‘The missing training shoe.’
‘Correct. The shoe that has gone walkabout. Do you have it?’
‘No…’
‘Losing such an important piece of evidence is causing something of a problem, to put it mildly.’ Yashere spoke slowly, with precision. A Nigerian accent.
‘I promise that I will find it,’ Thorne said. ‘And when I do, I will personally deliver it to you, in a box, with a fuckoff red ribbon round it. But right now I need a favour.’
‘I was just about to go home.’
The Crown Prosecution Service had a small office round the corner at Colindale station, but via the out-of-hours service Thorne had been put through to their Criminal Justice Unit at the main station in Edmonton. This was where Anthony Yashere and his fellow-caseworkers were based: collating exhibits; ensuring the integrity of evidence chains; firing off snippy emails and phone calls when blood stained training shoes disappeared.
Thorne explained what he needed.
Yashere took details, dates and names. Told Thorne that he could probably get him the trial transcript in a few days.
‘Not quick enough,’ Thorne said. ‘Sorry.’
Yashere began to think out loud, guiding Thorne through the process as he logged into his IT system. It provided a summary of all ongoing cases, but was not yet fully up to date with trials whose details had been on the system it had replaced three years before.
Thorne listened to the click of computer keys. To grunts and sighs of frustration.
‘We are going back quite a long way,’ Yashere said. ‘Perhaps I should ask a colleague who knows his way around the system better than I do.’
Thorne had a better idea. ‘Who was the prosecutor? You must have that on record.’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you have a number?’
Yashere logged out of one system and into another. More clicking, more waiting.
‘I think you will need a home number,’ Yashere said. ‘There are not too many fools like you and I still working at this time on a Saturday.’ He said that he’d try to get hold of Stuart Emery and have him call Thorne back.
Thorne gave Yashere his prepay phone number. ‘Can you tell him that it’s very urgent?’ he said.
‘Please don’t forget my missing training shoe, Inspector…’
Thorne tried Hendricks’ mobile again, and got no answer. He paced the office; told Kitson he’d see her on Monday when she stuck her head in to say goodnight; checked his watch every couple of minutes.
Ten minutes after Thorne had spoken to Yashere, Stuart Emery called.
Brooks climbed back up the bare wooden stairs from Tindall’s cellar. There was no electricity down there and he’d had to use a shitty little torch he’d dug out of a kitchen drawer. A kid’s thing with a thin, milky beam. He’d managed to find a couple of hammers, in a dusty canvas tool-bag, among the piles of damp magazines and boxes of videos, and he carried them both up to get a good look in the light.
He chose the smaller of the two: a claw hammer with green paint on the handle. Dropped it into a plastic bag which he carried down the hall and left by the front door.
There was plenty of time yet.
He wandered back into the kitchen and knelt to peer into the fridge. Tindall’s dog immediately climbed from her basket in the corner and scampered across to see what might be going. Milk, beer, onions. There were some tinned tomatoes in a dish, and Brooks thought about making some toast to go with them. In the end he settled for the plate of cooked sausages, set in fat under greasy cling-film.
He carried the plate to the small table against the wall and dropped half a sausage to the floor for the dog. It was chucking it down outside. He could see the rain bouncing off the felt on the shed roof.
He remembered Angie screaming at him one Sunday after he had taken Robbie over the field for a kick-about and they had both come home soaked, bouncing a muddy ball. Robbie thought it was funny, and shook his wet hair all over the kitchen before Angie could fetch a towel, which made her even angrier. The two of them pissing themselves. Angie shouting while she stripped off Robbie’s tiny West Ham shirt.
The dog was on its hind legs, pawing at his shins, so he lifted her up on to his lap. Let her lick the grease off the plate. He rubbed the dog’s bristly belly, and tried to stretch the memory out. In the end, he wasn’t sure if there were bits he was only imagining, but he had a clear enough picture of his son’s face; Robbie shaking his wet head, his two front teeth still coming through.
That would be the picture he’d try to hold on to when he was reaching into the plastic bag later on.
Stuart Emery was brisk, just the right side of surly, asking Thorne what he wanted the information for. Thorne tried to keep it quick and simple.
I want to be proved wrong, he thought.
For the second time, Thorne listened as someone at the end of a phone tried to call up the information that would confirm or assuage his worst fears.
‘Got twelve years of review notes on here somewhere,’ Emery said.
Thorne tried to stay calm while the wind threw rain against the window like tin-tacks.
‘Regina versus Brooks, yes?’
‘September 2000. Middlesex Crown Court.’ Thorne waited, willing each tap of a computer key to be the last.
‘Good job I’m organised,’ Emery said. ‘“Anal”, according to my wife.’
For pity’s sake…
‘Here we go… right. “Sentencing remarks”, “witness statements”, “pathology reports”, “grounds for appeal”… These are just my notes, you understand?’
Thorne stopped him, asked him to go back. Emery read, gave him a name. Then another.
His worst fears.
He spluttered out a ‘thank you’, then jerked the phone back to his mouth as he was about to hang up. He needed to move fast, but there was one more question he needed to ask: ‘Can anybody get hold of this stuff? Is it online?’
‘Well, by and large, it’s just specialist rulings,’ Emery said. ‘Judgements that pass into case law, that kind of thing. Mind you, I suppose most things are on the bloody Internet somewhere, if you can be bothered to look hard enough.’
If you’ve got the time, Thorne thought…
The panic fizzed in him, and anger tightened every muscle, every thought. Anger at Brooks, at the man Thorne knew was putting him up to this, and above all at himself. The procedure in this kind of emergency, this kind of nightmare, should have been straightforward. But Thorne knew too bloody well that he’d left himself no easy options.
He punched in Brigstocke’s mobile number.
Russell, I’ve been fucking stupid and I don’t care what happens when this is finished, but we’ve got a serious situation…
He changed his mind and tried Louise one more time.
‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling.’
‘I nipped out to the supermarket.’
‘Is Phil with you?’
‘No, he left about an hour ago. You OK?’
‘I’ve tried calling him. Shit…’
‘Tom, what’s the matter?’
So, Thorne told her what he’d discovered: about the message that was far from being a wind-up. And in a rush, garbled and guilty, he told her everything else. The evidence he’d kept to himself; the conversations that had gone unreported; the cracked and rotten limb he’d gone out on.
There wasn’t even a pause. ‘You’re a fucking idiot.’
‘I know, and I don’t have time,’ Thorne shouted. ‘You can call me everything under the sun later on. Now, I need to get hold of people. To find Phil.’
‘You said you’d tried to call him…’
‘His phone just kept ringing. He hasn’t got it with him, or he can’t hear it.’
‘I know where he is,’ Louise said. ‘There’s three or four places in town, could be any one of them. He asked me to go with him.’
‘Three or four?’
‘Some nights he calls in on all of them. Depends who he meets.’
‘Christ…’
‘Listen, I’ve been to these places. I know where they are.’