Golf. He felt wiped out. He was walking past the Golf towards his flat when he noticed a man asleep in the driver's seat. Thorne slowed his pace and leaned down to take a closer look. There was some light from a lamp-post twenty feet away, but not a great deal. The man in the car opened his eyes, smiled at Thorne and closed them again.
Thorne continued on towards his door, reached into a pocket for his keys. Perhaps he'd rattled Billy Ryan more than he'd realised. Hendricks had already made up the sofa-bed and was lying there reading a paperback with an arty-looking cover.
Thorne filled him in on the day's events.
As far as work on the case went, Hendricks had not been involved practically since the post-mortem on Marcus Moloney, but it was important that he remain part of the team. Besides, Thorne was certain that his particular skills would be required again before it was all over.
'There's a message on the machine for you,' Hendricks shouted through to the kitchen. 'Sounds interesting.' Thorne wandered in with his tea, pressed the button, sat on the arm of the sofa-bed to listen. The message was from Alison Kelly. She asked if he was free the following evening and left a phone number. Hendricks put down his book. 'Was that who I think it was?' Thorne turned off the living-room light and walked towards his bedroom.
'Hard to be sure,' he said. He was smiling as he opened the bedroom door. 'I don't know who you think it was, do I..?' A few hours later, Thorne padded back into the living room, as awake as he'd been when he'd left it. He moved slowly towards the window. As he edged past the end of the sofa-bed, he banged his foot against the metal rail.
Hendricks stirred and sat up, woken by the impact, or the swearing.
'It's four o'clock in the morning.'
'Yes, I know.'
Though there was no one left in the room to disturb, the darkness dictated that they spoke in whispers.
'What are you doing?' Hendricks moaned. Thorne was feeling irritable, and the throbbing pain in his foot was not helping matters. 'Right now, I'm thinking that it's getting a bit bloody crowded in here.' He stepped across to the window. 'How long can it possibly take to get rid of a bit of damp anyway?' Hendricks said nothing.
Thorne pulled back the blind and looked out into the street. The Golf had gone.
18 May 1986
AH and I went into town today. We just hung around really. AH bought a bag and a couple of new tops and I got some LPs. Afterwards we got a burger and sat on a bench outside the library. A couple of lads were messing around and they were both staring. I started joking around with AH, asking her which one of us she thought they fancied. It's only the sort of thing I would have said to her before. (AH was always the one lads fancied, by the way!) She looked uncomfortable and threw her burger away, and I know I should have left it, but I was just trying to make her laugh. I told her that it was obviously true what they say about how good-looking girls always hang around with an ugly mate, and then she started to cry.
Now I feel guilty that I've upset her, but also angry because her feeling sad or guilty or whatever it is she feels seems so fucking trivial when I look into the mirror on the back of the bedroom door, and half my face still looks like the meat in her burger. I know I'll feel differently about today by the morning and AH and I will be best mates again before the end of school on Monday, but it's difficult not to feel a bit low when I'm writing this stuff down and it's my own fault. I always write at night, staring out of the window and listening to the Smiths or something equally miserable. Maybe I should have bought some cheerier music when I was in town. The soundtrack to tomorrow's entry will be courtesy of Cliff Richard or the Wombles or something.
Shit Moment of the Day
The stuff with AH.
Magic Moment of the Day.
A comedian on the TV making a joke about burn victims sticking together.
SIXTEEN
A single word was written on the white board in red felt-tip pen.
UMIT.
'It means 'hope',' Tughan said. 'In Turkish.' Feet were shifted uncomfortably, and awkward looks exchanged. Thorne thought that if the people who'd been taken from the back of that lorry were now being handled by Billy Ryan, hope was something they would almost certainly have run out of.
It was Saturday morning, the day after the discovery of the abandoned lorry. The SO7 team was back at Becke House to work through this latest development. All that was actually developing was a sense of frustration.
'Customs and Excise are all over this now,' Tughan said. 'Not sure what they'll get out of it, but it'll probably be a damn sight more than we do.'
Thorne stood with Russell Brigstocke and the rest of the core team Kitson, Stone, Holland and their SO7 counterparts in a corner of the Incident Room. They watched as Tughan wore out a small strip of carpet in front of one of the desks. Weekend or not, there were always those who made no concessions to casual wear, but, despite the sharp and predictably well-pressed suit, Thorne thought that Tughan was starting to look and sound a little tired. Maybe not as tired as Thorne himself, but he was getting there.
'In terms of the Zarif brothers, you mean?' Thorne asked. Holland held up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. 'Surely there must be something tying them to this? Something that will at least give us an excuse to make their lives difficult.' Tughan put down his coffee and began to flick through a hastily assembled report on the hijacking. 'It's like six degrees of fucking separation,' he said. 'Between this lorry and the Zarifs there are any number of haulage companies, leasing agencies, freight contractors. They own the vehicle, theoretically, but if we spend a lot of time trying to tie them to whatever the vehicle was carrying, we'll be the ones whose lives are difficult.'
'I bet they're laughing at us,' Holland said. 'Them and the bloody Ryans.'
Tughan shrugged. 'Without any bodies, without the people who were inside the lorry, we've got sweet FA.'
'I can't believe they've got everything covered.' Holland looked around for support, found a little in the way of nods and murmurs.
'I've had a thought,' Brigstocke said. All eyes turned to him. 'Have we checked to see if that lorry's tax disc is up to date?' The joke got a decent, and much needed, response, even if some of the laughter was lost in yawns.
'Do we know what was inside the lorry?' Kitson said. 'Specifically, I mean. Are we ever going to know how many?' Tughan shook his head. 'Anywhere between a dozen and, I don't know… fifty?'
'There were that many found dead in the back of that lorry at Dover, weren't there?' Holland said.
'There were more,' Thorne said. He remembered the smell when he'd stepped up into that box the night before. He wondered what it must have been like for whoever had opened a pair of lorry doors a few years earlier and stared as the sunlight fell across the tangled heaps of crushed and emaciated dead. Fifty-eight Chinese immigrants, crammed like sardines into a sealed lorry, and found suffocated when it was opened on a steaming summer's afternoon. Their clothes in nice, neat piles. Their bodies in considerably less ordered ones. There had, of course, been a major outcry at the time. There were demands for tougher controls, for positive action to curb this barbaric trade. Thorne knew very well that more might have been done had the corpses in the back of that lorry been those of donkeys or puppies or kittens .
'How can that many get through?' Stone asked. 'Don't these lorries get searched?'
'Sometimes,' Tughan said. 'They can hide in secret compartments or behind stacks of false cargo.'
Stone was shaking his head. 'You'd think they'd check the lorries a bit more thoroughly after all that business at Dover, though.' Thorne knew that it wouldn't have taken a particularly thorough search to have found those Chinese immigrants earlier. To have saved their lives. They'd tried to hide behind a few crates of tomatoes.
'The smugglers aren't stupid,' Tughan said. 'They'll try to avoid the ports that have got scanners, but even those that do have them are overrun. They can't possibly check any more than a handful or you'd have queues fifty miles long waiting to board the ferries.' Thorne knew Tughan was right. Unable to sleep the night before, he'd
