‘He’s getting bloody good at this. Last month he was defending a kid who tried to take a woman’s car by climbing into the back seat while she was paying for petrol.’
‘Shit, that was Jennings?’
‘You see what I’m getting at?’
The trial had caused something of a stir in the papers, not to mention a nasty scuffle on the courtroom steps. The petrol station attendant had seen the boy getting into the car and kept the woman inside while he called the police. It emerged afterwards that the boy had a history of sexual assault, but, with no weapon found, the defence had been able to get the charge knocked down to trespass and he had walked away with a two-hundred-pound fine.
‘We need to be careful, that’s all,’ Hobbs said. ‘Don’t give the bugger anything he can use.’
‘It’s not happening.’
‘Let’s make sure it doesn’t,’ Hobbs said. ‘They’re starting to call him Jack-off Jennings.’
Despite the work this entailed, along with establishing base-camp at a fearsome mountain of paperwork, Thorne could not get the Anthony Garvey case out of his mind. Not for more than a few minutes, at any rate. Its dark beats, the twisted melody of it. Like the first song you hear on the radio in the morning that stays in your head all day.
Martin Macken’s mouth like a ragged wound, howling blood.
A note stuck to Emily Walker’s fridge.
Debbie Mitchell’s kid, pushing his train up and down the carpet.
And all the time, as he and the rest of the team flapped and fidgeted and waited for something to happen, the nagging worry that they were dancing to Anthony Garvey’s tune.
Towards the end of a nine-hour shift, with going home at a reasonable hour starting to look like a real possibility, Thorne ran into Yvonne Kitson on his way back from the toilet.
‘I think I’ve found the girl in the photograph,’ Kitson said.
His first thought was that Louise had been right, that dinner together was probably optimistic. This was good news, nevertheless. Then he saw the look on Kitson’s face. ‘Fuck…’
‘I went through all the missing-persons reports for the six months after the date when the picture was taken. Found a girl who fits the description. She turned up two weeks later. Was… discovered.’
‘Where?’
‘Same place she’d been sent to pick up the money, near as damn it,’ Kitson said. ‘Back of Paddington station. Looks like Garvey’s got a sense of humour.’
‘I’m pissing myself.’
‘I’ve put a call into the SIO. Got an address for the parents.’
‘You told Brigstocke?’
‘He’s out, so-’
‘Let me.’ He took out his phone as Kitson turned back towards the Incident Room, said, ‘Well done,’ as he dialled.
Got Russell Brigstocke’s voicemail.
‘It’s me. Just in case you’re playing golf with Trevor Jesmond, I thought you could pass on a message. Tell him that his nice, useful avenue of enquiry has just become a cul-de-sac.’
TWENTY-THREE
All at once, Alec Sinclair, a large man in his late fifties with thinning hair and restless hands, fell silent. He had been talking about his daughter Chloe, whose body had been found in a disused tool shed behind Paddington station almost three years earlier.
Struggling for words, he turned to his wife, who was seated next to him, in the cluttered living room of a terraced house in Balham. Miriam Sinclair was probably a few years younger than her husband, but there was grey bleeding through a dye job above her forehead and Thorne guessed the make-up was a little more thickly applied than it might once have been.
‘It’s nice to talk about her,’ she said. She smiled at Thorne and Kitson. ‘But then it all sort of rushes up at you. It’s not like you forget what happened or anything.’
‘I dream about her sometimes,’ Alec said. ‘And there are those few seconds when you wake up… before you remember she’s dead.’
‘You sure I can’t get you anything to drink?’
‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Thorne said.
The couple had asked, of course, as soon as Kitson had called the previous afternoon. Shocked to get the call, so long after the investigation into their daughter’s murder had petered out, but as eager as they had ever been to find out if there had been any progress. Kitson had told them that Chloe’s murder might well be connected to an ongoing inquiry; then she had checked herself, stressed that the inquiry into Chloe’s murder was still ongoing itself, would continue to be until an arrest was made.
‘It’s fine, love,’ Miriam had said on the phone. ‘I know how stretched you lot are, and, I mean, you’ve only got to open a paper to see there are plenty of other murders. Other families who haven’t been grieving quite as long as we have.’
‘Have you found him?’ Alec asked now.
‘We don’t have anyone in custody,’ Kitson said. ‘But we have a number of useful leads, and-’
‘The boyfriend.’ Miriam looked at her husband. ‘We know it’s the boyfriend.’
‘Right,’ Kitson said. The officer leading the hunt for Chloe’s killer three years before had confirmed that their prime suspect had been the man she’d been reported as seeing at the time of her death. Despite their best efforts, they had never been able to trace him.
‘We’ve got a name,’ Thorne said. ‘A description.’ He didn’t say that neither was exactly reliable. ‘We’re doing everything we can to follow these up and obviously we’ve passed all this information on to DCI Spedding.’ The man who had been in charge of the original investigation had been delighted to hear from Kitson; happy, he said, to share any intelligence that might take the Chloe Sinclair murder off his books.
Alec Sinclair turned to his wife. ‘Dave Spedding still gets in touch from time to time, doesn’t he?’
‘A card every Christmas,’ Miriam said. ‘A phone call on Chloe’s birthday. That sort of thing.’
‘I mean, he was very close to us by the end. Close to Chloe, too, in a funny sort of way.’
‘Hard for him as well, I would have thought,’ Miriam said.
Thorne nodded. It should be, he thought. The day it stops being hard is the day to get out, to up-sticks and find yourself a nice little pub to run. He said that Spedding seemed like a good man, and a good copper.
‘It might sound stupid,’ Kitson said, ‘but is there anything you might have remembered since the original investigation? Something that’s come back to you?’
‘We would have told Dave Spedding,’ Miriam said.
‘I know, and we really don’t want to dredge it all up again.’
‘Would you mind just going over it?’ Thorne asked. On the cupboard against the far wall, he could see a collection of photographs in metal frames: the Sinclairs on a beach with two small children; Chloe and her brother cradling a baby monkey at the gates of a safari park; a young man posing proudly next to what was probably his first car. The brother who had lost a sister, the son who had become an only child.
‘She was on her gap year,’ Alec said. ‘Saving up to go travelling before university. She did some stuff for me at my office for a while, but she was bored to death, so she got the job in the pub. That’s where she met this Tony.’
‘Did she tell you much about him?’ Kitson asked.
Miriam shook her head. ‘She told us he was a good few years older and I think she could tell we didn’t really approve.’
‘Maybe if we’d been a bit more… liberal or what have you, things might have been different.’ Alec stared into space for a few seconds. ‘I just didn’t want her getting too attached to anyone, not with university and everything round the corner. As it turned out, she started talking about not going at all, about going travelling with this Tony, or moving in with him.’
‘There were a lot of arguments,’ Miriam said.
Thorne said it was understandable, that he could see their first concern had been for their daughter. ‘But you never met him?’