Chamberlain put down her glass, leaned forward. ''She chose prison.' You said it yourself. You didn't put the weapon in her hand, Tom.'
'In a way, I did.' He took a sip of Guinness. It wasn't really tasting any better. 'Didn't somebody say that knowledge is a dangerous thing?' Feeling his brain start to fuzz up just a little. Breathing a bit more heavily.
Thinking: knowledge is a knife.
'Probably,' Chamberlain said. 'Some smart-arse.' The dour look on her face, the way her soft Yorkshire accent suited the word so perfectly, made Thorne laugh. A hole was punched through the murk that had been settling about their heads and sucking away the joy that was normally there between them.
'How's your cold case going, anyway? The case of the punctured publican.'
'It wasn't a publican, it was in a pub car park and 'cold' doesn't come close. There's icicles hanging off the bloody thing. Mind you, I've not exactly been giving it my undivided attention.'
'Maybe now you'll be able to focus a bit more.'
'Maybe.'
Thorne touched his glass to her hand. 'Billy Ryan. Jessica Clarke. You need to let it go now.'
Slowly, her eyes widened. ''Let it go'. Right. And the names Bishop, Palmer and Foley mean nothing to you.'
Thorne's hand moved to his scrubby beard and his thoughts to the cases Chamberlain was talking about. Cases that had left their mark on him. Carved deep, but never less than fresh, never less than tender. How had one fifteen-year-old put it? 'Like a mask you could never take off.'
'I think', he said after a few moments, 'that I preferred it when you were insulting me.'
Tottenham Court Road tube station was pretty handy for both of them. Thorne would take the Northern Line up to Kentish Town. Chamberlain could change at Oxford Circus, just two stops away from Victoria Station and the last train back to Worthing.
They walked past the church of St. Giles in the Field. It had been founded at the start of the twelfth century as a leper hospital, and its parish records contained the names of Milton, Marvell and Garrick. The burial grounds that lay behind the spiked metal fence contained many of those who'd met their end at Tyburn tree and whose final taste of alcohol had cost considerably less than Thorne and Chamberlain had just spent.
They crossed the road at Denmark Street and turned towards the Charing Cross Road. To the north of them, the skyline was dominated by Centre Point. The office block once thought smart, and even stranger, tall had stood totally empty for some time after it was first erected, and a charity for the homeless, as an ironic gesture, had taken its name. The building rose above an area that a hundred and fifty years before had been the city's most notorious and overcrowded slum. The Rookery had been a maze of filthy alleyways, rat-runs and courts where the poor had lived in squalor, and where crime had been as endemic as the disease. A sprawling network of so-called 'thieves kitchens' and 'flash houses' had made it a virtual no-go area for the police officers of the time.
Thorne outlined the history of the place as they walked. It had flourished, if that was an appropriate word, for over a century, before being demolished to make way for what was now New Oxford Street some time in the mid- nineteenth century. Thorne couldn't remember the exact date.
'You and I seem to talk about history a lot,' Chamberlain said. Thorne laughed. 'Some of it not quite so dim and distant.'
'Why do you think that is?'
Thorne considered the question for a moment. 'Maybe because we think we can learn from it.'
'Can we?'
'We can. I'm not sure we have. I'm not convinced anything's changed very much.'
Chamberlain said something, but her words were lost beneath the wail of a siren as a police van rushed past them towards Leicester Square. Thorne shook his head. Chamberlain waited for the noise to die down before she repeated herself. 'Perhaps that's reassuring.' Gazing through the windows of Internet cafes and computer stores, Thorne couldn't help but picture the gutters running with sewage, families packed into cellars. Men and women driven to prostitution and theft to maintain a standard of living that could only be described as inhuman.
'Have you read Oliver Twist?' Thorne asked. It was the iniquity of life in the Rookery, and places like it, that Dickens had described, perhaps a touch romantically, in his creation of Bill Sikes, Fagin and his gang of under-age rogues.
Chamberlain shook her head. 'I've only seen the musical. Shameful, isn't it?'
Thorne had taken a few steps before he decided to make his confession.
'I was in a production of Oliver! at school. I was the Artful Dodger.'
Chamberlain took his arm. 'Now that I would have paid good money to see.'
'You'd have felt very ripped off..' Thorne had actually enjoyed himself. He'd done his turn, shown off and clowned around, blissfully unaware that the real people on which the characters were based did somewhat worse than pick a pocket or two.
'Can you remember any of the songs?' Chamberlain asked. She began to hum 'Consider Yourself', but Thorne didn't join in.
'I remember I had a battered top hat that you could squash, and then it would pop up again. I remember my Nan waving at me on the first night when I walked on. I remember spending the whole time trying to cop off with a girl from the sixth form who was playing Nancy.' They turned into the entrance to the tube station. Walked down the stairs towards the turnstiles.
'Right,' Chamberlain said. 'So you were in helpless thrall to your knob even then.'
Back at the flat, Thorne sat at the kitchen table waiting for the kettle to boil. He called his father but the line was permanently engaged.
He was still getting used to having the place to himself again. Hendricks had moved back into his flat the week before, and, if he was being honest, Thorne missed having him around. It was good to have some peace and quiet, though, and he certainly didn't miss the discarded trainers dotted about the place or the disparaging comments about his record collection.
After five minutes he rang the operator, asked them to check his father's line. His dad's phone had been left off the hook. It was nice to have some privacy back too. Although Hendricks had shown no such inhibitions, Thorne had felt somewhat uncomfortable about being less than fully clothed in front of his friend. He knew he was being stupid, or worse, but the journey from bathroom to bedroom had occasionally been a little awkward.
Thorne carried his tea through to the living room. He put some music on and, while he was up, took a well- thumbed encyclopedia of London from the shelves.
The Rookery of St. Giles had been demolished in 1847. He drank tea and listened to Laura Cantrell, and to the hum of distant traffic between the tracks. He sat and read. While various King Georges had come and gone, while science and revolution were changing the world beyond recognition, the deprivation and crime in the worst areas of the capital had reached incredible levels. The poor and the sick had robbed and murdered one another, and sold their children to buy gin, while the law had more or less left them to get on with it.
Two centuries on, the drugs were different. The gun had replaced the cudgel and the cut-throat razor. The Rookeries were called housing estates.
Thorne remembered what Chamberlain had said when the siren had stopped screaming.
'Reassuring' was definitely not the word.
TWENTY-FOUR
'So, come on,' Rooker said. 'What level of protection do I get?' He looked from Thorne to Holland and back again, searching their faces for some hint. The two detectives looked at each other, milking the moment.
To say that the SO7 case specifically the part involving the testimony of Gordon Rooker had been thrown into confusion would be an understatement. The concept of witness protection did, after all, become a little pointless when the individual from whom you were providing protection had been carved up by an ex-wife. As Thorne had explained to Rooker before, there were different levels of protection, each appropriate to the perceived threat. Rooker had clearly grasped the concept, and, with the prison jungle drums going mental, had been on the phone before Ryan's death had so much as made it into the papers. He'd ranted and raved and demanded to know where
