‘Oh, personality change is certainly possible. I’ve dealt with a number of cases. But to the degree where you might murder someone? ’
‘Where you might murder
seven
someones.’
‘This is almost a Jekyl and Hyde thing we’re talking about.’
‘So?’
‘I was . . . dubious.’
‘You’re not saying it isn’t feasible, then?’
‘Almost nothing is hard and fast where the brain is concerned,’ Kambar said. ‘It’s nigh-on impossible to rule out anything completely, but there was no way I would have been wil ing to say that in a court of law.’
Thorne began picking up chips with his fingers. ‘I think I get it,’ he said.
‘Good. The lasagne’s better than normal today. It’s usual y solid.’
Thorne knew plenty of doctors and scientists who would have trotted happily up to the witness stand in search of notoriety or a hefty fee. Who would have said that, although such a thing were unlikely, they could not say for certain that it had not happened. People of that sort - many of whom were virtual y professional expert witnesses - were gifts to defence barristers seeking to get the likes of Raymond Garvey off the hook. Such testimony was almost designed to plant the seed of reasonable doubt within the mind of even the most sceptical juror.
The relatives of those murdered by Garvey should have been very grateful to Pavesh Kambar.
‘These cases you’ve dealt with,’ Thorne said, ‘how do these changes happen?’
Kambar raised his hand to demonstrate and it looked as though he might stab himself in the forehead, until he remembered and put down his fork. ‘The frontal lobe is what controls our cognition,’ he said. ‘It’s where the brain’s natural inhibitors are, where al the levels are set. It’s what makes us who we are.’
‘And a tumour can change that?’
‘Any foreign body, or any injury that affects that area. If the brain gets damaged, the personality can be affected. Altered.’
‘I read something in a paper once,’ Thorne said. ‘This woman suffered a massive head injury in a car accident and when she woke up she was speaking in a completely different language.’
Kambar nodded. ‘I’ve seen similar cases reported,’ he said. ‘But I’m not convinced. I think those kinds of things make good stories.’
‘So, what sorts of changes have
you
seen?’
‘Shy people who can suddenly become extremely gregarious. It’s usual y a question of inhibition, of barriers coming down. Alcohol works in the same way in that it disinhibits the frontal lobe. Imagine someone who is very drunk, but without the fal ing over and the slurred speech. There are no . . .
niceties
, you know? Social graces go out of the window, the mark is overstepped.’
‘I’ve seen that,’ Thorne said.
Kambar shoved the last forkful of pasta into his mouth and waited.
Ignoring what was left of his lunch, Thorne found himself tel ing this man he had known for only an hour about the Alzheimer’s that had blighted his father’s final years and a few of his own. About the old man’s bizarre obsessions and the lifestyle that had grown increasingly erratic and disturbing. Kambar told him that the disease acted on the brain in precisely the way he had been describing.
‘People think it’s al about forgetting people’s names or where you’ve left your keys,’ Kambar said. ‘But the worst thing is that you forget how to behave.’
Thorne laid down his cutlery. Straightened it. ‘What about the whole genetic thing?’
Kambar nodded, understanding what he was being asked. ‘Look, it’s far from being definitive, but only something like fifteen per cent of patients with Alzheimer’s had parents who suffered from it; and even then the strongest genetic link is with the rarest forms, like early onset. We’re not talking about that, right?’
Thorne shook his head.
‘The fact that your father had it might increase your own susceptibility a little, but no more than that.’ Kambar smiled. ‘Dementia is very common, though, and chances are you’l get it anyway, so I’d stop worrying. ’
‘Sometimes it was good,’ Thorne said. ‘With my dad, you know? There was this one afternoon we were al playing bingo on the pier and he just lost it. Started swearing and shouting, proper filth, and everyone was upset, but I was pissing myself. And he
knew
it was funny. I could see it in his face.’
‘I’m glad it wasn’t al gloom and doom,’ Kambar said. ‘How was it at the end?’
Thorne suddenly found his appetite again. He had discovered only recently how the fire in which Jim Thorne perished had started; the part he had played in the death of his own father.
He had not even felt able to share the truth with Louise. He heard Kambar from the other side of the table tel ing him that it wasn’t a problem, that he had not meant to pry.
Thorne started slightly when Kambar’s beeper went off. He got up and shook the doctor’s hand when it was offered. ‘You’ve been a great help. Thank you.’
‘I wish I could tel you I was off to perform some vital brain surgery,’ Kambar said. ‘But the truth is I’ve got a squash game.’ He reached inside his jacket and rubbed his stomach.
‘Should have eaten lunch a bit earlier.’
‘That was my fault.’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘Someone’s kil ing the children of his victims,’ Thorne said suddenly.
‘Sorry?’ Kambar pul ed his cryptic crossword face again.
Thorne could see a smal blob of sauce at the edge of the doctor’s moustache, a thin streak of it just below his col ar. ‘The children of the women that Raymond Garvey murdered.’
Thorne suddenly felt a little dizzy and guessed he’d stood up too quickly. He took a couple of seconds, hoping that Kambar would think the pause was for his benefit. ‘Whoever had those fragments of Garvey’s brain scan has already kil ed four people.’
Kambar looked as though he wished he had never asked. He puffed out his cheeks, said, ‘Fuck.’
The surprise was clearly evident on Thorne’s face.
‘It’s a medical term,’ Kambar said. ‘One you reserve for when you hear something that makes you feel like a hopeless quack with a pocketful of leeches.’
‘I use it pretty much the same way,’ Thorne said. ‘Just more often.’
‘There are so many things that can mess up the brain, but most of them we can do nothing about.’ Kambar shook his head, the resignation etched in lines around his mouth.
‘Sometimes the damage is . . . invisible.’
‘Enjoy your game,’ Thorne said.
When the doctor had gone, Thorne walked over to the counter again. He bought a coffee and a thick slice of cheesecake, took them back to the table. From the window, there was a spectacular view across the flat, green fenland: Grantchester huddled a little to the north; the spires of Cambridge just visible a few miles away to the east; and the pulsing grey vein of the M11 halfway to the horizon.
Thorne looked out, savoured his dessert and tried to remember exactly what his father had shouted that day on the pier. Based on what Kambar had told him, his father could probably have committed murder with a fair chance of getting away with it. It’s a shame his dad had never known that. He was a crotchety and unforgiving old sod sometimes, especial y in the last few years. He’d probably have drawn up a decent-sized hit list.
‘Garvey’s son thinks his father was wrongly imprisoned, and that the tumour might have been found earlier if he hadn’t been in prison. So he blames the world and his wife for his father’s death.’
‘I’m stil not convinced this nutcase is Garvey’s son,’ Thorne said.
‘Sounds like Garvey was, though.’
‘OK, for the sake of argument . . .’
‘So, the child of the kil er starts kil ing the children of the victims. It makes a kind of sense when you think about it.’
‘Sense?’
Thorne said.
‘You know what I mean.’
Thorne was walking slowly around the smal branch of WH Smith at Cambridge station, waiting for the 15.28 to King’s Cross and driven back inside by the wind knifing along the platform. He kept the phone close to his mouth as he talked, so he could whisper when he and Brigstocke got to the meat of it.
‘Twenty-six Anthony Garveys in the UK,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Could be better, but could be a hel of a lot worse.’
Thorne had spoken to Brigstocke earlier in the day, after the initial meeting with Kambar. Hol and had also checked in with the DCI, having met with the governor at Whitemoor, so now it was Thorne who needed bringing up to speed.
‘I think we’re wasting our time,’ Thorne said.
‘You’re not convinced. Yeah, you said.’
‘Even if he
is
Garvey’s son, I think the name is dodgy. If it was genuine, there’d be records. We would have known about it.’
‘Stil got to check them out, Tom.’
‘I know,’ Thorne said. He was sure that, whoever this man was and whatever his parentage, he himself had chosen the name he had used when visiting Whitemoor and pestering Pavesh Kambar. But he also understood that, as far as the investigation went, arses always had to be covered, and it was easy to criticise when you weren’t the senior investigating officer.
‘We’ve discounted half of them since you and I spoke earlier,’ Brigstocke said. ‘So it shouldn’t take too long.’
‘What about the potential victims?’
‘Not doing quite so wel there. Stil missing those three.’
‘Missing?’
‘One is apparently on a walking holiday, but his wife can’t tel us much more than that, or doesn’t want to, for some reason. The other two have both slipped off the radar thanks to one thing and another. We’l find them, though.’
‘As long as we find them first,’ Thorne said.
There was a pause, voices in the background. Thorne had stopped in front of the men’s magazines, and his eyes drifted from
Mojo
and
Uncut
, past
Four Four Two
, to the covers of
Forum
and
Adult DVD Review
on the higher shelves.
‘What do you think about this personality change business?’
‘Have a guess,’ Thorne said.
‘But Kambar didn’t deny that it was possible?’
‘Anything’s possible.’
‘Right.’
‘Right, and we shouldn’t discount the possibility that Garvey was actual y a werewolf, or maybe the unwitting victim of a gypsy’s curse. For Christ’s sake, Russel . . .’
‘Look, a man who’s already murdered four people believes it, so what we think doesn’t real y matter.’
‘You haven’t said what
you
think.’
‘I’m keeping an open mind,’ Brigstocke said. ‘You should try it some time.’
‘It wasn’t you that put Garvey away, so I don’t know why you think you’ve got to sit on the fence.’
‘Steady, mate.’
‘Sorry—’
‘It’s our
motive
, Tom, so we need to take it seriously. OK?’
Thorne picked up a copy of
Uncut
and wandered towards the til . There was a smal queue, but he stil had five minutes before the train was due. ‘I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night,’
he said.
‘What time do you get into King’s Cross?’
‘Half four-ish.’
‘Go straight home,’ Brigstocke said. ‘You had an early start and you wouldn’t get back here until after five anyway. Just make sure you’re the first one in tomorrow.’
‘You sure?’
‘It’s up to you. I mean, if you want to spend a couple of hours ringing up our dozen remaining Anthony Garveys . . .’
‘See you in the morning.’
‘I’l cal if anything turns up.’
Right, Thorne thought. Like the body of one of the three missing victims-in-waiting.
Thorne took another swig from the can of beer which, thanks to Brigstocke, he had been free to purchase and enjoy. Opposite him, a young woman, blonde with bad skin, was leafing through a copy of
heat
. Every so often she looked up from the glossy pages and stared at the beer in Thorne’s hand, as though the consumption of alcohol on a train was right up there with smoking crack or getting your dick out on a list of unacceptable public behaviour.
They were sitting in the train’s ‘quiet’ carriage, but it wasn’t as if he was drinking particularly
noisily
.
Raising the can to his lips, Thorne caught another dirty look and toyed with offering her a drink. Or belching as loudly as he could. Or letting her know just what he thought about every stick-thin brain-dead waste of DNA in her magazine, and that any moron who enjoyed gawping at photos of paparazzi fodder stumbling out of nightclubs or climbing out of limos with no knickers on was in no position to pass judgement on anybody. Then he thought about what Louise would say. He remembered that she occasional y flicked happily through
OK
and
heat
, albeit while she was having her hair done or sitting in a doctor’s waiting room.
He waited until the woman glanced up again, then smiled until she quickly dropped her eyes back to the magazine.
Makes a kind of sense
.
People dying because of who their mothers were; kil ing because of who their fathers might have been. Thorne swal owed his piss-weak lager and supposed that it made as much sense as anything else in a world where being famous counted for so much. Where what you were famous
for
didn’t matter at al . A world where couples who weren’t fit to look after hamsters dragged six kids round the supermarket. Where some women popped out babies like they were shel ing peas, while others didn’t find it quite so straightforward.
‘Any more tickets from Cambridge?’
Thorne had missed the inspector first time round while he’d been busy at the buffet. As soon as his ticket was punched, he stood up to make a return trip, crushing his empty can as noisily as possible as he squeezed out of his seat. Then tossing it back on to the table.
At the end of the carriage, a man was jabbering into his mobile. He was laughing, a hissy half cough, and tel ing someone how something was ‘just typical’ of someone else. It wasn’t loud so much as annoying.
Thorne stopped at the man’s table and snatched the phone from his hand, nodding up at the sign: a picture of a mobile with a red line through it. He pushed the button to end the man’s cal , and reached round quickly with his other hand to take out his wal et. The man said, ‘What the fuck do you—?’ then stopped when he saw the warrant card.