As long as it had taken for Thorne to give his evidence.
‘Smashing party, your honour,’ Thorne said.
The man stood close and stared hard at McCarthy, but McCarthy refused to meet the look, staring down instead into his wine glass. The man shifted his attention. Said, ‘Thorne.’
Thorne was even more impressed that his name had been remembered. Then he realised that McCarthy would have been in regular contact with his colleague from the moment Thorne had turned up at Barndale two days earlier and begun asking questions. That the man in front of him was simply putting two and two together.
The quicker he made four, Thorne decided, the better.
‘Your friend Dr McCarthy here has been great company,’ Thorne said. ‘And a fascinating storyteller.’ He looked at McCarthy. ‘You can toddle off now, Ian. My sergeant’s waiting for you downstairs.’
McCarthy hesitated, but only for a second, and neither Thorne nor the other man bothered to watch him leave.
‘So, who’s waiting for me?’ the man asked. ‘Not a lowly sergeant, surely.’
The music got louder suddenly, and someone let out a whoop of excitement from the other side of the room.
Thorne did not blink.
‘You’re all mine,’ he said.
SIXTY-FOUR
Helen Weeks’ phone rang out. Ten seconds, fifteen. Twenty…
‘They’re not going to answer,’ Chivers said.
‘ They? ’ Pascoe stared at him. ‘What exactly do you think is going on in there?’ Chivers started to answer, but Pascoe talked over him. ‘Because two and something days is a bit quick for Stockholm Syndrome to have kicked in, you know what I mean?’
Twenty-five seconds.
‘Neither the hostage nor the hostage taker is answering the phone,’ Chivers said. ‘I was stating a fact, that’s all. There was no-’
The call was answered and, almost simultaneously, all five people inside the truck held their breath. Pressed hands to headsets. There were a few, crackly seconds of near-silence, then Helen Weeks said, ‘Hello.’
‘Helen, it’s Sue Pascoe. I need to speak to Mr Mitchell.’ Calm, but authoritative. The tone she reserved for particular types of crisis intervention.
‘He’s asleep.’
‘I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to wake him up.’
‘Is there some sort of problem?’
‘I need to speak to him now, Helen. I need to know that he’s all right.’
There was a pause.
Chivers looked at Donnelly, turned his palms up.
‘Helen?’
‘Hang up now.’ Akhtar’s voice. Calm, but authoritative.
‘It was an accident.’
‘ Hang up! ’
The line went dead.
Pascoe removed her headset and dabbed fingers against the film of sweat on her ear. Donnelly and Chivers were already moving together towards the back doors, and their body language – their shoulders together, their heads low and close – made the manner of the conversation they were gearing up to have abundantly clear. Made it equally obvious that any further contribution from Pascoe would be entirely superfluous.
‘Going in through the front isn’t an option,’ Chivers said.
‘Right.’ Donnelly began nodding.
‘The shutters wouldn’t be a problem, but we’d be too far away. He’d have too much time to react. The back door’s the obvious entry point.’
‘How long?’
‘Best part of an hour to get set up. Forty minutes at a push.’
‘So let’s push it.’
Chivers jumped down from the back of the truck and immediately began shouting. Donnelly started talking to Pascoe. Something about how vital her role was going to be in this last hour or so, something about redeeming herself, but it took her a few seconds to focus. She was remembering something she had said to Tom Thorne.
The hostage is mine to lose.
And the nothing she’d had to say to Stephen Mitchell’s wife.
SIXTY-FIVE
Looking at him, Thorne suddenly had a very clear image of His Honour Judge Jeffrey Prosser QC dressing before a trial. Transforming himself, enjoying the ritual. He pictured the man standing in front of a large mirror in his chambers, the smile widening and the blood rushing to his cock as he slipped on his purple robe and red sash. As he became empowered. The wig would be last of all, best of all. Stern and imposing suddenly, that blissful scratch of horsehair against the tender pink skin.
The smallest suggestion of punishment.
Bare-headed now and wearing a blue pinstripe, Prosser reminded Thorne of an old deputy headmaster he had not thought about in more than twenty years. A scrawny neck and sagging gut. Almost entirely bald, his face flushed with the effort those few stray tufts of grey were making in fighting their desperate rearguard action. Fierce, but ultimately ineffectual. The man Thorne remembered from school had made up for countless failings as a teacher with a manic adherence to a disciplinary regime that involved caning boys from eleven and upwards on a regular basis. Across the palm much of the time, but always the buttocks for the younger boys. Breathless by the end of it, and sweating.
Right, Thorne, now get out of my sight.
Thorne looked at Prosser. Perhaps the similarity was even closer than he had thought.
They had not moved from their positions near the window, except for Prosser stepping briefly across to a low glass table to set his tumbler down, after finishing his drink in two large gulps. Another half a dozen guests had arrived in the last few minutes and one or two of the boys had begun dancing together, showing themselves off to potential customers. The judge made no attempt whatsoever to disguise the fact that he was enjoying the show.
‘I’m still not a hundred per cent sure why you’ve blundered into a private party without an invitation,’ he said. ‘One photograph is hardly going to give any of our friends at the CPS a hard-on, is it?’
‘One photograph of you, Ian McCarthy and Simon Powell.’
‘Whom I am not for one second denying that I know.’
‘That’s a good start.’
‘I’ve dealt with Simon several times professionally and I met Ian socially a couple of years ago.’
‘Somewhere like this.’
‘I’m not disputing the fact that Ian, Simon and I were once at the same party.’ He smiled. ‘You have that photograph, so to do so would be ridiculous.’
‘The person who took that photograph is willing to testify that Amin Akhtar was also at that party.’
‘I go to a lot of parties,’ Prosser said. ‘I meet a lot of people.’
‘I have a witness who puts you and Amin Akhtar at the same party just a few months before he was convicted. That’s just a few months before you sentenced him to eight years in a Young Offenders Institution.’
‘It’s a small world.’
Thorne turned his head, nodded towards a man sharing a joint with a boy young enough to be his grandson. ‘I bet this is. Same faces showing up all the time, I’d imagine. Same arses… ’
‘For God’s sake-’
‘Amin Akhtar.’
‘It really means nothing.’
‘Means everything if you had sex with him.’
‘Now, I really don’t see how you’re going to prove that. ’
A man in a cream shirt and brown velvet waistcoat approached and the smile indicated that he and Prosser clearly knew one another. He opened his mouth to speak, but Prosser shook his head, made it clear he was rather busy. The man raised his eyebrows and turned on his heel.
‘McCarthy’s not exactly playing hard to get any more,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s made it very clear that he’ll happily spill his guts in return for a nice bit of carpet in his cell, and there’s no reason to believe that Powell is going to be any less of a pushover.
‘Thing is though, I’d like to hear it from you. Because you’re the one it started with, that day eight months ago, when you looked up and saw Amin Akhtar in the dock in front of you. You’re the one who made everything happen, the one who put the fear of God into your friends and called in a few favours… so you’re the one who’s going to confess.’ He leaned in close to Prosser. ‘So that I can tell the father of the boy you had killed.’