have been the army, of course. They might at least have been able to shed some light on what sort of person was out there. What manner of individual might have stood on the black sand, soaked in shadow and petrol rain alongside that tank crew. It would be very difficult to make advances to the army now of course; not after certain important facts material to the case had been withheld. Brigstocke had confessed to Thorne in the pub that keeping the existence of the videotape secret was a decision he was starting to regret.
Thorne had done his best to be sympathetic. “We’re all Sherlock Holmes with hindsight, mate. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it.”
“If we don’t get a result,” Brigstocke had said, “there’ll be plenty ahead of me in the queue…”
The music from the flat above the shop opposite had stopped. It was replaced by the tuneless singing of a trio of football fans, who came down the street from the side of the Shakespeare’s Head and began to move in Thorne’s direction. He shrank a little farther back into the doorway and watched them pass.
They didn’t see him. Or, if they did, they didn’t give a toss.. .
In those few, brief moments of clarity that come before sleep, Thorne thought of someone he could perhaps speak to, a person who might at least provide some insight into what had happened on February 26, nearly fifteen years before. Thorne would have to be careful how he handled it of course, but nobody had come up with anything better.
He drifted off to sleep, deciding that he’d had worse ideas; thinking that he still had the business card stuffed inside his wallet back at the Lift. Hoping that he’d remember all this in the morning.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DS Sam Karim, who took responsibility for such things, had almost finished rejigging the layout of the whiteboard for the umpteenth time.
Still arranged at its center were the photographs recently provided by the Army Personnel Centre: Chris Jago, Ian Hadingham, Ryan Eales, and Alec Bonser. Portraits of four young men, all taken before they’d first been posted to the 12th King’s Hussars.
Holland stood and watched while the shape of the case as it stood that day was laid out. It was hard to equate the quartet of fresh faces-scrubbed and set square, a hint of a smile on one or two-with those whom he knew had been hidden behind rain-streaked goggles and muddy kerchiefs; sweating, contorted; the eyes tight shut at the moment when the trigger was pulled.
Elsewhere on the board…
The list of those victims who had been murdered simply to disguise the true nature of the crime: Hayes, Mannion, Asker.
Terry Turner: murdered, it would seem, in error; sharing nothing but initials with the man for whom he’d been been mistaken.
The names of those on the fringes of the investigation: Susan Jago, Shireen Hadingham.
Those who had provided information, statemented or otherwise: Spiby and Rutherford at Media Ops; Brendan Maxwell; Major Stephen Brereton; Poulter and Cheshire at the 12th King’s. One name had now been removed from this list, and from the contact sheet circulated to all officers: Paul Cochrane. The services of the National Crime Faculty profiler had been dispensed with, now that the motive for the killings had become apparent even to those without letters after their names.
“Last but not least…”
Karim drew a thick, black line down to a crudely drawn square that contained the only remaining question mark on the board. It was largely symbolic: a simple representation of their prime suspect; the man behind the video camera whom they now thought to be the reason why they were all there in the first place.
Karim stepped back and examined his work. It was far from the whole story, of course…
There was a side to the investigation that could not be encapsulated in crude capital letters or delineated by magnets and felt-tip pens. Thorne’s contribution to the case was missing: information that had originated from him, or from sources close to him, would remain absent. This was also the case with details of the secondary intelligence operation, the small-scale surveillance that had just been mounted on DI John McCabe and several other officers from the Homeless Unit based at Charing Cross. The authorization for such surveillance was need- to-know information that Brigstocke had passed on to none but his core team. As with any “blue-on-blue” operation, there was very good reason.
Somebody always knew somebody…
Karim walked away, and Holland approchaed the board. “You’re an artist, Sam.”
Stone was on his way back from the gents’. “ Piss – artist,” he said.
Jason Mackillop looked up from his computer and grinned. Stone moved across to join him, laughing at his own joke.
The whiteboard should have been replaced long ago. Countless murders had been mapped out across its surface over many years. As Holland looked, he could see, in what few white spaces were left, the faintest outline of old markings; the swoops and stabs of the pen just visible beneath the scratched and pitted metal. Death, terrible and tawdry; fury, loss, grief reduced to scribbled lines and letters; to names and numbers now long since wiped away and replaced. Holland licked the tip of a finger and reached over to rub at one of the ghost names. A name that had refused to fade completely…
“Dave?”
Holland started slightly and drew his finger quickly away. He hadn’t been aware of Yvonne Kitson moving alongside him. He turned to acknowledge her, then shifted his gaze back to the board.
They both stared at it for a while.
They looked at the sweep of it; the way that so many were ensnared by the tendrils that snaked from its poisonous root. The names of all those it had touched: the innocent and the guilty and the dead. But one name was now prominent.
Coming back again, both of them as they stared, to the same name.
“How the hell are we going to find Eales?” Kitson asked.
Holland considered the question. “Does the Home Office have any psychics?”
If they’d been lucky in tracing Ian Hadingham quickly, it had been more than balanced out by the complete lack of anything even resembling progress in the hunt for Ryan Eales.
The team had run “full research.” Both the CRIS and CRIM-INT systems had been scanned a number of times but had yielded nothing. Traces had been run via the National Voters Register, the DSS, the DVLC, and every local housing authority in the country. All major store-card and mobile-phone companies had been contacted, while the Equifax system-a software package giving access to a huge number of financial databases-was being run repeatedly without success. Thus far, save for a driving license, a National Insurance number, and a lastknown address that were all equally moribund, full research had come up empty.
The first conclusion, based on the fact that the recently deceased are often fairly easy to locate, was that Ryan Eales was probably still alive. The second conclusion was not quite so comforting.
“He doesn’t want to be found,” Kitson said.
Holland knew she was right. He also knew that if Eales was lying low, he had very good reason for doing so. “He’s hiding from the killer.”
Kitson wasn’t arguing. “There’s every chance. If he reads the papers, if he’s been in any sort of contact in recent years with the rest of them, or their families, it’s odds on he knows at least a couple of the other three are already dead. If so, he’d be justified in thinking he might be next.”
“And he might well have worked out that we know why…”
If Eales knew that the police were looking for him, he could guess that they had seen the videotape, so he would not be in any great hurry to step forward; to face the music for what had happened in
1991.
“It’s another thing they’re going to be good at,” Holland said.
“What?”
