A couple of weeks into spring, and summer weather seemed to have come early. The BMW's fans were chucking out all the cold air they could, but even in shirtsleeves it was stifling inside the car. Holland took a long swig from a bottle of water. "Still pleased you bought this?"
Thorne was singing quietly to himself. He reached across, turned down the volume of the first Highwaymen album. "Say again?"
"The car." Holland fanned himself theatrically. "Still think it was a good move?"
Thorne shrugged, as if the fact that they were all but melted to the leather seats was unimportant. "When they made these, cars didn't have air conditioning. It's the price you pay for a classic'
"I'm surprised they had the wheel when this thing was made."
"Good one, Dave."
"And what you pay to keep this on the road for a year would buy you a car with AC."
Thorne drew close to the back of a Transit van and flashed his lights. He slammed his palm against the wheel and eased his foot off the accelerator when the signal was ignored.
"Rooker's not easy to like, is he?" Holland said.
"Probably the right reaction, considering you're one of the Met's finest and he kills people for a living. Not that I haven't met plenty of murderers I could sink a pint or two with. and more than a few coppers I'd happily have beaten to death."
"Right, but Rooker's an arse hole whichever way you look at it."
"You do know that bit about "the Met's finest" was ironic, don't you?"
Holland opened his window an inch, turned his face towards it.
"Absolutely."
"Rooker was a touch more likeable when I had something he wanted," Thorne said. "And he'd probably say the same thing about me." He pulled across into the middle lane but was still unable to get ahead of the Transit van. It had a sticker on the back that read: "How am I driving?" Thorne thought about calling the phone number that was given and swearing at whoever was at the other end for a while.
"Tell me about some of them," Holland said. "The murderers you got on with."
Thorne glanced into his rear-view mirror. He saw the line of cars snaking away behind him. He saw the tension, real or imagined, around his eyes.
He thought about a man named Martin Palmer; a man who, in the final analysis, had killed because he was terrified not to. Palmer had strangled and stabbed, and his final, clumsy attempt at something like redemption had been made at a tragic price. He had changed Tom Thorne's thinking, not to mention his face, for ever. Thorne had not 'got on' with Martin Palmer. He had despised and abused him. But there had been pity, too, and sadness at glimpsing the man a murderer could so easily have been. Thorne had been disturbed, was still disturbed, by feelings that had asserted themselves; and by others that had been altogether absent when he'd sat and swapped oxygen with Martin Palmer.
Then there was last year: the Foley case.
The murderers you got on with.
"I don't really know where to start," Thorne said. "Dennis Nielsen was all right if you got to know him, and Fred West was quite a good laugh, till he topped himself. Talking of which, I remember one night, I was playing darts with Harold Shipman. Harry, I used to call him.." Holland let out a loud, long-suffering sigh. "If you're going to try to be funny, can you turn up the music again?" They drove on, the car barely getting into top gear for more than a few minutes at a time. The monotony yielded only briefly to drama when Thorne spent too long watching a kestrel hovering above the hard shoulder, and came within inches of rear-ending an Audi.
"How's Sophie and the baby?" he asked.
"They're good."
"What is she now?"
"Nearly seven months. It feels like we're getting our lives back a bit, you know?"
Thorne shook his head. He had no idea at all.
"There's not so much panic," Holland explained. "I mean, it's still bloody scary, and we're knackered all the time, but we know more or less what we're doing." He paused, glanced across at Thorne. "Well, Sophie always did, but now I know, more or less what I'm doing. You should come round and see her."
"So, you're fine with it all, then? The dad bit. I know you had some worries." Thorne remembered a conversation they'd had the previous summer. Bizarrely, it had been on the very day he'd bought the BMW. Holland had been drunk, had confessed to feeling terrified. He'd told Thorne he was worried that he might resent the baby when it came, that Sophie might make him choose between the baby and the job.
"I was being stupid," Holland said. He turned to Thorne, grinning.
"Chloe's brilliant. She's into everything, but she's fucking brilliant."
"I'm glad it's working out," Thorne said.
"Tell you the truth, the last couple of weeks have been great. A chance to recharge the batteries, you know? The only problem is that Sophie's starting to get used to having me around again." The officers on the investigation had all been spending more time with loved ones in the fortnight or so since the Ryan murder. The job had recently involved a lot of paperwork, much of it from other cases, and a good deal of time sitting on arses waiting for somebody -Stephen Ryan in particular to get off theirs. To make a move. The investigation had wound itself down, or spiraled into chaos, depending on your point of view.
"D'you reckon Stephen Ryan is going to do anything?" Holland asked. Thorne grunted, but only with pleasure as the Transit van finally indicated and moved inside. Thorne swerved back into the fast lane and powered past it, gaining a pointless thirty feet but enjoying it nonetheless.
He had no idea that, twenty miles ahead of him, uniformed officers were taping off the area around a minicab office on Green Lanes. Others were gathering witnesses and starting to take statements. Phil Hendricks was already on his way to the crime scene, while an ambulance was moving in the opposite direction, its services clearly not required.
Stephen Ryan had made a move.
TWENTY-FIVE
Wednesday morning in the Major Incident Room. Two days after the fatal shooting at the Zarifs' minicab office. A team back on its feet, but yet to get the feeling back in its arse.
"We've had word from Immigration," Brigstocke said. "They think a few more from the lorry might have turned up. I say "think" because the individuals concerned aren't telling anybody very much."
"Where?" Thorne asked.
Brigstocke glanced at the sheet of paper he was holding. "A car wash in Hackney. One of those places where there's half a dozen of them on your car at once, you know? With sponges and chamois leathers, inside with vacuums."
Stone nodded. "There's one near me. Inside and out for a tenner. Plus a tip."
"The owner's being questioned," Brigstocke said. "So far, surprise, surprise, he's pleading ignorance. There'll be a connection to the Ryans somewhere down the line, but I don't think it'll be much different from the others."
A man and a woman, suspected of being from the hijacked lorry, had been detained the previous week in Tottenham, having been discovered working in a restaurant kitchen. Two men had been seized a few days before that from a shop fitting wholesalers in Manor House. In both cases an astonishing bout of amnesia seemed to have struck all concerned. Arrests had been made, but none would lead to anything other than deportation orders for the illegals and fines for their employers. There would be enough red tape to stretch back to where the people in the lorry had originated and nothing to incriminate those who mattered in the Ryan or the Zarif organisations. Tughan took over from Brigstocke. "Let's move on to the shooting in Green Lanes. What about the witnesses, Sam? Any luck?" Karim shook his head. "Hard to believe, I know, but we still can't find anybody who saw anything that contradicts Memet Zarif's story. We've even got a couple who conveniently noticed a man in a balaclava carrying a gun and running away after the gunshots had finished."