‘There’s nobody else,’ Thorne said. Nina Collins had offered to take him, begged to, but she was few people’s idea of a fit mother.
Louise lay with her feet up on the sofa, Elvis sprawled across her chest. She reached down, fumbling until she found her empty wine-glass. She held it up. ‘Another one would be nice.’
Thorne stood, took the glass and walked into the kitchen.
‘Why do you think he did it?’ Louise asked.
Thorne bent to take the bottle from the fridge. He blinked and saw Jason Mitchell’s face, the desperation in the boy’s eyes as Thorne had reached for him, tried to pull him away; the sound of his repeated ‘puffpuffing’ just audible above the sirens and the squeal of the train’s brakes.
‘Come with me, Jason,’ Thorne had said. ‘Let’s go back, see Auntie Nina.’
Jason had still been smiling, still blowing imaginary smoke and pointing back towards the bridge, when Thorne had walked him up the path to within sight of the cars and the flashing lights.
‘Tom?’
Thorne walked back into the living room and handed Louise her wine. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘Why did Garvey kill himself?’
‘Carol reckons it was always part of his plan,’ Thorne said. ‘His mother was one of his father’s victims. So, he was on his own list.’
Louise looked dubious.
‘Yeah, I know.’ One or two lines in Garvey’s journal had also suggested that he thought he was dying, that he might soon go the same way as his old man. The post-mortem, carried out as soon as Hendricks had flown back from Sweden, showed that there had been no tumour, that Garvey had been suffering from nothing worse than the occasional migraine. It seemed as though hypochondria had been the mildest of his psychological problems. ‘It’s all speculation,’ Thorne said. ‘The truth is, I couldn’t give a flying fuck.’
He had said much the same to Nicholas Maier when the writer had called, cheerfully reminding Thorne that he had agreed to tell his story in return for Maier’s silence.
‘We had a deal,’ Maier had said.
Thorne had told him where he could stick their deal, then had hung up.
Chamberlain’s was just one of several theories about what had happened on the bridge. Debbie Mitchell might have struggled for her life, or at least ensured that she took Garvey with her, down into the path of the train. Perhaps Jason had done it, fought in those last moments to save his mother. The only thing that Thorne was sure of, having seen them sitting on the edge of that wall, was that, until Anthony Garvey had caught up with her, Debbie Mitchell had been intending to end her own life and that of her son.
He found it hard to understand, but equally hard to condemn. The love a mother had for her child – especially when she thought he was incapable of living happily without her – was something he could never fully fathom. Unless and until he became a parent himself. He had almost said as much to Louise, then stopped himself, still wary about applying any pressure.
‘We should get an early night,’ Louise said.
‘Sounds good.’
Thorne knew there was nothing suggestive in her comment. They both needed sleep. Louise was working even longer hours than he was on a messy kidnap case: the family of a building-society manager held while he was forced to enter his branch out of hours and open the safe. Thorne was already busy with two further murders: a domestic and a hit-and-run. Both were brutal and banal and neither was likely to catch the eye of TV news and tabloid editors in the way the Anthony Garvey killings had.
Yvonne Kitson had volunteered to deliver the death message to Sarah Dowd. To break the news that her husband was not the man they had been keeping in protective custody. That the real Andrew Dowd had been battered to death in an unknown location and dumped into the canal at Camden Lock.
Thorne had taken Kitson out for a drink that night and she had seemed glad of it.
‘She made me feel like I’d as good as given Garvey the brick,’ Kitson had said. ‘Or whatever it was he used to smash her husband’s head in.’
‘Sorry, Yvonne.’
‘It’s fine. I volunteered, remember?’
‘Why?’
‘You had the kid on the bridge,’ Kitson said. ‘We need to spread the misery around a bit.’
Now, the misery was being duly dispensed and the Garvey murders were someone else’s to worry about. Another team was responsible for wrapping things up and even though there would be no trial, there was still a mountain of paperwork to scale in preparation for those inquests still to be carried out.
Graham Fowler. Brian Spibey.
Rob Gibbons had been luckier – the knife had missed every major internal organ – though he would not be returning to work any time soon.
Simon Walsh, who called himself Anthony Garvey and later posed as Andrew Dowd, had been cremated quickly and quietly, with only Sandra Phipps and her daughter in attendance. Thorne wondered if there would be many more at the service for Debbie Mitchell in two days’ time. He had already booked the morning off, taken his black suit in to the dry cleaner’s.
Brigstocke had raised an eyebrow when Thorne had told him why he was booking himself out. ‘Time to move on, Tom,’ he’d said.
Thorne had said, ‘I know,’ and imagined walking away from the funeral with Nina Collins’ spit running down his jacket.
‘It’s our job to clean up the shit,’ Brigstocke had said. ‘That doesn’t mean walking about with bits of it stuck to us afterwards.’
Time to move on…
Carol Chamberlain had been round for dinner a few nights earlier, with Phil Hendricks making up an unlikely foursome. He’d arrived with the bottle of vodka he’d promised Thorne and unsavoury tales of the good-looking Swede he’d finally found on his last night.
It had been an enjoyable evening, with everyone drinking a little more than they should, especially Chamberlain. Thorne was pleased at how well she had got on with Louise, but was surprised that she hadn’t gone straight home to her husband as soon as she had the chance. She had told him that she would be going back to Worthing in a few days; that she liked to see things through to the ‘bitter end’. Thorne had not been convinced, but hadn’t pushed it.
She’d held him tightly and thanked him before climbing into the taxi she was sharing with Phil Hendricks. Thorne had told her not to be stupid, that he was the one who owed her. ‘All debts are cleared, Tom,’ she’d said. ‘OK?’
‘OK,’ Thorne said.
Then she had lowered the taxi window and nodded towards Hendricks. ‘If your friend was ever likely to turn, do you think he might go for an older woman?’
Thorne had wished her luck.
Afterwards, he had put on a Laura Cantrell album while he and Louise did their best to clear up. He sang along to her cover version of ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ while he ferried cups and plates through to the kitchen and Louise loaded the dishwasher.
Ten minutes later, with only half the clearing away done, they were in bed, neither of them willing to get up and turn off the light they’d left on in the hall and the song still rattling around in Thorne’s head.
‘This baby business,’ Louise said.
Thorne turned over, leaned up on one elbow.
‘There’s no reason to rush things, is there?’
He did not know what the right answer was, settled for a hesitant ‘no’.
‘We can just wait and see what happens.’
Thorne nodded and they looked at each other for a while. Then he turned over again and lay awake, with the words of the song outstaying their welcome as he waited for sleep to take him.
And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.
Life and love and murder, kids, whatever.
