Holland had just left seem intimate. He had no idea what it was called, and couldn’t have cared less, but it was not the sort of music you needed when you were as tense – as scared – as he was.

‘Not going to be easy,’ Holland said.

Thorne shook his head. He looked up at the lighting rig, at the huge mirrors and the rough sea of reflected heads, and for a few disconcerting seconds he lost a sense of where he was and why he was there. It was as though the noise, the pressure of it, was starting to squeeze out the simple thoughts; fuck around with the functions.

He wondered if he’d even know Hendricks if he saw him.

He lost sight of Holland within seconds, as he began to push through the crowd. Ignoring the elbows, and the shoes that scraped his ankles, as he looked at faces and studied the backs of necks.

Christ, it was loud. And hot.

He struggled between two tall men, turned to get a good look at the one with the shaved head. Got glared at by both of them.

The sound pulsed up through his feet and pounded in his head like a hammer wrapped in cotton wool.

Hitting and pressing and sucking away the air.

Shtoompshtoompshtoomp…

Getting smashed over the head, with a hammer, apparently.

Don’t joke about it…

Thorne took off his jacket. Craned his head to look for Holland. Caught light gleaming off the metal in a face, and on a jacket, and stared until the man danced away again.

Shtoompshtoompshtoomp…

Eyes open, eyes closed as they danced. Putting on a show or lost in it. Face after face and body after body; the shape usually more than enough.

Fuck, Phil…

A big man wheeled into the side of him, grinned and mouthed a ‘sorry’.

Fuckfuckfuckfuck…

He could taste his own sweat and other people’s. At the corner of his mouth; diluting the tang of adrenaline.

Salt and metal.

Pushing into warm, wet air and sweaty backs; shoes searching for space on the polished floor; ugly and dull among the Adidas and Nike. What would Phil be wearing?

Trainers, surely; those flashy white and silver ones.

You couldn’t dance in biker boots.

Shtoomp…

A voice behind, a man he’d just struggled past, telling him to watch where he was fucking going. Thorne stopped and sucked in a hot breath; squinting as a beam of light moved back and forth across his face. Fighting the urge to swing round and lay the twat out.

Saving it up.

Instead, he turned and walked quickly past, pushed back through the crowd towards the raised platform at the far end of the room. Plenty of people mouthing off at him now as he barged across the floor. Leading with his head, sending drinks flying and lurching up to the DJ booth.

Reaching up to slap his warrant card against the glass.

‘Turn it off…’

The DJ peered down at him as though he were mad. Thorne moved round swiftly and climbed up the short staircase. Realising that this was no ordinary request, the DJ was already pulling off his headphones as Thorne leaned across the decks to grab a handful of his shirt.

‘TURN. IT. OFF!’

It was odd, that second or more before the dancing stopped. The lights still swooped and wheeled around the floor as all heads turned towards the platform. A few shouts above the hubbub; arms raised as clubbers demanded to know what was happening.

Thorne leaned into the microphone. ‘Phil?’

There was a torrent of abuse from the dance floor. Demands that he be thrown out.

The microphone distorted as he pressed his mouth against it. ‘Phil Hendricks?’

Thorne stared into the light, waiting, his warrant card held out for the benefit of two enormous bouncers who were barrelling towards the platform. Five long seconds had almost become ten when his phone rang.

‘Maybe that’s him,’ someone shouted.

With the phone still buzzing in his fist, Thorne dropped down to the dance floor. He shook off grabbing hands, pushed the heels of his own into somebody’s chest as he rushed to get out. He caught sight of Holland fighting his way towards him, while the music started up again and he drove his shoulder into the door, hurrying outside to take Louise’s call.

‘I’m on my way to Waterloo,’ she said.

‘What’s in Waterloo?’ Thorne crossed over Wardour Street and took shelter in a shop doorway.

While Louise was telling him about the sighting at The Adam, he saw Holland come out and scan the street for him. He raised an arm and Holland jogged across through the downpour.

‘I’ll get to you as quick as I can,’ Thorne said.

‘No point. Anyway, I’ve got Kenny with me. Where are you?’

When Thorne told her, Louise suggested that he and Holland check out every bar and small club on Old Compton Street. None of them were regular haunts, as far as she knew, but she guessed that Hendricks had been into most of them at one time or another. ‘It can’t hurt,’ she said.

Thorne smacked his hand against the shop window then started walking. ‘Waste of fucking time.’

At his shoulder, Holland pushed back his wet hair and asked what was going on. Thorne grimaced, shook his head.

‘What else are you going to do?’ Louise asked.

Porter wasn’t paying, obviously, but she clocked the fifteen-pound entrance fee as she went in. The other places had been cheaper, but not by much. Three or four different clubs, and four quid a pop for drinks, she couldn’t help wondering how much cash Phil Hendricks got through during a typical Saturday night on the razzle.

She and Parsons might have waltzed to the front of the queue and past the ticket office, but there was still an awkward moment when a security guard – with the obligatory long black coat and earpiece – put out a hand to stop them at the door to the club itself.

Porter just stared. Parsons told the man to move.

The bouncer looked awkward, reddened when he spoke to Porter. ‘I’m not sure if I should search your bag or not.’ He stepped back when Parsons put a hand on his arm. ‘I don’t know, you might be carrying weapons.’

‘Several,’ Porter said.

It might just have been the newness, but Vada seemed classier than The Adam. The music was less insistent, and there was more space to move; the dance floor itself took up only a small area of the main room. The atmosphere was not as frenzied, and Porter imagined the place would fill up later, as clubbers looked for somewhere to talk or wind down.

Men danced close, to synthesised voices and a soft beat, as she and Parsons made their way across the room towards the bar. The designers had tried for something louche and late-sixties in the black and red velvet of the furnishings, fibre-optic table lamps, and blown-up portraits of Caine and Jagger on the walls.

Porter got nothing useful from the bar-staff, so she and Parsons split up to explore the rest of the club.

Unfortunately, the lighting was just as moody and atmospheric as the sound. Plenty of dark corners and pools of shadow, as Porter searched; looking for a black, maybe a silver shirt; a cropped hairline, softer at the back of the neck, where a tattoo began. Listening for a familiar, filthy laugh as she moved close to the tables and banquettes, in the areas where the music was deadened by walls of glass bricks.

Trying to stay optimistic.

There was a quieter bar at the top of a small staircase. Porter stalked from corner to corner, aware from some of the looks she received that her expression of frustration was perhaps being mistaken for disapproval. It couldn’t be helped.

The barman here was no more help than the one downstairs, suggesting to Porter that her friend probably hadn’t come in yet.

She felt another rush of anger at Thorne. He would say he hadn’t lied, of course, that he’d been protecting her, but she knew that was bollocks. The anger subsided when a man who matched the description of Marcus Brooks walked past her and smiled; as she found herself wondering how many coppers there might be in the place, aside from herself and Kenny Parsons.

On cue, the DS appeared at the doorway of the bar and shook his head. A look that suggested he’d done enough arse-licking for one Saturday night and was ready for home.

They walked out of the bar and down the stairs, with Porter checking a series of small lounges as they went, determined to cover every inch of the place before she gave up. She was on the verge of doing exactly that – wondering what the fuck was going to happen now with Thorne, what she could say to comfort him, should anything happen – when she finally saw a face she recognised.

The man was sitting in the third of the chill-out rooms, near the door, with two other men and a woman. There was a fair selection of bottles and glasses on the table between them.

Porter had no time for introductions, so let her warrant card make them for her. ‘I’ve met you before,’ she said. ‘With Phil Hendricks.’

‘Almost certainly,’ the man said. He ground out a cigarette, blew a thin stream of smoke across the table, then looked up; over Porter’s shoulder and beyond. ‘He’s knocking around somewhere.’

Porter felt something give in her stomach. ‘Where?’

The man’s eyes were still searching. ‘He was with some skinhead type. Getting very cosy.’

Porter turned, looked out through the doorway for any sign of Hendricks.

‘They were here ten minutes ago…’

Porter bolted for the door, with the man and his friends still discussing things behind her. She was scrabbling for her phone as she caught sight of Parsons at the other end of the corridor; dialled as he came running towards her.

‘Tom, he’s here, or he was, and maybe Brooks. You should probably get over.’ She left the address and hung up.

‘Where the fuck haven’t we been?’

‘Offices?’ Parsons suggested. ‘Toilets?’

Parsons rushed towards the gents’ and Porter made for the ladies’ at the other end of the carpeted corridor. Inside, one woman stood at the marbled sink and stared as Porter slammed back cubicle doors. Nothing.

Before the door had swung shut behind her, Porter was moving down to the far end of the corridor. She took a left and found herself in the kitchens; stared past the two waitresses sitting on the counter and backed quickly out again.

There was nowhere else to go.

She saw no sign of Parsons; could hear the music bleeding through the walls, and the rain on the other side of the door ahead of her. She leaned on the metal bar, pushed and stepped outside.

It was a narrow back alley, running forty or fifty yards to a side street that curled around the back of the club from the main road. The water ran from steeply pitched roofs on either side. It fell in sheets, lit in several places by the light from windows or the wall-mounted sodium lamps in doorways.

In one of those doorways halfway down, Porter could see two figures.

She edged slowly along the wall; could hear feet on the floor as someone adjusted their position. She heard something bang against a door. Something like a groan.

‘Phil?’

She took three or four more steps along, then away from the wall, and saw the head that turned towards her, the features in shadow.

Hendricks being pressed back hard against the door.

Hands raised around his neck…

Porter was running then, reaching into her bag, and when the bag hit the puddle her hands were tight around her telescopic baton. She was shouting something as she swung it hard into the back of the man’s legs; pulling and turning him as he fell, then dropping down on top of him.

‘Fuck… Louise…’

She drove her knee down beneath the man’s shoulder blades, grunting with the effort as she gripped the baton at either end and pressed it down on to the back of his neck… as other hands clawed at her own neck and grabbed at her hair.

Then she could hear Phil Hendricks screaming and swearing, his voice jagged, above the drumming of the rain and the roar of her own blood.

TWENTY-NINE

Thorne and Holland were on their way back to the car when the call came.

‘It’s Kenny Parsons, sir…’

Whatever Parsons said next was lost beneath the shouting in the background. Thorne recognised Hendricks’ voice; felt relief scald through him. Then another male voice; threatening.

‘What the fuck’s happening?’ Thorne shouted.

There was a pause before he heard the phone being handed over: Louise clearing her throat.

‘I got it wrong. He’s fine.’ She was buzzing, breathless. ‘I fucked up.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I thought it was Brooks, OK? That Phil was being attacked. I saw it and just thought-’

‘Slow down.’ Thorne could hear Parsons now, telling people to be quiet, raising his voice over theirs.

‘He was getting his end away, for Christ’s sake. Some kid he met.’

‘You sure?’

Louise started to describe how Hendricks had dragged her off the man on the ground; then hesitated, like she didn’t want to say too much else. What else she’d seen. ‘It looked like this bloke was… on him, you know?’

Thorne was walking faster now. ‘Is anybody hurt?’ he asked.

The phone was snatched again, before Louise could answer.

‘Right now, all I want to do is fuck you up,’ Hendricks said. ‘Go straight to Brigstocke and drop you as deep in the shit as I can.’

Thorne knew he had every right to be as angry as Hendricks, and he was. But he fought the urge to sound it. ‘You’d best shut up and listen,’ he said.

Hendricks got the message.

‘It wasn’t a wind-up, OK? You’re a legitimate target, because you gave evidence at Marcus Brooks’ trial six years ago.’

‘Fuck off,’ Hendricks said. ‘I’d barely finished training six years ago. I hadn’t set foot in a fucking courtroom.’

‘The senior pathologist was Allan Macdonald.’

‘So?’

‘Ring any bells?’

‘I assisted him for six months or something…’ Hendricks trailed off, and in the pause Thorne could hear the confidence evaporate. ‘He died a couple of years ago, I think.’

‘Right. Which puts you next in line. Very fucking handy.’

‘I still don’t know what you’re on about. I had nothing to do with that trial. Don’t you think I’d remember?’

‘The prosecution submitted a written statement confirming that Simon Tipper could have been killed during the time that Brooks was in his house. Time of death was the key element of Brooks’ defence. The only element, more or less. Once that medical evidence was put in front of a jury, along with the prints on the glass and everything else, the verdict was only ever going to go one way.’

‘I was just laying equipment out back then. Cleaning out the sluices, doing the paperwork…’

‘You countersigned that statement, Phil.’

Just rain for a few seconds, and muffled voices. ‘Fuck.’

‘Yeah. Fuck.’

Thorne jumped slightly at the touch of the hand on his arm. He followed Holland’s gaze towards the car, still parked outside the Spice of Life. Saw the sticker on the windscreen, then the dirty orange clamp wrapped around the front wheel.

‘Wait there,’ Thorne told Hendricks. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can.’

The drink Thorne had promised Holland for his help that night had turned into something more substantial by the time he’d persuaded him to stay with the car and wait for the clamping truck. He stepped into the road, telling Holland to keep an eye on the BMW’s dodgy clutch. Shouted back that he’d pick up the car some time tomorrow as he waved down a passing taxi.

The cab was halfway through a U-turn, and Thorne was watching Holland climb into his car, muttering, when the mobile went again.

‘I would have let him have some fun,’ Brooks said. ‘Before the kid delivered him.’

It took Thorne a few seconds to understand. Whoever Louise had found Hendricks with in the alley had been bait. Had been working with Brooks. A quick fumble to get Hendricks interested, then back to the kid’s place, where Brooks would have been waiting.

‘The poor little fucker came back with his tail between his legs. Some woman had beaten the shit out of him.’

Thorne fell back in his seat as the taxi accelerated away down Charing Cross Road. ‘Hendricks is off limits,’ he said.

‘Because he’s your friend?’

‘He had nothing to do with what happened to you.’ Thorne could feel his chest leaping against the seat belt. Water was running from his hair, dripping down between his ear and the handset.

‘Angie and Robbie weren’t off limits.’

Thorne quickly wiped the phone against his shirt. He thought about saying that he was sorry. Instead said: ‘I know about loss.’

There were brown smears across the window between Thorne and the cabbie, but he could still make out the spots on the back of the man’s neck.

Brooks grunted. ‘Nicklin said.’

Thorne’s hand tightened around the phone. He wondered if there was anything Nicklin didn’t know about him.

‘So?’

‘It’s not the same.’

There wasn’t time for Thorne to argue, though Christ knew he’d been over it in his head enough times. ‘Why put other people through it?’

‘It isn’t-’

‘Other families?’

The meter ticked over twice, and when Brooks finally came back there was still no answer. ‘Look, I’m sorry that he’s your friend, the bloke in the club. It’s weird how things turn out, isn’t it?’

Thorne knew there was nothing weird about it. He knew exactly how the connection had been made. Who had done the necessary research and then passed the information on to Marcus Brooks.

He’d sort that one out himself later on.

‘Listen to what I’m saying, OK? Things will go very badly for you unless you forget about Phil Hendricks. You need to know that.’

Ten seconds passed before Brooks spoke again. ‘There’s other people I’m more interested in,’ he said.

It sounded close enough to an understanding for Thorne. ‘So, where does it end, Marcus?’

‘Fuck knows.’

‘You going after the judge next? The people on the jury?’ The taxi drove fast around the western edge of Trafalgar Square. Swung left through amber on to the Strand. ‘Don’t forget the shorthand typist and the bloke who drove the prison van.’

‘How long d’you need these days?’ Brooks asked. ‘To get a trace?’

‘Nobody’s tracing this call.’

‘It’s been five minutes already, hasn’t it?’

‘There’s no one listening in, I swear to God.’

‘Right.’

‘It’s why I gave you this number.’

Thorne could hear the fatigue in the pause, and in Brooks’ words when they came. In the short time they’d been talking, his voice had been getting slower, thicker; as though an anaesthetic were kicking in.

‘I think I actually believe you,’ he said.

‘That’s good.’

‘And… I don’t know.’

‘What?’

‘Where it’s going to end…’

‘Marcus?’

But Brooks had already gone.

The rain had eased off, and they were waiting at the front of the club when Thorne’s taxi pulled up. He had thrust a tenner into the driver’s hand when they were halfway across Waterloo Bridge, and was out of the vehicle the second it pulled up at the kerb.

Louise, Parsons and Hendricks moved away from the queue that was waiting to go inside, with Parsons hanging back from the other two a little as Thorne came towards them, his arms outstretched, questioning.

‘Why did you let the kid go?’

Louise shook her head, angry. ‘What?’

Thorne clocked the glare from Hendricks as he wheeled away in frustration.

‘Christ, I was lucky he didn’t want to do me for assault.’

‘He was put up to it.’ Thorne glanced across at Parsons and took a step closer to Louise.

‘Kenny’s OK,’ she snapped.

Thorne nodded, lowered his voice anyway. ‘It was all set up. He was going to hand Phil over to Brooks later on.’

Hendricks was studying the floor; scraping a training shoe back and forth across the wet pavement. He wore a thin black shirt over jeans, and Thorne supposed that he’d left his jacket in the club. That the fact he was soaked was probably not the only reason he was trembling.

‘Where did you get all this from?’ Louise asked.

Thorne could see from the cold smile that she already knew. His voice dropped lower still. ‘Brooks called when I was on the way over.’ He was about to say more but was silenced by the scream of a siren. They all turned to see an ambulance belting down from the bridge; watched it jump the lights and race south.

‘Does he know where I live?’ Hendricks asked.

Thorne hadn’t given Hendricks too many details when they’d spoken earlier, but there seemed little point now in keeping anything back. ‘The video on the message was taken outside your flat.’

‘Well, that’s fucking dandy.’

‘It’s all right, Phil…’

‘Am I coming to yours then tonight, or what?’

‘He certainly knows where I live,’ Thorne said. ‘I think we should all go back to Lou’s.’ He looked across. ‘If that’s OK?’

Louise was nodding to Parsons, who took off his jacket and passed it to her. When she turned back, the smile had got frostier still. ‘Fine with me.’ She moved across and wrapped the jacket around Hendricks’ shoulders. ‘I presume your mate didn’t happen to mention if I was in his address book, did he?’

Thorne felt sure that Brooks had been given all such information, but was almost as certain that he would not be using it. ‘I think it’ll be all right now.’ He looked at Hendricks. ‘I told him to back off.’ Hendricks returned the stare. ‘When he called, you know? I think he got the message.’

‘You think?’ Louise said.

‘I think we understand each other.’

‘Have you any idea how fucking ridiculous that sounds?’

‘Louise-’

‘How ridiculous you sound?’

Thorne stood there, wishing he hadn’t left Holland back at the car. For all the self-righteous anger that had coursed through him earlier, he felt isolated suddenly, and apprehensive. Every bit as ridiculous as Louise said he was. When the dust had settled he knew there would be questions to answer and he didn’t know how he was going to face them.

The wet pavement smelled like new carpet.

‘Right, we should get back to Pimlico,’ he said. ‘Kenny, you can get yourself off home, and we’ll take a taxi.’

Parsons looked to Louise for approval.

‘I’ve got stuff inside,’ Hendricks said. ‘And anyway, I’m not going anywhere until I’ve had a seriously large drink.’ He began to head back towards the club and, after a few seconds, Louise turned to follow, taking Parsons with her.

Thorne watched them walk away, listening to the fading siren, a mile or more distant. Each hand clutched at the warm lining of a jacket pocket, and he realised that Hendricks wasn’t the only one who was shaking.