wanting to make me look like a mug.”
“It wasn’t Britton.”
The juggler was tossing meat cleavers into the air. He deliberately let one clatter to the cobbles, making the stunt look that bit more dangerous. The crowd didn’t seem overly impressed.
“Whoever opened their mouth did so for a reason,” Thorne said. “They must be getting something out of it.”
There was one major change to the layout on the whiteboard at the far end of the incident room: the list of victims had been divided into two. The names of Mannion, Hayes, and Asker now constituted a column of their own. Next to it, in black felt-tip, was written: Unknown Vic 1 and Jago, with a line in red leading from those names to 12th King’s Hussars and another to Tank Crew.
Beneath that were two question marks.
Of the large number of calls and e-mails that Brigstocke had fielded so far that day, he’d hoped that one or two might have gone some way toward replacing those question marks. He’d hoped that, despite everything Kitson and Holland had been told in Somerset, the army would have found some way to dig up the names of the other soldiers who had served on the tank crew with Christopher Jago in
1991.
One already dead. Two who might be, or might soon be…
As it was, far too many of those calls and e-mails had been about Tom Thorne.
“It’s a pain in the arse,” Brigstocke said. He and Holland were sitting in his office, having polished off a lunch of ham rolls and cheese-and-onion crisps brought across from the Oak. “I’ve had that tosser from the Press Office on half a dozen times at least. Norman? He reckons he’s got papers and TV all over him…”
Holland grimaced. He remembered Steve Norman from a case a couple of years before, when the MIT had been forced to work more closely than they’d have liked with the media. “Slimy sod deserves something a lot worse all over him.”
Brigstocke didn’t think it was funny or he wasn’t listening. “I said as little as I could get away with, but I think they’re happy enough to let the story run for a while. Nobody seems desperate to squash it, anyway.”
“It’s a bit late, I’d’ve thought…”
“Norman’s not an easy bloke to read, but he’s sharp enough. We were going round the houses a bit, you know, discussing the story, talking about the UCO.” He raised his fingers, used them to put the initials in inverted commas. “But I got the distinct impression that he knew we were talking about Thorne.”
There was a knock at the door.
Holland lowered his voice. “Should he know?”
“He shouldn’t, but if it was a copper who leaked the story, then it’s hardly a major surprise.”
Holland remembered a little more about the case during which he’d first come across the senior press officer; about the way Norman had clashed with one officer in particular. “Him and Thorne have got a bit of history…”
Brigstocke barked out a humorless laugh. “Is there anyone Tom Thorne hasn’t got history with?”
Another knock, and on being invited in, Yvonne Kitson put her head round the door. Holland saw something pass across her face on seeing that he and Brigstocke were ensconced, on guessing that they’d just stopped talking. But whatever she was feeling- curiosity, envy, suspicion-its expression was only momentary. He hoped that when the investigation was over, Kitson wouldn’t be pissed off that he’d been privy to the workings of the undercover operation while she had not. Holland thought he knew her well enough. He was pretty confident that she wouldn’t feel slighted; that she’d put it down to the close working relationship he had with Tom Thorne.
“Am I interrupting, sir?”
“No, you’re fine, Yvonne. Everyone okay after the briefing this morning?”
“I think so…”
Once the story had appeared in the previous day’s Standard, Brigstocke had been forced to say something to his team. He’d been forced to lie, told them that, yes, there was a UCO working as part of the investigation, but that the officer had been recruited, as might have been expected, from SO10. There was nothing else they needed to know.
There was no reason for anyone to doubt that this was the unvarnished truth. Even if they did, they certainly wouldn’t have imagined that the officer at the center of it all was Tom Thorne.
“You okay, Dave?” Kitson asked.
“Yeah, I’m good…”
Thinking about it, Holland might have preferred it if Kitson had been the dealing with Thorne. To be honest, he could have done without the stress.
Kitson and Brigstocke spent a few minutes talking about another case. While the rough-sleeper killings was far and away the most high profile and demanding of the team’s cases, there were, at least theoretically, another forty-seven unsolved murders on their books: dozens of men and women stabbed, shot, and battered. Murders that were horrific and humdrum. Predictable and perverse. Gangland executions, domestic batteries, hate crimes. From sexual predation to pub punch-ups. Killings of every known variety, as well as a few that seemed to have been created just for the occasion. Some had come in since the roughsleeper murders had started, but some dated back to long before. Thankfully, a healthy number were in the pretrial stage, but there were still many that showed no sign of progress, and these were the ones that had been shoved onto the back burner. It always struck Holland as a ridiculous mixture of metaphors: some cases had gone so cold that no amount of time on any sort of burner would do them any good. The top brass had their own way of describing such things: they were fond of words like de – prioritizing. He could almost hear Thorne’s voice:
De – prioritized in terms of fucking manpower, maybe. In terms of money. Try telling the victim’s family that they’ve been de – prioritized…
Holland knew that catching the man who was killing the ex-servicemen was the only acceptable outcome; that was their priority. He understood the decision not to reveal the videotape at this time. Still, he hoped when the time came, though some or all of those responsible would already be dead, that as much effort would go into investigating the murders of four Iraqi soldiers.
Kitson stopped on her way out. “I’ll let you get back to it.”
“Boy’s stuff,” Holland said.
Brigstocke pursed his lips and nodded, mock serious; masking the bullshit with silliness. “Right. You wouldn’t be interested…”
As she walked back toward the incident room, Yvonne Kitson tried to keep the irritation in check. She’d had enough of this crap the year before. When her private life had become the stuff of pub chat and watercooler gossip.
She’d been as rattled as anybody else by Brigstocke’s briefing that morning. Everyone had been talking since they’d seen it in the paper, of course, but hearing it from the DCI was something else. She knew very well that undercover operations could succeed only through secrecy, but still she’d felt as a DI that she could have been taken into confidence. Brought within the inner circle.
She hadn’t let Brigstocke or anyone else see how she was feeling, though. That was something else she’d learned the previous year. When Brigstocke had asked how everyone had taken it, she’d lied.
But hopefully she’d done so just a little better than he and Holland just had.
She walked back into a crowded and bustling incident room, wondering why it was that people whose job it was to find the truth lied like such rank amateurs.
He only came into the West End for work. At other times he couldn’t see any point in it. In terms of shopping or entertainment, you could get everything you needed locally, and he preferred not to venture too far from where he was staying. It wasn’t that he was a long way away; it wasn’t too much of a slog to get into town or anything like that. Central London just wore him out. Once he’d returned home, and the buzz of the job he’d been doing had worn off, he was left ragged and wrung out, with a dull ache, as if a muscle he’d been working on was complaining at the effort.
The West End was greedy.
Everywhere your eyes fell, the place had its scabby hand out in one way or another, from sandwich boards to neon signs and a hundred foreign students with a thousand pointless leaflets. Everyone wanted something, and
