been predictably blunt and blasphemous. Holland guessed that if Thorne, wherever he was, was being watched at that moment by passersby, his pissed-up dosser act would be highly convincing.
Thorne began to sound a little more upbeat as he spoke about a possible pattern to the killings. He was talking about the different groups of rough sleepers, and a possibility that the killer was carefully selecting victims from among each one.
Holland reached for a pen and a scrap of paper. He began to scribble it down.
“Are you getting this down?” Thorne said.
He’d write it out properly later, pass as full a version as possible on to Brigstocke in the morning. For now he jotted down the bare essentials. Killer’s basis for choosing. Junkie/Alcoholic/Mental Case…
From next door he could hear Sophie softly singing the “I Love You” song from Barney.
TWELVE
Thorne remembered what Brendan had said about real London grime as he watched it darkening the water. Running to his shins in inky trails and spinning away down the waste in a gray-black gurgle. A knock on the door told him that somebody else was waiting, so he tried to get a move on. It wasn’t easy. The flow from the shower head was little more than a trickle, and he had to slam his palm repeatedly into a steel button on the tiled wall to keep the water coming.
As he scrubbed himself, he sang an old Patsy Cline song, quietly enough to go unheard by whoever was outside the door. He didn’t know what had put the tune into his head, but it was appropriate enough; he’d certainly been doing a fair amount of walking after midnight. Sometimes he thought that sitting and walking were virtually all that any rough sleeper did when they weren’t actually sleeping. Come to think of it, weren’t they all that anybody did? Sitting behind a desk or at a till or in a doorway. Walking to work or to the pub or to wherever you could get what you needed to help you through the next few hours. Everyone was sitting and walking and scoring something.. .
There was another knock, louder this time. Something was shouted through the door.
For a final few seconds, he stood letting the warm water run across his face and thought about what he’d said to Holland the previous night. Maybe what looked like a pattern was in reality no more than simple chance. Was it likely that the killer would be selecting his victims so carefully when, as Thorne still believed, they were only there to cover up something rather more down-to-earth? It was perfectly possible, of course, that both theories were true. Even if the later victims were there purely as dressing, selecting them in this way would hardly take a great deal of time and effort. The junkies and the drinkers were easy enough to spot as they tended to hang out in their own groups, and you could hardly miss the likes of Radio Bob.
Things had been made nice and easy for him. All the killer had to do was wait, and watch for the people that the rest of the world avoided.
Brendan Maxwell came into the locker room as Thorne was changing back into his dirty clothes. “Why don’t you put clean ones on?” he said.
Thorne shoved a plastic bag containing soap and shampoo into the top of his locker. He turned to a mirror on the wall and stared at himself. “I’m okay with these.”
“Everyone else uses the washing machines…” “These are fine.”
Maxwell moved so that Thorne could see him in the mirror. He stuck out his bottom lip, shrugged his shoulders, and struck a pose. “You talking to me? You talking to me?”
Thorne laughed, stepped right to obscure the Irishman’s reflection. “Fuck off.”
Though he’d been into the cafe at the London Lift a couple of times, this was the first time Thorne had seen Brendan Maxwell in over a week. The first time since Radio Bob Asker’s funeral.
“How was it?” Thorne asked.
“Even grimmer than you’d expect. We took a few of Bob’s mates up in a minibus, you know? A couple of the older guys he used to knock around with.” He began to gesture with his hands. “So, it’s us and all of them on the right and his ex-wife and kid plus a couple of cousins or whatever on the left.”
Thorne, thinking there were probably more people there than at the last funeral he’d attended.
“It was fucking weird,” Maxwell said. “Like you’ve got this poor old fella’s two lives right there, one on either side of the church. No prizes for guessing which side was having the most fun, either. There was a bottle of something in a pocket or two, right, and all his mates were going on about what a laugh Bob had been, you know? How they should have been playing appropriate songs in the church like ‘Radio Ga-Ga,’ and how bloody funny Bob would have thought that was.”
He smiled wryly and Thorne reciprocated.
Maxwell’s smile became a snort. “That would have been funny, right ?”
Thorne had wanted to have something meaningful played at his dad’s funeral, but he hadn’t been able to think of a particular song or piece of music. He’d never had a chance to ask. They’d settled for some dirge of a hymn that his father would have hated.
Maxwell leaned back against a locker. “No chance of any laughter, though. No fucking way. No chance of any joy. Bob’s ex-wife sat there like the whole thing was keeping her from something important like a manicure, and the daughter just cried and cried. All the way through.” He kicked his heel against the metal door behind him. “They’re burying Paddy Hayes day after tomorrow. I’m getting plenty of wear out of the black suit.”
“We’re doing our best, Bren.”
Maxwell raised his eyebrows as if to ask exactly what constituted Thorne’s or anybody else’s best? Thorne was well aware that, although Maxwell was privy to his role within the investigation, he couldn’t say too much about how it was progressing.
“We need to find out who the first bloke was,” he said. “The first victim.”
Maxwell said nothing for ten, maybe fifteen seconds, then pushed himself away from the locker. “Good luck with that. Because I want to put the fucking suit away for a while.” He put on the De Niro voice to lighten the mood a little: “Do you know what I’m saying here?” He stopped at the door. “Phil’s coming in later, by the way, for the fortnightly surgery. I think he wants a word.”
“Fair enough.” Hendricks had been providing an ad hoc medical service to some of the Lift’s clients for the last couple of years. Doling out bandages, plasters, and, best of all, the odd prescription. He had some cracking stories about the absurd lengths people had gone to to get him to prescribe something. To get him to prescribe anything
…
“He’s got a bee in his bonnet about something or other,” Maxwell said.
“About the case?”
“God knows. He wouldn’t tell me if it was.”
“Right.”
Thorne looked at him and wondered if that was true. He knew very well that where partners were concerned, the rules about not discussing certain aspects of a case could become distinctly bendable. When it came down to it, Thorne really didn’t give a monkey’s, but he reckoned he knew his friend pretty well: Phil Hendricks would sell state secrets for a blow job or a Thierry Henry hat trick.
The morning briefing was becoming more like morning assembly all the time.
Brigstocke stopped in midsentence, waited for the murmuring at the back of the room to die down. “What’s so fucking important?” he said.
“Sorry, sir. We were just talking about the horse.” The last word was more spluttered than spoken, and the rest of the room immediately broke up.
“Right.” Brigstocke sighed. “Anyone not heard the horse story?”
A few hands were raised among the forty or so in the room. One or two blank faces…
The area car had, by all accounts, been called out in the early hours after reports of a horse running along the A1. Having caught the animal, the two officers were then faced with the problem of getting it anywhere, and hit on the bright idea of towing the horse. They wrapped a length of “Police-Do Not Cross” tape around the animal’s neck and while one officer drove, his mate crouched in the open boot of the car and pulled the horse
