Bloodline

‘Sounds like a charmer,’ Chamberlain said.

Duggan nodded and drained her glass. ‘Malcolm never went short of female company, that’s for certain.’ She sat back, leaned back and let the sun wash over her face. ‘If anyone knows what Ray was up to back then, who with, I mean, he will.’

Chamberlain wrote down the name, along with the name of the street where Malcolm Reece had been living in the 1980s. She thanked Duggan for her time, especially as it had involved her taking the morning off work.

‘I told them I’d got someone coming round to fix the boiler,’ Duggan said. ‘I’ve got used to telling lies over the years.’

As she put her notebook back in her bag, Chamberlain said, ‘Why didn’t you and Ray have kids?’

‘We wanted to. I couldn’t.’ Duggan’s tone was matter of fact, but Chamberlain could see the pain slide into her eyes before she let her gaze drop to the tabletop. Even after so many years, hearing that Raymond Garvey had fathered a child with someone else had obviously hurt. Chamberlain neglected to say that others had paid a far higher price for her ex-husband’s infidelity.

‘Do you fancy getting some lunch?’ Duggan asked. She pointed across the road to a small Italian restaurant. ‘I mean, you probably need to get back.’

‘Well, I’m not in a mad rush.’ Chamberlain was hungry, and she had thought to buy an open return. And, insignificant as it was in the scheme of things, the pain had not quite left Je

Kitson had made an appointment to see Dave Spedding, the DCI on the Chloe Sinclair murder. He was now a superintendent based in Victoria, so after leaving the Sinclair house in Balham, Thorne dropped Kitson off, then carried on towards the Peel Centre.

Driving north through the centre of town, he could not stop thinking about the horribly mixed emotions with which Miriam and Alec Sinclair had discussed their daughter. He’d seen enough grief to know that time would eventually tip the balance, that the good memories would one day outweigh the dreadful ones. Slow but steady, it had been like that – was still like that – with his father. There would come a day – though with the man responsible for her death still at large, he had not felt able to tell her parents – when Chloe’s name need not be whispered and when mention of her would not drive the air from their lungs like a sucker punch.

When cardigans would not need to be pulled tight on warm days.

In slow traffic on the Euston Road, Thorne flicked through the radio cha

But not very far…

He considered Emily Walker’s husband, and Catherine Burke’s good-for-nothing boyfriend. The father of Greg and Alex Macken and the parents of Chloe Sinclair.

Anthony Garvey’s other victims.

For reasons he could not fathom, Thorne imagined them strung along a rope, like life-sized beads on a living necklace. Stuck fast and twisting in the cold and dark, the bodies of their loved ones bloodless alongside them. One dead, one as good as, one dead, one as good as… the vast necklace straining with the weight of them, yet plenty of room still on the creaking rope.

Thorne turned up the music, put his foot down when the road opened up a little.

However their loss had caused each of them to behave – absurdly polite or obstreperous; howling or struck dumb – Thorne knew that the relatives of those Anthony Garvey had murdered were looking in his direction for a particular sort of comfort. Strong arms and warm words were easy enough to come by, but finding the man who was responsible for their pain was down to him and his sort. It would be one step, no more than that, but the first step to easing them from the knotted thread of grief.

He drove through Camden and Archway, up into Highgate as the rain started, then down into Finchley, passing within a few streets of where Emily Walker’s body had been found a little over two weeks before. Ten minutes later, approaching Barnet, he turned off the Great North Road, and shortly after that, on to the street where Nina Collins lived.

Thorne showed his ID to the officers in the patrol car that had been stationed outside since Debbie Mitchell had moved in with her friend, and rang the bell.

Collins came to the door and stared at him. ‘Well?’

‘Everything OK?’

She nodded towards the patrol car, flicked her cigarette into the bush at the side of the narrow path. ‘Apart from having to check with Starsky and Hutch every time I want to go and buy a packet of fags, yeah.’

‘It’s all right, Nina.’ Debbie Mitchell appeared behind Collins, who sighed and let her past before disappearing back inside.

‘I was just passing,’ Thorne said.

‘Good of you.’

‘Thought I’d check, you know… see how you were getting on.’

‘Well, I can’t go anywhere, and Jason’s missing school. Can’t be helped, though, right?’

‘I’m sorry, but you’ve always got the option to come into protective custody. It would probably be the best thing.’

She shook her head.

‘OK, well you can call if you’re worried about anything, you know that?’

Debbie Mitchell nodded and folded her arms. ‘Any joy?’

Thorne took a second or two. ‘We’ll let you know, I promise.’

Plenty of room still on the creaking rope.

Thorne’s mobile rang in his pocket. ‘Sorry.’ He saw the caller ID and walked a few steps away from the front door. ‘I need to take this.’

Holland was a little breathless, speaking from inside a fast car, raising his voice when necessary above those of the other officers travelling with him.

‘Where?’ Thorne asked, when Holland had said his piece. Listening, he glanced back towards Debbie Mitchell and saw the look on her face reacting to the expression on his own, saw her arms fall to her sides. ‘Sorry, Dave, say again.’

The rain was getting heavier, and as Thorne opened his mouth to talk, he heard her say, ‘There’s been another one, hasn’t there?’

He turned to look at her, with Holland still passing on the details, and spotted Jason Mitchell creeping through a doorway down the hall, peering past his mum to see what was happening.

Holland said, ‘Sir?’ and Debbie Mitchell said something else before taking a step back, out of the rain. For a few seconds Thorne remained silent. He could not tear his eyes away from the boy in the hall, wide-eyed and shiny-lipped in red-and-white pyjamas, his teeth sliding back and forth across his bottom lip.

MY JOURNAL

10 October

Not sure if they’ve found him yet, but if they haven’t, it can’t be very far away. My money’s on someone walking a dog. How many times do you read that? Or kids, playing where they shouldn’t. I was thinking that, if I had the chance, if I could somehow find out when it was going to happen, I might pop down to have a look at the fun and games. Mind you, unless you don’t have a television or you’re living in a cave, it’s not hard to imagine what it would be like. Dozens of them swarming about in their plastic masks and paper suits, lights and tents and tape, and some chain-smoking detective standing off to one side, shouting at his sidekick or moaning about his boss.

I can’t help thinking that if they’d made that sort of effort fifteen years ago, they might have figured out what was really happening a lot quicker. They might have saved a few women’s lives and might even have worked out that their ‘vicious killer’ was a man who could not help himself. Who was as much a victim as any of them.

They might have prevented all this.