‘I wasn’t, I swear.’
‘And all you’ve succeeded in doing is making yourself feel old.’
Thorne laughed, for the first time in a few days. He pushed up close behind her and slid his arm across her stomach. After a few seconds he felt awkward and began to wonder if she would want it there, so he took it away again.
FIVE
As per the standard system of rotas and rest days, Thorne spent seven Saturdays out of every eight at home. Normally, a Saturday morning would be taken up with sleeping far later than usual, nipping out for a newspaper then coming home for a gloriously unhealthy breakfast. Since Louise had come into his life, these were no longer always solitary activities, and thankfully the same was true of the sex, which could occasionally be squeezed in between the fry-up and Football Focus.
This Saturday, two days after Emily Walker’s murder, all rest days had been cancelled and overtime approved where necessary. Thorne sat in his office at Becke House, not looking through statements, ignoring the reports on the desk in front of him, wondering instead if the possibility of sex had now become remote.
When would it be all right to talk about it? Just how much of a self-centred bastard was he being, even thinking about it?
He looked over to the desk opposite, where Yvonne Kitson was working considerably harder than he was. She had been taken off a domestic murder that was all but done and dusted, and drafted in to bolster the top end of the team. Thorne was grateful to have her on board. Kitson was one of the best detectives they had, her achievements that much more impressive considering her circumstances, past and present. For several years she had been a single mum of two, her marriage having collapsed after a messy affair with a senior colleague that had also resulted in her formerly smooth progress through the ranks coming to a shuddering halt.
She glanced up from her desk, saw Thorne looking. She dropped her eyes again, turned a page. ‘What?’
Once, when neither had been laid for a while and it was debatable which was the more drunk, there had been the mildest of flirtations between the two of them, but they were long past that.
‘Saturday,’ Thorne said.
Kitson scoffed: ‘Never mind the bloody Tottenham game, or a morning under the duvet with Louise, or whatever you were thinking about missing. Some of us should be watching our sons playing rugby. I’ll have to be even more of a taxi service than I am already to make up for this.’
For a few moments, Thorne thought about telling her what had happened to Louise, getting a female perspective on it. But he just smiled and went back to the reports in front of him.
A minute later, a ball of paper bounced off his desktop and on to the floor. He bent to retrieve it and stared at Kitson. She shrugged, denying all knowledge.
Thorne unwrapped what turned out to be a transcript of that morning’s calls to the Incident Room. The published E-fit had generated a good deal of attention, and while the Press Office was handling the understandable media interest, the team itself had to deal with any information from the public. Thorne and Brigstocke had clearly underestimated the extent to which the picture would inspire some of the city’s more community-minded nutcases.
‘I wouldn’t mind coming in,’ Kitson said, pointing to the sheet of paper in Thorne’s hand, ‘if I didn’t have to spend all morning sorting through that shit.’
‘Got to be done, though,’ Thorne said.
They all knew it. Everyone on the team routinely joked about procedure and bitched about paper-pushing, and 99 per cent of the time, with a primary lead as shaky as their E-fit, nothing would come from this kind of work, but you had to double- and triple-check, just in case. Nobody wanted to be the one who missed the vital piece of information tucked away in a long list of crank calls. The clue hidden in the crap. In an age where the inquiry into the inquiry was commonplace, arse-covering had become second nature. It began before the victim was cold and would continue until the judge’s gavel came down.
It didn’t stop the whingeing, though.
‘Not a single name on there more than once,’ Kitson said.
‘You’re wrong.’ Thorne ran his finger down the list, stopping to beckon Holland inside when he saw his face come around the door. ‘Three different people phoned to let us know they think it looks like the bloke who runs the garage in EastEnders.’
‘We should arrest him anyway,’ Kitson said. ‘For crimes against acting.’
Thorne looked up at Holland.
‘Had a call I think you might be interested in,’ Holland said.
‘Don’t tell me. The killer looks like someone in Emmerdale.’
Holland dropped a scrap of paper on to Thorne’s desk: a scribbled name and number. ‘He’s a DI in Leicester. Someone up there saw Jesmond on TV last night talking about the Walker murder and thought it sounded familiar.’
‘Sounded what?’
‘So, this DI was calling to check the details we didn’t give out to the press. See if they matched up with a murder they caught a few weeks back.’
‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Kitson said.
Thorne was already dialling…
Once the pleasantries were out of the way, DI Paul Brewer told Thorne that the body of Catherine Burke, a nurse aged twenty-three, had been discovered three weeks earlier in the flat she had shared with her boyfriend, on a quiet street behind Leicester City ’s football ground.
She had been struck on the back of the head with a heavy ornament and then suffocated with a plastic bag.
‘It was the suffocation bit that got the old antennae twitching,’ Brewer said, the East Midlands accent not as thick as Thorne had been expecting. ‘When your superintendent mentioned it on the box. Wasn’t me that saw it, but as soon as I heard I thought it would be worth following up. You know, just to make sure.’ He sounded pleased with himself. ‘Looks like I was spot on.’
‘Three weeks ago, you said?’
‘Right.’
‘And?’
A chuckle. ‘And… brick wall, mate. We’ve got a description of a bloke she was seen talking to outside the hospital the day before, but we’ve had sweet FA off that. She was an occasional drug user, tablets mostly, nicked them from her own hospital as it turned out, but that’s led us nowhere. To be honest, it was all going stone cold until your one turned up.’
‘Stroke of luck,’ Thorne said.
Brewer said something else, but Thorne was too busy mouthing obscenities at Kitson and Holland.
‘What about forensics?’
‘That was the easy bit,’ Brewer said. ‘Looks like she scratched him when he had the bag over her head. We dug plenty of blood and skin from under her nails, so we can match the bastard up as soon as we make an arrest.’
Thorne scribbled ‘GOT DNA’ on the piece of paper and pushed it across the desk for Holland and Kitson to see.
‘You still there?’
‘So, how are we going to work this?’ Thorne asked.
‘Not a clue, mate,’ Brewer said. ‘I know it won’t be anything to do with me, so it don’t matter what I think. My guv’nor’s probably on the phone to your guv’nor as we speak, carving it up. Politics, budgets, all that shit. We just do what we’re told, right?’
‘Right…’
‘Just so you know… I’m not bothered about territory, anything like that,’ Brewer said. ‘No need to worry about any of that crap. We can sort out who gets the credit once we’ve caught him, fair enough?’
