was an argument Over a game of table-tennis, I think.' She smiled, sexy and very cold. 'Anything's possible.'
Thorne stood and walked away from Lenahan's desk towards the door. 'Let's presume that the man we're looking for is not an ex-con. The obvious question is how he got the information. How did he find Remfry? How could he find out where a convicted rapist was serving his sentence and when he was going to get released, in enough time to set all this up?'
Lenahan swiveled in her chair to face the computer screen on the corner of her desk. She hit a button on the keyboard. 'He would have had to have got it from a database somewhere.' She continued typing, watching the screen. 'This is a LIDS computer. Local Inmate Data System, which has everything on the prisoners in here. I can send stuff down the wire to other prisons if I need to, but I wouldn't have thought this would be enough…'
Thorne looked at the nearer of the two landscapes. The dark, thick swirls of the paint on the canvas. He thought it might be somewhere in the Lake District. 'What about national records?'
'IIS. The Inmate Information System. That's got everything locations, offence details, home address, release date.' She looked up and across at Thorne. 'But you'd still need to type a name in.'
'Who has access to that?' Holland asked. 'Do you?'
'No…'
'The Governor? Police liaison officer?'
She smiled, shook her head firmly. 'It's headquarters-based only. The system is pretty well restricted, for obvious reasons…'
Thanks and goodbyes were brisk and Thorne would have had it no other way. Though he hadn't so much as glimpsed a blue prison sweatshirt the whole time they'd been there, he was aware of the prisoners all around him. Beyond the walls of the Deputy Governor's office. Above, below and to all sides. A distant echo, a heaviness, the heat given off by over six hundred men, there thanks to the likes of him.
Whenever he entered a prison, moved around its green, or mustard or dirty-cream corridors, Thorne mentally left a trail of breadcrumbs behind him. He always needed to be sure of the quickest way out.
For most of the drive back down the M 1, Holland had his nose buried in a pamphlet he'd picked up on his way out of the prison. Thorne preferred his own form of research.
He eased Johnny Cash at San Quentin into the cassette player. Holland looked up as 'Wanted Man' kicked in. He listened for a few seconds, shook his head and went back to his facts and figures. Thorne had tried, once, to tell him. To explain that real country music was luck all to do with lost dogs and rhinestones. It had been a long night of pool and Guinness, and Phil Hendricks – with whichever boyfriend happened to be around at the time – heckling mercilessly. Thorne had tried to convey to Holland the beauty of George Jones's voice, the wickedness in Merle Haggard's and the awesome rumble of Cash, the dark daddy of them all. A few pints in, he was telling anybody who would listen that Hank Williams was a tortured genius who was undoubtedly the Kurt Cobain of his day and he may even have begun to sing 'Your Cheating Heart' around closing time. He couldn't recall every detail, but he did remember that Holland's eyes had begun to glaze over long before then…
'Fuck,' Holland said. 'It costs twenty-five grand a year to look after one prisoner. Does that sound like a lot to you?'
Thorne didn't really know. It was twice what a lot of people earned in a year, but once you took into account the salaries of prison staff and the maintenance of the buildings…
'I don't think they're spending that on carpets and caviar, somehow,' Thorne said.
'No, but still…'
It was roasting in the car. The Mondeo was far too oId to have air con, but Thorne was very pissed off at being completely unable to coax anything but warm air from a heating system he'd had fixed twice already. He opened a window but shut it after half a minute, the breeze not worth the noise.
Holland looked up from his pamphlet again. 'Do you think they should have luxuries in there? You know, TVs in their cells and whatever?
PlayStations, some of them have got…'
Thorne turned the sound down a little and glanced up at the sign as the Mondeo roared past it. They were approaching the Milton Keynes turnoff. Still fifty miles from London.
Thorne realised, as he had many times before, that for all the time he spent putting people behind bars, he gave precious little thought to what happened when they got there. When he did think about it, weigh all the arguments up, he supposed that, all things considered, a loss of freedom was as bad as it could get. Above and beyond that, he wasn't sure exactly where he stood.
He feathered the brake, dropped down to just under seventy and drifted across to the inside lane. They were in no great hurry… Thorne knew, as much as he knew anything, that murderers, sex offenders, those that would harm children, had to be removed. He also knew that putting these people away Was more than just a piece of argot. It was actually what they did. What he did. Once these offenders were… elsewhere, the debate as to where punishment ended and rehabilitation began was for others to have. He felt instinctively that prisons should never become.., the phrase 'holiday camps' popped into his head. He chided himself for beginning to sound like a slavering Tory nutcase. Fuck it, a few TVs was neither here nor there. Let them watch the football or shout at Chris Tarrant if that was what they wanted…
Sadly, by the time Thorne had formulated his answer to the question, Holland had moved on to something else.
'Bloody hell.' Holland looked up from the pamphlet. 'Sixty per cent of goal nets in the English league are made by prisoners. I hope they've made the ones at White Hart Lane strong enough, the stick Spurs get from other teams…'
'Right…'
'Here's another one. Prison farms produce twenty million pints of milk every year. That's fucking amazing…'
Thorne was no longer listening. He was hearing nothing but the rush of the road under the wheels and thinking about the photograph. He pictured the hooded woman, the make-believe Jane Foley, feeling a stirring in his groin at the image in his head of her shadowy nakedness.
Wherever he got it from…
Suddenly, Thorne knew where he might go to find the answer, at least any answer there was to be found. The woman in that photo might not be Jane Foley, but she had to be somebody, and Thorne knew just the person to come up with a name.
When he started to listen again, Holland was in the middle of another question.
'… as bad as this? Do you think prisons are any better than they were back in…?' He pointed towards the cassette player.
'1969,' Thorne said. Johnny Cash was singing the song he'd written about San Quentin itself. Singing about hating every inch of the place they were all stood in. The prisoners whooping and cheering at every complaint, at each pugnacious insult, at every plea to raze the prison to the ground.
'So?' Holland waved his pamphlet. 'Are prisons any better now than they were then, do you think? Than they were thirty-odd years ago?'
Thorne pictured the face of a man in Belmarsh, and something inside hardened very quickly.
'I fucking hope not.'
At a little after six o'clock, Eve Bloom double-locked the shop, walked half a dozen paces to a bright red front door, and was home. It was handy renting the flat above her shop. It wasn't expensive, but she'd have paid a good deal more for the pleasure of being able to tumble out of bed at the last possible minute, the coffee steaming in her own mug next to the till as she opened up. Every last second in bed was precious when you had to spend as many mornings as she did, up and dressed at half past stupid. Walking around the flower market at New Covent Garden, ordering stock, gassing with wholesalers, while every other bugger she could think of was still dead to the world.
She liked this time of year. The few precious weeks of summer, when she wasn't forced to choose between working in scarf and gloves or punishing her stock with central heating. She liked closing up when it was still light. It made the early starts less painful, gave that couple of hours between the end of the day and the start of the evening a scent of excitement, a tang of real possibility. She closed the door behind her and climbed the stripped wooden stairs up to the flat Denise had wielded the sander and done the whole place in a weekend, while Eve had taken responsibility for the decorating. Most domestic chores got split fairly equally between them, and though
