'This might be the way we get him, though, Tom.'
Thorne was counting on it…
Brigstocke came around his desk. 'Right, let's start with the bodies that are informed about an offender's registration requirements. The ones that get fed the notification details as a matter of course.' He started to count them off on his fingers. 'Social services, probation…'
'And us, of course,' Thorne said. 'We'd better not forget the most interesting one, had we, Russell?'
Macpherson House was located in a side street off Camden Parkway. In the course of a century, the building had been a theatre, cinema and bingo hall. Now it was little more than a shell, within which was situated temporary hostel accommodation.
'Fuck me gently,' Stone said. He was craning back his head, staring at the grimy, crumbling ceiling high above him. Holland looked up. There were still traces of gilt on the mouldings. Decorative swirls of plaster leaves trailed across the ceiling and then down towards four ornate columns in each corner of the vast room.
'Must have been amazing…'
There was a week-old copy of the Daily Star on the floor. Stone pushed it aside with his foot. He sniffed at the stale air and pulled a face. 'It's a bloody shame…'
As they walked, Holland took Stone through the simple, ironic history of the place. The theatre that had become a cinema. The cinema done for in the seventies by the more popular entertainment of the bingo hall. The bingo hall itself made redundant thirty years later by the easy availability of scratch cards and the National Lottery.
'From music hall to the Stupid Tax,' Holland said. Stone snorted. 'I take it those six numbers never came up, then?'
'I'm still here, aren't I?'
Their footsteps echoed off the scuffed, stone floors, else were muffled as they walked across the occasional threadbare rug, or curling square of carpet. 'Can't see what's going to replace the Lottery, can you. 7'
Holland shook his head. 'Not as long as there's a call for it.'
They were walking ten yards or so behind Brian, the hostel supervisor, a big man in his fifties with long, grey hair, a large hoop earring and a multicoloured waistcoat. Without turning round, he held out both arms. Taking in the place.
'Always be a call for this, though…'
Now, forty feet below the faded rococo grandeur, the space was taken up with cracked sinks and metal beds. A kitchen and a serving hatch. A pair of small televisions, each attached with a padlock and chain to nearby radiators. Behind the beds, along the walls, stood row upon row of scratched and dented lockers – some without locks, many without doors. All rusting and covered in graffiti.
'Council got them for a song,' Brian said. 'When the swimming pool down the road was knocked down. Same week they got this place off Mecca…'
Holland looked down at the floor as he walked. Shoes under many of the beds, trainers, mostly. The occasional tarry suitcase. Dozens of plastic bags.:
Stone took off his jacket. 'Dossers by and large, is it?'
Brian looked back over his shoulder. Holland thought he looked powerful, like he could handle himself. He probably needed to on occasion. 'All sorts. Long-term homeless, runaways, addicts. The odd ex-con like Welch…'
'Where do they go during the day?' Holland asked. The big man slowed, let Holland and Stone draw level with him.
'Wandering about. Begging. Trying to find somewhere to sleep.' He smiled when Holland looked confused. 'This place is warm and they can get something to eat, but there's not a lot of sleeping goes on. Most of them are scared of getting stuff nicked. Even if they do want a kip, a hundred blokes coughing and shifting around on creaky bedsprings is worse than a neighbour with a drum kit…'
'My ex-girlfriend kept me awake half the night,' Stone said. 'Talking in her sleep, grinding her teeth…'
Brian smiled thinly. 'It's quiet enough in here now, but you won't be able to hear yourself think by dinnertime. They'll start drifting back as soon as it starts to get dark. Be rammed in here by nine o'clock.'
Holland looked at the lines of beds, three and four deep. Imagined it.
Eyes down for a full house.
The supervisor stopped. He tapped on the open door of a locker and immediately began moving away again. 'This was Mr. Welch's. I'll be in the front office if you need anything…'
They both pulled on gloves. While Stone went through the locker, Holland got down on his hands and knees and, for the second time in a little over a fortnight, went rummaging under the bed of a recently murdered rapist.
It took less than two minutes to gather together Welch's worldly goods: a battered green holdall full of clothes which smelled of Oxfam; a plastic bag of dirty pants and socks; a radio spattered with white paint; an electric razor; a couple of tatty paperbacks… At the back of the locker, between the pages of one of the books, the photographs of Jane Foley.
'Here she is,' Stone said, holding one of the pictures up between his fingertips. 'Lovelier than ever.'?
Holland got to his feet, moved across to take a look. 'How many?'
'Half a dozen. Can't see any letters. Must have chucked them…'
Stone slid the photos into an evidence bag, popped it into an inside pocket. Holland shoved everything else into a black bin-liner. When he'd finished he picked the bag up. It wasn't heavy.
'Not a lot, is it?' he said.
Stone pushed the locker door closed and shrugged. 'That's what you get.'
It was nearly midday and starting to get really warm. Holland rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck. He thought about what he guessed was going through Stone's mind. 'Do you not give a shit because Welch was an ex-con?' he said. 'Or because he was an ex-con who was also a rapist? Honestly, I'm interested…'
Stone thought about it. Holland bounced the bin-bag against his knees.
'I suppose I'd give a bit more of a shit if he'd been a forger,' Stone said. 'Less if he'd murdered half a dozen schoolgirls…'
Holland looked at the expression on Stone's face. He couldn't help but laugh as they began to move away, back towards the entrance. 'I don't believe it. You've actually got a fucking sliding scale…'
They walked up Parkway towards the pay and display bay where Stone had parked the Cougar. At regular intervals, rubbish bags like the one Holland was carrying were piled high on the pavement. After Madame Tussaud's, Camden's Sunday market was now the second most popular tourist attraction in the city, and cleaning up after it was becoming a little like painting the Forth Bridge.
'So, what is it now? Couple of months till the baby?' Stone asked. Holland swung the bin-bag from one hand to the other. 'Ten weeks.'
'Sophie must be the size of a house…'
Holland smiled, turned to look into the window of a Japanese restaurant. The plates of plastic sushi, red and yellow and pink. He promised himself that one of these days he'd try some. They turned left and Stone unlocked the car with a remote. 'So?
Excited then?'
'Yeah, she's very excited.'
Stone opened the car door. Looked at Holland across the roof. 'I meant you…'
'Get your arse up. Right up in the air, that's it. Now, let your fingers do the walking…'
Charlie Dodd was making himself useful. The place had been hired out for a web-cam session and he'd thrown in his services, gratis. He was cheerfully relaying on-screen instructions to the bored-looking girl on the bed when the phone rang.
'Just do some moaning for a minute, sweetheart…'
His hand was slippery against the receiver as he mumbled a greeting and waited.
'I got your message…'
Dodd recognised the voice straight away. Without looking round he used his hand to indicate to the girl on the bed that she should carry on, then brought it to his mouth and took out the cigarette.
'I was wondering when I was going to hear back from you.'
