Mark Billingham: From the Dead

The Oak was hardly the sort of establishment to get done for after-hours drinking, but there was no more than fifteen minutes' official drinking time left when Thorne spotted someone he knew walking out of the Gents'. Gary Brand had been a DS on the original Alan Langford inquiry; had sat in on a couple of the Paul Monahan interviews, if Thorne's memory served him correctly. He had stayed in the Homicide Command for another eighteen months or so afterwards, until a vacancy for an inspector had come up elsewhere, and was now working south of the river, as far as Thorne could remember.

Thorne thought it might be an idea to run a few things past someone who had been part of the team ten years earlier. Moving through the crowd, he felt the drink starting to take hold. He took a few deep breaths. There was no way he was driving home, but that didn't matter a great deal. He had spent the afternoon on the phone, making the necessary arrangements, and he would not be needing the car much, if at all, the following day.

Brand looked pleased to see him and immediately reached for his wallet. They made for the bar. Thorne took a half, though he knew it was already a little late for caution.

'Hardly your local any more this, is it, Gary?'

Brand was a slim six-footer and a few years younger than Thorne. His light hair was cut close to the scalp and he wore the kind of thin, soft-leather jacket that Thorne thought looked better on a woman. 'Well, obviously I know quite a few of the lads on the Chambers inquiry, and I've been following the case.' He was originally from the West Midlands and it was still clear enough in the flattened vowels and the downward intonation at the end of each sentence. As a result, he often sounded despondent, even if he were in the best of moods. He shrugged. 'Couldn't think of anywhere else I'd rather be tonight.' He raised his glass, touched it to Thorne's. 'What an absolute shocker.'

'We've had a few of those.'

'Right enough.'

'Talking of which…'

Thorne told Brand about the visit from Anna Carpenter and the photographs. About a case that had come back to life as miraculously as Alan Langford himself appeared to have done.

'He was always a slippery sod,' Brand said. 'The type that enjoyed making the likes of you and me look stupid.'

'The type to snatch his own daughter?'

'I don't see why not.'

'And what about the photos?'

Brand told Thorne that he had no idea why they might have been sent to Donna. 'So, what are you going to do?'

'See if I can get anything out of Paul Monahan.'

'Good luck,' Brand said. 'I don't remember that animal being particularly talkative.'

'Maybe he's mellowed in prison,' Thorne said. It was banter, no more than that. Thorne had checked Monahan's record that afternoon and discovered that he had hardly been a model prisoner. His sentence had been increased twice since his original conviction.

'Yeah, course he has.'

'He might be one of those types that takes degrees and spends his spare time making quilts for Oxfam.'

'My money's on the gym and homemade tattoos,' Brand said. 'But let me know how you get on…'

They exchanged mobile numbers and Thorne went back to his table. Holland asked if he wanted another, but faced with a straight choice between heading home now or fighting for a taxi later with half of Homicide Command, Thorne decided to make a move. He said as few goodbyes as he could get away with and headed out to the car park, grateful for the cold against his face and the fresh air.

He called home on his way to Colindale Tube Station and heard his own voice on the machine. He guessed that Louise had gone to bed or back to her own flat, but he left a message anyway.

Then he called Anna Carpenter.

He was suddenly aware, as he heard the call connect, that it was probably way too late to be ringing, that he should have called on his way to the Oak, or just sent a text. Then again, a part of him was hoping that she would not answer, or if she didn't, that she might not get the message he was about to leave.

When Anna's voicemail cut in, Thorne spoke a little more slowly than he might otherwise have, careful not to slur. 'This is Tom Thorne. Just calling to say, if you're still up for this, meet me at eight o'clock tomorrow morning outside the WHSmith at King's Cross Station. Bring your passport. And you might want to wear something that's a bit more… severe or whatever.'

Though there had been a prison on the same site since 1595, the majority of the current building dated from two hundred and fifty years later, with a brooding neo-Gothic gatehouse and wings arranged in the typical midnineteenth-century radial system. Like most Victorian prisons, HMP Wakefield had certainly not been designed to be beautiful, but approaching it, as he had done several times before, it seemed to Thorne as though every blackened brick and each barred window had been infused by those that had built it with something poisonous. Something subtle and dark that might leach from the building's brutal fabric into those inside and slowly kill off hope; harden them. Or perhaps it was the other way round. Was it the people within its walls that made the place so ugly?

Whether it was a Victorian monstrosity like Pentonville or Strangeways, or a pale, concrete, US-style penitentiary like Belmarsh, Thorne was never wholly comfortable stepping inside a prison.

He could see that Anna Carpenter felt the same way.

He watched her cheerfully handing over her passport at the first of three checkpoints they would have to pass through before being admitted into the main body of the prison.

'Trust me to get the wrong end of the bloody stick,' she said, nodding towards Thorne. 'There I was thinking that when he asked me to bring my passport, he was going to whisk me off on some glamorous, last-minute holiday.'

The man-monkey checking her details did not so much as glance up from the paperwork. Anna turned to Thorne, rolled her eyes. She was rattled, he could see that, and overdoing the nonchalance.

'Nice to chat,' she said, when her passport was handed back.

She was right to be apprehensive, though. Thorne knew that better than most. The outfit she was wearing – a suitably understated dark skirt and jacket – would lead any prisoner to assume she was a copper. She would feel studied and hated, just as much as Thorne always did. But, as a woman, she would also feel things that were a damn sight more unpleasant.

'He was a cheery so-and-so,' she said, as they moved on.

Rattled as she might have been, Anna seemed in a better mood now than she had been two and a half hours earlier at King's Cross, marching up to where Thorne stood slurping from a takeaway coffee at one minute before eight o'clock.

'A bit of notice would have been nice.'

'You're very punctual,' Thorne said. 'I like that.'

'And I don't like being told what to wear.'

'You should consider yourself lucky. I was dead set against you coming at all.'

'So why am I here?'

'Because I do what I'm told.'

'Why don't I believe that?'

Thorne blew on his coffee, began walking towards the platform.

'Coming where, anyway?' she asked, following. 'Do I get to find out where I'm going, or is that classified information? I'm guessing it's not Hogwarts.'

Thorne told her.

'Bloody hell.'

'"Bloody hell" is right,' Thorne said. 'Now, here are the rules. ..'

Once they were through security, they moved towards the Visits Area. Even though the route kept them well clear of prison landings and association areas, the atmosphere worsened. Wakefield was a high-security lifers' prison, and the air tasted a little different when so many of those breathing it had nothing to lose and no reason to give a shit. Anna was clearly still thrown simply by being there, maintaining an all but constant stream of frivolous comments as they walked.