Bloodline

‘Where?’

‘Same place she’d been sent to pick up the money, near as damn it,’ Kitson said. ‘Back of Paddington station. Looks like Garvey’s got a sense of humour.’

‘I’m pissing myself.’

‘I’ve put a call into the SIO. Got an address for the parents.’

‘You told Brigstocke?’

‘He’s out, so-’

‘Let me.’ He took out his phone as Kitson turned back towards the Incident Room, said, ‘Well done,’ as he dialled.

Got Russell Brigstocke’s voicemail.

‘It’s me. Just in case you’re playing golf with Trevor Jesmond, I thought you could pass on a message. Tell him that his nice, useful avenue of enquiry has just become a cul-de-sac.’

TWENTY-THREE

All at once, Alec Sinclair, a large man in his late fifties with thi

Struggling for words, he turned to his wife, who was seated next to him, in the cluttered living room of a terraced house in Balham. Miriam Sinclair was probably a few years younger than her husband, but there was grey bleeding through a dye job above her forehead and Thorne guessed the make-up was a little more thickly applied than it might once have been.

‘It’s nice to talk about her,’ she said. She smiled at Thorne and Kitson. ‘But then it all sort of rushes up at you. It’s not like you forget what happened or anything.’

‘I dream about her sometimes,’ Alec said. ‘And there are those few seconds when you wake up… before you remember she’s dead.’

‘You sure I can’t get you anything to drink?’

‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Thorne said.

The couple had asked, of course, as soon as Kitson had called the previous afternoon. Shocked to get the call, so long after the investigation into their daughter’s murder had petered out, but as eager as they had ever been to find out if there had been any progress. Kitson had told them that Chloe’s murder might well be co

‘It’s fine, love,’ Miriam had said on the phone. ‘I know how stretched you lot are, and, I mean, you’ve only got to open a paper to see there are plenty of other murders. Other families who haven’t been grieving quite as long as we have.’

‘Have you found him?’ Alec asked now.

‘We don’t have anyone in custody,’ Kitson said. ‘But we have a number of useful leads, and-’

‘The boyfriend.’ Miriam looked at her husband. ‘We know it’s the boyfriend.’

‘Right,’ Kitson said. The officer leading the hunt for Chloe’s killer three years before had confirmed that their prime suspect had been the man she’d been reported as seeing at the time of her death. Despite their best efforts, they had never been able to trace him.

‘We’ve got a name,’ Thorne said. ‘A description.’ He didn’t say that neither was exactly reliable. ‘We’re doing everything we can to follow these up and obviously we’ve passed all this information on to DCI Spedding.’ The man who had been in charge of the original investigation had been delighted to hear from Kitson; happy, he said, to share any intelligence that might take the Chloe Sinclair murder off his books.

Alec Sinclair turned to his wife. ‘Dave Spedding still gets in touch from time to time, doesn’t he?’

‘A card every Christmas,’ Miriam said. ‘A phone call on Chloe’s birthday. That sort of thing.’

‘I mean, he was very close to us by the end. Close to Chloe, too, in a fu

‘Hard for him as well, I would have thought,’ Miriam said.

Thorne nodded. It should be, he thought. The day it stops being hard is the day to get out, to up-sticks and find yourself a nice little pub to run. He said that Spedding seemed like a good man, and a good copper.

‘It might sound stupid,’ Kitson said, ‘but is there anything you might have remembered since the original investigation? Something that’s come back to you?’

‘We would have told Dave Spedding,’ Miriam said.

‘I know, and we really don’t want to dredge it all up again.’

‘Would you mind just going over it?’ Thorne asked. On the cupboard against the far wall, he could see a collection of photographs in metal frames: the Sinclairs on a beach with two small children; Chloe and her brother cradling a baby monkey at the gates of a safari park; a young man posing proudly next to what was probably his first car. The brother who had lost a sister, the son who had become an only child.

‘She was on her gap year,’ Alec said. ‘Saving up to go travelling before university. She did some stuff for me at my office for a while, but she was bored to death, so she got the job in the pub. That’s where she met this Tony.’

‘Did she tell you much about him?’ Kitson asked.

Miriam shook her head. ‘She told us he was a good few years older and I think she could tell we didn’t really approve.’

‘Maybe if we’d been a bit more… liberal or what have you, things might have been different.’ Alec stared into space for a few seconds. ‘I just didn’t want her getting too attached to anyone, not with university and everything round the corner. As it turned out, she started talking about not going at all, about going travelling with this Tony, or moving in with him.’

‘There were a lot of arguments,’ Miriam said.

Thorne said it was understandable, that he could see their first concern had been for their daughter. ‘But you never met him?’

It was a warm morning, but Miriam pulled her cardigan a little tighter around her chest as she shook her head. ‘She got very secretive about it, told us that it was her life, all that kind of thing.’ Her smile was regretful, a tremble in her bottom lip. ‘I could see that in the end there was a danger we’d drive her away, so I asked her to bring him round.’

‘She told us it was too late for all that,’ Alec said. ‘That Tony knew how we felt and she didn’t want to put him through the whole trial-by-parents thing.’

‘It’s stupid, looking back,’ Miriam said. ‘It was only a few months, but she was completely smitten with him. One day she was talking to us about all the places she wanted to visit and the next thing we wouldn’t see her for days on end.’

Alec’s face darkened. ‘That’s why we didn’t even know anything had happened for a few days.’

‘Can you tell us…?’ Thorne asked.

Alec cleared his throat, but it was his wife who spoke. ‘She’d taken to stopping over at his place more and more.’

‘Where was that?’ Kitson asked.

‘Hanwell, I think. At least Hanwell was somewhere she mentioned a few times, and I remember she needed to get a travel-card for Zone Four. We never had the address, though. Obviously, we would have passed it on to the police.’ She picked at a loose thread on the arm of the sofa. ‘So, when she didn’t come home on the Thursday night, we just presumed, you know…’

‘We started to get worried by the Saturday morning,’ Alec said. ‘I mean, I know we’ve said there were arguments, but she’d always phone after a day or two. She knew we’d worry.’

Miriam tugged at the loose thread until it broke, then balled it up in her palm and closed her fist. ‘We called the police on the Saturday,’ she said. ‘Then, three weeks later, we had the visit.’

‘There were two of them on the doorstep,’ Alec said. ‘I knew it, when the woman tried to smile and couldn’t quite manage it.’

‘Do you know why?’ Miriam asked suddenly. ‘I know you’ve got a name now, so maybe you’ve got some idea why he did what he did.’

Because Anthony Garvey already had a plan. Because he needed your daughter to get the money to fund it. And once she’d done what he wanted, he had to get her out of the way. He could not afford to have loose ends lying around once his grand scheme of killing was under way, so he stuffed your daughter behind a pile of rusted metal and dusty sacking, curled up among the shit and the silverfish with the back of her skull caved in and a plastic bag tied around her head.