Thorne started slightly when Kambar’s beeper went off. He got up and shook the doctor’s hand when it was offered. ‘You’ve been a great help. Thank you.’
‘I wish I could tell you I was off to perform some vital brain surgery,’ Kambar said. ‘But the truth is I’ve got a squash game.’ He reached inside his jacket and rubbed his stomach. ‘Should have eaten lunch a bit earlier.’
‘That was my fault.’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘Someone’s killing the children of his victims,’ Thorne said suddenly.
‘Sorry?’ Kambar pulled his cryptic crossword face again.
Thorne could see a small blob of sauce at the edge of the doctor’s moustache, a thin streak of it just below his collar. ‘The children of the women that Raymond Garvey murdered.’ Thorne suddenly felt a little dizzy and guessed he’d stood up too quickly. He took a couple of seconds, hoping that Kambar would think the pause was for his benefit. ‘Whoever had those fragments of Garvey’s brain scan has already killed four people.’
Kambar looked as though he wished he had never asked. He puffed out his cheeks, said, ‘Fuck.’
The surprise was clearly evident on Thorne’s face.
‘It’s a medical term,’ Kambar said. ‘One you reserve for when you hear something that makes you feel like a hopeless quack with a pocketful of leeches.’
‘I use it pretty much the same way,’ Thorne said. ‘Just more often.’
‘There are so many things that can mess up the brain, but most of them we can do nothing about.’ Kambar shook his head, the resignation etched in lines around his mouth. ‘Sometimes the damage is . . . invisible.’
‘Enjoy your game,’ Thorne said.
When the doctor had gone, Thorne walked over to the counter again. He bought a coffee and a thick slice of cheesecake, took them back to the table. From the window, there was a spectacular view across the flat, green fenland: Grantchester huddled a little to the north; the spires of Cambridge just visible a few miles away to the east; and the pulsing grey vein of the M11 halfway to the horizon.
Thorne looked out, savoured his dessert and tried to remember exactly what his father had shouted that day on the pier. Based on what Kambar had told him, his father could probably have committed murder with a fair chance of getting away with it. It’s a shame his dad had never known that. He was a crotchety and unforgiving old sod sometimes, especially in the last few years. He’d probably have drawn up a decent-sized hit list.
‘Garvey’s son thinks his father was wrongly imprisoned, and that the tumour might have been found earlier if he hadn’t been in prison. So he blames the world and his wife for his father’s death.’
‘I’m still not convinced this nutcase is Garvey’s son,’ Thorne said.
‘Sounds like Garvey was, though.’
‘OK, for the sake of argument . . .’
‘So, the child of the killer starts killing the children of the victims. It makes a kind of sense when you think about it.’
‘Sense?’ Thorne said.
‘You know what I mean.’
Thorne was walking slowly around the small branch of WH Smith at Cambridge station, waiting for the 15.28 to King’s Cross and driven back inside by the wind knifing along the platform. He kept the phone close to his mouth as he talked, so he could whisper when he and Brigstocke got to the meat of it.
‘Twenty-six Anthony Garveys in the UK,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Could be better, but could be a hell of a lot worse.’
Thorne had spoken to Brigstocke earlier in the day, after the initial meeting with Kambar. Holland had also checked in with the DCI, having met with the governor at Whitemoor, so now it was Thorne who needed bringing up to speed.
‘I think we’re wasting our time,’ Thorne said.
‘You’re not convinced. Yeah, you said.’
‘Even if he is Garvey’s son, I think the name is dodgy. If it was genuine, there’d be records. We would have known about it.’
‘Still got to check them out, Tom.’
‘I know,’ Thorne said. He was sure that, whoever this man was and whatever his parentage, he himself had chosen the name he had used when visiting Whitemoor and pestering Pavesh Kambar. But he also understood that, as far as the investigation went, arses always had to be covered, and it was easy to criticise when you weren’t the senior investigating officer.
‘We’ve discounted half of them since you and I spoke earlier,’ Brigstocke said. ‘So it shouldn’t take too long.’
‘What about the potential victims?’
‘Not doing quite so well there. Still missing those three.’
‘Missing?’
‘One is apparently on a walking holiday, but his wife can’t tell us much more than that, or doesn’t want to, for some reason. The other two have both slipped off the radar thanks to one thing and another. We’ll find them, though.’
‘As long as we find them first,’ Thorne said.
There was a pause, voices in the background. Thorne had stopped in front of the men’s magazines, and his eyes drifted from Mojo and Uncut, past Four Four Two, to the covers of Forum and Adult DVD Review on the higher shelves.
‘What do you think about this personality change business?’
‘Have a guess,’ Thorne said.
‘But Kambar didn’t deny that it was possible?’
‘Anything’s possible.’
‘Right.’
‘Right, and we shouldn’t discount the possibility that Garvey was actually a werewolf, or maybe the unwitting victim of a gypsy’s curse. For Christ’s sake, Russell . . .’
‘Look, a man who’s already murdered four people believes it, so what we think doesn’t really matter.’
‘You haven’t said what you think.’
‘I’m keeping an open mind,’ Brigstocke said. ‘You should try it some time.’
‘It wasn’t you that put Garvey away, so I don’t know why you think you’ve got to sit on the fence.’
‘Steady, mate.’
‘Sorry—’
‘It’s our motive, Tom, so we need to take it seriously. OK?’
Thorne picked up a copy of Uncut and wandered towards the till. There was a small queue, but he still had five minutes before the train was due. ‘I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,’ he said.
‘What time do you get into King’s Cross?’
‘Half four-ish.’
‘Go straight home,’ Brigstocke said. ‘You had an early start and you wouldn’t get back here until after five anyway. Just make sure you’re the first one in tomorrow.’
‘You sure?’
‘It’s up to you. I mean, if you want to spend a couple of hours ringing up our dozen remaining Anthony Garveys . . .’
‘See you in the morning.’
‘I’ll call if anything turns up.’
Right, Thorne thought. Like the body of one of the three missing victims-in-waiting.
Thorne took another swig from the can of beer which, thanks to Brigstocke, he had been free to purchase and enjoy. Opposite him, a young woman, blonde with bad skin, was leafing through a copy of heat. Every so often she looked up from the glossy pages and stared at the beer in Thorne’s hand, as though the consumption of alcohol on a train was right up there with smoking crack or getting your dick out on a list of unacceptable public behaviour.
They were sitting in the train’s ‘quiet’ carriage, but it wasn’t as if he was drinking particularly noisily.
Raising the can to his lips, Thorne caught another dirty look and toyed with offering her a drink. Or belching as loudly as he could. Or letting her know just what he thought about every stick-thin brain-dead waste of DNA in her magazine, and that any moron who enjoyed gawping at photos of paparazzi fodder stumbling out of nightclubs or climbing out of limos with no knickers on was in no position to pass judgement on anybody. Then he thought about what Louise would say. He remembered that she occasionally flicked happily through OK and heat, albeit while she was
having her hair done or sitting in a doctor’s waiting room.
He waited until the woman glanced up again, then smiled until she quickly dropped her eyes back to the magazine.
Makes a kind of sense.
People dying because of who their mothers were; killing because of who their fathers might have been. Thorne swallowed his piss-weak lager and supposed that it made as much sense as anything else in a world where being famous counted for so much. Where what you were famous for didn’t matter at all. A world where couples who weren’t fit to look after hamsters dragged six kids round the supermarket. Where some women popped out babies like they were shelling peas, while others didn’t find it quite so straightforward.
‘Any more tickets from Cambridge?’
Thorne had missed the inspector first time round while he’d been busy at the buffet. As soon as his ticket was punched, he stood up to make a return trip, crushing his empty can as noisily as possible as he squeezed out of his seat. Then tossing it back on to the table.
At the end of the carriage, a man was jabbering into his mobile. He was laughing, a hissy half cough, and telling someone how something was ‘just typical’ of someone else. It wasn’t loud so much as annoying.
Thorne stopped at the man’s table and snatched the phone from his hand, nodding up at the sign: a picture of a mobile with a red line through it. He pushed the button to end the man’s call, and reached round quickly with his other hand to take out his wallet. The man said, ‘What the fuck do you—?’ then stopped when he saw the warrant card.
Thorne walked on towards the buffet car in a far better mood.
Louise didn’t get home until an hour after Thorne.
‘You know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘You take a couple of days off and there’s shed-loads to catch up on.’ She told him she was enjoying getting stuck into things, having something else to think about. She was in a good mood.
Thorne suggested that she should put in for some overtime, as work was so obviously agreeing with her.
‘It’s about getting things in perspective,’ she said.
Louise made them spaghetti with bacon, onions and pesto and afterwards they sat in front of the TV for a while. She said, ‘I do want to talk about what happened, you know. I think we should.’
‘We have talked about it.’
‘No, we haven’t. Not how we feel about it.’ She smiled. ‘It’s been bloody deafening, tell you the truth.’
‘What?’
‘The sound of you walking on eggshells.’
Thorne stared at the television.
‘How do you feel?’ Louise said.
‘I don’t know,’ Thorne said. ‘How you’d expect. Upset.’
‘You’ve not said anything.’
Thorne felt uncomfortably warm. ‘I don’t think I’ve had enough time to . . . process things.’
‘Fine. Good. That’s OK.’
They watched a little more television, then went to bed. They lay and cuddled, and when Louise fell asleep Thorne read for a while; a few more chapters from one of the true-crime books he’d bought online.
Raymond Garvey had supported Crystal Palace and kept pet rabbits as a boy. He had enjoyed tinkering with motorbikes and had battered his first victim to death with half a house-brick.
When Thorne had switched the light out, he turned on to his side, feeling Louise come with him, pressed soft into his back, and the guilt bubbling up in him like acid reflux.
FOURTEEN
H.M.P. Whitemoor
‘I can’t get over how hard they make it getting in here.’
‘It’s a damn sight harder getting out.’
‘They take everything off you, check your stuff. All these doors you have to go through.’
‘So you don’t smuggle anything in.’
‘Like what?’
‘Cigarettes is the main thing. Drugs. People still manage it, though.’
‘OK.’
‘Sorry for . . . staring. I can’t believe you’re really here.’
‘Did you not believe me, when I said I was coming?’
‘It’s just so out of the blue, you know? I never expected . . . I never thought you’d find out.’
‘I wasn’t meant to. Nobody would have told me.’
‘So, how—?’
‘There were some old letters in the loft, some official stuff, at my auntie’s place. I asked her and she started to cry, so I knew it was true.’
‘And how did you feel when you found out?’
‘Pissed off. With her, I mean . . . with Mum, for not telling me.’
‘She never told me, either. About you.’
‘I know. I found the letter you wrote to my auntie. I know why you did what you did.’
‘Oh, Jesus . . .’
‘It’s fine, really. I know how it made you feel, Christ—’
‘It’s not fine.’
‘I think I’d have done the same thing.’
‘I always presumed you’d hate my guts. That’s why I never tried to get in touch or anything.’
‘From when I was six or seven or whatever, she said you were dead. That my “father” was dead. Told me he was an engineer. How could she do that?’
‘I was an engineer, for British Telecom. Before . . .’
‘I’m not sorry she’s dead. You don’t have to worry.’
‘You look different to the photos you sent.’
‘God, they’re ancient. From when I was at school. I’ll send you some more recent ones, if you want.’
‘You not at school any more?’
‘What’s the point?’
‘Long as it’s not got anything to do with me, with finding out who I was, I mean. If you’ve got exams, anything like that, you should probably finish them.’
‘You look different, too. I saw a few pictures on the internet, some old newspapers. There’s that one they use in all the books.’
‘Everybody piles on the weight in here. I don’t get as much exercise as other prisoners . . . normal prisoners.’
‘That’s really unfair.’
‘They keep the special ones apart from the rest. Ex-coppers, nonces, all that sort.’
‘You’re not that sort.’
‘It’s fine, I’m used to it.’
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘It’s funny, she never told you about me, then she goes and gives you my middle name.’
‘No, she didn’t. She gave me a stupid name. I changed it as soon as I found those letters. Not legally or anything, but I’ll probably get round to that.’
‘Up to you.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’m Anthony from now on, whatever.’
‘It’s nice.’
‘Second name too: Anthony Garvey.’
‘That’s got a ring, definitely.’
‘Tony’s all right, I don’t mind that.’
‘Sounds good. Younger, like.’
‘So, you don’t mind if I visit again?’
‘Are you going already?’
‘No, don’t worry, there’s ages yet. I was just checking it would be OK.’
‘Better than OK.’
‘For me too.’
‘Yeah . . . Tony sounds really good . . .’
FIFTEEN
Brigstocke was upbeat at the morning briefing, but then he did not have a great deal of choice. Progress - unspectacular yet tangible - was being made, but the DCI’s mood would have been much the same even if it were not. As senior investigating officer and team leader, he could never be seen banging his head against the wall, telling the troops that the investigation was going nowhere and that everything was turning to shit.
It was one of the reasons why Thorne had resisted the step up; why, despite Louise’s encouragement, he had not taken the chief inspector’s exams. The extra money would have been welcome, of course, and there was a much better parking space attached to the rank, but the putting on of a brave face, however much the circumstances might demand it, was not something he w
as good at.
‘You learn all that stuff,’ Louise had said.
But Thorne had not been persuaded. ‘I don’t want to learn it,’ he had said. And I’d most likely punch the first tosser to give me a funny handshake.’
After the briefing, Thorne walked back into the Incident Room with Holland. He waited while Holland made them both coffee and let his eyes drift across to the large whiteboard that dominated one wall. Below photographs of the four victims to date, the board was divided in half, with a thick, not-quite-straight line of black felt-tip running down the middle. On the left-hand side were listed the seven women murdered by Raymond Garvey; and opposite, their children. Red lines linked the mothers’ names with those of their sons and daughters.
Thorne looked at the list of names on the right-hand side of the board, their ages and the dates on which they had died, where relevant. A roll-call of those already killed and those they had to presume would be targeted by the killer:Catherine Burke (23 yrs) 9 Sept. (Brother, Martin, killed in RTA)
Emily Walker (33 yrs) 24 Sept.
Gregory and Alexandra Macken (20 yrs/18 yrs) 27 Sept.
Andrew Dowd (31 yrs)
Deborah Mitchell (29 yrs)
Graham Fowler (30 yrs)
Simon Walsh (27 yrs)
Along the bottom of the board were three E-fits, based on the descriptions given by Emily Walker’s neighbour, the witness who had seen a man talking to Catherine Burke and the students who had watched Greg Macken get picked up in the Rocket Club. Under each was the name ‘Anthony Garvey’. Whether Thorne was right to doubt its authenticity or not, it was the only name they had to go on when it came to the identity of their prime suspect.
Holland appeared at Thorne’s shoulder and handed him his coffee. Thorne stared into the plastic cup.
‘No milk in the fridge, so I had to use the powdered stuff.’
‘We’re going to have to start leaving notes on the cartons,’ Thorne said. ‘Like those students.’
Holland nodded towards the whiteboard. Said, ‘What d’you reckon it is with Dowd and his wife, then?’
Andrew Dowd was the man Brigstocke had mentioned the day before; someone who, according to his wife, had set out to go walking in the Lake District a few days before and with whom she had had minimal contact since. She claimed not to know the place he had been headed, the names of any hotels or B&Bs he had been intending to stay in or even how long he had planned to be away. There had been predictable concern for Dowd’s safety, until officers had spoken to his wife, after which they decided it was only his marriage that was almost certainly dead. She had told them that Andrew had gone with very little notice, that he had taken his mobile phone but not his charger and that he had called only once, the evening of the day he went, to let her know he had arrived safely. Using cell-site technology, the team had confirmed that the call was made from Keswick, which was where local searches were now focused. A text message had been sent to Dowd’s phone asking him to contact the police urgently, but since that first call either the handset had been switched off or the battery was dead.
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