way of knowing how careful everyone else involved had been. One slip and they'd all be buggered.
Pulling up outside the house, Pat was talking about making them both tea as soon as they got indoors, and Cook told himself to try to relax. These were people who knew what they were doing, course they were, who did their homework. He had often wondered if they knew him even better than his wife did. Asked himself if, back when they had made their first approach, they had known exactly how worried he was about making ends meet on a prison officer's pension.
That he would be unlikely to refuse their offer.
'Here we are, love…'
Christ, though, now he wished he'd refused. Back then, it had seemed like a lot of money for very little work or risk. A few bits and pieces of business in and out of the prison, and a bag full of tenners in the boot of his car.
'Wait there and I'll help you out.'
No talk of anybody being killed. No cell floors running with blood and homemade blades to get shot of. And no way for him to stay clear of it.
He was theirs by then, wasn't he?
He got out of the car and walked around to open Pat's door. She held out a hand and he was about to take it when the headlights broke across the brow of the hill.
The car was travelling at such a speed that he knew what was coming for no more than a few seconds. Just enough time to squeeze his wife's hand once before letting go. Before the car took him and the open door, then accelerated away, the roar of its engine dying as Patricia Cook's screams grew louder.
A few minutes later, kneeling over the body in the road, a neighbour phoned 999 while his wife tried to calm the distraught woman in the car. Once an ambulance was on the way, the emergency call was relayed to the on- call Homicide Assessment Team and one of their cars was immediately dispatched. Within an hour, as soon as the pathologist had made his initial examination and the identity of the dead man had been established, contact was made with the relevant unit of the West Yorkshire Homicide and Major Inquiry Team. Once the name had been run through the computer, details of the incident were passed to the senior investigating officer of the investigation with which Howard Cook appeared to be closely connected. Within two hours of the incident in Kirkthorpe, the case had been given a number and the necessary files had been opened.
A second murder inquiry had been launched.
Just before 11.30 p.m., driving towards the crime scene from his home on the other side of Wakefield, Andy Boyle called Tom Thorne.
TWENTY
'There's so much to do,' she said. 'To be organised and what have you. I haven't even had the chance to go to the shops yet or cook anything and the house is a pigsty. I wish you'd let me make some tea or something. I could easily nip down to the end of the road and pick up some cake…'
Pat Cook stopped, the thought trailing away as though she had just remembered something, and turned to look at the woman sitting next to her on the sofa. She seemed surprised to see the local WPC – sent to stay overnight and by her side ever since – and shook her head. For a moment or two, she appeared to be trying to work out what the woman, and two other police officers, were doing in her front room.
At least one of those officers was not entirely sure himself.
'Honestly,' Thorne said. 'We're fine.'
It was Monday lunchtime, but the curtains were drawn at the large windows and the only light struggled from behind the fringed, brown shade of a standard lamp. Pat Cook wore a padded blue housecoat and was clutching what looked like a man's pyjama jacket. She spoke slowly, each thought an effort, like someone who was not quite awake yet.
'Did you get any kind of a look at the car?' Andy Boyle asked. He was standing near the door, a similar position to the one he had taken when he and Thorne had interviewed Jeremy Grover. Thorne wondered if he did it deliberately, if it was some kind of status thing. 'The make or the colour?'
'It was dark,' Pat Cook said. 'And it was all so quick.'
'Not even when it was driving away? A glimpse of the number plate, maybe?'
'I wasn't watching the car, I was watching Howard. He seemed to roll over and over, for ages. Then, when he stopped, I could just see the door lying beyond him in the grass.' She turned to look at the WPC. 'It took the door clean off the car, did you know that?' The WPC nodded, confirmed gently that she did. 'I was looking at it, lying there all twisted, and I was thinking that they'd have one hell of a job to fix it back on the car. It's ridiculous, now I come to think about it. Don't you think that's ridiculous?'
'It's not ridiculous,' Thorne said.
He knew from experience that the strangest thoughts could fly into people's heads at the most extreme moments. He remembered a woman who had taken a carving knife to her husband and would not stop talking about how bad she felt for ruining his favourite shirt. A father whose young son had been the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting who became obsessed with finding the football his son had had with him at the time. 'It was his best ball,' the man kept saying. 'He would have been so upset if that had gone missing.'
'Could you even see if the car had one occupant or two?' Boyle asked.
As inconspicuously as possible, Thorne rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and loosened his collar. The room was far too hot, but none of the visitors had been brave enough to make any comment.
'I didn't see anything.'
Thorne found himself wondering if Howard Cook had been the one responsible for turning the radiators down; the one who complained about it being too stuffy and marched around the house adjusting the thermostat and throwing open windows. Thorne had yet to encounter a couple who agreed about such things.
Boyle asked a few more questions about the incident, but Thorne knew that it was all academic. The car would almost certainly have been stolen and, when it finally turned up, they would be very lucky if it yielded anything remotely useful. Based on the pattern of the inquiry thus far, even if they were to get super -lucky and pull in whoever was responsible, they would probably not be able to identify the third party who paid them to murder Howard Cook. Thorne knew who was ultimately responsible, of course, and he had it on very good authority that this was a man who considered all eventualities. These would surely include the arrest and questioning of the people he hired.
'It's to do with his job, isn't it?' Pat Cook asked suddenly. 'The money.'
Boyle took half a step away from the door. 'What about it?'
'When I asked him, and this is going back to last year now, he said he was doing a lot more overtime.' She shook her head at what she clearly believed was the littlest and whitest of lies. 'But I knew all his comings and goings, because I always cooked for him, always had a hot meal ready, you know? I knew his hours better than he did and it wasn't overtime.'
'What did you think it was, then?' Thorne asked.
'I knew it… wasn't overtime.'
Thorne nodded. 'So, how did you become aware of it?'
'A few little things, really. He bought me one of them TENS machines for the arthritis, and an orthopaedic bed, one of those as goes up and down. And they're not cheap. I checked. When the service was due on the car, there was none of the usual moaning, you know? Because they'll rob you blind, those garages, won't they? Crooked, the lot of them.'
Thorne and Boyle exchanged a look. The death of her husband had clearly not quite sunk in yet, so irony would almost certainly be lost on her.
'So you just accepted it? You didn't say anything?'
'I as good as forgot about it, tell you the truth. Howard always looked after things financially. He didn't like me to worry.'
I bet he didn't, Thorne thought.
'The bills were paid, we had our holidays. Everything went on as normal, you know?'
