Thorne glanced at the file and held up his hands. He tried his best to sound pleasant as he spoke. 'Listen, is there any chance we can do this another time? We're up to our elbows in a very big case and…'
'I know exactly what case you're up to your elbows in,' she said.
'Which is why we should really do it now.'
Thorne stared at her. There was a steel in this woman's voice that suggested it would not be worth his while to argue. With a sigh, he pulled the folder across the desk, began to leaf through it.
'Five weeks ago, DC Holland pulled the file on an unsolved murder from 1996.' Aside from the steel, her voice had the acquired refinement that often came with rank, however distant, but Thorne thought he detected the remnants of a Yorkshire accent beneath. 'The victim's name was Alan Franklin. He was killed in a car park. Strangled with washing line.'
'I remember,' Thorne said. He flicked a couple of pages over. It was one of the cases Holland had pulled off CRIMINT. 'There were a couple of these that we looked at and then dismissed. Nothing suggested that…'
Chamberlain nodded, dropped her eyes to the folder. 'This was handed to me as a cold case. My first cold case, as it happens…'
'I read about the initiative. It's a good idea.'
'I've been looking at the Franklin murder again…'
'Right…' Thorne stopped, noticing the faintest trace of enjoyment then, another tiny line around her mouth that cracked open for just half a second and was gone. It was enough to prompt a reaction in him, a flutter of something that began, as always, at the nape of his neck…
'Alan Franklin should have been known to us, to those who were investigating his murder back in '96. His name should have come up on a routine check…'
Thorne knew there was no need to ask why. He knew she was about to tell him. He watched, and listened, and felt the tingle grow and spread around his body.
'In May 1976, Franklin stood trial at Colchester Crown Court. He was accused of rape. Accused and acquitted.'
Thorne caught a breath, let it out again slowly. 'Jesus…'
Like a beam of light in the right direction… Later, when Thorne and the woman he'd thought was Dave Holland's mother knew and liked each other better, Carol Chamberlain would confess to him that this was one of those rare moments she'd missed more than anything. The seconds looking at Thorne, just before she revealed the most significant fact of all. When she'd had to fight very hard to stop herself grinning.
'Alan Franklin was accused of raping a woman named Jane Foley…'
PART THREE
The grunting seemed to be coming from somewhere very deep down. A noise of effort and of immense satisfaction. Rising up from his guts and exploding, carried on hot breath from between dirty, misshapen teeth. Beneath these animal sounds – dog-noise, monkey-noise, pig-noise – the counterpoint provided by the dull slapping of hot flesh against cold as he pushes himself harder, again and again.
Refusing to speed up. Giving no sign that it might soon be over. Taking his pleasure. Inflicting his pain.
How was this allowed to happen? Naivety and trust had proved to be perfect complements to frustration and hatred. It had happened in moment. How long ago was that? Fifteen minutes? Thirty?
There seems little point in struggling. It will be over eventually, it must be. No point in thinking about what happens afterwards. Probably a shy smile, maybe an apology and a cigarette and a speech about signals and crossed wires.
Fucker. Fucker. Fucker.
Until then…
Eyes that cannot bear to stay open, shut tight and a new picture presents itself Small at first, and far away. Posed, waiting in a distant circle of light at the end of a tunnel.
Now it is the grunting and the slapping that begin to recede into the distance as the picture gets closer, rushing up the tunnel, sucking up the darkness until it is fully formed and clearer than it has ever been.
Clearer even than it ever really was. The colours more vivid: the red wetness against the white shirt; the cobalt-blue of the rope's coils around the neck like an exotic snake at his throat. The sounds and smells of the body and the rope, deafening and pungent. Creaking and fecal. The feeling: the unique horror of seeing it. Seeing the indescribable pain in 'those eyes at being seen.
Then, at the end, watching it. Sensing something struggle to escape, and finally float free, up and away from the body that twirls slowly at the end of a frayed and oily rope.
SEVENTEEN
It was as grim a story of broken bodies and bruised lives as Tom Thorne had ever heard…
A week since Carol Chamberlain had sat in Thorne's office had blown everything wide open. Holland was at the wheel of a car-pool Laguna as they drove into Essex, heading towards Braintree. The two men were comfortable enough with each other to let silences fall between them, but today's was particularly heavy. Thorne could only hope that what was in Holland's head was a sight less dark than what was in his own.
As grim a story…
Jane Foley was raped by Alan Franklin. Thorne was convinced of it, though if it had not been proved then, there was very little chance that the truth would emerge over twenty-five years on. What nobody doubted, then or now, were the bizarre and brutal actions taken by her husband, Dennis. What he had done to Jane, and then to himself, on the afternoon of 10 August, 1976.
Thorne would probably never know for certain exactly what had gone on in that house, what had passed between those two people and led to those last, intimate moments of horror. Thorne did know that he would spend a good deal of time imagining those moments: the terror of Jane Foley as her husband draws near to her; the guilt and the anguish and the fear of a man who has just committed murder; the blood not yet dry on his hands, the tow rope slippy with it as he fashions a makeshift noose.
Worst of all, the incomprehension of the two children, finding the bodies of their parents…
Thorne started slightly as Holland smacked his palms against the wheel. He opened his eyes to see that they'd run into a line of slow moving traffic. Ever since they'd come off the M 11 it had been snarled up. Mid- morning on a Saturday and no good reason for the jam, but it was there all the same.
'Shit,' Holland said. It was the first word either of them had spoken in nearly an hour.
If Thorne was going to spend time thinking about what had happened between Jane and Dennis Foley, he was also going to be dwelling on something equally as painful. Something that, God help him, might have been responsible for horrors all of its own. Thorne had fucked up. He had fucked up as badly as he could remember and, for him, that was saying something… Carol Chamberlain had presumed that the officers working on the Franklin murder in 1996 had also fucked up. It looked as if they'd failed to check Franklin's name against the General Registry at Victoria, which would have revealed his part in the Jane Foley rape case twenty years before that.
In fact, it was a matter of record that those officers had phoned the General Registry. What was not a matter of record, what would have to remain conjecture, was that the brain-dead pen-pusher on the other end of the phone – a man long-since retired and, Thorne hoped, long since dead – had missed Franklin's name. One eye on his crossword as the other had simply skipped past it. It had been a costly mistake. But Thorne's had been costlier.
Unlike the officers in 1996, Thorne had not checked. Jane Foley's name had never been run past the General Registry, had never been put through the system. Strictly speaking, it had not been Thorne's job to do it, but that didn't matter. As far as Thorne was concerned, he carried the can. He never made sure, and even if he had thought
