Death Message (34 page)

'We are going back quite a long way,' Yashere said. 'Perhaps I should ask a colleague who knows his way around the system better than I do.'

Thorne had a better idea. 'Who was the prosecutor? You must have that on record.'

'I think so.'

'Do you have a number?'

Yashere logged out of one system and into another. More clicking, more waiting.

'I think you will need a home number,' Yashere said. 'There are not too many fools like you and I still working at this time on a Saturday.' He said that he'd try to get hold of Stuart Emery and have him call Thorne back.

Thorne gave Yashere his prepay phone number. 'Can you tell him that it's very urgent?' he said.

'Please don't forget my missing training shoe, Inspector...'

Thorne tried Hendricks' mobile again, and got no answer. He paced the office; told Kitson he'd see her on Monday when she stuck her head in to say goodnight; checked his watch every couple of minutes.

Ten minutes after Thorne had spoken to Yashere, Stuart Emery called.

Brooks climbed back up the bare wooden stairs from Tindall's cellar. There was no electricity down there and he'd had to use a shitty little torch he'd dug out of a kitchen drawer. A kid's thing with a thin, milky beam. He'd managed to find a couple of hammers, in a dusty canvas tool-bag, among the piles of damp magazines and boxes of videos, and he carried them both up to get a good look in the light.

He chose the smaller of the two: a claw hammer with green paint on the handle. Dropped it into a plastic bag which he carried down the hall and left by the front door.

There was plenty of time yet.

He wandered back into the kitchen and knelt to peer into the fridge. Tindall's dog immediately climbed from her basket in the corner and scampered across to see what might be going. Milk, beer, onions. There were some tinned tomatoes in a dish, and Brooks thought about making some toast to go with them. In the end he settled for the plate of cooked sausages, set in fat under greasy cling-film.

He carried the plate to the small table against the wall and dropped half a sausage to the floor for the dog. It was chucking it down outside. He could see the rain bouncing off the felt on the shed roof.

He remembered Angie screaming at him one Sunday after he had taken Robbie over the field for a kick-about and they had both come home soaked, bouncing a muddy ball. Robbie thought it was funny, and shook his wet hair all over the kitchen before Angie could fetch a towel, which made her even angrier. The two of them pissing themselves. Angie shouting while she stripped off Robbie's tiny West Ham shirt.

The dog was on its hind legs, pawing at his shins, so he lifted her up on to his lap. Let her lick the grease off the plate. He rubbed the dog's bristly belly, and tried to stretch the memory out. In the end, he wasn't sure if there were bits he was only imagining, but he had a clear enough picture of his son's face; Robbie shaking his wet head, his two front teeth still coming through.

That would be the picture he'd try to hold on to when he was reaching into the plastic bag later on.

Stuart Emery was brisk, just the right side of surly, asking Thorne what he wanted the information for. Thorne tried to keep it quick and simple.

I want to be proved wrong, he thought.

For the second time, Thorne listened as someone at the end of a phone tried to call up the information that would confirm or assuage his worst fears.

'Got twelve years of review notes on here somewhere,' Emery said.

Thorne tried to stay calm while the wind threw rain against the window like tin-tacks.

'Regina versus Brooks, yes?'

'September 2000. Middlesex Crown Court.' Thorne waited, willing each tap of a computer key to be the last.

'Good job I'm organised,' Emery said. '"Anal", according to my wife.'

For pity's sake...

'Here we go... right. "Sentencing remarks", "witness statements", "pathology reports", "grounds for appeal"... These are just my notes, you understand?'

Thorne stopped him, asked him to go back. Emery read, gave him a name. Then another.

His worst fears.

He spluttered out a 'thank you', then jerked the phone back to his mouth as he was about to hang up. He needed to move fast, but there was one more question he needed to ask: 'Can anybody get hold of this stuff? Is it online?'

'Well, by and large, it's just specialist rulings,' Emery said. 'Judgements that pass into case law, that kind of thing. Mind you, I suppose most things are on the bloody Internet somewhere, if you can be bothered to look hard enough.'

If you've got the time, Thorne thought...

The panic fizzed in him, and anger tightened every muscle, every thought. Anger at Brooks, at the man Thorne knew was putting him up to this, and above all at himself. The procedure in this kind of emergency, this kind of
nightmare
, should have been straightforward. But Thorne knew too bloody well that he'd left himself no easy options.

He punched in Brigstocke's mobile number.

Russell, I've been fucking stupid and I don't care what happens when this is finished, but we've got a serious situation...

He changed his mind and tried Louise one more time.

'Where've you been? I've been calling.'

'I nipped out to the supermarket.'

'Is Phil with you?'

'No, he left about an hour ago. You OK?'

'I've tried calling him. Shit...'

'Tom, what's the matter?'

So, Thorne told her what he'd discovered: about the message that was far from being a wind-up. And in a rush, garbled and guilty, he told her everything else. The evidence he'd kept to himself; the conversations that had gone unreported; the cracked and rotten limb he'd gone out on.

There wasn't even a pause. 'You're a fucking idiot.'

'I know, and I don't have time,' Thorne shouted. 'You can call me everything under the sun later on. Now, I need to get hold of people. To find Phil.'

'You said you'd tried to call him...'

'His phone just kept ringing. He hasn't got it with him, or he can't hear it.'

'I know where he is,' Louise said. 'There's three or four places in town, could be any one of them. He asked me to go with him.'

'Three or four?'

'Some nights he calls in on all of them. Depends who he meets.'

'Christ...'

'Listen, I've been to these places. I know where they are.'

Thorne was finding it hard to concentrate. He was dizzy with the panic; with the increasing odds against everything turning out the right way.

Who gets to do your
PM, Phil?

'Tom...?'

'I should call Brigstocke. Tell him everything.'

'Wait.' Louise's voice was quiet, steel in it, suddenly. 'You don't have to call anyone.'

'We need to get officers out there.'

'You willing to fuck your career up?'

'It doesn't seem very important now.'

'We can do this.'

Thorne leaned against his desk, thinking for a moment that he might be sick. There were pinpricks of sweat across his shoulders, in the small of his back. He felt murderous. Helpless. 'How?'

'Who do you trust?' Louise asked.

'I don't know. Holland... Kitson...'

'Just get Holland.'

Thorne felt the urge to argue, but said nothing. Louise had given him orders before, when they'd worked together. She was better at it than he was. 'Right.'

She told him to stay calm and listen; gave him the addresses of two gay clubs in the West End. 'You and Holland get to those. I'll round a couple of my boys up and we'll take the other two. They'll do it for me if I tell them it's important. No questions asked.'

'It's Saturday night.'

'There are plenty of people I can trust, OK?'

Thorne hung up and flew along the corridor. He found Holland at his desk, his nose in a copy of Auto Trader.

'Remember what I said about leading you into trouble?'

Holland took one look at Thorne's face and stood up. Thorne began to talk, explaining and apologising, as he all but dragged Holland towards the exit; filling him in as best he could as they took the stairs two at a time and crashed out through the doors, into the rain.

They hit the top end of Tottenham Court Road inside fifteen minutes.

Holland had helped himself to a magnetic blue strobe-lamp and Thorne had stuck it to the roof of the car, running the cable in through the window and plugging it into the cigarette lighter. Neither had said much on the drive, and it wasn't just a matter of necessary concentration, or Thorne's use of the horn, or alarm at their speed on the wet roads, that had kept the conversation to a minimum.

There wasn't really too much to say.

Holland had plenty of questions for Thorne, but he knew they would have to wait. In silence, braced against the dashboard, he asked himself a few questions that
he
didn't have any answers for. Some of the ones Sophie would ask, if she knew.

Thorne had to pull over hard as an ambulance screamed up the wrong side of the road. He waited, revving the BMW's engine and smacking his hand against the wheel.

'Think about it,' Holland said. 'Brooks isn't going to do anything in the middle of a club, is he? He's probably followed him, same as he did with Cowans.'

Thorne nodded, yanked the wheel across and accelerated out in front of a bus. The driver flashed his lights and leaned on the horn.

'Presuming Hendricks is still...' Another nod.
Alive
. Holland didn't need to say it. 'We've probably got until the end of the night.'

Thorne looked at his watch: it wasn't even nine o'clock.

'There's time,' Holland said.

What Holland was saying made sense, but Thorne took precious little comfort from it. Driving like a maniac, thinking like one, he struggled to focus, to order this thoughts.

He didn't have a picture of Hendricks; nothing to show to bouncers or bar-staff. He'd just have to use his eyes. He thought about the few times he'd been to places like these in the past. There was little enough light to read the label on your beer bottle.

He wondered if he could use the video clip that Brooks had sent...

What have I got to do with any of this?

You're connected to me. That might be enough.

Thorne knew now that it was more than that, but he was also certain that he was the primary reason why Hendricks had been targeted. Chosen ahead of another biker, a police officer, anyone.

They crossed Oxford Street on a red light; slowed to weave through the traffic in front of them.

'These two clubs are a couple of minutes' walk from each other,' Thorne said. 'Which one do you want?'

Holland shook his head. 'We do both of them together.'

'No.'

'Come on, aren't we being stupid enough? Whatever you might think about Brooks, about why he's been doing this...'

'Fine. Together then.'

'I'm shitting myself,' Holland said, half smiling. 'Don't know about you.'

Thorne knew Holland was right and the last thing he needed was to put anybody else in danger. 'We split up but try to stay in sight of each other.' He knew that he should be afraid of a man who had killed three times, that it ought to make him careful, but it wasn't the thought of confronting Marcus Brooks that was making his stomach jump.

Thorne turned right at Cambridge Circus and stopped the car on yellow lines outside the Spice of Life. They got out.

'So, if I see Hendricks?'

Thorne's fists clenched, and he felt something like relief that he was as angry at Phil Hendricks as he was at anybody else.

'Jump on him,' he said. 'Jump on the fucker hard.'

It had only taken Porter ten minutes to find three officers willing to do as she asked without getting overly curious. She would have liked to put it down to respect, or even affection, but in a couple of cases she thought simple arselicking was closer to the truth.

It didn't much matter.

On Thorne's insistence she'd sent a DC to Hendrick's place in Deptford, in case he decided to call it a night early. Another officer who lived south of the river was heading for New Cross - to a local place Hendricks used when he couldn't be bothered to go all the way into town. Of all the venues Porter had mentioned to Thorne, she thought that one was the least likely. It was rather more sedate, less 'scene' than the others, and when Thorne had told her that Hendricks had not been answering his phone, she'd felt sure it was because he was somewhere noisy. She thought back to the mood he'd been in earlier, listening to the thrash-metal; guessed that he'd want to be somewhere he could dance, get off his face. Maybe fuck someone until he felt better.

More than anything, she wished she'd said 'yes' the day before, when he'd asked her to go out with him.

Of course, she knew now that Hendricks' mood had been due to his conversation with Thorne. There hadn't been time to get into that when Thorne had finally come clean, but once this was over, however it finished, she'd want to know why he hadn't told her earlier; why he'd asked Hendricks not to tell her.

'Guv...?'

Detective Sergeant Kenny Parsons pointed towards a small queue running back from a pair of high glass doors, along the front windows of a Pizza Express. Most of those waiting stood under umbrellas, but a few, like Porter and Parsons, didn't seem awfully bothered by the rain.

The Adam was a members-only place, tucked away behind Charing Cross station. It was more bar than club most of the time, but once the dancing kicked off on a Friday or Saturday night, it could get pretty lively. Porter had been here a couple of times with Hendricks and she remembered that this was where he'd met his ex-boyfriend Brendan.