‘He was like a different bloke, Lou. Skinny and scared to death, and without a clue how he was supposed to carry on. What the point was in carrying on. He just stood there in his front room, clutching this old box with his cards in them, and he was ranting at me. Trying to shout, but his voice was… cracked, you know?’
Thorne summoned half a smile. By now his own voice was no more than a whisper. ‘Wanted me to know that when he was younger he’d have sorted the little bastards out, no problem. “No fucking problem,” he said. He’d have defended himself, done what he had to, protected his home. Now he couldn’t do anything. Told me he was pathetic, because he wasn’t even man enough to top himself. On and on about how useless he was, how he wished they’d killed him. And all the time he was talking, he was smacking his walking stick against a tatty old armchair. Dust flying up each time he did it. Standing there, whacking this stick against the chair and crying like a baby.’
‘What happened to him?’ Louise asked.
‘He was put into a care home afterwards, as far as I know.’ He let out a long, slow breath. ‘Wouldn’t have thought he’d have lasted too long.’
Louise inched closer. Pushed her head against Thorne’s shoulder.
‘I can’t even remember his fucking name,’ Thorne said.
THIRTY-TWO
‘Anything come up on Saturday I should know about?’ Brigstocke asked.
‘Not that I can think of,’ Thorne said.
‘Good.’
‘Just the Kemal stuff, really.’
‘Nice to come back to some good news,’ Brigstocke said.
Hakan Kemal had been arrested at his cousin’s house in the St Paul’s area of Bristol in the early hours of the morning and driven back to London overnight. While Thorne and Brigstocke were busy catching up, Yvonne Kitson was having first crack at her prime suspect in an interview room at Colindale station.
‘And how was your day off?’
The questions weren’t getting any easier. ‘Typical bloody Sunday,’ Thorne said.
He couldn’t recall a Monday morning when he’d been so pleased to get back to work, and even the grey sky that bore down on the city did little to dampen his enthusiasm. It was good to see Brigstocke back, too. It wasn’t clear if his problems had disappeared completely, but if they were still around, he seemed to be rising above them.
The DCI was clumsily multitasking: breaking off from the conversation to sign memos; scribbling on assorted bits of paper; then firing off more questions and comments while he tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing. ‘Be even better if we got a break on the Brooks inquiry. Tell you the truth, that was the one I was expecting the result on.’
‘I still think you’ll get it.’
‘I sincerely bloody hope so. I’m just grateful he seems to have gone quiet for the time being. Maybe you’ve done something to upset him.’
Thorne swallowed hard. ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lot more than those messages to go on, though.’
Brigstocke scribbled again, sucked his teeth. ‘Nothing we took out of that flat is helping very much. Not helping us find him, at any rate. We’ve got plenty to put him away with if the time comes, but bugger all that’s telling us where he is.’
‘If we do put him away, where d’you think he’ll end up?’ Thorne wandered across to the small window. Brigstocke had a view only marginally less depressing than his own. ‘He’s got to have a decent case for diminished responsibility.’
‘It’s not going to be clear cut. He planned everything over a period of months, you know? It wasn’t like he just lost it suddenly.’
‘What happened to his family, though. When it happened…’
‘He killed a copper, don’t forget that.’
‘Oh, I’m not.’
‘Never goes down well with a jury.’
‘Skinner wasn’t exactly one of our brightest and best.’
‘Yes, well. The powers-that-be might be keen to play down that aspect of things ever so slightly.’
‘Jesus…’
They talked for a few more minutes about other cases. The trial of the man accused of caving in his wife’s head with a Smirnoff bottle was well under way, and his defence team were pushing for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The prosecution argued that such grounds were not constituted merely by discovering your wife was shagging her best friend’s husband seven ways from Sunday.
Apparently, the smart money – Karim was running a book, and usually managed to turn a profit – was on the bloke getting away with murder and going down for the lesser charge.
Makes sense, Thorne thought. He guessed that Marcus Brooks would not get quite such an easy ride when the time came.
Nobody liked a slag, did they? Or a cop-killer.
As Thorne was about to leave, Brigstocke said, ‘How did you enjoy the stint as DCI?’
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Thorne said. ‘The power gives me a stiffy, and I’d like a bigger office. It’s just the responsibility and having to make decisions I’m not so keen on.’
‘Since when have you worried about making decisions?’
‘OK then, having to make good ones.’
‘You’re right about the responsibility, though…’
Thorne hovered in the doorway, sensing there was more to come.
‘I should have told you what was going on with the DPS,’ Brigstocke said.
‘No problem. And you don’t have to tell me now.’
‘It’s fine, it’s sorted, more or less.’ Brigstocke took off his glasses and pushed his paperwork away from him. ‘Basically, another officer had one too many in The Oak a few months back and made “inappropriate remarks” to a female member of staff.’
Thorne nodded. He didn’t need to be told who they were talking about.
‘I was there when these remarks were made, sitting at the same table. I’d probably had one too many myself, if I’m honest, but the fact remains that because I didn’t say anything to this other officer at the time, because I was negligent, I’m equally responsible, apparently.’
‘But now they’ve decided to drop it?’
‘Thank fuck. Stays on my record, though.’
‘What about Andy Stone?’
Brigstocke smiled. ‘We don’t know yet.’
Thorne leaned back against the door jamb, marvelling at the different ways people found to waste time and money. Such incidents raised profound questions about where the energy and resources of the capital’s police service should be focused, and Thorne knew he should be seriously questioning an ethos which pilloried good men like Russell Brigstocke for no good reason.
In the meantime, though, there were more important questions to be asked. ‘Come on then, spill the beans,’ he said. ‘What exactly did Stone say?’
It wasn’t that Hakan Kemal was saying nothing; but he might just as well have been.
Kitson had seen plenty of suspects struck dumb on the advice of a solicitor, but less so since the law had changed. These days, interviewees were advised that, later on, judge and jury could draw adverse influence from their silence during questioning. Could presume that they had something to hide. That tended to loosen people’s tongues a little, but Hakan Kemal was anything but chatty.
‘We will have your fingerprint results back by tomorrow,’ Kitson said. ‘And we both know they’re going to match the prints we took off the knife.’
‘Let’s wait and see.’
Kemal was perhaps ten years older than his sister. A small man, with thinning dark hair and glasses. The voice was high-pitched, with just the trace of a Turkish accent.
Kitson looked across at the young black woman sitting next to Kemal. Gina Bridges, the duty solicitor, wore a beautifully tailored grey jacket and trousers and was perfectly made-up. She made Kitson feel like a badly dressed bag of shit.