He reckoned that fifty-fifty was pretty good odds.
‘Are you hands free?’ Kitson asked.
‘What do you think?’
‘I think that if anyone ever asks, I should deny having this conversation. ’
‘Where are you?’
‘At home,’ Kitson said. ‘Got back about ten minutes ago to a kitchen that looks like a bomb-site and a bloke who’s pissed off because he’s had two kids giving him grief al evening.’
Kitson had already left Becke House for her evening shift when Thorne had returned from his meeting with Sarah Dowd. He had spent the rest of the day being reasonably constructive between long bouts of window-watching. Trying to put together a rough picture of Anthony Garvey’s movements in recent weeks, and asking himself why he’d let Kitson handle the rough-sleeper lead while he had been content to drink coffee and do marriage-guidance duty in Shoreditch.
Now, he asked Kitson how things had panned out in the West End.
‘Aside from having to work with a tosspot of a trainee, pretty wel .’ She told him about the sighting of a man who was almost certainly Anthony Garvey, who in al likelihood had been fol owing Graham Fowler, waiting to pick his moment.
‘I was wondering how he does it,’ Thorne said. ‘Pick his moment I mean.’
‘Maybe he wants to do them in a particular order.’
‘I thought about that, but he’s not doing them in the same order their mothers were murdered.’
‘No point trying to second guess a nutcase,’ Kitson said.
Thorne said that she was probably right. He’d wasted too much time trying to do that in the past.
‘Oh, and I bumped into a friend of yours.’
‘Not too many of those about,’ Thorne said.
‘Bloke cal ed Spike. Told me to say hel o to you.’
Thorne feathered the brake of the BMW as his memory fired a series of unwelcome images into his mind: a network of tunnels; a couple making love inside a coffin-sized cardboard box; a syringe blooming with blood. ‘Was there a woman with him?’ he asked.
‘Not that I could see,’ Kitson said. ‘He looked pretty far gone, to be honest.’
Thorne thought about Spike and a woman named One-Day Caroline, who had loved each other and the drug that was kil ing them so fiercely. If Caroline had managed to get off the streets - and he hoped that was why she was no longer around - staying away from the one person who might drag her back on to them was probably a good idea. There had been a child as wel , a boy. Thorne squeezed the steering wheel, wil ing himself to remember the name.
‘I’l catch up with you tomorrow, then,’ Kitson said, breaking the silence.
He knew this was why he had been happy to let somebody else interview the rough sleepers. He had no desire to revisit a period of his life that had been so out of kilter, both personal y and professional y. No need to step back into the shadows.
‘Right. Tomorrow.’ He jumped a red light at the Archway roundabout, stil buzzing with the drink and with those images from his past, and wondering who he was trying to fool. Asking himself if his life now - professional y and personal y - was real y any better than it had been back then.
He cracked the window to let in some cold air, silently wished Spike wel and drove on.
‘Tom . . . ?’
Robbie. The kid’s name was Robbie.
THIRTY
Malcolm Reece, the man whose name had been provided by Raymond Garvey’s ex-wife, stil worked for British Telecom, though, in the three decades since Jenny Duggan had first met him, he had risen from being an engineer to a service instal ation manager. He was based in a smal office on an ugly industrial park in Staines, a Thames-side town in the London commuter belt that looked as depressing as it sounded.
He was decidedly frosty from the moment Chamberlain walked in.
‘Look, I’ve already spoken to the police once.’
‘I know,’ Chamberlain said.
‘Told them where I was on whatever dates . . . bloody ridiculous.’
Officers had spoken to Reece a fortnight earlier, as soon as the Garvey connection to the kil ings had been established. He had been eliminated from their enquiries almost immediately, but the record of the interview meant that Chamberlain had been able to track him down very quickly. ‘I’m actual y here to talk to you about something else,’ she said.
Reece looked up from his desk, his head almost perfectly framed by a large year planner on the wal behind him. ‘Wel , I haven’t got al day, so . . .’
‘Some of the fun and games you and Ray Garvey got up to, thirty-odd years ago.’
‘Fun and games?’
‘I spoke to his ex-wife. She told me the two of you were quite a pair back then.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘Right couple of likely lads, she said.’
Reece leaned back in his chair, and gradual y a smile that said, ‘It’s a fair cop’ spread across his doughy features. Chamberlain smiled back, suitably conspiratorial. Although looking at him now, the only thing Malcolm Reece seemed likely to do was burst the buttons on his pale blue nylon shirt or drop dead from heart failure.
Chamberlain put him somewhere in his mid-fifties, maybe a year or two younger than she was, and it was hard to envisage him as the man whom Jenny Duggan had described as never going short of female company. He was bloated and jowly, with glasses perched halfway down a drinker’s nose. He had kept his hair, but it was grey and wiry, the kind she remembered her father having.
‘Blimey, you’re going back a fair way,’ Reece said. ‘And there was a bit more about me then, if you know what I mean.’
Chamberlain nodded, thinking: I doubt that.
‘I was single, for a start.’
‘Ray Garvey wasn’t, though, was he?’
‘Neither were a lot of the girls,’ Reece said. ‘Didn’t seem to matter much to anyone, though.’ He took off his glasses and leaned forward. ‘Look, it wasn’t like there were orgies every day, anything like that. We were lucky, that’s al . A lot of the girls in the office back then were very attractive and they didn’t mind a bit of flirting. We were in our twenties, for God’s sake.
Come on, you must have been the same.’
Chamberlain reddened a little, in spite of herself.
‘I mean, that’s al it was most of the time, harmless flirting. Every so often you’d have a drink and things might go a bit further, but it was just a bit of fun at work, you know? These days, you as much as tel a woman she looks nice and you get slapped with a, what do you cal it . . . sexual harassment charge.’
Thinking that she’d like to slap him in a way that would be rather more painful, Chamberlain told him that she sympathised, that things were even worse in the police force. ‘So, you and Ray put it about a bit, then?’
‘Wel , like you said, Ray was married, so he had to be more careful.’ He unfastened his top button and loosened his tie, enjoying himself. ‘I was probably more of a naughty boy than he was. I told you though, some of those girls didn’t need a lot of encouragement.’ He grinned. ‘A couple of gin and tonics was usual y more than enough.’
‘Can you remember any names?’
‘The girls, you mean?’
‘Sounds like it might be a long list.’
‘Bloody hel , now you’re asking.’
‘Come on,’ Chamberlain said, smiling, stil playing the game. ‘I know what you blokes are like. You can’t remember to put the bins out, but you can remember the name of every girl you ever copped off with.’
‘Wel . . .’
‘Ray, I’m talking about.’
Reece looked disappointed. Eventual y, he said, ‘I suppose he had a few over the years.’
‘Anyone special?’
Reece thought about it. ‘Maybe one girl, worked as a secretary. A little bit older than he was, if I remember, and married. Yeah, he was seeing her for a while on the quiet.’
‘Name?’
‘Sandra.’ He closed his eyes and fished for a surname. When it came to him, he snapped his fingers and pointed at Chamberlain, delighted with himself. ‘Phipps!’ He shook his head.
‘Bloody hel . . . Sandra Phipps.’
Chamberlain noted down the name and stood to go.
‘That al finished when she left, though,’ Reece said. ‘She moved away, I think. In fact, there were a few rumours flying about at the time.’
‘Rumours about what?’
‘Wel , Ray didn’t say much, but I know one or two people thought she might have been up the duff.’
Chamberlain nodded, as though the information were of no more than minor interest.
‘You on the train?’ Reece asked.
She said that she was, and when he offered her a lift to the station she lied and told him that she had pre-ordered a taxi. Reece walked her out of the building and up close, pushing through the swing doors, she noticed that he smel ed quite good. As he told her how nice it had been to meet her, Chamberlain thought, just for a second or two, that she could understand what those girls had seen in him thirty years earlier. It was only momentary, though. Walking away, she decided that back then British Telecom must have had a policy of employing young women with particularly poor eyesight or very low self-esteem.
She cal ed Tom Thorne and talked him through the interview, told him that she might final y have a name for Anthony Garvey’s mother. He said it would be good to catch up in person and they arranged to meet later on at Chamberlain’s hotel.
‘I’l see you about seven unless anything comes up,’ he said.
Then, she cal ed Jack.
Listening to the phone ring out, imagining her husband turning off the TV and taking his sweet time strol ing into the hal , she remembered how she had blushed when Reece had asked what she had been like in her twenties. When Jack final y answered, she snapped at him.
‘What’s up with you?’ he asked.
She had blushed not because she had put herself around back then, but because she had not.
Andrew Dowd turned from the window of Graham Fowler’s apartment. ‘You think we’re the only ones? The
last
ones?’
Fowler was sitting on the sofa, a can of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. On the table in front of him were the remnants of several previous beers and many previous cigarettes. He shook his head. ‘There’s at least one more,’ he said. ‘Those two coppers were talking about it.’
‘I wonder why he isn’t staying here.’
‘She,’
Fowler said. ‘I heard one of them mention a name.’ He put down his can. ‘Fuck, you think she’s already dead?’
Dowd shook his head and resumed looking out of the window. After half a minute he said, ‘What if they don’t get him?’
‘I can put up with this for a while,’ Fowler said.
‘I mean ever.’ Dowd walked across and dropped down into the smal armchair. ‘They’l give it a couple of months and then, if they haven’t got him, it’l just fizzle out. They’l have other fish to fry.’
‘You reckon?’
‘How can we go back to a normal life?’
‘Some of us never had one, mate.’
‘OK,
any
life, then.’ Dowd sounded irritated suddenly, or perhaps it was just nervousness. ‘They’l have to protect us somehow . . . set us up somewhere else. New identities, maybe.’
‘Like those blokes who blow the whistle on the mafia,’ Fowler said. ‘That doesn’t sound too bad, tel you the truth.’
Dowd shook his head again, then let out a laugh as he picked up the coffee he had been drinking a few minutes before. ‘You’re just about the most optimistic bastard I’ve ever come across,’ he said. ‘Especial y considering you’ve got every right to think life is shit.’
Fowler raised his can in a salute. ‘Things can only get better, pal.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ Dowd said. ‘You reckon that bloke Thorne’s up to much?’
‘Seemed like it,’ Fowler said. He leaned forward to stub out his cigarette. ‘There’s not a fat lot we can do about it either way, is there?’
They sat for a while, the silence broken only by the noises of the block - the water moving through the central-heating system, the low hum of a generator - and the grumble of the traffic moving along the Euston Road. Fowler took a fresh cigarette from his pack and rol ed it between his fingers.
‘Did you think about her a lot when you were growing up?’ he asked. ‘Your mum?’
Dowd swal owed, then sniffed. ‘For ages I just pretended she was stil around. My imaginary mum. I wrote her long letters tel ing her how I did at school, al that. It got better, eventual y.
What about you?’
Fowler smiled. ‘I think I just went from being one sort of mess to another,’ he said. ‘I felt it every day, you know? Felt like everyone knew what had happened, that they were looking at me like I was some kind of freak. I got into a shit-load of fights at school. They used up al their sympathy in the end and threw me out.’ He narrowed his eyes, remembering, the cigarette stil unlit between his fingers. ‘Even after I got married, had kids, it was stil . . . difficult, so I found things to help me forget about it, you know?’ He nodded towards the empty cans on the table. ‘Only problem is, those things tend to ruin your life ever so slightly, and you end up replacing one kind of grief with another.’ He scrabbled for the lighter. ‘Christ, I’m rambling.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Sorry . . .’
‘You ever see your wife or kids?’
Fowler shook his head and pointed at Dowd through the thick fug of smoke. ‘Listen, you want to make sure you don’t lose
yours
, mate.’
‘Already lost her,’ Dowd said. ‘In al the ways that count.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘I’m serious. I’m taking a leaf out of your book and thinking positive. Making a fresh start once al this is sorted.’ He got to his feet quickly and clapped his hands together. ‘Right, I’m making more coffee and I think you should have one.’
Fowler laughed and said thanks. He watched Dowd disappear into the smal kitchen, then said, ‘I real y do think that copper’s OK, you know, Andy. Thorne.’
After a second or two, Dowd shouted back, ‘He might need to be better than that.’
As soon as the video had finished, Jason wanted to watch it again, same as always. He tugged at Debbie’s arm until she handed over the remote, grinning at the noise of the tape rewinding and settling back down in front of the screen.