"It's the timing I don't understand," Thorne said. "Now, I mean, after."
"I think this decision was made before the shooting in the minicab office."
"And that didn't cause anybody to rethink it?"
"Apparently not."
Richards, the concentric-circles man, came along the corridor with a file that was, by all accounts, terribly important. Tughan took it with barely a word. Thorne waited until the Welshman had gone.
"When we found that lorry driver dead and those two in the woods with bullets in the backs of their heads, you were fired up. "This has got to stop," you said. You were angry about the Izzigils, about Marcus Moloney. You were up for it. There's no point pretending you weren't."
Tughan said nothing, clutched the file he was holding that little bit tighter to his chest.
"How do these people decide what we're going to do?" Thorne asked.
"Who we target and who we ignore? Which lucky punters have a chance when it comes to us catching the men responsible for killing their husband or their father, and which poor sods might just as well ask a traffic warden to sort it out? How do these people formulate policy?
Do they roll a fucking dice every morning? Pick a card?" Tughan spoke to the pin board scratched at a small mark on the lapel of his brown suit. "They divvy up the men and they dole out the money as they see fit. It goes where they think it's most needed, and where they think it might get a return. It's not rocket science, Thorne."
"So, which deserving cause came out of the hat this time?"
"We're shifting direction slightly, looking towards vice. The Job wants to crack down on the foreign gangs moving into the game: Russians, Albanians, Lithuanians. It's getting nasty, and when one of these gangs wants to hit another operation they tend to go for the soft targets. They kill the girls."
Thorne shrugged. "So, Memet Zarif and Stephen Ryan just go about their business?"
"Nobody's giving them "Get out of Jail Free" cards."
"Talking of which."
"Gordon Rooker will be released by the beginning of next week." Thorne had figured as much. "Right. He's one of those loose ends you were talking about."
"Rooker can give us names, a few decent ones, and we're going to take them."
"Define "decent"."
"Look, there'll be better results, but there'll be plenty of worse ones.
Right now, this is what we've decided to settle for." Even Thorne's sarcastic grunt failed to set Tughan off. He'd remained remarkably calm throughout the entire exchange. "You're a footie fan, right? How would you feel if your team played beautiful stuff all bloody season and won fuck all?"
If Thorne had felt like lightening the atmosphere, he might have asked Tughan if he'd ever seen Spurs play. But he didn't. "You won't be offended if I don't hang around for the emotional goodbye later on?" he said.
"I'd be amazed if you did."
Thorne pushed himself away from the door, took half a step.
"I'm the same as you," Tughan said. "Really. I want to get them all, but sometimes. no, most of the bloody time, you've got to be content with just some of them. Not always the right ones, either-nowhere near, in fact but what can you do?" Thorne completed the step, carried on taking them. Thinking: No, not the same as me.
He'd found nothing suitable in Kentish Town and fared little better in Highgate Village, where there seemed to be a great many antique shops and precious little else. He'd carried on up to Hampstead and spent half an hour failing to find a parking space. Now, he was trying his luck in Archway, where it was easy enough to park, but where he wasn't exactly spoiled for choice in other ways.
Having decided with no idea what else to get for a seven-month-old baby to buy clothes, Thorne couldn't really explain why he was wandering aimlessly around a chemist's. As it went, it was no ordinary chemist's and had quickly become Thorne's favourite shop after he'd discovered it a few months earlier. Yes, you could buy shampoo and get a prescription filled, but it also sold, for no reason Thorne could fathom, catering-sized packs of peanuts past their sell-by date, motor oil, crisps, and other stuff not seen before or since in a place you normally went for pills and pile cream. It was also ridiculously cheap, as if the chemist were just trying to turn a quick profit on items that had been delivered there by mistake. Thorne might have wondered if somewhere there wasn't a grocers with several unwanted boxes of condoms and corn-plasters, if it weren't for the fact that there were a number of such multi-purpose outlets springing up in the area.
Maybe small places could no longer afford to specialise. Maybe shopkeepers just wanted to keep life interesting. Whatever the reason, Thorne knew a number of places where the astute shopper could kill several birds with one stone, even if it might not otherwise have occurred to him to do so. One of his favorites was a shop that sold fruit and vegetables. and wool. Another boldly announced itself as 'currency exchange and delicatessen'. Thorne could never quite picture anyone asking for 'fifty quid's worth of escudos and a slice of carrot cake' and was sure the place was a front for some dodgy scheme or other. He remembered a small shop near the Nag's Head which had seemed to sell nothing much of anything during its odd opening hours. The owners, a couple of cheery Irish guys, appeared uninterested in any conventional definition of 'stock', and no one was hugely surprised when the place closed down the day after the IRA cease fire It was easy for Thorne to imagine places and people as other than they seemed. It was in his nature and borne of experience. It was also, for better or worse, his job.
In the chemist's, Thorne finally realised that, though disposable nappies would be useful, they were really no kind of a present. He looked at his watch: the shops would be shutting soon. After a few words with the woman behind the counter, who he was seriously starting to fancy, Thorne stepped out on to the street.
He stood for a minute, and then another, letting people move past him as the day began to wind down. It wasn't that he had any grand moral notions about serving these people. He didn't imagine for one second that he, or the thousands like him, could really protect them. But he had to side with those of them who drew a line. He knew from bitter experience that some of them might one day be his to hunt down. Some would think nothing of hurting a child. Some would wound, rape or kill to get whatever it was they needed. That was a fact, plain and terrible.
Most, though, would know where to stop. They would draw a line at round about the same place he did. Most would stop at cheating the tax man or driving home after a few drinks too many. Most would go no further than a raised voice or a bit of push and shove to blow away the cobwebs. Most had a threshold of acceptable behaviour, of pain and fury, of disgust at cruelty that was close to his own. These were the people Thorne would stand with.
The lives of these people, to a greater or lesser extent were being affected every minute of every day by the Ryans and the Zarifs of the world. By those who crossed the line for profit. Some would never even know it, handing over a cab fare or the money for a burger without any idea whose pockets they were lining. Whose execution they might unwittingly be funding. Some would be hurt, directly or through a loved one, their existence bumped out of alignment in the time it took to lose a child to drugs. Twisted by those few moments spent signing the credit agreement. Smashed out of existence in the second it took to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They worked in banks and offices and on buses. They had children, and got cancer, and believed in God or television. They were wonderful, and shit, and they did not deserve to have their lives sullied while Thorne and others like him were being told to step away. Thorne thought about the woman he fancied in the chemist's and the bloke who lived in the flat upstairs, and the man passing him at that very second yanking a dog behind himself. He remembered the Jesus woman and the reluctant security guard who'd thrown her out of the supermarket.