He’d thought a fair bit about Thorne, asking himself why Nicklin should have had such a thing about him. He was a bloke to be taken seriously, that’s what Nicklin had said. Had to be, if he’d managed to put Nicklin away.
Now the copper they’d lined up to be on the receiving end was sending messages of his own. Like an invitation.
Exhausted, he watched the sky beginning to turn pink beyond Hammersmith Bridge, and wondered what the hell Tom Thorne was up to.
FIFTEEN
‘There’s one by us, lit up like sodding Disneyland. Big, fuck-off sleigh on the garage roof and a flashing Santa climbing up a ladder on the outside of the house.’
‘Some people actually take their kids. Get out of their cars to look at this shit.’
‘The electric bills must be a fortune.’
‘Have you noticed that the more of this tat anyone’s got, the cheaper the fucking house is?’
Halfway through November, and already Christmas was giving the team plenty of things to get worked up about. Plenty to take minds off the job for a minute or two, when the work was frustrating.
The chain of days, and deaths.
Stone looked up from his desk, saw Tom Thorne at the photocopier, and shouted across: ‘Tipped your dustmen yet this year?’
Big laughs all round.
A few years before, Thorne had handed over a tenner to men in fluorescent tabards and woolly hats, knocking on his door and wishing him ‘Merry Christmas from your dustmen.’ When Thorne had discovered that they weren’t in fact his or anyone else’s dustmen, he’d stormed into work, blood boiling. Told anybody who would listen about the scam and how he’d uncovered it, as though he’d pieced together the Jack the Ripper killings.
‘You can’t exactly ask for a fucking ID, can you? And you can pick up one of those fluorescent jackets anywhere…’
His indignation had only increased the hilarity of his colleagues.
‘Bit early for that one, isn’t it?’ Thorne said, lifting the lid of the copier and gathering his papers.
Karim grinned. ‘I don’t know. I reckon once they switch on the lights in town we should be allowed to start taking the piss.’
That suggestion met with general approval, and when, a minute or two later, Stone started whistling ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’, there was scattered applause to go with the laughter. Thorne smiled, but found himself heading out of the Incident Room shortly afterwards.
Tuesday morning, thirty-six hours since they’d gathered as a team, as a force, at the scene of Paul Skinner’s murder, and Thorne was finding it hard to see too much humour in anything. Along with everyone else, he’d thrown himself into the work, but that hadn’t proved an especially helpful distraction. Brooks was still making a good job of keeping himself hidden, and their best bet – until such time as he popped up on some credit-card check or CCTV camera – remained the cell-sites.
Another message might help; might narrow down his location from several square miles of west London to a few streets in which to concentrate their efforts.
Another message like the one Thorne had chosen to keep to himself.
He had taken a step which might open up a channel of communication between himself and a man who had killed at least twice. The implications of his actions were growing more terrible as time passed, but it was too late to do anything about it. He couldn’t go back and admit what he’d done. Try to explain why he’d done it.
Killed at least twice…
If Brooks hadn’t killed Skinner, then who had? The same man who had killed Simon Tipper? The same police officer?
Ever since he’d sent the text to Brooks, the repercussions had begun to gather at the back of his mind. Elbowing their way forward and crowding out the good stuff. Fucking up any moment when he began to look forward to something; any encounter that should have been pleasant.
Louise had finally called the morning before. Early, when he was still thick-headed, when what had happened at Skinner’s place had seemed, for a few precious seconds, like a dream that was refusing to fade.
‘You’re not a nutter.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You sound like shit, though. Were you on the piss last night?’
It felt like it. Except that he could remember exactly what he’d been doing. ‘I wish,’ he said.
‘We going to see each other later?’
‘Can I call you in a bit?’
‘Oh, OK.’
‘I’m just on my way out the door.’
He’d been standing in the kitchen wearing nothing but underpants, waiting for the kettle to boil; on his way nowhere. His only thought had been to keep the conversation short. He could hardly say, ‘This phone’s being monitored, so for Christ’s sake don’t say anything embarrassing. Anything that might drop me in the shit…’
He’d decided that he’d tell her later on, in person.
Not that he would tell her everything.
As it was, Louise had been the one to cry off the previous evening, when the wife of an Albanian gangster had been hauled into a car outside Waitrose just before the end of the day.
Now, in his office, Thorne thought about Louise; about the look on her face when she stared at him and unhooked her bra. He decided that was definitely something worth looking forward to. And that unless Marcus Brooks decided to step up his game and slaughtered the Mayor, the Commissioner and their families, he was going to see her, and that look, later.
The look on Marcus Brooks’ face was harder to read. For the umpteenth time, Thorne opened the file on his desk and stared down at the man who’d received the shocking message that had started it all – the death message – five months before. Who had come out of prison, made his plans and begun sending messages of his own.
The hair was dark, short. The eyes were darker; ‘brown’, according to the information printed below the picture. This was all that Thorne could tell for certain. It wasn’t just the blank expression that might equally have been masking simple boredom or murderous fury. Or that the picture itself was six years old, and that prison, as Thorne had seen only too well with Nicklin, could change a person’s appearance as radically as any surgery.
Thorne was simply unable to get a handle on who Marcus Brooks was, and his picture did not tell the whole story. Common sense told him he was dealing with a man who knew how to take care of himself; who might watch a man die and not blink. But the man Nicklin had described, the man Thorne had heard in the silence down a phone line, had also been destroyed by grief. Had been hollowed out by it.
He thought that most faces gave it all away. Was sure that almost anyone presented with a photograph of him would not have needed more than one quick look. Would say: Copper. Lives alone. Doesn’t mix too well with others.
But Marcus Brooks’ picture was a lot less revealing. Thorne could only hope that if and when it came to it, he could look into the man’s eyes and understand what they were telling him. Lives, his own included, had depended on a lot less.
Meantime, try as he might, he couldn’t see the person behind the picture.
It was like looking at one of the cartoons around his online poker table.
DS Adrian Nunn had called earlier in the day for a quick chat. He’d moaned about his workload, about caps on overtime, and had asked Thorne what time his shift was ending.
When Thorne walked out of Becke House a little after six, Nunn was waiting for him. He was wearing his Gestapo coat again.
‘Tube or car?’ Nunn asked.
‘I’m on the Tube.’
Nunn fell into step with him. ‘Suits me. I can get the Northern Line straight down to Embankment. District from there all the way to Putney.’