yes, I am pretty busy, but I can find the time.' The flush had moved up to the base of her throat. 'I'll probably be quicker on my own, to be honest. You know, without somebody else getting in the way…'
Thorne thought about her offer. It sounded like such a wild-goose chase that he'd probably only be wasting an officer anyway. He nodded. 'Thanks.'
At the door, while Holland took down Lesser's phone number and handed her a card, Thorne stared at the posters on the wall next to the door. One image in particular caught his eye: a girl and a boy, hand in hand, staring straight at the camera, their moist, round eyes begging. They were much younger than Mark and Sarah Foley would have been, no bigger than toddlers, and they were almost certainly actors. Still, their faces held Thorne's attention…
He tensed a little when he felt Lesser's hand on his arm.
'It's funny,' she said, 'to think that people can. just slip through the net like that, isn't it?'
Thorne nodded, thinking that some people were a lot more slippery than others.
Driving back through the town centre, Holland talked about Joanne Lesser. He joked about the sort of woman who looked like she wouldn't say boo to a goose and then went home and lay in the bath, one hand holding some gruesome true-crime book, while the other…
Thorne wasn't paying too much attention. He felt as though someone had poured concrete in through his ears. The thoughts floundered in his head, sticky and dismal, while his face, as always, was easy to read.
'Like she said, we were going a long way back,' Holland said.
'Probably wasting our time. We'll find them somewhere else…'
Thorne grunted. Holland was right, but all the same, he had been counting on something a bit more positive.
Holland made for the motorway, heading out of town along the line of the Roman wall. From here at St Mary's of the Wall, during the English Civil War, a vast Royalist cannon named Humpty Dumpty was said to have fallen, later to be immortalised in the children's nursery rhyme. They passed the ancient entrance to the town, through which Claudius, the invading Emperor, had once ridden into Colchester on the back of an elephant. Thorne found it strange that two thousand years later, whether by accident or design, the far more recent history of ordinary people could be so impenetrable.
'I'm betting Miss Marple back there's already rootling through her dead files,' Holland said. He laughed, and Thorne dredged up something that might have been a smile, if one half of his face had been paralysed. 'What d'you reckon?'
Thorne reckoned that he'd been right about chasing leads. This one had sounded solid, like it wasn't going anywhere. Now it had put on a burst of speed and Thorne felt as if he could do nothing but watch it disappear into the distance.
The slice of white bread in Peter Foley's hand was blackened with dabs of newsprint from his fingers. He looked at his hands. There were still scabs on a couple of the knuckles, and oil beneath his fingernails from where he'd spent the morning tinkering with his motorbike. He used the bread to mop up the last of his gravy, then picked up his mug of tea and leaned back against the red, plastic banquette.
He stared out of the care window and watched the cars drift by. He thought about his family. The dead and the disappeared. Bumming around…
That's what he'd told those fuckers, when they'd asked what he was doing back when it had happened, and it was pretty much all he'd done since as well. Holding down a job, once he'd got back into the swing of things, had become difficult. He'd developed a tendency to take things the wrong way, to react badly to a tasteless comment or a funny look. He couldn't say for sure that what had happened was responsible. He might always have been destined to be a shiftless loser with a tendency towards casual violence, but what the luck, it was comforting to have something to blame.
To have somebody to blame.
He should have moved away from the area. There was always some old dear with an opinion, or a pair of young mums whispering and shielding their children. Always some interfering fucker, willing to tell any woman he got close to all about his happy family. People had good memories. Not as good as his, though…
He remembered the argument he'd had with Den a couple of days before it had happened. He'd wanted to come round, had asked Den why nobody had seen Jane for a while, if everything was all right. Den had lost it and told him to mind his own business, said that he knew very well what was going on. He remembered his brother's face, the trembling around the mouth as he'd accused him of fancying Jane, all but suggesting they'd been screwing behind his back. He remembered the guilt he'd felt, then and afterwards, because he did fancy Jane and always had.
And he remembered the faces of the children, the last time he'd seen them, before that cow from the social services had driven them away. Sarah had been quiet, she'd probably not really understood what was going on, but the boy's face, Marte's face, pressed against the back window of that car, had been streaked with snot and tears.
He slid out of the booth, grabbed his paper, and strolled across to the counter to pay for his lunch.
He thought about his nephew and his niece and hoped that they were together somewhere a long way away. A place where nobody could ever find them and fuck their new lives up. The afternoon stretched ahead. He would go back and lie down and wait for it to get dark. Then he would put some metal on, and drink. He would empty can after can, until the noise inside his head was quieter than the screech and the smash of the music that would be filling his bedroom.
When they got back to Becke House, Thorne filled Kitson and Brigstocke in on how things had gone in Colchester. They conferred about progress on the other flank of the operation. The Southern killing had plenty in common with those that had gone before: the cause of death; the layout of the murder scene; the wreath ordered in person from an out-of-hours floristry service – this time delivered as far as the hotel-room doorway, then hurriedly dropped after one look at the state of its recipient.
But there were plenty of differences too. There were new avenues which had to be explored…
Southern had been released from prison more than ten years previously. He hadn't been selected in the same way as the previous victims, and he was certainly approached differently. Unlike Remfry or Welch, he had a whole life that had to be sifted through if they were going to find out just how the Miler had made himself part of it. Interviews, running into many hundreds, were still being conducted with anyone who had contact with Southern: the people he worked with; the friends he drank with; the members of the gym he worked out at; the girlfriend he'd recently broken up with…
These people who had been part of his new life, would, for the most part, have had no idea that Howard Southern had once served time in prison. Even if he'd told any of them – and with some people it might have gained him kudos, or a round of drinks – chances are he wouldn't have told them what for.
Unfortunately for him, someone had found out exactly what Howard Southern had once done, and had killed him for it. In his Office, Thorne went through his mail. As always, it was mostly junk. Pointless memos, press releases, crime statistics, new initiative outlines. He glanced through the monthly Police Federation newsletter, at a story about a local force recording themselves whistling the theme tunes to a host of well-known police TV shows. These recordings were being broadcast in some of the rougher estates and shopping centres in an effort to deter street criminals. When Thorne had finished laughing, he checked his messages. There'd already been a call from Joanne Lesser to say that she'd start checking the records the following morning, and that some files had apparently been moved from County Hall to a new storage facility on an industrial estate just outside Chelmsford. The next one was from Chris Barratt at Kentish Town. There was nothing from Eve… Thorne picked up the phone, wondering at the sharp twinge of disappointment he felt. He marveled, as he dialed, at his seemingly endless capacity for indecision, for fucking about…
'About bloody time too,' he said.
'Calm down,' Barratt said. 'We haven't got him yet. But we know exactly who he is. We'll pull him first thing tomorrow morning.'
'How did you find him?'
'Are you listening? This is funny as fuck…'
'Go on…'
'He'd got rid of the stereo, right? Probably shifted it the same day, got himself off his tits on the proceeds. Then, he has a problem…'
