Mark Billingham - From the Dead

'Tonight,' she said.

On the way down in the lift, Thorne asked Samarez what the girl had said to him.

'She offered me money,' Samarez said.

'After that,' Thorne said. 'She said something else after you shook your head.'

'She offered me all sorts of things…'

By mid-afternoon Thorne was back in Mijas, where the streets were just as busy, though thankfully a little less noisy than they had been the previous evening. There were still many people in outlandish outfits, some wearing elaborate masks or dressed as giants with papier-mache heads and oversized boots. In the main square, some kind of competition was in progress. An enthusiastic and vocal crowd had gathered in front of a stage to choose between half a dozen different couples in traditional costume.

Thorne found himself standing next to a middle-aged man with a Liverpool accent. ' Mr and Mrs kind of thing, is it?' he said.

The man laughed and began to describe the crowning of the feria 's King and Queen in such detail that, within a few minutes, Thorne was wishing he had not bothered to ask. The man, who turned out to be not only a resident of the village but one who prided himself on his extensive local knowledge, went on to deliver a potted history of the feria itself: the original sighting of the Virgin by two shepherd boys and the carving of her shrine into the rocks above the village by monks in 1548.

'That's where the name comes from,' he said. '"Virgin of the Rock". It's quite funny, as it goes, because a lot of people get it wrong. They think " pena " means "pain", but it's actually "rock". Or "cliff ", if you want to be strictly accurate, like.'

'Might as well get these things right,' Thorne said.

The man pointed Thorne towards the site of the shrine, and Thorne seized his chance to escape, following a group of Japanese tourists up a gentle, winding slope until he reached the cave. It was predictably small and crowded. The entrance was blocked by those taking pictures, but Thorne could just see the candles throwing shadows on to the rock walls and across the statue of the Virgin, which would – so Thorne had been reliably informed by his know-it-all Scouse tour guide – be paraded through the village the following evening.

Thorne had no desire to go inside, so he walked across to a small wooden balustrade from which a few people were pointing video cameras. He squeezed in next to a young couple with two noisy kids and looked down into the valley.

'Stop that, Luke!'

'Don't climb on there, Hannah, that's really old…'

He thought about the past, both recent and long distant; what you honoured and what you tried to put behind you. He wondered if Alan Langford thought about his past quite as much as he did about his future. Thorne knew how carefully Langford planned his moves, how he always tried to anticipate what might lie ahead. But once those things had happened, once they had become part of his history, did they stay with him as much as they would with those whose lives he had ruined in the process?

At the side of him, the mother yanked one of her children down from the first rail of the balustrade, then swiped at the back of his leg.

How carefully Langford planned his moves…

What had Donna and Fraser said to him?

Alan never did anything by halves. He planned things out, thought them through…

He thinks a long way ahead, does Mr Mackenzie. Plays the long game

…

Thorne moved away from the couple and their kids, took out his phone and called Holland. 'Have a look through the original case notes and find out when Donna first met up with Monahan.'

'What?'

'The date,' Thorne said.

Holland needed only half a minute. 'In court, she said she couldn't remember the exact date, but it was the last week of June.'

'Right, and they killed whoever was in that Jag at the end of November.'

'OK…'

'Five months later.'

'I'm not with you,' Holland said. 'We know that.'

'What if Langford found out early on what Donna was up to? We don't know when he got the tip-off, but if it was right after that meeting, he might have snatched whoever ended up in that car straight away. Someone he wanted to get rid of. I mean, he didn't know Donna was going to keep losing her nerve and putting it off, did he?'

'I suppose not.'

'If Langford knew all along who was going to take his place in that car, he might have been holding on to the poor bastard for months, waiting for Donna to give the go-ahead, keeping him holed up somewhere. ' The more Thorne thought it through and talked it out, the more it made sense. The more it seemed screamingly bloody obvious. 'We've only been looking for people who were reported missing a couple of weeks either side of the killing,' he said. 'We've not been looking back far enough.'

He told Holland to get the mispers reports dating all the way back to early June ten years before. To start working through them with Kitson straight away.

'Before you go,' Holland said, 'the DCI wants a quick word.'

As soon as Brigstocke came on the line, Thorne told him what he had just been discussing with Holland. Told him that the time frame made sense; that Langford was smart enough and cold enough. Brigstocke sounded pleased, but Thorne heard something in his voice, an enthusiasm that sounded forced.

'What did you want, Russell?'

'Adam Chambers,' Brigstocke said.

Thorne tensed and began to walk back down the hill. 'I hope you're going to tell me he's been hit by a bus.'

'There's some stupid campaign been started up to clear his name.'

' What? '

'The press have got hold of it and now some twat of an MP has jumped on board. It's all over the news.'

Holland and Kitson spent the rest of the day making all the necessary calls and computer searches, gathering together the relevant mispers files so as to begin the process of elimination all over again. They worked well into the evening, poring over report after report, watching as one shift was replaced by another and eating pizza ordered by phone and delivered to the gate.

Thorne called twice, and was told twice by Yvonne Kitson that he wasn't helping.

The search parameters remained broadly the same. They were looking for missing Caucasian males of approximately six feet in height. The age of the victim was somewhat trickier. At the time of the post-mortem, there had been no reason to suspect that the body in the car was anyone other than the man identified by Donna Langford as her husband, and therefore no reason to examine bone fragments and tissue samples for an accurate assessment of the victim's age. So, Phil Hendricks had re-examined the samples he'd taken during the PM ten years earlier. He established conclusively that the victim had not been drugged, but the damage caused by the fire meant determining a precise age was impossible.

'Between twenty and fifty years old,' Hendricks had told Holland. 'But even that's just a guess, and make sure you-know-who knows that.'

*

Thorne had to sit through twenty minutes of Far East business reports on BBC World before the main news bulletin came on.

It was the second item.

Thorne was shocked to see that the MP Brigstocke had mentioned was a woman – young and earnest in a nicely cut business suit. She was standing outside Scotland Yard, the iconic sign revolving slowly behind her as she outlined the aims of the campaign.

'Yes, Adam Chambers is innocent in the eyes of the law,' she said. 'But that is not enough. He has been traumatised by the experience of being falsely accused of such a terrible crime and is finding it desperately hard to rebuild his life. Mr Chambers is as much a victim as anybody. In fact, as far as anyone has been able to prove, he is the only victim in this entire shambolic investigation.'

Thorne was sitting on the edge of the bed, no more than a couple of feet from the small screen. 'Bollocks,' he said.