Bloodline-9 (6 page)

Inside Becke House, Thorne walked into the lift and jabbed the button for the third floor, thinking back.

He was an up-the-sergeant’s-arse, eager-to-please detective constable back then. Kentish Town CID, the station no more than five minutes’ walk from where he lived now.

The lift doors were stubbornly refusing to close, so Thorne stabbed at the button again. He was ashamed that he could remember every detail of a blue suit he used to wear back then and the number plate of the car he’d been driving around in, but
not
the names of Raymond Garvey’s victims.

The door final y slid shut.

Not a single one . . .

He told himself that it was always the way, especial y with a series of kil ings. How many of Dennis Nilsen’s fifteen victims could he name, or Colin Ireland’s five? Could he remember any of Harold Shipman’s two hundred or more?

Out of the lift, he walked down the corridor, past the Major Incident Room and towards the smal office he shared with DI Yvonne Kitson.

It was different with his own cases, of course. He could remember every name, every face; each ‘before’ and ‘after’ photograph. Her mother’s name might not have been as instantly familiar as it should have been, but Thorne knew he would never forget Emily Walker’s.

Kitson had left a note on his desk about a case that was due in court the fol owing week and some evidence that needed chasing up. Thorne laid it to one side and pul ed the computer keyboard towards him. Al the way back from Colindale, he had been wondering where the Garvey case notes would have been archived. Now, he decided there was a far quicker way to do a bit of research.

Thorne hit a few keys and logged on to Google. Typed in ‘Raymond Garvey’.

There were over three hundred and fifty thousand hits.

He scrol ed past the first half a dozen links, ignoring Wikipedia and something cal ed serialkil er.com, until he found a site that was not advertising a magazine or true-crime shows on satel ite TV and seemed more or less reliable. Hee looked at the list of names. Susan Sharpe, aged forty-four, was number four. She had been attacked on her way home from a gym, bludgeoned to death, as had al the other victims, and been found on a canal bank in Kensal Green, the vast mausoleums and elaborate statuary of its famous cemetery spread out alongside. Thorne clicked on the name and brought up a picture. He saw no immediate resemblance to Emily Walker, then reminded himself that he had never seen Emily alive.

Raymond Anthony Garvey had murdered seven women in four months. He might have kil ed many more had he not been arrested after a simple pub brawl in Finsbury Park. Had a sample of his DNA taken after that incident not matched that found on two of the victims. It was the kind of coincidence that would have crime-fiction writers accused of laziness, but good luck played a bigger part in cracking such cases than most senior police officers would care to admit.

Garvey, who always refused to talk about his motives, was given five consecutive life sentences, and was told by the judge that he would die in prison. That happened a lot sooner than anyone expected, as he was diagnosed with a brain tumour twelve years into his sentence and succumbed to it six months later.

Thorne looked again at the picture of Raymond Garvey - the bland, blissful stare of an ordinary psychopath - before highlighting the names of the women he had murdered. Just after he’d clicked PRINT, the door opened and Russel Brigstocke walked in.

The DCI dropped his sizeable backside on to the edge of Thorne’s desk and glanced at the images on the computer screen. He nudged at his glasses. ‘Hol and told me about that.

What are the bloody chances?’ He pushed his fingers through what had once been a pretty impressive quiff, but was now getting decidedly thin.

‘Yeah.’ Thorne knew that his own appearance had changed just as much. There was stil more grey hair on one side than the other, but a lot more of it everywhere. He logged out of the website, Garvey’s face giving way to a blue screen and a Met Police logo: the reassuring words ‘Working Together for a Safer London’.

‘Thirty-six hours into this one already, Tom,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Where are we?’

The DCI could interpret Tom Thorne’s expressions and his curt body language as wel as anyone. He recognised the twitch in the shoulder that meant ‘Nowhere.’ The puff of the cheeks that said, ‘Barring our kil er handing himself in, you won’t be standing outside Colindale station making triumphant announcements to the press anytime soon.’

‘What’s happening with the FSS?’ Thorne asked.

The Forensic Science Service lab in Victoria was busy examining al the trace evidence gathered from the crime scene: hairs, fibres, fingerprints. They were analysing the bloodstain pattern in the hope of creating an accurate reconstruction of the crime. They were trying to identify the fragment of cel uloid found clutched in Emily Walker’s hand.

‘I’m chasing,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Same as I always am. Tomorrow, with a fol owing wind, but more likely Sunday.’

‘What about the E-fit?’

‘Have you
seen
it?’

Thorne nodded. The curtain-twitching neighbour had clearly not witnessed as much, or in as much detail, as he had first claimed. ‘I’m not holding my breath,’ he said.

‘Right. I don’t think it’s going to help us a great deal either, but what do I know? Jesmond wanted it out there on the hurry-up, so it’s out. It’s in the
Standard
today, and some of the nationals.
London Tonight
, too.’

Brigstocke was every bit as transparent as Thorne himself, and Thorne caught the rol of the eyes that translated as, ‘Waste of fucking time.’ Of course, Superintendent Trevor Jesmond would want the E-fit distributed as widely as possible, to show that his team were making progress. It did not seem to concern him as much as it should - with a picture of the kil er that looked as though it had been drawn by a chimpanzee - that precious time and manpower would now be wasted taking, logging and filing hundreds of pointless cal s, mental or plain misguided, proclaiming that the person the police were looking for was everyone from the man next door to Johnny Depp.

The superintendent’s overriding concern was always how
he
came across on screen or in print. He would be doing his bit to camera outside Colindale station later that day. He would dispense the simple, shocking facts, emphasising the brutality and the horror of what had been done to Emily Walker and letting it be known that any steps necessary would be taken to bring her kil er to justice.

Thorne had to give the man his due. He couldn’t catch a council-tax dodger if his life depended on it, but he did righteous indignation pretty damn wel .

‘It’s someone she knew,’ Thorne said. ‘Someone who’d been watching. She’d seen him around, spoken to him, whatever.’

Brigstocke nodded. ‘Let’s get bodies into every shop she went to regularly, the nearest supermarket, the gym she visited. Let’s take a good hard look at friends and workmmates.

Interview al the neighbours again.’

‘Phil reckons he came prepared.’ Thorne picked up the post-mortem report that Hendricks had delivered the previous afternoon, flicked through it. ‘I’ve got a feeling he’d been

“preparing” for a while.’

Brigstocke groaned. ‘How bloody long have I been doing this?’ he said. ‘And yet hearing stuff like that stil depresses me.’ He eased himself up from Thorne’s desk and walked to the window. ‘I mean, I’m not saying it would be any better if her old man had caught her playing away from home and smacked her over the head with something. I know she wouldn’t be any less dead. But Jesus . . .’

‘It
should
depress you,’ Thorne said. ‘When it doesn’t—’

‘I know, time to retire.’

‘You turn into Trevor Jesmond.’

Brigstocke smiled. He picked up the piece of paper that had been spewing from the printer when he’d walked in. He looked down at the list of seven names. ‘This anything we should be looking at?’

‘Don’t see why,’ Thorne said. ‘Garvey died in prison three years ago.’

Brigstocke flapped the sheet of paper, as though he were fanning himself. ‘Just one of those freaky things.’

The DCI nodded his understanding. The pair of them had worked a case only a few months before in which a man had been beaten to death in front of his family after confronting a noisy neighbour. It transpired that twenty years earlier, and only two streets away, exactly the same thing had happened to that victim’s father.

‘One of many,’ Thorne said.

As it turned out, with a briefing that overran by twenty minutes and a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer who refused to get off the phone, lunchtime would have been a tricky time for Thorne to get away. But by then it did not matter: Louise had already cal ed to say that she would be making her own way back to the flat. That she felt OK and needed to get out.

Driving back at the end of the day, Thorne felt nervous, as though he and Louise had had an argument. He ran through the conversations they might have when he got home, but they al went out of his head the moment he stepped into the silent flat. When he saw her lying on her side in the darkened bedroom.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m not asleep.’

It was only eight o’clock, but Thorne got undressed and climbed in beside her. They lay stil for a while, listening to a motorbike revving up in the street outside, and a song Thorne couldn’t quite place drifting down from the flat upstairs.

‘Do you remember the Garvey kil ings?’ he asked.

She grunted and he wondered if he had woken her up, then she said, ‘I was at col ege, I think. Why?’

Thorne told her about Susan Sharpe. How a mother and daughter had been murdered, fifteen years apart. It was quiet now upstairs and Thorne stil wasn’t sure what the song had been.

‘You’re doing it again,’ Louise said. ‘Trying to make me feel better.’

‘I wasn’t, I swear.’

‘And al you’ve succeeded in doing is making yourself feel old.’

Thorne laughed, for the first time in a few days. He pushed up close behind her and slid his arm across her stomach. After a few seconds he felt awkward and began to wonder if she would want it there, so he took it away again.

FIVE

As per the standard system of rotas and rest days, Thorne spent seven Saturdays out of every eight at home. Normal y, a Saturday morning would be taken up with sleeping far later than usual, nipping out for a newspaper then coming home for a gloriously unhealthy breakfast. Since Louise had come into his life, these were no longer always solitary activities, and thankful y the same was true of the sex, which could occasional y be squeezed in between the fry-up and
Football Focus
.

This Saturday, two days after Emily Walker’s murder, al rest days had been cancel ed and overtime approved where necessary. Thorne sat in his office at Becke House, not looking through statements, ignoring the reports on the desk in front of him, wondering instead if the possibility of sex had now become remote.

When would it be al right to talk about it? Just how much of a self-centred bastard was he being, even thinking about it?

He looked over to the desk opposite, where Yvonne Kitson was working considerably harder than he was. She had been taken off a domestic murder that was al but done and dusted, and drafted in to bolster the top end of the team. Thorne was grateful to have her on board. Kitson was one of the best detectives they had, her achievements that much more impressive considering her circumstances, past and present. For several years she had been a single mum of two, her marriage having col apsed after a messy affair with a senior col eague that had also resulted in her formerly smooth progress through the ranks coming to a shuddering halt.

She glanced up from her desk, saw Thorne looking. She dropped her eyes again, turned a page. ‘What?’

Once, when neither had been laid for a while and it was debatable which was the more drunk, there had been the mildest of flirtations between the two of them, but they were long past that.

‘Saturday,’ Thorne said.

Kitson scoffed: ‘Never mind the bloody Tottenham game, or a morning under the duvet with Louise, or whatever you were thinking about missing. Some of us should be watching our sons playing rugby. I’l have to be even more of a taxi service than I am already to make up for this.’

For a few moments, Thorne thought about tel ing her what had happened to Louise, getting a female perspective on it. But he just smiled and went back to the reports in front of him.

A minute later, a bal of paper bounced off his desktop and on to the floor. He bent to retrieve it and stared at Kitson. She shrugged, denying al knowledge.

Thorne unwrapped what turned out to be a transcript of that morning’s cal s to the Incident Room. The published E-fit had generated a good deal of attention, and while the Press Office was handling the understandable media interest, the team itself had to deal with any information from the public. Thorne and Brigstocke had clearly underestimated the extent to which the picture would inspire some of the city’s more community-minded nutcases.

‘I wouldn’t mind coming in,’ Kitson said, pointing to the sheet of paper in Thorne’s hand, ‘if I didn’t have to spend al morning sorting through that shit.’

‘Got to be done, though,’ Thorne said.

They al knew it. Everyone on the team routinely joked about procedure and bitched about paper-pushing, and 99 per cent of the time, with a primary lead as shaky as their E-fit, nothing would come from this kind of work, but you had to double- and triple-check, just in case. Nobody wanted to be the one who missed the vital piece of information tucked away in a long list of crank cal s. The clue hidden in the crap. In an age where the inquiry into the inquiry was commonplace, arse-covering had become second nature. It began before the victim was cold and would continue until the judge’s gavel came down.

It didn’t stop the whingeing, though.

‘Not a single name on there more than once,’ Kitson said.

‘You’re wrong.’ Thorne ran his finger down the list, stopping to beckon Hol and inside when he saw his face come around the door. ‘
Three
different people phoned to let us know they think it looks like the bloke who runs the garage in
EastEnders
.’