Thorne saw what was happening too late.
Saw the hand that the boy had kept pressed against his leg come up high. Saw the light catch something in his fist. Heard the sigh as the flesh was pierced, and the snap.
Then everything was happening at double speed. Crowded with screams and coloured red.
Thorne found himself at Lardner’s feet, staring at the broken shard that Luke had dropped. Its edge was bloodied, and the gaffer tape, wrapped around one end as a makeshift handle, was slick with sweat.
Picture-glass, it looked like. Thin, easily snapped.
He looked up for the piece he knew was embedded in Peter Lardner’s neck, saw that it was already lost beneath a bubbling spring of scarlet.
Maggie Mullen was on her knees, whispering, one arm wrapped tight around Lardner’s neck, both of them slick with blood. Her other arm was reaching desperately for Luke, the hand flapping, trying to grab the son who stood a few feet away, still screaming as though it were a language he had just mastered. The boy’s eyes were saucers, wild with horror and exhilaration.
And with something else Thorne could not name, something more shocking than all the blood that flowed into the cracks between the chipped and flaking boards.
MONDAY
TWENTY-NINE
They’d had wine and a glass of whisky each before getting back to Thorne’s flat. A fair amount of lager since. And their first kiss.
It was a little after six in the morning, and getting light outside.
They lounged, laughing on the sofa, arms and legs moving against each other, and bed clearly on the cards at some point, once a different sort of excitement had burned itself out.
‘I wonder if Hignett and Brigstocke have started arguing about credit yet?’ Porter said. ‘Worked out how this is going to get divvied up.’
Thorne was grinning like an idiot, same as Porter, but he pulled a mock-thoughtful face. ‘Well, we get the three murders, obviously. Four, if you count Sarah Hanley. Your lot can have the kidnap. How’s that?’
‘Oh, can we?
‘Plus any little extras that come up: out-of-date tax discs, that sort of thing…’
‘Very generous of you.’
‘Bloody generous, if you ask me.’
Porter raised her eyebrows.
‘If Lardner had been at that flat in Catford and your lot had collared him, I bet you’d be claiming the bloody set.’
‘Fair point.’
‘Too right it is,’ Thorne said. ‘Now shut your face.’
She smiled, the pissed kind of smile that spread a little slower, and wider. ‘So… You charging into that cottage then, not bothering to let me, or anybody else, know…’
‘Hardly “charging”.’
‘How would you describe it, then?’
‘There wasn’t time to call. I didn’t know how close you were…’
‘You didn’t bother to find out.’
‘I took a decision, same as you did when you went into the flat.’
‘I didn’t go in on my own!’
‘Look, she was terrified about a firearms unit going in there, after what happened in Bow. I was just…’ Thorne puffed out his cheeks, gave up. He knew she had him.
‘Maybe you were getting your own back for being left in the van when we went into Allen’s place?’
Thorne looked shocked. ‘You really think I’m that bloody petty, do you?’
‘It crossed my mind.’
‘You’re right, obviously. I’m very petty.’ He leaned across. ‘Vindictive. Vengeful. I’m a nasty piece of work…’
They kissed again. Longer, the second time.
‘Sorry about the smell,’ Thorne said. ‘They only had that soap, you know? The medicated shit. Little green slivers.’ Thorne had showered at the hospital.
‘It’s five murders,’ Porter said. ‘You said “four”.’
He nodded.
Picture glass. Thin, easily snapped…
Peter Lardner had died in an ambulance which had taken twenty-five minutes to reach the cottage.
‘One more reason not to live in the countryside,’ Thorne had said.
Porter reached down, felt for the lager can on the floor. ‘So what about Luke?’
Thorne could not shift the picture of the boy’s face when they’d finally unwrapped the tape. Red from the adhesive, and wet with tears and sweat, but still that crazed expression around his eyes.
Crazed, just like words scrawled in rage on the wall behind a poster.
‘He’s alive, which I suppose is the main thing. But he won’t be able to wake up tomorrow and just get on with it, will he? That’s going to be who he is now. Getting over that kind of thing’s all about support, and there’s not much of a family for him to go back to.’ He clocked Porter’s expression. ‘What?’
‘I meant what about the case against him?’
Thorne shrugged, picked up his own can. ‘Fuck knows. They’ll have to charge him…’
They each took a drink. Thorne asked Porter if she was hungry, and she told him that she wished she’d eaten something before they’d started celebrating. Thorne got up and went into the kitchen to make them both toast.
They talked easily about nothing through the open door, letting the dirt settle. Like they’d been out all night dancing, or at a party.
Like nobody had bled to death.
Thorne turned from monitoring the grill when he heard Porter get up and watched her walking across the room towards the stereo. He told her to put on some music, apologised for the absence of any Shania Twain. He checked on the toast, flipped over the slices of bread on the grill-pan, then felt her fingers against his shoulder.
She was leaning into him as he turned round, one hand on his face and the other fumbling with the buttons on his shirt.
‘We’ll leave the toast then, shall we?’ Thorne said.
Her tongue tasted sweet and boozy in his mouth. He bent his knees to press his groin against hers, and they staggered away from the cooker, lips pressed back hard against gums and teeth banging together.
She leaned back against the kitchen table and he went with her. Then he felt the pull and the pop, and the dizzying rush of pain, slicing deep from thigh to ankle.
He waited until they’d broken the kiss before he cried out.
PART FOUR. A PICTURE OF THE DAMAGE
THIRTY
Thorne lay perfectly still in the tight, white tunnel and tried to listen to Johnny Cash.
The music was faint in his headphones, and all but drowned out by the noise of the MRI scanner that was slowly putting together a picture of his spine. Of the state of it. The sound, like a pneumatic drill, made it seem as if he were listening to some radical, techno remix of the Man in Black, but it was still better than the alternative. They’d told him he could choose one of their CDs for the twenty minutes or so he’d be inside the chamber, but Thorne had decided to take no chances and brought The Man Comes Around along with him. Good job he had. Even the little he could hear was preferable to some of the shit on the laminated list he’d found waiting for him in the changing room.
Jamie Cullum, Katie Melua, Norah bloody Jones.
He lay, quite still as he’d been instructed. Straining to hear. His hand around the rubber panic button he’d been told to squeeze if he felt uncomfortable or alarmed for any reason. If he wanted to stop the procedure.
The rhythm of the machine, the repetitive clatter, like a buzz that had been slowed, began to fade. The noise relaxed him. He started to drift and reflect, savoured the luxury of the time, the space inside his head. Like slipping between pristine sheets after too long in a bed that was stained and stinking.
Six days since the end of it. The end of part of it, at any rate.
Everything now would be in the hands of judges and lawyers. All Thorne and the rest of them could do from hereon was present those people with the material, and hope they made decent decisions.
They’d already made a couple of very brave ones.