'Absolutely right,' Brigstocke said. 'Not when we've got the latest Police Performance Assessment Framework to read and twelve-page reports on Standard Operating Procedure to complete by the end of the day.'
Thorne laughed and felt it take the chill off.
They talked about football for a few minutes, then families. Thorne asked after Brigstocke's three kids. The DCI asked Thorne how on earth his girlfriend was handling her job on the Kidnap Unit and managing to share a flat with someone who supported Spurs and listened to country music.
'How does she cope with all that pain and stress, day after day?' Brigstocke asked.
Thorne shook his head and let the punchline come.
'And the kidnaps must be even worse…'
They joked and chatted. Piss-takes and bullshit. Killing time and pretending not to think about the twelve strangers arguing in a room on the other side of the city.
FOUR
Anna bolted her dinner.
It was always fairly awkward when it was just her, Megan and Megan's latest boyfriend – on this occasion the admittedly gorgeous, but palpably brain-dead, Daniel – and it didn't help that Megan had done the cooking. Anna's housemate could only really manage pasta, and usually just threw in whatever happened to be lying around in the fridge. Her latest creation involved carrots, tinned peas and hard-boiled eggs, and watching Daniel slather brown sauce all over it didn't do much for Anna's appetite. Half a plate was filling enough, in the end.
It still tasted better than sushi, though…
After ten minutes' idle chat, during which nobody asked how her day had been, and ten more growing increasingly annoyed as Daniel sprawled on the sofa, smoking and dodging the washing-up, Anna went upstairs to her room. She lay on the bed and watched TV. Channel-hopped through the local news, a quiz show that left her utterly baffled, and a pointless remake of a sitcom that had been pointless first time around.
That had to be a sign of getting old, Anna thought: when they remake something you've grown up watching. It had to be a bad sign, surely. Looked at objectively by almost anybody – her parents, for example – it made her present circumstances seem that much sadder.
Working for peanuts and living like a student.
The house was only a couple of minutes' walk from the office which, along with the lower-than-average rent, justified for Anna the fact that she hated the area. It helped her forget, some of the time at least, that she had nothing in common with her nineteen-year-old housemate and had actually lived in a far nicer place when she was a student.
Back then, of course, her parents had been happy to chip in a little and help her do the place up. They had arrived unannounced, beaming on the doorstep with the radio she was always borrowing when she was at home and a brand-new microwave. They sent funny letters and food-parcels. Later, though, all of that had changed.
'What the hell did you think you were doing?'
Her father did not often lose his temper, and seeing him looking so lost, so genuinely confused, when Anna had announced that she had thrown in her job at the bank had been hugely upsetting. She felt ashamed just thinking about it; prickling with sweat and as close to tears as he had been when she'd told him.
'What are we supposed to think, your mum and me?'
Her mother had risen slowly from her seat as soon as Anna had begun saying her piece, but had made no response. She had just stared, red-faced and breathing noisily, as though she were trying her very best not to march across the carpet and slap her daughter.
'I'm really sorry you're upset,' Anna had said. Standing in her parents' overheated front room, she had heard her mother's voice in her own. The tone that had been reserved for those occasions when Anna or her sister had done something more than usually idiotic. 'But I think I'm old enough and ugly enough to make my own decisions, don't you?'
Her father had opened and closed his mouth. Her mother had just sat down again.
My own seriously stupid decisions…
Detective Inspector Tom Thorne knew nothing about Anna's history or her questionable lifestyle decisions, but clearly he thought she had been stupid to take on Donna Langford as a client. Thinking through their conversation on her journey back south of the river, she had decided he'd been pleasant enough, if a little condescending. No, more than pleasant, but he had made his scepticism and his distaste perfectly obvious, so she had not been holding out much hope.
A text message had been waiting for her when she came out of Victoria Tube Station: ' Like I thought. Not much we can do with this. Good luck with Donna. '
She was halfway through a reply, trying to word a jokey comment about Thorne's broken photocopier, when she changed her mind and erased what she had typed.
Luck was hardly likely to help her, Anna decided. She could not imagine where it might come from and how it would turn things around. It would not prevent her having to make the phone call she was dreading; giving back the money she'd been paid in advance and admitting to her client – her only client – that she had run out of ideas.
Downstairs, housemate and housemate's stupid boyfriend had put on some music. Anna turned up the volume on the TV. She flopped back down on the bed, muttered a barrage of swear-words and slapped her palms repeatedly into the softness of the duvet.
I've got more important things to worry about, Thorne had said. Well, she hadn't. She needed the money and she needed something to get her blood pumping a little faster. Whatever Tom Thorne thought about her, Donna Langford had nowhere to turn and she was even more desperate than Anna had guessed when she'd first laid eyes on her.
There was something about Thorne, too; something that told her she could not quite write him off. She had seen it in his face when she'd challenged him, when she'd told him she thought he might be interested. When she had shamelessly done her very best to sound disappointed.
She sat up and reached for the remote. Smiling now, thinking about her poor put-upon father. He was a man who could always be relied upon for a decent homily, whether one was needed or not.
If you want something doing, gift horses and the price of politeness. Always wear clean underwear in case you're in an accident, that sort of thing.
You make your own luck…
'He's got a point,' Louise Porter said.
'Yeah, right.' Thorne had told her about Russell Brigstocke's joke: the kidnaps and the country music.
Louise held out her wine glass and Thorne topped it up. 'It's a wonder I don't throw you out.'
'It's my flat.'
'I'm fully expecting the Pope to make me a saint.'
'I think that only happens once you're dead.'
'See? Everything Russell said is true and you're a smartarse.'
They had spent more evenings together recently, at Thorne's place or occasionally at Louise's in Pimlico, than was usually the case. Louise's team on the Kidnap Unit was less busy than it had been in a long time and Thorne had not caught a murder that necessitated too much overtime. Certainly nothing as all-consuming as the Andrea Keane inquiry.
He had picked up a takeaway en route from Hendon, ignoring the Bengal Lancer – his usual port of call – and opting instead to try a new Greek place a little further south on the Kentish Town Road. The food had been fine, but looking down at what was left of his chicken souvlaki, Thorne wished he had not been so adventurous.
It wasn't like him, after all.
They drank their wine and a silence grew between them, while Louise flicked through the Evening Standard
