'Shot in the head.'
'Nice.'
'But not until they'd smashed half of it to pulp with a dirty great tree branch.'
'The A7,' Kitson said. 'That's the main road between Edinburgh and Carlisle. My ex had family up there.'
Holland had his notebook in his hand and began flipping through the pages.
Thorne had been right on the nail at the morning briefing. It looked like the lorry had been hijacked after coming into Scotland on the route he'd described. The cargo would have been loaded on to another vehicle, then the original lorry driven south and dumped at Chieveley.
Holland had found what he was looking for. 'Right,' he said. 'The lay-by was just north of Galashiels. It was the Lothian and Borders boys who found the bodies.'
'Found the what?' Thorne said.
'There were two other bodies. Three altogether.' Holland looked from Thorne to Kitson. 'No identification on them. Gunshot wounds to the head.'
Kitson spat out the breath in her lungs like it had suddenly become foul. She took a mouthful of fresher air. 'A couple of them put up a fight, maybe?' She looked to Thorne.
He nodded. 'Or tried to run.'
'I think that's the theory they're working on,' Holland said. Thorne immediately pictured the two men thrashing desperately through woods in the dark. Tearing, breathless, through wet leaves and sprawling over rotting stumps. He saw them fall before the echo of the shots had died away. He knew that whatever last word passed through their heads the second before the bullet did, it had certainly not been umit. He had been taught a Turkish toast; maybe he should go back and learn a few Turkish prayers.
The door opened wider and Holland stepped aside as Brigstocke and Tughan marched in.
'Ten bodies now,' Tughan said. 'Double figures. This has to stop.'
Double figures? Tughan was making it sound as if the Ryan-Zarif turf war had now exceeded some unspoken quota of acceptable victims. Thorne had known stranger things to be true, but, for whatever reason, he had the impression that the plan to 'disrupt' had been superseded in light of the news from north of the border. Tughan certainly looked as if he now had something rather more direct in mind.
Brigstocke swept a hand through his thick, black hair, nudged his glasses with a knuckle. 'Ten bodies, and the civilian victims are starting to outnumber the soldiers.'
'Let's stop pissing around with monkeys then,' Thorne said. 'Go straight for the organ-grinders.'
Tughan held up a hand. 'That's exactly what we're going to do.'
'All right.' Thorne was thinking: I've got a date later, but there's still time. I needn't hang around too long. Finchley is a bit of a schlep, and trickier in terms of just dropping by, but Green Lanes isn't too far out of my way.
'We will put Billy Ryan away,' Tughan said. 'We'll get him with the Rooker case, and we'll get the Zarif brothers as well, eventually. Right now, our top priority has to be preventing any more deaths.'
'Eventually' was one word that Thorne hadn't wanted to hear.
'I'm going to the detective chief superintendent in the first instance and he may well have to take it higher. We'll make an official approach to Ryan, almost certainly through his solicitor, and we'll do the same thing to the Zarif family, probably via a community leader, or perhaps a priest.' Tughan was nodding to nobody in particular, as if he were trying to convince himself of something. 'Things have got to the point now where intervention might well do us as much good as investigation. Sitting down with these people is not something we do every day of the week, but if getting them around a table might help us put a stop to this fucking chaos, I'm happy to do it.' Thorne looked thoughtful for a second or two before he spoke. He was thinking it was no great surprise that Tughan was not exactly proposing to kick anybody's door in.
'Do we have to provide the sandwiches?' he said.
'Where you going?' The man behind the simple wooden counter asked the question with only the most cursory glance up from his newspaper. The thick accent transformed the three words into one: Werrugoeen?
'I'm not going anywhere,' Thorne said, 'but you're going back there to tell your boss that somebody wants to have a quick word with him.' Thorne looked hard at the man who was now giving him his full attention. He pointed back over the man's shoulder towards the dimly lit space behind him. He knew that a second man, sitting on a tatty armchair in the corner behind and to the left of him was also studying him intently.
Thorne held up his warrant card. 'Quick as you can.' The man slapped down his paper, snorted back phlegm and disappeared into the gloom.
The minicab office consisted of little more than a waiting room the size of a cupboard. An unpainted door to the right of the hatch led back into any number of rooms behind. Thorne guessed that the drivers themselves would be sitting nearby in their dodgy Vauxhalls and Toyotas, or perhaps waiting in the Zarifs' cafe next door. He turned and watched a few seconds of a film he didn't recognise on the TV bolted above the front door. The local news might be on the other side, might be showing the three goals Spurs had put past Everton earlier in the day. He let his eyes drop to the man on the armchair. The latter raised an eyebrow as if they were both just frustrated customers waiting for a lift home. He held Thorne's stare for longer than was strictly necessary before standing and walking through the side door towards the rear of the office.
A few seconds after it had closed, the door opened and Memet Zarif stepped into the waiting room. At the same time, Thorne was aware of the man he'd first spoken to resuming his position behind the counter. A few feet further back, hovering in the shadows, stood the man who'd been sitting in the armchair.
'You want a cab, Mr. Thorne?' Memet said. He wore a simple white shirt, buttoned at the collar, over black trousers and tasselled loafers.
Thorne smiled. 'No, thanks. I think I'd like to get home in one piece. Last minicab I took, the driver didn't know that a red light meant stop.'
'My drivers know what they're doing.'
'You sure?'
'Of course.'
'They know how to fill out insurance forms, do they?'
Memet laughed, glancing across to the men behind the counter and nodding towards Thorne. The man from the armchair moved forward and stood at the shoulder of the receptionist. He spat some Turkish in Thorne's direction.
Thorne whipped his head round and smiled. 'Same to you,' he said. He turned back to Memet, still smiling at the tremendous fun they were all having. 'So, you don't think it would be worth my while getting a few officers round here, checking that all your cars and all your fantastic drivers are fully insured?' Thorne was fighting against the sound of gunfire from the TV set. He raised his voice: 'I'd be wasting my time, would I?'
The noise from the TV suddenly dropped enough for Thorne to hear Memet sigh. 'Do you think we are stupid?'
It seemed to Thorne that everyone was awfully keen to tell him that the likes of Memet Zarif and Billy Ryan were anything but stupid. He didn't doubt that they were careful, but he refused to buy into a myth that he and his team were up against the gangland chapter of Mensa. Thorne had caught his fair share of supposedly clever villains, and he knew equally that plenty were thick as shit and doing very nicely for themselves. He knew that, actually, the most successful villains got by on instinct, like many of those who were out to catch them. Instinct was fallible, though, as Thorne knew only too well. Do you think we are stupid?
Memet was certainly clever enough to load a simple question with meaning. He was no longer talking about a minicab firm. Thorne moved past Memet, talking as he pushed open the wooden side door and stepped into a dimly lit corridor. 'I like what you've done with this place,' he said. Through the thin wall, he could hear the men behind the counter moving round to intercept him. Memet was following as Thorne walked calmly along a strip of greasy linoleum. The place smelled faintly musty. Flakes of magnolia paint crackled under his shoes.
'Did you do it yourself, or did you get professionals in?'
'What do you want, Mr. Thorne?'
They walked past the doorway that led to the reception hatch. The two hired hands stared at Thorne, then looked to Memet for instructions. At the end of the corridor was a small, gloomy living room. The three men sitting around the table put down their playing cards and looked up as Thorne approached. Hassan Zarif made to stand up,
