It was Roper who brought Thorne down to earth with a bump.
‘As far as kidnapping anyone goes, I really can’t see it,’ he said. ‘If Freestone’s been happily staying out of our way all this time, why would he suddenly make himself visible again? If it is because this kid’s father put him away all those years ago or whatever, why risk being caught for something as stupid as revenge?’
Thorne had to agree that it was a bloody good point.
Louise Porter picked up the photograph, stared at the faces of the three boys, and lost herself for a moment or two.
In terms of its layout, the Area West Murder Squad HQ was a very different set-up from the one she was used to back at Scotland Yard. The Major Incident Room, on the third floor of Becke House, was an open-plan goldfish bowl, with smaller offices dotted along the corridor that curled around one side of it. It was into one of those occupied by Team 3 personnel that Porter had wandered looking for Yvonne Kitson.
An hour or so short of lunchtime, she felt as though she’d already put in a full day’s work. Since arriving at Becke House, everyone had been going flat out; and though it was early days, and operationally a little ad hoc, things seemed to be rubbing along smoothly enough. In terms of the two units working together, both DCIs had been insistent on going in at the deep end. This was evident in the pairings that had been sent after the two men whose names had yet to be crossed off the original ‘grudge’ list: Holland had been teamed up with a Kidnap Unit DC to pay a call on a career armed robber turned mature student named Harry Cotterill; while Stone and Heeney were trying to track down a second-division pimp and occasional arsonist called Philip Quinn. The latter was a former snout, who Mullen had put away when he had outlived his usefulness and who had, at the time, been resentful enough to try to burn down Mullen’s house.
While these four – and Tom Thorne – were on the street working the grudge angle, Porter and others were office bound, letting fingers do the walking at computer keyboards while a dead woman pointed the way.
One look at Amanda Tickell’s wasted body – the skin like wax-paper where it wasn’t covered in blood – had told Phil Hendricks that she was an addict, and he’d called twenty minutes into the post-mortem to confirm it, giving Porter and the others a direction in which to start moving. The rest of the morning had been spent making connections: talking to rehab centres and borough drug squads; chasing up her family and friends to try and shake loose the name of a dealer or fellow users; anyone who might give them a lead from Tickell to Conrad Allen, and from there to the possibility of a third party with whom, or at whose instruction, the pair had taken a major step up, and kidnapped Luke Mullen.
The possibility…
Without forensic evidence to the contrary, the idea that Luke Mullen had killed his kidnappers was still floating about, although Porter hadn’t spoken to many who were completely convinced, or convinced enough to climb off the fence, at any rate. She, for one, was in little doubt that Allen and Tickell had been involved with someone else; that, for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, this person had murdered them and was now holding Luke Mullen themself.
It was senseless, but the only explanation that made any sense. Porter wondered why she’d even bothered to hedge her bets when she’d been talking to Tom Thorne outside the Yard a few hours before.
She was still holding the photograph when she looked up and saw Yvonne Kitson in the doorway. She muttered an apology as she put the frame back on the desk. ‘Nice kids.’
‘Sometimes,’ Kitson said.
Porter smiled and glanced back at the picture as she carried a chair across; painted faces and gaps where milk teeth had once been. ‘I just came in so we could catch up, really.’
Kitson pointed back towards the corridor as she sat down. ‘Sorry, I was just in with the DCI. As a matter of fact, I won’t be around for a couple of hours this afternoon.’
‘Hot date?’
‘Not as such.’
Kitson hadn’t said much to Porter that wasn’t work-related since they’d met for the first time at that morning’s briefing. But she’d taken a look, in the way that any female copper might size up another. Or any female. Short and dark, Porter was the exact opposite of Kitson herself, and, although she was not conventionally pretty, she had a figure it was hard not to resent a little. Kitson generally didn’t mind her own body, she just tended to see it in one of two very different ways: ‘vivacious’ when she liked herself; ‘mumsy’ when she didn’t.
She saw Porter glance around the office. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ Kitson said. ‘You must be green with envy.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘The disabled toilet’s bigger.’
Porter nodded towards the room’s second desk, back to back with Kitson’s and piled high with folders and box files, as though it were being used as storage space. ‘You normally share with Thorne, don’t you?’
‘Normally, but everything’s been a bit up in the air for a while. He’ll probably be wanting it back now.’
‘I can’t imagine his side of the room being quite so homely, somehow,’ Porter said. ‘Photos of his kids or whatever.’
Kitson punched at her keyboard. ‘Not even if he had any. Maybe the odd picture of Johnny Cash or Glenn Hoddle.’
‘You’re kidding. Johnny Cash?’
‘Sometimes I think he just likes to be perverse.’
Porter opened the notebook she was carrying and began to leaf through the pages, looking for the bullet points she was keen to go over. ‘Thorne’s not the easiest bloke to suss out, is he?’
Kitson smiled. ‘There isn’t nearly enough time…’
‘You should be glad I never throw anything away,’ Roper said. ‘And that my wife knows where everything is.’ He opened up the green folder and took out a piece of paper. ‘I called her after we spoke on the phone and she copied these out of an old desk diary. It was the quickest way I could think of to get them. The only way, come to think of it.’
Thorne took the piece of paper and looked at the list of names:
DI C. Roper.
Mr P. Lardner.
Mrs K. Bristow.
Ms M. Stringer.
Mr N. Warren.
Roper shifted his chair closer to Thorne’s, studied the list over his shoulder, pointing at each name in turn.
‘I was just a DI back then with the CID at Crystal Palace; thought this would be a good thing to do, career-wise.’ He shook his head at the stupidity of a slightly younger self. ‘Never realised what a pain in the arse it was going to turn out to be, sitting round a table with half of bloody Bromley Borough Council once a month. Pete Lardner is the only one I’ve seen since, as a matter of fact. He was with the Probation Office, and I know he’s still there, so it shouldn’t be hard to get hold of him. ‘Mrs Bristow. Scottish woman. Kathleen, Katharine, something like that. She was the social worker, and you’d work that out straight away. Liked to meddle and called it “caring”. You know the sort, right? She tried to run the whole thing, and, to be honest, the rest of us were happy to let her. She was knocking on a bit, as I remember, so she might well have retired. Ms M. Stringer was from the local education authority.’
Thorne looked up, amused by the DCI’s emphasis on the ‘Ms’, but also a little puzzled.
‘There were four or five different schools within a few miles of where Freestone had been housed,’ Roper explained. ‘It was obviously a cause for concern.’ He glanced back at the list. ‘Warren was the drugs awareness bloke from the health authority. Freestone had developed something of a problem in prison and was attending a methadone clinic. Actually, I think Warren and Lardner had worked together before, but the rest of us didn’t know one another from Adam.’ He pointed again to the last name on the list, then leaned back and shifted his chair away again. ‘Looked like he’d taken a few drugs himself, as far as I can remember.’