He checked his watch: just after nine, not too late to call. He wondered if she was alone. ‘It’s Tom Thorne.’
‘What do you want?’
The words sounded as if they’d taken some effort, like she’d just woken up or been drinking. He looked at the can of lager in his own hand and pushed the thought from his mind. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ he said. ‘With the pictures.’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘All right, but just enough to make you leave.’
‘Just enough? Like you can measure it?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘They made me feel sick. What if Jason had seen them? Have you any idea . . . ?’
‘I didn’t know what else to do,’ Thorne said. ‘I got into trouble for it, if that makes you feel any better.’
There was a pause. ‘It does a bit.’
Thorne laughed, expecting her to join in, but she didn’t. ‘When are you going to Nina’s?’
‘First thing tomorrow,’ Mitchell said. ‘I’m trying to pack.’
‘It’s a bloody nightmare, isn’t it?’
‘This isn’t a fortnight in Majorca, though, is it?’
Thorne was starting to wish he hadn’t called, wondering what on earth had possessed him. Not that he had imagined Debbie Mitchell would give him an easy ride. ‘You on your own?’
‘Yeah. Nina’s . . . at work.’
‘He will come, you know?’ Thorne took a sip of beer. ‘If we don’t catch him. You’ve done the right thing.’ He heard the click of a lighter, the pause as she inhaled.
‘I suppose.’
‘Listen, you can always call if—’
‘Are you going to catch him?’ Her voice no longer sounded tired. ‘“If we don’t catch him,” you said. How likely is that, d’you reckon, this bloke getting away with it?’
‘We’re doing everything we can.’
‘On a scale of one to ten?’
Thorne thought about it. Five? More? Said, ‘How’s your hand?’
‘Sorry?’
‘It was bleeding earlier.’ Thorne looked up at the sound of keys in the front door. ‘I think you caught it on Jason’s teeth.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘I was trying to say you can call if you’re worried about anything.’
‘What? You, or just 999?’
‘Me. If you’re . . . anxious, whatever.’ He could hear the inner door opening as he gave Debbie Mitchell his mobile number, then heard it close while he waited for her to write it down and read it back to him.
‘Anyway . . .’
‘Right, I’ll leave you to your packing,’ Thorne said.
‘OK.’
Louise came through the lounge door. Thorne raised a finger, mouthed, ‘One minute,’ as she walked past him towards the kitchen. He thought about saying something like, ‘Say hello to Jason,’ but decided it would sound cheesy and insincere, so he just said, ‘Bye, Debbie.’
He followed Louise into the kitchen and was about to say, ‘You caught me on the phone to my girlfriend’ when she turned from the fridge with a bottle in her hand and he saw her expression.
‘What?’
‘Nothing, it’s fine.’
‘I thought you’d be a bit later,’ Thorne said. ‘Obviously not much of a celebration.’
She poured herself a large glass of wine and leaned back against the worktop. ‘Obviously.’ She held out the bottle towards him, asking the question.
He raised his can, answering it. ‘That snotty DCI turned forty again, did she?’
Louise took a drink, like she needed it. ‘It wasn’t a birthday.’
Thorne shook his head. ‘I just presumed . . .’
‘Lucy Freeman’s pregnant,’ Louise said. Another drink, the swallow giving way to a wobbly kind of smile. ‘She kept it very quiet. Like you’re supposed to.’
‘Shit.’
‘No, really, it’s OK. I’m happy for her.’ She stared past him, swilled the piss-coloured wine around in her glass. ‘I need to be happy for her.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘I mean it. I just need to crack on, you know? I can’t get stupid every time I see a pushchair outside a shop or feel upset if I run into someone who’s up the duff.’
‘I know,’ Thorne said, not knowing at all.
‘It’s just . . . hard. It’s like when you’re a teenager and you get dumped and every song on the radio feels like it’s about you.’
Thorne nodded. ‘All By Myself ’ by Eric Carmen had torn his heart out when he was fifteen. ‘I Know It’s Over’ by the Smiths did it again ten years later. Hank Williams singing ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ could still do it.
‘I’ll deal with it,’ Louise said. ‘I’ll have to, won’t I? She sits at the next desk, for God’s sake. I’ve got a big pile of baby magazines I can take in for her.’
‘Don’t.’
‘A pack of three newborn Babygros she can have as well. Shouldn’t have bought them really, but I couldn’t resist.’
Thorne stepped across to her and took the glass from her hand. ‘Come here.’
A few seconds later, she lifted her face from his neck when a phone started to ring in the next room. She started to pull away, but Thorne held her close.
‘It’s your mobile.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘Answer it.’
‘It’s fine.’
Louise broke the embrace and walked into the living room. Thorne lobbed his empty beer can into the bin. He heard her answer and say, ‘Just a minute.’ They crossed in the kitchen doorway, Thorne taking the phone as Louise held it out to him.
He recognised the caller’s voice, the precision in it. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ he said.
Pavesh Kambar laughed. ‘Well, obviously you were in my thoughts too, Inspector. Hence the call. Great minds and all that.’
Thorne waited. The only other person he knew who used the word ‘hence’ was Trevor Jesmond. ‘Hence the importance of correct procedure. ’ ‘Hence the fact that I’m suspending you from duty . . .’
‘I thought of somebody you should speak to,’ Kambar said. ‘A writer.’
‘OK.’
‘The name is Nicholas Maier.’
‘Let me grab a pen . . .’ He found one on the table near the door, pulled a scrap of paper from inside his wallet.
Kambar repeated the name, spelling it out, and Thorne scribbled it down. Kambar told him that the writer had contacted him two years previously, a year or so after the death of Raymond Garvey, claiming to be doing research.
Another searing, true-crime masterpiece, Thorne thought. He didn’t recognise the name. Though he couldn’t remember who had written the two books he had sent away for and was currently reading, he was sure neither author was Nicholas Maier.
‘This chap was writing a book, or updating one he’d already written, something like that. He called me several times, came to the hospital on more than one occasion. He certainly knew everything there was to know about Raymond Garvey’s condition and wanted to get my take on it.’
‘Your take?’
‘Did I think the tumour might have changed his personality?’
‘Same thing the son was banging on about?’
‘That’s why I’m calling really,’ Kambar said. ‘He claimed to have got his information from the son.’
‘He’d been in contact with him?’
‘So he said. He talked as though he’d been commissioned as Raymond Garvey’s official biographer or something.’
Thorne was drawing a line under the name, going back and forth over it. ‘So, you refused to speak to him?’
‘Of course.’ Pavesh answered as though it was a particularly stupid question. ‘Once I knew what he wanted, yes, of course. He made substantial offers, but I told him what he could do with his money. He was sure I would come round eventually. That sort always are, aren’t they? He left me his card. Would you like the details?’
&n
bsp; Thorne took down phone numbers and an email address, then thanked Kambar for taking the trouble to call.
‘It’s not a problem,’ Kambar said. ‘When we met, you seemed convinced that this man claiming to be the son was very important. Might well be the man you are looking for.’
‘It certainly looks that way.’
‘In which case this writer is definitely someone you should be talking to.’
‘Maier told you he knew him?’ Thorne asked. ‘That they’d spoken?’
‘Oh yes, very definitely,’ Kambar said. ‘The way Mr Maier told it to me, he was more or less Anthony Garvey’s best friend.’
MY JOURNAL
3 October
It’s not always easy, certainly not in a city like London, where almost anyone can get lost without even knowing it, can become anonymous, but most people want contact with others. They crave intimacy. I probably crave it just as much as anyone else, but I gave up on all that a long time ago. The fact that everyone else seems to need it makes my job easier, that’s all I’m saying. It makes it simple to get close to other people’s lives. You just have to watch and figure out the best way in. If someone’s a nurse, for example, you can pretty much bet that they care. So you run into them a couple of times. Maybe you’re a junkie who’s trying to kick the habit and you know that they’ll sympathise. You become a face they know, someone they trust, right until the moment they see the rock coming down or whatever. You watch. You get to know routines, patterns. What time Hubby comes home from school to have his lunch. When the time comes to pay a call on the wife, you’re just that bloke who she’s spoken to in the supermarket or wherever a couple of times. She isn’t wary, like she should be. You’re a face across a busy student bar, or a man who cleans the family car once a week. Eventually you’re invited in for a coffee and you get familiar. You can figure out timings, habits, the fact that the man you’re after and his wife are fighting like cat and dog. You find your angle.
It’s starting to get trickier now, but I always knew it would. I found the easy ones, got them out of the way first; geared myself up. Obviously, the police will have put the pieces together by now (literally, I should imagine) and will have worked out what’s happening. That’s all fine, though. Now they can do the hard work for me. They can find the ones I still haven’t been able to track down. Hopefully, that’s the bit they haven’t worked out yet.
Dug into the cash again and moved into a new place, a fairly tidy one-room flat, near a station, same as the others, which makes it easier to travel. King’s Cross this time. Even though it’s only for a few weeks at a stretch, I like walking around each area, getting to know the streets a bit. King’s Cross is supposed to be pretty rough, with the prossies and the drugs, but so far I like it. Nobody gives you a second look, which is fine by me. It’s like what I said before about people becoming anonymous. That’s what everyone seems like round here. It’s another thing which makes my life easier.
The newsagent was banging on about the Macken murders this morning, when I went in for fags. Still loads of stuff in the paper. Family snapshots, all that. Nothing connecting it with the others, though, which is probably just the police playing their cards close to their chests. The bloke in the shop was getting all worked up. He didn’t quite get as far as saying they should bring back hanging, but near enough. They were so young, he kept saying, their whole lives ahead of them. Why does it matter how old they were? I just don’t get that. Like the young have any more right to life than anyone else. Like it’s more tragic than if some pensioner tumbles down the stairs.
‘Bright futures’, that’s what it said in the paper. The newsagent kept stabbing at the Sun or the Mirror or whatever it was and shaking his head at how sad it was. How unfair. All that’s been taken away from them, he said.
Stolen.
Like years spent in prison for something that wasn’t your fault. Like a normal life. Like the right to walk around without being spat at or beaten up and not spending twenty hours a day trying to deal with the headaches, going quietly mental in your cell.
In the end I just nodded and took my cigarettes and walked out of there. Thinking that he had no bloody idea what ‘fair’ was. Thinking about my part in other people’s futures, bright or otherwise.
Thinking all sorts of lives can be stolen.
EIGHTEEN
Thorne had arranged to meet Carol Chamberlain at the Starbucks near Oxford Circus, having taken care to specify which of the umpteen branches in the area he meant. Thanks to the Northern Line, he was fifteen minutes late, and as Chamberlain had already finished her coffee by the time he arrived, they decided to walk. It was a bright, dry Saturday morning and Oxford Street was teeming. Four days into October and many people were obviously keen to get their Christmas shopping done nice and early. The shops were already tinselled-up and piled high with tat, the predictable music spilling out of the doorways.
Slade, Wizzard, the Pogues. Cliff bloody Richard.
‘It’s utterly ridiculous,’ Chamberlain said.
‘Don’t get me started,’ Thorne said.
Thorne had first met Carol Chamberlain four years previously, when her intervention in an inquiry that had been going backwards had provided the much-needed breakthrough. She had been out of the Force five years by then but working for the Area Major Review Unit, a new team that was utilising the invaluable know-how and experience of retired officers to take a fresh look at cold cases. The Crinkly Squad, many had called it, Thorne included, until he’d met Chamberlain. Decked out with a blue rinse and furry slippers and pulling a tartan shopping trolley through the streets of Worthing, where she lived, she might have looked harmless, but he had seen her work. He had seen her extract information from a man half her age in a way that had sickened him. Sickened him almost as much as the fact that he had watched and said nothing, because even as he had smelled the man’s flesh burning, he had known it needed to be done.
They had not spoken about the incident since.
Much had changed for both of them since a case that had taken its toll on each in different ways and had ultimately cost Thorne’s father his life. They did not speak about that, either. Though it was always there, a shadow between them, they just got on with taking the piss, same as any other two coppers, despite the differences in age and experience.
Negotiating the crowds, Thorne talked her through the inquiry; the link between two series of murders fifteen years apart. She remembered the Garvey case very well, she told him, having worked for a number of years with the SIO. She had been close enough to have watched a few of the early interviews.
‘He never said why he did it, did he?’ Chamberlain said. ‘Like Shipman. Never gave any reason for it. They’re always the worst.’
‘Maybe there wasn’t a reason. Maybe he just liked it.’
‘There’s usually something, though, isn’t there? With most of them. The voice of God telling them to do it. A message from the devil in a Britney Spears song. Something.’
‘Well, this one’s certainly got a motive,’ Thorne said. ‘Or thinks he has. He wants us to know exactly why he’s doing it.’
‘OK, forget what I said. They’re the worst.’
They carried on towards Tottenham Court Road, crossing Oxford Street at Chamberlain’s insistence so they could walk in the sunshine. He told her about the search for the three missing sons of Raymond Garvey’s original victims, and about the phone call from Pavesh Kambar.
Thorne had done some checking and discovered that Nicholas Maier had written a book about the Garvey case that was published a year before Garvey’s death. He had picked up a copy of Battered - The Raymond Garvey Killings from his local Waterstone’s in Camden before catching the Tube. On first glance, it looked much the same as the ones he had bought online. The same pictures, the same semi-salacious blurb on the back of the jacket. He fished the book from his bag and showed it to Chamberlain.
‘When are you seeing him?’ she asked.
‘Monday,’
Thorne said. ‘He emailed me back from his “lecture tour” in America. He gets back tomorrow.’
Chamberlain pulled a face.
‘I know. They teach this stuff in universities over there. Serial Killers 101, whatever. Said something in his email about it paying for his next holiday. Also said he’d be happy to meet me.’
‘I don’t like the sound of that.’
Thorne laughed, knowing very well what she meant. He was always suspicious of anyone who seemed overly pleased to see a police officer. It wasn’t his job to be popular.
‘I mean, I know you,’ Chamberlain said, ‘and even I’m not happy to see you.’
They crossed back over the road and cut down into Soho Square. Though it wasn’t exactly warm, there were plenty of people gathered on benches or sprawled on the grass with books. They squeezed on to a bench next to a cycle courier who was finishing a sandwich. He got up and left before he’d swallowed the last mouthful.
‘So, what do you need?’ Chamberlain asked.
‘We need to know where this bloke comes from. It’s looking very much like he’s Garvey’s son, so let’s start with trying to find out who his mother is. It doesn’t sound like she was in contact with Garvey.’
Chamberlain was still holding the book. She lifted it up. ‘Why don’t you ask your new best friend?’
Thorne took it back. ‘I’ve skimmed through and there’s nothing about any son in there. I think Anthony Garvey made contact with him after his father had died.’
‘You think he wants Maier to write another book? Go into all this brain tumour stuff?’
‘I’ll find out on Monday,’ Thorne said. ‘Meanwhile, you can start digging around, see what you can come up with. All the descriptions put him at thirty-ish, so he was born fifteen years or so before Garvey started killing. You up for it?’
Chamberlain nodded. ‘Well, this or the gardening? It’s a tough choice.’
‘AMRU not keeping you busy, then?’
‘They couldn’t afford me and the hypnotherapist.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The brass thought it would be a nice idea to try some regression therapy on a few witnesses, see what they could remember.’
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