Bloodline

Thorne was walking slowly around the small branch of WH Smith at Cambridge station, waiting for the 15.28 to King’s Cross and driven back inside by the wind knifing along the platform. He kept the phone close to his mouth as he talked, so he could whisper when he and Brigstocke got to the meat of it.

‘Twenty-six Anthony Garveys in the UK,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Could be better, but could be a hell of a lot worse.’

Thorne had spoken to Brigstocke earlier in the day, after the initial meeting with Kambar. Holland had also checked in with the DCI, having met with the governor at Whitemoor, so now it was Thorne who needed bringing up to speed.

‘I think we’re wasting our time,’ Thorne said.

‘You’re not convinced. Yeah, you said.’

‘Even if he is Garvey’s son, I think the name is dodgy. If it was genuine, there’d be records. We would have known about it.’

‘Still got to check them out, Tom.’

‘I know,’ Thorne said. He was sure that, whoever this man was and whatever his parentage, he himself had chosen the name he had used when visiting Whitemoor and pestering Pavesh Kambar. But he also understood that, as far as the investigation went, arses always had to be covered, and it was easy to criticise when you weren’t the senior investigating officer.

‘We’ve discounted half of them since you and I spoke earlier,’ Brigstocke said. ‘So it shouldn’t take too long.’

‘What about the potential victims?’

‘Not doing quite so well there. Still missing those three.’

‘Missing?’

‘One is apparently on a walking holiday, but his wife can’t tell us much more than that, or doesn’t want to, for some reason. The other two have both slipped off the radar thanks to one thing and another. We’ll find them, though.’

‘As long as we find them first,’ Thorne said.

There was a pause, voices in the background. Thorne had stopped in front of the men’s magazines, and his eyes drifted from Mojo and Uncut, past Four Four Two, to the covers of Forum and Adult DVD Review on the higher shelves.

‘What do you think about this personality change business?’

‘Have a guess,’ Thorne said.

‘But Kambar didn’t deny that it was possible?’

‘Anything’s possible.’

‘Right.’

‘Right, and we shouldn’t discount the possibility that Garvey was actually a werewolf, or maybe the unwitting victim of a gypsy’s curse. For Christ’s sake, Russell…’

‘Look, a man who’s already murdered four people believes it, so what we think doesn’t really matter.’

‘You haven’t said what you think.’

‘I’m keeping an open mind,’ Brigstocke said. ‘You should try it some time.’

‘It wasn’t you that put Garvey away, so I don’t know why you think you’ve got to sit on the fence.’

‘Steady, mate.’

‘Sorry-’

‘It’s our motive, Tom, so we need to take it seriously. OK?’

Thorne picked up a copy of Uncut and wandered towards the till. There was a small queue, but he still had five minutes before the train was due. ‘I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,’ he said.

‘What time do you get into King’s Cross?’

‘Half four-ish.’

‘Go straight home,’ Brigstocke said. ‘You had an early start and you wouldn’t get back here until after five anyway. Just make sure you’re the first one in tomorrow.’

‘You sure?’

‘It’s up to you. I mean, if you want to spend a couple of hours ringing up our dozen remaining Anthony Garveys…’

‘See you in the morning.’

‘I’ll call if anything turns up.’

Right, Thorne thought. Like the body of one of the three missing victims-in-waiting.

Thorne took another swig from the can of beer which, thanks to Brigstocke, he had been free to purchase and enjoy. Opposite him, a young woman, blonde with bad skin, was leafing through a copy of heat. Every so often she looked up from the glossy pages and stared at the beer in Thorne’s hand, as though the consumption of alcohol on a train was right up there with smoking crack or getting your dick out on a list of unacceptable public behaviour.

They were sitting in the train’s ‘quiet’ carriage, but it wasn’t as if he was drinking particularly noisily.

Raising the can to his lips, Thorne caught another dirty look and toyed with offering her a drink. Or belching as loudly as he could. Or letting her know just what he thought about every stick-thin brain-dead waste of DNA in her magazine, and that any moron who enjoyed gawping at photos of paparazzi fodder stumbling out of nightclubs or climbing out of limos with no knickers on was in no position to pass judgement on anybody. Then he thought about what Louise would say. He remembered that she occasionally flicked happily through OK and heat, albeit while she was having her hair done or sitting in a doctor’s waiting room.

He waited until the woman glanced up again, then smiled until she quickly dropped her eyes back to the magazine.

Makes a kind of sense.

People dying because of who their mothers were; killing because of who their fathers might have been. Thorne swallowed his piss-weak lager and supposed that it made as much sense as anything else in a world where being famous counted for so much. Where what you were famous for didn’t matter at all. A world where couples who weren’t fit to look after hamsters dragged six kids round the supermarket. Where some women popped out babies like they were shelling peas, while others didn’t find it quite so straightforward.

‘Any more tickets from Cambridge?’

Thorne had missed the inspector first time round while he’d been busy at the buffet. As soon as his ticket was punched, he stood up to make a return trip, crushing his empty can as noisily as possible as he squeezed out of his seat. Then tossing it back on to the table.

At the end of the carriage, a man was jabbering into his mobile. He was laughing, a hissy half cough, and telling someone how something was ‘just typical’ of someone else. It wasn’t loud so much as a

Thorne stopped at the man’s table and snatched the phone from his hand, nodding up at the sign: a picture of a mobile with a red line through it. He pushed the button to end the man’s call, and reached round quickly with his other hand to take out his wallet. The man said, ‘What the fuck do you-?’ then stopped when he saw the warrant card.

Thorne walked on towards the buffet car in a far better mood.

Louise didn’t get home until an hour after Thorne.

‘You know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘You take a couple of days off and there’s shed-loads to catch up on.’ She told him she was enjoying getting stuck into things, having something else to think about. She was in a good mood.

Thorne suggested that she should put in for some overtime, as work was so obviously agreeing with her.

‘It’s about getting things in perspective,’ she said.

Louise made them spaghetti with bacon, onions and pesto and afterwards they sat in front of the TV for a while. She said, ‘I do want to talk about what happened, you know. I think we should.’

‘We have talked about it.’

‘No, we haven’t. Not how we feel about it.’ She smiled. ‘It’s been bloody deafening, tell you the truth.’

‘What?’

‘The sound of you walking on eggshells.’

Thorne stared at the television.

‘How do you feel?’ Louise said.

‘I don’t know,’ Thorne said. ‘How you’d expect. Upset.’

‘You’ve not said anything.’

Thorne felt uncomfortably warm. ‘I don’t think I’ve had enough time to… process things.’

‘Fine. Good. That’s OK.’

They watched a little more television, then went to bed. They lay and cuddled, and when Louise fell asleep Thorne read for a while; a few more chapters from one of the true-crime books he’d bought online.

Raymond Garvey had supported Crystal Palace and kept pet rabbits as a boy. He had enjoyed tinkering with motorbikes and had battered his first victim to death with half a house-brick.