Bloodline

‘It was their choice, Dad,’ his daughter said on the phone. ‘You were unlucky, that’s all.’ That was before it all came out in the newspapers, of course. Choice had nothing to do with what happened to that woman and her boy.

He saw the bodies dropping, of course, the arms and legs, the woman’s skirt blowing up around her waist. Just enough time for the wrench in his belly before he was on them, bracing himself for it.

There’s a mess of papers on the floor by the side of his armchair, and half a dozen paperbacks piled up on the dining table. He’s always loved reading, would come home on a Monday with four books from the library, regular as clockwork. Lizzie had gone and fetched this lot for him, told him it would help to take his mind off things, but he only picked at them, same as the food. The books he likes, thrillers and whatnot, don’t seem fitting somehow, and he can no more read one of Lizzie’s romances than fly.

‘All hearts and flowers and kissy-kissy,’ he said to her once.

‘Nothing wrong with that.’ She pulled a face. ‘Better than all that blood and badness you seem to like so much.’

She comes in ten minutes later and takes away his untouched plate. Says it doesn’t matter. He’s wondering whose job it is to clean up the front of the train afterwards. Thinking that there’s always someone worse off than yourself.

‘I think I’ll take the paper to bed,’ Michael says.

He goes up and gets into bed in his underpants, shuts his eyes and hopes there won’t be any dreams. He hears a door close somewhere downstairs, feels it through the bedroom floor.

Just a bump. No more, not really, than when he hit that fox.

MY JOURNAL

16 October

So, all over bar the shouting and famous last words’ time. Last words in these pages at least, whichever way things turn out later. I should probably try to think of something deep and meaningful, but it’s hard to focus at the moment, feeling like this. Ironic that today of all days the headache should flare up this badly. I should probably lie down in the dark for a while, but there isn’t time. Things are going to kick off soon.

A nice, friendly card game.

All through this, I’ve been wondering what my father would have said about what I was doing. I can only hope that he would have approved, but I’ll never know for sure. He didn’t really want to talk about what he’d done, those women that he went inside for. Maybe it was because he didn’t understand it, at least not until the tumour was discovered. But either way, he preferred to keep it all to himself and, much as I was desperate to know, I had to respect that. He decided to keep quiet. That’s where we differ.

If the worst happens and I end up in the same situation, they won’t be able to shut me up. I’ll be happy bending any sod’s ear. It’ll be solitary confinement for me, just to give everyone else in there a rest!

Have I made a point doing this? I think so. Has it changed anything? It’s changed me, which I’ll probably have to settle for. Those last words? Well, I suppose it depends on who I’m writing them for. The select few who will ever get to read this. It will probably get read out in court, nice and dramatic, so the more sensitive members of the jury can catch their breath or fight back a tear or two. The juicier bits will almost certainly be picked out as headlines in the red-tops, which will be worth a few quid extra to my old mate in the newsagent’s. And I know every page is going to get pored over endlessly later on by the shrinks and the documentary-makers.

Best of luck.

The thing is, though, I’m not sure I care about impressing any of them. Any of you.

At the end of the day, especially a day as important as this one, I can’t waste valuable time trying to come up with something profound.

So, fuck it.

Fingers crossed.

FORTY-FOUR

Thorne laid down the final page of the file; a thick sheaf photocopied from the dog-eared notebook found among Dowd’s things at Grass-up Grange. The journal dated back to the day of Raymond Garvey’s death in Addenbrooke’s Hospital after the operation on his tumour. The day when everything had changed.

The day when Anthony Garvey had begun making plans.

Thorne reached for his beer and drank deep from the can. He needed it.

‘What’s going to happen to Jason?’ Louise asked.

‘It’s down to Social Services,’ Thorne said. ‘Foster care in the short term, I suppose.’

‘Their history’s not great with him, though, is it?’

‘There’s nobody else,’ Thorne said. Nina Collins had offered to take him, begged to, but she was few people’s idea of a fit mother.

Louise lay with her feet up on the sofa, Elvis sprawled across her chest. She reached down, fumbling until she found her empty wine-glass. She held it up. ‘Another one would be nice.’

Thorne stood, took the glass and walked into the kitchen.

‘Why do you think he did it?’ Louise asked.

Thorne bent to take the bottle from the fridge. He blinked and saw Jason Mitchell’s face, the desperation in the boy’s eyes as Thorne had reached for him, tried to pull him away; the sound of his repeated ‘puffpuffing’ just audible above the sirens and the squeal of the train’s brakes.

‘Come with me, Jason,’ Thorne had said. ‘Let’s go back, see Auntie Nina.’

Jason had still been smiling, still blowing imaginary smoke and pointing back towards the bridge, when Thorne had walked him up the path to within sight of the cars and the flashing lights.

‘Tom?’

Thorne walked back into the living room and handed Louise her wine. ‘Sorry, what?’

‘Why did Garvey kill himself?’

‘Carol reckons it was always part of his plan,’ Thorne said. ‘His mother was one of his father’s victims. So, he was on his own list.’

Louise looked dubious.

‘Yeah, I know.’ One or two lines in Garvey’s journal had also suggested that he thought he was dying, that he might soon go the same way as his old man. The post-mortem, carried out as soon as Hendricks had flown back from Sweden, showed that there had been no tumour, that Garvey had been suffering from nothing worse than the occasional migraine. It seemed as though hypochondria had been the mildest of his psychological problems. ‘It’s all speculation,’ Thorne said. ‘The truth is, I couldn’t give a flying fuck.’

He had said much the same to Nicholas Maier when the writer had called, cheerfully reminding Thorne that he had agreed to tell his story in return for Maier’s silence.

‘We had a deal,’ Maier had said.

Thorne had told him where he could stick their deal, then had hung up.

Chamberlain’s was just one of several theories about what had happened on the bridge. Debbie Mitchell might have struggled for her life, or at least ensured that she took Garvey with her, down into the path of the train. Perhaps Jason had done it, fought in those last moments to save his mother. The only thing that Thorne was sure of, having seen them sitting on the edge of that wall, was that, until Anthony Garvey had caught up with her, Debbie Mitchell had been intending to end her own life and that of her son.

He found it hard to understand, but equally hard to condemn. The love a mother had for her child – especially when she thought he was incapable of living happily without her – was something he could never fully fathom. Unless and until he became a parent himself. He had almost said as much to Louise, then stopped himself, still wary about applying any pressure.

‘We should get an early night,’ Louise said.

‘Sounds good.’

Thorne knew there was nothing suggestive in her comment. They both needed sleep. Louise was working even longer hours than he was on a messy kidnap case: the family of a building-society manager held while he was forced to enter his branch out of hours and open the safe. Thorne was already busy with two further murders: a domestic and a hit-and-run. Both were brutal and banal and neither was likely to catch the eye of TV news and tabloid editors in the way the Anthony Garvey killings had.