Holland poured hot water into the mugs, then the two of them stood for a minute, prodding at their tea bags with stained teaspoons.
“So, how d’you really think Thorne’s getting on?”
Holland thought about it, but not for long. “Not brilliantly,” he said.
They might have been talking about the case, about Thorne’s undercover role. But neither of them was.
The lights from the South Bank lay as ragged blades of color on the water, while the river breathed, black beneath them. Thorne stared out across the Thames from the wide, concrete platform above Temple Gardens. The area had once been popular with prostitutes, but was frequented these days by those with nothing worth selling. At the other end of the bench, Spike and Caroline sat cuddled up. It was somewhere near midnight, and chilly. Thorne cradled a beer: the 2 percent stuff in a Special Brew can. Spike and Caroline were swigging from cans of Fanta. They were both in their early twenties, but when he glanced at them, Thorne thought they looked like they had barely made their teens. They hadn’t spoken for a few minutes and suddenly Thorne became aware that Caroline was crying softly. Spike had put his head against hers, begun to murmur and shush.
When Thorne asked what was wrong, Caroline turned and demanded to know why anyone could be sick and cruel enough to hurt the likes of them. People who wouldn’t, who couldn’t, hurt anyone themselves. She spat, and wiped snot from her nose with her palm, and Spike explained to Thorne-as he’d done the day after they’d found the body-that she had been fond of Radio Bob. That he’d made her laugh and stuck up for her sometimes. Caroline kept asking why, and shouted for a time, while for Thorne, there was little to do but wait for it to stop.
Then, all he could tell her was that the man who was doing these things would be caught. That he would be stopped and punished. He said it slowly, then repeated it until he almost believed it himself.
Later, after Spike and Caroline had left, Thorne sat and finished his beer, and thought about what Phil Hendricks had said.
He knew bloody well that Hendricks had been as unconvinced by that “work to do” crap as he had been himself. To the right and left of him, cars carried people out of the city center across Waterloo and Blackfriars bridges. Thorne watched them go, wondering how long it would be before he could consider going home himself. Wondering how long before he no longer felt the dread, squatting in his belly.
Since the loss of his father, he’d increasingly begun to think of home as the house where he’d grown up: the big old place in Holloway where his parents had lived until his mum had died six years earlier. Suddenly his own flat felt like no more than a space in which to store things. A furnished turning circle he could change in before heading out of the door as someone else. A locker room with IKEA furniture.
Maybe, when this was all over, he should move. Now there was some money…
Down below him a large pleasure boat yawed and creaked against Temple Pier. Thorne watched a group of people in suits and evening gowns leave, stepping off the boat and moving carefully along the walkway. A necklace of bulbs had been strung between the gray funnels of the boat. When Thorne closed his eyes it swung and shifted; bright for a moment behind his lids, as the beads of light had been against the darkness of the river, before starting to fade.
1991
It’s dark still, like the smoke from burning rubber, and now there are only three men sitting on the floor.
The fourth is standing between two of the men with guns and goggles. While one points a pistol, the other drags back the dark-haired man’s arms and walks around behind him. He takes out a length of clear, thin plastic and ties the man at the wrists. While this is going on the three men on the floor, whose wrists are already bound, look up and watch. One of them spits and shouts something, and the two other men with guns appear on either side of him. A pistol is jammed, hard against the man’s head, and one of the men wearing goggles and shamags leans down to say something. Then he steps back, raises a boot to the seated man’s chest, and pushes. The man topples backward onto the sand, which is saturated now, and solid.
All the men, sitting and standing, are soaked through. The men with goggles raise gloved hands to clear their lenses, while those who are tied can do little but shake their heads like wet dogs.
The dark-haired man who was last to be tied is pushed down onto his knees by the two men. A gun is put to the back of his head and he closes his eyes. Nobody moves for a long time until the men who have the guns start to laugh and the barrel of the pistol is raised. The man on his knees slumps toward the floor, moaning, but is hauled back up again. He is kicked between the legs, then allowed to fall.
Some time passes before one of the men with guns begins to wave a plastic bag around. He starts to take things out of it. Dark strips. ..
The man on his knees sees what is happening and his eyes widen. His friends on the floor start to protest, try to move, but guns are smartly raised and leveled. The kneeling man is jerked hard backward by an arm around his neck.
Then voices are raised to be heard above the noise of the rain. Words are nevertheless lost.
“… d’you get it?”
“Say again?”
“Where d’you get it?”
“Brought it with me.”
“… reminds me… could kill a fry-up…”
“That stuff fucking stinks, Ian…”
Then a few muffled words. Something muttered from close by, the voice somehow far louder than the others but deep and distorted; impossible to make out clearly.
The one holding the plastic bag stretches out an arm. There is something flopping at the end of it. He pushes it toward the man on his knees, who tries to turn his head, but his hair is seized and tightened until he cannot look away.
Then they are placed on his face; laid across his mouth, nose, and forehead as he screams.
Rashers of bacon.
THIRTEEN
A few years before, a major inquiry had been launched as to why the murderer of two young girls had been allowed to work as a school caretaker, having been investigated for serious sexual offenses on a number of previous occasions. This inquiry revealed a nationwide system that was both unwieldy and seriously flawed. The country’s police forces were supposed to be able to cross-reference, check and liaise with one another and with external bodies, yet the inquiry found that effective communication was thwarted at nearly every turn.
This was hard to believe, three decades on from the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper-a man who had been questioned several times, eliminated on each occasion, and then caught by accident. Mistakes of this nature were understandable, back in those dark days of card indexes, and case notes exploding from mountains of overstuffed files, but now?
However many officers were sent on IT courses, and despite the many millions that were spent on tailor- made software and state-of-the-art networking, people still fucked up. Sometimes it wasn’t ineptitude so much as incompatibility. Not only were some police computing systems not able to communicate with those of associated services, but often they could not even talk to each other. There were firewalls and brick walls; there were untraceable programs and intractable machines. While a perfectly diligent and proficient detective could store the complete works of Shakespeare on a key ring and send naked pictures of his girlfriend round the world with the click of a mouse, he might easily find himself unable to access intelligence on another floor of the same building.
Computers had become smaller, of course, and lighter, but there were still plenty of police officers who didn’t trust them as far as they could throw them. In this brave new world, the Met got through as much paper as ever…
