'So, this is all part of a plan?' Anna asked. 'The photos…'
'Christ, I don't know.' Donna suddenly looked very weary as she lit a cigarette. 'He used to tell this story,' she said, 'when he'd had a drink.' She turned to Thorne, rubbed her belly through her thick coat. 'Remember I told you about that scar he's got, where he was knifed?'
Thorne nodded.
'He'd bang on about how that only happened because he hadn't thought things through properly. Because he hadn't thought about the details. Basically, he was a cocky sod and he hadn't reckoned on the other bloke carrying a knife. But he always said it taught him an important lesson. After that he became obsessed with planning stuff out, working through every eventuality.' She sat back and screwed up her face, against the cold or an unpleasant memory. 'However vicious business got, however mental some of it seemed, it was all… thought through, you know?' She looked at Anna. 'My husband never did a spontaneous thing in his life, love. So, yeah, I reckon he knows exactly what he's doing.'
'Why did you want him dead?' Anna asked.
Donna let out a long, slow breath, threw a half-smile at Thorne.
'It's a reasonable question,' he said.
It was also one Thorne had never asked, not to Donna's face at least. As with so many cases, once he had got his result, in the form of Donna Langford's confession, he had moved on to something else. There had been speculation about her motive, of course, not least in the Sunday People and the News of the World. But with a conviction more or less in the bag, Thorne had had neither the time nor the inclination to care a great deal about the 'Why?' Donna had not spoken in her own defence at the trial, her counsel fearing that she might come across as somewhat hard-faced and spoiled. Instead, her brief had spoken passionately about 'years of mental torment and domestic abuse'. In the end, though, the jury had been unconvinced.
Such provocation, the prosecution had countered at the time, might understandably lead victims to lash out with knives and hammers, or, at a push, to slip rat poison into the old man's shepherd's pie. But calmly planning and paying for a gangland-style execution was a very different matter.
'Alan was spontaneous enough when it came to using his fists,' Donna said. 'But even then he was usually smart enough to avoid hitting me where it would show.' She had been staring at her feet, but now glanced up towards Anna. 'I didn't like what it was doing to Ellie. What he might do to her.' She shook her head, as though correcting herself. 'I never saw him hit her, but I was starting to think it was on the cards, and there was no way I was going to let that happen.'
Anna placed a hand on Donna's arm.
'So, it wasn't about the money, then?' Thorne said. He saw the look from Anna but stared right back, hoping she would get the message.
I know this woman a lot better than you do.
'Look, I'm not going to deny that I thought I'd be all right when Alan was dead. That I thought I'd be comfortable.' Donna stared across the park. By now, the Micra was stationary and two young men, two kids , were leaning against it, smoking and laughing. 'That wasn't the reason I wanted him gone, though, I swear to you. I had money when I was with him and I was miserable as sin.' She shrugged. 'I wasn't remotely surprised that there was nothing left, either. I always thought he might be squirrelling it away overseas, somewhere the taxman couldn't find it. Now I know he's still alive, I'm damn well sure that's what he did. One more thing he was planning for.'
'Why the contract killer, though?' Thorne remembered the smell of cooked meat in the forest clearing, and the questions the prosecution had put to the jury during the trial. The same questions that were posed in a dozen magazine articles and a particularly salacious edition of London Tonight. 'Why bother with Paul Monahan? Why not just take a knife to him or batter him while he was asleep?'
Donna nodded, like they were fair questions. 'Of course, I thought about all those things,' she said. 'All my options. In the end, though, I was just terrified that I wouldn't hit him hard enough. That I wouldn't stab him in the right place, wouldn't get the dosage quite right, whatever. You wouldn't want to be the person who tried to murder him and saw him survive.'
'I imagine he wouldn't have been too thrilled,' Thorne said.
'The way I chose to do it, by paying someone to do it for me, felt like the safest bet.' She smiled, genuine enjoyment in it. 'Alan wasn't the only one who was concerned about details. Eventualities.'
Thorne glanced across and caught another look from Anna. There was enjoyment in her smile, too.
Maybe you don't know this woman as well as you thought you did.
'Monahan's dead,' Thorne said. 'You should probably know that.'
Donna blinked three or four times, her face suddenly pale. She stared at Thorne for a few seconds, then looked to Anna. 'When?'
'Day before yesterday,' Anna said. 'He was stabbed in his cell.'
Donna took another moment, then shrugged. 'Well, I'm not going to pretend I give a monkey's.'
'I wouldn't expect you to,' Thorne said.
They watched as a man came towards them walking a Jack Russell. He stopped a few feet away and waited, staring blithely into the distance while the dog curled out a good-sized turd in the middle of the path. Then he carried on walking.
As he passed the bench, Anna said, 'You should pick that up.'
The man turned, yanked his dog closer and told her to go fuck herself.
Thorne stood up and stepped across. 'That's not very polite.'
The man sighed and tried to walk past, but Thorne moved sideways and pushed the flat of his hand into his chest. The dog was jumping and scrabbling at Thorne's knees as he reached into his pocket and pulled out his warrant card.
'Shit,' the man said.
'Now.' Thorne held his ID inches from the man's face. 'Pick it up.'
'I haven't got a bag.'
'Use your hands.'
' What? '
'It's all right.' Anna stood up and took a crumpled wad of tissues from her pocket. She leaned across and handed them over. The man dragged his dog back along the path, picked up its waste, then walked quickly away in the opposite direction.
Anna watched until he was out of sight. Muttered, 'Arsehole.'
Thorne was still breathing heavily a few minutes later when the three of them began walking back towards Donna's flat. Donna nodded over her shoulder towards Anna, who was a step or two behind them. 'Looks like I picked the right girl for the job, doesn't it?' she said.
At the end of her path, Donna reached into her pocket and produced a brown envelope. 'The latest photo. London postmark, same as before.'
Thorne took out the photo, not caring about how it was handled. The other photographs had gone to the FSS lab the day before, and he reckoned if there were any fingerprints to be had, they were as likely to be found on those as they were on this one. He would send over the envelope, though. It would not be the first time DNA had been extracted from the back of a stamp.
The photo was from the same set as the others. Sun, sea, the usual.
'Why do you think he's doing this?' Thorne asked.
'Revenge,' Donna said. 'It's not complicated. What I said before, about not wanting Alan to survive and know that I'd tried to kill him? Well, that's what's happened, except that it's taken him ten years to do something about it.' She wrapped her anorak tight around her chest. 'To take Ellie.'
'So, why now?' Anna asked.
'It's the perfect time,' Thorne said. He remembered a case from a year or two earlier. A man whose girlfriend and child had been murdered just before his release from prison. It was as cold and brutal an act of revenge as Thorne had ever encountered, and it had gone on to cost many more lives.
Donna nodded. 'Couldn't be better, could it? He takes her just before I'm due to come out, when all I'm thinking about is being with her again.'
'You think he planned that, too?' Anna asked.
