Chamberlain and Louise had never met. Thorne himself had not seen Chamberlain in over a year, although he made a point of trying to call her as often as he could. He felt oddly guilty.
‘She’s busy,’ Thorne said. ‘You know how it is.’
‘Two coppers together. Always a big mistake.’
It suddenly struck Thorne that he had no idea what Chamberlain’s husband did; or used to do, before he retired. There was no way to ask without making it obvious. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said.
They sat for another minute or two and then, with a nod to each other, got up and moved through the square, walking out towards Greek Street and into the heart of Soho.
‘I’ll send over all the stuff later,’ Thorne said. ‘And a copy of the original Garvey file.’
‘A nice bit of bedtime reading.’
‘What is it normally, then, Catherine Cookson?’
She flashed Thorne a sarcastic grin, then slowed to stare through the window of an arty-looking jeweller’s. She leaned in close, trying to make out the prices on the labels, then turned to Thorne and said, ‘Thanks for this, by the way.’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘I know you could have found someone closer to home.’
‘I couldn’t think of anyone better.’
‘I presume you mean that the nice way,’ she said.
‘Do you want me to walk you back?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
Chamberlain was staying at a small hotel in Bloomsbury at which the Met maintained a constant block-booking of half a dozen rooms. It was used for visiting officers from other forces, relatives of victims who had nowhere else to stay, and occasionally a high-ranking officer who, for one reason or another, did not fancy going home.
‘Be nice staying in a hotel for a while,’ Chamberlain said.
‘Make the most of it,’ Thorne said. He felt himself redden slightly, remembering the last night he had spent in a hotel; the misunderstanding at the bar.
‘I’ll get some sleep at least,’ Chamberlain said.
‘You never know, you might pull.’
‘Jack’s snoring’s been driving me batty.’
‘With a bit of luck there might be some Ovaltine in the mini-bar.’
‘Shut up.’
It was ‘winner stays on’ at the pool table in the upstairs room of the Grafton Arms, and it took the best part of an hour before Thorne and Hendricks got a game against each other. The table was being dominated by an oikish type in a rugby shirt, who beat both of them easily before losing to Hendricks by knocking in the black halfway through the frame. Hendricks beat the rugby player’s mate, then showed no mercy to a teenage Goth, who stared admiringly at the pathologist’s piercings and looked as though she didn’t know one end of a pool cue from the other.
‘You’re ruthless,’ Thorne said, as Hendricks fed in the coins.
‘I think she fancied me,’ Hendricks said. ‘It clearly put her off her game.’
‘Pool’s not the only thing she knows sod all about, then.’
‘Fiver on this, fair enough?’
Thorne fetched a couple more pints of Guinness from downstairs while Hendricks racked the balls. The bar was rammed, even for a Saturday night, but it was only two minutes’ walk from Thorne’s flat and the familiarity was comforting. The Oak was a Job watering-hole, and, as such, would never be somewhere he could completely relax. It wasn’t as though anybody in the Grafton knew his name, and there were no wry philosophical types propping up the bar, but Thorne enjoyed the nod from the barman and his step towards the Guinness tap without having to be told.
‘I’m in the wrong job,’ Hendricks said, bending down to break. ‘A bloody lecture tour?’
Thorne had told him about the email from Nicholas Maier. ‘You teach, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, and what I make in a month wouldn’t pay for a weekend in Weston-Super-Mare.’
‘You do it for the love.’
Hendricks had knocked in a spot. He moved around the table, chalking his cue. ‘Maybe I should write this one up as an academic study: “Man kills children of his father’s victims, the pathological implications then and now”, that kind of thing. I could get something like that published anywhere, I reckon. America, definitely.’
‘Go for it,’ Thorne said. He knew Hendricks didn’t mean it. He looked down at his friend’s heavily tattooed forearm as Hendricks lined up a shot and remembered it pressed across the throat of that insensitive CSI. ‘If you need someone to carry your bags on the lecture tour, you know…’
It was Thorne’s turn at the table. Hendricks took a drink, smiled across the room at the Goth girl, who was sitting in the corner with two friends. ‘The bloke’s book any good?’
Thorne had spent the afternoon reading Battered, with one ear on the radio’s football coverage. ‘Nothing that isn’t in any of the others, as far as I can make out. Nobody interviewed that hasn’t said their piece plenty of times before. Usual pictures: Garvey and his bloody rabbits. That’s what most of these books do, just rehash old material. Money for jam.’
‘Not going to trouble the Booker Prize judges, then?’
Thorne missed a sitter and went back to his drink. ‘Why do people read this stuff?’
Hendricks knocked in a couple of balls. ‘Same as all these misery memoirs,’ he said, without taking his eyes off the table. ‘You go into Smith’s, it’s wall-to-wall books about kids who’ve been locked in cellars, people who’ve had eighteen types of cancer or whatever.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘People enjoy knowing there’s someone worse off than they are. Maybe it makes them feel… safer, or something.’
‘It’s cheap thrills, if you ask me,’ Thorne said. He watched as Hendricks fluked his penultimate ball. ‘You jammy bastard.’
‘Pure skill, mate.’
Hendricks left the final spot over a pocket with the black placed nicely in the middle of the table. With four balls still to pot, Thorne tried to do something clever and nudge the black on to the cushion. He made a mess of it, leaving Hendricks with a simple clearance.
‘Maybe people read these books to find out why,’ Hendricks said. ‘The ones about Garvey and Shipman and the rest of them. They want to know why those things happened.’
‘You’re giving them way too much credit.’
‘I’m not saying they know that’s what they’re doing, but it makes sense if you think about it. It’s the same reason they turn these people into monsters, talk about “evil” or whatever. It makes it easier to forget they’re just builders and doctors and the bloke next door. It’s not the killers themselves anyone’s really frightened of. It’s not knowing why they did it, where the next one’s coming from, that terrifies people.’
Hendricks had yet to play his shot. Thorne was aware that the next player up, a spiky-haired kid sitting on the Goth girl’s table, was looking daggers from the corner, waiting for them to finish talking and wrap up the game. ‘They can read about Ray Garvey all they want,’ Thorne said. He was remembering the conversation with Carol Chamberlain. ‘No “why” with him. He didn’t even kill any of his pet rabbits.’
When Hendricks had polished off the frame, the spiky-haired kid stepped forward and picked up his coins from the edge of the table. Hendricks laid down his cue, told the kid he was taking a break, and followed Thorne back to their table, leaving the next player in the queue to take his place.
‘So, maybe there’s something in this tumour business? The personality change.’
‘Kambar says not.’
‘Hypothetically, though,’ Hendricks said.
‘It’s rubbish.’
‘Let’s say you’ve got some severe tic or whatever, something that makes you thrash around.’
‘I think you’ve finally lost it, mate.’