“Where’ve you been?” Holland asked. He stepped into a shop doorway to escape the noise of the traffic.
“Sorry. I only just got your message. I fancied a lie-in…”
“Where are you?”
“Hang on… I can’t see a street sign. I’m somewhere round the back of the National Gallery.”
“I was looking for you at the theater.”
“That’s where I normally am.”
“I know. I went in to the London Lift when you didn’t return the call and that’s where Brendan said you’d be.”
“I moved,” Thorne said.
Holland grunted, relieved that Thorne was okay but pissed off that he’d spent all morning running around like a blue-arsed fly, trying to find him. “We’ve had a bit of luck,” he said.
“What?”
“Where can we meet?”
The three of them had walked the length of Oxford Street before Spike and Caroline had gone down into the subways beneath Marble Arch to catch up on some sleep. Thorne had crossed the road into Hyde Park and sat down on a bench near one of the cafes at Speakers’ Corner.
This triangle at the northeast corner of the park should have been a pleasant enough place to sit at this time of year. Even if the verge adjoining the bridle path had been freshly churned into mud, elsewhere the autumn crocuses were in full bloom, bright and lively. The railed-in lawns were still lush, and despite the plastic bags that danced from many of the branches, the leaves provided plenty more color a little higher up-green, and bronze, and butter yellow on the ash trees.
Thorne knew that twenty-four hours earlier, as on every Sunday morning, the political pundits, the zealots, and the nutcases would have been out in force. They’d have been up on their soapboxes, shouting about freedom and enlightenment, and aliens sending messages through their toasters, each one honoring the tradition of free speech that had been guaranteed on this spot by act of Parliament a hundred and twentyfive years before. Halfway through this bleak Monday, freezing his tits off and with a headache just starting to kick in, Thorne found it far easier to picture the gallows at Tyburn, which had stood on the same spot for centuries before that. It was less effort to imagine the creak of a body swinging-of twenty – four at one time from the Triple Tree-and the bloodthirsty cries of the crowd than to conjure the voices of debate and discussion.
Holland dropped down onto the bench next to him and nodded toward the corner. A semicircle of pin oaks had been planted on its farthest boundary, fiery red against the off-white brickwork on the far side of Park Lane. “What would you want to get off your chest, then?”
“Eh?”
“If you had a crowd, and you could talk about anything you liked. ..”
It was one of the main reasons why Thorne enjoyed having Holland around; why Thorne had made himself unpopular with anyone who’d stepped, however briefly, into the former DC’s shoes. Holland had the pleasing knack of being able to punch through the hard shell of a black mood with one glib comment or seemingly innocent inquiry; with a stupid question in too cheery a voice. There were occasions, if Thorne was feeling particularly arsey, when he put this down to insensitivity on Holland’s part, but more frequently he saw it to be the exact opposite.
“God knows,” Thorne said. “The way things are going, I think I’ll end up as one of the toasters-andaliens brigade.”
“Sorry?”
Thorne shook his head. It didn’t matter. “What about you?”
“Where d’you want to start? I’d try to win the crowd over to the idea that all children should be taken into care between the ages of one and sixteen. I’d ask them to support my campaign for police paternity leave to be extended to, say, five years, and to include free alcohol and Caribbean holidays. I’d ask if any of them wanted to sleep with me…”
“Things a bit sticky at home?”
“How much room is there in your doorway?”
Thorne did his best to smile, and leaned back on the bench. He watched a pair of squirrels chase each other around a litter bin; saw a fat magpie hop lazily away as one of them ran at it.
Holland took off his gloves as he reached down to pull something from his briefcase. “I’m only joking,” he said.
It was a magazine. Glossy, with a picture of a grimfaced soldier on the front: sand all around and in sandbags at his feet; sheets of dust rising black behind him. In bold red lettering across the top: glorious.
“It’s the regimental magazine,” Holland said. “That’s their nickname: the ‘Glory Boys’ or the ‘Glorious Twelfth.’ A woman from their HQ sent it. She’s the assistant adjutant…”
“She sent it to you?”
“Just arrived out of the blue. It’s the Spring 1991 issue.”
Thorne threw him a sideways look as he began to flick through the magazine.
“I’m sure she was genuinely trying to help.” Holland tried to summon a cocky grin, but blushed despite himself. “But I think she did take a shine to me…”
“It’s bloody typical,” Thorne said. “The finest detectives on the force applying themselves twenty-four hours a day, and we get a break because some woman, who’s clearly mad or desperate, thinks you’ve got a nice arse.”
The magazine was a mixture of regimental news and notices. There were letters, quizzes, and book reviews; advertisements for modeling kits, financial services, and shooting weekends. There were obituaries for those who had long since left the regiment and for some who had died more recently, while on active service.
About half the magazine was taken up by articles and photographs. All these were the work of serving soldiers, and the majority of them concerned what had, in spring 1991, been the very recent conflict in the Gulf: “Christmas in Kuwait”; “Desert Shield-A Trooper’s Perspective”; “Into the Storm.”
“That’s the one,” Holland said. He leaned across and pointed to where a page had been marked by a piece of paper. “That’s the page she wanted us to see.”
Thorne unfolded the bookmark. It was headed with the regimental crest and Latin motto. The message was handwritten in blue ink: Thought this would be a shot in the dark, but I think we struck lucky. The photograph is what you’ll probably be most interested in. Lt. Sarah Cheshire.
“No kiss?” Thorne asked.
“I’m not listening,” Holland said. He pointed to a black-and-white photo that took up half a page of the magazine. “Our four men are somewhere among that lot…”
Two dozen or so soldiers had posed for the camera, arranged in front of, around, and in many cases on top of three battle tanks. They all wore desert camouflage and berets. Each carried a rifle and no more than a few of them were smiling. There was a caption to the right of the picture: D Troop, 2nd Sabre Squadron. Bremenhaven. October
1990.
“Just before they were posted to the Gulf,” Holland said. He reached over again and jabbed a finger toward one of the soldiers. The faces were small in shot, the features indistinct. “That’s Jago…”
Thorne looked at the list of names beneath the photograph. Jago’s was certainly there, but the list was not structured in any way. It was impossible to tell how the names corresponded to the men in the picture, gathered as arbitrarily as they were.
“How do you know?” Thorne asked.
“We scanned the photo and e-mailed it to Susan Jago. She picked her brother out for us.”
“She pick out anybody else?”
“She told us before that she’d only seen one photo of the crew together… and that was years ago.”
Thorne studied the photograph. He thought he could read fear-apprehension, at least-on one or two of the faces, but decided in the end that he was simply projecting. He couldn’t see what was in the heads and hearts of
