“Naturally. Listen, if this is a professional job, can you find out who took it?”
“I could ask around, I suppose, but—”
“What about where the film was developed?”
“Waste of time. Unless the bloke’s a moron, he’d have done it himself. Digital camera, straight to his PC. Piece of cake…”
“Find out what you can, then. I want to know who the model is and who paid for the shoot.”
Bethell looked pained. “Oh, be fair, Mr. Thorne. A bit of info is all well and good, but that’s like doing your job for you. Like being a bloody detective.”
The waitress delivering Thorne’s beer giggled at Bethell’s despairing squeak and hurried away. Thankfully Bethell didn’t catch it.
“Think of it as another string to your bow, Kodak. You might fancy a change of career. The force is always on the lookout for eager young lads like yourself…”
“You can be a right bastard sometimes, Mr. Thorne…”
Thorne leaned across the table and held a chopstick inches away from Bethell’s face. “Yes I can, and just to prove it, if you don’t do a decent job on this for me, I will come round to your dwelling slash business premises, take your zoomiest zoom lens, and stick it so far up your arse, you’ll be taking pictures of your large intestine with it. Pass the prawn crackers, will you…?”
Bethell sulked for a few minutes. Then he picked up the photograph and slid it into the pocket of his combat trousers.
“You really should try one of these duck’s feet, Kodak,” Thorne said. “Did you know, they can actually make you swim faster?”
Bethell’s eyes widened. “Are you winding me up, Mr. Thorne…?”
Welch was standing, waiting in the doorway, when Caldicott appeared at the other end of the landing with the mail trolley. As it got closer, agonizingly slowly, stopping at almost every door, it became clear that Caldicott’s face still hadn’t healed properly.
One side, from mouth to forehead, was shiny, like it was slick with sweat, and the color of something that might have been skinned. Against the raw, weeping red, the lines of tiny white rings stood out clearly, the ones on what was left of his lips looking like a row of cold sores…
The mail trolley squeaked that little bit nearer. Caldicott grinning as best he could, the mail round a nice cushy number. A sweetener from the caring sharing screws on the VP wing, after the weeks spent in hospital.
A couple of morons from B-wing had caught him in the laundry room. They shouldn’t have been anywhere near the place by rights, should have been locked up, but someone somewhere had turned a blind eye. Left a door open.
One of Caldicott’s women had actually been a girl. A fourteen-year-old. Caldicott had told Welch, sworn to him that he thought she was older, that he wasn’t into meat that tender. Surely, Caldicott pleaded, surely he must be able to understand. He must have been in a similar position. I mean, come on, some of the girls around these days! Welch had admitted that, yes, he knew what Caldicott meant and he had been there himself, several times, and he mentally thanked his lucky stars that the girl he’d been caught for had been over sixteen, if not by a great deal. Caldicott had probably told them as well, the animals down in the laundry room. He’d have pleaded, told them that he thought the girl was older, but they wouldn’t have been interested in that kind of bullshit from a pervert. These were men who dealt in facts.
While one held Caldicott calmly by the cock and balls, the other had emptied the dryer, dropping the laundry neatly into the red plastic bucket. Then, his screams unheard or ignored, they had bent Caldicott over and forced his head and shoulders into the massive steel drum, pressing his face down onto the red-hot metal…
Caldicott holding out a letter, a smile pulling the seared skin up and back across his yellowing incisors. Welch, thinking he looks like the phantom of the fucking opera, snatching the envelope and stepping quickly back behind the door…
The envelope has been opened, of course, but he’s long past caring about privacy or any of that. He has a few precious minutes alone and the chance to read her letter, the last one he will be forced to read in a tiny room that stinks of his cellmate’s shit.
There’s another photo. It’s the first thing he looks for and he almost shouts out loud when he feels it tucked down between the pages of the letter itself. He pulls it out and slaps it down flat on his chest without looking. Then slowly he lifts it up, little by little, moaning out loud as he catches his first glimpse of her. The hood has gone, but this time her back is to the camera, her head lowered. Just a glimpse of shortish hair, the face hidden. She is sitting on her heels, her wrists fastened securely behind her, the shadows falling across her shoulder blades and beautiful round arse…
The door opens and he is not alone anymore. He quickly draws his knees up to hide the erection and presses the picture flat against his chest again. As his cellmate drops with a grunt onto the bed opposite, Welch is already closing his eyes, every last detail of Jane’s nakedness clearly recalled and perfectly visible on the back of his eyelids.
May 7, 1976
“Ladies and gentlemen, you may find this surprising, but I wish, for the next few minutes, to concentrate on the evidence of a witness called by the defense…I invite you to consider the evidence given here by Detective Sergeant Derek Turnbull. Sergeant Turnbull’s record as a police officer is exemplary and I believe we should set great store by his testimony. We should take seriously the words we have heard him speak during this very disturbing case.
“I want you to remember these words…
“We should remember Sergeant Turnbull’s words about the interviews he carried out with the woman who accuses my client of this serious offense. He spoke about the ‘confusion,’ about the ‘lack of focus,’ he conceded under cross-examination that this woman’s thinking ‘seemed to be all over the place.’ I ask you, should an incident that was allegedly so distressing not be easy to recall accurately? Should it not be seared into the memory? Yes, of course. And yet this woman cannot be sure about exact times. There is no consistent description of what my client was wearing at the time of the supposed attack. Just a good deal of hot air and a lot of irrelevant nonsense about aftershave…
“We should remember Sergeant Turnbull’s words when he described the results of the physical examination. Nothing was found beneath this woman’s fingernails. Nothing was found to suggest any resistance whatsoever. Sergeant Turnbull repeated to the court what she said when questioned about this fact. ‘I couldn’t fight back,’ she said.
“Could not? Or did not want to?
“We should remember, too, the sergeant’s words when describing the circumstances of the first interview, the first physical examination. This examination was, in his words, ‘worse than useless,’ taking place as it did the morning after the alleged attack and after the so-called victim had showered. Remember his colleague’s words when describing the dress which you have been shown as Exhibit A? ‘Too nice to wear to work.’ I put these things together, ladies and gentlemen, and I come up with an altogether different version of what happened in that stockroom in December of last year…
“Could not that dress have been torn during the frenzied, and consensual, bout of lovemaking to which my client freely admits? Could not the bruising be no more than the marks of excessive passion? Could not that shower have been taken, yes, to wash away the smell of my client, but only so as to hide the truth of her ongoing sexual relationship with him from her husband?
“I have asked you to remember the words of a police officer whose evidence was intended to damn the man I represent here today. Instead, unwittingly, I’m sure, he has done quite the opposite. I have asked you to consider these words and I can see that you are doing just that. I can see from your faces, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that these words have caused you, quite rightly, to doubt. If you doubt, as you surely must, the truth of what this woman claims to have happened, then I know that your deliberations in the jury room will be very
short.
“The law, of course, is quite clear about reasonable doubt. I feel sure that this being the case, doubting as you must, you will do the right thing. You will do the just thing. You will do as His Honor must instruct you so to do, and acquit my client…”
FIVE
Another hot, humid evening. The air outside heavy with the taste of a storm on the way. Tantalizing snippets of conversation from people walking past drifted into the living room through the open windows.
Thorne had sat eating in T-shirt and shorts, listening to the noise from a party on the other side of the road. He didn’t know what annoyed him more—the raised voices and the cranked-up sound system, or the good time that some people he didn’t know were clearly having.
His plate licked clean by Elvis, Thorne had opened a can of cheap lager, tuned out the sounds of music and laughter, and spent a couple of hours reading. A summer’s evening absorbed in violent death.
These were the reports based on searches of CRIMINT—the Criminal Intelligence database—looking for any cases whose parameters might overlap with the Remfry killing…
Holland and Stone had been thorough. It was largely about trial and error, about narrowing the search down and coming up with hits that might be significant. Key words were entered. Matches were sifted and examined in relation to those from other searches. Rape/murder produced few cases where the victim was male, but the results were still cross-referenced with those that came up when other, more specific key words were punched into the system.
Sodomy. Strangulation. Ligature. Washing line.
And up they’d come…
A series of unsolved murders going back five years. Eight young boys brutally abused and strangled, their bodies dumped in woods, gravel pits, and recreation grounds. A pedophile ring that was too well organized or too well connected. Uncatchable.
A man attacked in his own home. Tied up with washing line while his home was ransacked, then kicked to death for no good reason. Thorne thought about Darren Ellis, the old couple he’d tied up and robbed…
A catalog of vicious sexual assaults and murders, many still unsolved. The grim details now little more than entries in a uniquely disturbing reference library. A resource to be accessed, in the hope that a past horror might shed light on a present one.
Not this time.
Holland had actually pulled the files on two cold murder cases: a young man, thirty or so, found in the boot of a car in 2002. Raped and choked to death with an unidentified ligature. A man in his sixties, attacked in a multistory car park and strangled with washing line in 1996.
Thorne had agreed both with Holland’s initial assessment and his final conclusion. Both files had been worth a closer look. Both had been put back.
Once he’d stuffed the report away in his briefcase, Thorne went over and stood by the open window. Forten minutes or so he’d stared across at the house where the party was, trying and failing to identify a song from its annoyingly familiar bass line. Trying and failing to stop thinking about bodies years dead and a body as yet unburied and the photograph he’d given Dennis Bethell…
Then he’d called his father.
After he’d hung up, twenty frustrating minutes later, Thorne stood, holding the phone, and tried to imagine the synapses in his father’s brain misfiring, the thoughts exploding in a shower of tangential sparks…
The cascade of color blackened. It became the dark hood that covered the head of a naked woman and masked the terror on the face of a pale, stiffening corpse. Life choked off and arse exposed and a thin line of brown blood on rusty bedsprings.
Thorne took off what few clothes he still had on, walked through to the bedroom, and dropped down onto the mattress. He lay there in the semidarkness, staring up at the outline of the lampshade that had cost a pound from IKEA, realizing that it was cheap because it was also nasty.
The bed felt as if it were full of grit.
He could feel the dreadful, delicate weight of the case upon him. Like the dark tickle of something unwanted crawling across his body. The sharp, spindly legs of it picking their way across the sheen of sweat on his chest.
Thorne closed his eyes, remembering a moment of calm and contentment on a bracken-covered hillside.
Except that he was unsure it was a memory. If it had ever happened, the details had slipped away over time. Perhaps it was the memory of a dream he’d once had, or a fantasy of some sort. Maybe it was a scene from a long-forgotten film or TV show he’d once watched and into which he’d projected himself…
Wherever it came from, two others were always there with him, lying on the hillside among the bracken. A man and a woman, or perhaps a girl and a boy. Their ages were as unclear as their relationship to him or each other, but all three of them were happy. Where they actually were never seemed to matter. The geography of the place was changeable. Sometimes he was sure there was a river down below them. At other times it was a road, the hum of insects becoming the distant drone of traffic.
The only constants were the bracken and the presence of the pair lying just a few feet away, the ground beneath and the sky above the three of them…
It seemed as if they’d eaten something, a picnic maybe. Thorne felt full, lying there, his arms spread out wide, six inches off the ground, moving lazily back and forth through the bracken. He had a smile on his face and his stomach still jumped and fluttered with the final bursts of laughter. He could never be sure who or what had caused them all to laugh such a lot. He could never be sure of much beyond the fine, unfamiliar feeling that surged through him as he remembered. As he imagined. As he lay on that hillside.
Blurred as the edges of Thorne’s reality on that hillside were—the whys and whens and whos so indistinct as to be virtually nonexistent—it still seemed, at moments such as these, ankle-deep in madness and butchery, a pretty good place to be.
With the first fat raindrops beginning to fall outside, he pressed his head back into the pillow and imagined the fronds of bracken, feathery against his neck.
As the headlights from passing cars played across the bedroom window, Thorne felt only the sunlight on his face.
June 12, 1976
They moved through the shopping center, almost touching, their faces blank, each carrying a bag. A couple walking around the shops together. Seeing them, no one could ever have known.
The enormity of the space between them.
The pain that grew to fill it.
How little time they had left…
They touched things in shops, picked up items to get a closer look, occasionally made the same banal comments they might have made six months before. “We could put that in the kitchen.” “Do you think one of those would look nice in the bedroom?” “That color really suits you.”
They walked into a shop that sold ugly ornaments, useless knickknacks, like two people in a dream…
Since the day the trial had ended, they had been going through the motions. Shopping, eating, tidying toys away. Sitting on the settee together and watching It’s a Knockout and George and Mildred. Getting through the days. The only obvious change being that she hadn’t gone back to work. Unlike Franklin. He’d been welcomed back with apologies and open arms.
Out of one shop and into another. They strolled through a department store, taking care, of course, to avoid the cosmetics department. The perfumes, and especially the aftershave. These days, the great smell of Brut was liable to make her throw up all over the place.
They were almost perfect, like the victims of bodysnatchers. They were a “Spot the Difference” competition that was unwinnable. The “before” and “after” were, to all intents and purposes, identical, but what was in their heads and their hearts would never be seen, could never be imagined. Least of all by them.
She had retreated into herself and he had become unbearably buoyant. Around the house their bodies did the normal things, while her silence and his false cheer chased each other from room to room. While the mania and the suspicion festered
and matured.
It was my fault…
Why didn’t she struggle…?
He was looking at picture frames, remembering the face of the jury foreman. A few feet away, she stood, spinning a display of postcards, seeing only stubby fingers reaching into trousers, scrabbling at her crotch. He caught her eye but she looked away before he could smile.
The next second, Franklin’s wife had stepped from behind a glass display case and was standing in front of her.
He took a step toward them, then stopped as his wife raised a hand, reached toward this woman who had looked down on her, at her, every day from the public gallery. He watched as Franklin’s wife ignored the hand that reached out to her, pulled back her head, and snapped it forward, releasing a thick gobbet of spittle into his wife’s face.
There was a gasp from a woman nearby. Another stepped back, openmouthed, and knocked a glass decanter crashing to the floor.
He stepped in front of his wife then, and guided her gently but firmly toward the exit. As they left she never took her eyes from the woman who had spat at her. She never made a move to wipe the spit away.
She didn’t speak a word as she was taken back to a house she would never leave again.
SIX
From Kentish Town, Thorne took every shortcut he knew, cutting through side streets until he reached High-bury Corner and then heading east along the Balls Pond Road toward Hackney.
Thorne took a quick glance at his A–Z. The florist’s was tucked away somewhere behind Mare Street, a stone’s throw from London Fields. This area of parkland stood alone in the midst of one of the most depressed areas in the city. It was once grazed by sheep and prowled by highwaymen. Now up-and-comers who directed videos or worked in advertising sat on benches sipping their skinny lattes or walked their pit bulls across the green, doing their best to look like hard men.
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