From the Dead (2010)

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne told them about his conversation with Donna Langford, about the daughter that had gone missing and Donna's belief that her ex-husband was responsible.

  'Well, that clearly needs to be another element of the inquiry,' Jesmond said. 'We need to keep her happy.'

  'Do we?'

  'She may not have a leg to stand on legally, but she might decide to make a few quid by selling her story. If she went to the press or wrote a book, we could be made to look like idiots.'

  Thorne bit his tongue.

  'Let's give her what she wants,' Brigstocke said. 'After all, it's what we want too, near enough.'

  Thorne had no real objection, at least not when it came to searching for Ellie Langford. Her mother's concern was genuine. And it was not the first time Thorne had looked at photographs of a missing girl and found it hard to catch his breath for a few seconds. 'OK, whatever,' he said.

  Jesmond nodded and grunted enthusiastically. 'But let's try to keep it all as low key as we can, all right? Make this a priority, but we don't want any bulls in china shops.'

  Thorne did not need telling which particular bull his superior officer was talking about. 'What about Anna Carpenter?' he asked. Jesmond glanced down at his papers. Clearly the homework had not been that thorough. 'The private detective.'

  'Right.' Jesmond thought for a few seconds. 'She could embarrass us too, if she felt like talking to the papers.' He looked over to Brigstocke, received a nod of agreement. 'What does she want?'

  'This case,' Thorne said. 'Well, any case, I'm guessing, but she's keen to do something.'

  'OK, let her get involved,' Jesmond said. He saw Thorne open his mouth to object. 'Or let her think she's involved. Tell her she can shadow you?'

  'You're joking, right?'

  'As long as she knows when to keep her mouth shut, it shouldn't be a problem. Fair enough? Russell?'

  'I can't see it doing any harm,' Brigstocke said.

  Thorne shook his head. 'Yeah, well, you're not the poor sod who'll be stuck with her.'

  Jesmond stood up, said that he needed to crack on. To get into the incident room and do whatever he could to build morale, bearing in mind what had happened. On his way out of the door, he told Brigstocke and Thorne that he was pleased they were all singing from the same hymn sheet.

  'What a racket that's going to be,' Thorne said.

  The Royal Oak was unlikely to attract anyone for whom great service or a friendly atmosphere was important, but it was five minutes' walk from both the Peel Centre and Colindale Station. As such, and with an ex-DI's name above the front door, it was always going to be a pub where the Met's finest, and its decidedly less fine, were in the majority. Tonight, though, any punter without a warrant card would have been well advised to open a few cans at home instead.

  It was wall-to-wall Job.

  The clientele could equally well have been bikers, football fans or braying, pissed-up City boys. Friends, colleagues or strangers, it hardly mattered. Something in their shared experience, in the unspoken bonds between these men and women, caused feelings to run high and wild as bewilderment turned to anger and sorrows were drowned many times over in white wine, Stella and Jameson's. Had it not been for the stronger smell coming from the toilets, the whiff of testosterone might have been overpowering, drifting above the pockets of aggression and self-pity as Thorne pushed his way to the bar. Walking back to the table with another Guinness for himself and lager-tops for Dave Holland and Yvonne Kitson, he was accosted several times by those keen to give vent to one emotion or another; to pass comment on the only topic of conversation in the room.

  'Bad luck, mate . . .'

  'Don't worry, he'll get what's coming to him.'

  'Wankers!'

  Thorne handed Holland and Kitson their drinks and sat down, wondering exactly who that last half-cut philosopher had been talking about. The members of the jury? Adam Chambers and his legal team? Thorne and his? Himself and every other copper in the pub for not making a better job of the case?

  Whichever it was, Thorne wasn't arguing.

  'Cheers,' Holland said.

  Thorne nodded and drank.

  'They're like arseholes,' Kitson said.

  'What are?'

  'Opinions.'

  Holland swallowed. 'Every bugger's got one.'

  Thorne looked from one to the other. 'So, what's yours?'

  Thorne had spent a good deal of the morning with Russell Brigstocke, speculating as to what might have happened in that jury room, but he had yet to sit and talk things through with anyone else whose opinion he valued. He had tried to get hold of Louise, but she had been in and out of meetings all day and able to do no more than leave a message saying how sorry she was.

  Kitson was a damn sight less cautious than she had once been when it came to speaking her mind; and Holland, though not quite the wide-eyed innocent he used to be, could still usually be counted upon to say what he thought.

  'It's hard enough getting a conviction at the best of times,' Holland said. 'You've got the judge instructing the jury, banging on about reasonable doubt and the weight of evidence, all that.'

  Kitson nodded. 'So, when you haven't got a body and there's a brief who knows what he's doing, you're really up against it.' She looked at Thorne. 'We're up against it.'

  'Nothing else you could have done,' Holland said.

  Thorne blinked slowly and imagined Adam Chambers celebrating, pissing it up the wall in some West End bar where there were far fewer police officers knocking around. He pictured the jubilant friends and family and supposed that, in a way, it was a let-off for them, too. There would be no need to lie to work colleagues or rewrite their personal histories. They would not have to duck difficult questions when journalists came knocking every year on Andrea Keane's birthday, insisting that they must know something about what happened to her. Now they could happily let their own doubts about Adam Chambers' innocence - and Thorne knew they had them - shrivel, until they seemed like something only dreamed or imagined.

  'We've just got to crack on,' Kitson said.

  'Life's too short, right?' Thorne necked a third of his pint, swallowed back a belch. 'But a lot shorter for some than it is for others.' He thought about two eighteen-year-old girls. The memory of one sullied by injustice. A chance, perhaps, to find the other. And to make himself feel a damn sight better, to salve a conscience scarred by his failure to find the first.

  The horse that Jesmond thought he should get back on.

  They were joined by Sam Karim, who brought another round to the table just as Russell Brigstocke stood up and made a short speech. The DCI thanked everyone for their hard work, told the team they were the best he had ever worked with, and said that one day, if something new turned up, they might get another crack at it. There were cheers and some half-hearted applause, then the pub drank a toast to Andrea Keane.

  'God bless,' Thorne said. It was the kind of thing a copper with a drink inside him came out with at such a moment. Even one without a religious bone in his body.

  The Oak was hardly the sort of establishment to get done for after-hours drinking, but there was no more than fifteen minutes' official drinking time left when Thorne spotted someone he knew walking out of the Gents'. Gary Brand had been a DS on the original Alan Langford inquiry; had sat in on a couple of the Paul Monahan interviews, if Thorne's memory served him correctly. He had stayed in the Homicide Command for another eighteen months or so afterwards, until a vacancy for an inspector had come up elsewhere, and was now working south of the river, as far as Thorne could remember.

  Thorne thought it might be an idea to run a few things past someone who had been part of the team ten years earlier. Moving through the crowd, he felt the drink starting to take hold. He took a few deep breaths. There was no way he was driving home, but that didn't matter a great deal. He had spent the afternoon on the phone, making the necessary arrangements, and he would not be needing the car much, if at all, the following day.

  Brand looke
d pleased to see him and immediately reached for his wallet. They made for the bar. Thorne took a half, though he knew it was already a little late for caution.

  'Hardly your local any more this, is it, Gary?'

  Brand was a slim six-footer and a few years younger than Thorne. His light hair was cut close to the scalp and he wore the kind of thin, soft-leather jacket that Thorne thought looked better on a woman. 'Well, obviously I know quite a few of the lads on the Chambers inquiry, and I've been following the case.' He was originally from the West Midlands and it was still clear enough in the flattened vowels and the downward intonation at the end of each sentence. As a result, he often sounded despondent, even if he were in the best of moods. He shrugged. 'Couldn't think of anywhere else I'd rather be tonight.' He raised his glass, touched it to Thorne's. 'What an absolute shocker.'

  'We've had a few of those.'

  'Right enough.'

  'Talking of which . . .'

  Thorne told Brand about the visit from Anna Carpenter and the photographs. About a case that had come back to life as miraculously as Alan Langford himself appeared to have done.

  'He was always a slippery sod,' Brand said. 'The type that enjoyed making the likes of you and me look stupid.'

  'The type to snatch his own daughter?'

  'I don't see why not.'

  'And what about the photos?'

  Brand told Thorne that he had no idea why they might have been sent to Donna. 'So, what are you going to do?'

  'See if I can get anything out of Paul Monahan.'

  'Good luck,' Brand said. 'I don't remember that animal being particularly talkative.'

  'Maybe he's mellowed in prison,' Thorne said. It was banter, no more than that. Thorne had checked Monahan's record that afternoon and discovered that he had hardly been a model prisoner. His sentence had been increased twice since his original conviction.

  'Yeah, course he has.'

  'He might be one of those types that takes degrees and spends his spare time making quilts for Oxfam.'

  'My money's on the gym and homemade tattoos,' Brand said. 'But let me know how you get on . . .'

  They exchanged mobile numbers and Thorne went back to his table. Holland asked if he wanted another, but faced with a straight choice between heading home now or fighting for a taxi later with half of Homicide Command, Thorne decided to make a move. He said as few goodbyes as he could get away with and headed out to the car park, grateful for the cold against his face and the fresh air.

  He called home on his way to Colindale Tube Station and heard his own voice on the machine. He guessed that Louise had gone to bed or back to her own flat, but he left a message anyway.

  Then he called Anna Carpenter.

  He was suddenly aware, as he heard the call connect, that it was probably way too late to be ringing, that he should have called on his way to the Oak, or just sent a text. Then again, a part of him was hoping that she would not answer, or if she didn't, that she might not get the message he was about to leave.

  When Anna's voicemail cut in, Thorne spoke a little more slowly than he might otherwise have, careful not to slur. 'This is Tom Thorne. Just calling to say, if you're still up for this, meet me at eight o'clock tomorrow morning outside the WHSmith at King's Cross Station. Bring your passport. And you might want to wear something that's a bit more . . . severe or whatever.'

  SEVEN

  Though there had been a prison on the same site since 1595, the majority of the current building dated from two hundred and fifty years later, with a brooding neo-Gothic gatehouse and wings arranged in the typical midnineteenth-century radial system. Like most Victorian prisons, HMP Wakefield had certainly not been designed to be beautiful, but approaching it, as he had done several times before, it seemed to Thorne as though every blackened brick and each barred window had been infused by those that had built it with something poisonous. Something subtle and dark that might leach from the building's brutal fabric into those inside and slowly kill off hope; harden them. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Was it the people within its walls that made the place so ugly?

  Whether it was a Victorian monstrosity like Pentonville or Strangeways, or a pale, concrete, US-style penitentiary like Belmarsh, Thorne was never wholly comfortable stepping inside a prison.

  He could see that Anna Carpenter felt the same way.

  He watched her cheerfully handing over her passport at the first of three checkpoints they would have to pass through before being admitted into the main body of the prison.

  'Trust me to get the wrong end of the bloody stick,' she said, nodding towards Thorne. 'There I was thinking that when he asked me to bring my passport, he was going to whisk me off on some glamorous, last-minute holiday.'

  The man-monkey checking her details did not so much as glance up from the paperwork. Anna turned to Thorne, rolled her eyes. She was rattled, he could see that, and overdoing the nonchalance.

  'Nice to chat,' she said, when her passport was handed back.

  She was right to be apprehensive, though. Thorne knew that better than most. The outfit she was wearing - a suitably understated dark skirt and jacket - would lead any prisoner to assume she was a copper. She would feel studied and hated, just as much as Thorne always did. But, as a woman, she would also feel things that were a damn sight more unpleasant.

  'He was a cheery so-and-so,' she said, as they moved on.

  Rattled as she might have been, Anna seemed in a better mood now than she had been two and a half hours earlier at King's Cross, marching up to where Thorne stood slurping from a takeaway coffee at one minute before eight o'clock.

  'A bit of notice would have been nice.'

  'You're very punctual,' Thorne said. 'I like that.'

  'And I don't like being told what to wear.'

  'You should consider yourself lucky. I was dead set against you coming at all.'

  'So why am I here?'

  'Because I do what I'm told.'

  'Why don't I believe that?'

  Thorne blew on his coffee, began walking towards the platform.

  'Coming where, anyway?' she asked, following. 'Do I get to find out where I'm going, or is that classified information? I'm guessing it's not Hogwarts.'

  Thorne told her.

  'Bloody hell.'

  '"Bloody hell" is right,' Thorne said. 'Now, here are the rules . . .'

  Once they were through security, they moved towards the Visits Area. Even though the route kept them well clear of prison landings and association areas, the atmosphere worsened. Wakefield was a high-security lifers' prison, and the air tasted a little different when so many of those breathing it had nothing to lose and no reason to give a shit. Anna was clearly still thrown simply by being there, maintaining an all but constant stream of frivolous comments as they walked.

  'You need to turn it down a bit,' he said.

  'Turn it down?'

  'The volume. All of it. I know you're nervous, but--'

  'I'm fine.'

  'And I certainly don't want any chit-chat when we see Monahan. Fair enough?'

  'Sorry,' she said. 'I talk too much, I know that. Always have. Overcompensating, I suppose.'

  'For what?'

  'All sorts.'

  They rounded a corner and entered the waiting area. Two dozen people sat clutching torn-off, numbered tickets as though they were queuing at a supermarket deli counter. Thorne showed his authorisation to the officer at the desk, and he and Anna walked straight through to the Visits Area. The room was large, bright and airy, with several rows of clean tables and simple metal chairs. A prison officer sat near the doors at either end, while a third moved slowly up and down between the tables, leading a bored-looking sniffer-dog. The carpet smelled new and Thorne wondered if that made the dog's job any harder. It can't have helped, surely. How many visitors were able to waltz in with wraps of crack shoved up their arses for weeks after Allied Carpets had been in?

  There was a supervised play area in one corner, and a few sm
aller rooms for private visits at the far end. As they moved past a refreshments counter towards one of these, Anna asked, 'What about building a rapport?'

  'What?'

  'No chit-chat, like you said, but don't we need to make him relaxed or whatever?'

  'We don't need to do anything,' Thorne said. 'And trust me, you don't want any kind of "rapport" with a man like Paul Monahan.'

  He was waiting for them, looking agitated, if not exactly nervous. His face and hair were both greyer than Thorne remembered, and he had filled out a little beneath the blue and white striped shirt he wore with standard HMP-issue jeans and training shoes. He stabbed at his watch. 'You're late.' The irritation was clear enough under the nasal Derry twang.