'You know who you sound like, don't you?' Kitson said. Holland knew very well, and thought that maybe there was still hope for him, after all. It struck him as odd that people had taken to talking about Tom Thorne without using his name.
As if on cue, the man himself walked through the door looking almost as angry as Tughan had been a few moments before. and still was, judging by his expression as he loomed at Thorne's shoulder.
'You've kept a lot of people waiting, DI Thorne.' Thorne spoke to the room, without so much as a glance towards Nick Tughan. 'I'm sorry. The car wouldn't start.' He caught the beginnings of a smirk on the most likely face. 'And neither should you, Holland. I'm not in the mood.'
'OK, we've wasted enough time,' Tughan said. 'Core-team briefing in my office. Five minutes.'
While Tughan spoke, Thorne let his mind drift. He was taking it all in, but he was thinking about other things.
Thinking about Yvonne Kitson for one. He'd seen the copy of the Murder Manual that she was cradling as he'd walked into the Incident Room. It was like her to stay on top of things; she was someone who Thorne had always admired for her ability to juggle her responsibilities at work and at home. Those responsibilities had shifted somewhat since the previous summer, when her husband had found out about the affair she'd been having with a senior officer and walked out with the three kids. She had the kids back at home now, but she was a changed person. Before, she'd been moving effortlessly upwards. Now, she was clinging on. Thorne could see the difference in her face. She seemed to be hanging on every one of Tughan's words, but Thorne was pretty sure he wasn't the only one thinking about other things. His mind drifted on to his father. He needed to talk to him, to see how everything was going. Perhaps it would be easier if he just called Eileen.
Then, he started thinking about why, nearly three days after he and Chamberlain had been to Park Royal prison, he still hadn't told Tughan what Gordon Rooker had told them.
All over the weekend Hendricks had kept bringing it up, looking at him as if he were an idiot, nagging him about it while they slob bed out in front of The Premiership.
'You want to get Billy Ryan yourself, don't you?' Hendricks had said.
'You want to catch whoever set fire to that girl. Whoever as good as killed her.'
'Heskey is such a bloody donkey. Look at that.'
'You're an idiot, Tom.'
'I do not want to get him myself.'
'So why haven't you told anybody about Rooker?' Thorne knew no more than that it was because of his relationship with Chamberlain, and, OK, to a degree because of the one he had with Tughan. He had also virtually convinced himself that Rooker's information, his offer, related to a case that was twenty years old. It was not strictly relevant to the investigation into the killings of Mickey Clayton, the Izzigils and the others. He would, of course, have fucking loved to nail Billy Ryan on his own, but he didn't have the first idea how.
Tughan was talking about Dave Holland and Andy Stone. He commended them on the work that had thrown up the all-important name. Thorne focused on what Tughan was saying, but noticed how pissed off Holland looked at having to share any credit with Andy Stone.
'The NCIS have been working on this for us over the last forty-eight hours,' Tughan said, 'and we now have a decent bit of background on the Zarif family.'
Tughan was leaning against the front of the desk. Brigstocke stood to the left of it, arms folded. There were maybe a dozen people facing them, crammed into the small office: the senior officers from Team 3 at the Serious Crime Group (West), together with their opposite numbers from SO7.
'The Zarif family would appear to be model citizens,' Tughan said.
'Each property they own or have a stake in, every business interest we've been able to establish mini cabs a chain of video outlets, haulage, van hire are all completely legal. Not even a parking ticket.'
'Par for the course, right?' Brigstocke said. Tughan nodded towards one of his DCs, a squat, bearded Welshman named Richards. Thorne's heart sank as Richards started to address them. He'd been stuck in the corner of a pub with him a day or two into things and been less than riveted.
'Think of it as three concentric circles,' Richards said. Not caring if it was spotted or not, Thorne closed his eyes. The tedious little tit had given him the 'concentric circles' speech in the pub. Cornering him next to the fruit machine, he'd explained in ten minutes when it could easily have been covered in two the basic way a gangland firm, or family, operated. There were the street gangs: the robbers and the car-jackers and those who'd shove a handgun in a child's face for the latest mobile phone or an MP3 player. Then came the institutionalised villains: those controlling loan-sharking operations, illegal gambling, arms-smuggling, credit-card fraud. Finally, there were the tycoons: the seemingly legitimate businessmen who ran huge drug-trafficking empires and money-laundering networks, and who behaved as if they were respectable captains of industry.
'Think of three concentric circles,' Richards had said, an untouched half of lager-top in his fist. 'They all touch and bleed into one another, but the points where they actually meet are always shifting, impossible to pin down.' He'd smiled and leaned in close. 'I like to think of them as concentric circles on a target.' Thorne had nodded, like he thought that was a great idea. He preferred to visualise the circles as ripples moving out across dirty water. Like when a turd hits the bottom of a sewer-pipe.
He was jolted back from dull remembrance to even duller reality by Richards talking about 'footsoldiers'. Thorne rubbed his eyes, let his hand fall over his mouth to cover the aside to Sam Karim: 'Jesus, he thinks he's in an episode of The Sopranos.'
'The Izzigil video shop is a good example of how it works,' Richards said. 'The name Zarif appears on the deeds of the property, and on the paperwork at Companies House; and the vehicles that theoretically distribute the perfectly legal videotapes are leased from their company. But there's nothing tying them to anything illegal going on in those premises and they can't be held responsible for what the people who hire their vans and lorries get up to.' Tughan cleared his throat, took over: 'There are three brothers. We'll distribute photos as soon as we have them.' He glanced down at his notes. 'Also a sister, and probably plenty of cousins and what have you knocking about. At this stage, even the NCIS don't know a great deal about them. They're Turkish Kurds, been here a couple of years, kept their heads down.' He looked up from his clipboard. 'Getting their feet under the table. Main business premises and homes in the area you'd expect, between Manor House and Turnpike Lane.' A voice from the back of the room: 'Little fucking Istanbul.' Tughan smiled for about half a second. 'Now they've got themselves established, it seems like they're looking to expand. And poor old Billy Ryan's on the receiving end.'
'Let's bring a bit of pressure to bear,' Brigstocke said. 'See just how well established they are.'
Tughan pushed himself upright, tugged at the sharp creases in the trousers of his suit, dropped his clipboard down on to the desktop.
'Right, DS Karim, DC Richards, let's get some Actions organised and allocated.'
As the briefing broke up, Thorne was amazed when Tughan stepped over and spoke almost as if the two of them didn't hate the sight of each other.
'Fancy coming to see Billy Ryan?' Tughan asked.
'What about the Zarifs?'
'We'll give that a day or two. Get ourselves a bit of ammunition first.'
'Right.'
'At the moment, the Ryans are four-two down. Let's go and see how they're coping with getting spanked, shall we?' Thorne nodded, thinking that the surprises were coming thick and fast. Four-two down. It was tasteless, but still, any joke from Nick Tughan was firmly in X-Files territory.
They said virtually nothing as they sat in Tughan's Rover, heading towards Camden Town, the music from the stereo conveniently too loud to allow casual conversation. They took what was more or less Thorne's usual route home, south through Hampstead and Belsize Park, through one of the most expensive areas of the city towards what was arguably still the trendiest, though the combat-wearing media brigade in Hoxton or Shoreditch might have welcomed the argument. They drove past the development on the site of Jack Straw's Castle, the coaching inn on Hampstead Heath named after one of the leaders of the Peasants' Revolt and once a favourite haunt of Dickens and Thackeray. Now, on certain nights of the week, gay men who liked their sex casual, and perhaps even dangerous, would gather there in darkened corners before disappearing on to the Heath with strangers.
'Dick-ins of a completely different sort,' Phil Hendricks had said. They parked in front of a snooker hall behind Camden Road Station, a few streets away from Billy Ryan's office. Thorne was hugely relieved to escape from Tughan's car, deciding that, although his own taste in music had irritated a few people in its time, he wouldn't wish
