Good as Dead

SIXTY-THREE

McCarthy had punched in the code needed to access the private lift. It had been sent by text message the previous day. He and Thorne said nothing as the lift rose up towards the penthouse level, then just before they reached the top floor, McCarthy said, ‘They’re not always about the sex, you know?’ He looked at Thorne. ‘These parties. Sometimes it’s just a question of meeting people and talking, without having to worry about what they’re thinking. It’s about having fun and not having to lie. You said it yourself this afternoon in my office. It’s about being yourself.’

The doors opened.

‘All very touching,’ Thorne said. ‘Except when “yourself” is nuts deep in an underage boy.’

The man who answered the door had the build of a nightclub bouncer, but his suit was somewhat better cut and Thorne doubted he ever had cause to turn people away for wearing trainers. He nodded his recognition at McCarthy then looked Thorne up and down.

‘A guest,’ McCarthy said.

The man at the door sniffed. ‘Nobody said anything.’

‘Sorry.’ Thorne smiled. ‘Should I have brought a bottle or something?’

‘Oh come on, Graham, stop pissing around,’ McCarthy said. ‘He’s with me, all right? And I’m gagging for a drink.’

In the hour and a half since McCarthy had told him about the party, Thorne had been thinking very carefully about the best way to get inside. To make his entrance. At this point of course, it would have been easy enough simply to produce a warrant card, to put a shoulder against the door and march inside shouting the odds. Thorne doubted very much that he would encounter a lot of resistance if he did, certainly none of an aggressive nature, but all the same he had decided on a rather more low-key approach. He wanted to walk in there with the not-so-good doctor and for it to be seen. He needed the man whose evening he was intent on spoiling to see clearly that the chain was broken and that McCarthy was his. To understand, as quickly as Thorne could engineer it, that no amount of wriggling was going to get anyone off the hook.

‘Actually, Graham, we’re both gagging for a drink,’ Thorne said.

Graham rolled his eyes and stood aside. ‘Enjoy… ’

They laid their jackets down on a cowhide-covered chaise longue just inside the door. McCarthy took a glass of wine and Thorne helped himself to water from the tray proffered by a teenage boy with spiky black hair and pupils like piss-holes in the snow. Then they took three steps down into a large, open-plan living area.

Thorne smelled marijuana, amyl nitrate and aftershave.

Money…

The decor and furnishings reminded Thorne of Rahim Jaffer’s flat and he wondered if it was all those evenings the young man had spent in places such as this that had given him a taste for the ultra-modern and expensive. Ironic, as they had certainly helped pay for it. Looking around – as though he were doing no more than admiring the art on the walls or the stylish light fittings – Thorne counted fourteen men in the room. Forty-ish and upwards and all dressed as though they had just come from one office or another, and while most had a drink in their hands, some had not yet been there long enough to loosen their ties.

There were at least the same number of boys.

While their prospective clients were just starting to relax and remained content to talk among themselves for a while, most of those who had been invited to provide a paid service did the same thing. They were gathered in twos and threes at the edges of the room. Whispering and giggling, moving in time to the low-level soft rock, or hovering near the long glass table where a cold buffet had been laid out.

Two distinct groups, for the time being.

There was plenty of eye contact though. Sizing-up being done on both sides. Sly looks and not so shy smiles.

The boys were white, black, Asian. A selection made deliberately, Thorne guessed, so as to appeal to all tastes. He wondered if the same consideration had gone into picking out the invitees according to their age. Thorne guessed that the majority were fifteen and up, but several were younger – or were at least trying to look younger – while two boys who stood close together near the food could not have been more than twelve.

Someone had probably agreed to pay a little more for them.

With McCarthy staying close to him as per instructions, Thorne wandered across the bleached-wood floor to stand near the vast windows that ran around half the room. A man with swept-back silver hair tapped a finger against the rain-streaked glass and nodded out.

‘Shame about the bloody weather,’ he said. ‘Out on that balcony you get the most astonishing view.’

Thorne turned and leaned back against the glass, scanning the room.

The man nodded towards a skinny boy in a tight black vest who looked to Thorne as though he was not that long out of Spiderman pyjamas. ‘Mind you, the view’s pretty spectacular in here… ’

At that moment, Thorne got his first look at the man he was there for. He walked into the room from one of the two softly lit corridors running off on either side. Coming from the toilet, Thorne guessed, or perhaps a bedroom, though it did seem a little early for that. Thorne watched the man help himself to a drink from another of the boys with the trays, then lean across, smiling at whatever the boy had said, to take something from the buffet. He popped the food into his mouth as he turned, and saw McCarthy.

He raised his glass and started walking towards them.

It took a few steps before the man got his first good look at Thorne, before the easy stride faltered, just a little. Thorne was impressed that he had been recognised so quickly. It had been eight months after all, and even then they had only been face to face for half an hour or so.

As long as it had taken for Thorne to give his evidence.

‘Smashing party, your honour,’ Thorne said.

The man stood close and stared hard at McCarthy, but McCarthy refused to meet the look, staring down instead into his wine glass. The man shifted his attention. Said, ‘Thorne.’

Thorne was even more impressed that his name had been remembered. Then he realised that McCarthy would have been in regular contact with his colleague from the moment Thorne had turned up at Barndale two days earlier and begun asking questions. That the man in front of him was simply putting two and two together.

The quicker he made four, Thorne decided, the better.

‘Your friend Dr McCarthy here has been great company,’ Thorne said. ‘And a fascinating storyteller.’ He looked at McCarthy. ‘You can toddle off now, Ian. My sergeant’s waiting for you downstairs.’

McCarthy hesitated, but only for a second, and neither Thorne nor the other man bothered to watch him leave.

‘So, who’s waiting for me?’ the man asked. ‘Not a lowly sergeant, surely.’

The music got louder suddenly, and someone let out a whoop of excitement from the other side of the room.

Thorne did not blink.

‘You’re all mine,’ he said.