Lifeless - 5 (11 page)

Thorne looked over at the two girls busy at their computer screens

when they weren't answering the constantly tril ing phones. He wondered which of them had replaced Jane Lovel .

'Sean Bracher... sorry.'

Thorne looked up to see a sharp suit, a proffered hand and a mouth

with far too many teeth in it. Hol and was already on his feet and Thorne stood up to join him. He picked up his battered leather jacket and moved to fol ow Bracher to his office, but Baynham & Smout's Assistant Director of Personnel was going to do his talking to the police right there in the lobby. He flopped into one of the chairs, tossed his mobile phone on to the coffee table and cal ed across to the reception desk. 'Jo, a pot of coffee would be good...'

Bracher was in his mid-thirties, with rapidly thinning hair, which Thorne guessed he was not at al happy about. Clearly an Essex boy made good, he could probably turn on an acquired sophistication when it was needed. With Thorne and Hol and, he'd obviously decided that matey was the way to play it: estuary vowels, laughter, innuendo. One of the boys.

The coffee arrived quickly, and Bracher said his piece. 'I can only

real y tel you what I told your col eague back in the summer. We're a big company and I tend to pick up on most things that are going on, but there's no way I can be on top of what the people here are up to in their own time. Having said that, there was no-one Jane had a problem with as far as I'm aware. I'm here for people to tel me stuff like that and Jane and I were good mates, you know, so, I think she'd have said something.'

Hol and placed his coffee cup back on the table. 'I get the impression that Jane was pretty much the life and soul round here. That she liked to enjoy herself.'

There was a resounding raspberry noise as Bracher shifted on the leather chair. 'I think that's why what happened hit everybody here so hard. It can get a bit dul around here if you're not careful, and since everything went so bloody PC, some people can get a bit touchy if people try to... liven things up.'

Thorne glanced across as a motorcycle courier came through the revolving doors, took off his helmet and strol ed towards the reception desk.

'Liven things up?' Hol and said.

Bracher leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers intertwined. He had a serious point to make. 'Seventy-five per cent, at least, seventy five per cent of people meet their husbands, wives, or long-term parmers at work. That's a fact. But if you so much as ask a woman out these days, you've got to be careful, you know? You used to be able to have some fun, men and women could wind each other up a bit, but now it's al got a bit po-faced. Nobody real y talks to anybody else now, except for five minutes when they're making a coffee or whatever.

'Water-cooler time' I think they cal it in America. Anyway, Jane didn't give a toss about any of that. She just enjoyed a laugh, and if people didn't like it, then sod 'em, you know?'

Thorne watched as the courier pul ed a package from the bag over his shoulder and handed it to one of the girls at the desk. She laughed at something he said...

'Was there anybody who didn't like it?' Hol and asked d in such a way as to imply that not liking it, whatever it was, would have been utterly stupid.

'Wel , there's always a couple of arseholes anywhere isn't there? I bet you've got a few on the force haven't you?' Hol and smiled, but only with his mouth. 'Yeah, there was the odd one, you know, couldn't see the joke, but we'd just take the piss. You've got to have a sense of humour haven't you? I mean, we're al fair game at the end of the day...'

Thorne tuned Bracher out. The courier and the girls on reception were stil flirting. Jane Lovel might have been kil ed by a complete stranger, and she might have been kil ed by someone she knew wel . A third option was that her murderer was someone with whom she was casual y acquainted - someone she saw regularly without ever real y knowing. A courier, a shop assistant, someone she met at the tube station every morning.

Cal it a couple of thousand suspects...

'Jane was always up for it, you know? Up for the crack.' Bracher was stil eulogising. 'As far as I know, she got on with almost everybody.'

Thorne spoke directly to him for the first time, his sarcasm undisguised. 'And, as far as you know, Mr Bracher, did she ever get offwith anybody?'

Bracher reddened. He picked up a teaspoon and tapped it against the side of the table for a few seconds. 'Look, I'm here to make sure that people can work together. Who they're sleeping with is real y none of my business.'

'Even if it's someone in the same office? I find that hard to believe.' Bracher's mobile rang and he grabbed for it grateful y. As he murmured into it, he raised his eyebrows at Thorne, an apology for the tiresome interruption. Thorne looked at Hol and. Time to go.

Bracher shrugged and stood up. 'I'm sorry, but unless there's anything else...'

As they al shook hands, gathering up jackets and overcoats, the thought crossed Thorne's mind that Bracher had primed a col eague to ring him after ten minutes, giving him an excuse to get away. As he and Hol and pushed their way out through the revolving door, a second thought entered his mind. A question. Had he developed finely honed, razor-sharp instincts, or was he just a cynical bastard?

'What do you make of him, then?' Hol and asked. They were walking along Shaftesbury Avenue, towards the Cambridge Circus NCP on Gerrard Street, where Thorne's F-reg Mondeo was busy lowering the tone. It was bright but freezing. Scarves and sunglasses weather... 'I think he was sleeping with Jane Lovel , or had been at some point.' Hol and nodded. 'Worth looking at d'you think?'

Thorne pul ed a face. He was a cynical bastard, but those instincts he did have, told him that Bracher, though an arrogant, unpleasant sod, was probably no more than that. He wondered how many more of them he was going to have to deal with before this case was finished.

Back at Becke House, Thorne walked past McEvoy who was on the phone in the Major Incident Room. She waved at him, indicating that she needed to talk. He nodded and carried on through to his own office.

He sat down at his desk, flicked the desktop calendar forward to Tue, Dec 11, and stared for a minute at the psychedelic screensaver that Hol and had instal ed for him. The vivid colours swam and morphed and bled into one another, and he gazed at them until they began to blur and hurt his eyes. They were there, so he'd been told, to stop the computer screen burning out. Thorne wondered if they made something that could do the same for policemen.

He stood up and marched briskly out of the office into the Incident Room, not looking at anybody, not speaking, grabbing a chair and taking it with him.

He wasn't burnt out yet...

If he disliked his office, his feelings for the Incident Room were closer to pure hatred. There was so much more of it. A room of sharp corners and dead air. A long, dirty window, the light d.iffused through an off-white vertical blind, one blade permanently broken and crumpled onto the windowsil , where it lay among the corpses of a hundred long-dead bluebottles. A dozen or more desks. Sharp corners waiting to catch a thigh or tear the back of a hand. There was one in

particular that caught Thorne several times a week, no matter how hard he tried to avoid it. The room was a feng shui nightmare. Not that he had any truck whatsoever with that kind of rubbish. The only rearrangement of furniture and personal belongings that he had any belief in, involved burglars and fences.

He dragged the chair across the room behind him, steering wel clear of the lethal desktop. He planted himself at the far end, in front of the wal , and stared.

Jane Lovel . Katie Choi. Ruth Murray. Carol Garner. Photocopies of photos on a ratty, cork pinboard.

And file names on a computer, sticky labels on jars in a mortuary... Arrows and swooping lines marked in thick, black felt-tip pen on a wipe-clean chart. Lines that linked grainy prints of the four victims to lists of dates, times and locations. Beneath these was another batch of names in a row of wonky columns. Margie Knight. Michael Murrel . Lyn Gibson.

Charlie Garner...

Witnesses. Friends. Family. Figures at the periphery of the case diagram. Thorne stared at the chart. A few nights before, he had sat and thought about the hundreds, the thousands of those whose livelihood depended on kil ing. Now, he thought about the more unwil ing participants. Those who had not chosen to play any part in the process - a process that ended with their names scribbled on a wipe clean board.

Those hundreds of lives touched by a single death.

Jane Lovel . Katie Choi. Ruth Murray. Carol Garner. Four single deaths. Two twisted kil ers. Thorne stared at the names and pictures on the wal in front of him and felt it slipping away.

The case was going cold. They were losing it.

Thorne turned at a commotion behind him and saw Brigstocke marching across the office in his direction. A step or two behind the DCI was a man Thorne recognised from the press conference a few days earlier. He couldn't remember the name...

'Tom, this is Steve Norman, our new Senior Press Officer.' Norman, that was it. Soberly suited and suitably respectful as he'd welcomed the ladies and gentlemen of the media into the briefing room at Scotland Yard, and smoothed the way for Trevor Jesmond with a few easy jokes. Nothing that might compromise the seriousness of the investigation of course, or distract the attention of the cameras from their intended target. Clearly he was someone who could tailor his demeanour to any occasion.

Thorne stood. Norman stepped smartly forward and reached for his hand. He was a smal ish man, sinewy and energised. His black hair was gel ed and swept back, and his dark eyes held Thorne's as their hands met.

'Pleased to meet you, Tom.'

There were perhaps forty people in the room - detectives, uniforms and civilian auxiliaries. The hubbub, the noise of phones ringing and printers whirring, was not inconsiderable.

Thorne, for reasons he couldn't explain, felt forty pairs of eyes upon him and imagined that the entire place had fal en silent.

Brigstocke gestured towards the other side of the room. 'Let's go into the office shal we. You can't hear yourself think in here...'

Thorne led the way. Brigstocke and Norman walked a few paces behind, and despite his best efforts, Thorne could hear nothing of their murmured conversation. As he glanced back over his shoulder,

he caught his thigh on the sharp corner of the deadly desktop. 'Fuck!'

The stab of pain was intense. He kicked the leg of the desk. The eyes of the woman behind it widened in alarm, her arms spreading to prevent a tottering tower of paperwork from col apsing.

When Thorne reached the door to his office, stil rubbing the top of his thigh, Hol and, who was on a coffee run, caught his eye. The DC's raised eyebrows asked the question. Thorne's tiny shrug gave the answer. Your guess is as good as mine, mate...

Once inside, Thorne poured himself into a chair and was a little

disconcerted to see that Brigstocke was stil standing and Norman was leaning casual y against a desk. They were both looking down at him.

'It's clear that the media are not giving up on this until we've got a result ...' Brigstocke said. It was the voice he usual y reserved for superior officers. 'So it's important that we keep Steve up to speed with everything.' Thorne was hugely relieved that Brigstocke hadn't gone as far as mentioning the fabled hymnsheet that they were al supposed to be singing from.

Norman flashed the smile that Thorne had seen him use to such good effect when he'd introduced Jesmond at the press conference. 'Russel 's already fil ed me in. I just wanted to introduce myself properly, and apologise in advance, because at some point I wil become a pain in the arse.'

Thorne, who didn't doubt it for a second, did his best to summon up something like a smile in return. 'I'm sure I'l cope.'

Norman nodded, pushed himself away from the edge of the desk, strol ed across to the window. 'If a media type says "off the record", my advice usual y would be to shut the fuck up very bloody quickly, but off the record, Tom...' Brigstocke laughed. Thorne sort of joined in. 'Anything I should know about?'

'Impossible to say,' Thorne said. 'I don't know how many things you don't know.' Norman didn't turn from the window so Thorne couldn't judge his reaction, but Brigstocke's was clear enough. Thorne knew that he'd better play along. 'We'l make sure you're the first to know if anything significant breaks. We're chasing up a few leads...'

Norman turned from the window and looked straight at Thorne. 'Listen, I don't real y expect to be the first person to know anything, but it's always a good idea to use the press. If you don't, give them a chance and they'l have you...' Th0rne didn't bother even trying to think of a smart-arse answer, because he knew Norman was right. He'd seen too many good policemen eaten up. If the appetite was to be satisfied, he needed to tolerate people like Norman.

'Right now, they're getting a bit impatient,' Norman said. 'We've made a major breakthrough, no question about it, but we need to fol ow it up.'

'We should never have made it public. The fact that the kil ers are working together...'

Norman dropped the matey tone as if it was a turd. 'That was not down to me, Inspector, as you wel know. My job was, and is, to implement the decisions taken at a far higher level than this, as far as they affect the Met's relations with the media.' He looked across at

Brigstocke, cocked his head.

Was that clear enough?

Brigstocke took a few steps towards Thorne, put his hands on the back of the chair.

'Anything from the meeting with Bracher?'

Thorne was uncomfortable discussing the case as it was actual y unfolding with Norman in the room, but he understood that Brigstocke was angling for something, anything, that he might be able to throw to the press office.

'Not real y.' He turned to look at Norman. 'But we should be able to let you have a definitive e-fit of the man we think kil ed Jane Lovel and Ruth Murray very soon.'