Debbie could not bear to sit through it again. She knew every word by heart, every moment when Jason would turn and blow at her, imitating the puff-puff of each and every train. She got up and walked out into the hal , thinking that she could happily throttle Ringo Starr, and that Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine was in serious need of a derailment.
Nina came out of her bedroom just as the theme music kicked in next door. ‘I can’t believe he hasn’t worn that bloody video out by now.’
‘
It
’s wearing
me
out,’ Debbie said. ‘I’l tel you that much.’
‘He loves it though.’
‘Yeah, I know . . . best fifty pence I ever spent. That car-boot fair up in Barnet, remember?’ She watched Nina checking her make-up in the hal mirror. ‘You going out?’
‘Got to work, darling.’
‘You don’t have to. I was thinking, why don’t I start giving you something towards the rent?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘No, I should.’
‘Where from?’
Debbie closed the lounge door. Jason would not be able to understand what they were saying, but he was sensitive to tone of voice, and easily upset by any fal ing-out. ‘I’l find it.’
‘Not as easy as I can,’ Nina said. ‘I’ve got three lined up tonight and one always pays me a bit extra.’ She looked at Debbie in the mirror. ‘You al right on your own? You’re not worried are you?’
‘No.’
‘Those coppers are stil sitting out there and you can always ring Thorne if you’re nervous.’
‘I’m fine.’
Nina nodded. ‘I need the money, Debs. You know?’
When Nina had gone, Debbie remained in the hal for a few minutes, doing her best to tune out the sounds from Jason’s video in the next room. She would put him to bed as soon as it had finished, and once the screaming and playing up were done with, she’d get an early night herself. It was better than sitting up and fretting, waiting for Nina to get home.
There was no way she could tel her friend how frightened she was. She’d decided years before that the only way to keep it together was never to let anyone see how scared she was.
No man, however handy he might be with his fists, not any of those pinch-faced bitches from Social Services, and certainly not Jason. Ever since the police had first come knocking with their serious faces, warning her, she’d been thinking about what it might be like to be separated from him. Not just for a few weeks, but for ever. She watched him sleeping, or stared at the back of his head as he knelt in front of the TV screen, and it made her want to be sick.
She got up and pressed her ear to the lounge door, held back the tears as she listened to her son puff-puffing and humming to himself. I’m the Fat Control er, she thought, and Thomas wouldn’t know what to do without him.
The Fat Control er can’t be shit-scared.
THIRTY-ONE
When Thorne entered the lobby of Grass-up Grange, DS Rob Gibbons was sitting behind the desk, reading a paperback. Thorne glanced at the cover: some fantasy rubbish.
‘Dragons and hobbits, al that kind of stuff?’ he asked.
Gibbons smiled, clearly unimpressed. ‘Not real y.’
‘Where’s Spibey?’
‘Upstairs with the Gruesome Twosome,’ Gibbons said.
Walking up, Thorne wondered which of the stock answers he could give to Fowler and Dowd when they asked the inevitable question about how the inquiry was going. It was a reasonable question, al things considered, but such conversations were never easy.
Have you found the man who killed our mum/dad/brother/sister?
Why is this taking so long?
When are you going to
catch
him
. . .
?
We’re doing our best
.
We’re making progress
.
There have been several significant developments
. Whichever version of ‘no’ and ‘I don’t know’ he trotted out, Thorne was always left feeling slightly grubby. He’d talked about it to Louise more than once, and they’d agreed that there was nothing that could be done about it, and besides, wasn’t it better to give people who were grieving something to hope for? Perhaps, but it didn’t make lying to them any easier.
Any day when a case moved in the right direction was a good one, but they were few and far between, and the real y good days, when an arrest - the
right
arrest - was made, gave hen’s teeth and rocking-horse shit a run for their money. Even then, of course, the possibility of a
great
day lay with the courts. A less than foolproof legal system meant that the best anyone could do at that stage was cross their fingers, move on to the next case and try not to worry.
‘If
they
screw up,’ Hendricks had said once, ‘it doesn’t mean
you
did.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Thorne had said. Because it wasn’t tricksy barristers or incompetent judges who had to face the toughest question of the lot, was it?
How could that happen?
Thorne stepped on to the top-floor landing. He could hear laughter coming from Graham Fowler’s apartment.
So, any chance we might get out of here soon, that you might catch this bloke? You know, the one who’s trying to kill us.
Not for the first time, Thorne resolved to be as honest as possible, knowing that when the time came he would probably bottle it.
Forensical y, they had about al they were ever going to get, and the phone number provided by Sarah Dowd had proved to be as useless as Thorne had feared. Her information, together with the sightings reported by Yvonne Kitson, was helping to put the picture together, but no more than that. Looking at it from almost any angle, Kitson’s grumbling sidekick might have had a point.
Thorne walked along the corridor, past the open doors of the vacant apartments. Each one looked clean and ready, should it be needed, and there was the faintest tang of new paint.
Thorne wondered if Grass-up Grange was expecting a particularly fussy gangland informant, and then - for no good reason - if it was true that the Queen thought the world smel ed of fresh paint. Hers was certainly a sweeter-smel ing world than the one he and Phil Hendricks lived in.
The poor old soul
did
have a lot of waving to do though . . .
He knocked on the door of Fowler’s apartment. Said, ‘Brian, it’s Tom Thorne.’ Spibey gave him the four-digit entry code and Thorne walked in to find him at a table with Fowler and Dowd, a scattering of poker chips just visible between the takeaway cartons and beer cans. The room stank of curry and cigarettes.
Spibey, who was seated with his back to the door, held up his cards so that only Thorne could see. He was holding two kings and a jack. ‘Three-card brag. Fancy a few hands?’
Thorne said that he couldn’t as he was only stopping by on his way to an appointment.
‘Go on,’ Dowd said. ‘You might change my luck, help me get some money back off this jammy bastard.’
‘Pure skil ,’ Spibey said.
‘Where’s al the money come from anyway?’
Fowler nodded at Dowd. ‘Wel , I came in here with about forty-six pence, but Andy’s subbed me.’
‘And I’m the only one losing,’ Dowd said.
Fowler slowly pumped his arms in the air, began tunelessly singing ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. It was clear that the empty cans were down to him.
Dowd looked at Thorne, shaking his head. ‘Like I told you, it’s a sick world.’
Thorne asked if everything was OK, and Spibey told him it was. Fowler and Dowd nodded their agreement, the two of them sitting there as if it were the most ordinary situation imaginable.
Neither seemed inclined to ask Thorne any difficult questions.
‘Go on then, sod off,’ Spibey said. ‘I’m about to clean these two out.’
‘Oh right, your pair of kings.’
Fowler and Dowd threw their hands down immediately.
‘Bloody hel !’ Spibey said.
Thorne grinned. ‘I’l phone later tonight,’ he said. ‘OK?’ He would cal Debbie Mitchel too, last thing.
Spibey caught up with him at the door. ‘Listen, Tom, I just thought this would take their minds off things, you know? Any problem?’
‘Not as far as I can see,’ Thorne said. Both men had been far more relaxed than the last time he had seen them, and a few hours’ harmless gambling had certainly got Thorne himself off the hook. If it worked with men whose lives had been targeted, he wondered if the chance of a quick flutter might be the key to diluting those awkward moments with desperate relatives.
I’m
so
confident that we’ll catch the man who killed your husband/wife/hamster that I’ll give you ten to one against us catching him. Stick a tenner on and it’s a win-win
. . .
He decided to bring up the idea next time he saw Trevor Jesmond. See if the twat thought he was joking.
‘Have you eaten?’
Thorne suddenly felt guilty. ‘I grabbed a burger on the way over. Sorry. I thought you’d have had something.’
‘I can grab a sandwich later,’ Chamberlain said. ‘It’s fine.’ She held up her glass of wine. ‘I’l probably need something to soak this up.’
The bar of the hotel in Bloomsbury was nice enough, but no bigger than a large sitting room, so Thorne and Chamberlain, once they’d got beyond the chit-chat, had needed to keep their voices down. The other occupants, a pair of blousy Midlands girls on the lash, were showing no such discretion. Thorne had twice come close to marching across and letting them know he had no interest in their jobs or boyfriends and suggesting that they might like to take their Bacardi Breezers somewhere else.
‘You’re turning into a miserable old git,’ Chamberlain said.
‘I was always a miserable git,’ Thorne said. ‘I just used to be younger.’
‘You think it’s the Job?’
‘Not real y.’
‘That you’d be any less miserable if you worked in Currys?’
‘Christ, no.’
‘Wel then.’
‘A week of that and I’d hang myself with one of their reasonably priced extension leads.’
‘So, cheer up,’ Chamberlain said.
She refil ed their glasses then picked up the bar menu, tapping her fingers against it in time to the quasi-Celtic folk drivel being piped from the speakers in the ceiling. The girls at the next table laughed and Thorne thought about asking if he could have the drivel turned up a little.
‘You think there’s anything in what this bloke Reece told you?’
‘If it had been himself he was talking about, I’d probably have thought he was ful of it. But it sounded . . . convincing.’
‘A convincing rumour.’
‘Got to be worth checking out though.’
Thorne knew that, as the inquiry stood, a cal claiming that Anthony Garvey was the bastard son of Lord Lucan would be worth checking out. ‘So, tel me about this woman,’ he said.
Chamberlain inched forward in her chair. This was what she was being paid for. ‘Sandra Phipps. Wel , Phipps as was. She’s been married twice since then. She lives out near Reading somewhere.’
Something rang the faintest of bel s with Thorne.
‘What?’
For a second or two he almost nailed it, but the noise from the adjoining table made it difficult to concentrate. ‘Nothing. When are you going to see her?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘She know you’re coming?’
‘I thought it might be best if I just turned up,’ Chamberlain said. ‘If she
is
Anthony Garvey’s mother, I’d rather not give her any time to think about it, cook up false alibis.’
Thorne agreed that it was a good idea. He knew how easily the bond between a parent and their child could breed credulity and twist into denial. It was hard to condemn unconditional love, even when it bordered on stupidity, but if it came close to a perversion of justice, a line had to be drawn.
He remembered a woman who had flown at him a few years back, after her son had been jailed for kicking an Asian shopkeeper to death. He’d held her at arm’s length until she’d been restrained. Stood there with gobbets of spit running down his shirt, wondering if the woman hated him as much as she hated herself.
And he remembered Chloe Sinclair’s mother and the father of Greg and Alex Macken. A different sort of unconditional love.
He knew where his sympathies lay.
‘You want me to come with you?’ he asked.
‘Right,’ Chamberlain said. ‘I do al the donkey work and you step in at the finish.’
‘Not at al .’
‘You don’t think I’m up to it?’
‘No, I mean . . . yes, ’course I do. I just thought you might want some company.’ Thorne shook his head. ‘Bloody hel , you’re turning into a
touchy
old git.’
Chamberlain emptied her glass. ‘Less of the “old”, you cheeky sod.’
‘Pardon me.’ Thorne finished his own wine and sat back for a few moments. He noticed that one of the Midlands girls, despite the grating voice, was not unattractive. He thought about Louise and quickly turned his attention back to Chamberlain. ‘’Course, even if this woman is Garvey’s mother, she might wel have no idea where he is.’
‘Or he might be popping round every Sunday with a bunch of flowers. We don’t know, do we? At the very least we might get a real name.’
‘True.’
‘Maybe more.’
‘God, I hope so.’
‘This one’s wound you up, hasn’t it?’ Chamberlain asked.
Thorne took a few seconds to gather his thoughts, which weren’t coming quite as quickly or cleanly as usual. ‘The weird thing is that I’m almost grateful for it. Just when you think you might be getting . . . desensitised to this stuff, some freak like Garvey comes along and you find there’s a bit of you that’s stil . . . Shit, can’t think of the word.’
‘I know what you’re saying.’
‘And there’s other things . . . things at home or whatever. They change the way you react to people. Make you angrier, sadder. Jack al your reactions up a few notches so you can’t switch off quite so easily.’
‘What things?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Thorne shook his head. ‘I’m talking shite, that’s al .’
Chamberlain waited, but Thorne waved the subject away as though it weren’t worth their time and effort. The music had dropped in tempo, like Clannad on Mogadon. They watched the barman flirting with the two girls as he gathered up their empties.
‘Are you driving?’ Chamberlain asked. She held up the spent wine bottle to let Thorne see how much they’d put away.