Thorne crossed to the other desk and sat down. 'What are you doing about Palmer?'
'What are we doing? You're priceless…'
'Sorry. I know that sounded…'
'We're doing what you'd expect, which is more than you did, isn't it?
The media are all over this and we'll have to play along a bit if we want to use them. Somebody knows where Palmer's gone and the only way we're going to find them is through the papers, the TV…'
As if on cue, Steve Norman strolled into the office.
'Russell… DI Thorne…'
Brigstocke stood up. Thorne, for no good reason, found himself wearily doing the same. 'I'm going to get coffees,' Brigstocke said, moving to the door. 'Everybody want one?'
Thorne nodded. Norman grunted his assent as he dropped a pile of newspapers onto the desk. He picked off the top one and turned to Thorne, holding it up.
'You certainly know how to generate a good story, Thorne.'
The front page of the tabloid was almost filled with a photo of Martin Palmer. The headline was simple and dramatic. What the Americans called a 'scarehead'…
KILLER ON THE RUN.
Thorne stepped around the desk. He was tired, in pain and in no mood for another shouting match. 'Listen, Norman…'
Norman raised a hand to stop him and looked surprised when it did the trick. 'Look, before this kicks off, I want to apologise for the argument the other week. I was being an arsehole, OK? I've been meaning to come in and sort it out, but work's been piling up.'
Thorne was completely on the back foot. 'Right…'
'Things had been a bit tricky at home to tell you the truth, and I was just on a short fuse. It was out of order, and I know we're not going to be best mates but there's no point us being at loggerheads, is there?
Especially not now. Fair enough?'
Thorne nodded, wondering if he was suffering with delayed concussion. Norman thrust a finger at the front of the paper. 'Actually, this is exactly what we need. The phones have been ringing all morning. We'll probably have him back in custody by tea time.' Norman's expression darkened a little as he pulled out another paper from further down the pile. 'Did you see yesterday's?'
Thorne shook his head. He'd been lying in a darkened room most of the day, waiting to stop feeling like somebody had their boot on his face. This time the picture on the front page of the paper was far more indistinct. Two figures, shot with a zoom probably, from hundreds of feet away, like one of those blurry photos of Bigfoot or the Beast of Bodkin.
Thorne and Palmer at Karen McMahon's grave.
'This one we didn't give them,' Norman said. 'Somebody did though. Somebody who's getting a bit too pally with the press.'
Distasteful as it was, Thorne had to agree. Bracher was probably responsible for the early stuff the papers had got hold of, but this had to be down to someone on the team. 'I'll find out who it is.'
'Good. I have to say, though, that it's doing us more good than anything else at the moment. We've actually started feeding them a bit more on Karen McMahon.' Thorne looked slightly confused. 'They formally identified her thirty-six hours ago. Around the time this was taken.'
Thorne needed to catch up fast. He'd been out of the loop since he'd put Palmer in the back of the Mondeo on Thursday afternoon and driven him back to the railway embankment.
'I think he might be a police officer…'
'There's a lot of human interest there,' Norman said. 'Which they love of course. Fifteen years of torment for the parents, all that. Plus, the simple fact that a murder's been solved. Finding that body has done everybody a lot of favours. We can claw back a bit of lost ground.'
The stabbing pain that ran across Thorne's face cranked up a notch. He reached into his jacket pocket for the painkillers. 'I found one body, then lost another.'
Norman laughed, a wheezy snicker. 'Right. But they kind of cancel each other out.' Norman had a newspaper in each hand. He held them up in turn to illustrate his argument. 'Thanks to the brownie points we earn for finding Karen McMahon, we can let them go to town with Palmer's escape, and hopefully we can keep one or two of the less impressive procedural details out of it.'
Less impressive procedural details?
'Right,' Thorne said. 'Obviously I'd be grateful…'
Thorne poured himself a glass of water. He needed it to swallow the pills and to take a very unpleasant taste out of his mouth. As he threw his head back, he caught sight of Brigstocke heading towards them across the incident room with three plastic cups.
'Coffee's here…'
'Great.' Norman's mobile rang. He looked at the screen. 'Excuse me, I need to take this…'
Thorne watched as Norman took the call, turning away and murmuring into his phone. He was finding it hard to distinguish between the pain and disorder colliding in his head like a pair of very long trains, ploughing endlessly into each other. Norman apologising… one body lost, one body found.., a leak on the investigation.., the DPS… Palmer's tone of voice in the car when he said what he said about Nicklin.
Then, there was the one less-than-impressive procedural detail he hadn't told them about at all…
McEvoy was logged on to the Internet. Holland hadn't recognised the page she'd had up on screen, but the glimpse he'd caught before she saw him and quit, gave him the idea it might be a mail server. They were not supposed to use the system to send or receive personal e-marls, but Holland said nothing. In the scheme of things it was pretty trivial, and besides, he knew how any comment of that sort would be taken.
'At least you're not leaving when I come into the office. We must be making progress.'
McEvoy shrugged, not looking up. 'Can't let you accuse me of not doing my job properly.'
Holland saw no point in pussyfooting around the issue. He opened his mouth and said it. 'I think one of us needs to transfer off this team.' Her face told him that he'd shaken her. 'Come on, you must have been thinking about it, it's-'
She cut him off. 'Well I'm not fucking going.'
'Sarah…'
'Right, course. By one of us, you mean me. Well?'
Now would be the time to walk away if he was going to; to forget he'd brought it up and make the best of it. He hesitated. 'Yes.'
'Forget it.'
'You're the one with the problem, not me.'
'Are you sure?'
'Don't psychoanalyse me. I'm not the one snorting away my wages, fucking everything up, putting the lives of my colleagues at risk…'
The colour sprang into McEvoy's face. She could feel tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. 'When? Tell me when?'
'Maybe never. Maybe half an hour from now…' Holland wanted so much to cross the five feet of space between them, right then, and take hold of her. He couldn't.
'Nobody else knows about this, Dave.' McEvoy watched herself, feeling like a ditzy blonde trying to avoid a speeding ticket. Loathing it.
'Let's just forget all the shit that's happened. Dave…?'
'Nobody else knows for now. I don't think you're doing a very good job of hiding it.'
McEvoy changed tack in a second. 'You go to Brigstocke and I'll be right behind you. I'll tell him you've been harassing me. They'll think you're making it up because I wouldn't fuck you…'
Holland could see that she was desperate, backed into a corner. He knew that she was clinging to the ledge by her fingernails, saying things she didn't mean and would never carry through, but still his temper got the better of him. He marched across the office, picked up the newspaper from the top of a filing cabinet and threw it down in front of her.
McEvoy stared down at the picture of Thorne and Palmer at the drainage ditch.
