you're talking about. Which particular fuck-up.
It's a bloody long list…
Later, approaching LIMP Belmarsh, Thorne's mind turned to DIY or gardening as it usually did. The place couldn't help but put him in mind of a B amp;Q, or any one of those other shop-cum-warehouse monstrosities he could see from his office window, if he was unlucky and it was a clear day. Belmarsh looked as if it had been modeled on an American-style penitentiary: utilitarian, functional. Though the big old Victorian prisons like Strangeways' and Brixton were doubtless grimy and overcrowded, Thorne couldn't help thinking that they had a little more.., character.
Not that character was really the point, of course. That bizarre London mix of old and new was there again, sandwiching Thorne on his drive south, from the Greenwich marshes, through Charlton towards where the prison squatted, somewhere indistinct between Woolwich and Thamesmead. It was a straight road running alongside the river, and though the scenery on either side was hardly picturesque, it was certainly contrasting. On the right, set back from the road, were a number of converted Victorian barracks and army buildings. Dark and dirty, and on land most probably poisoned by a hundred years of oil and ordnance. To Thorne's left as he drove along beneath a sky already dour and darkening at four o'clock, stood plot after plot of new housing developments. They were the sort that used to be advertised by that bloke with the square chin and the deep voice who swooped down in a helicopter. Red bricks and green roofs, which would almost certainly fall down long before the somewhat darker buildings on the other side of the road. Then there was the prison itself. Its security level was as high as anywhere in the country. Home at one time or another to Jeffrey Archer, Ronnie Biggs and any terrorist worth their salt. Nobody had ever escaped. Low and grey and grim, and itself overlooked by yet another housing development. Thorne wasn't sure who had the worst view: the unhappy families in their lovely new red-brick houses, or the prisoners…
It took a little over half an hour from when Thorne first showed his warrant card at the desk in the visitors' centre to when he was sitting in the Category-A legal visit room, waiting to see Martin Palmer. It was a drawn-out and regimented procedure. From the Visitors' centre, where Thorne had to leave all personal belongings in a locker, on to the main building where his authorisation was checked again and an ultraviolet mark stamped onto the back of his hand. Then out into a courtyard where his pass was re-checked, through an X-ray portal, a maze of glass and air-lock type passages – one door shutting before the next one opened. And then the wait for the van that transported visitors to the separate Category-A compound. Once there, a third check on credentials, another X-ray machine and a good deal more grunting and staring before Thorne was finally ushered into the small, rectangular visit room.
Then another wait that depended on nothing but the mood of the prison officers concerned. It was always the same and it always pissed Thorne off. Police officers and prison staff were old enemies. The finders and the keepers resenting each other. Screws were seen as failed coppers. Coppers were thought of as delivery boys with smart suits and clean hands. On a prison officer's territory, if anything could be done to make things that little bit more tedious and difficult, it usually was.
Ten minutes later, a heavily tattooed and deeply depressed prison officer led Martin Palmer into the room. Palmer walked across and took a seat at the table opposite Thorne. The prison officer, who Thorne thought looked like a shithouse with right-wing leanings, left to take up his position behind the door from where he could observe through the window.
Palmer was pale. He was wearing the orange hooded top that Thorne had seen him in at his flat on Christmas Eve. He stared at Thorne, blinking slowly. He looked more like a man who'd just woken up than one who, as a matter of policy, would be on suicide watch. Despite the time and trouble he'd taken to get there, Thorne wanted to keep it quick and simple. He was only really there to deliver a message.
'I'm going to find Karen,' he said.
PART FOUR
NINETEEN
Palmer looked lost.
He stared around in search of something that might anchor him, some familiar landmark from which he could navigate, but everything felt alien and unknown.
Thorne watched, trying to imagine the man as a boy in this place when the world was very different, but he was no more successful than Palmer at recapturing the past.
It was understandable, of course. The embankment was unrecognisable compared to how it must have been almost twenty years earlier. This stretch of line, which a mile or so further on ran past the bottom of the King Edward's playing fields, had been disused for years. It had been earmarked for a development which, luckily for this operation, was never quite funded properly. The railway buildings – maintenance sheds and equipment stores – had long been demolished. The track was overgrown and in pieces. In patches, the grass was over eight feet high. Palmer was a stranger in this place he had once known so well. The handcuffs he was wearing hardly helped.
Thorne moved across to him, stood at his shoulder. 'Something tells me this isn't going to be easy.'
'It's not the same place. It's completely different.'
'Nowhere's ever the way we remember it.'
'I know. But this…' Palmer began to move towards a clump of trees. Thorne went with him. The sky was clear, but it had rained heavily overnight and the wind, which had picked up, blew water off the brown ferns and grey sycamores. The long grass clinging to their legs as they walked was heavy and wet. Thorne was wearing waterproof over-trousers and Palmer's jeans were already soaked.
'The curve of the bank, maybe,' Thorne said. 'A particular arrangement of trees. Anything that might at least narrow it down for us.'
Palmer nodded. 'I'm looking.'
Thorne saw the confusion etched across his face, but beneath it, Palmer wore the same base expression, his key expression, that Thorne had seen often. The one he had seen staring out at him from the front page of most of the papers that morning. Palmer, six months earlier, blinking and blurry, cradling a soft drink at some doubtless horrendous office party or other. Snapped hiding in a corner, his eyes wide, the pupils reddened by the flash; doing his best to look as if he was enjoying himself and failing dismally.
Thorne's money was on Sean Bracher as the source of the photo. If the slimy wanker had been in front of him at that moment, he might have given him a dig, but he couldn't summon up the energy to be too pissed off about it. Bracher, like that cleaner in the hotel, cashing in on killing, making a little something. One person's tragedy and all that. One dog-eared snap. One nice new sports car and a couple of weeks in Antigua with the girlfriend. It was only a picture. Fuck it, why not…
Palmer with that same expression now as he stared around him. All at once, Thorne recognised the expression for what it actually was: embarrassment. Embarrassed to be at that party. To be walking into a police station confessing to murder. Embarrassed to be here. Palmer was, Thorne realised, embarrassed to be pretty much wherever he was.
Palmer let out a small groan, his disorientation growing, and it struck Thorne that even the seasons were conspiring against him against both of them. Palmer would have remembered this place as it was in summer. Then the trees would have been heavy with fruit and flower. Today they dripped, dark and skeletal.
'It might help to think of the place in relation to the houses,' Thorne suggested. 'Can you remember which estate Nicklin used to live on?'
They both looked up towards the top of the embankment. A healthy crop of TV aerials and satellite dishes blossomed, just visible, beyond the tree line.
