Thorne was finding it hard to concentrate. He was dizzy with the panic; with the increasing odds against everything turning out the right way.
Who gets to do your PM, Phil?
‘Tom…?’
‘I should call Brigstocke. Tell him everything.’
‘Wait.’ Louise’s voice was quiet, steel in it, suddenly. ‘You don’t have to call anyone.’
‘We need to get officers out there.’
‘You willing to fuck your career up?’
‘It doesn’t seem very important now.’
‘We can do this.’
Thorne leaned against his desk, thinking for a moment that he might be sick. There were pinpricks of sweat across his shoulders, in the small of his back. He felt murderous. Helpless. ‘How?’
‘Who do you trust?’ Louise asked.
‘I don’t know. Holland… Kitson…’
‘Just get Holland.’
Thorne felt the urge to argue, but said nothing. Louise had given him orders before, when they’d worked together. She was better at it than he was. ‘Right.’
She told him to stay calm and listen; gave him the addresses of two gay clubs in the West End. ‘You and Holland get to those. I’ll round a couple of my boys up and we’ll take the other two. They’ll do it for me if I tell them it’s important. No questions asked.’
‘It’s Saturday night.’
‘There are plenty of people I can trust, OK?’
Thorne hung up and flew along the corridor. He found Holland at his desk, his nose in a copy of Auto Trader.
‘Remember what I said about leading you into trouble?’
Holland took one look at Thorne’s face and stood up. Thorne began to talk, explaining and apologising, as he all but dragged Holland towards the exit; filling him in as best he could as they took the stairs two at a time and crashed out through the doors, into the rain.
TWENTY-SEVEN
They hit the top end of Tottenham Court Road inside fifteen minutes.
Holland had helped himself to a magnetic blue strobe-lamp and Thorne had stuck it to the roof of the car, running the cable in through the window and plugging it into the cigarette lighter. Neither had said much on the drive, and it wasn’t just a matter of necessary concentration, or Thorne’s use of the horn, or alarm at their speed on the wet roads, that had kept the conversation to a minimum.
There wasn’t really too much to say.
Holland had plenty of questions for Thorne, but he knew they would have to wait. In silence, braced against the dashboard, he asked himself a few questions that he didn’t have any answers for. Some of the ones Sophie would ask, if she knew.
Thorne had to pull over hard as an ambulance screamed up the wrong side of the road. He waited, revving the BMW’s engine and smacking his hand against the wheel.
‘Think about it,’ Holland said. ‘Brooks isn’t going to do anything in the middle of a club, is he? He’s probably followed him, same as he did with Cowans.’
Thorne nodded, yanked the wheel across and accelerated out in front of a bus. The driver flashed his lights and leaned on the horn.
‘Presuming Hendricks is still…’ Another nod. Alive. Holland didn’t need to say it. ‘We’ve probably got until the end of the night.’
Thorne looked at his watch: it wasn’t even nine o’clock.
‘There’s time,’ Holland said.
What Holland was saying made sense, but Thorne took precious little comfort from it. Driving like a maniac, thinking like one, he struggled to focus, to order this thoughts.
He didn’t have a picture of Hendricks; nothing to show to bouncers or bar-staff. He’d just have to use his eyes. He thought about the few times he’d been to places like these in the past. There was little enough light to read the label on your beer bottle.
He wondered if he could use the video clip that Brooks had sent…
What have I got to do with any of this?
You’re connected to me. That might be enough.
Thorne knew now that it was more than that, but he was also certain that he was the primary reason why Hendricks had been targeted. Chosen ahead of another biker, a police officer, anyone.
They crossed Oxford Street on a red light; slowed to weave through the traffic in front of them.
‘These two clubs are a couple of minutes’ walk from each other,’ Thorne said. ‘Which one do you want?’
Holland shook his head. ‘We do both of them together.’
‘No.’
‘Come on, aren’t we being stupid enough? Whatever you might think about Brooks, about why he’s been doing this…’
‘Fine. Together then.’
‘I’m shitting myself,’ Holland said, half smiling. ‘Don’t know about you.’
Thorne knew Holland was right and the last thing he needed was to put anybody else in danger. ‘We split up but try to stay in sight of each other.’ He knew that he should be afraid of a man who had killed three times, that it ought to make him careful, but it wasn’t the thought of confronting Marcus Brooks that was making his stomach jump.
Thorne turned right at Cambridge Circus and stopped the car on yellow lines outside the Spice of Life. They got out.
‘So, if I see Hendricks?’
Thorne’s fists clenched, and he felt something like relief that he was as angry at Phil Hendricks as he was at anybody else.
‘Jump on him,’ he said. ‘Jump on the fucker hard.’
It had only taken Porter ten minutes to find three officers willing to do as she asked without getting overly curious. She would have liked to put it down to respect, or even affection, but in a couple of cases she thought simple arselicking was closer to the truth.
It didn’t much matter.
On Thorne’s insistence she’d sent a DC to Hendrick’s place in Deptford, in case he decided to call it a night early. Another officer who lived south of the river was heading for New Cross – to a local place Hendricks used when he couldn’t be bothered to go all the way into town. Of all the venues Porter had mentioned to Thorne, she thought that one was the least likely. It was rather more sedate, less ‘scene’ than the others, and when Thorne had told her that Hendricks had not been answering his phone, she’d felt sure it was because he was somewhere noisy. She thought back to the mood he’d been in earlier, listening to the thrash-metal; guessed that he’d want to be somewhere he could dance, get off his face. Maybe fuck someone until he felt better.
More than anything, she wished she’d said ‘yes’ the day before, when he’d asked her to go out with him.
Of course, she knew now that Hendricks’ mood had been due to his conversation with Thorne. There hadn’t been time to get into that when Thorne had finally come clean, but once this was over, however it finished, she’d want to know why he hadn’t told her earlier; why he’d asked Hendricks not to tell her.
‘Guv…?’
Detective Sergeant Kenny Parsons pointed towards a small queue running back from a pair of high glass doors, along the front windows of a Pizza Express. Most of those waiting stood under umbrellas, but a few, like Porter and Parsons, didn’t seem awfully bothered by the rain.
The Adam was a members-only place, tucked away behind Charing Cross station. It was more bar than club most of the time, but once the dancing kicked off on a Friday or Saturday night, it could get pretty lively. Porter had been here a couple of times with Hendricks and she remembered that this was where he’d met his ex-boyfriend Brendan.
Parsons led the way to the front of the queue and flashed a warrant card at an immaculately dressed female bouncer. She leaned on the door and let them in.
It sounded like the club was in full swing.
Hurrying down the steep staircase, Porter checked her phone. The signal could get iffy below ground, and with Airwave units out of the question for obvious reasons, she and Thorne had agreed to keep in touch via their mobiles.
The music grew louder, and the thought smacked her in the face: if, wherever he was, Hendricks couldn’t hear his phone, what guarantee was there that she, Thorne or anyone else would hear theirs? If there was a signal, they’d need to keep the phones on vibrate.