‘Gang rape and chainsaws and all that.’
‘Did you know that nine out of ten people enjoy gang rape?’
Allen was lying on his side in front of the sofa. His eyes were half closed and protruding. His lips were blue. The side of his face that lay against the floor was swollen and purplish and there was a light coating of froth around his mouth.
‘The other morning,’ Holland said, ‘when I said this case sounded like something different.’ He nodded down towards the body. ‘I suppose I meant that there wouldn’t be any of this.’
Thorne looked at Peter Allen’s pale fingers, clawed against the tatty carpet, and remembered what had been said on the phone the night before.
Another box ticked.
It was not the first time he had thought about Louise that morning.
It had seemed somewhat incongruous, barrelling through the rush-hour traffic towards Hackney and listening to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Roaring along bus lanes with the blue light flashing on the roof and jumping lights with his hand pressed to the horn, while those voices – one frail, one pure – snaked so perfectly around one another. Emmylou had always maintained that she and Parsons had never been lovers, but Thorne still found it hard to believe. You could hear it in the way they sang to each other, for each other.
He listened, and asked himself why he had really called Louise.
Had some part of him hoped that she would tell him how unhappy and lonely she was, what a mistake they had made? How would he have felt if she had actually said any of those things?
He had wanted to talk to someone who knew him, he could admit that much, however uncomfortable it might turn out to be. He had wanted to hear her voice. Yes, and perhaps he had needed to pick at the scab just a little. To open it up. All those changes that had been decided upon in the wake of the split were exciting in theory… fresh challenges, change of outlook, all that, but wasn’t it possible that you could change too much and move on too quickly?
He would be stupid if he wasn’t scared.
No time to dwell on it now, thank God.
Another box…
Thorne had put his foot down and pushed on across the roundabout at Old Street, losing himself in the gorgeous noise of Gram and Emmylou, and the tightness in his chest was gone by the time he saw Holland raising a hand to him outside the crime scene.
Hemmings, the on-call pathologist, was a humourless piece of work Thorne had run into a time or two before. As he walked across to join Thorne and Holland, the look on his doughy face made it clear that having already conducted his initial examination of the body, he was not best pleased at being asked to wait until Thorne arrived.
‘He’s been dead at least eight hours. No more than twelve.’
‘No time for hello?’
‘I was told you were in a hurry.’
Thorne thought he could probably spare the few seconds it would take to tell Hemmings where to go and what to do to himself when he got there. He decided against it. ‘Definitely an overdose?’
‘Well, clearly I can’t say if there was any underlying condition that precipitated it, but on the face of it… probably. There are no track marks to suggest he’d done it before.’
‘So, not self-inflicted?’
‘Not for me to say, but presuming he was right-handed, it’s a little odd that he injected himself in his right arm. Then again, you’re the detective.’ The way he said the word, and the smile before he turned away, made it clear the pathologist thought much the same about what the likes of Thorne did as Thorne himself.
Blundering, clumsy…
‘Arsehole,’ Holland muttered.
‘That’s Dr Arsehole to you,’ Thorne said. ‘They like you to remember that.’ They walked across to where a fingerprint officer was working at the hi-fi, passing a magnetic wand across the surface, then applying powder with a fibreglass brush as delicately as if he were restoring an Old Master. ‘Anything?’
‘Plenty,’ the officer said. ‘But I’m guessing they all belong to the victim.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there are whole areas that have no prints at all, lots of things that have obviously been wiped clean. Even the empty beer cans in the bin.’ He nodded across towards the body. ‘And the syringe, and as far as I know not many people can jack up without touching that.’ He smiled. ‘I mean, I don’t want to tell you your job… ’
‘I wish more people would,’ Thorne said.
‘Whoever did it wasn’t as clever as he thought though.’ The officer laid down his brush and took a step across to a plastic box containing evidence that had already been earmarked for further examination. He reached inside and held up a plastic bag containing a bottle of cleaning spray. ‘He didn’t think to wipe this down after he’d used it.’
‘D’oh!’ Holland said.
‘It gets even better.’ The crime scene forensic manager, who had clearly been listening in, walked across and removed a second bag with one of the beer cans inside. ‘No prints,’ she said, ‘but I’ll bet we can still get DNA from it.’
Thorne looked at the two technicians, each proudly holding up their evidence bags like children waiting to be praised. ‘Which is going to be quicker?’ he asked.
They looked at one another.
Thorne knew that under normal circumstances the prints would probably come back faster than the DNA, but he also knew that there were a good many variables and that turnaround times for both could be significantly improved if the job was deemed urgent enough. If the samples were hand-delivered to the Forensic Science Service labs at Lambeth and prioritised. A matter of hours as opposed to days.
The forensic manager shrugged. ‘Probably not a lot in it.’
‘What about ADAPT?’ Holland asked. He reddened slightly as everyone turned their attention to him. ‘Accelerated DNA Profiling Technology. They reckon they can get a profile in under an hour now.’
‘Where did you get that from?’ Thorne asked.
‘You know those memos and Job newsletters that you throw away every day? Some of us actually read them.’ Holland looked to the forensic manager. ‘DNA in a box, right?’
She nodded, then turned to Thorne, a hand raised. ‘Under an hour is a bit of an exaggeration and anyway it’s not cut and dried. It’s enough to make an arrest on, but the level of identification is not strictly evidential. So, even if I got permission to run it, nothing I come up with would be admissible in court.’
‘I’ll worry about that later,’ Thorne said.
‘I can’t promise anything.’
‘See what you can do.’
The fingerprint officer took half a step forward. ‘I reckon I can get the prints turned around in a few hours,’ he said. ‘If it’s really important.’
Thorne knew that normally the forensic manager would be responsible for looking after both print and DNA evidence. For getting the samples to the lab then transferring the information to the relevant offender databases at Scotland Yard to see if there was a match. On this occasion though, he guessed that keeping them separate and encouraging a degree of competition would get him a result the quickest.
‘There’s a bottle of decent Scotch in it, OK?’ Thorne looked to the fingerprint officer, who nodded. He turned to the forensic manager.
‘Make it a case of Merlot and you’re on,’ she said.
‘You get back to me before he does, I’ll cook you dinner and drink it with you.’ Thorne looked back to the fingerprint officer. ‘That offer doesn’t apply to you, obviously.’
As he walked towards the front door, Thorne barked instructions at Holland who was a step or two behind. ‘I want everything done on the hurry-up,’ he said. ‘House-to-house, the lot.’
‘I’ll sort it.’
‘And talk to the coroner. I want this PM done straight away, so put the wind up him a bit. Tell him there’s a police officer’s life at stake.’ He began to strip off the paper suit. ‘And I want Hendricks to do it.’
