Bloodline

Johns leaned forward. ‘Listen, nobody’s saying we can’t run the other pictures at some point. We’re weighing up the options, that’s all.’ He looked hard at Thorne. ‘I’m sure you understand our position well enough, Inspector. You’re not naïve. So, I’ll put your tone down to a genuine concern for the missing men rather than pure bolshiness.’

‘It’s probably a bit of both,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke cleared his throat. ‘Tom…’

Jesmond held up a hand and nudged the water jug towards Thorne. ‘I can’t see too much of a problem with ru

There it was. One of the superintendent’s favourite words. Thorne was amazed it had taken so long to hear it.

‘Right, we’ll go that way,’ Johns said. ‘And keep an open mind as far as the other photographs are concerned.’

‘Absolutely,’ Jesmond said. His eyes closed as he smiled, same as always.

Thorne poured then sipped his water. It was warm and tasted faintly metallic. ‘If things should change…?’

‘We can move quickly,’ the Press Officer said.

Thorne did not doubt it. He knew that, when it came to shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted, there was nobody quicker.

Brigstocke had been kept back for a one-to-one with Jesmond, but Thorne wasn’t complaining. He was happy to get out of that room and back on to the street, to take a few decent-sized breaths of gorgeous, dirty air.

Sitting on the Tube back to Colindale, his eyes fixed on the ads above the heads of the passengers opposite, Thorne felt the tension ease a little. He let the images drift and sputter in his mind and the ideas raise their voices above the noise of the train; let his imagination run amok.

He imagined Jesmond’s face as the contents of the water jug ran down it, and the look on the face of the WPC – equal parts lust and admiration – as she unbuttoned her crisp white shirt and begged him to take her, right there across the blond-wood table.

He imagined telling Martin Macken that the man who had murdered both his children was sitting in a cell, or breaking news of an altogether more terrible kind to a father he had yet to meet.

He imagined Louise, smiling at him across the di

He imagined her starting to show.

Taking a life seemed a little easier if the person it belonged to was drunk; same as lifting a wallet. It had certainly been the case with Greg Macken – the responses sufficiently dulled and the defences down, something not quite there in the eyes even before the light had started to fade from them. Watching the man walk away from the pub now, he couldn’t say if he was pissed or not, but even a pint or two would blunt the reflexes. He crossed the road and began to follow. Once someone had poured enough alcohol down their necks, you could take almost anything you liked from them with nothing more deadly than a kebab.

That was not to say of course, that everyone became easier to deal with when alcohol was involved and he knew that as well as anybody. Had his father not been the kind of drunk more liable to throw a punch than blow a kiss, he might never have kicked off in that Finsbury Park boozer, might never have got himself arrested.

Might, arguably, still be alive.

Walking past a crumbling stretch of wall, he bent quickly to pick up a fist-sized rock. He kept his eyes on the figure fifty yards in front of him, watching as the man stepped on to the road when such pavement as there was gave way to muddy verge. He picked up his pace a little, checked his pockets one last time to make sure the bag was there, and the other bits he needed.

When he was no more than a few yards away, he reached into his jacket for his cigarettes, smiling like an idiot when the man looked over his shoulder and miming the striking of a match; thanking him when he saw the nod, then jogging the last few feet between them so as not to hold him up.

‘Swap you a light for a fag?’ the man said.

Even better…

He thought about his father in those few seconds before he swung the rock, about the yellow fingers knitting themselves together on the metal tabletop and the way his cheeks caved in with every draw on one of those pin-thin roll-ups. The fucked-up teeth showing when he said, ‘Ba

The rock bounced off the man’s arm – broke it, more than likely – when he lifted it to protect his face, but the cry of pain was quickly silenced by the second blow. He followed the man down on to the grass and rolled him over, knelt across his chest and hit him several times more, until there was no resistance.

No, not drunk, he thought, but he looked for that dying light anyway, staring at the point where the man’s eyes should have been as he reached for the plastic bag.

It was impossible to tell. The face was no more than blood and meat by then.

He drove the rock down into the mess again, a few more times, until it became too slippery to hold.

When headlights began creeping towards him, he rolled the body over the brow of the verge and waited there with it, his heart starting to slow and the damp grass tickling his face as the lorry rumbled past. He picked himself up and wiped the worst of the mud from his jeans. The man’s book of matches was lying near the edge of the road and he used one to light a cigarette as he walked back to where he’d parked the car.

TWENTY-TWO

Wednesday morning: two weeks since a schoolteacher had come home from work and found the body of his wife; since a man calling himself Anthony Garvey had begun to make himself known.

Carol Chamberlain wondered if it was too early to pour herself a glass of wine. Despite Thorne’s crack about Ovaltine, it was not the kind of hotel where the rooms were furnished with mini-bars, but over the last few nights she had got through a bottle and a half of the Pinot Grigio she’d bought at the local Threshers and kept cool in the bathroom sink.

Knowing what Jack would have to say about it, she decided to wait until di

Bloody wild-goose chase, by the sound of it, Jack had said. She’d given him a general picture of what she’d been asked to do, not deeming it necessary to mention Ray Garvey’s name, and he had still struggled to share her enthusiasm.

‘Why should you be able to get anywhere if the cops can’t?’ he had said.

Because I am a cop, she’d wanted to say. Inside. And I’m bloody good at this stuff.

‘How long are you going to be away?’

It was the kind of job that might have suited a private detective – a career move she had considered a few years back, when she’d left the Force. Been pushed out. But she knew she’d hate sitting in cars for hours on end, clogging up the footwell with empty crisp packets and watching nondescript houses in the hope of getting a picture or two of an unfaithful wife or husband.

She’d made light of the hypnotherapist business, but it had not been fu

Christ, she wasn’t even sixty yet.

Thorne had seemed a little distracted, she’d thought, when they’d met on Saturday. It was hard to tell if there was anything really wrong, though, because, if she were being honest, she could not say that she knew him well enough to discern what was normal. There were too many things they never spoke about, and she always sensed a reaction if she as much as alluded to them.