If they could find it.
He spoke to Porter again as he pushed the car north. Telling her where he was heading, talking her through his likeliest route. Porter sounded tense, knowing she could do little but take her team in the same direction and wait for more specific instructions.
‘Goes without saying that you keep me up to speed, right?’
‘So why say it, then?’
‘Tom-’
‘You’ll know where as soon as I know,’ Thorne said. ‘If I know…’
Another glance down, once he’d hung up, and one more at the woman in the passenger seat. They’d barely spoken since they’d left the house in Arkley. Maggie Mullen had spent most of the time staring hard out of the window, not wanting to risk making any kind of contact until she had to, unwilling, or afraid, to catch Thorne’s eye. To engage.
They drove on in silence, save for the low hum of the big engine and the hiss of the tyres against a still slick road, though the rain had stopped. It would have been wrong, of course, horribly inappropriate, but just for a second or two Thorne had considered reaching for the stereo, as the atmosphere in the car grew more uncomfortable with every minute and every mile.
He wondered what Tony Mullen’s taste in music might be. The trivial nature of the thought was a welcome relief from the darker ones that sloshed around in his brain. The blackness spreading, discolouring the contents. He thought about Tony Mullen waiting back at the house. Had he got on the phone to Jesmond or any of his other friends in high places yet? What on earth would he have said to them if he had?
Thorne touched 110 in the outside lane. Hoped the Hertfordshire traffic boys were a long way away.
‘You think I should have spoken up?’ she said suddenly.
Thorne focused on the tail-lights ahead of him. ‘Fuck, yes.’
‘I was trying to protect Luke.’
‘You’re well aware how ridiculous that sounds, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘That’s obvious…’
‘I knew he wouldn’t hurt him.’
‘You still sure?’
She hesitated.
‘And are you sure that keeping all this to yourself had nothing to do with Sarah Hanley? With the fact that you’d be in just as much trouble as he was if it came out?’
Her answer wasn’t quick in coming. ‘He said we’d both go to prison for it.’
‘Right. Turned your stupid threat back on you, didn’t he?’
She closed her eyes. ‘Yes.’
Thorne grunted, satisfied. ‘You didn’t want to go to prison…’
‘He asked me what it felt like, being without my son,’ she said. There was an edge to her voice, and a hardness in her expression when Thorne glanced across. ‘He asked me how I thought I’d feel if I lost both of them. If I spent however many years it might be inside, while they grew up without me.’ She straightened out the seat belt across her chest. ‘No, I didn’t want to go to prison.’
‘It’s no excuse,’ Thorne said. ‘You said yourself that you didn’t know what was going on in this man’s head. That you were scared, that he was out of control.’
‘I talked to him,’ she said. ‘I tried to keep him calm, to reassure him, if you like, but it was all for Luke…’
The thought struck Thorne with such force that Maggie Mullen slid away from him, inching towards the passenger door when he turned and looked at her again. ‘What did you tell him about the case?’
The silence was answer enough.
‘You told him that we had the fingerprints, didn’t you? That we got Conrad Allen’s prints off the videotape. That we were close to an address.’
‘I thought he’d stop it if he knew the police were coming. I wanted him to give up.’
‘What about Kathleen Bristow?’ Thorne was asking himself as much as he was asking her, working through the chronology in his head, putting the pieces in the correct order. Had Kathleen Bristow died before or after her killer had been interviewed? ‘He knew we were coming to see him, didn’t he? You told him we were asking about Grant Freestone, that we’d be talking to members of the panel…’
‘It was all going to come out anyway,’ she said. ‘What had happened, I mean. I thought if I could make him understand that, he would let me have Luke back.’
‘You thought wrong.’ Thorne was forcing the accelerator to the floor, squeezing the wheel. ‘He killed her, same as he killed Conrad Allen and Amanda Tickell. It sounds to me like those three deaths are down to you.’
‘Please…’
‘Three more deaths.’
She turned away. Leaned her forehead against the window.
‘Whatever you thought you were doing, you were just pushing all the buttons.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘I hope Luke’s alive, that he hasn’t been hurt; more than anything, I hope that. But if he isn’t…’
She moaned, her head sliding against the glass.
‘It’s probably no more than you deserve.’
Thorne drove on, past signs for Welham Green and Hatfield, past the turn-off to St Albans that he’d taken so many times when his father was alive.
The water on the road was like a long, lonely shush beneath them.
Without turning, Maggie Mullen said, ‘She was dead when we left. Sarah. She’d lost such a lot of blood.’
Thorne thought she sounded pathetic. He felt numb, cold, without anything even close to sympathy. Knowing what might be waiting for him when they arrived at their destination, he thought it was probably the best way to be. ‘Right. And you watched her die.’
They turned off the A1 just past Welwyn Garden City. That much she could remember. But from there on it was hit and hope. There were some fragmented memories of the village they were looking for – a large house on its outskirts, a church – but no more than that.
Within five minutes, it was a different world.
The overhead lighting had gone, and even the catseyes disappeared at the end of the slip road, which quickly narrowed as A route became B, with high hedges on both sides and barely room enough for one vehicle to pass another.
Thorne drove as quickly as he was able, full beam cutting through the black, which twisted away ahead of him.
They moved slowly through a village called Codicote: Tudor houses, pubs, a village green; Maggie Mullen searching desperately for some clue that they might be in the right place. Thorne sped out the other side, past the sign that thanked him for driving carefully, back into the dark necklace of lanes that strung these villages together, a mile or two apart.
He swore and dipped the headlights as another car came around a corner, braking too hard and wrestling the Mercedes into the verge. He tried to look at the other driver as the car went past, but he could see nothing. Back on full beam, the lights caught yellow eyes, low in the undergrowth, and something flashing across the road fifty yards ahead of them.
‘All these roads look the bloody same,’ Maggie Mullen said.
They drove through Kimpton and Peter’s Green. Stopped and turned the car round when they got within a mile of Luton airport and a sign told them they were entering Bedfordshire. Heading north again, they passed through Whitwell, crossed over the River Maran and entered the village of St Paul’s Walden.
‘Stop…’
Thorne jumped on the pedal and put out his arm as Maggie Mullen shot forward in her seat. ‘What?’
‘That’s the big house.’ She nodded towards a pair of wrought-iron gates. The outline of a grand mansion was just visible in the distance. ‘We visited it once. Something to do with the Queen Mother. Keep going…’
At the other end of the High Street she told Thorne to stop again. Pointed to a church. A spike rising up from a turreted tower, vivid against the night sky.
‘You can see that tower from the cottage,’ she said. ‘Across the fields.’
‘There are fields everywhere,’ Thorne said. ‘Which direction?’
She looked around, unsure.