squeaky wheels.
‘Sit down… ’
Thorne sucked in a deep breath that tasted of metal and bandages. He blinked away an image of himself jamming the phone into McCarthy’s mouth, holding it steady with one hand and smashing it through the teeth with the heel of the other.
I was joking, Dave.
Instead, he held up the phone with his left hand, spread the fingers of his right hand around the back of McCarthy’s head and slowly but firmly moved one towards the other. ‘The man on the left, I know,’ he said. ‘You with me?’
McCarthy nodded.
His head moved a few inches closer to the phone.
‘So who’s the ugly-looking article in the middle?’
McCarthy said nothing.
‘Name not coming to you?’
‘No… ’
A few seconds later, his nose was pressed up against the screen.
‘I mean you look matey enough there,’ Thorne said. ‘So I presumed you knew one another.’ McCarthy was pushing back hard against Thorne’s hand, but Thorne kept the pressure on. ‘The thing is, I’ve got a real sense that you’re not exactly top dog in this particular set-up. Trust me, you get a feel for these things, Ian, and if I’m honest, I don’t believe you were the one calling the shots. I’m not saying you weren’t the one with the brains or anything like that, I mean you’re clearly hugely intelligent and you may have been the one who planned the whole thing for all I know.’
Thorne felt the smallest movement beneath his fingers, a shake of the head, aborted.
‘I’m just saying, you might want to think about being the one that names the names. That does it now, because it’s the kind of thing that’ll do you a favour when the sentences are handed out. And they will be handed out, Ian. I promise you that.’
Another shake of the head, firmer this time.
‘No, you don’t know his name?’ Thorne asked. ‘Or no, you’re not going to tell me?’
‘Take your pick.’
McCarthy raised his hand and grabbed at Thorne’s wrist. There was a second or two of resistance before Thorne reluctantly loosened his grip and the doctor ducked smartly away. He was quickly out of his chair and moving into the centre of the room. Keeping one eye on Thorne as he backed away, rolling his neck around on his shoulders, then smoothing down the hair at the back of his head.
He turned to see a female PHO staring in at them through the window. He raised a hand and nodded. He stuck up a thumb. The woman looked Thorne up and down before moving away.
‘Listen, I don’t have to tell you a thing,’ McCarthy said. ‘I don’t have to talk to you at all, in fact, because the truth is you’ve got nothing but a single, pointless photograph and a very sick mind.’ He began to pick at the corner of his goatee. ‘Actually, I think your options at this point are rather limited, don’t you? I mean you’re certainly not going to arrest me, because the fact is that you haven’t got a shred of evidence on which to charge me with anything and you’re only going to end up looking like an idiot.’
Thorne came slowly round the desk. He watched and listened.
‘You’re pissing in the wind, and you know it.’
It was not the worst attempt at a show of confidence that Thorne had ever seen, but the smile was now looking awfully ragged. The words had clearly been well rehearsed, but they were spoken a fraction too quickly and Thorne could hear how dry the mouth was.
‘That business at the newsagent’s,’ McCarthy said. ‘It was still going on, last time I checked.’
Suddenly, Thorne’s mouth was equally dry.
‘I mean we can take a trip to the station if you want, and I promise to come quietly. Might be quite an adventure. We can hang around and make small talk while I wait for my lawyer and then you can sit and listen to me saying “No comment” for a couple of hours, by which time those poor people being held at gunpoint may well be dead, and whose stupid fault do you think that will be?’
The PHO reappeared at the window, watching for a few seconds before gesturing at McCarthy that she needed to speak to him. He held up one finger to let her know that he would only be a minute, then turned back to Thorne.
‘So… those options. Well, just the two really. You can waste a little more time asking me some more questions I’m not going to dignify with an answer. Or you can get the hell off my wing.’
FIFTY-FIVE
There was strictly no food or drink allowed inside the Technical Support Unit vehicle, so with a few minutes left until they were due to put the next call in, Pascoe finished her coffee walking around the playground. There was rain in the air, and it had turned a little colder, so anyone who did not need to be out here was back inside the school, but it was still busy enough. Kidnap, traffic, CO19. Uniform and CID. A situation like this was one of the few that brought a large number of different Met Police units together on the same operation. ‘Suits’ and ‘lids’ in something almost approaching harmony. They just needed Vice, Anti-Terror and the Royalty Protection branch, maybe a copper or two on horseback, and they would have pretty much the whole set.
Pascoe lit a cigarette, then walked across to a chalked-out hopscotch court and stepped slowly from square to square, careful to avoid the lines.
Not forgetting the one poor bugger from the Murder Squad, of course. Who, if he succeeded, would almost certainly receive no credit for his part in a successful outcome, and who she felt sure would blame himself if things did not turn out well. She thought about Tom Thorne; grim-faced, a blue-arsed fly, desperately searching for answers with no guarantee there were any there to find.
His hand wrapped tightly around the shitty end of the stick.
She bent to pick up a smooth, flat stone and weighed it in her palm. She walked back to the first square of the court and told herself that if she could toss the pebble cleanly into the semicircle at the end, she would be drinking tea with Helen Weeks before the day was out. She crouched and prepared to throw the stone, wondered how many people as control-freakish as she was were also superstitious.
‘DS Pascoe… ’
She turned to see Donnelly beckoning her from the back doors of the TSU truck. She threw her cigarette away and slipped the stone into her jacket pocket as she crossed the playground to join him.
As she climbed up a small set of metal stairs into the truck, Donnelly asked her if she had thought about what to say, how to get the necessary message across. She told him how she was planning to handle things and he said that it sounded ideal. Clear enough, but still subtle.
‘She’s clever,’ Pascoe said.
‘So is he,’ Donnelly said.
Pascoe took her place on a low stool on the left-hand side of the truck and picked up a headset. Donnelly settled in next to her and did likewise. A large pair of speakers were mounted above a line of TV monitors on the rear wall, while on the right-hand side a pair of civilian technicians – a twenty-something woman and a forty- something man – sat in front of a console that made the cockpit controls of a 747 look primitive.
‘Can you get Radio 1 on there?’ Pascoe asked.
The woman looked over her shoulder. ‘Sorry?’
‘Scott Mills is on in a bit.’
Donnelly managed a grunt of amusement, but the woman just shrugged as though Pascoe had been speaking a foreign language and slowly turned back to her bank of knobs and faders.
‘We set?’ Donnelly asked.
The man turned, said, ‘Absolutely.’ What was left of his hair was fine and sandy-coloured and his paunch was exaggerated by the tight black polo shirt he wore over neatly ironed jeans. His name was embroidered in red just
