‘I was only asking.’
‘Or I’ll call your girlfriend and tell her you’re back on twenty a day.’
Holland did as he was told, and they sat in silence for a few minutes. The smoke drifted away from them towards the light, disappearing at its edge, where moths and midges danced in and out of the beam. When he’d finished, Holland stubbed out his fag-end on the bottom of the bench and stood up. ‘Best get back in there,’ he said. ‘I reckon they’ll be bringing her out in a minute.’
This was the other advantage of working a murder scene at this hour: save for the occasional insomniac dog-walker or crazed jogger, Kathleen Bristow could leave her home for the last time without an audience. During the day, there would be no shortage of gawpers, standing silently, shifting from foot to foot, formulating the story they would tell later around the dinner table or in the pub. Whenever Thorne listened to traffic updates on the motorway, he wondered why the announcer didn’t just tell the truth; why they didn’t come clean and say that the tailback was the result of drivers slowing down to get a good look at the accident.
He raised his head at the rustle of plastic trouser-legs moving against each other and shifted across to let Porter sit down.
‘Holland giving you a hard time?’ she asked.
‘He knows better.’
Thorne thought Porter probably had more to say about what had nearly gone on at his flat, but he made it obvious that he wasn’t too keen to get into it. He couldn’t help but wonder how he’d feel about discussing it if anything had actually happened.
‘I spoke to Hendricks,’ she said. ‘So I suppose we should at least ask Freestone where he was on Friday night.’
‘Can’t see the point.’
‘Well, how about because we haven’t got anyone else even resembling a suspect?’
Thorne shrugged. ‘We can ask.’
‘A tenner says he was with his sister anyway, right?’
‘Probably. But whether Freestone’s got an alibi or not, this is the same man that killed Allen and Tickell. Has to be. The same man who’s holding Luke.’
A light came on in an upstairs window of the house next door. Looking across, Thorne saw that there were downstairs lights burning on the other side, too. So much for the absence of an audience. In London, he supposed, there was usually someone watching. There would probably be a house-to-house later that morning, and they could only hope that someone had been equally watchful twenty-four hours earlier.
‘OK, seeing as who is pretty much a non-starter, any bright ideas about why?’
Bright ideas? More like guesswork and speculation…
‘Did you look in the spare room?’ Thorne asked.
He had noticed the three battered, metal filing cabinets in the second bedroom and remembered something Callum Roper had said about who was most likely to have kept any records of the MAPPA meetings back in 2001. He ran the idea that had begun to form in his mind past Porter.
Her response suggested that, as pieces of speculation went, it wasn’t the most outlandish she’d ever heard. ‘You think she was killed because of something she knew?’
‘Or something she had. Perhaps without even knowing she had it. It’s just a thought…’
‘The problem is that without us knowing what was in those filing cabinets, I don’t see how we’re going to work out what might have been taken.’
‘I had a quick look in one of them. There’s a ton of stuff in there, going back years. We can go through it all later, when scene of crime’s finished. If there’s nothing there about Freestone, or the MAPPA project in 2001, I think we should try and find out if there ever was.’
‘We’ll need to get back on to whichever social services department she was working for then.’ Porter winced, like she’d just remembered what day it was. ‘Won’t have a lot of luck on a Sunday, mind.’
‘I wouldn’t bank on them having copies of these records themselves,’ Thorne said. ‘Not if what Roper said is true. But they might know what Bristow took with her when she retired, or at least confirm that she kept her own records.’ Even as Thorne said it, the idea was starting to sound vague and flabby; time-consuming at the very least. Though they now had three murders to investigate, there was still a missing boy whose safety, whose quick recovery was, theoretically, their prime concern.
A boy who, theoretically, was still alive.
Porter, though, seemed energised by Thorne’s idea. While Thorne himself could only hope that he didn’t look as bad as he felt, her face showed no sign of the fact that she was approaching what must have been twenty-four hours without sleep.
‘Maybe it’s Freestone’s connection to this MAPPA business that’s important,’ she suggested. ‘Not the threats he made before he went to prison.’
Three murders…
‘Well, something’s seriously important to someone,’ Thorne said.
‘What about Luke?’
There was guesswork and there was speculation. And there were some things that just became horribly obvious. ‘He’ll kill Luke if he has to,’ Thorne said.
Porter nodded, like Thorne had confirmed what she already knew. She lifted her feet on to the bench, wrapped her arms around her knees, and said, ‘I’ve only ever lost two.’
For a minute or more, Thorne searched for something to say, but before anything suitable could come to him Porter had chased away the need for reassurance and was getting to her feet.
‘We need to get a fucking shift on,’ she said. ‘Maybe coming at it from this new angle might help.’
‘Maybe.’ Thorne hauled himself upright, hoping that her optimism would prove justified. There was no doubt that the map of the case was being freshly laid out on memos and whiteboards; was redrawing itself in Thorne’s head. But as lines snaked in new directions and intersected for the first time with others, one name – whatever else was happening – kept drifting towards an area where it should not, by rights, belong. It kept floating away from that part of the map reserved for victims and witnesses and heading towards an altogether murkier, unlabelled zone.
Tony Mullen.
A wave from just inside the kitchen door indicated that the body of Kathleen Bristow was being brought out. Porter started walking back towards the house, with Thorne a few paces behind her.
The joking always stopped at this point, for a few minutes at least, until the mortuary vehicle had driven away. Then the bagging and the scraping, and the banter, could resume; with the volume cranked up a notch or two.
Once the body had gone, the murder scene could let out the breath it had been holding.
Thorne watched as the stretcher was lifted over the step at the back door and into the garden. Holland came out after it, then Hendricks, who began to clamber out of his plastic suit in readiness for following the body to the mortuary. The stretcher was taken through the gate, the arc light illuminating its path along the side of the house towards the road.
Thorne walked back into the house, thinking that cigarette smoke wasn’t the worst thing you could go home stinking of.
Custody reviews took place six and fifteen hours into the twenty-four. Thirty minutes earlier, at 8 a.m., Kitson and Brigstocke had reviewed the ongoing custody of Adrian Farrell for the second time. Now, she was cheerfully passing on the news to the prisoner himself: that should matters not proceed to her satisfaction, she and her DCI would be going to the superintendent to seek a six-hour extension.
Smartarse, the solicitor – who preferred the name Wilson – was less than impressed. ‘And this is on the basis of a video parade, is it?’
‘A positive identification from an eyewitness who says he watched Mr Farrell and two others murder Amin Latif on October 17th, last year. Sorry… I should say, “murder Mr Latif after seriously sexually assaulting him”, if we’re being accurate. Although, that said, I think the murder will probably be enough, don’t you?’