'I'm likely to be up for several,' Thorne said. Holland ran a hand along the front wing of the hire-car. 'This is the sort of thing you ought to get.'
'Sort of thing I ought to get when?'
'Come on, your car is fucked. This is nice, though…'
'It's white.., and my car is not fucked…'
'Name one thing that's good about it.'
Thorne opened the Corsa's door, hesitated before getting in. 'What?
Straight off the top of my head?'
Holland laughed, leaned down as Thorne climbed in. 'If this was a woman we were talking about, you'd dump her.'
The electric window slid down. 'You've got a very strange mind, Holland.'
'How's it going with the florist, anyway?'
'Mind your own business.'
There was a rumble as an engine started up. Thorne looked across to see Stone watching them from behind the wheel of his own car, a silver Ford Cougar. He nodded towards it. 'What d'you think of Stone's motor?'
'It's a bit flash,' Holland said.
Thorne could see Stone slapping his palm off the steering wheel.
'Better get a move on. He looks keen to get back.'
Holland took a step away from the car, stopped. 'Did your dad have a good time at the wedding?'
'A good time? Yes. I think so…'
'I meant to tell you…' Stone sounded the horn. 'William Hartnell was the first Doctor Who. I looked it up on the Internet.'
'I'll tell him…'
Thorne turned the key in the ignition, watched as Holland ran across and climbed into Stone's car. He could hear the music being cranked up as the sports car roared past him, and out on to the main road with hardly a look from Andy Stone towards anything that might have been coming.
Thorne looked at his watch and turned the engine off again. Not quite one o'clock yet. The post-mortem wasn't until two and it was no more than a ten-minute drive to the hospital. He sat for a few minutes trying to decide between sleep and a Sunday paper and then he started to hear distant shouting, a cheer, a solitary handclap. The noise recognisable, tantalising. Carrying easily on the warm, afternoon air. It took him twenty minutes to find the game, a quarter of a mile away up the main road in a small park. The season was still a month and a half away, but Sunday footballers cared as little for the calendar as they did for other trivialities like fitness and skill. A team in red and a team in yellow and a dozen or so lunatics watching, living every less than beautiful second of it.
Thorne could not have been more content. He stood on the touchline and lost himself in the game. In a little over an hour he would be watching organs meticulously excised, the flesh expertly sliced and laid aside… For a while, he was happy to watch a team in red and a team in yellow, running and shouting and kicking lumps out of each other. Thorne picked up his pint and turned from the bar. Except for Russell Brigstocke, one of whose kids was unwell, and Yvonne Kitson, most of the senior members of the team had come out. There was an unspoken need to loosen up, to enjoy a night out that they might not have the chance to repeat for a while, now that the case had moved up a gear. Now that there was a second body.
Thorne wasn't planning on staying long. He was wiped out. One drink, maybe two, and then home…
They were gathered around a couple of smallish tables. Holland and Hendricks were sitting at one end with Andy Stone and Sam Karim, a DS who worked as office manager. They were playing Shag or Die, a game that involved choosing between a pair of equally undesirable sexual partners, which had swept through the entire Serious Crime Group in the last few weeks. The choice between Ann Widdecombe and Camilla Parker-Bowles was prompting heated debate. Phil Hendricks was trying to make himself heard, claiming that as a gay man, he should not have to sleep with either of them. His point was eventually accepted as valid and he was given a choice between Jimmy Savile and Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond to mull over…
If the Royal Oak had a theme other than drinking heavily, nobody had ever worked out what it was. Apart from being the nearest pub to Becke House, it had nothing whatsoever to recommend it. The fairly constant presence of police officers may have had something to do with it, but there was rarely anybody drinking in the pub who didn't have a warrant card.
Thorne looked around. Sunday night and the place was all but deserted: a couple at a table near the toilets, staring into their drinks like they'd had a row; the room quiet, save for his team's graphic deliberations and the tinny, musical stings from the unused quiz machine in the corner.
Hardly any more there than had gathered earlier in the Dissecting Room: Phil Hendricks; a trio of mortuary attendants; the exhibits officer; a stills photographer; a video cameraman; the PC who had been first to arrive at the Greenwood Hotel, there to confirm that the body was indeed the same one he had seen on the bed in room 313. And Thorne…
Nine of them, gathered in a cold room plumbed for hoses, with easy-to-clean surfaces and drains in the floor. The smallest murmur or the crunching of peppermints magnified, bouncing off the cracked, cream tiles. A small crowd, waiting for the body of Ian Welch to be uncovered and taken apart.
Thorne had attended hundreds of post-mortems, and though it was a process he had become resigned to, he had found that lately it was a difficult one to leave behind, to shed easily. The visceral onslaught disturbed him now far less than the tiny details, the sensory minutiae which might stay with him for days after each session… Blinking awake in the early hours, as a brain plops gently into a glass jar.
Dabbing at his freshly shaved face, the water spiraling away, its momentary slurp like the sucking of the flesh at the finger that presses into it.
A smell at work, the odour of something very raw, lurking some, where deep within the medley of sweat and institutional food… Nine of them gathered. Waiting like embarrassed guests at a bizarre party, strangers to each other. That dreadful hiatus between arriving, and anything actually happening…
Finally, Hendricks drew back the white sheet and asked the equally white PC to confirm it was the same body he'd seen earlier. The constable looked as though the only thing he could confirm was rising rapidly up from his stomach. He swallowed hard.
'Yes,' he said, 'it is.'
And they were away…
Holland had moved across to the bar to get a round in and Thorne took his place next to Andy Stone. Karim leaned across, eager to involve Thorne in the game. Before he had a chance to speak, Thorne angled his body away, turned into the corner, towards Stone.
'Idiotic, bloody game,' Stone said. Thorne had only just got there, but Stone sounded like he was three or four drinks ahead of him. 'If it's shag or die, you'd shag anybody, wouldn't you? So what's the point?'
Thorne swallowed a mouthful of lager and leaned a little closer to Stone. 'I need to have a quick word about what happened when we picked Gribbin up.'
If Stone had been on the way to being drunk, he sobered up very quickly. 'I was protecting the kid. I didn't know what he was going to do.'
'Which is exactly what the DCI is going to say. Still, Fm here to tell you, off the record, that you overstepped the mark. That nobody wants to see it happen again, OK?' Stone stared forward, said nothing.
'Andy…?' Thorne took another drink. Half the pint had gone already.
'Nobody's very fond of blokes like Gribbin, but you were over the top.'
'There's just so bloody many of them. I don't understand how there can be so many of them walking about.'
'Listen…'
Stone turned. He spoke low and fast as if imparting dangerous information. I've got a mate on the Child Protection Team over at Barnes. He told me about this time they were after a child-killer up in Scotland. This bloke had already killed three kids, they had a description, and some woman claimed she'd spotted him on a beach one bank holiday, right? So they appealed for people to come forward with their holiday snaps, see if anybody might have got a picture of this fucker accidentally…'
Thorne nodded. He remembered the case. He had no idea what Stone wanted to tell him.
