Thorne folded the paper and tucked it away. ‘Thanks for this.’
‘No problem, but I really do have to wind this up now.’
‘Are there any minutes of the meetings?’
‘Well if there are, I couldn’t begin to tell you where they are now. God knows who kept them. The woman from social services would be my guess…’
Thorne wasn’t hugely shocked, but it was more than enough to show on his face.
‘We were the trial run for all this, remember?’ Roper looked like he could remember perfectly well, and wasn’t too thrilled about the fact. ‘Now, it’s structured. Now, the meetings are properly chaired and records are kept documenting every decision and responsibility for whatever tasks have been agreed. It’s all properly buttoned up, with each agency cooperating with the relevant authority, sharing their information and so on. Back then, we were making it up as we went along. Now, there are “jigsaw teams” – local public protection units in each borough – so it’s covered from both sides. There are “exclusion zones” and “action plans”, and any factors that put public safety at risk are identified early on and addressed. All we could do was react to whatever happened.’ He leaned forward, placed the flat of his hand against the coffee pot. ‘Basically, we were guinea pigs.’
Thorne said nothing, and stood up, thinking that, despite the points Callum Roper had made, his final plea for mitigation had been a bit rich. It was definitely a bit bloody late. Some might have said that Grant Freestone was as much of a guinea pig as any member of that panel.
The woman he’d killed certainly was.
‘I’ll walk you to the lift…’ Roper said.
In the lobby, waiting for the glass lift with the posh speaking voice to glide up, Roper seemed keen to end their meeting on something of a lighter note. Thorne didn’t see the need, but listened politely enough.
‘You remember Space Patrol?’ Roper asked.
‘Sorry.’
‘It was a kids’ show in the early sixties. A science-fiction thing, with crappy puppets. Made Thunderbirds look high-tech.’
Thorne said he couldn’t remember the show; that he’d only have been a couple of years old at the time.
‘Anyway, back then, this building was pretty futuristic for its time, so they used a shot of it in the programme.’ Roper raised his arms. ‘This place was the original Space Patrol headquarters.’
Thorne couldn’t think of anything to say. Puppets, science fiction, the Metropolitan Police. There were at least half a dozen different punchlines.
He’d switched off his phone before going in to see Roper. Once he was outside, he checked for messages and found two new ones. Porter’s didn’t seem to be about very much, while Phil Hendricks had rung to say that everything he’d suggested at the briefing – the way that Allen and Tickell had died – had been more or less confirmed by the postmortems. Thorne called Hendricks back first, got an answering machine. ‘What do you want, a bloody gold star? Seriously, Phil, it was a privilege to watch you doing some excellent mime work this morning, and I’d love to pat you on the back personally, but fuck knows when. Give us a call later, if you fancy a natter…’
Then he called Porter.
‘Touching base?’
‘It’s just an expression,’ she said. ‘Calm down.’
‘It’s a stupid expression. Unless you’re an American teenager and you haven’t told anyone.’
‘I was wondering what you were up to, that’s all.’
‘Well, I’ve stopped sulking. You probably noticed that I’d been sulking since the raid at Bow. But I’ve stopped now.’
‘I didn’t notice anything. I just thought that was what you were normally like.’
‘If you’re still keen, we could touch base after lunch.’
She ignored the dig so completely that he started to wonder if he’d really pissed her off.
‘Where?’
‘Have you got a pen?’ Thorne waited, smiled at a uniform eyeing him with suspicion from the Empress’s front entrance. ‘Right, see if you can track down someone called Peter Lardner at the Probation Service. I’m not sure which borough. If you can, fix up an appointment for this afternoon and give me a call back.’
He could see a greasy spoon on the far side of the road and began walking towards it like a man in a trance. Coffee and Hobnobs had simply not been enough. It was gone midday, and right about then Thorne decided that a full English breakfast sounded like the perfect lunch.
It was madness, this dividing of himself.
He’d spoken and spoken, and been spoken to in this meeting and that. And all the time, while he was smiling or looking suitably serious, while he was getting on with normal things, he was thinking about the boy.
Thinking about what he’d done, and what he was going to do.
What he was doing was, literally, madness; a textbook example of it. But wasn’t it a different type of insanity that had caused the problem in the first place? Wasn’t that called madness by some people? In some languages it was, certainly, and with good reason. He’d been as mad as a March hare in that way, in the good way, for years now; long before he’d been driven to any of this.
Driven to stab. To steal children.
It was the way things went though, wasn’t it? Swings and roundabouts, whatever you wanted to call it. Anything that felt good was ultimately going to hurt you. Cigarettes and chocolate. Sex and sugary deceit.
The door opened and someone came into the toilets, so he turned on the tap, splashed water into his face to hide the tears.
He needed to get back to his office anyway. There was plenty to get on with.
As he pressed the paper towel to his face, he thought about the pithy slogan that dieters used, that he’d seen on a fridge magnet at his sister’s place. The phrase so beloved of those keen to change themselves, to make their lives better. A simple reminder that to give into temptation was to pay for the rest of your life. He smiled at his colleague in the mirror, then turned away towards the door.
A minute on the lips…
TEN
Peter Lardner worked as a probation officer for the Borough of Westminster, based in an office at Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court. The Guildhall was located on the north side of Parliament Square, which meant that Thorne and Porter met up again after lunch close to where they’d parted company five or six hours before. Porter moaned about having to come all the way south again, but at least the weather had improved since they’d last walked across the square. Thorne’s leather jacket had dried out, and Porter tossed what looked like an expensive waterproof coat across her arm. Thorne thought it was the type favoured by that strange breed who trudged across hills of a weekend, pockets stuffed full of Kendal mint cake.
‘Are you a walker?’
‘Only as far as the car,’ Porter said.
For all its gargoyles and ornate Gothic stylings, the Guildhall was less than a century old, but it was an imposing building nevertheless, with a position as historic as any in the city. It had once been the site of the Sanctuary Tower, from where, ironically, the seven-year-old Duke of York had been dragged, en route to being murdered with his elder brother by the future Richard III. Four centuries later, Tothill Fields Prison had stood on the same spot, housing inmates as young as five years old in conditions only slightly less horrific than those a mile or two up the river in Newgate. And the building was still playing its part in constitutional history. Later in the year it was due to close, before reopening in 2008 as the Supreme Court, new home to a dozen fully independent law lords, and the single highest court in the country.