‘Did I?’
Louise nodded, tossed her coat on to the sofa.
‘OK…’ Thorne just stood, no idea where this might be going.
‘Did you think I might be upset?’ she said. ‘Because it was your ex-wife; because I might feel embarrassed, or awkward, or whatever?’ She took a breath. Tried to smile, or tried not to, Thorne couldn’t tell. ‘Or because she was pregnant?’
Thorne stepped across and turned down the stereo. He was flustered; felt instinctively that a lot depended on his answer. He pushed fingers through his hair, laced them together on top of his head. ‘I don’t know. I just… squeezed your hand.’
When Louise finally looked up at him, the smile was there. Shaky and uncertain of itself. Pushed out of shape by the tremble in her bottom lip.
‘It was nice,’ she said.
Afterwards, Thorne went to the bathroom to flush away the condom, and brought back some toilet paper so that Louise could wipe herself.
‘That was nice,’ he said.
They talked for a while about Brooks and the letters. Louise said she was always amazed that more people who had lost loved ones violently didn’t wreak violence in return; those who had lost children especially. Said she couldn’t imagine…
Thorne told her about his trip to Holland’s place. That Holland was thinking about getting out of the city. ‘Maybe even the Job,’ he said.
‘You ever thought about it?’ Louise asked. It was something they’d joked about before; that every copper joked about. She stopped him before he could come back with a flippant remark. ‘Really, I mean.’
‘I’ve wished that there was something else I could do,’ Thorne said. ‘Anything else.’
‘We all hate what we do from time to time.’
‘It’s what we can’t do.’
Louise raised her head, eased herself on to her belly and looked down at him. ‘Was it one case?’
There were a few; names and cases that prompted something more than a wink or a war story. That pressed ice against his skin still, and fluttered in the gut. A list of dangerous men and women; and of dead ones. He guessed that Marcus Brooks would take his place on one list or another.
Names, cases.
But it was none of them…
‘Twenty-odd years ago,’ Thorne said. ‘I was a baby copper working out of Brixton nick. We got called out to a council flat in Thornton Heath, one of those crappy sixties blocks on three or four levels; an old guy, in his mid-seventies. He’d come back one afternoon and found a couple of kids turning the place over. They were never going to find anything worth having, so they were just making a mess of the place, and when this old man turned up, they started taking it out on him.’
‘Did you find them?’
Thorne shook his head slowly; frowning with concentration, trying to remember. ‘There were dogs on his wallpaper… brown on green. And he had a collection of cards out of packets of tea. Hundreds of the things, with old footballers and cricketers on them. Tom Finney and W.G. Grace. Me and this other copper were picking them off the carpet while we waited for the ambulance.’ He pulled up his legs, arranged the duvet around the two of them. ‘They smashed his face up pretty badly, broke his arm and two or three ribs. Could have been worse, I suppose, but he was in hospital for a couple of weeks.’
He turned his eyes to Louise’s. She was waiting; knowing there had to be more.
‘Anyway, we got called back, a month after the break-in. I remember seeing that the address was the same and presuming the poor old sod had been done again, you know? As it was, his neighbours had phoned, and when we got there we had to pull him down off the balcony. He was just stood up there, terrified. Trying to summon up the courage to jump.
‘We got him down and made him a cup of tea, what have you, but he was all over the place. He hadn’t been able to sleep since the attack, wasn’t eating properly. The place stank. There was dog-shit all over the kitchen floor…
‘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.’