Mark Billingham - Bloodline

‘They’ll be wanting heads to roll, and sure as shit Trevor Jesmond’s won’t be one of them.’

Thoren had put the man’s behaviour down to stress and medication. To some kind of breakdown caused by his predicament and the business with his wife. Christ, he’d been an idiot. Been made to look an idiot. ‘Are you going to catch this bloke?’ Dowd had asked, looking him in the eye, right where Thorne was standing. He turned to the female detective, who was standing behind them, talking quietly to one of her junior officers. ‘We need a description out there now,’ he said.

She stepped towards him. ‘It’s done.’

‘Every car in the area, right?’

‘Like I said-’

‘House-to-house as well, nearest half a dozen streets.’ He glanced back into the room. ‘Bastard’ll be covered in blood, so he can’t have got far without somebody seeing him.’

‘We think he took DS Spibey’s jacket,’ the woman said. ‘We can’t find it, anyway.’ She glanced back towards her colleague, looking for a little moral support before continuing. ‘There’s no sign of his car, either. I checked and Spibey definitely drove in, so…’

Thorne stared at her.

‘We have to assume our suspect’s taken it.’

‘What about a briefcase?’

It was the woman’s turn to stare.

‘Briefcase, bag, whatever,’ Thorne said. ‘Is Spibey’s stuff missing?’

‘I’ve not seen anything.’

‘Look. For. It.’

She turned and headed back down the stairs, but Thorne knew it was pointleess. He began shouting as he lurched forward and followed her. At anyone who would listen. At himself. ‘The killer is almost certainly now in possession of sensitive case-notes and documents.’ His voice echoed as he got close to the lobby. ‘Details of surveillance and protection operations. Names and numbers…’ He froze for a second and almost stumbled, used the momentum to take the remaining stairs two at a time.

Debbie Mitchell’s name.

The address of Nina Collins’ flat.

Coming out on to the street, he watched a patrol car pull up and saw two uniformed officers step out. He recognised their faces and felt a spasm in his gut. What had Nina Collins called them? Starsky and Hutch…

‘Why the hell aren’t you in Barnet?’

The older one leaned back against the car, peered past Thorne at the comings and goings. ‘We were told to leave and get over here.’

His colleague chipped in: ‘Yeah, he said it had all kicked off.’

‘Who did?’ Thorne asked.

‘Detective Sergeant Spibey.’

It felt like a punch, and Thorne was still reeling from it as he ran towards the marked BMW that was moving slowly towards him, its driver searching for a parking space. Thorne furiously signalled to the driver that he should turn the car around fast. He blinked to erase the picture in his head as he reached for his radio, shouting about blues and twos.

Debbie Mitchell’s face peering through a plastic bag.

The BMW raced through traffic in Camden and Kentish Town, then screamed north along the Archway Road. The thoughts were flying equally frantically around Thorne’s head as he braced himself against the dashboard, trying to keep his breathing under control and shouting obscenities at any vehicle that did not get out of their way quickly enough.

Obscenities meant, in truth, for the man who had run rings round him.

The body found in the canal must have been that of the real Andrew Dowd. It would be easy enough to get a DNA sample and make a positive ID. The conversation Thorne would soon be having with Dowd’s wife would be more difficult. He half expected the woman to sue them for incompetence.

It would be a difficult case to defend.

‘Hang on.’

Thorne gritted his teeth, trying to look unafraid as the car accelerated through a red light and swerved hard into a bus lane. He glanced across to see the speedometer’s needle touching seventy-five.

‘Ten minutes away, tops,’ the driver said.

He remembered what Hendricks had said about the victim being killed elsewhere, then dumped. It was a fair assumption that Walsh – or Garvey, as he now called himself – had followed Dowd to Cumbria and killed him there, then travelled back to London to dispose of the body before heading up to Kendal again and handing himself in to the local police.

As monsters went, this one was brilliant.

The trick had been in not trying to make himself look like Dowd, in so radically changing the appearance of the man whose identity he had stolen. The shaved head had convinced everyone they were looking at a man who had been through a major breakdown and Garvey had used every ounce of knowledge he had gained about Andrew and Sarah Dowd’s private life to keep the wife out of the picture. Washing their cars. Watching and waiting for his chance, tucking away the information he would use when the time came. The troubled marriage gave him the perfect excuse once he’d ‘become’ Dowd to avoid any confrontation with the one person who would know he was not who he claimed to be.

As a confidence trick, it was the equivalent of a shoplifter pushing a double bed out through the doors of a department store.

With two people on his list that Anthony Garvey could not track down, he had let the police do the work for him. He had smuggled himself inside the investigation. Fowler had been there on a plate, holed up in the room next door. A sitting duck. It was one policeman’s weakness for gambling, the ease with which he had abandoned procedure that had provided Garvey with the opportunity he had been waiting for, the information he needed.

Had led him to the last victim on his list.

Despite the speed, the noise, the adrenaline fizzing through him, Thorne still tensed when his phone rang. As the car tore down into Finchley, he spent half a minute shouting above the siren to Dave Holland, asking him to check the ETAs of the other units he had ordered to Nina Collins’ flat, hoping that they might get there quicker than he could.

‘We’ll get him,’ Holland said.

The siren screamed again before Thorne could think of anything to say, so he just hung up. He was tucking the phone back into his pocket when he had the idea.

Garvey had taken Spibey’s jacket and briefcase, his paperwork, the ID he had used when talking to the officers outside Collins’ flat. So, why not…?

He pulled his phone out again, searched through the memory and dialled the number he had called first thing that morning, the last time he had spoken to Brian Spibey.

The mobile rang three times, four, then it was answered.

‘You took your time, Mr Thorne.’

Thorne needed a moment to catch his breath. The casual tone, the lightness in the man’s voice, sent a shiver through his chest and shoulders. ‘Is she alive?’

‘You might need to be a little more specific.’

‘Look, I know what this is all about, Simon, and we need to talk about it.’

‘My name’s Anthony.’

‘Sorry… Anthony. We need to talk about what happened to your father. I think we can get the case looked at again.’ It was nonsense, but Thorne could think of no other way to reach the man. He winced at Garvey’s reaction, the playful mockery in his voice, which made it clear that he thought it was nonsense, too.

‘Really? You’d do that for me? After all these bodies?’

Thorne’s mouth went dry. These bodies, not those. Was Garvey looking down at the body of Debbie Mitchell even as they were talking?

‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m still here,’ Thorne said.

‘I suppose you’re tracing this.’

‘No.’

‘Using cell-site location or whatever.’

‘No, really.’ There would not have been time, and there was no point when Thorne knew precisely where Garvey was.