Mark Billingham - Bloodline

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 tell if there was anything really wrong, though, because, if she were being honest, she could not say that she knew him well 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 alluded 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 all 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 all over again by the casual brutality of the murders. Like Thorne, she found it hard to swallow 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 filled her time subsequently on the phone or working at her laptop, making contact with old colleagues, many of whom had been closely involved with the inquiry. She had picked brains and called in favours, telling 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 following 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 calling again in a couple of hours. They spoke three times a day, sometimes even more. Often, he would call 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 well 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 still had together and the cancer not returning.

‘It’s strange, love, that’s all,’ 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 killer taking up everybody’s time. There were also many cases going through the post-arrest stage. There was evidence to be carefully 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 call 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 called with depressing news. Eight months earlier, a young woman had been killed 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 pulled 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 called 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 all,’ 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 call 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 all 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 all 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.