He knew it was nonsense.
He did not want an argument, it was probably as simple as that. Yes, Louise was more easily hurt these days, was prone to see offence where there was none intended, but so was he. He was still raw, and he was not up to a fight.
Louise rolled over and her arm moved across his leg. 'How many did you have?'
'Only a couple,' Thorne said.
'That's very responsible.'
'I was driving.'
'How early are you in tomorrow?'
Her fingers dropped to his groin and her breath was hot as she moaned softly into his shoulder. He had more or less stopped thinking about Anna Carpenter when he turned to her.
TWELVE
Thorne picked up Anna near Victoria Coach Station and they drove north, along Whitehall and around Trafalgar Square, across the Euston Road, up into Camden and beyond.
He did not bother warning her this time or issuing ground rules that he guessed she would break anyway. He was rather less cautious about this interview than he had been about the one in Wakefield Prison, on top of which he now thought she'd probably had a point the night before. He might well get more out of Donna Langford with Anna along for the ride.
Presuming there was anything to get.
They didn't talk much in the car. Thorne content to listen to the radio and Anna appearing to get the message. Waiting to cross the Holloway Road, Thorne slipped a CD into the player; a vintage bluegrass compilation. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, the Louvin Brothers, Bill Monroe…
'Oh, I love this sort of stuff,' Anna said.
Thorne nudged the volume up as he accelerated away from the lights.
'My dad used to have loads of these records.'
He glanced across and was pleased to see that she did not appear to be taking the piss; nodding her head in time to the music and smacking out the rhythm on her knees. She had made all the right noises when she had first seen the BMW, too; something Thorne was not accustomed to. Certainly not from work colleagues, most of whom delighted in describing the 1975, pulsar-yellow CSi as the 'rusty banana' or a 'puke-coloured death-trap'. Anna told Thorne she thought it was 'cool'. He told her she had very good taste, but couldn't help wondering if she had held secret meetings with Holland or Hendricks, and had been comprehensively briefed on the best ways to wind him up.
'My mum hates it, though,' Anna said, smiling. She was still tapping along to the beat of the upright bass, the scratchy melody of the fiddle, and the syncopation, so delicately picked out on the resonator guitar.
'This Weary Heart' by the Stanley Brothers, honey-sweet and hell-dark, as the car turned off the Seven Sisters Road and slowed.
'Most people do,' Thorne said. 'I think it's one of the reasons I like it so much.'
Donna Langford did not seem overly keen on letting Thorne and Anna inside when they arrived. She was already pulling her coat on when she opened the door and stepped out quickly. 'Kate's got the right hump this morning,' she said.
Thorne and Anna exchanged a look as Donna marched past them down the path.
'It's a nice day. Let's go to the park.'
The day, though bright and sunny, was hardly warm, while the park, a five-minute walk from Donna's block, turned out to be a scrubby patch of green and brown no bigger than a couple of tennis courts. There was a pair of rusted swings and a set of goalposts without a net. A fire had scorched what might once have been a penalty area, and there was a collection of discarded cans and bottles scattered among the long grass behind.
The three of them squeezed on to a metal bench.
'What was your first thought?' Thorne asked. 'Back when you saw that first picture of Alan.'
A few leaves skittered half-heartedly at their feet, and for the few seconds before Donna answered they all watched as a battered Nissan Micra raced down the small road that ran behind the goalposts.
'I thought it was typical,' Donna said, laughing. 'Once I'd got over the shock, I mean. I started wondering why I hadn't thought he was alive before. Why I ever thought I'd actually managed to get rid of him.'
'Why "typical"?'
'Alan never did anything by halves,' she said. 'He planned things out, thought them through, you know?'
'So, this is all part of a plan?' Anna asked. 'The photos…'
'Christ, I don't know.' Donna suddenly looked very weary as she lit a cigarette. 'He used to tell this story,' she said, 'when he'd had a drink.' She turned to Thorne, rubbed her belly through her thick coat. 'Remember I told you about that scar he's got, where he was knifed?'
Thorne nodded.
'He'd bang on about how that only happened because he hadn't thought things through properly. Because he hadn't thought about the details. Basically, he was a cocky sod and he hadn't reckoned on the other bloke carrying a knife. But he always said it taught him an important lesson. After that he became obsessed with planning stuff out, working through every eventuality.' She sat back and screwed up her face, against the cold or an unpleasant memory. 'However vicious business got, however mental some of it seemed, it was all… thought through, you know?' She looked at Anna. 'My husband never did a spontaneous thing in his life, love. So, yeah, I reckon he knows exactly what he's doing.'
'Why did you want him dead?' Anna asked.
Donna let out a long, slow breath, threw a half-smile at Thorne.
'It's a reasonable question,' he said.
It was also one Thorne had never asked, not to Donna's face at least. As with so many cases, once he had got his result, in the form of Donna Langford's confession, he had moved on to something else. There had been speculation about her motive, of course, not least in the Sunday People and the News of the World. But with a conviction more or less in the bag, Thorne had had neither the time nor the inclination to care a great deal about the 'Why?' Donna had not spoken in her own defence at the trial, her counsel fearing that she might come across as somewhat hard-faced and spoiled. Instead, her brief had spoken passionately about 'years of mental torment and domestic abuse'. In the end, though, the jury had been unconvinced.
Such provocation, the prosecution had countered at the time, might understandably lead victims to lash out with knives and hammers, or, at a push, to slip rat poison into the old man's shepherd's pie. But calmly planning and paying for a gangland-style execution was a very different matter.
'Alan was spontaneous enough when it came to using his fists,' Donna said. 'But even then he was usually smart enough to avoid hitting me where it would show.' She had been staring at her feet, but now glanced up towards Anna. 'I didn't like what it was doing to Ellie. What he might do to her.' She shook her head, as though correcting herself. 'I never saw him hit her, but I was starting to think it was on the cards, and there was no way I was going to let that happen.'
Anna placed a hand on Donna's arm.
'So, it wasn't about the money, then?' Thorne said. He saw the look from Anna but stared right back, hoping she would get the message.
I know this woman a lot better than you do.
'Look, I'm not going to deny that I thought I'd be all right when Alan was dead. That I thought I'd be comfortable.' Donna stared across the park. By now, the Micra was stationary and two young men, two kids , were leaning against it, smoking and laughing. 'That wasn't the reason I wanted him gone, though, I swear to you. I had money when I was with him and I was miserable as sin.' She shrugged. 'I wasn't remotely surprised that there was nothing left, either. I always thought he might be squirrelling it away overseas, somewhere the taxman couldn't find it. Now I know he's still alive, I'm damn well sure that's what he did. One more thing he was planning for.'
'Why the contract killer, though?' Thorne remembered the smell of cooked meat in the forest clearing, and the questions the prosecution had put to the jury during the trial. The same questions that were posed in a dozen magazine articles and a particularly salacious edition of London Tonight. 'Why bother with Paul Monahan? Why not just take a knife to him or batter him while he was asleep?'