The jokey tone hadn’t lasted long…
“You said that going undercover would just be about gathering information,” Brigstocke said. “We’ve got that information now. We know who the victims are, and we know why it’s happening, so give me one good reason for you to carry on.”
“Because the killer hasn’t gone anywhere.”
“We talked about this when you came to me with your stupid idea in the first place…”
“Things are much different now,” Thorne said.
“Fucking right they’re different.” Brigstocke glanced toward the couple, then across at the woman who stood smoking behind the bar. He lowered his voice. “The night before last, it was you he tried to kill
…”
Thorne put the half-eaten cheese roll back onto his plate. He wasn’t hugely hungry. He’d gone to the Lift early and put away a full breakfast while he waited in vain for Spike or Caroline to turn up. Thorne hadn’t seen either of them since the previous morning. He’d left the subway when Holland had called with news of the murder, then returned a few hours later to wake them; to tell them that he’d been into the West End and seen the police gathered outside the theater.
To tell them that Terry was dead…
“You’re not willing to consider the possibility that Terry Turner being kicked to death in that doorway was a bizarre coincidence, are you?” Thorne looked at Brigstocke. “I thought not…”
“The killer knows who you are,” Brigstocke said.
“Thanks to one too many cans of Special Brew, the world and his fucking wife knows there’s an undercover copper on the streets.”
“Right, but this bloke knows it’s you.”
“I’m well aware of that…”
“Do you think he knows you personally? Is it someone you’ve met?”
Thorne stared into his beer. “He mistook Terry Turner for me, so I doubt it.”
“It was dark. It was pissing with rain. Turner might well have been out of it, asleep, with his back to the killer…”
“Terry was a foot taller than I am,” Thorne said. “I can’t see it.”
The door opened and a man walked in leading a greyhound. He climbed onto a stool at the bar and the dog dropped flat at his feet. The man exchanged a word or two with the barmaid, ordered a pint, and turned to stare at the TV.
“We can skirt around the obvious question all bloody day…” Brigstocke said.
Over by the bar, the greyhound raised his head for a moment, yawned, and let it drop again. The dog looked like he couldn’t give a fuck, and so did his owner. The man seemed far more at ease than Thorne imagined him to be behind his own four walls: he looked at home; he looked like himself.
“Tom?”
“I’m listening…”
“Why? That’s what we need to address. Why on earth does he come after you?”
Thorne took a second to collect his thoughts. “Okay, this is the best I can come up with, and you’re not going to like it. I reckon he’s shitting himself.”
“ He’s shitting himself?”
“I think he’s panicking. I think he knows we’re getting close. Maybe not to him, not as yet, but he doesn’t feel safe because he knows we’ve put the nuts and bolts of it together. Like you said, we’ve got the names and we’ve got a motive. If Eales is still alive, and we can find him, the killer knows he can be identified.”
“So why not just kill Eales?”
“Maybe he already has,” Thorne said. “Look, all I’m really saying is that I don’t think this bloke’s that bloody clever. He’s felt cornered, he’s started to panic, and he’s reacted, and I don’t think there’s a lot more to it than that. Who knows? Maybe he thinks I’m such a brilliant detective that he needs to get me out of the way.”
“Now it’s getting really far-fetched.”
“Whichever way you look at it, it wasn’t a very clever thing to do, but I think we’re talking about someone who works on instinct, you know? If we’re right about the blackmail angle, this whole thing is about him feeling threatened and trying to protect himself…”
The pub’s business rocketed as a pair of lads came through the door. The dog barked halfheartedly and was silenced by a nudge from his master’s boot. The barmaid lit another fag from the butt of the last one, and on TV, a blonde with a smile as overcooked as her tan was promising to find an elderly couple their dream home in the sun.
Brigstocke tore open a bag of crisps and leaned across the table. “All this stuff he knows. How exactly does he know it?”
“That’s the bit you’re not going to like,” Thorne said.
“We’re back to him being on the Job, are we?”
“I’m starting to think it’s likely. If I’m right about why I was targeted, I can’t see how else he’d know what was going on, unless he was a copper.”
“ If you’re right…”
“He knew more than who I was, Russell. He knew where I’d be.” Thorne pictured Terry T, fingering the padlock at his throat, offering to share the doorway that even now they were still trying to scrub the blood out of. “Where I was supposed to be.”
Brigstocke said nothing for several moments. His face, distorted as it was through his glass of water, made it clear he was finding Thorne’s point a hard one to argue against. “So who are we talking about? How many people knew where you were sleeping?”
“You, Holland, Hendricks. Brendan Maxwell at the Lift. McCabe and maybe one or two others at Charing Cross.”
“Was McCabe’s name last for any particular reason?”
“I just think he’s worth looking at. Him and a few of his team.”
“Looking at?”
“Maybe we could get a couple of Intel lads on it. Keep an eye on him…?”
Brigstocke looked drawn suddenly, like another weight had been added to a load that was already unbearable. “This kind of thing’s easy to suggest. It’s a piece of piss in a pub, but actually getting it done is a fucking nightmare. You don’t really grasp any of that, do you, Tom? Christ, putting a DI under surveillance on the strength of something like this, on the strength of very little, is asking for trouble.”
Thorne remembered something he’d said to McCabe that still held true. “I can’t speak for you,” he said, “but some of us are in plenty of trouble already. I don’t think a bit more’s going to make a lot of difference.”
Thorne stared and Brigstocke stared back at him; a grim expression that stayed frozen on the DCI’s face for several seconds, until he stuffed a handful of crisps into his mouth.
Shireen Collins-Ian Hadingham’s ex-wife-was a petite, attractive black woman whom Holland guessed, once he’d seen her up close, to be somewhere just the right side of forty. She presented a fair bit younger- her hair cut in cornrows and her clothes suitably sporty-though with half a dozen kids under five running about, a tracksuit and trainers were probably the most practical choices.
She worked as a child minder, and Holland and Stone had arrived to find that she was looking after four children that day. “Plus two of my own,” she told them, pointing out a boy and a girl. “Those are mine, the really evil ones…”
“They’re nice-looking kids,” Stone said.
“The older two, Ian’s two, are both at school.” The flat, on the southern side of Salford, was on the ground floor; one of three in a Victorian conversion. “The people upstairs work all day,” Collins said as she showed them in. “So we can make as much noise as we like, which is great. Four- and five-year-olds make a lot of noise.”
From what Holland and Stone could make out, there were a couple of bedrooms and a large living room that ran off a kitchen-diner. They sat at a long kitchen table, from which Collins had been clearing the remains of lunch when they’d arrived. “There’s a bit left if you fancy chicken nuggets and potato faces,” she said. Having missed breakfast, Holland was seriously tempted, but the offer was declined. In the next room, visible through a serving hatch, the kids were gathered in front of a widescreen TV. Collins leaned through the hatch and issued
