Kitson thanked everyone and put away the pictures. She was turning to leave when a man she had not spotted before came marching across the road in her direction. He was probably mid-twenties, skinny as a stick, with bad skin and dirty-blond hair teased into sharp spikes. His walk was oddly purposeful, and the fact that he was grinning was probably the only reason why Bridges did not step forward to meet him.
‘I know one of your lot,’ he said.
Kitson was wary. ‘Oh yes?’
‘We did a job together once, as it goes. I helped him catch a bloke. You can ask him about it.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Thorne.’ He stared at her, waiting for some sign of recognition and seeing none. ‘Been a few years, like, but you don’t forget stuff like that. We’re talking seriously heavy business.’ He stepped a little closer. ‘You know him?’
‘Yeah, I know him.’
The grin grew wider and Kitson got a good look at what few teeth the boy had left, brown against grey gums. She could almost smell the rot. A junkie’s mouth.
‘Tell him Spike says hello, yeah? He’ll know who you mean.’ He began rooting in the pockets of his jacket and eventually produced a packet of cigarettes. ‘Tell him to take care.’
Walking away, Bridges was keen to know what the boy had been talking about, but Kitson ignored the question, talking instead about what Bobby and the others had told her. She said they should be pleased with a good night’s work: ‘It puts Garvey here. Tells us a bit more about the way he does things.’
Bridges looked unconvinced. ‘Doesn’t help us catch him, though, does it? Not really sure of the point.’
‘It’s called building a case, all right? Helps us put him away when we do catch him.’
‘If you say so.’
Kitson picked up her speed and moved a step or two ahead of the TDC. The lad was probably able to handle himself, and if she’d been interested she might have said he wasn’t bad looking, but she couldn’t help feeling she’d got herself lumbered with the superintendent’s idiot son.
Bridges grumbled behind her. ‘It all takes so bloody long.’
‘You want a job that’s quick and easy,’ Kitson said, ‘you made a very bad career choice.’
‘I thought he’d be back by now, to be honest.’ Louise took another look at her watch and pulled up her legs. ‘I knew he was going to be late, but it’s usually before this. Maybe there’s been a break in the case.’
Hendricks was sitting at the other end of the sofa. ‘He’ll call if something’s happened,’ he said. He reached down for the wine bottle and poured each of them another glass. ‘This is a bloody awful case, Lou.’
‘Why does he always get the bad ones?’
‘They seem to suit him.’
‘Maybe I should be worried about that,’ Louise said. ‘If he’s going to be the father of my child.’
‘Don’t worry. With any luck, the kid’ll get your looks and your personality. ’
‘Right, and his bloody taste in music.’
They were talking over an album Hendricks had dug out from the back of a cupboard, a CD he’d left at the flat one time or another, something they both knew Thorne would have hated.
‘I’ve got to say, I was amazed he had it in him at all.’
‘He was sound asleep at the time,’ Louise said. ‘I just helped myself.’
Hendricks laughed for a few seconds longer than he might have done with fewer glasses of wine inside him. Said, ‘So you are going to try again?’
‘We’ve not talked about it, and maybe not yet… but I want to, yeah.’
Hendricks drank, holding the wine in his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing. ‘Funny, I remember sitting here a couple of years ago… well, lying here actually, because I was staying over while I was getting the damp sorted in my flat. I was upset, because I really wanted a kid back then and the bloke I was with at the time wasn’t keen, so…’
Louise shuffled across and let a hand drop on to Hendricks’ knee. ‘I remember telling him about seeing this… exhibition on children’s mortuary facilities, this special room all done up to look like a kid’s bedroom. I’d seen a kid in there and it was like being kicked in the stomach. Anyway, I was telling him all this and suddenly I was just lying here, crying like a girl. No offence.’
‘None taken.’
Hendricks took another swig, emptied the glass. ‘Silly soft sod.’
‘You’d still like to have a child, though?’ Louise asked. ‘“Back then”, you said.’
‘Yeah, ’course I would. But now it’s just like… if it happens, it happens, you know? There’s no point getting worked up about it.’
‘That’s how I feel, I think. I say that – if we get pregnant again I’ll probably be going up the wall – but I reckon I’m less stressed about the whole idea now.’
‘That’s good,’ Hendricks said. ‘I mean, stress can have a lot to do with… you know.’
‘How was Tom? When you got upset?’
‘Awkward.’
Louise nodded, half smiling. ‘That’s how he’s been about this. Like he doesn’t know what to say. Or he wants to say something but he doesn’t know how to get it out.’
‘He’ll get there in the end.’
‘Yeah, that’s him,’ Louise said. ‘Awkward. And only happy when he’s got some awful murder case to get his teeth into.’
‘I don’t know about happy.’
‘OK then, comfortable.’
Hendricks thought, said, ‘Yeah, that’s about right.’
And they sat there and carried on drinking, comfortable enough with one another to say nothing for a while.
Thorne had rounded off a longish day with a quick one in the Oak, which had turned into a couple once Brigstocke and a few of the other lads had turned up. He had not meant to stay quite so long, but was glad he did, knowing now, as he drove back towards Kentish Town, that he had needed to let off a little steam.
It was better for everyone concerned.
He reached across to the passenger seat for his mobile, deciding to compound the fact that he was almost certainly over the limit by committing a second offence. If he were stopped, it would be by one of only two kinds of copper. There were those who would call him all sorts of silly beggar and look the other way and those who did their job properly and would gleefully do him without turning a hair.
He reckoned that fifty-fifty was pretty good odds.
‘Are you hands free?’ Kitson asked.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think that if anyone ever asks, I should deny having this conversation. ’
‘Where are you?’
‘At home,’ Kitson said. ‘Got back about ten minutes ago to a kitchen that looks like a bomb-site and a bloke who’s pissed off because he’s had two kids giving him grief all evening.’
Kitson had already left Becke House for her evening shift when Thorne had returned from his meeting with Sarah Dowd. He had spent the rest of the day being reasonably constructive between long bouts of window- watching. Trying to put together a rough picture of Anthony Garvey’s movements in recent weeks, and asking himself why he’d let Kitson handle the rough-sleeper lead while he had been content to drink coffee and do marriage-guidance duty in Shoreditch.
Now, he asked Kitson how things had panned out in the West End.
‘Aside from having to work with a tosspot of a trainee, pretty well.’ She told him about the sighting of a man who was almost certainly Anthony Garvey, who in all likelihood had been following Graham Fowler, waiting to pick his moment.
‘I was wondering how he does it,’ Thorne said. ‘Pick his moment I mean.’
‘Maybe he wants to do them in a particular order.’
