'You're joking, right?'
'As long as she knows when to keep her mouth shut, it shouldn't be a problem. Fair enough? Russell?'
'I can't see it doing any harm,' Brigstocke said.
Thorne shook his head. 'Yeah, well, you're not the poor sod who'll be stuck with her.'
Jesmond stood up, said that he needed to crack on. To get into the incident room and do whatever he could to build morale, bearing in mind what had happened. On his way out of the door, he told Brigstocke and Thorne that he was pleased they were all singing from the same hymn sheet.
'What a racket that's going to be,' Thorne said.
The Royal Oak was unlikely to attract anyone for whom great service or a friendly atmosphere was important, but it was five minutes' walk from both the Peel Centre and Colindale Station. As such, and with an ex-DI's name above the front door, it was always going to be a pub where the Met's finest, and its decidedly less fine, were in the majority. Tonight, though, any punter without a warrant card would have been well advised to open a few cans at home instead.
It was wall-to-wall Job.
The clientele could equally well have been bikers, football fans or braying, pissed-up City boys. Friends, colleagues or strangers, it hardly mattered. Something in their shared experience, in the unspoken bonds between these men and women, caused feelings to run high and wild as bewilderment turned to anger and sorrows were drowned many times over in white wine, Stella and Jameson's. Had it not been for the stronger smell coming from the toilets, the whiff of testosterone might have been overpowering, drifting above the pockets of aggression and self-pity as Thorne pushed his way to the bar. Walking back to the table with another Guinness for himself and lager-tops for Dave Holland and Yvonne Kitson, he was accosted several times by those keen to give vent to one emotion or another; to pass comment on the only topic of conversation in the room.
'Bad luck, mate…'
'Don't worry, he'll get what's coming to him.'
'Wankers!'
Thorne handed Holland and Kitson their drinks and sat down, wondering exactly who that last half-cut philosopher had been talking about. The members of the jury? Adam Chambers and his legal team? Thorne and his? Himself and every other copper in the pub for not making a better job of the case?
Whichever it was, Thorne wasn't arguing.
'Cheers,' Holland said.
Thorne nodded and drank.
'They're like arseholes,' Kitson said.
'What are?'
'Opinions.'
Holland swallowed. 'Every bugger's got one.'
Thorne looked from one to the other. 'So, what's yours?'
Thorne had spent a good deal of the morning with Russell Brigstocke, speculating as to what might have happened in that jury room, but he had yet to sit and talk things through with anyone else whose opinion he valued. He had tried to get hold of Louise, but she had been in and out of meetings all day and able to do no more than leave a message saying how sorry she was.
Kitson was a damn sight less cautious than she had once been when it came to speaking her mind; and Holland, though not quite the wide-eyed innocent he used to be, could still usually be counted upon to say what he thought.
'It's hard enough getting a conviction at the best of times,' Holland said. 'You've got the judge instructing the jury, banging on about reasonable doubt and the weight of evidence, all that.'
Kitson nodded. 'So, when you haven't got a body and there's a brief who knows what he's doing, you're really up against it.' She looked at Thorne. ' We're up against it.'
'Nothing else you could have done,' Holland said.
Thorne blinked slowly and imagined Adam Chambers celebrating, pissing it up the wall in some West End bar where there were far fewer police officers knocking around. He pictured the jubilant friends and family and supposed that, in a way, it was a let-off for them, too. There would be no need to lie to work colleagues or rewrite their personal histories. They would not have to duck difficult questions when journalists came knocking every year on Andrea Keane's birthday, insisting that they must know something about what happened to her. Now they could happily let their own doubts about Adam Chambers' innocence – and Thorne knew they had them – shrivel, until they seemed like something only dreamed or imagined.
'We've just got to crack on,' Kitson said.
'Life's too short, right?' Thorne necked a third of his pint, swallowed back a belch. 'But a lot shorter for some than it is for others.' He thought about two eighteen-year-old girls. The memory of one sullied by injustice. A chance, perhaps, to find the other. And to make himself feel a damn sight better, to salve a conscience scarred by his failure to find the first.
The horse that Jesmond thought he should get back on.
They were joined by Sam Karim, who brought another round to the table just as Russell Brigstocke stood up and made a short speech. The DCI thanked everyone for their hard work, told the team they were the best he had ever worked with, and said that one day, if something new turned up, they might get another crack at it. There were cheers and some half-hearted applause, then the pub drank a toast to Andrea Keane.
'God bless,' Thorne said. It was the kind of thing a copper with a drink inside him came out with at such a moment. Even one without a religious bone in his body.
The Oak was hardly the sort of establishment to get done for after-hours drinking, but there was no more than fifteen minutes' official drinking time left when Thorne spotted someone he knew walking out of the Gents'. Gary Brand had been a DS on the original Alan Langford inquiry; had sat in on a couple of the Paul Monahan interviews, if Thorne's memory served him correctly. He had stayed in the Homicide Command for another eighteen months or so afterwards, until a vacancy for an inspector had come up elsewhere, and was now working south of the river, as far as Thorne could remember.
Thorne thought it might be an idea to run a few things past someone who had been part of the team ten years earlier. Moving through the crowd, he felt the drink starting to take hold. He took a few deep breaths. There was no way he was driving home, but that didn't matter a great deal. He had spent the afternoon on the phone, making the necessary arrangements, and he would not be needing the car much, if at all, the following day.
Brand looked pleased to see him and immediately reached for his wallet. They made for the bar. Thorne took a half, though he knew it was already a little late for caution.
'Hardly your local any more this, is it, Gary?'
Brand was a slim six-footer and a few years younger than Thorne. His light hair was cut close to the scalp and he wore the kind of thin, soft-leather jacket that Thorne thought looked better on a woman. 'Well, obviously I know quite a few of the lads on the Chambers inquiry, and I've been following the case.' He was originally from the West Midlands and it was still clear enough in the flattened vowels and the downward intonation at the end of each sentence. As a result, he often sounded despondent, even if he were in the best of moods. He shrugged. 'Couldn't think of anywhere else I'd rather be tonight.' He raised his glass, touched it to Thorne's. 'What an absolute shocker.'
'We've had a few of those.'
'Right enough.'
'Talking of which…'
Thorne told Brand about the visit from Anna Carpenter and the photographs. About a case that had come back to life as miraculously as Alan Langford himself appeared to have done.
'He was always a slippery sod,' Brand said. 'The type that enjoyed making the likes of you and me look stupid.'
'The type to snatch his own daughter?'
'I don't see why not.'
'And what about the photos?'
Brand told Thorne that he had no idea why they might have been sent to Donna. 'So, what are you going to do?'
