Tom Thorne dropped his menu and crossed stained fingers above it. The decision made. He stared hard across the table.
“Things change,” he said.
TWO
Lots of things had changed…
What everything was bloody well called for a start. When he’d returned to work, it had seemed to Thorne that in the short time he’d been away they’d decided to change the name of just about everything. The Serious Crime Group, in which Thorne had been a detective inspector on one of the nine Major Investigation Teams in Murder Command (West), was now part of what had laughably been christened the Specialist Crime Directorate. Directorate, for crying out loud. Did the people who pushed pens around and decided these things really think that changing something’s name made a scrap of difference to what it actually did?
Directorate, group, pool, squad, team, unit… posse, gang, shower, whatever.
Just a bunch of people, of mixed ability, scrabbling around in various degrees of desperation, trying to catch those who had killed. Who were still killing.
Or, if they were really lucky, those who were planning to kill.
The Specialist Crime Directorate. Thorne remembered a vacancy advertised by a well-known supermarket in something called “ambient replenishment.” The job had turned out to be stacking shelves.
Naturally, the structure Thorne came back to had changed as well. Each MIT on the Murder Squad was now composed of three detective inspectors, each at the head of a smaller, core team and each with that much more paperwork, that much more administrative responsibility, and that much more time spent behind a desk. Each with another few hours of their working life spent ensuring that staff morale was high while levels of sick leave stayed low, and that actions were carried out within those very necessary constraints of bloody time and sodding budget, and so fucking on and so fucking forth
…
“I know this stuff has all got to be done, and I know it’s got to be done properly, but there have to be priorities. Don’t there? For Christ’s sake, I’ve got two Asian kids with bullets in their heads and some nutcase who seems to take great delight in sticking a sharpened bicycle spoke into people’s spines, but I’m being prevented from getting out and doing anything about it.”
“Listen…”
“Every time I so much as set foot outside the office, one or other of my so-called colleagues starts bitching about having to do my share of the fucking paperwork and it’s getting stupid. I just want to do the job, you know? Especially now. You can understand that, can’t you? I’m just a copper, that’s all. It’s not complicated. I’m not a resource, or a facilitator, or a fucking homicidal-perpetration-prevention-operative…”
“Tom…”
“Do you think whoever shot those two kids is sitting at home doing his paperwork? Is this lunatic I’m trying to catch filling in forms? Making a careful note, no, making several copies of a careful note about how many different bicycle spokes he’s used, and how much they cost him, and exactly how long it took him to get them just sharp enough to paralyze somebody? I don’t think so. I don’t fucking think so…”
The man sitting in the armchair wore his usual black hooded top and combats. There was a selection of rings and studs in both ears, and the spike below his bottom lip shifted as he moved his tongue around in his mouth. Dr. Phil Hendricks was a pathologist who worked closely with Thorne’s team. He was also the nearest thing Tom Thorne had to a best friend. Violent death and its charged aftermath had forged a strong bond between them. He’d caught a taxi to the flat in Kentish Town as soon as Thorne had called.
Hendricks waited just long enough to be sure that Thorne had run out of steam, without giving him the time to get up another head. “How are you sleeping?” he asked.
Thorne had stopped pacing, had sat down heavily on the arm of the sofa. “Do I sound tired to you?”
“You sound… hyper. It’s understandable.”
Thorne jumped up again, marched across to the fireplace. “Don’t start that lowering-your-voice shit, Phil. Like I’m not well. I’m right about this.”
“Look, I’m sure you’re right. I’m not there enough to see it.”
“Everything’s different.”
“Maybe it’s you that’s different…”
“Trust me, mate, this job’s going tits up. It’s like working in a bank in there sometimes. Like working in the fucking City!”
“What happened when you saw Jesmond?”
Thorne took a deep breath, placed the flat of his hand against his chest, watched it jump. Once, twice, three times…
“I got a lecture,” he said. “Apparently, these days, there’s a lot less tolerance for deadwood.”
Lots of things had changed…
Hendricks shifted in the armchair, opened his mouth to speak.
“Deadwood,” Thorne said, repeating the words as if they were from a foreign language. “How fucked is that from him? Pointless, tight-arsed tosser!”
“Okay, look, he’s all those things, we know that, but… maybe the caseload is getting on top of you a bit. Don’t you think? Come on, you’re not really dealing with the work properly, with any of it.”
“Right, and why’s that, d’you reckon? What have I just been telling you?”
“You haven’t been telling me anything; you’ve been shouting at me. And what you’ve actually been doing is making excuses. I’m on your side, Tom, but you need to face a few facts. You’re either completely out of it or you’re ranting like an idiot, and either way people are getting pissed off with you. Getting more pissed off with you…”
“Which people?”
Then, despite what Thorne had said a few moments earlier, Hendricks lowered his voice. “You weren’t ready to start work again.”
“That’s bollocks.”
“You came back too soon…”
It was not much more than eight weeks since Thorne’s father had died in a house fire. Jim Thorne had been suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s at the time of his death, and the blaze had almost certainly been no more than an accident. A misfired synapse. A piece of tragic forgetfulness.
There were other possibilities, though. Thorne had been working on a case involving a number of powerful organized-crime figures. It was possible that one of them-that one man in particular-had decided to strike at Thorne via those closest to him. To inflict pain that would stay with him far longer than anything of which a simple blade or bullet was capable.
Other possibilities…
Thorne was still coming to terms with a lot of things. Among them, the fact that he might never know for sure whether his father had been murdered. Either way, Thorne knew he was to blame.
“I would have come back earlier if I could,” Thorne said. “I’d’ve come back the day I buried him. What else am I going to do?”
Hendricks pushed himself out of the chair. “Do you want some tea?”
Thorne nodded and turned toward the fireplace. He leaned against the stripped-pine mantelpiece, staring at himself in the mirror above as he spat out the words. “Detective Chief Superintendent Jesmond is thinking about a few weeks’ ‘gardening leave.’ ”
Standing in front of Trevor Jesmond’s desk that afternoon, Thorne had felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. He’d dug down deep for something like a smile. Deeper still for the flippant comeback.
“I’ve only got a window box…”
Now the anger rose up again, but quickly gave way to a perverse amusement at yet another, ridiculous euphemism. “Gardening leave,” he said. “How nice. How fucking cozy.”
It made sense, he supposed. You could hardly call it what it was: some pointless, hastily invented desk job designed to get shot of anyone who was causing a problem. Anyone embarrassing, but not quite sackable. Gardening sounded so much better than burned out, or fucked up. So much more pleasant than drunk, traumatized, or mental.
Hendricks had walked slowly toward the kitchen. “I think you should take it,” he said.