Thorne knew that, whatever opinion he was rapidly forming about DI Paul Brewer – Job-pissed and probably disliked by all his colleagues – he was going to have to get along with him. He thanked him for his help, praising his initiative and insisting that the credit would most definitely go where it was due. He called him ‘Paul’ as often as he could manage without gagging, promising him a night on the town when they eventually got together and trying to sound pleased when Brewer promised to take him up on the offer.
‘It’s from an X-ray, by the way,’ Brewer said.
‘What is?’
‘The piece of plastic in her hand.’ Brewer sounded pleased with himself again. He waited. ‘There was a piece of plastic, right?’
‘An X-ray of what?’
‘They can’t tell us that just yet. There’s a few letters and numbers on it but they can’t make sense of them. If we’re lucky, your piece might help.’
When Thorne looked up he saw the expressions of confusion from Holland and Kitson who had only heard his side of the conversation.
‘X-ray?’ Kitson whispered.
Thorne put a hand over the mouthpiece, told them he’d be another minute. Brewer was saying he was on his way into a meeting but that he’d try to call again later. That his was a large Scotch and water.
‘Just before you go,’ Thorne said. ‘Is Catherine’s mother still alive?’
‘What?’
‘Her mother.’
‘No. Both parents dead, and an elder brother who was killed in a car accident a few years ago. Took us a while to trace a blood relative.’
‘How did she die?’
‘Sorry?’
‘How did the mother die, and when?’
‘No idea,’ Brewer said.
‘Could you find out and get back to me?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Cheers, Paul, I appreciate it. What kind of Scotch do you like?’
‘What’s all this about?’
‘Probably nothing,’ Thorne said. He looked up and locked eyes with Kitson. ‘Just covering my arse.’
Brewer had phoned back a few minutes before the briefing was due to start, and apologised for taking so long. He told Thorne that he’d spoken to Catherine Burke’s boyfriend, who had confirmed that her mother had died of cancer when Catherine was a young girl. Thorne had thanked him, unable to decide if he felt disappointed or relieved.
‘Oh, and by the way, any single malt will do nicely,’ Brewer had said.
Thorne passed the news on to Brigstocke outside the door of the Briefing Room as the troops were filing in. The DCI glanced up from the notes he had been working on for the last hour.
‘Worth a try,’ he said.
Thorne watched as unfamiliar faces drifted past; nodded to one or two of those drafted in quickly from other teams. ‘So, how’s this going to pan out?’
‘We take it from here,’ Brigstocke said.
‘Really?’
‘Well, no, not officially, but in terms of money and manpower we’re way more capable of doing it than they are. So, off the record, we get to run things.’
‘And off the record, what happens if we mess up?’
‘Then, obviously, it was always a fifty-fifty operation and the blame for any operational glitches gets shared out equally.’
‘Sounds fair,’ Thorne said.
Inside, it was standing room only. Muttered conversation no more than the preferred alternative to silence. One phone call had changed the complexion of the case entirely and suddenly the atmosphere was as charged as Thorne could remember in a while.
There weren’t too many like this.
Loss of life was never treated lightly, not if you looked beyond the banter and the off-colour jokes to what was in the eyes of the men and women at a crime scene. Thorne had met clever murderers and profoundly stupid ones. Those who had lost it and lashed out and those who had enjoyed themselves. Some had made him angry enough to come close to murder himself, while for others he had felt nothing but pity.
There were as many shades of killer as there were ways to end a life, but while it was Thorne’s job to catch them, the murderer was always taken seriously.
And when he murdered more than once…
‘Right, thanks for gathering so quickly,’ Brigstocke said. ‘There’s a lot to get through.’
From the back of the room, Thorne watched the notebooks open, heard fifty ballpoints click. He glanced at the door as a handful of late-comers hurried in, half expecting to see Superintendent Trevor Jesmond make a well-timed and inspirational appearance.
‘As some of you know already, we received a call this morning that has changed the focus of the Emily Walker inquiry. I’ve spent most of the day since then on the phone to various senior officers from the Leicestershire constabulary…’
While Brigstocke spoke, Thorne thought about control; the exercise of it. Emily Walker’s killer had been meticulous in his preparation, in waiting to make his move and in the use of the bag to suffocate her. Now, there was every reason to believe that the same man was responsible for the death of Catherine Burke. She too had been discovered at home, with no sign of forced entry, so it seemed likely that he had planned her murder every bit as carefully as Emily Walker’s.
A man who waited and watched and then killed twice in three weeks.
‘So, the investigations into these two killings will proceed separately for the time being,’ Brigstocke said. ‘With as much cooperation between ourselves and the boys in Leicester as is required…’
Thorne felt his mouth go dry. Twice in three weeks… as far as they knew.
‘… and if, as seems likely, they turn out to be linked, then we will have the necessary protocols in place.’
By and large, the briefing was about practicalities from then on, as Brigstocke outlined the way forward. Neither force would want to risk the other screwing up their investigations, so it had been agreed that each would have ‘read only’ access to the other’s HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) account. As the Met team’s office manager, DS Sam Karim would be responsible for all case information inputted into their account and for liaising daily with his opposite number in Leicester.
‘Not a problem,’ Karim said.
‘Especially not if his other half ’s a “she”,’ someone added.
It was a ‘delicate’ situation, Brigstocke said, and ‘potentially fraught’, but he trusted his team could handle it.
If his team needed any more reasons to try to make things work, Brigstocke waited until the end to give them the best one of all. He nodded, then turned to the screen behind him as the lights were flicked off. Many in the room had seen the picture of Emily Walker, but none save Brigstocke and his DIs had seen the photo of Catherine Burke that had been emailed across a few hours earlier.
The pictures had been taken from different angles, but projected next to one another, the similarity was evident… and horrifying. Though the limbs were splayed differently and there was a little more blood in one bag than the other, Thorne guessed that all eyes in the room would be drawn, eventually, to the faces. To the shock and desperation etched into each woman’s chalk-white skin, just visible through plastic fogged with her dying breath.
When he had finished talking, Brigstocke left the lights out and waited for each officer to walk out past the pictures on the screen.
Thorne was the last to leave.
