"You're supposed to turn those off in here," Rooker said. "They can interfere with medical equipment, you know. Fuck up the machines ."
The prison officer spoke for the first time: "Shame you're not wired up to a couple then. Might have done us all a favour." Thorne couldn't help smiling. "How long's he going to be here for?"
"We'll get him shifted back to the health care wing tomorrow, with a bit of luck," the officer said. "It's a level-three unit. They've got all the facilities, all the medication for any infection or what have you."
Rooker looked less than delighted, but it made sense. The prison would want him back as soon as possible. The officers would be wanted back where they could be of more use, and the hospital would be glad to get shot of any patient who needed guards.
Thorne heard the single, short tone as Holland ended the call and turned to ask him. "What?"
"That was DCI Tughan. He wants me to give you a message. You're not going to like it."
"Fuck."
Thorne could guess what the message would be. They must have turned down Rooker's offer. There hadn't been enough time for it to get up as high as it needed to go. It must have been blocked at a lower level. It would be interesting to find out exactly where. Thorne stood and pulled on his jacket. "It's not looking too promising, Gordon."
He saw the prison officer smirk, and return to his book. Thorne managed to make it through to the end of the day without having it out with Nick Tughan. He lost himself in a pile of unread memos, Police Federation junk mail and case updates from investigations he'd been working on before this one.
He then spent an evening in front of the TV without calling Tughan at home.
By lunchtime on Friday, just when he thought he'd given up on the idea, he found himself cornering Tughan in the Incident Room, spoiling for a fight. Sam Karim, who had been talking to Tughan when Thorne had marched over, made himself scarce pretty bloody quickly. Tughan leaned across a desk, flicking through the Murder Investigation Manual that seemed to have become his Bible.
"Answer in there, is it?" Thorne asked. Tughan glanced up. "What do you want, Tom?" Thorne wasn't 100 per cent sure. "Why didn't they go for it?"
"All the obvious reasons."
"Such as?"
"Oh, come on. Russell and I raised a number of concerns when you first brought it to our attention. When you eventually brought it to our attention."
It was clear to Thorne that Tughan was as riled up as ever. "This was a genuine chance to get Ryan for something and make it stick."
"Right. On the word of a man who confessed to it twenty years ago, and who suddenly decides to change his story."
"Ryan is panicking. He's seriously fucking rattled. Why else would he try to get Gordon Rooker out of the way after all this time?" Tughan went back to the manual. He licked a finger and began to flick through the pages. He was trying to slow things down, to put a foot on the ball. "Securing the release of a potentially dangerous prisoner is not something to be undertaken if there is any room for doubt."
"He'd be released into our custody, for fuck's sake."
"The last thing we need is a compensation case for wrongful imprisonment."
"How could Rooker claim compensation for that? He confessed!
Tughan looked at him as if he were an idiot. "If a decent lawyer gets a sniff of what's going on, that confession might suddenly turn out to have been all but beaten out of him."
"These are just excuses."
Tughan turned over another page.
"You're just pissed off because I came up with a way to nail Billy Ryan."
"I think you should get back to work."
"Same thing with the idea that it was Ryan who killed Moloney. Is anybody actually pursuing that line of inquiry?" The colour began to rise above Tughan's button-down collar. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Ryan had the perfect cover. He knew exactly what the X-Man did to his other victims. His men found two of the bodies, for fuck's sake."
"I know all this."
"All he had to do was make sure that whoever killed Moloney used the same type of gun and carved the X. It was a piece of piss."
"We're looking into it."
Thorne snorted. "Right, but not too hard. Because it came from me." Tughan slammed the manual shut. It sounded as though he was trying hard to keep his voice down. "Me again. There's over fifty officers working on this case."
"Don't give me that fucking "team player" speech." Thorne leaned forward, gripped the edge of the desk. "It's all well and good as long as you're the captain of the team. That's the truth."
"I'm not going to stand here and listen to this." Tughan picked up the manual and waved it angrily at Thorne. "Who do you think you're talking to?"
Thorne stepped back from the desk, laughing in spite of his anger.
"What? Are you going to throw the book at me?" For a few seconds, Tughan glared. Then, he dropped his eyes, gave a smile some room on his face. He opened the manual again and leafed through it until he found the page he was looking for. "Maybe just a bit of it," he said. Tughan snatched up a pen, dragged it hard across the page, and tore it out. He hesitated for just a second before stepping forward and pressing it hard against Thorne's chest.
"Something to think about."
Thorne grabbed at the torn-out sheet while Tughan stamped out of the room. Tughan had underscored one section hard enough to go through the paper.".
"The modern-day approach to murder recognises the fact that there is no longer the place for the "lone entrepreneur" investigating officer." Hendricks was working late. For the second night in a row, Thorne sat alone in front of the TV, trying to regain some equilibrium. It rankled that Tughan was choosing to ignore perfectly sound ideas, but, more than anything, Thorne couldn't cope with the idea that Ryan was going to get away with it. Yes, Tughan might nail him one day for drugs of fences or fraud, or bloody tax evasion. Who knew, perhaps even the Zarifs would get him?
But he wouldn't have paid for Jessica Clarke. Thorne brooded for most of the evening, then shouted at a TV chef for a while until the sourness began to dissipate and he started to feel better. Fuck it, February was almost over and spring was around the corner. He was thinking about maybe picking up his dad, driving down to Eileen's place in Brighton for the weekend, when the phone rang.
"Are you watching ITV?" Chamberlain asked.
"I was going to call you. The Rooker thing's a non-starter."
"Put it on," she demanded.
Thorne reached for the remote, changed the channel and turned up the volume.
A female reporter was talking straight to camera. Thorne watched, not clear what he was supposed to be seeing, until the camera cut away from the reporter and the story was told in a series of related shots. An empty playground. A group of schoolgirls gathered at a bus stop. A can of lighter fluid.
Thorne felt his guts jump.
"He tried to do it again," Carol Chamberlain said. "He tried to burn another girl."
MARCH
THE WEIGHT OF THE SOUL
TWELVE
Thorne pulled up outside the house and sat for five minutes. It felt like the longest pause for breath he'd taken in a while. The time had passed in a flurry of activity, mindless and otherwise: seven days between the attempt to kill one young girl, and this, a visit to the father of another who had died almost twenty years earlier. Seven days during which the powers-that-be had quickly changed their minds about Gordon Rooker's offer.
Thorne waited until the engine had ticked down to silence and it had begun to get cold in the car before he got out and walked towards the house. It was in the centre of a simple Victorian terrace on the south side of Wandsworth Common, not far from the prison. Thorne rang the bell and took a couple of steps back down the path. There were lights on in most of the houses: people settling down to eat, or getting ready for a Friday night out. The place would probably fetch around half a million. It was certainly worth much more now than it had been fifteen years ago, when the Clarkes had moved back here from Amersham. Back from where Jessica had gone to school.