people's legs broken. Yeah, Alan Langford got what was coming to him, probably, but it was still a seriously nasty way to go.'
'Look at the date,' Anna said, She pushed the photo back towards Thorne. 'Bottom right…'
Thorne picked up the photo. The date had been stamped automatically by the camera: a little over three months earlier. 'They can do that sort of thing with Photoshop,' he said. 'Besides which, this could be a photo of anybody.'
'Donna says it's her husband,' Anna said. She shook her head, searched for something else, but in the end she just shrugged and said it again. 'She swears it's Alan.'
'Then she's lying.'
'Why?'
'Because… Look, maybe she went a bit funny inside. She wouldn't be the first. Maybe she wants money. Maybe she's trying to get some big 'miscarriage of justice' thing off the ground.'
'She doesn't even know I'm here,' Anna said. 'She came to me because she doesn't want the police involved.'
Thorne was taken aback. 'OK, so how are you going to explain this conversation to your client?' He could not suppress a smile and felt more than a little guilty as he watched her start to fidget and redden again.
'I'll just be honest and tell her that I was getting nowhere,' Anna said. 'That I couldn't think what else to do. I'll tell her I've spent a fortnight staring at that sodding photo and that I'm none the wiser.'
'Why did you come to see me?' Thorne asked.
'I thought you might be able to get a bit more information from the photograph.' She looked at Thorne, but got no response. 'Don't you have ways of… enhancing pictures, or whatever? I mean, there must be some way to tell where this picture was taken. I don't know, geographical profiling, a computer programme or something?'
'This isn't CSI,' Thorne said. 'We haven't even got a photocopier that works properly.'
'I also thought you might be interested.' Anna was leaning towards him suddenly. 'Stupid of me, I can see that, but it seemed like a decent idea at the time. It was your case, so I hoped that if you saw the photo you might at least think that maybe it wasn't… finished.' She stared at Thorne for a few seconds longer, then sat back and reached for a strand of hair to pull at.
'It's a waste of time,' Thorne said. 'I'm sorry, but I've got more important things to worry about. Actually, I can't think of anything that isn't more important than this.' He pushed back his chair and, after a moment or two, Anna got the message and did the same.
'I'll get out of your way, then,' she said.
She took a step towards the door.
Thorne thought she looked about fourteen. 'Look… I'll run it past my boss, all right?' He saw her expression change and raised a hand. 'He'll only say the same as me, though, so don't hold your breath.' He picked up the photograph again, nodded down at it. 'Could do with a bit of that myself,' he said. 'Sun and sand.'
'Tom?'
Thorne looked up to see DI Yvonne Kitson standing in the doorway. They shared the office and most of the time Thorne was happy enough with the arrangement. He certainly liked her a lot more than he had back when she was a high-flier, and suspected that she felt the same way about herself. Like Thorne, she could still put noses out of joint without much effort, but it was hard not to admire the way she had rebuilt a career that had plunged so calamitously off the tracks after an extra-marital affair with a senior officer.
'Like a self-assembly wardrobe,' she had once said to Thorne. 'One loose screw and the whole thing fell to pieces.'
Now, she had one eye on Thorne's visitor. He gestured towards Anna, the photograph flapping between his fingers, and introduced her.
Kitson nodded a cursory greeting and turned back to Thorne. 'I just thought you'd like to know that the jury's gone out.'
'Right.' Thorne stood and moved around the desk.
Anna was doing up the buttons on her jacket. 'The case you were in court for?'
Thorne nodded, thinking about the wink he'd given Adam Chambers. 'One that isn't quite so… piss-easy,' he said.
DCI Russell Brigstocke's office was twenty feet along the corridor from the one Thorne shared with Yvonne Kitson. When Thorne walked in, Brigstocke was on the phone, so Thorne dropped into a chair and waited. He thought about an eighteen-year-old girl whose bones still lay waiting for an inquisitive dog and about a man who had died screaming, handcuffed to the wheel of a car in the middle of nowhere.
He tried to separate the two murders, committed so many years apart. To tease out the tangle of pictures, real and imagined.
He wanted to worry about the right thing…
Brigstocke put the phone down and reached for a mug of coffee. He took a sip, grimaced.
'You know the jury's out?' Thorne asked.
Brigstocke nodded. 'No point thinking about it, mate,' he said. 'I heard it went really well this morning.'
'Sam tell you it was in the bag, did he?'
'I'm just saying we've done everything we could.'
'Everything except find her,' Thorne said.
He felt chilly suddenly, aware of how thin and flimsy his suit was, missing the heavy familiarity of his leather jacket. As it went, most coppers dressed the way he was at that moment. It was as if each one graduated to a plain-clothes unit and instantly acquired the fashion sense of a low-end estate agent, but Thorne had always resisted the pull of the off-the-peg M amp;S two-piece, the easy-iron shirt and shiny tie.
'It's bloody cold in here,' he said.
Brigstocke nodded. 'There's air in the radiator and nobody's got a key.'
Thorne got up and walked across to the radiator, bent and put his hand to the metal, which was no better than lukewarm. He stood up, pressed his calves against it. Hearing a sound he had come to recognise and dread, he looked round and saw Brigstocke shuffling a pack of cards.
'I've got a new one for you.'
'Do you have to?' Thorne asked.
For reasons nobody could quite fathom, Brigstocke had developed a keen interest in magic over the previous few months. He attended classes at a club in Watford and had started performing close-up magic for beer money at assorted Met parties and conferences. He also insisted on trying out new tricks on anyone who could not escape quickly enough.
'Just think of a card,' Brigstocke said, slipping into the patter. 'Don't tell me, though. I mean, what kind of a trick would that be?'
The trick was pretty good, and Thorne did his best to sound encouraging, but he had never really seen the point of magic. He had no real interest unless the magician explained how a trick was done. Russell Brigstocke was a decent copper, but he was certainly not a wizard.
'Who was the girl in your office?' Brigstocke asked, putting away the cards.
Thorne told him about Anna Carpenter and the Curious Case of the Suntanned Corpse. Brigstocke had not worked on the Langford inquiry, but he remembered the investigation well enough.
'Coming back from the dead,' he said. 'Now that's a decent trick.'
'It would be impressive.'
'Anything in it?'
Thorne took the photograph from his pocket and passed it over. 'God knows what Donna Langford's up to,' he said. 'I just hope that detective agency's screwing a decent wedge out of her.'
'Does it even look like him?'
Thorne stood at Brigstocke's shoulder and looked again. The dyed hair, the squint, the grin. That faint bell was ringing a little louder now, but surely that was just because Anna Carpenter had told him who it was supposed to be. 'Looks like a lot of people,' he said. 'Looks like a bad actor playing a gangster on his holidays.'
'What did you tell her?'
'That she was wasting her time and we couldn't afford to waste any of ours.'
