a few letters after your name.?' Rooker muttered curses.
Thorne watched as he snatched the lid from his tobacco tin, dug into it. 'Why are you so very keen to get out, Rooker? Got a little something stashed away?'
Rooker spat back the answer without so much as raising his head. 'I told you before.'
'Right. Some desperately moving crap about fresh air and wanting to watch your grandson play football.'
'Fuck you, Thorne.'
'You never know, Gordon. If the pair of you avoid injury, you might be out in time to watch him score the winning goal in the FA Cup Final. Although, with him playing for West Ham.' The motorcyclist idled the bike, steady against the kerb, waiting out the final minute.
Trying to focus. Deciding to go half a minute early, to take into account the probable wait for a gap in the late afternoon traffic. Trying to clear his head. Trivial thoughts intruding, sullying the pure white horizon of his mind in the final few moments. They'd need to set aside enough for school uniforms. They weren't cheap when you needed to buy four or five of everything. Did the all-inclusive package in the Maldives include booze? He'd need to check. That could make a big difference.
He let one car pass, two cars, a push bike before accelerating away hard from the kerb and swinging the machine across both lanes in a wide U-turn. He pulled up outside a dry cleaner's, two doors along from the address he would be visiting. Then, within fifteen seconds, the moves he'd gone over in his mind a hundred times or more in the last few hours.
He flicked the bike on to its stand, left the engine running. He walked quickly to the box on the back. It had been left unlocked. He reached inside, withdrew his hand as soon as it had closed around the rubberised grip of the gun, and turned away from the street. The arm swung loose at his side as he walked, quickly but not too quickly from kerb to shop front Without breaking stride, he turned right into the open doorway of the minicab office. He was two large paces towards the counter before the man behind it looked up and by then the gun was being leveled at him. A man in an armchair in the corner lowered his newspaper and executed a near-perfect double-take before crying out. Hassan Zarif cried out too as a bullet passed through him. The spray of blood that fell across the calendar behind him was somewhat over dramatic in comparison with the gentle hiss from the weapon that had caused it. The motorcyclist fired again and Zarif fell back, dropping behind the wooden counter. The gun bucked in his hand, but only slightly. No more than it might recoil had it brushed the surface of something hot to test the temperature.
As he strode forward, his target having disappeared from sight, the door to the right of the counter burst open, and the motorcyclist turned just as the gun in Tan Zarif s hand began to do its work. The bullet smashed through the plastic of the darkened visor. By the time the first passer-by had spilled his shopping, and others who knew very well that a car was not backfiring close by were starting to run, the man in the leathers had dropped, with very little noise, on to the grubby linoleum.
For a few seconds inside the tiny office, there was only the ringing report of the unsilenced gunshot. The high-pitched hum of it rose above the deep rumble of a bus, passing by outside on its way towards Turnpike Lane.
Tan Zarif shouted to the man in the armchair, who jumped up and ran past him through the doorway that led to the rear of the office. Zarif stepped smartly across to the body. And it was a body, that much was obvious: the ragged hole in the visor and the blood that poured along the cushioned neck of the helmet and down, made it clear that the man on the floor would not be getting up again.
It didn't seem to matter.
The man who had been sitting in the armchair, the man who was now behind the counter bending over the bloodied figure of Hassan Zarif, clapped his hairy hands across his ears as Hassan's younger brother emptied his gun into a dead man's chest.
The first part of the drive back had been pleasant enough. They'd moved through the Wiltshire and Hampshire countryside quickly, but with enough time to enjoy the scenery, to laugh at the signs to Barton Stacey and Nether Wallop. Once they'd joined the M3, however, things had quickly become frustrating. It was one of those journeys where drivers had decided to sit there, beetling along at seventy or below in all three lanes. As usual, Thorne sat in the outside lane, grumbling a good deal and damning those ahead of him for the selfish morons they were. He never for a moment entertained the possibility that he might be one of them.
A couple of weeks into spring, and summer weather seemed to have come early. The BMW's fans were chucking out all the cold air they could, but even in shirtsleeves it was stifling inside the car. Holland took a long swig from a bottle of water. 'Still pleased you bought this?'
Thorne was singing quietly to himself. He reached across, turned down the volume of the first Highwaymen album. 'Say again?'
'The car.' Holland fanned himself theatrically. 'Still think it was a good move?'
Thorne shrugged, as if the fact that they were all but melted to the leather seats was unimportant. 'When they made these, cars didn't have air conditioning. It's the price you pay for a classic'
'I'm surprised they had the wheel when this thing was made.'
'Good one, Dave.'
'And what you pay to keep this on the road for a year would buy you a car with AC.'
Thorne drew close to the back of a Transit van and flashed his lights. He slammed his palm against the wheel and eased his foot off the accelerator when the signal was ignored.
'Rooker's not easy to like, is he?' Holland said.
'Probably the right reaction, considering you're one of the Met's finest and he kills people for a living. Not that I haven't met plenty of murderers I could sink a pint or two with. and more than a few coppers I'd happily have beaten to death.'
'Right, but Rooker's an arse hole whichever way you look at it.'
'You do know that bit about 'the Met's finest' was ironic, don't you?'
Holland opened his window an inch, turned his face towards it.
'Absolutely.'
'Rooker was a touch more likeable when I had something he wanted,' Thorne said. 'And he'd probably say the same thing about me.' He pulled across into the middle lane but was still unable to get ahead of the Transit van. It had a sticker on the back that read: 'How am I driving?' Thorne thought about calling the phone number that was given and swearing at whoever was at the other end for a while.
'Tell me about some of them,' Holland said. 'The murderers you got on with.'
Thorne glanced into his rear-view mirror. He saw the line of cars snaking away behind him. He saw the tension, real or imagined, around his eyes.
He thought about a man named Martin Palmer; a man who, in the final analysis, had killed because he was terrified not to. Palmer had strangled and stabbed, and his final, clumsy attempt at something like redemption had been made at a tragic price. He had changed Tom Thorne's thinking, not to mention his face, for ever. Thorne had not 'got on' with Martin Palmer. He had despised and abused him. But there had been pity, too, and sadness at glimpsing the man a murderer could so easily have been. Thorne had been disturbed, was still disturbed, by feelings that had asserted themselves; and by others that had been altogether absent when he'd sat and swapped oxygen with Martin Palmer.
Then there was last year: the Foley case.
The murderers you got on with.
'I don't really know where to start,' Thorne said. 'Dennis Nielsen was all right if you got to know him, and Fred West was quite a good laugh, till he topped himself. Talking of which, I remember one night, I was playing darts with Harold Shipman. Harry, I used to call him..' Holland let out a loud, long-suffering sigh. 'If you're going to try to be funny, can you turn up the music again?' They drove on, the car barely getting into top gear for more than a few minutes at a time. The monotony yielded only briefly to drama when Thorne spent too long watching a kestrel hovering above the hard shoulder, and came within inches of rear-ending an Audi.
'How's Sophie and the baby?' he asked.
'They're good.'
'What is she now?'
'Nearly seven months. It feels like we're getting our lives back a bit, you know?'
