Bloodline-9 (24 page)

Bloody wild-goose chase, by the sound of it, Jack had said. She’d given him a general picture of what she’d been asked to do, not deeming it necessary to mention Ray Garvey’s name, and he had stil struggled to share her enthusiasm.

‘Why should you be able to get anywhere if the cops can’t?’ he had said.

Because I
am
a cop, she’d wanted to say.
Inside
. And I’m bloody good at this stuff.

‘How long are you going to be away?’

It was the kind of job that might have suited a private detective - a career move she had considered a few years back, when she’d left the Force. Been pushed out. But she knew she’d hate sitting in cars for hours on end, clogging up the footwel with empty crisp packets and watching nondescript houses in the hope of getting a picture or two of an unfaithful wife or husband.

She’d made light of the hypnotherapist business, but it had not been funny at the time, and she was stupidly grateful to Tom Thorne for the helping hand. It had pul ed her back from a cosy future of dog-walking and crosswords. That was a pace of life she might be ready to embrace five or ten years down the line, but not now.

Christ, she wasn’t even sixty yet.

Thorne had seemed a little distracted, she’d thought, when they’d met on Saturday. It was hard to tel if there was anything real y wrong, though, because, if she were being honest, she could not say that she knew him wel enough to discern what was normal. There were too many things they never spoke about, and she always sensed a reaction if she as much as al uded to them.

Sometimes, watching the dog tear along the seafront, or pottering about with Jack in their tiny garden, those events seemed as if they had happened to somebody else. But she was not ashamed of what she’d done. Back then, the need to get a result had overshadowed everything - a single good one being enough to compensate for a dozen cases’ worth of frustration and failure. It drove her - something she knew she had in common with Tom Thorne - and even now, staring at the mess of paperwork and Post-its spread out on the bed in front of her, she felt an excitement she had feared had al but bled out of her.

I need to get out of the sodding house a bit more, she thought.

She had spent the day after she’d met up with Thorne going through the case notes from the original Garvey inquiry. She hadn’t expected any great revelation, but she had been shocked al over again by the casual brutality of the murders. Like Thorne, she found it hard to swal ow that they had been carried out by a man whose personality had been horribly altered; one for whom such terrible actions were wildly out of character.

She had fil ed her time subsequently on the phone or working at her laptop, making contact with old col eagues, many of whom had been closely involved with the inquiry. She had picked brains and cal ed in favours, tel ing those who were interested enough to ask what she had been up to since they’d last been in touch.

‘You know, keeping my hand in,’ her stock reply.

At the time of his arrest, Raymond Garvey had been married for seventeen years to his childhood sweetheart. In the wake of the predictable press hounding and after one too many turds through her letterbox, Jenny Garvey had left London and gone to ground, waiting for the man she thought she knew to go to prison, and, later, for her divorce to come through.

Chamberlain had traced her to a flat in Southampton. The woman had sounded understandably wary on the phone, but had softened a little when Chamberlain had assured her that she would not be picking at too many old scabs.

She would catch the train down to the South Coast first thing the fol owing morning and see what a chat with the ex-wife threw up. She knew, of course, that Anthony Garvey was not Jenny’s child, but without too much else to go on, she had little choice but to see where the conversation led. If she could catch so much as a glimpse of Jack’s wild goose.

He would be cal ing again in a couple of hours. They spoke three times a day, sometimes even more. Often, he would cal if she was taking a little longer than usual at the supermarket, but she rarely resented it.

It would be the usual conversation later on.

The night before, she’d asked how he was holding up and he’d told her he was trying to make the best of it, despite the fact that his hip was playing up and he missed her cooking.

She made sympathetic noises, but knew damned wel that he was living the life of Riley, walking about the house in his vest and living on takeaways and tinned bitter. It was a little lie, a lovely one. But she’d been spending a lot more time lately thinking about the less than lovely lies they told themselves and each other every day. The years they stil had together and the cancer not returning.

‘It’s strange, love, that’s al ,’ he’d said. ‘With you being away.’

Chamberlain did her best to organise the paperwork, made some room on the bed to lie down. Yes, she was away, she decided, so there was no reason why
she
should not behave a bit differently, too. She picked up the glass from the table next to the TV and carried it into the bathroom.

Despite the scope and scale of the Anthony Garvey inquiry, Thorne, like every detective on the Murder Investigation Team, had other cases on his books. Those inclined to murder a spouse or take a knife to someone who disrespected their training shoes did not hold back simply because there was a serial kil er taking up everybody’s time. There were also many cases going through the post-arrest stage. There was evidence to be careful y checked and prepared where court proceedings were imminent, and time-consuming liaison with the Crown Prosecution Service. As the trial date neared, a CPS rep might cal the detective on an hourly basis to pass on the thoughts and wishes of those trying to keep their clients out of prison.

With little he could do to help in the search for Dowd, Fowler and Walsh, and with Kitson working on the Maier photograph, Thorne had spent much of the morning dealing with his backlog: the beating to death of a thirteen-year-old boy by a gang of older girls in a park in Walthamstow; a couple who had died in an arson attack on a block of flats in Hammersmith.

Just after lunch, a CPS lawyer named Hobbs cal ed with depressing news. Eight months earlier, a young woman had been kil ed during an attempted car-jacking in Chiswick. She had got into her car after shopping, then stopped when she’d noticed a large piece of paper stuck to her rear windscreen. When she’d pul ed over and got out to remove it, a man had jumped from the vehicle behind and attempted to steal her car. In trying to stop him, she had been dragged beneath the wheels and, a week after the incident, her husband had taken the decision to turn off the life-support machine.

‘It’s Patrick Jennings defending,’ Hobbs said. ‘And he’s confident he can get this reduced to manslaughter.’

‘No chance,’ Thorne said.

‘Claims he’s got a decent crack at it. Reckons it was the woman’s fault. He intends to present a heap of Met Police campaign material which urges victims not to struggle, to hand over their property when threatened.’

‘You’re winding me up.’

‘He’s getting bloody good at this. Last month he was defending a kid who tried to take a woman’s car by climbing into the back seat while she was paying for petrol.’

‘Shit, that was Jennings?’

‘You see what I’m getting at?’

The trial had caused something of a stir in the papers, not to mention a nasty scuffle on the courtroom steps. The petrol station attendant had seen the boy getting into the car and kept the woman inside while he cal ed the police. It emerged afterwards that the boy had a history of sexual assault, but, with no weapon found, the defence had been able to get the charge knocked down to trespass and he had walked away with a two-hundred-pound fine.

‘We need to be careful, that’s al ,’ Hobbs said. ‘Don’t give the bugger anything he can use.’

‘It’s not happening.’

‘Let’s make sure it doesn’t,’ Hobbs said. ‘They’re starting to cal him Jack-off Jennings.’

Despite the work this entailed, along with establishing base-camp at a fearsome mountain of paperwork, Thorne could not get the Anthony Garvey case out of his mind. Not for more than a few minutes, at any rate. Its dark beats, the twisted melody of it. Like the first song you hear on the radio in the morning that stays in your head al day.

Martin Macken’s mouth like a ragged wound, howling blood.

A note stuck to Emily Walker’s fridge.

Debbie Mitchell’s kid, pushing his train up and down the carpet.

And al the time, as he and the rest of the team flapped and fidgeted and waited for something to happen, the nagging worry that they were dancing to Anthony Garvey’s tune.

Towards the end of a nine-hour shift, with going home at a reasonable hour starting to look like a real possibility, Thorne ran into Yvonne Kitson on his way back from the toilet.

‘I think I’ve found the girl in the photograph,’ Kitson said.

His first thought was that Louise had been right, that dinner together was probably optimistic. This was good news, nevertheless. Then he saw the look on Kitson’s face. ‘Fuck . . .’

‘I went through al the missing-persons reports for the six months after the date when the picture was taken. Found a girl who fits the description. She turned up two weeks later. Was . .

. discovered.’

‘Where?’

‘Same place she’d been sent to pick up the money, near as damn it,’ Kitson said. ‘Back of Paddington station. Looks like Garvey’s got a sense of humour.’

‘I’m pissing myself.’

‘I’ve put a cal into the SIO. Got an address for the parents.’

‘You told Brigstocke?’

‘He’s out, so—’

‘Let me.’ He took out his phone as Kitson turned back towards the Incident Room, said, ‘Wel done,’ as he dial ed.

Got Russel Brigstocke’s voicemail.

‘It’s me. Just in case you’re playing golf with Trevor Jesmond, I thought you could pass on a message. Tel him that his nice, useful avenue of enquiry has just become a cul-de-sac.’

TWENTY-THREE

Al at once, Alec Sinclair, a large man in his late fifties with thinning hair and restless hands, fel silent. He had been talking about his daughter Chloe, whose body had been found in a disused tool shed behind Paddington station almost three years earlier.

Struggling for words, he turned to his wife, who was seated next to him, in the cluttered living room of a terraced house in Balham. Miriam Sinclair was probably a few years younger than her husband, but there was grey bleeding through a dye job above her forehead and Thorne guessed the make-up was a little more thickly applied than it might once have been.

‘It’s nice to talk about her,’ she said. She smiled at Thorne and Kitson. ‘But then it al sort of rushes up at you. It’s not like you forget what happened or anything.’

‘I dream about her sometimes,’ Alec said. ‘And there are those few seconds when you wake up . . . before you remember she’s dead.’

‘You sure I can’t get you anything to drink?’

‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Thorne said.

The couple had asked, of course, as soon as Kitson had cal ed the previous afternoon. Shocked to get the cal , so long after the investigation into their daughter’s murder had petered out, but as eager as they had ever been to find out if there had been any progress. Kitson had told them that Chloe’s murder might wel be connected to an ongoing inquiry; then she had checked herself, stressed that the inquiry into Chloe’s murder was stil ongoing itself, would continue to be until an arrest was made.

‘It’s fine, love,’ Miriam had said on the phone. ‘I know how stretched you lot are, and, I mean, you’ve only got to open a paper to see there are plenty of other murders. Other families who haven’t been grieving quite as long as we have.’

‘Have you found him?’ Alec asked now.

‘We don’t have anyone in custody,’ Kitson said. ‘But we have a number of useful leads, and—’

‘The boyfriend.’ Miriam looked at her husband. ‘We
know
it’s the boyfriend.’

‘Right,’ Kitson said. The officer leading the hunt for Chloe’s kil er three years before had confirmed that their prime suspect had been the man she’d been reported as seeing at the time of her death. Despite their best efforts, they had never been able to trace him.

‘We’ve got a name,’ Thorne said. ‘A description.’ He didn’t say that neither was exactly reliable. ‘We’re doing everything we can to fol ow these up and obviously we’ve passed al this information on to DCI Spedding.’ The man who had been in charge of the original investigation had been delighted to hear from Kitson; happy, he said, to share any intel igence that might take the Chloe Sinclair murder off his books.

Alec Sinclair turned to his wife. ‘Dave Spedding stil gets in touch from time to time, doesn’t he?’

‘A card every Christmas,’ Miriam said. ‘A phone cal on Chloe’s birthday. That sort of thing.’

‘I mean, he was very close to us by the end. Close to Chloe, too, in a funny sort of way.’

‘Hard for him as wel , I would have thought,’ Miriam said.

Thorne nodded. It should be, he thought. The day it stops being hard is the day to get out, to up-sticks and find yourself a nice little pub to run. He said that Spedding seemed like a good man, and a good copper.

‘It might sound stupid,’ Kitson said, ‘but is there anything you might have remembered since the original investigation? Something that’s come back to you?’

‘We would have told Dave Spedding,’ Miriam said.

‘I know, and we real y don’t want to dredge it al up again.’

‘Would you mind just going over it?’ Thorne asked. On the cupboard against the far wal , he could see a col ection of photographs in metal frames: the Sinclairs on a beach with two smal children; Chloe and her brother cradling a baby monkey at the gates of a safari park; a young man posing proudly next to what was probably his first car. The brother who had lost a sister, the son who had become an only child.

‘She was on her gap year,’ Alec said. ‘Saving up to go travel ing before university. She did some stuff for me at my office for a while, but she was bored to death, so she got the job in the pub. That’s where she met this Tony.’