Mark Billingham: From the Dead

'If she went missing last August,' Thorne said, 'that was only a few months before you received the first photograph.'

'She didn't go missing. She was taken.'

'Don't you think the two things might be connected?'

If Donna heard the question, she showed no sign of it. She just stared at Thorne, her breathing heavy and her eyes filling as she reached for her cigarettes yet again, turned the packet over and over in her hands. 'I need her back,' she said. 'I was taken from her. Now she's been taken from me.' She looked at Thorne. 'Can you find her?'

Thorne could not hold the look. He dropped his eyes to the tabletop, to the changing face of Ellie Langford.

'Can you?'

An eighteen-year-old girl, gone. Missing.

Another one.

The phone buzzed in Thorne's jacket pocket and he stood up quickly. He saw that it was DS Dave Holland calling, told Donna he needed to take it, and stepped into the corridor.

'It's Chambers,' Holland said. 'It's not good news.'

'Oh, Jesus.'

'Bastard's on TV right now.'

Thorne walked back into the living room and asked Donna if she would mind turning on her television.

It was actually the bastard's solicitor doing all the talking, posing on the steps outside the Old Bailey and issuing a statement on his client's behalf because 'Mr Chambers' was 'too overcome to speak'. Family and friends were thanked, as were those who continued to believe in his client and to have faith in a just outcome. Chambers himself stood a few feet behind and to the right. He kept his head down, nodding in agreement, looking up only once to wave at the rank of photographers who were shouting his name.

He smiled shyly. He'd already taken off his tie.

Kate had appeared in the doorway behind Thorne. 'He definitely did it,' she said, nodding towards the TV. 'I said that right from the start, didn't I, Don? He killed that poor girl and hid her somewhere. Look at him, you can see it.'

'You can't see anything,' Donna said. 'You can never tell.' She shook her head. 'Not everything's what it seems, is it? I mean, I thought Alan was dead.'

'Thanks for the tea,' Thorne said.

Unexpectedly running into his chief superintendent could provoke a wide range of emotions in Tom Thorne. Revulsion, horror and fury were among the most common. But seeing him with his feet under Russell Brigstocke's desk, today of all days, caused Thorne to feel nothing but a wash of bog-standard bemusement.

Thorne was spotted hovering in the doorway, beckoned into the office and instructed to close the door.

As a man who normally kept well away on days such as this one, blithely wafting the stink of failure in the direction of others, Trevor Jesmond was the last person Thorne expected to see. Had the Chambers result gone the other way, of course, it would have been a different story. Jesmond would have been the first one cracking open the supermarket Cava and saying his finely honed piece to all and sundry.

Failure, though, did not touch the likes of Trevor Jesmond. Not in any sense.

Thorne walked towards the desk, nodding to Brigstocke, who was seated near the window, as he went. Even before he had sat down, Jesmond was shaking his head, then raising his arms in theatrical disbelief and giving it his best, matey 'What can you do?' expression.

'No sense to it, Tom,' he said. 'No sense at all. Just chalk it up.'

Chalk it up? You pathetic, pussy-arsed tosser.

'Right,' Thorne said.

'You did everything you could. You did a fantastic job.'

So, it's my fault? thought Thorne. 'Thanks,' he said.

'Just put it behind you. Get back on the horse.'

Why are you here?

'Now, obviously, I came in to gee the team up a bit in the wake of this Chambers fiasco, but seeing as I'm here…'

Here we go…

Jesmond leaned forward, leafing through the papers in front of him on the desk. He nodded towards Brigstocke, and Thorne noticed that the bald patch was that little bit bigger than last time; that even though there was less hair, the production of dandruff only seemed to have increased.

'I've been talking to Russell about this Alan Langford thing.'

Thorne glanced at Brigstocke, whose barely perceptible shrug told Thorne everything he needed to know. DCI was a tricky rank; caught in an uncomfortable limbo between the lads and the brass. 'Like a cock in a zip,' Brigstocke had told Thorne once. 'Up or down, it's a world of pain.'

'What thing are we talking about?' Thorne asked.

'No need to be arsey, Tom,' Brigstocke said. 'You're not the only one around here in a bad mood.'

Jesmond waved away the DCI's concerns. He had not stopped smiling. 'The same thing that took you to Donna Langford's this morning.'

Thorne watched Jesmond's smile widen as he enjoyed his moment or two of triumph; watched him shake his head as though it meant nothing.

'I checked the log,' Jesmond said. 'No big mystery. I saw the address you'd signed out to for the morning was the same as the one I've got in front of me.' He picked up a sheaf of papers. 'I started doing my homework yesterday, putting a small dossier together as soon as Russell had filled me in on this photo business.' He straightened the papers, laid them down again. 'So, what do we think, Tom? Is Alan Langford still alive and kicking?'

'I reckon so,' Thorne said. 'Either that or he's got a double.' It was strange how saying it made Thorne realise that he'd known who the man was from the first moment he'd clapped eyes on the photo. That without quite understanding why, it had been easier to pretend otherwise. But having acknowledged the simple and seemingly harmless fact of it, he still felt as though denial might have been the safer option. As though he were no more than a step or two away from a terrible drop.

'Well, I don't think there's any reason to panic,' Jesmond said. 'Russell?'

Brigstocke was cleaning his glasses. 'No reason at all. There's no way a miscarriage-of-justice suit would stick. I mean, regardless of whether the man she wanted dead was the man who actually died, Donna Langford did conspire to kill her husband. She's certainly not denying that, so there's no worries on that score.'

'What about Monahan?'

'Same thing,' Brigstocke said. 'We know he killed somebody, so I can't see an appeal with any legs coming from that direction either.'

'Looks like we can all sleep easy in our beds, then,' Thorne said.

Jesmond missed the sarcasm or chose to ignore it. 'I'm not sure that's quite true, Inspector. In the light of these developments, we have to look at the Langford inquiry again and it seems obvious to me that, in retrospect, we might have done one or two things differently.'

So, this one's down to me as well, is it? Thorne thought. He cleared his throat. 'Such as?'

'Well, DNA and dental checks are the obvious ones.'

'She identified him, for Christ's sake!' Thorne saw Brigstocke raise a hand in warning. He raised his own to make it clear that he was perfectly in control, that he was unlikely to throw himself across the desk and start throttling the chief superintendent just yet. 'The body was the same height as Alan Langford and wore Alan Langford's jewellery. And Alan Langford's wife formally identified it.'

'Even so-'

'And if all that wasn't enough, she knew it was him handcuffed to the wheel of that Jag because she had paid somebody to do it. Bearing that little lot in mind, sir, aside from the formality of the post-mortem, there seemed no reason to trouble the boys in the white coats.'

'However it might have seemed, a belt-and-braces approach is always advisable. And it would certainly have paid off in this instance.'

Thorne could not suppress a grin, remembering something. 'On top of which, I seem to recall a memo from yourself which was widely circulated at the time, implementing a Command-wide cost-cutting scheme.'