Nicklin drifted off to sleep and dreamed about fucking them both.
SIX
Baynham amp; Smout was a large accountancy firm whose glass-fronted premises on Shaftesbury Avenue nestled next to those of film companies and publishers, a stone's throw from Chinatown and Soho. If, having spent a hard morning number-crunching, an accountant wanted a bowl of hot and sour soup and a hand job at lunchtime, this was a fantastic place to work.
Thorne sat on a vast black leather sofa admiring the understated but classy artwork on the expansive white walls. He glanced at Holland on the chair opposite, leafing through the style magazine he'd picked up from the glass-topped coffee table in front of him. He wondered how much more it had cost to kit out this lobby, than it had cost to furnish his entire flat. Probably more than it had cost to buy his flat… He caught the eye of one of the two gorgeous young receptionists sitting at adjacent, walnut desks on the other side of the lobby. She smiled. 'Won't be much longer.' As the words echoed off the marble and glass, her colleague looked up and smiled as well. Thorne nodded. One of them would only have been there for five months…
He closed his eyes and saw an image from one of the photos in his ever expanding gallery. She was lying on her side, her right arm trapped beneath her, and her left thrown high above her head, like a schoolgirl eager to get a teacher's attention. One high-heeled shoe was missing; it lay a few feet away, in a patch of nettles, and the dew glistened on her thin summer skirt. She was yellowy white, like the bone of some giant dog, gnawed and then forgotten. Her clothes hung on her like scraps of flesh, her hair like pale strands of gristle. The single patch of colour – the blood that had poured from the wound in her chest and dried overnight to the shade of old meat. Thorne looked over at the two girls busy at their computer screens when they weren't answering the constantly trilling phones. He wondered which of them had replaced Jane Lovell.
'Sean Bracher… sorry.'
Thorne looked up to see a sharp suit, a proffered hand and a mouth with far too many teeth in it. Holland was already on his feet and Thorne stood up to join him. He picked up his battered leather jacket and moved to follow Bracher to his office, but Baynham amp; Smout's Assistant Director of Personnel was going to do his talking to the police right there in the lobby. He flopped into one of the chairs, tossed his mobile phone on to the coffee table and called across to the reception desk. 'Jo, a pot of coffee would be good…'
Bracher was in his mid-thirties, with rapidly thinning hair, which Thorne guessed he was not at all happy about. Clearly an Essex boy made good, he could probably turn on an acquired sophistication when it was needed. With Thorne and Holland, he'd obviously decided that matey was the way to play it: estuary vowels, laughter, innuendo. One of the boys.
The coffee arrived quickly, and Bracher said his piece. 'I can only really tell you what I told your colleague back in the summer. We're a big company and I tend to pick up on most things that are going on, but there's no way I can be on top of what the people here are up to in their own time. Having said that, there was no-one Jane had a problem with as far as I'm aware. I'm here for people to tell me stuff like that and Jane and I were good mates, you know, so, I think she'd have said something.'
Holland placed his coffee cup back on the table. 'I get the impression that Jane was pretty much the life and soul round here. That she liked to enjoy herself.'
There was a resounding raspberry noise as Bracher shifted on the leather chair. 'I think that's why what happened hit everybody here so hard. It can get a bit dull around here if you're not careful, and since everything went so bloody PC, some people can get a bit touchy if people try to… liven things up.'
Thorne glanced across as a motorcycle courier came through the revolving doors, took off his helmet and strolled towards the reception desk.
'Liven things up?' Holland said.
Bracher leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers intertwined. He had a serious point to make. 'Seventy-five per cent, at least, seventy five per cent of people meet their husbands, wives, or long-term partners at work. That's a fact. But if you so much as ask a woman out these days, you've got to be careful, you know? You used to be able to have some fun, men and women could wind each other up a bit, but now it's all got a bit po-faced. Nobody really talks to anybody else now, except for five minutes when they're making a coffee or whatever.
'Water-cooler time' I think they call it in America. Anyway, Jane didn't give a toss about any of that. She just enjoyed a laugh, and if people didn't like it, then sod 'em, you know?'
Thorne watched as the courier pulled a package from the bag over his shoulder and handed it to one of the girls at the desk. She laughed at something he said…
'Was there anybody who didn't like it?' Holland asked d in such a way as to imply that not liking it, whatever it was, would have been utterly stupid.
'Well, there's always a couple of arseholes anywhere isn't there? I bet you've got a few on the force haven't you?' Holland smiled, but only with his mouth. 'Yeah, there was the odd one, you know, couldn't see the joke, but we'd just take the piss. You've got to have a sense of humour haven't you? I mean, we're all fair game at the end of the day…'
Thorne tuned Bracher out. The courier and the girls on reception were still flirting. Jane Lovell might have been killed by a complete stranger, and she might have been killed by someone she knew well. A third option was that her murderer was someone with whom she was casually acquainted – someone she saw regularly without ever really knowing. A courier, a shop assistant, someone she met at the tube station every morning.
Call it a couple of thousand suspects…
'Jane was always up for it, you know? Up for the crack.' Bracher was still eulogising. 'As far as I know, she got on with almost everybody.'
Thorne spoke directly to him for the first time, his sarcasm undisguised.
'And, as far as you know, Mr. Bracher, did she ever get off with anybody?'
Bracher reddened. He picked up a teaspoon and tapped it against the side of the table for a few seconds. 'Look, I'm here to make sure that people can work together. Who they're sleeping with is really none of my business.'
'Even if it's someone in the same office? I find that hard to believe.'
Bracher's mobile rang and he grabbed for it gratefully. As he murmured into it, he raised his eyebrows at Thorne, an apology for the tiresome interruption. Thorne looked at Holland. Time to go. Bracher shrugged and stood up. 'I'm sorry, but unless there's anything else…'
As they all shook hands, gathering up jackets and overcoats, the thought crossed Thorne's mind that Bracher had primed a colleague to ring him after ten minutes, giving him an excuse to get away. As he and Holland pushed their way out through the revolving door, a second thought entered his mind. A question. Had he developed finely honed, razor-sharp instincts, or was he just a cynical bastard?
'What do you make of him, then?' Holland asked. They were walking along Shaftesbury Avenue, towards the Cambridge Circus NCP on Gerrard Street, where Thorne's F-reg Mondeo was busy lowering the tone. It was bright but freezing. Scarves and sunglasses weather…
'I think he was sleeping with Jane Lovell, or had been at some point.'
Holland nodded. 'Worth looking at d'you think?'
Thorne pulled a face. He was a cynical bastard, but those instincts he did have, told him that Bracher, though an arrogant, unpleasant sod, was probably no more than that. He wondered how many more of them he was going to have to deal with before this case was finished. Back at Becke House, Thorne walked past McEvoy who was on the phone in the Major Incident Room. She waved at him, indicating that she needed to talk. He nodded and carried on through to his own office.
He sat down at his desk, flicked the desktop calendar forward to Tue, Dec 11, and stared for a minute at the psychedelic screensaver that Holland had installed for him. The vivid colours swam and morphed and bled into one another, and he gazed at them until they began to blur and hurt his eyes. They were there, so he'd been told, to stop the computer screen burning out. Thorne wondered if they made something that could do the same for policemen. He stood up and marched briskly out of the office into the Incident Room, not looking at anybody, not speaking, grabbing a chair and taking it with him.
