and pick the car up. I thought I'd go and see how McEvoy's getting on. Find out if her mother's any better…'
At three thirty, they pulled up outside Sarah McEvoy's flat in Wembley.
Thorne got out of the car and walked up the steps to the front door. He turned and looked at Holland who was still sitting in the passenger seat, staring forwards. 'Come on, Dave…' Holland got out while Thorne rang the bell. He arrived next to him as Thorne rang again. Nothing.
Thorne took a step back, peered to his left at the dark blue curtains drawn across the bay window. 'Is that her flat?' He'd picked McEvoy up outside the place on a few occasions, dropped her off on a couple more, but he'd never been inside.
Holland's answer was non-committal. 'Maybe she's in bed,' he said. Thorne shrugged, thrust his hands into his jacket pockets and trudged back down towards the car.
Holland watched Thorne moving away, wrestling with it, knowing how easy it would be to jog gently down the steps after him. His voice when he spoke was louder than he'd intended it to be – more urgent.
'I think we should go in…'
Thorne turned, twirling the car keys around a finger. 'I don't think I want the Funny Firm doing me for breaking and entering as well, Dave…'
'I've got a key,' Holland said.
Thorne came up the steps two at a time and took hold of the arm that was already reaching forward to push a key into the lock.
'We'll need to talk about this, Holland…'
It was as dark and gloomy inside the flat as it was outside on the street. As well as the curtains at the front, in McEvoy's bedroom there was a blind pulled down over the back window, the one that looked out on to the garden.
'Well, she's not asleep,' Holland said, coming back into the living room.
Thorne wasn't listening. He was staring at a dozen reflections of himself. He counted at least a dozen of them. Mirrors were suspended from the ceiling, propped up on the floor, leaning against the walls at a variety of strange angles. Heavy and ornate, plain and unframed, round, square, all highly polished…
'What the fuck is this…?'
Holland moved past him to the window, raised the blind, then turned around. He opened his mouth to answer the question but nothing came out.
Thorne moved slowly around the room, every glance bringing some new reflection, some bizarre perspective on himself. The back of a leg, the top of his head. His fading bruises appeared straight on and profiled at the same time.
On the table, Thorne saw another, smaller mirror, and the creased lottery ticket. He knew at once what he was looking at.
'How long have you known about it?' he asked.
'About three weeks.'
'You're a fucking idiot…'
Holland raised a hand to shut Thorne up. Yes, he was a fucking idiot, he was much, much worse, but he had to stop Thorne going off on one. Not now. He could bow his head and accept the bollocking another time. Now, there was something else…
'Sir, I think McEvoy's in some sort of trouble.'
'Some sort…?'
'Real trouble.' Holland couldn't say why he was worried. He didn't know what it was that was nagging at him, couldn't explain where the feeling came from. It made him shiver and it kept him awake, and he needed to tell someone. It was there in McEvoy's eyes and the things she said, and the way she'd been acting for a while. It was as if she had a secret. Another secret…
'What?' Thorne said.
Holland shook his head, looked around the room, searching desperately for something that might bring this indistinct unease into sharp relief. His gaze settled on the computer. . The look on McEvoy's face a few days before, when he'd walked in to the office and found her on the Internet. Panic, and something else. Defiance?
Triumph…?
Thorne watched Holland walk across, pull up a chair, hit the button to wake the machine up.
'What are you doing?'
'I'm going to check her emails.'
'You think she's been ordering drugs by email?'
'No… maybe. I don't think this is about the coke…' Holland began moving the mouse, clicking, opening windows.
'Don't you need some sort of password?'
'I would if I was actually going to sign on to her account, but I should be able to check her filing cabinet – see what she's been sending out, what she's received…'
Thorne nodded, letting Holland get on with it, whatever it was. Cocaine. Thorne had suspected as much. He'd known a few coppers who liked a sniff. It was usually the older ones who should have known better, the ones that couldn't be doing with Ecstasy because it involved dancing. Whatever their reason for doing it, some of them got seriously messed up.
Thorne wondered how far into it McEvoy had got. He looked up and saw the answer reflected around the room, from one mirror to another…
'Fuck… oh fuck, no.'
'What?' Thorne felt the change in his body straight away. He sensed a livening in the nerve endings, a heightening of the senses as he moved rapidly across the room, reacting instinctively to the panic in Holland's voice. 'What is it, Dave?'
Holland ran his fingers through his hair, scratching hard at his scalp, staring in disbelief at the screen. Thorne leaned in and looked over his shoulder. He couldn't immediately work out what he was looking at.
'I can't…'
'She's been getting e-mails from the killer,' Holland said. 'From Night Watchman…'
Thorne felt something prickle around the top of his shoulders, heard his heartbeat quicken. 'Getting them, or getting them and replying?
How long…?
'Wait…' Holland clicked, sorting the mails by date. He began to scroll slowly through them, and Thorne watched it move down the screen in front of his eyes. A correspondence between a woman on his team and the man they were trying to catch. A man who killed more brutally than anyone Thorne had ever lost sleep over.
'A week or more,' Holland said. 'Shit, there's fucking dozens of them…'
It had begun tentatively, like an exchange of letters between lovers to-be. He told her he thought she was special, that there was something about her. He wondered how far across the line she would go to get the right result. His words were cryptic, teasing. Thorne could tell that, at least initially, he had been fishing, trying to find out how much she knew, how much any of them knew about him. He was wooing her. Thorne could see it, clear as day. He wondered if McEvoy had seen it. Her responses were open and forthright. She had fallen for it, or was letting him think she had. Thorne couldn't tell which.
'What the fuck is she playing at…? Holland's panic was increasing with every minute that passed, with every e-mail opened. As Thorne read on, the answer became horribly apparent. The round-the-houses stuff had given way, in the last day or two, to something specific. An invitation. Did she want to meet him? Was she the individual he thought she was? McEvoy had replied. She was everything he thought she was, and more.
'When? There's got to be something that gives us a time…'
'Got it,' Holland said, opening another mail. 'Jesus, it's today. Four o'clock…'
Thorne looked at the time flashing at him in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Whatever the hell McEvoy thought she was doing, she probably had about twenty-five minutes to live.
'Where?'
Holland clicked, scrolled, jabbed viciously at the keys. 'His last email was.., just after one this morning.' He opened the file and they stared at the killer's words on the screen.
Let's make it the place where Martin was told the Jungle Story. Looking forward to it, Sarah…
