Thorne blew on his tea, held up the paper cup. ‘This is the only reason I got into the job,’ he said. ‘The glamour.’
She smiled, ran fingers through short dark hair with an undisguised smattering of early grey at the roots. ‘Right.’
Kimmel was a good copper, Thorne had decided, better than good, but up to this point, based on the couple of snatched conversations they’d had, she’d been all business. Almost certainly because she had to be, he thought. Because choosing to get her nut down and not waste time on bullshit and banter might be the only way to get ahead – or even to stay on something like level terms – when she was the only member of the team without a penis.
Thorne smiled back.
Gordon Boyle probably had a penis, he thought, but it was almost certainly only visible with the aid of an electron microscope.
‘Somebody’s put the cat among the pigeons,’ Kimmel said.
Thorne looked at her. Sipped his tea. He knew that by somebody she meant him.
‘I’d heard you were pretty good at that.’
‘I wasn’t the one doing the post-mortem,’ Thorne said.
‘Don’t shoot the messenger, you mean?’
‘Something like that.’ Though shooting might have been going a little far, even for Boyle, the DI’s expression had visibly darkened when Thorne had passed on what Hendricks had told him. He had certainly looked as though he wouldn’t have minded giving Thorne a good kicking. A Glasgow kiss, at the very least. ‘You think it’s bad news, then? That Figgis was murdered?’
Kimmel poured what was left of her soup into the sink and turned on the tap. ‘Bad news for somebody.’
Thorne knew who that somebody was, too. Whoever had leaked Grant Figgis’s identity, and almost certainly his address, to the newspapers. ‘Hope whoever it was had a decent payday,’ Thorne said. ‘Enough to last them through an early retirement.’
‘They might not have time to spend it,’ Kimmel said. ‘There’s a case to be made for bringing charges, I reckon.’
‘For what, though?’ Thorne took another mouthful of tea and considered it. ‘Accessory’s probably pushing it. Perverting the course, maybe.’
‘What about just . . . “being an arsehole”?’ Kimmel smiled again, steely. ‘I know the CPS might not go for it, but worth a try.’
‘If we ever find out who it was,’ Thorne said. ‘And if the powers-that-be decide to air the Met’s dirty linen.’
The silence that fell between them was enough to acknowledge that both ifs were sizeable and was only broken when Ajay Roth leaned around the corner.
‘DI’s office,’ he said. ‘Now.’
Thorne had never been very good at dissembling, at keeping his thoughts from being eminently readable on his face. Roth’s reaction made it clear that what was going through Thorne’s mind at that moment might just as well have been flashing up in neon on the wall behind him.
I don’t much appreciate what sounded a lot like an order being barked at me by an officer I outrank. Fair enough, Ajay? Certainly not one whose tongue is usually so far up his guvnor’s fat arse that I’m always amazed when he manages to say anything at all.
Kimmel was looking at the floor, but Thorne knew that she’d seen it, too.
‘Just . . . passing that on,’ Roth said.
Boyle had been at his desk, head down over paperwork, when Thorne and Kimmel arrived to join Roth and Brigstocke in the DI’s office, but now he stood up, walked round and leaned back against it. He appeared casual, confident even, in the wake of an urgent meeting with DCI Andy Frankham and the chief superintendent, which everyone on the team had presumed would be tricky to say the least.
A prime suspect released then hand-fed to the mob.
A man murdered inside a building with officers stationed outside, only hours after begging the police for help.
A plutonium-grade cock-up.
‘So, a confirmed overdose, then,’ Boyle said.
‘An overdose, for sure.’ Thorne looked to Brigstocke for a little support.
‘Not self-inflicted, though,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Not by the look of it. The heroin, for a kick-off.’
Thorne sat forward. ‘Pure morphine, basically, and if not actually administered by a third party, supplied in the full knowledge of what would happen when Figgis shot up.’
‘Right,’ Boyle said. ‘According to this new weirdo pathologist we’ve been lumbered with.’
‘Hendricks,’ Roth said.
‘His theory.’
‘Which he’s certain will be confirmed when the toxicology results come back.’ Thorne sat back again. ‘Yeah, he takes a bit of getting used to, but he knows what he’s talking about, I can promise you that.’
‘Well, it’s certainly worth bearing in mind,’ Boyle said.
Thorne looked to Brigstocke again, then to Paula Kimmel, then back to Boyle. ‘We are opening a murder investigation?’
‘Obviously, if that’s what it turns out to be, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’
‘Don’t we want to get ahead of the game?’
Boyle’s manner wasn’t quite so casual any more. ‘Come on, Tom. What did Russell say a minute ago? Not self-inflicted by the look of it.’ He nodded at Brigstocke. ‘Right?’
Brigstocke hesitated.
‘A suspicious death,’ Kimmel said. ‘That’s what he meant. So surely—’
‘I don’t understand.’ Thorne took care to keep his voice down, his tone nice and even. He understood completely, but there was little to be gained in a shouting match, especially when he knew Boyle would give as good as he got. ‘If we’d found Figgis with half his head splattered up the wall and a gun in his hand we wouldn’t take it at face value, would we? We’d still check the gun for prints or whatever, look for signs of forced entry. We’d still do a proper job. So why is this any different?’
‘It’s not.’ Boyle raised his hands, helpless. ‘We’re stuck waiting for toxicology results. Not sure there’s a lot more we can do.’
‘We could talk to Billy Coyne,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s got to be pretty high on a list of suspects. He’s just found out he’s not Kieron’s dad. He’s all over the place, probably; every chance he’s going to lash out, I would have thought.’
Boyle shook his head. ‘Too early, you ask me. I’ve already sent officers to interview him once, the day after the boy was taken, so let’s hold fire on that for now.’
‘Hold fire?’
‘OK, we can call and check Coyne’s visitors’ list, for now. Look, I’ve already spoken to Andy about this. Made sure he’s up to speed about everything – your pathologist’s theory included – and we’re on the same page. Fair enough?’
Andy? As if Boyle and Frankham were best mates, suddenly. It was becoming clearer by the moment that the meeting had been less about upgrading the inquiry and more about damage limitation. Boyle seemed keen to move on, but Thorne didn’t want to let him.
‘I just think, seeing as you seem so bothered about how things look, we shouldn’t forget that we all thought Figgis looked guilty.’ Thorne jabbed a finger to his chest. ‘Me especially. It looked like he was the man we’re after, but we couldn’t find a single piece of evidence to back that up and the only witness we had turned out to be useless. Figgis looked so very guilty that the papers, with a bit of help, pretty much told everyone he was, and that was obviously good enough for whichever upstanding member of society decided to handle things personally and give him enough top-of-the-range smack to kill an elephant.’
Thorne stopped and glanced around. Brigstocke was looking at Boyle, and Roth sat with his arms folded, like he had somewhere better to be. Thorne caught Kimmel’s eye just for a moment and she gave him the smallest of nods.
Boyle said, ‘Noted, Tom.’ He walked back around his desk and sat down again, then looked to Ajay Roth. ‘How are we getting on with the parents?’
They had, thus far, been unable to trace Figgis’s next of kin, with no mention of parents or siblings to be foun
d on any official documents, as though they had deliberately been omitted or even expunged. In the end, with no one else available to do what was required, they had asked a work colleague to provide the official identification of the body.
‘Finally managed to track down the mother.’
Roth revealed this breakthrough as though it was the result of many hours of dogged police work, when Thorne had overheard him an hour or so earlier describing the difficulty in contacting anyone close to the dead man as a ‘decent bit of luck’.
‘The dad died a few years ago,’ Roth said. ‘After they both moved to Australia.’ He described the steps he’d taken to locate Margaret Figgis, her current whereabouts and circumstances. ‘I spent a good while on the phone with her, passed on condolences, all that, but I’ve got to say she didn’t seem massively upset. She never mentioned a funeral, asked for more information, anything like that. I don’t think they were close.’
Another bit of luck, Thorne thought. Nobody to make a fuss or hold them to account. Nobody to go after the newspapers that put Grantleigh Figgis on trial alongside the horoscopes, the competitions to win holidays or free booze for the weekend, and the ‘Starbirds’ with their tits out.
‘Good work, Ajay,’ Boyle said. ‘Never an easy conversation to have, we all know that.’
While the DI said a few more things designed to bring his team back together, to gee them up as they resumed the push to find a missing boy, Thorne found himself thinking instead about a middle-aged woman living alone in a suburb of Adelaide. Not all families were like the Waltons, he knew that. Brothers and sisters, mums, dads and kids fell out for all sorts of reasons and minor disputes could easily escalate, most especially between those who were supposed to be close. The estrangement between Grantleigh Figgis and his parents sounded more than usually serious, though.
Had it been his decision to cut them out of his life, or theirs?
‘Right then,’ Boyle said. ‘Moving forward . . . ’
Thorne wondered what had happened between them. Something simple and stupid, probably. Or perhaps Margaret Figgis and her husband had not liked the way their own son looked any more than everyone else.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Laying down the Roald Dahl book, an hour or more after she’d first brought Josh upstairs, Maria sat at the end of his bed and watched her still wide-awake son snuggle tight to a stuffed bear called Snowball, which he’d had since birth. One of many presents from Jeff’s passive-aggressive mother, if she recalled. Maria had washed the grubby white bear and stashed it away in a cupboard a few years ago, once Josh had replaced it with toy cars and superhero figures, but it had been quickly brought out of hibernation and Josh had been keeping it close – tearful if he so much as lost sight of it – since Kieron had gone missing.
Before then, now that Maria thought about it.
The friction at home and then the divorce; problems of some sort at school. Maria still couldn’t put her finger on exactly when or why things had started to become difficult for her son.
‘I want to go back to school,’ Josh said, pulling the bear closer.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea, chicken.’
‘You said I could.’
‘Of course you can go back to school, but not just yet, that’s all. It’s been horrible for you. With Kieron and everything.’
‘I want to go.’
There was a vehemence in his voice Maria didn’t much like the sound of, but she comforted herself with the thought that his wanting to go back so badly had to be a good sign. That he was on the mend, that perhaps he hadn’t been lying when she’d asked if anyone was being horrible to him at school. If Josh was being bullied or if there was a teacher he was frightened of for whatever reason, surely he’d be keen to stay away.
‘Well, why don’t we wait and see how things go over the next couple of days?’ Maria said.
‘Why can’t I go back tomorrow?’
‘Because it’s Saturday tomorrow.’ She squeezed his foot through the duvet. ‘Silly.’
He groaned in frustration, then growled as he grabbed the edge of the duvet and pulled it up over his face.
‘If you still feel OK about it on Monday, maybe you can go back.’
Josh’s face reappeared slowly and he nodded, serious. ‘I don’t want to wear my yellow coat.’
‘Oh.’ Maria had washed the mud off the coat as soon as they’d got back from the woods that terrible afternoon. He’d never much liked it, but she guessed that now he was associating it with his missing friend. She told him it was fine, that she’d buy him a new coat. One that didn’t make him look like a banana. ‘You should try and go to sleep now,’ she said. ‘You look ever so tired.’ She stood up, leaned down to kiss him and moved towards the door.
‘Don’t turn the light off,’ he said. He turned his face away so that she couldn’t see it. ‘Snowball doesn’t like the dark.’
Maria half-closed the door, walked downstairs and opened the bottle she’d been thinking about through three chapters of George’s Marvellous Medicine.
Hers was even better.
She sat down and turned on the TV, became quickly annoyed by what seemed like wall-to-wall football coverage, so switched to the VCR and began to watch an episode of This Life that she’d taped a couple of nights earlier. She didn’t much like Anna and thought Egg was a bit soppy, but the actor playing Miles was unquestionably dishy. He reminded her a little of Jeff actually, of a younger Jeff, anyway, and she found herself wondering what he was doing on a Friday evening, who he might be with.
She poured herself another glass of wine.
Now Warren, the gay one, was flirting with a motorcycle courier.
She turned down the volume and picked up the phone.
‘I suppose you’re watching the bloody football,’ she said when he answered.
He took a few seconds. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Everything’s fine.’ Maria swirled the red wine around in her glass, took a quick mouthful. ‘There doesn’t always have to be a problem. I know that if I’m calling you it’s usually because there is, but we can just . . . talk. That is allowed, you know.’
Jeff laughed. ‘Right, but you must admit it’s normally because you need money for something.’
‘I don’t need any money. Honestly.’ She was smiling as she lifted her feet up on to the sofa; flirting, she supposed, the way she’d done with that younger Jeff ten years before. When they were Miles and Anna. ‘Obviously if you want to send me some just because you feel like it, I’m not going to say—’
‘Or it’s a problem with Josh. Is he all right?’
‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘So come on then, who’s playing?’
‘Italy versus the Czech Republic.’
‘Sounds gripping.’
‘Not a bad match, actually.’
‘You don’t even like football.’
‘What?’
‘Not really.’
He laughed again. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Well, you definitely prefer rugby. I don’t remember you ever going to watch a game.’ She waited for him to come back at her, enjoying the cut-and-thrust of it. She took another drink and leaned down to pick up the bottle.
He said, ‘You were a bit quick before.’
‘What?’
‘When I asked if Josh was all right. And you changed the subject.’
Maria poured herself some more wine. ‘He’s still upset about Kieron. Still a bit fragile.’
‘Right,’ Jeff said. ‘Of course he is.’
‘Clinging on to that bear like it’s his only friend in the world.’
‘Snowball? Blimey, I thought he was way past that.’
‘He’s keen to go back to school, though, so that’s a good sign. Don’t you think?’
‘Listen . . . have you ever wondered if it might be something else? These problems he’s having?’
‘Such as?’
She heard him swallow and there was silence for a fe
w seconds.
‘Such as, Jeff?’
‘You know what I mean, Mazz.’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘I don’t know who he sees, do I? Friends of yours.’
‘I don’t have any bloody friends,’ Maria said.
‘Sorry—’
‘Well, not very many, and none that you need to be concerned about.’
‘I just don’t think we should ignore the possibility that . . . somebody’s doing something to hurt him. Oh, God, I don’t know.’
‘It’s this business with Kieron, that’s all. On top of the divorce. All that upheaval.’
Ashton grunted. ‘I wish you’d let me take him for a bit. I’d really like to spend more time with him.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Well, yes, it’s fine for you.’ There was an edge to his voice suddenly. ‘It suits you perfectly . . . same as the fact that he’s always loved you more than he loves me.’
‘Now you’re being really stupid,’ Maria said.
‘We don’t have to stick to our arrangement, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘I know we don’t, but—’
‘Especially when something awful like this happens.’
‘I just don’t think now’s a good time to change things.’
‘No, you’re probably right.’
‘His routine, you know? It’s important.’
She heard him sigh. ‘Next weekend then?’
‘He’s looking forward to it.’ She reached to try and smooth out a crease in her skirt, rubbed at it. ‘It’ll be even more of a treat than usual.’
‘So, how are you doing?’
On screen, Warren and the motorcycle courier were kissing, their hands all over each other. Hungry.
‘Oh, you know me,’ she said.
‘Yeah, you were always good in a crisis.’
‘Was I?’ The wine like acid suddenly, her tongue coated with it, thick and heavy in her mouth. A man who had drifted so far from the one she had fallen in love with, who she had finally begun to glimpse again, describing a woman she no longer recognised.
Lost, lonely and ashamed.
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