Thorne started the car, pointed towards the glove compartment. ‘There’s an A-Z in there,’ he said. ‘Find the nearest park.’
He sat towards the end of the bench against which the boy’s small, blue and white bike was leaning; so people would know he was looking after it. So they would know he was there with a child.
The boy jumped down from the roundabout while it was still spinning and ran for three or four steps before he stopped and waved across at him. He waved back, then stuck up a thumb. The boy grinned and ran towards a large wooden tree-house, with a rope bridge and a slide. He shouted across at the boy to be careful, but the boy showed no sign of having heard.
‘I think you’re wasting your time.’ A woman who was leaning against the fence was smiling at him. She dropped her cigarette, stepped on it. ‘Not scared of anything at that age, are they?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re not.’
‘It’s nice, I suppose. That they’re fearless, I mean. It’s natural, isn’t it?’ She laughed, reaching into her handbag for another cigarette. ‘But it does mean you can’t take your eyes off the little buggers. Not my two, anyway.’
He smiled back, picked up the newspaper he’d brought with him and stared at the front page until the woman turned round again.
It was as nice a day as he could remember for a while; perfect for getting out and about. The playground was always popular, even when the weather wasn’t so good, but this morning it was particularly crowded.
There were plenty of boys and girls for his nephew to play with.
Which was good for all sorts of reasons, not least because it meant that he’d been able to slip into the trees for ten minutes and smoke a little joint. He’d get into town later, buy himself something stronger for the weekend, but a bit of dope was a good start. Helped him enjoy the morning, enjoy the view, without getting too stupid about things.
‘Excuse me…’
He always kept a decent eye on what was happening, on stuff going on around him, and he’d seen the couple coming from a long way away. Hand in hand, honeymoon-period twats, smug and full of themselves. They’d stopped a few feet from his bench, and he could see the camera in the man’s hand. He could tell that they were embarrassed to ask.
‘Do you want me to take a picture of the two of you?’
‘Would you?’ the woman asked.
He stood up and the man handed over one of those cheap, disposable cameras, same as they sold in his local newsagent’s. He put it to his eye and the couple posed, arms around each other with the playground behind.
‘Cheers.’ The man in the leather jacket stepped towards him.
He held out the camera, but the man grabbed his wrist instead, squeezed it hard, and took hold of his shirt at the shoulder, while the short woman with the dark hair opened up the warrant card and told him he was under arrest for the murder of Sarah Hanley.
After a minute or two of swearing and struggling, he nodded towards the playground and asked what they were going to do about his nephew. The woman told him that he needn’t worry. That the boy would be taken back to his mother.
As the handcuffs were ratcheted around Grant Freestone’s wrists, he glanced across at the woman by the fence. The cigarette drooped from her fat lips, and he couldn’t help noticing that she’d happily taken her eyes off both her little buggers.
THIRTEEN
They were getting used to this sort of meeting by now: ad hoc gatherings to take stock, to regroup, and jointly fight the temptation to panic or run around screaming for a while. To discuss the latest development in a case where surprises were being thrown up faster than dodgy kebabs.
The kidnap case with no ransom demand, two dead kidnappers, and a convicted paedophile arrested for a murder committed years before.
‘Anything we haven’t managed to get in yet?’ Brigstocke asked. ‘Freestone’s still using, by all accounts, so we’ve got drugs covered. All we need now is a bit of prostitution, some gun-running maybe.’
Porter laughed.
‘I’m serious. A bomb factory and one or two stolen library books and we’ve got the complete fucking set.’
Just after midday, and four of them were making a good job of filling Brigstocke’s office at Becke House: Brigstocke himself, Hignett, Porter and Thorne. The sun was struggling to find its way through a layer of thin cloud and the streaky patina of grime on the window. Thorne hadn’t bothered to take off his jacket. Nobody in the room was sitting down.
‘We should just step back and hand Freestone over,’ Hignett said. ‘Call in this Hoolihan, enjoy our pat on the back and get on with trying to find Luke Mullen.’
‘Maybe Freestone can help us find him,’ Thorne said.
Brigstocke stared at Thorne for a few seconds, as if looking for a hint before asking the inevitable question. ‘Hadn’t you more or less dismissed Freestone as a suspect?’
‘More or less.’ He was being more or less honest.
‘But he’s the closest thing we’ve got,’ Porter said.
Whatever the various moods in the room – prickly, confused, determined – nobody could argue with Porter’s assessment. Philip Quinn had finally been tracked down in Newcastle, and the assortment of crimes for which he’d been subsequently nicked had given him a cast-iron, if costly, alibi for the night Conrad Allen and his girlfriend had been murdered. With Quinn out of the frame, the only name on the list belonged to the man that Thorne and Porter had arrested in Boston Manor Park; the man now sitting in a cell five minutes up the road at Colindale station.
‘Where did we get Freestone’s name from anyway?’ Hignett looked and sounded as if everything were starting to get away from him a little. Like it was all so much easier when people were snatched for cash. When an ear or two might be sliced off to bump up the price a bit, and everyone knew where they stood. He pointed towards Thorne. ‘From some friend of yours, wasn’t it?’
‘An ex-DCI, now working on cold cases for AMRU.’ Watching Hignett nod, as though this were significant, Thorne felt as though he had just been accused of something. Of chasing wild geese and landing the team with the horrible inconvenience of an arrest. ‘She remembered Freestone making threats against Tony Mullen when she worked with him, and thought he might be worth pursuing. It seemed a reasonable avenue of enquiry, while you were busy looking at… other possibilities.’
The idea that Luke Mullen had committed manslaughter – that he had run amok with a knife and then vanished – thankfully seemed to have all but gone away. Thorne hoped that it had been as a result of certain officers coming to their senses, but couldn’t help wondering if certain ex-officers had brought a degree of pressure to bear.
Hignett looked at his feet and rubbed his fingertip across the desktop, as though checking for dust. ‘So, Freestone’s name wasn’t on the original list provided by Tony Mullen?’
‘No…’ Thorne let the word hang and make its point. Then threw a ‘sir’ in on the end for good measure.
‘It still seemed like as strong a possibility as any,’ Porter said.
‘You thought initially that he should be considered a suspect?’
‘Considered, yes,’ Thorne said. ‘We began talking to one or two of those who’d been on the MAPPA panel that monitored Freestone when he was released from prison in 2001.’
‘And as far as I understand it from your notes, those conversations persuaded you that he wasn’t our kidnapper.’
‘To a degree.’
‘But you carried on talking to people, chasing it…’
‘It was just a question of being thorough, sir,’ Porter said. ‘And, to be frank, we didn’t have a fat lot else to chase.’
Thorne was grateful for Porter’s help. He was hedging his bets, and sounding like it, and he didn’t know how much longer he could fight shy of telling them why he really thought Grant Freestone was worth looking at. He’d spoken about it off the record to Brigstocke, but he couldn’t be certain who else might have Tony Mullen’s ear.