Mark Billingham - Bloodline

Chamberlain nodded. The less than lovely lies they told themselves and each other.

‘He kept all that out of the house, at least. He always came home.’

‘We’re looking for someone who would have been born around thirty years ago,’ Chamberlain said. ‘So…’

‘Just after we got married.’

‘Yes.’

Duggan nodded, thinking back, staring down at the last of the wine in her glass. ‘When we were trying for kids ourselves.’

Chamberlain waited.

‘There was a group of women he worked with at British Telecom,’ Duggan said. ‘A couple of them were married themselves, but they were a right bunch of slags. I went to a few nights out early on, but it was obvious partners weren’t really welcome. I wondered back then if he might be knocking around with any of them.’

‘Can you remember any names?’

Duggan said she couldn’t, even when Chamberlain pressed her. But she said that she knew someone who might be able to help and told Chamberlain about a friend of Raymond Garvey from when he’d first joined BT. ‘Malcolm Reece was a wanker,’ she said. ‘He used to come round and sit there while I waited on him and Ray, making sandwiches and fetching them beer from the fridge. Sometimes I’d catch him smirking, like he knew something I didn’t, and once I got so angry I deliberately spilled tea in his lap.’ She smiled, enjoying the memory, but not for long. ‘Even then I told myself I was imagining it, you know, about there being other women. Convinced myself that it was only Malcolm who was up to that kind of thing. He really fancied himself. I remember one time he grabbed my arse when Ray wasn’t looking.’

‘Sounds like a charmer,’ Chamberlain said.

Duggan nodded and drained her glass. ‘Malcolm never went short of female company, that’s for certain.’ She sat back, leaned back and let the sun wash over her face. ‘If anyone knows what Ray was up to back then, who with, I mean, he will.’

Chamberlain wrote down the name, along with the name of the street where Malcolm Reece had been living in the 1980s. She thanked Duggan for her time, especially as it had involved her taking the morning off work.

‘I told them I’d got someone coming round to fix the boiler,’ Duggan said. ‘I’ve got used to telling lies over the years.’

As she put her notebook back in her bag, Chamberlain said, ‘Why didn’t you and Ray have kids?’

‘We wanted to. I couldn’t.’ Duggan’s tone was matter of fact, but Chamberlain could see the pain slide into her eyes before she let her gaze drop to the tabletop. Even after so many years, hearing that Raymond Garvey had fathered a child with someone else had obviously hurt. Chamberlain neglected to say that others had paid a far higher price for her ex-husband’s infidelity.

‘Do you fancy getting some lunch?’ Duggan asked. She pointed across the road to a small Italian restaurant. ‘I mean, you probably need to get back.’

‘Well, I’m not in a mad rush.’ Chamberlain was hungry, and she had thought to buy an open return. And, insignificant as it was in the scheme of things, the pain had not quite left Jenny Duggan’s eyes.

Kitson had made an appointment to see Dave Spedding, the DCI on the Chloe Sinclair murder. He was now a superintendent based in Victoria, so after leaving the Sinclair house in Balham, Thorne dropped Kitson off, then carried on towards the Peel Centre.

Driving north through the centre of town, he could not stop thinking about the horribly mixed emotions with which Miriam and Alec Sinclair had discussed their daughter. He’d seen enough grief to know that time would eventually tip the balance, that the good memories would one day outweigh the dreadful ones. Slow but steady, it had been like that – was still like that – with his father. There would come a day – though with the man responsible for her death still at large, he had not felt able to tell her parents – when Chloe’s name need not be whispered and when mention of her would not drive the air from their lungs like a sucker punch.

When cardigans would not need to be pulled tight on warm days.

In slow traffic on the Euston Road, Thorne flicked through the radio channels, looking for something that would not annoy him too much. He stopped at a classical station, let his finger hover above the button, then moved it away. He could barely tell Beethoven from Black Sabbath, but the music was pleasant, and, despite the car’s stop-start progress, his mind began to drift.

But not very far…

He considered Emily Walker’s husband, and Catherine Burke’s good-for-nothing boyfriend. The father of Greg and Alex Macken and the parents of Chloe Sinclair.

Anthony Garvey’s other victims.

For reasons he could not fathom, Thorne imagined them strung along a rope, like life-sized beads on a living necklace. Stuck fast and twisting in the cold and dark, the bodies of their loved ones bloodless alongside them. One dead, one as good as, one dead, one as good as… the vast necklace straining with the weight of them, yet plenty of room still on the creaking rope.

Thorne turned up the music, put his foot down when the road opened up a little.

However their loss had caused each of them to behave – absurdly polite or obstreperous; howling or struck dumb – Thorne knew that the relatives of those Anthony Garvey had murdered were looking in his direction for a particular sort of comfort. Strong arms and warm words were easy enough to come by, but finding the man who was responsible for their pain was down to him and his sort. It would be one step, no more than that, but the first step to easing them from the knotted thread of grief.

He drove through Camden and Archway, up into Highgate as the rain started, then down into Finchley, passing within a few streets of where Emily Walker’s body had been found a little over two weeks before. Ten minutes later, approaching Barnet, he turned off the Great North Road, and shortly after that, on to the street where Nina Collins lived.

Thorne showed his ID to the officers in the patrol car that had been stationed outside since Debbie Mitchell had moved in with her friend, and rang the bell.

Collins came to the door and stared at him. ‘Well?’

‘Everything OK?’

She nodded towards the patrol car, flicked her cigarette into the bush at the side of the narrow path. ‘Apart from having to check with Starsky and Hutch every time I want to go and buy a packet of fags, yeah.’

‘It’s all right, Nina.’ Debbie Mitchell appeared behind Collins, who sighed and let her past before disappearing back inside.

‘I was just passing,’ Thorne said.

‘Good of you.’

‘Thought I’d check, you know… see how you were getting on.’

‘Well, I can’t go anywhere, and Jason’s missing school. Can’t be helped, though, right?’

‘I’m sorry, but you’ve always got the option to come into protective custody. It would probably be the best thing.’

She shook her head.

‘OK, well you can call if you’re worried about anything, you know that?’

Debbie Mitchell nodded and folded her arms. ‘Any joy?’

Thorne took a second or two. ‘We’ll let you know, I promise.’

Plenty of room still on the creaking rope.

Thorne’s mobile rang in his pocket. ‘Sorry.’ He saw the caller ID and walked a few steps away from the front door. ‘I need to take this.’

Holland was a little breathless, speaking from inside a fast car, raising his voice when necessary above those of the other officers travelling with him.

‘Where?’ Thorne asked, when Holland had said his piece. Listening, he glanced back towards Debbie Mitchell and saw the look on her face reacting to the expression on his own, saw her arms fall to her sides. ‘Sorry, Dave, say again.’