' Very fond of them? I think you're being a bit bloody generous…'
'I think she was more than very fond of them,' Holland said. 'But yes, she was also naive. Call it stupid, if you like…'
Stone snapped his gaze towards Holland. 'If love is blind, she must have been fucking besotted…'
Whoever thought that computers would do away with paperwork was sadly mistaken. There was as much paper piled up on desks as there ever had been. The only difference was that now, most of it was printed out by computer…
Thorne sat and read through the stories of four murders. Those same scraps of information that clogged his brain had also been recorded somewhere on paper. On laser-printed sheets of A4, on faded and curling reams of fax paper, on Post-It notes and pre-printed memo sheets torn from a pad. The entire case was laid out like this before him. Ream after dog-eared ream, piled in stubby blocks of yellow and white and buff. Banded by elastic or bound with laminate sheets or stapled and stuffed into cardboard folders… Thorne went over every piece of paper, of the jigsaw. Looking for the answer he knew to be there. Sifting through the shit, like a squaw)zing gull flapping around a vast dump. Black, beady eye searching for that morsel of interest….
Hearing the trace of that Yorkshire accent in Carol Chamberlain's voice. The good sense in every flat vowel of it.
'If it's anywhere, it's in the details.'
Opposite him, Yvonne Kitson sat typing, her face all but obscured by a paper mountain range of her own. She was still working on the Foley/Noble search, sorting through tens of thousands of addresses and car registrations and NI numbers, as well as dealing with, collecting and collating, the information that was still coming in on the Southern killing.
Thorne looked across at her. He toyed with lobbing a ball of paper over to get her attention. He flicked briefly through the piles on his desk, looking for something he could screw up, then thought better of it…
'Apart from anything else,' Thorne said, 'murderers aren't doing the rainforests a whole lot of good.'
Kitson looked up and across at him. 'Sorry?'
He picked up a sheaf of post-mortem reports and waved them. She nodded her understanding.
'How's it going, Yvonne?'
'We won't have any more luck finding him as Noble than we did as Foley. He was only Mark Noble for five minutes, anyway…'
'Which he'd have hated. That man's name…'
'Too bloody right. If I was him I'd've changed my name, or at least stopped using that one, as soon as I got the hell out of there.'
Thorne could find nothing in what Kitson had said to argue with. He'd have gone to Brigstocke straight away, suggested they concentrate their resources somewhere else. But he didn't have the faintest idea where…
'Let's just plough through it,' he said.
The whole adoption/abuse/runaway lead was shaping up to be another one of those which came to nothing horribly quickly. It was hard enough trying to work out what might have happened to someone who'd run away from home six months before. To piece together the theoretical movements of a pair of teenagers who'd vanished from a house in Romford nearly twenty years earlier, was almost certainly impossible.
They had little choice but to try, and while Holland, Stone and the rest of the team did what they could, Thorne was going back over everything they already had. Sure that they already had enough. By lunchtime, he'd found nothing, and felt as though he'd read about every murder that had ever taken place. He'd watched the hands of the pathologist rooting about in every chest cavity and down into the cold, wet depths of every gut. He'd listened to the less than helpful words of everybody who'd so much as stood at the same bus stop as one of the victims.
He'd had a belly full…
'What's on your sarnies today, then?'
Kitson shook her head without looking up from her computer screen. 'Didn't have time today. The kids were playing up, and everything got a bit…' The rest of the sentence hung there until Thorne spoke.
'You can't keep all the balls in the air all the time, Yvonne. You're allowed to drop one occasionally, you know.' Kitson glanced up, gave him a thin smile. 'Is everything all right, Yvonne?'
'Has somebody said something?' It came a little too quickly.
'No. You've just seemed a bit.., out of it.'
Kitson's smile thickened, until she looked, to Thorne, much more like herself. Much more the type he could lob a ball of paper at.
'I'm just tired,' she said.
This next killing had to be the last one, at least for a while. It made a pretty picture, and it also made bloody good sense. Afterwards, the police investigation was bound to be stepped up, and the risk of getting caught, just statistically, would increase. '
If he were to be caught, to be tried for his crimes, the next killing would be a very bad one to get done for. He would certainly be crucified with little argument. Now, though, with just the others under his belt, it would be something of a different matter. Standing trial for the murders of Remfry and Welch and Southern, he would fancy his chances…
If the papers were excited at the manhunt, they would be wetting themselves at a court case. The tabloids would back him, he was sure of it. He could probably even persuade one or other of the red-tops to stump up for his defence, pay to hire a top lawyer. He had decided already that should it ever come to it, he would speak in his own defence, would stand up and tell them exactly what he'd done and why. He was pretty confident that only a very brave judge would put him away for too long after that.
There would be an outcry from certain sections for sure, from the misguided and the bleeding hearts. From those who believed he should pay his debt to society, in the same way that those fine, upstanding citizens he'd killed had once done.
That would be all right with him. Let the silly bastards protest. Let them take the words 'perversion' and 'justice', and put them together like they owned them, even though they hadn't got the least fucking idea what either of them could really mean.
Perversion and justice. The degradation and the dashed hope. The hideous comedy that had started everything… It was all a fantasy, of course, unless the police came knocking on his door in the next couple of days. After that, after the final killing, nothing he could say would save him. The loyalties of the gutter press would switch very bloody quickly, along with everybody else's, once the final victim had been discovered.
Rapists were one thing, but this was, after all, very much another. Thorne was in the corner of the Major Incident Room, feeding coins into the coffee machine when Karim approached him.
'Miss Bloom on line three, sir.'
Momentarily confused, Thorne reached for his back pocket, understanding when he found it empty. His mobile was on his desk in the office. Eve would have tried that first and then, having got no reply, would have called the office number…
Thorne crossed to a desk and picked up the phone. He held it to his chest until Karim had wandered far enough away.
'It's me. What's up?'
'Nothing serious. Keith's let me down, so I just need to change the time a bit on Saturday. I told him I was going out and he said that he'd lock up for me. Now he turns round and says that he needs to leave early as well, so I'm a bit stuffed…'
'It doesn't matter. Get over when you can.'
'I know, I just wanted to get to your place early, drop some stuff off before we go out to eat.'
'Sounds interesting…'
'It'll probably be nearer seven now, by the time I've sorted out the shop and put my face on.'
'I can't see myself getting home a lot sooner than that anyway…'
'Sorry to screw our arrangements around, but it's not my fault. Keith's usually pretty reliable. Tom…?'