'Not really,' Thorne said.
The woman nodded and said, 'Looks like you could do with one.'
Thorne closed his eyes again and did not open them until the plane's wheels screamed against the runway.
Standing at the luggage carousel, he felt the pulse in his collarbone again and pictured a bare-chested man raising up a beer glass. Smiling and squinting against the sun. Would that smile be summoned quite as easily now, Thorne wondered, after everything the man had done to keep his place in the sun?
Probably…
From the moment Thorne had returned to duty, he had badgered Brigstocke, had even gone cap in hand to Jesmond, begging for the go ahead to travel to Spain. Initially, there had been reluctance, with little more in the way of real evidence than there had been on the night Anna was killed. Three dead now. Four, including the unidentified body from ten years before. But still nothing to tie the man they all knew was responsible to any of the killings.
Eventually, Thorne had been given the nod; out of sympathy, as much as anything, he suspected. But it didn't matter. He would take whatever was on offer if it meant a chance to get up close and personal with Alan Langford. He would do whatever he could. He would find Langford and wait, rely on others back in London to furnish him with whatever was needed to bring the fucker back in chains.
'I hate to sound like the captain in Starsky and Hutch,' Brigstocke had said. 'But I can only give you a couple of weeks.'
Holland had driven Thorne to Luton Airport. 'We'll be busting a gut,' he had said. 'You know that.'
Pulling up outside the terminal, Thorne had said, 'Find out who was in that Jag, Dave. He's the key to all this.'
Thorne's suitcase came out early. He was happy to take it as a good omen.
He grabbed the case and wheeled it out quickly through the automatic doors, reached into his carry-on bag for sunglasses, and stepped into the late-April Spanish sunshine.
Full of hate.
TWENTY-NINE
Not so much 'shit-hot', Thorne decided, as 'lukewarm'.
Within a few minutes of meeting DI Peter – 'call me Pete' – Fraser, Thorne was convinced that the agent assigned by Silcox and Mullenger as his guide and liaison for the Spanish leg of the inquiry was probably not one of SOCA's finest.
'Welcome to the madhouse,' Fraser said as they walked towards the airport car park. He grinned and lowered his head, peered at Thorne over wraparound sunglasses. 'From what I've heard, you should slot in quite nicely.'
He was not much taller than Thorne, but looked a good deal fitter. His hair had the kind of blond streaks that Louise called 'bird-shit highlights', while the three-quarter-length shorts, beaded necklace and salmon-pink shirt made him look more like a small-time drug dealer than a big-time secret squirrel. Perhaps that was the idea, Thorne thought. He pictured his own, more conservative collection of shorts and polo shirts, bought a few days earlier with his warm-weather allowance of M amp;S vouchers. He guessed that anyone with an eye for such things would mark him out for what he was straight away.
He decided that he didn't much care.
'Good flight?' Fraser asked.
'It was easyJet,' Thorne said.
They sat in Fraser's Punto for a few minutes, waiting for the air conditioning to kick in before heading away. Listening to the agent's easy chatter, Thorne wondered if, first impressions aside, he should perhaps give the man the benefit of the doubt. Hadn't he taken an instant dislike to Andy Boyle? Hadn't he thought that Anna Carpenter was a pain in the neck when he had first been lumbered with her?
Perhaps Fraser would surprise him, too.
The SOCA man watched as Thorne held sticky palms towards the air vents. 'This is chilly, mate,' he said. 'You want to try being here in August. I promise you, you'd be sweating like a rapist.'
Perhaps not…
The road from the airport was clogged with traffic, squeezing between building works every quarter-mile or so that narrowed the lanes. The carriageways were separated by a seemingly endless line of palm trees and, for the first twenty minutes, snaking slowly through the built-up outskirts of Malaga, drab-looking apartment blocks and retail strips crowded in from both sides. Furniture stores, DIY warehouses and restaurants, with as many English signs as Spanish.
Fraser took a call and, in a London accent that was sounding increasingly affected, told whoever he was talking to that Thorne was in the car with him. He said his passenger was clearly feeling the heat and laughed at the response. He hummed his agreement to a few things and promised to call back later. After hanging up, he turned the radio on and found an English station; some Radio Essex reject proudly announcing a programme of back-to-back eighties classics.
Spandau Ballet gave way to Kajagoogoo.
'We should probably give you a day or two to get settled.'
'I don't need a day or two,' Thorne said.
Fraser shrugged. 'You might want to feel your way into things is all I'm saying. There's not much on today, anyway.'
'You got more stuff for me to read?'
'Oh yeah, we'll go through everything tonight over dinner. But you know, softly-softly-catchee-monkey, all that.'
'Way past that with Alan Langford,' Thorne said.
Fraser looked at him, placed a finger to his lips. ' If he's who we think he is, you start saying that name too loudly and we might just as well be wearing pointed hats.'
Thorne nodded. As Brigstocke had guessed might be the case, SOCA suspected that Alan Langford was a man they had been observing for some time, and information about him had been faxed through piecemeal in the weeks since the shooting. Details of the new life Langford had made for himself in Spain. Some of his nice new friends and not so nice business associates.
His new name.
The traffic had eased and, despite the high-rise sprawl of Torremolinos in the distance, their clear view of the coast – arcing south-west towards Gibraltar – was spectacular. The sea was shining to the left of them, crashing against the beaches in waves far bigger than Thorne had expected.
'Nice, isn't it?' Fraser asked.
' Looks nice,' Thorne said.
Five minutes later, Fraser drifted across to the right-hand lane and Thorne clocked the sign for the turn- off.
Benalmadena.
'Where the photographs were taken,' Thorne said.
Fraser nodded, said, 'Seems as good a place as any for some lunch. You hungry?'
Thorne had found it easy to resist the lure of easyJet's in-flight catering service. But even if he had fancied something on the plane, he could not have justified using up a fortnight's expenses on one cup of coffee and a sandwich.
'Yeah, I could eat,' he said.
They found a small restaurant in a parade of shops and bars just across from the beach, where people were sharing tapas around large upturned barrels. Fraser told Thorne that he'd do the honours and, having put away one small beer and asked for another, ordered food for both of them in fluent Spanish. Thorne let him get on with it. He was happy enough, for the time being at least, to let the SOCA agent play his games, as well as a
