From the Dead

'I never said she wasn't,' Thorne said. He looked down again, turned his attention to the photograph. A man was squinting into the sunshine, grinning at the camera and holding up a glass of beer. He was probably mid-fifties, with the hair on his head a little darker than it would have been naturally, judging by the grey tangle on his flabby, nut-brown chest. The sky behind him was cloudless, with the jagged line of a mountain sloping down to a dark blue streak of sea in the background, a small sail-boat in the far distance. He might have been sitting on a boat himself, or at the end of a pier. In a restaurant near the water's edge, perhaps.

'Greece? Spain? South of France?' Thorne shook his head. 'Florida, maybe? Your guess is as good as mine.'

'It's not Birmingham,' Anna said. 'That's about as far as I've got.'

The man's eyes were all but closed against the glare, but the grin seemed unforced, effortless. 'He looks happy enough.'

'Got every reason to be,' Anna said. 'Actually, I thought you might recognise him.'

Thorne looked closer. A bell was ringing, but faintly. 'What's your client's name?'

There was a pause, the hint of a satisfied smile. 'She was sent that picture last December.' Anna moved her chair forward until she was tight against the desk. 'That was two months before she was released from prison.'

'What did she do?'

'Conspiracy to murder her husband.'

'How long?'

'Twelve years. She served ten.'

' Langford? ' Thorne stared at her. The penny had dropped, hard, but it made no sense. 'Your client is Donna Langford?'

Anna nodded. 'She's using her maiden name now, but, yes, she was.'

'Somebody's winding you up, love.'

'I don't think so.'

'You know what she did?' Thorne stabbed a finger at the photograph. 'Why this can't possibly be who she thinks it is?'

'She told me some of it.'

'Let me tell you all of it,' Thorne said. 'Then we can both stop wasting our time.'

Thorne had worked on cases within the last six months that he could not remember as clearly as this one, even though it had been more than a decade since Alan Langford was murdered.

They'd called it the 'Epping Forest Barbecue' in the office.

Langford had always been a man who made news. He had kept a good few journalists busy over the years, crime and business correspondents both; his property empire growing as fast as his competitors retired suddenly, vanished or met with unfortunate accidents. He finally became front-page fodder when his charred remains were discovered in his burned-out Jag in Epping Forest. Then the column inches became feet and yards when it emerged that his wife had arranged his murder.

Donna Langford, an immaculately turned-out businessman's wife, patron of several local charities and lady who lunched, had paid someone to kill her husband.

'She used her old man's own contacts,' Thorne said. 'Maybe the bloke she hired was in Langford's address-book… under "H" for "Hit-men".'

'Look at the picture again,' Anna said. 'It's him. You must remember what he looked like back then. You can see that he's aged, surely?'

Thorne glanced down. 'Yes, well, he's certainly looking a lot better than the last time I saw him.'

'If you're talking about the body in the car, that wasn't him.'

'Donna identified him.' Thorne was doing his best not to sound patronising, but it was a struggle. 'It was his car and his jewellery. That was pretty much all that was left, mind you…'

'She never knew that was how he was going to do it,' Anna said. 'The man she hired.'

'She never asked.' Thorne leaned back in his chair. 'She calmly paid an Irishman called Paul Monahan twenty-five thousand pounds. He used a few quid of it to buy some petrol and a pair of handcuffs.'

'When did you know she had been involved?'

'About thirty seconds after I met her,' Thorne said. 'When she came in to identify the body. I've seen people react in all sorts of ways, but she just stood and… shook. I asked her if she was all right, and she more or less made a confession on the spot, with her old man still stinking like overcooked meat in the corner.'

'How did you catch Monahan?'

'Donna gave us his name and then we matched his DNA to a cigarette butt we found at the crime scene. It couldn't have been more straightforward in the end.' Thorne slid the picture across the desk towards Anna. 'Trust me, cases as piss-easy as that one don't come along every day.'

Anna nodded and cleared her throat. 'Donna's served ten years in prison, Inspector.'

Thorne took a few seconds, gathered together some papers on his desk. He summoned the same calm expression he had been relying on in court all morning, but he could still remember the smell of that Jag, the taste of the smoke and the ash that was not just ash, and the pale globules of fat that were stuck to the seats.

'She got off pretty lightly, if you ask me,' he said. 'She pleaded guilty, which always does you a favour, and it didn't hurt that her old man was a scumbag who was probably knocking her about when he wasn't busy having people's legs broken. Yeah, Alan Langford got what was coming to him, probably, but it was still a seriously nasty way to go.'

'Look at the date,' Anna said, She pushed the photo back towards Thorne. 'Bottom right…'

Thorne picked up the photo. The date had been stamped automatically by the camera: a little over three months earlier. 'They can do that sort of thing with Photoshop,' he said. 'Besides which, this could be a photo of anybody.'

'Donna says it's her husband,' Anna said. She shook her head, searched for something else, but in the end she just shrugged and said it again. 'She swears it's Alan.'

'Then she's lying.'

'Why?'

'Because… Look, maybe she went a bit funny inside. She wouldn't be the first. Maybe she wants money. Maybe she's trying to get some big "miscarriage of justice" thing off the ground.'

'She doesn't even know I'm here,' Anna said. 'She came to me because she doesn't want the police involved.'

Thorne was taken aback. 'OK, so how are you going to explain this conversation to your client?' He could not suppress a smile and felt more than a little guilty as he watched her start to fidget and redden again.

'I'll just be honest and tell her that I was getting nowhere,' Anna said. 'That I couldn't think what else to do. I'll tell her I've spent a fortnight staring at that sodding photo and that I'm none the wiser.'

'Why did you come to see me?' Thorne asked.

'I thought you might be able to get a bit more information from the photograph.' She looked at Thorne, but got no response. 'Don't you have ways of… enhancing pictures, or whatever? I mean, there must be some way to tell where this picture was taken. I don't know, geographical profiling, a computer programme or something?'

'This isn't CSI,' Thorne said. 'We haven't even got a photocopier that works properly.'

'I also thought you might be interested.' Anna was leaning towards him suddenly. 'Stupid of me, I can see that, but it seemed like a decent idea at the time. It was your case, so I hoped that if you saw the photo you might at least think that maybe it wasn't… finished.' She stared at Thorne for a few seconds longer, then sat back and reached for a strand of hair to pull at.

'It's a waste of time,' Thorne said. 'I'm sorry, but I've got more important things to worry about. Actually, I can't think of anything that isn't more important than this.' He pushed back his chair and, after a moment or two, Anna got the message and did the same.

'I'll get out of your way, then,' she said.

She took a step towards the door.

Thorne thought she looked about fourteen. 'Look… I'll run it past my boss, all right?' He saw her expression change and raised a hand. 'He'll only say the same as me, though, so don't hold your breath.' He picked up the photograph again, nodded down at it. 'Could do with a bit of that myself,' he said. 'Sun and sand.'