Thorne had woken several times in the night and, after a few minutes lying there in the dark, he had somehow managed to drift away again, but now his chest was tight and it felt as though his heart was pulsing hard and fast against the bone. He knew there was no chance of getting back to sleep now, because this time his phone was ringing.
‘We’ve got a body you might be interested in,’ Holland said.
‘I’m always interested.’
‘I stuck a flag-up on the PNC. Everyone we spoke to the last couple of days, just in case. The on-call DI in Hackney rang me ten minutes ago.’
Thorne tried to think. Who was in Hackney? He found himself smiling when it came to him. ‘Peter Allen?’
‘Dead as mutton.’
‘That’s a coincidence and a half.’
‘Isn’t it though?’
‘I’ll be about forty minutes,’ Thorne said. ‘Make sure the body stays where it is until I get there.’
While he dressed, the eight-thirty news bulletin on BBC London told him that traffic was building up on the A40 into town, that the Olympics were now seven billion pounds over budget and that there had been no significant developments overnight at the armed siege in Tulse Hill. Thorne had thought it best to check. He guessed that he would not be the first person Donnelly called if there had been.
Studying his reflection as he brushed his teeth, he realised that he had not shaved for the last couple of days. He had not showered either, but had gone heavy on the Right Guard and hoped he would get away with it.
Hendricks would be the first to let him know if he hadn’t.
He spat into the sink, then stared at himself again. He probably looked a little less worn out than he felt, but there wasn’t much in it. His hair was a good deal greyer these days, more of it on one side than the other, same as always, and creeping in at much the same rate that the line of his jaw was subsumed into flesh and the circles darkened into black smiles beneath his eyes. Hendricks had already mentioned all those things of course, had gone as far as giving him a selection of male grooming products the previous Christmas. They each remained unopened in the bathroom cabinet. It wasn’t that Thorne thought them in any way effeminate, rather that he was still unconvinced that any of them actually worked. It was a smart move on the part of cosmetics companies, he reckoned, to start ripping men off in the same way they had done for so long with women.
Men were every bit as vain after all, and probably a damn sight more gullible.
The toupee, Bruce? Trust me, it’s absolutely invisible.
He leaned in close to the mirror, a ragged rumble in his throat as he breathed. He reached up to wipe away the smear of condensation. Wasn’t this about the time that men his age were supposed to start looking distinguished? Maybe that was just architects and film directors, blokes that knew about wine and read books nobody had heard of. Most of the coppers he knew who were pushing fifty just looked… fucked.
Were fucked.
Thorne walked back into the bedroom and picked up his leather jacket from the chair in the corner. He examined the dark stain on the front and wondered if buying a new one in exactly the same style and colour would count as a minor addition to his list of lifestyle changes. He shoved the tattered slab of Amin Akhtar paperwork into his briefcase, then carried it to the bathroom.
He tossed in the can of Right Guard and turned towards the front door.
Holland was waiting on the pavement and raised a hand in greeting as Thorne pulled up. The entrance to the block had been tented off and stood guarded by uniformed officers, statue-still behind the fluttering line of crime scene tape that ran around the edge of the front garden. Holland was already wearing a blue paper suit and, as soon as Thorne was out of the car, Holland handed him one of his own. Thorne tossed his jacket into the back seat of the BMW and clambered into the suit, a hand on Holland’s shoulder for balance, turning his face away from the small crowd of onlookers who stood watching from the other side of the street.
Nodding towards the newcomer and muttering to one another. Phones raised to snap pictures.
Some, Thorne knew, were waiting eagerly for a body – or better still, bodies – to be brought out, while others were looking around for cameras and faces they recognised, wondering who the star of the film was. The majority were almost certainly standing there purely because that’s what other people were doing.
It was probably the most popular that Peter David Allen had ever been.
‘Who found the body?’ Thorne asked.
Holland turned towards the block. ‘There was music playing all night. He had the same album on repeat at full volume, so the neighbours called the council.’
‘ He being Allen?’
‘Well… possibly. Anyway, the council sent the noise pollution jobsworths round and eventually they called us. They ran the address through the PNC and when the flag came up, the local boys put the door in.’
‘No sign of forced entry?’
‘Apart from that one, no.’
‘What was it?’
‘What was what?’
‘The album.’
‘Slayer. Hell Awaits, if you want to get really specific.’
‘Definitely a suspicious death then,’ Thorne said. ‘Nobody in their right mind leaves that on repeat.’
‘You don’t think he could have overdosed accidentally then?’
‘Come on, you’ve seen his records.’ Thorne bent down to pull on the paper bootees that he hated so much. ‘No record of intravenous drug use. Not so much as an arrest for anything even drug-related. To be honest, even if he’d been a Premier League junkie, I’d still think it was iffy the day after you spoke to him.’
Holland nodded. ‘Easy enough to give someone an overdose if they’ve got no tolerance.’
‘Right.’ Thorne stood up and they began walking towards the flat. On the other side of the road a few more mobile phones were raised to begin shooting stills and video. ‘Having said all that, I mean… Slayer?’
‘That’s a decent motive in itself,’ Holland said.
‘Could easily have been a mercy killing.’
There were more pictures being taken in the now crowded room where Allen’s body had been discovered, though the cameras were a little more sophisticated and, with the exception of the jury at any resulting court case, the films and photos were not intended for public consumption. The police cameramen moved easily around the crime scene examiners, weaving between assorted groupings of forensic scientists and fingerprint officers, each team intimately acquainted with the working practices of the others as they calmly went about their tasks.
Bagging, tagging, scraping.
Thorne could never watch any of them work without being reminded of how clumsy his own efforts seemed by comparison. These were the men and women who did the real detection, while he blundered around hoping to get lucky and banging his head into a succession of brick walls. At its best, there was a kind of… grace to what they did, though this was not to say that their manner was always delicate, or necessarily deferential to the corpse around which they crouched and crept.
‘Think anyone would notice if that hi-fi went walkabout?’
‘Well, I’ll keep schtum if I can have the wide-screen.’
‘Seriously though, you seen some of the DVDs he had?’
‘Yeah, he was a bit of a torture buff, clearly.’
‘Gang rape and chainsaws and all that.’
‘Did you know that nine out of ten people enjoy gang rape?’
Allen was lying on his side in front of the sofa. His eyes were half closed and protruding. His lips were blue. The side of his face that lay against the floor was swollen and purplish and there was a light coating of froth around his mouth.
‘The other morning,’ Holland said, ‘when I said this case sounded like something different.’ He nodded down towards the body. ‘I suppose I meant that there wouldn’t be any of this.’
Thorne looked at Peter Allen’s pale fingers, clawed against the tatty carpet, and remembered what had been said on the phone the night before.
Another box ticked.
It was not the first time he had thought about Louise that morning.
It had seemed somewhat incongruous, barrelling through the rush-hour traffic towards Hackney and listening to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Roaring along bus lanes with the blue light flashing on the roof and jumping lights with his hand pressed to the horn, while those voices – one frail, one pure – snaked so perfectly around one another. Emmylou had always maintained that she and Parsons had never been lovers, but Thorne still found it hard to believe. You could hear it in the way they sang to each other, for each other.
He listened, and asked himself why he had really called Louise.
Had some part of him hoped that she would tell him how unhappy and lonely she was, what a mistake they had made? How would he have felt if she had actually said any of those things?
He had wanted to talk to someone who knew him, he could admit that much, however uncomfortable it might turn out to be. He had wanted to hear her voice. Yes, and perhaps he had needed to pick at the scab just a little. To open it up. All those changes that had been decided upon in the wake of the split were exciting in theory… fresh challenges, change of outlook, all that, but wasn’t it possible that you could change too much and move on too quickly?
He would be stupid if he wasn’t scared.
No time to dwell on it now, thank God.
Another box…
Thorne had put his foot down and pushed on across the roundabout at Old Street, losing himself in the gorgeous noise of Gram and Emmylou, and the tightness in his chest was gone by the time he saw Holland raising a hand to him outside the crime scene.
Hemmings, the on-call pathologist, was a humourless piece of work Thorne had run into a time or two before. As he walked across to join Thorne and Holland, the look on his doughy face made it clear that having already conducted his initial examination of the body, he was not best pleased at being asked to wait until Thorne arrived.
‘He’s been dead at least eight hours. No more than twelve.’
‘No time for hello?’
‘I was told you were in a hurry.’
Thorne thought he could probably spare the few seconds it would take to tell Hemmings where to go and what to do to himself when he got there. He decided against it. ‘Definitely an overdose?’
‘Well, clearly I can’t say if there was any underlying condition that precipitated it, but on the face of it… probably. There are no track marks to suggest he’d done it before.’
‘So, not self-inflicted?’
‘Not for me to say, but presuming he was right-handed, it’s a little odd that he injected himself in his right arm. Then again, you’re the detective.’ The way he said the word, and the smile before he turned away, made it clear the pathologist thought much the same about what the likes of Thorne did as Thorne himself.
Blundering, clumsy…
‘Arsehole,’ Holland muttered.
‘That’s Dr Arsehole to you,’ Thorne said. ‘They like you to remember that.’ They walked across to where a fingerprint officer was working at the hi-fi, passing a magnetic wand across the surface, then applying powder with a fibreglass brush as delicately as if he were restoring an Old Master. ‘Anything?’
‘Plenty,’ the officer said. ‘But I’m guessing they all belong to the victim.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there are whole areas that have no prints at all, lots of things that have obviously been wiped clean. Even the empty beer cans in the bin.’ He nodded across towards the body. ‘And the syringe, and as far as I know not many people can jack up without touching that.’ He smiled. ‘I mean, I don’t want to tell you your job… ’
‘I wish more people would,’ Thorne said.
‘Whoever did it wasn’t as clever as he thought though.’ The officer laid down his brush and took a step across to a plastic box containing evidence that had already been earmarked for further examination. He reached inside and held up a plastic bag containing a bottle of cleaning spray. ‘He didn’t think to wipe this down after he’d used it.’
‘D’oh!’ Holland said.
‘It gets even better.’ The crime scene forensic manager, who had clearly been listening in, walked across and removed a second bag with one of the beer cans inside. ‘No prints,’ she said, ‘but I’ll bet we can still get DNA from it.’
Thorne looked at the two technicians, each proudly holding up their evidence bags like children waiting to be praised. ‘Which is going to be quicker?’ he asked.
They looked at one another.
Thorne knew that under normal circumstances the prints would probably come back faster than the DNA, but he also knew that there were a good many variables and that turnaround times for both could be significantly improved if the job was deemed urgent enough. If the samples were hand-delivered to the Forensic Science Service labs at Lambeth and prioritised. A matter of hours as opposed to days.
The forensic manager shrugged. ‘Probably not a lot in it.’
‘What about ADAPT?’ Holland asked. He reddened slightly as everyone turned their attention to him. ‘Accelerated DNA Profiling Technology. They reckon they can get a profile in under an hour now.’
‘Where did you get that from?’ Thorne asked.
‘You know those memos and Job newsletters that you throw away every day? Some of us actually read them.’ Holland looked to the forensic manager. ‘DNA in a box, right?’
She nodded, then turned to Thorne, a hand raised. ‘Under an hour is a bit of an exaggeration and anyway it’s not cut and dried. It’s enough to make an arrest on, but the level of identification is not strictly evidential. So, even if I got permission to run it, nothing I come up with would be admissible in court.’
‘I’ll worry about that later,’ Thorne said.
‘I can’t promise anything.’
‘See what you can do.’
The fingerprint officer took half a step forward. ‘I reckon I can get the prints turned around in a few hours,’ he said. ‘If it’s really important.’
Thorne knew that normally the forensic manager would be responsible for looking after both print and DNA evidence. For getting the samples to the lab then transferring the information to the relevant offender databases at Scotland Yard to see if there was a match. On this occasion though, he guessed that keeping them separate and encouraging a degree of competition would get him a result the quickest.
‘There’s a bottle of decent Scotch in it, OK?’ Thorne looked to the fingerprint officer, who nodded. He turned to the forensic manager.
‘Make it a case of Merlot and you’re on,’ she said.
‘You get back to me before he does, I’ll cook you dinner and drink it with you.’ Thorne looked back to the fingerprint officer. ‘That offer doesn’t apply to you, obviously.’
As he walked towards the front door, Thorne barked instructions at Holland who was a step or two behind. ‘I want everything done on the hurry-up,’ he said. ‘House-to-house, the lot.’
‘I’ll sort it.’
‘And talk to the coroner. I want this PM done straight away, so put the wind up him a bit. Tell him there’s a police officer’s life at stake.’ He began to strip off the paper suit. ‘And I want Hendricks to do it.’
Holland watched him. ‘So what do you think? If Allen was responsible for putting Amin on to the hospital wing… ’
‘He was,’ Thorne said. ‘Someone paid Allen to do it, and now they’ve paid someone else to make sure he never tells us who.’ He leaned against the front door and bent to remove the bootees. ‘Whoever killed Amin wanted him in that hospital, because that was the only place they could really make it look like suicide. Whoever did it knows the prison. Knows it’s not very easy to walk into someone’s cell in the middle of the night and string them up. They organised the whole thing, and now we’ve started sniffing around they’re ordering a clean-up operation.’
‘If we can find him, it sounds like whoever killed Allen is our best bet.’
‘One of them,’ Thorne said.
He kicked off the suit, took out his mobile and walked towards the BMW, dialling as he went.
The call went straight to an answering machine.
‘Rahim, it’s Tom Thorne. Listen, I know you’re already frightened, but I thought you should know that whoever was responsible for Amin’s death has just had somebody else killed. If that scares you even more, then good. I’m sorry, but I don’t really have time to care. Now, is there something you want to tell me?’