The problem was Tughan.
Half a mile shy of Hendon, Thorne had settled for Unchained. By the time Cash's vocal came in on 'Sea of Heartbreak' and he was smacking his palms against the steering wheel, Thorne was starting to feel much better. As well as it was possible to feel, given the current procedural set-up. The current personnel.
He drove east for a while, then cut south, crossing the North Circular and heading towards Golders Green.
Thorne had clashed with Nick Tughan on a case four years previously, and he'd thanked all the deities he didn't believe in when their paths had finally separated. While Thorne had been part of the new team established at the Serious Crime Group, Tughan had found other tits to get on at SO7. Now he was back as part of the investigation into the Ryan killings, the investigation with which Thorne and his team were supposed to cooperate. He was back giving Thorne grief. Worst of all, the slimy fucker was back as a DCI.
Though they hadn't set eyes on each other for four years, their relationship had picked up exactly where it had left off. It had been neatly encapsulated in their first, terse exchange in the Major Incident Room at Becke House.
'Thorne.'
'Tughan.'
'I'll settle for 'Sir' or 'Guv'.'
'What about 'twat'?'
If an officer were to get physical, to throw a punch, for example, at another officer of equal or subordinate rank, things could get a tad sticky. If he were to throw that punch and break a nose, or maybe a cheekbone even if he just handed out a good, hard slap, to a superior officer a DCI, say he would be in a world of very deep shit. Thorne was thinking about just how unfair this was when his mobile began to ring.
He took a deep breath when he saw the name on the caller ID.
'Tom?' Auntie Eileen, his father's younger sister. 'Listen, there's no need to panic.'
Thorne listened, glancing in the rear-view mirror, swerving across the road and pulling up in a bus lane. He listened as buses and cabs drove around him, deaf to the swearing of the irate drivers, to the bark and bleat of their horns. He listened, feeling sick, then scared, and finally fucked off beyond belief.
He ended the call, dragged the car through a U-turn, and accelerated north, back the way he'd come.
The scorch mark rose up the wall behind the cooker and licked a foot or so across the ceiling. The patterned wallpaper had bubbled, then blistered, where the grease that had accumulated over the years had begun to cook the dried paste and plaster beneath. The windows in the kitchen were open, had been for several hours, but still the stench was disgusting.
'No more fucking chip pans,' Thorne said. 'We get rid of all the pans, all the oil in the place.'
Eileen looked rather shocked. Thorne thought it was his language but then realised when she spoke that it was more than that.
'We should disconnect the cooker] she said. 'Better still, we should get someone to come and take the bloody thing away.'
'I'll get it organised,' Thorne said.
'Why don't you let me?'
'I'll sort it.'
Eileen shrugged and sighed. 'He knows he's not supposed to come in here.'
'Maybe we should put a lock on the door in the meantime.' Thorne began walking around the room, opening cupboards. 'He was probably hungry.'
She nodded. 'He might well have missed his lunch. I think he's been swearing at the Meals on Wheels woman.'
'They don't call it Meals on Wheels any more, Eileen.'
'He called her a 'fucking cow'. Told her to 'stick her hot-pot up her fat arse'.' She was trying not to laugh, but once she saw Thorne giving in to it, she stopped bothering to try.
With the tension relieved, they both leaned back against work tops Eileen folded her arms tight across her chest.
'Who called the fire brigade?' Thorne asked.
'He did, eventually. Once he worked out that it was the smoke alarm going off, he hit the panic button. For a while, I don't think he could remember what the noise was.'
Thorne let his head drop back, looked up at the ceiling. There was a spider's web of smoke-stained cracks around the light fitting. He knew very well that, some mornings, his father had trouble remembering what his shoes were for.
'We really need to think about doing something. Tom?' Thorne looked across at her. For years, Eileen and his father had not been close, but since the Alzheimer's diagnosis two years earlier, she had been a tower of strength. She'd organised virtually everything, and though she lived in Brighton, she still managed to get up to his father's place in St. Albans more often than Thorne did from north London.
Thorne felt tired and a little light-headed, exhausted as always by the combination punches of gratitude and guilt.
'How come they called you?' he asked.
'Your father gave one of the firemen my number, I think.' Thorne raised his arms and his voice in mock- bewilderment. 'My number's on all the contact sheets.' He started looking in cupboards again. 'Home and mobile.'
'He can always remember my number, for some reason. It must be quite an easy one.'
'And why did it take you so long to ring? I could have got here well before you.'
Eileen walked across to him, let a hand drop on to his forearm. 'He didn't want to worry you.'
'He knew I'd be bloody furious with him, you mean.'
'He didn't want to worry you, and then I didn't want to worry you. The fire was already out by the time they called, anyway. I just thought I'd better get here first, tidy up a bit.'
Thorne tried to shut the cupboard door, but it was wonky and refused to close properly, however hard he slammed it.
'Thanks for doing that,' he said, finally.
'We should at least talk about it,' she said. 'We could consider the options.' She pointed towards the cooker. 'We've been lucky, but maybe now's the time to think about your dad going somewhere. We could get this place valued, at the very least.'
'No.'
'I'm worried he might start going off; you know, getting lost. There was a thing on the radio about tagging. We could get one of those tags put on him and then at least if he did forget where he was.'
'That's what they do to juvenile offenders, Eileen. It's what they put on bloody muggers.' He moved past her and into the narrow hall. He glared at himself briefly in the hall mirror, then leaned on the door to the living room and stepped inside.
Jim Thorne sat forward on a brown and battered armchair. He was hunched over a low coffee-table, strewn with the pieces of various radios he'd taken apart and was failing to put together again. He spoke without looking up.
'I fancied chips,' he said. He had more of an accent than Thorne. The voice was higher, and prone to a rattle.
'There's a perfectly good chippy at the end of the road, for Christ's sake.'
'It's not the same.'
'You love the chips from that chippy.'
'I wanted to cook 'em.' He raised his head, gestured angrily with a thick piece of plastic. 'I wanted to make my own fucking chips, all right?'
Thorne bit his tongue. He walked slowly across to the armchair next to the fire and dropped into it.
He wondered whether this was the point at which the disease moved officially from 'mid' to 'late' stage. Maybe it wasn't defined by anything clinical at all. Maybe it was just the first time that the person with the disease almost killed themself.
'Bollocks,' his father said to nobody in particular. It had been a struggle up to now, no question, but they'd
