out on that in the weeks and months to come. Anyway, I'm sure you'll be looking forward to getting back to work on your own cases. To getting your offices back, at least.' There was a smattering of unenthusiastic laughter.
'We'll have a pint or two later, of course, and say our goodbyes. Obviously, we won't be vanishing right away. Like I said, there are a few loose ends.' And he was moving away towards the door. Brigstocke cleared his throat, walked a few paces after Tughan, then turned. He looked to Thorne, Kitson and the rest of his officers.
'I'll be getting together with DS Karim later. Re-assigning the casework.' His parting words were spoken like a third-rate manager trying to gee up a team who were six-nil down at half time. 'There's still plenty of disorganised criminals out there who need catching.'
For a few seconds after Brigstocke had left the room, nobody moved or spoke. One of those uneasy silences that follows a speech. Gradually, the volume increased, though not much, and the bodies changed position, so that in a few subtle turns, half paces and casual shifts of the shoulder, the single team became two very separate ones. The officers from each unit began to huddle and look to their own, their conversations far from secret, but no longer to be shared. The members of Team 3 at the Serious Crime Group (West) stayed silent a little longer than their SO7 counterparts. It was Yvonne Kitson who sought to break the silence and change the mood at the same time.
'How's the philosophy going, Andy? Nietzsche is it this week, or Jean-Paul Sartre?'
Stone tried to look blank, but the blush betrayed him. 'Eh?'
'It's all right, Andy,' she said. 'All blokes have tricks. All women too, come to that.'
Stone shrugged, the smile spreading. 'It works.'
'Obviously you have to use whatever you've got.' Holland lounged against a desk. 'Only some of us prefer to rely on old-fashioned charm and good looks.'
'Money goes down quite well,' Karim said, grinning. 'Failing that, begging usually works for me.'
'Begging's excellent,' Kitson said.
Holland looked to Thorne. He was six feet or so distant from them, the incomprehension still smeared across his face like a stain.
'What about you, sir?' Holland asked. 'Any tricks you want to share with the group?'
Stone was laughing at his joke before he even started speaking. 'I'm sure Dr. Hendricks could get his hands on some Rohypnol if you're desperate.'
But Thorne was already moving towards the door.
'Can't you be predictable just once in your life,' Tughan said. 'I thought you'd be glad to see the back of me.' Tughan stood in the doorway to his office. Brigstocke was nowhere to be seen.
'Look, we can't stand each other,' Thorne said. 'Fair enough. Neither of us loses a great deal of sleep about that, I'm sure, and once or twice, yes, I've said things just to piss you off. Right? But this he gestured back towards the Incident Room, towards what Tughan had said in there 'is seriously stupid. I know you're not personally responsible for the decision.'
'No, I'm not. But I stand by it.'
''Ours is not to reason why'. That it?'
'Not if we want to get anywhere.'
'Career-wise, you mean? Or are we back to results again?'
'Take your pick.'
Thorne leaned against the door jamb. He and Tughan stood on either side of the doorway, staring across the corridor at the wall opposite. At a pin board festooned with Police Federation newsletters and dog-eared photocopies of meaningless graphs. At an AIDS-awareness leaflet, a handwritten list of last season's fixtures for Metropolitan Police rugby teams, a torn-out headline from the Standard that said, 'Capital gun crime out of control', at postcards advertising various items for sale: a Paul Smith suit; a scooter; a second-hand Play Station.
'It's the timing I don't understand,' Thorne said. 'Now, I mean, after.'
'I think this decision was made before the shooting in the minicab office.'
'And that didn't cause anybody to rethink it?'
'Apparently not.'
Richards, the concentric-circles man, came along the corridor with a file that was, by all accounts, terribly important. Tughan took it with barely a word. Thorne waited until the Welshman had gone.
'When we found that lorry driver dead and those two in the woods with bullets in the backs of their heads, you were fired up. 'This has got to stop,' you said. You were angry about the Izzigils, about Marcus Moloney. You were up for it. There's no point pretending you weren't.'
Tughan said nothing, clutched the file he was holding that little bit tighter to his chest.
'How do these people decide what we're going to do?' Thorne asked.
'Who we target and who we ignore? Which lucky punters have a chance when it comes to us catching the men responsible for killing their husband or their father, and which poor sods might just as well ask a traffic warden to sort it out? How do these people formulate policy?
Do they roll a fucking dice every morning? Pick a card?' Tughan spoke to the pin board scratched at a small mark on the lapel of his brown suit. 'They divvy up the men and they dole out the money as they see fit. It goes where they think it's most needed, and where they think it might get a return. It's not rocket science, Thorne.'
'So, which deserving cause came out of the hat this time?'
'We're shifting direction slightly, looking towards vice. The Job wants to crack down on the foreign gangs moving into the game: Russians, Albanians, Lithuanians. It's getting nasty, and when one of these gangs wants to hit another operation they tend to go for the soft targets. They kill the girls.'
Thorne shrugged. 'So, Memet Zarif and Stephen Ryan just go about their business?'
'Nobody's giving them 'Get out of Jail Free' cards.'
'Talking of which.'
'Gordon Rooker will be released by the beginning of next week.' Thorne had figured as much. 'Right. He's one of those loose ends you were talking about.'
'Rooker can give us names, a few decent ones, and we're going to take them.'
'Define 'decent'.'
'Look, there'll be better results, but there'll be plenty of worse ones.
Right now, this is what we've decided to settle for.' Even Thorne's sarcastic grunt failed to set Tughan off. He'd remained remarkably calm throughout the entire exchange. 'You're a footie fan, right? How would you feel if your team played beautiful stuff all bloody season and won fuck all?'
If Thorne had felt like lightening the atmosphere, he might have asked Tughan if he'd ever seen Spurs play. But he didn't. 'You won't be offended if I don't hang around for the emotional goodbye later on?' he said.
'I'd be amazed if you did.'
Thorne pushed himself away from the door, took half a step.
'I'm the same as you,' Tughan said. 'Really. I want to get them all, but sometimes. no, most of the bloody time, you've got to be content with just some of them. Not always the right ones, either-nowhere near, in fact but what can you do?' Thorne completed the step, carried on taking them. Thinking: No, not the same as me.
He'd found nothing suitable in Kentish Town and fared little better in Highgate Village, where there seemed to be a great many antique shops and precious little else. He'd carried on up to Hampstead and spent half an hour failing to find a parking space. Now, he was trying his luck in Archway, where it was easy enough to park, but where he wasn't exactly spoiled for choice in other ways.
Having decided with no idea what else to get for a seven-month-old baby to buy clothes, Thorne couldn't really explain why he was wandering aimlessly around a chemist's. As it went, it was no ordinary chemist's and had quickly become Thorne's favourite shop after he'd discovered it a few months earlier. Yes, you could buy shampoo and get a prescription filled, but it also sold, for no reason Thorne could fathom, catering-sized packs of peanuts past their sell-by date, motor oil, crisps, and other stuff not seen before or since in a place you normally went for pills and pile cream. It was also ridiculously cheap, as if the chemist were just trying to turn a quick profit on items that had been delivered there by mistake. Thorne might have wondered if somewhere there wasn't a grocers with several unwanted boxes of condoms and corn-plasters, if it weren't for the fact that there were a number of such multi-purpose outlets springing up in the area.
Maybe small places could no longer afford to specialise. Maybe shopkeepers just wanted to keep life interesting. Whatever the reason, Thorne knew a number of places where the astute shopper could kill several birds with one stone, even if it might not otherwise have occurred to him to do so. One of his favorites was a shop that
