‘Sorry…’
‘I’m not even sure we’re looking at a kidnap,’ Thorne said. ‘This business with the woman’s bloody odd. And if someone is holding the kid, it doesn’t make any sense that they haven’t got in touch.’
‘What does Porter think?’
‘She thinks it’s strange, too. We were talking about motivation, you know? About why anybody takes a hostage. There’s always a reason. It might be drugs, or money, or some kind of political statement. But they always want something.’
‘You think the boy’s just left home?’
‘God knows. I think we might be wasting a lot of time and effort, though.’
The doorbell rang, but almost as soon as Thorne was on his feet, Hendricks had come inside and was making his way to the door. Thorne reached into his leather jacket for his wallet but Hendricks waved him away.
‘So I’d be right in thinking you wouldn’t be keen on me making this transfer permanent, then?’
‘This is going to sound weird, and I know that, whatever the reason turns out to be, there’s still a missing kid, but I find it hard to get… excited about it. There’s an element of going through the motions. Does that make sense?’
‘You’re happier when there’s a body, aren’t you?’ Brigstocke said. ‘You want a killer to go after.’
Thorne thought about what Holland had said to him in the car that morning: ‘Sounds almost like you’re hoping.’ He wondered if the pair of them might have a point; if perhaps there were a part of him that could only be described as ‘ghoulish’. ‘I just think we should do what we’re good at,’ he said. He knew, even as he spoke, that he was sounding sulky and defensive.
Brigstocke sniffed. ‘I could say something deep and meaningful here, about how some people care more about the dead than they do about the living, but I’m not sure I can be arsed.’
‘I think you’d be doing the pair of us a favour if you didn’t,’ Thorne said.
Brigstocke said nothing. Just hummed, like he was thinking about it.
The front door slammed and Hendricks walked back towards the kitchen with the boxes. Thorne was eager to follow him. ‘I need to go. I’m about to eat my dinner.’
‘I know. I heard the doorbell,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Curry or pizza?’
Thorne laughed. ‘You haven’t lost it.’
A minute later he was taking two fresh cans of beer from the fridge, glad that the call from Brigstocke had ended on an upbeat note. It could easily have gone the other way. So many conversations he’d had of late had seemed dangerously poised, while Holland, Hendricks and a number of others had all used the phrase ‘walking on eggshells’ more than once. When Thorne got snappy, told them in no uncertain terms that they were being oversensitive, they just looked at him like he’d proved their point.
‘Shall we eat this outside?’ Thorne asked.
Hendricks was already picking at pepperoni slices. ‘Are you kidding? It’s even colder now. I’m young, free and single, mate, and if I’m going out on the pull, the last thing I need is my knob shrinking to the size of an acorn.’ He picked up his pizza box and wandered into the living room.
Thorne was about to shout after him, ask if he fancied putting some music on, then thought better of it. Hendricks might have been gagging it up, but the pain hadn’t gone anywhere. He would almost certainly pull out an album with at least one unsuitable track on it; the makeup of Thorne’s collection would make it hard not to. It was, as people never seemed to tire of telling him, the problem with country music: too many songs about dead dogs and lost love.
‘Stick the TV on,’ he shouted as an alternative. ‘See if there’s a game on Sky.’
He stepped back outside to bring in the kitchen chairs. It was a clear night, but there was no guarantee it wouldn’t piss down before morning. He thought through what he’d said to Brigstocke about not feeling excited, and about what it might take to start the blood pumping that little bit faster. He wondered how bad he’d really feel if the body so many people accused him of wishing for turned up. He just hoped to Christ that if it did, it wasn’t Luke Mullen’s.
He looked up as a plane passed, winking and droning overhead. The sky was the colour of a dusty plum, and spattered with stars. He carried the chairs inside and shut the door. Hendricks was already shouting at the television.
In spite of his bad back, of the boredom and the morbid thoughts, Thorne was feeling pretty good. Relative to the recent past, at any rate. All the same, it was a welcome diversion to spend a few hours with someone who – if only for the time being – was in worse shape than he was.
CONRAD
The kid was clever, no doubt about that. A bit of a smartarse, in fact, but it didn’t matter how brainy you were if you weren’t the one in the driving seat. The kid had probably passed a ton more exams than he ever had, but it didn’t count for much now, did it? Clever didn’t mean a lot with a bag over your head.
Because he was the one calling the shots.
Even as the words formed in his mind, it struck him as a smart way of putting things. ‘Shots’ as in guns, and ‘shots’ like when you give someone an injection.
He’d always been tall and well built, and he’d always looked after himself, but he’d never been given any real respect. Not when he was younger, anyway. Back then he’d lacked the ‘necessary’, the something in the eyes or whatever, that made people take you seriously; that made them back off, try to smile, and say, ‘All right, mate, whatever you want.’ He’d wanted to make someone react like that ever since his balls had dropped, and he could still remember when it had happened for the first time. It was a few years ago now, but he could remember every single detail of it. It was like watching a film that he was starring in.
A poxy red Fiesta.
The spiky-haired ponce behind the wheel had cut in front of him at the lights, swerved across into his lane instead of turning right like he should have done. Then, to top it off, the arsehole had given him the finger when he’d leaned on his horn, as he’d every bloody right to do!
So he’s chased the fucker. He’s right up his arse, doing fifty and sixty through Dalston and Hackney, all the way to Bow. There’s big puddles on the streets and precious little traffic around that time of the morning; just night buses and the odd dodgy minicab getting out of the way seriously fast.
The Fiesta pulls up hard and sharp somewhere round the back of Victoria Park, and the bloke gets out and starts waving a baseball bat around. Shaking his head and pointing a finger. Shouting his mouth off as he walks towards the car.
The next bit’s in slow motion and the sound’s really pumped up loud. He can feel his heart going mental underneath his Puffa, but it’s excitement, not fear, and when he gets out of the car he gets the look he’s been dreaming about for so long.
It’s the moment when power shifts.
The tosser with the bat has obviously fancied it right up to that moment, because the bat gives him the edge, and he probably isn’t afraid to use it either. It’s made him braver than he’s got any right to be. But then he sees the gun, and he shits himself.
He shits himself. Or he might just as well have done, judging by the look on his face as he walks away. As he puts down the bat, and puts up his hands, and says, ‘All right, mate, no harm done.’
Of course, the gun was only a replica and, real or not, maybe it was the gun that was getting the respect rather than him, but still. It didn’t matter. The feeling as he climbed back into his car was amazing, like nothing he’d known before, and it had stayed with him. Singing in his blood as he tore past the buses and ripped through the puddles, right up until the moment when everything had gone very tits up twenty minutes later…
Across the room, the boy was awake beneath the hood. He could tell by the position of him, by the way his head turned and his face pressed against the material.
‘You hungry?’
They’d had a long discussion about whether to use a gag and Amanda had decided against it
in the end. It was maybe a bit over the top. Anyway, the kid was drugged up most of the time and, even when he wasn’t, they’d be on him like a rash if he tried screaming.
‘You want something to eat?’
The boy said nothing, even though he could. Just ignored the question. He chose to keep quiet for some reason, like he was protesting or something; like he was playing a game with them.
Trying to be clever.
WEDNESDAY
FOUR
His father had taken to coming by in the early hours of the morning.
Since the back problems, Thorne had been waking anywhere from 5 a.m. onwards. He’d lie there in the dark, in the only comfortable position he’d been able to find – his knees up to his chest – and think about his old man. Occasionally, he’d manage to drift back to sleep again, and then their encounters would be stranger, richer, as, in that hour or two before he would need to get up, he invariably dreamed.
In the dreams, Jim Thorne would appear as he had been in the final stages of the Alzheimer’s; in the six months or so before the fire that had killed him. It was typical of his father, Thorne thought, to be so perverse, so bloody-minded. Why couldn’t he have moved through the dreams as a younger man? Or a man whose mind was at least firing on the right cylinders? Instead, his father came to him belligerent and foul-mouthed, stumbling through their conversations, distracted, furious and lost.
Helpless…
Often, the old man would do nothing but sit on the edge of Thorne’s bed, eager to ask questions. This was how it had been towards the end. The disregard for social niceties had gone hand in hand with an obsession for trivia, lists and quizzes.
‘Name ten World War Two fighter planes. Which are the three biggest lakes in the world? That’s freshwater lakes.’
Since passing on, he’d introduced the element of multiple choice.
‘Was the cause of the fire that killed me: (A) accidental or (B) started deliberately?’
Often this would be followed by a question Thorne found a little easier to answer: ‘Whose fault was it: (A) yours or (B) yours?’
This was usually when Thorne would wake, and for a while the question would stay with him. The feelings it stirred were unmistakable, yet hard to name or pin down. Not quite shame, but a shade of it. Like the relationship which ‘coming down with something’ has to the illness itself; to the symptoms that will eventually appear. He would move robotically through the rituals of the morning – ablutions, breakfast, getting dressed – until the memory of the dream began to dissolve. Feeling the water sizzle against his skin as he shaved, and the cereal turning to charcoal in his mouth.
He’d put Phil Hendricks into a minicab late the previous night. As always, the sofa-bed had been on offer, but Hendricks had wanted to get home. The big talk about cruising for someone to take his boyfriend’s place had not lasted long. The beer had washed away the pretence of acceptance, and by the end of a long evening he was tearful again, and desperate to return to the flat in case Brendan had decided to come back.
In his kitchen, Thorne ate toast and marmalade standing up, listening to Greater London Radio and waiting for the early morning dose of painkillers to kick in.
It was five weeks until the first anniversary of his father’s death.
Outside, it had started to rain gently, and on GLR the host was trying to get a word in as some woman ranted about the disgusting state of the capital’s rail network.
He decided that he would call his Auntie Eileen – his father’s younger sister – and Victor, the old man’s best friend. Maybe they could all get together on the day. Have a drink or something.
His was not, had never been, a close family, and it was all so terribly British, this cleaving together after a loss. Yet, while he saw it for the gesture that in many ways it was, he still craved it; he needed the chance to measure his grief against that of others. He wanted to be with people who could talk to him without feeling like they were walking on eggshells.
On the radio, a man was saying that the previous caller had been rude and overbearing, but that she’d been right about how crap the railways were.
Thorne wondered how the Mullens were doing. To lose someone but not know for sure if they were really gone was arguably the worst kind of loss, and they certainly seemed to be cleaving together. It was odd, he thought, that a word could have such opposite definitions: to cling together, and to split violently apart.
He was scooping food into a bowl for Elvis when the phone rang, and though the codeine hadn’t quite taken effect, Porter’s call was enough to make him forget the pain pulsing down his leg and into his foot.
They could now be certain that Luke Mullen had been kidnapped. Whoever was holding him had finally decided to get in touch.
At Central 3000, chairs had been hastily put out and a screen set up in a corner beneath the red flag. Officers from other departments cut their conversation, stood still or just worked in silence, as the team from the Kidnap Unit gathered round and watched the video that had come through the Mullens’ front door first thing that morning.
When it had finished, Porter rewound the tape without a word and they watched it through again.
‘Obviously the original’s gone to the FSS,’ she said when they’d finished. ‘They’ll fast-track it, along with the envelope it came in.’
The Forensic Science Service handled enquiries from all forty-three police forces in England and Wales, testing firearms and fibres, running toxicology screens, minutely analysing blood, drug or tissue samples. Their labs in Victoria would normally take a week or more to turn round comprehensive fingerprint or DNA results. A fast-track request could reduce that time significantly: with luck, they would hear back within a day, on the prints at least.
‘Not that I can see us getting a great deal,’ Porter said. She gestured towards the screen. The image was frozen at the point where, seen from behind with his face hidden from view, a man carrying a bag in one hand and a syringe in the other is moving purposefully towards Luke Mullen. ‘It looks very much like they know what they’re doing.’
‘What do we think’s in the syringe?’ Holland asked.
A DS in front of him – a tall Scotsman with a mullet – turned around. ‘Rohypnol maybe, or diazepam. Any benzodiazepine, really.’
‘How’s he get hold of that kind of stuff?’
‘With a computer and a credit card. It’s pretty bloody simple these days. They shut down a site a couple of weeks ago that was selling a vial of ketamine and a couple of syringes in a smart leather case. Knocking them out at £19.99 as “date-rape kits”.’
‘Doesn’t he need to know what he’s doing, though? If he’s going to keep the kid sedated all the time?’
Thorne listened to the exchange, but kept his eyes fixed on the television screen; on the frozen, flickering image of the boy and the man who was holding him. There was terror in the boy’s eyes. It had been there throughout, of course, albeit partially hidden by the brave face he’d been putting on for his parents. But the mask had fallen quickly away when the man began walking towards him with the needle.
The Scottish officer shook his head. ‘You can also find out how to do it on the Net. Plenty of teach-yourself guides out there. What size doses to use or whatever.’
‘Or you learn from experience,’ Thorne said.
There was a sizeable pause after that.
Then the ACTIONS were outlined and allocated. There was little of substance to work on other than the partial number plate of the blue or black car, and talking to a few more witnesses who’d seen Luke getting into it.
Porter waited until most of her team had been given tasks and those few who hadn’t were clearing away chairs or paperwork before she talked to Thorne and Holland about their roles. ‘I’m going back to the school this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which of you is better at talking to teenage boys…’
Holland was the first to speak up, aware of a good, long look from Thorne as he answered. ‘Y
eah, I’ll tag along.’
‘Tom?’
‘I thought I might have a word with one or two people Tony Mullen used to work with,’ Thorne said. ‘Show them the list. See if their memory’s any better than his.’
At the end of the previous day, Mullen had handed over the list of all those who might have held a grudge against him.
‘He has got quite a lot to think about,’ Porter said.
Thorne could see she had a point, but he was not completely convinced. ‘That’s exactly why I thought it might be more… comprehensive, I suppose. If my son was taken and there was no obvious reason why, I’d be sticking down the name of anyone who’d so much as looked at me funny.’
Mullen had come up with just five names. Five men who might, at one time, have had cause to wish or do him harm. Each had been run through the CRIMINT database within minutes, and once those traced to Australia, HMP Parkhurst and Kensal Green cemetery had been eliminated, they were down to two.
Porter was pulling papers from her desktop, bits and pieces from a drawer and sweeping them into her handbag. ‘I’m going over to the house for an hour or two first. I’ll probably head straight to the school from there. You never know, he’s had a bit more time to think, he might have come up with another name or two overnight.’
She picked up her mobile phone and clipped it to her belt, then dropped a second handset into her handbag. The Airwave had been rolled out across the force over the previous year and a half, one handset issued to every officer. It was certainly an ingenious piece of kit: a phone and a radio, with a range that, for the first time, would allow the user to talk to a fellow officer anywhere in the UK at the touch of a button. Still, in spite of a blizzard of memos, some officers preferred to stick with their own phones. These were less flashy perhaps, but they were generally smaller, lighter and, most importantly, didn’t have GPS capability built in. Mysteriously, a large number of these state-of-the-art Airwave handsets were getting lost, or left at home by officers who were none too keen on Control-room staff knowing exactly where they were at all times.
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