She would catch the train down to the South Coast first thing the following morning and see what a chat with the ex-wife threw up. She knew, of course, that Anthony Garvey was not Jenny’s child, but without too much else to go on, she had little choice but to see where the conversation led. If she could catch so much as a glimpse of Jack’s wild goose.
He would be calling again in a couple of hours. They spoke three times a day, sometimes even more. Often, he would call if she was taking a little longer than usual at the supermarket, but she rarely resented it.
It would be the usual conversation later on.
The night before, she’d asked how he was holding up and he’d told her he was trying to make the best of it, despite the fact that his hip was playing up and he missed her cooking. She made sympathetic noises, but knew damned well that he was living the life of Riley, walking about the house in his vest and living on takeaways and tinned bitter. It was a little lie, a lovely one. But she’d been spending a lot more time lately thinking about the less than lovely lies they told themselves and each other every day. The years they still had together and the cancer not returning.
‘It’s strange, love, that’s all,’ he’d said. ‘With you being away.’
Chamberlain did her best to organise the paperwork, made some room on the bed to lie down. Yes, she was away, she decided, so there was no reason why she should not behave a bit differently, too. She picked up the glass from the table next to the TV and carried it into the bathroom.
Despite the scope and scale of the Anthony Garvey inquiry, Thorne, like every detective on the Murder Investigation Team, had other cases on his books. Those inclined to murder a spouse or take a knife to someone who disrespected their training shoes did not hold back simply because there was a serial killer taking up everybody’s time. There were also many cases going through the post-arrest stage. There was evidence to be carefully checked and prepared where court proceedings were imminent, and time-consuming liaison with the Crown Prosecution Service. As the trial date neared, a CPS rep might call the detective on an hourly basis to pass on the thoughts and wishes of those trying to keep their clients out of prison.
With little he could do to help in the search for Dowd, Fowler and Walsh, and with Kitson working on the Maier photograph, Thorne had spent much of the morning dealing with his backlog: the beating to death of a thirteen-year-old boy by a gang of older girls in a park in Walthamstow; a couple who had died in an arson attack on a block of flats in Hammersmith. Just after lunch, a CPS lawyer named Hobbs called with depressing news. Eight months earlier, a young woman had been killed during an attempted car-jacking in Chiswick. She had got into her car after shopping, then stopped when she’d noticed a large piece of paper stuck to her rear windscreen. When she’d pulled over and got out to remove it, a man had jumped from the vehicle behind and attempted to steal her car. In trying to stop him, she had been dragged beneath the wheels and, a week after the incident, her husband had taken the decision to turn off the life-support machine.
‘It’s Patrick Jennings defending,’ Hobbs said. ‘And he’s confident he can get this reduced to manslaughter.’
‘No chance,’ Thorne said.
‘Claims he’s got a decent crack at it. Reckons it was the woman’s fault. He intends to present a heap of Met Police campaign material which urges victims not to struggle, to hand over their property when threatened.’
‘You’re winding me up.’
‘He’s getting bloody good at this. Last month he was defending a kid who tried to take a woman’s car by climbing into the back seat while she was paying for petrol.’
‘Shit, that was Jennings?’
‘You see what I’m getting at?’
The trial had caused something of a stir in the papers, not to mention a nasty scuffle on the courtroom steps. The petrol station attendant had seen the boy getting into the car and kept the woman inside while he called the police. It emerged afterwards that the boy had a history of sexual assault, but, with no weapon found, the defence had been able to get the charge knocked down to trespass and he had walked away with a two-hundred-pound fine.
‘We need to be careful, that’s all,’ Hobbs said. ‘Don’t give the bugger anything he can use.’
‘It’s not happening.’
‘Let’s make sure it doesn’t,’ Hobbs said. ‘They’re starting to call him Jack-off Jennings.’
Despite the work this entailed, along with establishing base-camp at a fearsome mountain of paperwork, Thorne could not get the Anthony Garvey case out of his mind. Not for more than a few minutes, at any rate. Its dark beats, the twisted melody of it. Like the first song you hear on the radio in the morning that stays in your head all day.
Martin Macken’s mouth like a ragged wound, howling blood.
A note stuck to Emily Walker’s fridge.
Debbie Mitchell’s kid, pushing his train up and down the carpet.
And all the time, as he and the rest of the team flapped and fidgeted and waited for something to happen, the nagging worry that they were dancing to Anthony Garvey’s tune.
Towards the end of a nine-hour shift, with going home at a reasonable hour starting to look like a real possibility, Thorne ran into Yvonne Kitson on his way back from the toilet.
‘I think I’ve found the girl in the photograph,’ Kitson said.
His first thought was that Louise had been right, that dinner together was probably optimistic. This was good news, nevertheless. Then he saw the look on Kitson’s face. ‘Fuck . . .’
‘I went through all the missing-persons reports for the six months after the date when the picture was taken. Found a girl who fits the description. She turned up two weeks later. Was . . . discovered.’
‘Where?’
‘Same place she’d been sent to pick up the money, near as damn it,’ Kitson said. ‘Back of Paddington station. Looks like Garvey’s got a sense of humour.’
‘I’m pissing myself.’
‘I’ve put a call into the SIO. Got an address for the parents.’
‘You told Brigstocke?’
‘He’s out, so—’
‘Let me.’ He took out his phone as Kitson turned back towards the Incident Room, said, ‘Well done,’ as he dialled.
Got Russell Brigstocke’s voicemail.
‘It’s me. Just in case you’re playing golf with Trevor Jesmond, I thought you could pass on a message. Tell him that his nice, useful avenue of enquiry has just become a cul-de-sac.’
TWENTY-THREE
All at once, Alec Sinclair, a large man in his late fifties with thinning hair and restless hands, fell silent. He had been talking about his daughter Chloe, whose body had been found in a disused tool shed behind Paddington station almost three years earlier.
Struggling for words, he turned to his wife, who was seated next to him, in the cluttered living room of a terraced house in Balham. Miriam Sinclair was probably a few years younger than her husband, but there was grey bleeding through a dye job above her forehead and Thorne guessed the make-up was a little more thickly applied than it might once have been.
‘It’s nice to talk about her,’ she said. She smiled at Thorne and Kitson. ‘But then it all sort of rushes up at you. It’s not like you forget what happened or anything.’
‘I dream about her sometimes,’ Alec said. ‘And there are those few seconds when you wake up . . . before you remember she’s dead.’
‘You sure I can’t get you anything to drink?’
‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Thorne said.
The couple had asked, of course, as soon as Kitson had called the previous afternoon. Shocked to get the call, so long after the investigation into their daughter’s murder had petered out, but as eager as they had ever been to find out if there had been any progress. Kitson had told them that Chloe’s murder might well be connected to an ongoing inquiry; then she had checked herself, stressed that the inquiry into Chloe’s murder was still ongoing itself, would continue to be until an arr
est was made.
‘It’s fine, love,’ Miriam had said on the phone. ‘I know how stretched you lot are, and, I mean, you’ve only got to open a paper to see there are plenty of other murders. Other families who haven’t been grieving quite as long as we have.’
‘Have you found him?’ Alec asked now.
‘We don’t have anyone in custody,’ Kitson said. ‘But we have a number of useful leads, and—’
‘The boyfriend.’ Miriam looked at her husband. ‘We know it’s the boyfriend.’
‘Right,’ Kitson said. The officer leading the hunt for Chloe’s killer three years before had confirmed that their prime suspect had been the man she’d been reported as seeing at the time of her death. Despite their best efforts, they had never been able to trace him.
‘We’ve got a name,’ Thorne said. ‘A description.’ He didn’t say that neither was exactly reliable. ‘We’re doing everything we can to follow these up and obviously we’ve passed all this information on to DCI Spedding.’ The man who had been in charge of the original investigation had been delighted to hear from Kitson; happy, he said, to share any intelligence that might take the Chloe Sinclair murder off his books.
Alec Sinclair turned to his wife. ‘Dave Spedding still gets in touch from time to time, doesn’t he?’
‘A card every Christmas,’ Miriam said. ‘A phone call on Chloe’s birthday. That sort of thing.’
‘I mean, he was very close to us by the end. Close to Chloe, too, in a funny sort of way.’
‘Hard for him as well, I would have thought,’ Miriam said.
Thorne nodded. It should be, he thought. The day it stops being hard is the day to get out, to up-sticks and find yourself a nice little pub to run. He said that Spedding seemed like a good man, and a good copper.
‘It might sound stupid,’ Kitson said, ‘but is there anything you might have remembered since the original investigation? Something that’s come back to you?’
‘We would have told Dave Spedding,’ Miriam said.
‘I know, and we really don’t want to dredge it all up again.’
‘Would you mind just going over it?’ Thorne asked. On the cupboard against the far wall, he could see a collection of photographs in metal frames: the Sinclairs on a beach with two small children; Chloe and her brother cradling a baby monkey at the gates of a safari park; a young man posing proudly next to what was probably his first car. The brother who had lost a sister, the son who had become an only child.
‘She was on her gap year,’ Alec said. ‘Saving up to go travelling before university. She did some stuff for me at my office for a while, but she was bored to death, so she got the job in the pub. That’s where she met this Tony.’
‘Did she tell you much about him?’ Kitson asked.
Miriam shook her head. ‘She told us he was a good few years older and I think she could tell we didn’t really approve.’
‘Maybe if we’d been a bit more . . . liberal or what have you, things might have been different.’ Alec stared into space for a few seconds. ‘I just didn’t want her getting too attached to anyone, not with university and everything round the corner. As it turned out, she started talking about not going at all, about going travelling with this Tony, or moving in with him.’
‘There were a lot of arguments,’ Miriam said.
Thorne said it was understandable, that he could see their first concern had been for their daughter. ‘But you never met him?’
It was a warm morning, but Miriam pulled her cardigan a little tighter around her chest as she shook her head. ‘She got very secretive about it, told us that it was her life, all that kind of thing.’ Her smile was regretful, a tremble in her bottom lip. ‘I could see that in the end there was a danger we’d drive her away, so I asked her to bring him round.’
‘She told us it was too late for all that,’ Alec said. ‘That Tony knew how we felt and she didn’t want to put him through the whole trial-by-parents thing.’
‘It’s stupid, looking back,’ Miriam said. ‘It was only a few months, but she was completely smitten with him. One day she was talking to us about all the places she wanted to visit and the next thing we wouldn’t see her for days on end.’
Alec’s face darkened. ‘That’s why we didn’t even know anything had happened for a few days.’
‘Can you tell us . . . ?’ Thorne asked.
Alec cleared his throat, but it was his wife who spoke. ‘She’d taken to stopping over at his place more and more.’
‘Where was that?’ Kitson asked.
‘Hanwell, I think. At least Hanwell was somewhere she mentioned a few times, and I remember she needed to get a travel-card for Zone Four. We never had the address, though. Obviously, we would have passed it on to the police.’ She picked at a loose thread on the arm of the sofa. ‘So, when she didn’t come home on the Thursday night, we just presumed, you know . . .’
‘We started to get worried by the Saturday morning,’ Alec said. ‘I mean, I know we’ve said there were arguments, but she’d always phone after a day or two. She knew we’d worry.’
Miriam tugged at the loose thread until it broke, then balled it up in her palm and closed her fist. ‘We called the police on the Saturday,’ she said. ‘Then, three weeks later, we had the visit.’
‘There were two of them on the doorstep,’ Alec said. ‘I knew it, when the woman tried to smile and couldn’t quite manage it.’
‘Do you know why?’ Miriam asked suddenly. ‘I know you’ve got a name now, so maybe you’ve got some idea why he did what he did.’
Because Anthony Garvey already had a plan. Because he needed your daughter to get the money to fund it. And once she’d done what he wanted, he had to get her out of the way. He could not afford to have loose ends lying around once his grand scheme of killing was under way, so he stuffed your daughter behind a pile of rusted metal and dusty sacking, curled up among the shit and the silverfish with the back of her skull caved in and a plastic bag tied around her head.
Because he needed to practise on someone.
‘It’s a bit too early to say,’ Thorne said, hoping that it didn’t sound as piss-weak and pathetic as he felt while saying it.
Kitson glanced at him, but couldn’t meet his eye. ‘We’ll come back to you as soon as we know any more.’
Thorne could see that the couple had had enough. He thanked them for their time and apologised for making them talk about something that was so painful. Miriam said that it was no trouble, that nothing was too much trouble if it might help find the man who had murdered her daughter. She said she was the one who should apologise for not being a better hostess.
‘Did Chloe have a diary?’
‘Yes, but only for appointments and things,’ Miriam said. ‘I looked through it afterwards . . . hoping she might have said something. The police had a good look, of course, but it’s just “meeting T”, “having a drink with T”, that kind of thing. You’re welcome to take it, if you want.’
‘It might be useful for checking dates,’ Thorne said. ‘What about a mobile phone?’
‘Police looked at that, too,’ Alec said. ‘They found it in her bag.’
‘Do you still have it?’
Miriam shook her head. ‘Once the police had returned all Chloe’s things, Alec took it to one of those recycling places.’
‘I can’t bear waste.’ Alec reached across and fumbled for his wife’s hand. ‘Can’t bear it.’
Thorne nodded and looked down for his briefcase. He knew the man was not talking about mobile phones any more.
Jenny Duggan, formerly Jenny Garvey, had not been comfortable with the idea of Carol Chamberlain visiting her at home, so they met outside a small pub in the city centre. Chamberlain was the second to arrive, her train from Waterloo having got in fifteen minutes late, and once she had visited the toilet and got some drinks in, she walked back outside to join Duggan at a table in the sunshine. They were no more than a hundred yards from the Bargate, the ancient monument at t
he northern end of the old medieval wall. It had served as police headquarters during the Second World War and now housed a contemporary art gallery, but eight hundred years earlier it had been the main gateway to the city of Southampton.
‘All very nice,’ Duggan said, as Chamberlain drew back a chair. ‘But it’s still rough as you like round here on a Friday night.’
Chamberlain took a pair of sunglasses from her bag, smaller than the rather oversized pair Jenny Duggan was wearing. Chamberlain found herself wondering if, even now, fifteen years on and in a different city, the woman worried about being recognised.
‘I didn’t think you were allowed to drink on duty,’ Duggan said. ‘Or is that just something they say on TV?’
‘I’m not on duty, strictly speaking,’ Chamberlain said. ‘I’m retired, actually. Just helping with an inquiry.’
‘Like a cold-case thing? Like on Waking the Dead?’
‘I suppose.’
‘I’ve always quite fancied the main bloke in that,’ Duggan said. ‘Do you know any coppers like him?’
‘Not many,’ Chamberlain said.
They sat there for ten minutes or more, talking about television, the weather, the job doing the accounts for a local furniture firm that Duggan had recently found for herself. Chamberlain knew she was ten years or so older than her drinking companion, but guessed that an impartial observer would have put it closer to fifteen. Duggan had looked after herself, maintaining a good figure and with her hair kept in the kind of shaggy bob that women a lot younger seemed to favour. Chamberlain was a little ashamed at wondering if the sunglasses might also be hiding the signs of having a bit of work done.
Duggan was talkative and relaxed. Chamberlain knew that she ought to be steering the conversation towards Garvey, but she was reluctant to push it, and not only because it was always useful to establish a rapport. She was enjoying their chat about nothing in particular. The sun was warm and the wine wasn’t too bad, and any passer-by would have taken them for two friends having lunch or gearing up for an afternoon at the shops.
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