"Sir."
Thorne broke the short but awkward silence that followed. He nodded towards the car. "The Zarifs have really upped the stakes now. Marcus Moloney's in a different league from Mickey Clayton and the others. It's going to get a bit tasty from here." He looked at Russell Brigstocke, and received the same look he'd got from Holland.
"The stakes have certainly been upped," Jesmond said, 'but not for the reasons you're assuming."
"Oh?" Thorne glanced at Tughan, who was studying the gravel. Jesmond looked as drawn, as defeated, as Thorne had ever seen him.
"Marcus Moloney was an undercover police officer," he said.
TEN
Thorne left the Moloney murder scene as the sun was coming up and drove through streets that were showing the first faltering signs of life. He spent a couple of hours at home showered, changed and had some breakfast but he was still getting through on what little sleep he'd managed before being woken by Hendricks with the phone call. Driving towards Hendon, he couldn't decide whether the heaviness he felt was due to the lack of sleep, the wine from the night before or the memory of the atmosphere on that canal bank. The change in those who hadn't known the truth about Moloney was clear to see as soon as word had got around. The volume had fallen; the movements in and around the Jag had become a fraction more delicate. Bodies were always accorded a measure of respect, but that measure tended to vary. Dead or not, a gangland villain was treated by the police a little bit differently to a fellow officer.
Thorne hated that 'one of our own' nonsense, but he understood it. The life of a police officer was clearly worth no more or less than that of a doctor or a teacher or a shop assistant. But it wasn't doctors, teachers and shop assistants who had to pick up the bodies, inform the next of kin and try to catch those responsible. Yes, sometimes the self-righteous anger when a policeman died could make his skin crawl, and the speeches made by senior officers could sound horribly false, but Thorne told himself he could see it all for what it really was. There was nothing false about the relief and the fear, nor about anger at feeling both of those things.
Nothing false about 'there but for the grace of God'. It was early, but Thorne knew Carol Chamberlain would be up and about. She needed to know that everything had changed. He called her as he hit the North Circular and told her about Marcus Moloney.
"Well, he certainly had me fooled," she said.
"Me too," Thorne admitted. And neither of them was stupid. Moloney was clearly a committed and brilliant undercover officer, but still, it bothered Thorne that he hadn't sensed something. Anything. There was a lot of crap talked about 'instinct', but if there was one thing Thorne was certain of, it was that instinct was unreliable. He certainly possessed it himself, but it came and went, failing him at all the wrong moments, as inexplicable as a striker's goal drought or a writer's block. And it had landed him in the shit plenty of times over the years.
Occasionally, Thorne felt like he could look into a killer's eyes and see exactly what was on his mind. See all those dark imaginings that Hendricks had been talking about the night before. Sometimes, Thorne thought he could spot a villain by the way he smoked a cigarette. Other times, he wouldn't know the enemy if he was wearing a ski-mask and carrying a sawn-off shotgun.
"How come you didn't know?" Chamberlain asked. "About Moloney?" Thorne didn't have an answer, and by the time he hung up on Chamberlain and pulled into the compound at Becke House, he was extremely pissed off about it. Why hadn't Tughan told him? It was a fucking good question.
The answer wasn't particularly satisfactory: "It wasn't deemed necessary, or prudent."
"Talk English," Thorne said. He turned to Brigstocke. He and Tughan had both stood up when Thorne had come marching into the office without knocking. "Russell, did you know?"
Brigstocke nodded. "It wasn't to go below DCI level," he said. "That was the decision."
Tughan sat back down again. Thorne could see a copy of the Murder Investigation Manual on the desk in front of him. "Moloney's role as an undercover officer was strictly on a "need to know" basis," he said, as if he'd just read the phrase in the book.
Thorne sighed, leaned back against the door. "Did he have a wife? Kids?"
Brigstocke nodded again, just once.
"Have they been told he was carved up and shot in the head? Or is that on a "need to know" basis, too?"
"Close the door on the way out," Tughan said, looking away.
"A few things suddenly make a lot more sense, though," Thorne said. "I wondered how you could be so certain that the Izzigil murders were down to Ryan. How you knew where that threatening letter had come from. Obviously you had a hotline."
Tughan slammed a piece of paper on to the desktop. "Why the hell is everything always about you, Thorne? An officer has been killed. You just said it: "carved up and shot in the head". The fact that you hadn't been told that he was a police officer is pretty fucking unimportant, wouldn't you say?"
Brigstocke was no great admirer of Tughan himself, but his expression told Thorne that he thought the DCI had a point. And as Thorne calmed down, he could see Tuchman's point too. He felt a little ashamed of the outburst, of the sarcasm. He walked across the office, dragged a spare chair over to the desk and dropped into it. He was relieved to see that Tughan didn't object.
"How long had Moloney been in there?"
"Two years, more or less," Tughan said.
Thorne was amazed it had been so short a time. "He got where he was in the organisation pretty bloody quickly."
Tughan nodded. "He was bright, and Billy Ryan liked him. Stephen Ryan treated him like an older brother."
"He was doing a pretty good job," Brigstocke said. Tughan corrected him: "He was doing a very good job and, with him dead, it's all been worse than useless."
"Hang on," Thorne said. "In two years he must have put together a fair bit of evidence against Ryan."
"More than a "fair bit", but Moloney was the key witness. He would have been the one standing up in court. All the evidence was based on conversations he'd had, things he'd seen, or been told. We've got sod all that'll stand up without him."
"What about the Izzigil killings? He knew about that, right? There must be something."
Tughan picked at something on his chin. He was freshly shaved, rash-red from the razor, but Thorne could see a small patch of sandy stubble that he'd missed to the left of his Adam's apple. "He knew about it afterwards. He knew something was being planned a few days before it happened but couldn't find out who was being hit or who'd been given the contract."
"It was true Ryan liked to have Moloney around," Brigstocke said. "But there were others he trusted to get the really dirty work done."
"Stephen?" Thorne suggested.
"Yeah, Stephen," Tughan said, 'and others." Thorne thought about how hard it must have been for DC Marcus Moloney. Once the killings had started, he'd been caught in an impossible position. He'd have wanted to dig around, to try to find out the names of the people Ryan was planning to have killed so that he could tell his colleagues at SO7. He'd also have known full well that if he did go sniffing around after information he wasn't meant to have, he ran the risk of exposing himself and ruining everything. And later after Muslum and Hanya Izzigil had been killed had he felt somehow responsible?
"We can still get Ryan," Thorne said.
The other two men in the room looked at him with renewed interest. This was what Thorne had been putting off, but now was the perfect moment. He'd told Chamberlain on the way in that he was going to have to come clean about what they'd been up to. He hadn't realised it was going to be quite this important.
"How?" Tughan asked.
"I've got a witness."