where he can do it. He can't just ride up on a motorbike or wait for them outside a pub. He needs a bit of time and space.'
Hendricks took a can. 'He obviously puts a lot of effort into his work. Plans it. I bet he's bloody expensive.' Thorne thought Hendricks was probably right. 'It's still cheap though, isn't it? When you think about it. To kill someone, I mean. Twenty, twenty-five grand's about top whack. That's a damn sight less than the people putting out the contracts pay for their Jeeps and top-of-the-range Mercs.'
'What d'you reckon I can get for a couple of hundred quid?' Hendricks asked. 'There's this mortuary assistant at Westminster who's getting on my tits.'
Thorne thought about it for a second. 'Chinese burn?' The laugh was the first decent one that Thorne could remember sharing with anyone for a few days.
'How can it be the Yardies?' Hendricks said when he'd stopped giggling. 'Or Yakuza? We know our hit man's not black or Japanese.'
A witness claimed to have seen the killer leaving the scene of the third murder and had given a vague description of a white male in his thirties. The witness, Marcus Moloney, was an 'associate' of the Ryan family, and not what you'd call an upright citizen, but he seemed pretty sure about what he'd seen.
'It's not that simple,' Thorne said. 'It might have been, ten years ago, when people stuck to their own, but now they don't care so much and the freelancers just go where the work is. The Triads use Yardies. Yardies work with the Russians. They nicked a gang of Yakuza last year for recruiting outside schools. They were as good as giving out application forms; signing up Greek lads, Asians, Turks, whoever.' Hendricks smiled. 'It's nice to see that they're all equal-opportunities employers.'
Thorne grunted, and the two of them settled back into saying nothing for a few minutes. Thorne closed his eyes and picked at the goatee he'd grown towards the end of the previous year. The beard created the illusion of a jaw line and covered up the scar from a knife wound. The puckered line that ran diagonally across Thorne's chin was the only visible reminder of a night six months before when he'd both begged for his life and prayed for death to come quickly. There were other scars, easier to disguise, but far more troublesome. Thorne would reach into his gut in the darkness and finger them until they reopened into wounds. He could imagine the scab forming then, blood black across the tender flesh. The crust that would itch and crumble beneath his fingernails, exquisite and agonising, for him to poke and pick at. Lucinda Williams sang softly about an all-consuming lust, her voice sweet and saw-toothed at the same time, rising like smoke above a single acoustic guitar.
Thorne and Hendricks both started slightly when the phone rang.
'Tom?' A woman's voice.
Thorne sank back into his armchair with the phone. He shouted across to Hendricks deliberately loud enough for the caller to hear, 'Oh Christ, it's that mad old woman who keeps phoning me up.' Hendricks grinned and shouted back, 'Tell her I can smell the cat food from here!'
'Come on then, Carol,' Thorne said. 'Tell me what's been happening in glamorous Worthing. Any 'cat stuck up tree' incidents or Zimmer-frame pile-ups I should know about?'
The woman on the other end of the line was in no mood for the usual banter. 'I need to talk to you, Tom. I need you to listen.' So, Thorne listened. The curry arrived and went cold, but he didn't even think about it. He could tell as soon as she started to talk that something was seriously wrong.
In all the time he'd known Carol Chamberlain, Thorne had never heard her cry before.
TWO
'I presume you tried 1471?'
She raised her eyebrows. Asked if he thought she was a complete idiot.
Thorne shrugged an apology.
When he had first met Carol Chamberlain the previous year, he had taken her for a frumpy, middle-aged woman with too much time on her hands; a frumpy, middle-aged woman he had mistakenly assumed to be the mother of one of his constables.
She still claimed not to have forgiven him.
Ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain had arrived in Thorne's office on a humid July morning seven months earlier, and turned the hunt for a sadistic rapist and killer on its head. She was a member of what had become known as the Crinkly Squad a unit made up of former officers brought out of retirement to work on cold cases. Chamberlain hadn't needed a great deal of persuading to come back. Having done her thirty years, she'd been forced out of the Met to her way of thinking at least prematurely, and felt, at fifty-five, that she still had a good deal to offer. The first case she'd worked on had thrown up information that had changed the course of Thorne's investigation, and it would turn out later, his life. The cold case now anything but cold had quickly been taken away from her, but Thorne had kept in touch and he and Chamberlain had quickly grown close.
Thorne wasn't sure precisely what Carol Chamberlain got from her relationship with him, but he was happy to give whatever it was in exchange for her directness, her sound advice and a bullshit detector that seemed to get sharper with age.
Looking at her now across the table, remembering that first impression of her, Thorne wondered how he could have made so gross a misjudgment.
Chamberlain held up the dirty cream envelope for Thorne to see, and then tipped it, emptying the ashes on to the table. 'These arrived yesterday morning.'
Thorne picked up a fork and nudged the tines through the blackened scraps of material. He was careful not to touch any of it with his bare hands, but he didn't know why he was bothering. He wasn't sure yet if he was going to do anything about this. The pieces crumbled even as the fork touched them, but he could see that one or two fragments still retained their original blue colour.
'I'll hang on to these.' He picked up a menu and used the edge of it to scrape the ashes back into their envelope.
Chamberlain nodded. 'It's serge, I think. Or heavy cotton. Same material that Jessica Clarke's skirt was made out of..' Thorne thought about what she was saying, what she'd begun to tell him the previous night on the phone. He remembered a little of the case, remembered the outrage, but most of the details were new to him. He asked himself if he'd ever heard such a horrific story. If he had, he couldn't remember when.
'What sort of sick sod does that to a kid?' Thorne said. He glanced around, anxious not to alarm those at the nearby tables. Chamberlain waited until he turned back, looked him in the eye. 'One who's getting paid for it.'
'What?'
'We thought it was some sort of head case everybody did. Us and the schools and the papers, all getting jittery, waiting for him to do it again. Then we found out that Jessica Clarke was the wrong girl.'
'How d'you mean, 'wrong'?'
'The girl standing next to her in the playground that day was called Alison Kelly. She was one of Jessica's best friends. Same height, same colour hair. She was also the youngest daughter of Kevin Kelly.' She looked at Thorne as though expecting a reaction. She didn't get one.
Thorne shook his head. 'Should I…?'
'Let me run you quickly through how it was in 1984. You'd have been about what?'
Thorne did the mental calculation. Id've been about to come out of uniform,' he said. 'About to get married. Sowing the last of my wild oats, probably. Going to clubs, going to gigs.'
'You lived in north London, right?'
Thorne nodded.
'Well, chances are that any club you went to was owned by one of the big firms, and the Kelly's were the biggest. There were others taking control of the south-east, and there were a few independents knocking about, but the Kelly's' had a stake in most things north of the river.'
As Thorne listened, it struck him that her normal, measured tone had become hesitant; the neutral accent had slipped, allowing her native Yorkshire to emerge. He'd heard it before, when she was angry or excited. When she was fired up about something. If he hadn't already known, he'd have guessed that something had shaken her badly.
