‘A couple, I thought,’ Mitchel said. ‘You know, that
might
have been by this same man.’
Thorne looked at Kitson. He wondered who had taken the decision about what this woman should be told. Had they deliberated over how many previous murders they could mention?
Was two deemed to be OK and three unacceptable? It seemed ridiculous, not least because
one
should have been enough to send anyone scurrying for cover without looking back. But whatever was preventing Debbie Mitchel from doing the sensible thing, and however much trouble he might be in for taking a unilateral decision, Thorne could see no point in pussyfooting around.
‘Would you like to know how he did it?’ Thorne asked.
‘No.’ Col ins had gone noticeably pale.
‘Exactly how he stalked and murdered four people, what he used to kil them. Would that make you take this seriously? Get you off your arse and make you start packing?’
‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchel said, raising her voice. ‘We need to stay here.’
The women had moved even closer together. Thorne could see that Jason had stopped playing with his train and was on his knees by the side of the sofa, pul ing at his mother’s hand, trying to rub it against his cheek.
‘Are you worried about Jason?’ Kitson said. ‘Is that the problem? Because you wouldn’t be separated.’
Mitchel started shaking her head, but it wasn’t clear if she was answering the question or just didn’t believe what Kitson was tel ing her.
‘We have special accommodation designed for families.’
‘No.’
‘You need to get out—’
‘He got into their houses,’ Thorne said. ‘Don’t you understand? They
all
thought they were safe and he got inside and murdered them.’
‘I’l look after them,’ Col ins said.
Thorne flicked his eyes to her. ‘What, even at night, Nina? You’l be working, won’t you?’ Thorne had checked Col ins’ record and seen that she’d had more arrests for soliciting than Debbie Mitchel . He watched her blink, glanced across in time to see something pass across Kitson’s face, and felt a stab of guilt; felt the wind leak out of him. However stupid and stubborn these women were being, it was clear that Nina Col ins was hugely attached to Debbie Mitchel and her son; that her affection for them was fierce and unconditional. ‘Look, I’m just saying . . .’
When Col ins came back at him, her voice had dropped a little. The nerves were evident in the staccato drags on her cigarette and the stutter as she blew out the smoke. ‘Can’t
you
look after us?’
‘That’s what we’re trying to do,’ Thorne said.
‘We can’t go,’ Mitchel said. She was staring at Jason, watching the teeth move across his bottom lip as he squeezed her hand. ‘You don’t understand. He needs routine. We both do.
It’s the only way we can manage to keep everything on an even keel, you know? The only thing that stops it al going to pieces.’
In the desperation that had masked her face, Thorne caught a glimpse of what was driving her. He could see that her terror in acknowledging the threat - the crippling fear of change that could see a spiral back into drugs and might conceivably cost her custody of her child again - was even greater than her fear of the man who wanted to kil her.
‘He would be so unhappy,’ she said.
Thorne understood,
just
, but it didn’t matter. ‘How happy would he be if you were dead?’
Mitchel suddenly cried out in pain and yanked her hand away from Jason’s mouth, her knuckles having caught on the boy’s teeth as he squeezed and kissed it. His face was frozen for a few seconds in shock and she quickly got off the sofa to comfort him, but he was already starting to whimper and turn back to his plastic train.
Col ins stood up too. ‘That’s enough, I reckon,’ she said. She waited for Thorne and Kitson to get up, then ushered them towards the front door.
Kitson stopped and turned at the end of the hal way. ‘Please try and talk some sense into her, Nina.’
Col ins reached past her and opened the door. ‘What would make sense is for you lot to stop pissing about and catch this nutter. Al right, love? Then we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation, would we?’
‘For Jason’s sake,’ Thorne said.
Col ins al but pushed them both out on to the front step and stared Thorne down, her swagger returned. She said, ‘I liked you better when you were tel ing your shit jokes.’
Then she slammed the door in their faces.
‘Looks like it’s got to be an arrest then,’ Kitson said, as they walked towards the car.
Thorne shook his head and moved quickly ahead of her. ‘Last chance,’ he said. He opened the door of the BMW, reached inside for a large brown envelope and walked back past Kitson, towards Debbie Mitchel ’s front door.
‘Tom . . . ?’
He said nothing when Nina Col ins opened the door. Just pushed the envelope into her hand and wheeled away. He was halfway back to the car when he heard the door close behind him.
Kitson stared at him as he turned the ignition over. ‘Was that what I think it was?’
‘Impossible to answer that,’ Thorne said. He held up his hand to stop her speaking again, as if it might help the engine catch. ‘I have no idea what you think it was.’
SEVENTEEN
Back at the office there were stil a few Anthony Garveys to trace and eliminate. There was paperwork for the DVLA and assorted credit-reference agencies to be completed as part of the hunt for Graham Fowler and Simon Walsh; liaison with forces in the north in an effort to track down Andrew Dowd. So, in terms of excitement, there was nothing to match the smal wager that Thorne and Kitson had made with each other on the way back from Whetstone.
‘By the end of the day, I reckon,’ Kitson had said.
‘No chance.’
‘I’m tel ing you. Col ins is the type who likes to have her say.’
There was every chance Kitson was right, but Thorne was in the mood to argue that white was black. ‘Tomorrow,’ he’d said. ‘Earliest, if at al .’
‘Tenner?’
Being of a mind to argue - ‘chopsy’, his father used to cal it - was one thing, but this was cold, hard cash. Thorne had read somewhere that the buzz of gambling lay in the fear of losing far more than in the possibility of winning, and having recently kicked an online poker habit, he’d been looking for something to make his heart beat a little bit faster. ‘You’re on,’
he’d said.
With fifteen minutes until going-home time, Sam Karim put his head round the door to say that Brigstocke wanted a word, and Thorne’s heart-rate increased for al the wrong reasons.
‘How are you going to spend the money?’ he asked on his way to the door.
‘I’m saving up for shoes,’ Kitson said. ‘Do you want to go double or quits?’
‘On what?’
‘Another tenner says Spurs lose tomorrow.’
At home against Aston Vil a. Should be guaranteed at least a point. It
was
Spurs, though . . .
‘I think somebody’s bottle’s gone,’ Kitson said.
Karim was stil standing in the doorway. ‘The guv’nor did say
now
.’
‘Stick it up your arse,’ Thorne said. ‘Both of you.’
‘I think maybe you should make another appointment to see that brain doctor,’ Brigstocke said. He leaned back against the edge of his desk, arms folded.
Thorne said nothing. It was usual y best just to sit there and take it.
‘Tel him to have a look, see if he can find one.’
Brigstocke had moved on from the straightforward, high-volume bol ocking - he had done that while recounting his fifteen-minute phone conversation with Nina Col ins - and was now on to the sarcasm. Before long he would be into the last phase, which Thorne enjoyed the least: the one where the pitch dropped and the tone became one of sadness and disappointment, as though the offence for which he was dishing out the dressing down had actual y
wounded
him. Thorne knew that Brigstocke had learned this ‘you’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let the whole school down’ approach from Trevor Jesmond, who considered himself a master of it. Thorne had been on the receiving end many times, had looked suitably chastened at the slowly shaking head and the puppy-in-need-of-a-home expression, but in Jesmond’s case he always relished it, working on the principle that if he was upsetting the superintendent, he was clearly doing something right.
‘Mitchel was terrified,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Poor woman’s shitting herself, according to her friend.’
‘That was the idea.’
‘Oh, thank Christ for that. There I was thinking you were showing her confidential photographs of al the murder victims because you were an insensitive idiot who was gagging to get back into uniform. Have you stil got a pointed hat?’
‘Not
all
the victims,’ Thorne said.
‘What?’
‘It wasn’t al the victims. Just the Mackens.’
‘Wel , that’s OK then.’
Thorne couldn’t prevent the faintest of smirks washing across his face. ‘Just a sample.’
‘Jesus, Tom . . .’
‘Did it work?’
Brigstocke stared at him for a few seconds, as though toying with one last cathartic bout of shouting, before walking behind his desk and sitting down. ‘Debbie Mitchel ’s moving in with Nina Col ins,’ he said. ‘It’s only a couple of streets away—’
‘Doesn’t matter, as long as she moves.’
‘She wants to stay close to the park, she says. It’s the kid’s favourite place, apparently.’
‘Wel , she can forget about that for a while.’
‘Plus, the kid knows Nina, so there shouldn’t be too much disruption. I understand he doesn’t respond wel to . . . upheaval.’
Thorne told Brigstocke he was right. He remembered the boy’s smile, how easily it appeared and how astounding it was, considering that upheaval was something he had lived with for a long time. ‘So, I’m not in the shit then?’
It was Brigstocke’s turn to smirk. ‘Oh, don’t worry, if Col ins or Mitchel decides to make any sort of official complaint, I’l give you up like a shot.’
‘You’re a pal,’ Thorne said.
‘Yes, I am.’ Brigstocke looked down to the papers on his desk, as though he were good and ready for Thorne to leave. ‘Or I would have given you up already.’
Thorne recognised a cue and turned for the door, but Brigstocke cal ed him back.
‘You were wrong about Anthony Garvey,’ he said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Don’t know about the name, but we can be pretty sure he’s Raymond Garvey’s son.’
Thorne nodded. ‘The DNA . . .’
‘We had Garvey senior’s on file, obviously, so we ran a match with the sample we got from under Catherine Burke’s fingernails. We can be ninety-nine per cent sure they’re father and son.’
‘Ninety-nine per cent?’
Brigstocke knew that Thorne understood why they could not declare it a 100 per cent match, but he said it anyway, enjoying the moment. ‘To be certain, we need to know who the mother was.’ The look, before Brigstocke dropped his eyes back to his paperwork, said, ‘
Now
we’re done.’
Walking out into the car-park, Kitson - ten pounds richer - said, ‘You remember the argument with Brigstocke in the pub? That stuff about the “tension” between the need to catch the kil er and the need to protect the potential victims.’
‘I think that’s when his bad mood started,’ Thorne said. ‘That, or the fact that I got the last lamb casserole.’
‘Seriously.’
‘What?’
‘I was thinking. Didn’t it seem like nobody was trying very hard to get Debbie Mitchel out of that house?’
‘Wel , she certainly took some shifting.’
‘You managed it, though. How come nobody else did?’
It was cold and starting to rain. They waited under the concrete overhang outside the rear entrance to Becke House, Thorne’s car fifty yards to his left and Kitson’s further away in the other direction.
‘You saying they were happy to let her stay there as some kind of bait?’ Thorne asked.
‘Wel , it wasn’t like they had to plan it or anything. I mean, she didn’t want to leave, so maybe someone thought, Let’s use this to our advantage.’
‘Then we can’t be blamed if it al goes tits up.’
‘Right,’ Kitson said. ‘They stick a few unmarked cars around the place, set up an observation point, cameras, whatever.’
Thorne was nodding, going with it. ‘And the brass are pissed off with
me
, not because of this business with the crime-scene photos, but because they had their next victim sitting there waiting for the kil er on a plate, and I went and bal sed it up.’
‘Maybe.’ Kitson was wearing a grey hooded top under a leather jacket. She raised the hood, stared out into the drizzle. ‘I’m just thinking out loud. It’s been a long day.’
‘You’ve had sil ier ideas,’ Thorne said.
‘You think so?’
‘For sure.’ Thorne turned to her and held the look to let her know that he meant it, before al owing the smile to come. ‘We’re definitely worth a point against Vil a tomorrow.’
‘You should have taken the bet then,’ Kitson said.
The alert tone on Thorne’s mobile sounded. He fished the handset from his pocket. The text was from Louise:
celebration drink with team after work. won’t be 2 late. X
.
‘Fancy grabbing a drink?’ Thorne asked. Kitson looked at her watch, but he could see it was a gesture as much as anything. ‘Quick one in the Oak?’
‘I’d better not. The kids, you know.’
‘Why are you stil talking to me?’
‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Not sure I’l be in,’ Thorne said. He was pressing buttons on his phone, deleting the message from Louise. ‘Got a meeting in the centre of town mid-morning, so we’l see how it goes.’
‘Monday, then . . .’
Thorne grunted a ‘yes’ and watched Kitson jog away towards her car. After a few moments, he stepped out into the rain and began to walk towards his.
Later, sinking into the sofa, his eyes scanned the living room, taking in the patch of damp by the side of the window and the bits on the carpet that were not the fleck in its weave. Not for the first time, he contemplated getting a cleaner. He listened to Charlie Rich singing ‘A Sunday Kind of Woman’ and ‘Nothing in the World’, letting his eyes close and his mind wander, the music fading into a mix that included the less tuneful voices of Russel Brigstocke and Yvonne Kitson, the hectoring rasp of Nina Col ins and the scream of Martin Macken, howling like feedback against the sugary strings and soft waves of pedal-steel.