As usual, when he’d first opened his eyes, he’d had no idea whether it was day or night. The curtains had been drawn tight across. But for almost the first time he’d been alone, with his hands untied, so after a minute or two he’d got up from the mattress on the floor, crept over and pulled the curtains back an inch or two. It was dark outside, but in the tower blocks opposite he could see lights in some of the windows and the flickering of TV sets. He’d guessed that it was probably early evening.
Trying not to breathe, he’d stood very still in the middle of the room, listening to the screaming from down the corridor.
He’d mentally mapped out the whole place during those first few trips to the bathroom. It wasn’t a complicated layout and he’d always been good at picturing stuff, at laying out diagrams on his computer and seeing how things connected. He’d known, standing there in the dark, that were he to take a left turn out of the room he was in, he would need to get through two doors before he was on the street. He knew that because he’d tried to run through one of them on the first day, which was when they’d started giving him the injections more often. Turning right would have been a better bet, but he knew that he would have had to go past their room, would have had to risk being seen, and he knew that there would still be a locked door between him and the back way out. He was fairly certain there was a way down through the kitchen: an old-fashioned fire escape like his nan used to have. He’d been almost completely out of it, but he could remember seeing the metal steps, hearing the man’s feet ringing against them as they’d carried him in.
How many days ago was that?
Half a dozen times after he’d been woken, he’d decided that he’d have the best chance if he tried to get away right then, while they were distracted. If he went for it and tried to sneak past while they were still shouting and chucking stuff at each other. Half a dozen times he’d chickened out and told himself he was a shitty little coward. Shivering in the dark and pissing in his pants, afraid to make a run for it.
Then the shouting had stopped and he’d felt his feet carrying him from the room and turning to the right. The map in his head was bright and pulsing, and he was a glowing dot moving slowly along a dark line as he inched along the corridor, as he pressed himself against the wall and tried to move with no noise. And perhaps he wasn’t quite as awake or alert as he’d thought, because things suddenly seemed to blur and shift when he glanced through the open doorway to the bedroom. When he saw Conrad and Amanda.
When he noticed the knife, and bent to pick it up.
Everything was very fucked-up and fuzzy from there on: from whenever the hell it was, to whenever the hell this was; from those incredible moments of light and colour to this newest, numbest darkness.
Memory came in beats and shocking flashes.
Explosions of clarity, like that moment in the horror film when the power goes out and the stupid girl lights a match and sees the face of the slasher: the door as he ran at it, and his heart like a hammer; the klaxon of his breath; a woman’s face at the window of a house moving quickly past him.
And the warm, wet memory of so much blood.
EIGHT
Thorne stood in his dressing-gown, drinking tea and staring out at the garden as it grew lighter. His eye had been caught by a beer can he’d forgotten to bring in from the other night; then he’d seen the movement at the end of the garden and stayed to watch.
The fox was worrying at something, digging at it in the corner behind one of Thorne’s recently purchased pots. Thorne wondered whether it might be a squirrel or a baby bird, then decided it was more likely to be an old burger carton or a discarded piece of KFC. Without turning round he called softly for Elvis, and relaxed a little when he felt the wetness of the cat’s rheumy eye against his ankle.
Motionless, he stood with both hands wrapped around his mug, and tried not to think about what Russell Brigstocke might say, what he would be unable to resist saying, when Thorne saw him in an hour or so’s time. He tried to think about the boy and not the bodies, but he was unable to separate the two. They’d have results on the knife and the blood by now, and perhaps the bizarre idea that some had begun to whisper the night before at the crime scene would have solidified into a genuine theory. Thorne was more comfortable with a very different notion, but his own idea was equally strange. And equally hard to explain.
A car alarm began to scream somewhere at the front of the house and Thorne watched the fox look up and freeze. He saw drops run along the animal’s flank, the fur darkened and plastered to its bones by the drizzle. After a few seconds it turned back, unconcerned, to its meal.
Typical Londoner, Thorne thought.
He took a sip of tea, but it was almost cold, so he rinsed out the mug and wandered through to the bedroom to get dressed.
He ran into Brigstocke near the door of Central 3000, standing behind him in a short queue for the drinks machine. The chat was asinine enough: how it made the crappy old kettle at Becke House look a bit shit; how Spurs still needed someone who could put the ball in the net. Then, when Brigstocke had got his drink, he turned and leaned against the machine, spoke as Thorne stepped forward to stab at the buttons.
‘Well, you’ve got those bodies you wanted.’
There it was…
Thorne could say nothing, could do nothing but acknowledge the point with a look he hoped did not come across as sheepish.
They walked slowly towards the far side of the room, where two very pissed-off civilian staff were laying out many more chairs than Thorne had seen last time, when the team had gathered to watch the videotape of Luke Mullen.
‘How’s this going to work?’ Thorne asked.
‘I think that’s what we’re all here to try and work out.’
‘Why here, though? Why not Becke House?’
‘We tossed a coin.’ Brigstocke blew across the top of his coffee. ‘I lost.’
Thorne laughed, then realised he was the only one. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’
‘The Kidnap Unit gets home advantage, and I get to make the speech.’
‘Well, it’s nice to see that this is all being handled so professionally.’
‘That’s the point,’ Brigstocke said. ‘None of us has handled anything quite like this before.’
‘We’ve had FSS working their arses off overnight, and none of the blood found at the crime scene belongs to Luke Mullen. But we do know he was there. His fingerprints were all over the smaller of the two bedrooms, which is where he appears to have been held, and where we’re ninety-nine per cent certain the videotape was shot. Luke Mullen’s fingerprints have also been found on the knife which was used to kill Conrad Allen and his girlfriend, who, from the statement given by the car dealer in Wood Green, and from identification found on the premises, we believe to be one Amanda Tickell. Miss Tickell’s mother is due at the mortuary any time now to identify the body formally.’
Brigstocke moved a pace or two to the left and right of centre as he spoke, his voice rather than his body language holding the attention of the fifty-odd men and women in front of him. Though the thick specs and the quiffy hair often lent the DCI a vaguely comic aspect, he could recite the phone book and no one listening would shuffle their feet. Toss of a coin or no, he commanded the attention far better than his opposite number at SO7. Thorne guessed this was why Barry Hignett was doing the listening, standing off to one side and trying to look like he endorsed everything that was being said.
Brigstocke gestured towards a black-clad figure in the front row. ‘Doctor Hendricks is going to say a quick word about how the murders appear to have been carried out.’
Phil Hendricks stood up while Brigstocke stepped further across to stand next to Barry Hignett. Now there was movement, and a murmur or two, and a good deal of coughing as the changeover took place. Thorne took the opportunity to stretch his legs out, groaned quietly as the pain moved up and down in a wave from thigh to ankle. He was sitting in the same row as Holland, Kitson and Stone, while Porter, Parsons and the rest of the Kidnap crew were a couple of rows in front. Thorne read nothing into it beyond the usual demarcation of territory, the polite, run-of-the-mill ‘fuck you’.