From the Dead Read online

‘Take your time.’

  ‘Have you got kids?’

  ‘No,’ Thorne said. He started the engine again, told her he would run her back to Victoria.

  ‘That’s miles out of your way.’ She rooted in her bag, pulled out a small pack of tissues. ‘Haven’t you got to get back to Hendon?’

  ‘It’s really not a problem.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Just drop me at a tube.’

  The argument picked up where it had left off; Kate on her way down the stairs as Donna came through the front door.

  ‘How did that go?’

  Donna ignored the question, threw her coat across the banister and walked past her girlfriend into the kitchen. Kate followed, asked the same question.

  ‘Why would you care?’

  ‘Come on, Don . . .’

  ‘You’ve already made your opinion perfectly clear.’

  Kate sat at the small table. ‘Look, I was just warning you about getting your hopes up.’

  ‘My hopes?’

  ‘I don’t want you to be miserable.’

  ‘You’re making me miserable, because you’re not supporting me.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ Kate said.

  ‘I don’t need people being negative.’ Donna slapped her hand against a cupboard door. ‘I’ve had years of that. I need you to back me up.’

  ‘I’ve always backed you up. I’m just saying go steady, that’s all. You’re pinning everything on that copper and that soppy girl and if you’re not careful—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You just might be in for a shock, that’s all.’

  ‘You think she’s dead, don’t you?’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You think my Ellie’s dead? I will not listen to that crap.’

  ‘You’re not listening to anything . . .’

  Donna flicked the kettle on, paced up and down the five feet of worn linoleum. ‘I know what this is about,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not about anything, OK? I just think you need to be realistic.’

  ‘You’re threatened by her,’ Donna said. ‘You’re threatened by Ellie.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  Donna nodded, suddenly sure of herself. Spitting out the words. ‘You think that if I had my daughter around, I wouldn’t have time for you. You’re scared shitless about being number two.’

  ‘You’re pathetic.’

  ‘I should have worked it out before,’ Donna said. ‘Same as when we were inside. You were always a stupid, jealous bitch.’

  ‘How can I be jealous of someone who isn’t even here? Someone you don’t even know?’

  ‘I know you, though,’ Donna said. ‘I fucking know you!’

  ‘You don’t know anything.’ Kate stood up and walked to the door. ‘You don’t know anything, and I can’t help you.’

  They stared at each other for a few seconds, until Kate turned and walked out. Donna leaned against the kitchen worktop, feeling the anger and the panic wheeze in her chest as the grumbling of the kettle grew louder behind her.

  THIRTEEN

  No more than a couple of days into it, Dave Holland had to face the fact that they might never discover the identity of the man who had died in Alan Langford’s place.

  It wasn’t that the numbers were daunting. Although more than two hundred thousand people were reported missing each year, only a third of them were adults. Of those, the majority were found safe and well within seventy-two hours, and almost ninety-nine per cent turned up within a year. So the number still missing ten years on was in the dozens rather than the hundreds. The parameters within which Holland was working narrowed down the search even further. He was looking for a man of roughly the same height and build as Alan Langford, who had probably been reported missing a week or two either side of the body being discovered in Epping Forest.

  Thus far, however, there was only one name on the list of likely candidates.

  Jack Shit.

  Holland had started from the assumption that, when faking his own death, Alan Langford had barbecued two birds in one Jag and got rid of someone he wanted dead. It was the ideal opportunity to knock off a business rival, or at the very least to get shot of someone who had simply pissed him off. But having cross-referenced the Police National Computer, the National Policing Improvement Agency’s Missing Persons’ Bureau and the relevant section of every police force website in the country, no obvious name had emerged. No gangsters, major or minor, no legitimate businessman who might have found themselves in Alan Langford’s way, in fact nobody with any visible connection whatsoever to him who had been reported missing around the time that the man himself had apparently been killed.

  It was a shame, but hardly unprecedented in this sort of case. The optimism had been knocked out of Dave Holland long ago, and these days he was surprised when any aspect of an inquiry turned out to be a walk in the park.

  With no obvious enemy fitting the bill, everybody else had to be checked out – those few dozen men of the requisite build who were still unaccounted for ten years after their loved ones had first reported them missing. After two days, Holland was already ranking this as one of the most unpleasant spells of donkey-work he had ever done. Calling the relatives of the missing men, he was always careful not to raise their hopes by suggesting that their loved ones might have been found, especially when that hope would quickly turn to horror as soon as the circumstances were explained. So he was as vague, occasionally as evasive, as he needed to be until he felt sufficiently confident to ask the person on the other end of the line if they would be willing to provide a DNA sample. ‘This is purely to help us eliminate your son/brother/father from our inquiries . . .’ That usually did the trick. The sample could then be compared with tissue taken at the original post-mor tem and now stored at the FSS lab in Lambeth.

  But plenty of people could be ruled out before that stage. The PM report had detailed two metal pins holding together the bones of the victim’s right leg and though there was little of anything left, Phil Hendricks had been unable to find any trace of an appendix in the victim’s body. At the time, in light of Donna Langford’s confession, no one had felt it necessary to check whether her husband had suffered a serious leg injury and undergone an appendectomy.

  ‘You look like you could do with this.’

  Holland looked up and smiled, relieved to see an attractive trainee detective constable brandishing a cup of coffee. She had been paying him a good deal of attention over the previous few weeks, but he couldn’t decide if she fancied him or was just arse-licking. He was happy enough either way and certainly grateful for the drink.

  ‘Bit of a slog, is it?’

  Holland had just got off the phone with a woman whose younger brother, a soldier in the British Army, had disappeared after going AWOL from his unit.

  ‘Can’t you just tell me if he’s dead?’ The woman had sounded wrung out. ‘It’d be so much bloody easier if we knew he was dead . . .’

  ‘Yeah, a slog,’ Holland said.

  He had found himself constructing scenarios in a bid to explain the often baffling disappearances laid out in the files before him. The twenty-eight-year-old who had vanished on the way home from the pub during a stag weekend in Newquay could have been bundled into a car by Alan Langford or one of his cronies. Equally, he could simply have wandered off the road, three sheets to the wind, and tumbled into the sea from a cliff-top. The thirty-seven-year-old man with a history of mental illness last seen at a bus stop in Willesden could have been picked up by Langford. But he was more likely to have drifted into the shadows and lost himself, to die later in rather more banal circumstances than the man Dave Holland was looking for.

  It was a long and laborious process: tracing the relatives; dispatching officers to collect samples; testing the DNA. With no guarantee of a result at the end of it. There was a real possibility that Langford had deliberately selected someone whose disappearance might not even be noted; someone who had already slipped through
society’s cracks and would not merit a missing person’s report. It made a sick kind of sense, Holland understood that, and was far less risky than targeting someone whose nearest and dearest would go running to the police as soon as he didn’t show up for his dinner.

  If that were the case, they might never identify the victim.

  They might never pin the murder on Alan Langford.

  Holland took the tea, asked where the biscuits were, then told the blushing TDC that he was only kidding. ‘Pull up a chair,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you through it.’

  As soon as Thorne returned to the office, he called Gary Brand, the DI he had spoken to in the Oak a few nights earlier. Before being drafted into the Langford inquiry ten years earlier, Brand had worked on the old Serious and Organised Crime Squad. In fact, his expertise in that area had been the very reason why he had been drafted in.

  Thorne hoped that same expertise might come in handy again.

  ‘I heard about Monahan,’ Brand said. ‘Sounds like you’ve opened a right can of worms.’

  ‘It was opened for me,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Doesn’t really matter, does it?’

  Thorne told Brand about his conversations with Jeremy Grover and with Cook, the bent prison officer. Brand did not seem remotely shocked at any of it, but he was more surprised when Thorne told him what Donna had said about the possibility of Langford being in Spain.

  ‘Really? I mean, it was my first thought when you told me about the photograph, but you would have thought he’d be slightly more imaginative. The Costa del Crime’s a bit bloody predictable, don’t you reckon?’

  ‘We’d never catch any of these buggers if they weren’t occasionally predictable,’ Thorne said.

  Brand laughed. ‘True enough, mate.’

  ‘Look, it’s a possibility, that’s all, but she said he used to know a few people who were holed up over there. I wondered if you might be able to come up with some names.’

  ‘Bloody hell, we’re going back a bit . . .’

  ‘I know, and it’s probably a waste of time . . .’

  ‘Let me make a couple of calls, see if I can dig out some old files.’

  ‘Anything you can find.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘My shout next time you’re in the Oak,’ Thorne said.

  Brand said he would get back to him by the close of play.

  Once he’d hung up, Thorne wandered along the corridor and into Russell Brigstocke’s office. The DCI had a selection of coins laid out in front of him on the desk. He was moving them from hand to hand and growing increasingly annoyed at his own less-than-impressive legerdemain. Thorne sat down and watched, thinking that Alan Langford’s sleight of hand had been all but faultless. He had slipped away, leaving a mysterious body in his place. And, if Donna’s suspicions were correct, he had returned ten years later to make his daughter disappear.

  ‘Revenge,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s what Donna reckons it’s all about.’

  ‘You buying it?’ Brigstocke asked.

  ‘If that’s what it is, it’s certainly worked,’ Thorne said. ‘She’s in pieces.’

  ‘Did you take Anna Carpenter with you this morning?’ There was a slight smile on Brigstocke’s face as he casually asked the question, but Thorne convinced himself it was because he’d just palmed one of the coins particularly well.

  ‘I thought it was a good idea,’ Thorne said. ‘She’s pretty close with Donna. Puts her at her ease, you know?’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’m glad all that’s working out.’ Brigstocke opened his hand to show Thorne it was empty. ‘Jesmond will be happy at any rate.’

  ‘I wouldn’t sleep well otherwise,’ Thorne said.

  While Brigstocke continued to practise, Thorne told him about the call to Brand, and the possibility of Langford having followed an old friend or two to Spain.

  Brigstocke agreed that it sounded somewhat obvious, but suggested it was certainly worth chasing up. ‘I’ll put the SOCA boys on stand-by,’ he said. ‘It would be nice if we had something a bit more definite before you meet them, mind you.’

  Thorne said he’d do his best.

  ‘Any word from Bethell?’

  ‘I’ve left two more messages today,’ Thorne said.

  Brigstocke admitted he was having no more luck with the FSS lab than Thorne was having with his own image-analysis ‘expert’. ‘I’ll chase them up too,’ he said. ‘Tell them we need something by tomorrow. ’ He thought for a second, then spun round in his chair to study the chart of shifts on the wall behind him. ‘Are you on tomorrow?’

  Saturday.

  The first since a long-forgotten and seemingly resolved case had come back with a brutal vengeance. Since a corpse had been revealed as a killer. Since one murder had become two, separated by ten years, but each orchestrated by the same man.

  ‘Presuming you’ve managed to conjure up the overtime,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Makes you want to ring in,’ Yvonne Kitson said. ‘Put some of these idiots straight.’

  ‘Would it make any difference?’

  ‘Who cares?’ She slammed shut a drawer in her desk. ‘I tell you this, though, they’d need a state-of-the-art bleeping machine if I ever got on there.’

  ‘There’s a delay,’ Thorne said. ‘Thirty seconds or something, so the swearing doesn’t get broadcast.’

  Kitson thought about it. Said, ‘Wankers.’

  In their office, Thorne and Kitson had the radio tuned to 5 Live and were listening intently to a phone-in discussion about the legal system and the presumption of innocence.

  The guest in the studio was Adam Chambers.

  It seemed to Thorne that the show’s host was fawning all over Chambers as though he were some hot-shot actor or pop star. Chuckling at every quip and grunting in sympathy each time her guest complained about how he had been treated by the police or pleaded for the tolerance and understanding that, as an innocent man, he believed was his by right.

  ‘It’s another example of trial by media,’ one caller said. ‘And the police just go along with it.’

  ‘Adam?’ the host simpered.

  ‘That’s spot on,’ Chambers said. ‘The police know very well that people are reading these stories, taking in all these rumours and allegations, and the truth goes out the window. Even if the truth does come out, which, thank God, it did in my case, you still have to deal with being . . . marked out and stigmatised. Tarnished by it, you know?’

  ‘No smoke without fire, right?’

  Thorne winced; the phrase, as it always did, setting his teeth on edge.

  ‘Absolutely, Gabby,’ said Chambers.

  ‘I think I might be sick,’ Kitson said.

  Thorne felt pulled in two very different directions. He despised the ‘no smoke without fire’ brigade, the knee-jerk smugness of their tabloid-friendly mantra. He knew better than most that some people were convicted of crimes they had not committed. And he did his best to accept that, in principle at least, those who were innocent in the eyes of the law should be able to walk free, unburdened by any association of guilt.

  But then there was Adam Chambers.

  In his case it was not so much fire as a raging inferno.

  When Sam Karim came in and said that Andy Boyle was on the line from Wakefield, Thorne told him to put the call through and turned off the radio.

  ‘Bloody good job,’ Kitson said. ‘I was about to lose my lunch.’

  Thorne would listen to the rest of the programme on his computer when he got home. Get worked up all over again. He felt sure that Andrea Keane would not even warrant a mention.

  Boyle was in a marginally better mood than the last time Thorne had spoken to him, but it could not have been described as cheerful. Thorne doubted the Yorkshireman ever did cheerful.

  ‘Thought you might like a progress report.’

  ‘That’s good of you,’ Thorne said. ‘So?’

  ‘There isn’t an
y,’ Boyle said, his mood lightening further as he delivered the bad news. ‘We’ve had another crack at Grover and we’ve had that bent screw in a couple of times an’ all, but neither one’s about to roll over.’

  ‘What about trying to find the money?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Well, you know what the sodding banks are like. Hardly falling over themselves to give us any records on the hurry-up. But I’m betting the payments were made in cash and never deposited, so we’re probably wasting our time.’

  Thorne had already come to the same conclusion about any money paid to Paul Monahan, but a detailed investigation into his finances had been put on the back burner since his death. There was not much point in pressurising a witness who was no longer around to give evidence.

  ‘Even if we do find the cash,’ Boyle said, ‘there’s no way of tracing where it’s come from. Cook might have bought a new car more often than most, taken the odd flash holiday or whatever, but without a paper trail, there’s bugger all linking either him or Grover to Langford.’

  ‘They still have some explaining to do, though.’

  ‘Best we can hope for,’ Boyle said. ‘I mean, they might not even have been paid yet for the Monahan job, and any money they pocketed before will probably be long gone. You just keep the cash under your bed and spend it as you see fit, right?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Thorne said.

  ‘These days you can pay for most things with readies, right? People are too grateful to bother asking questions.’

  Thorne said he supposed so.

  ‘I’m betting that whoever’s handing the dosh over is going to wait until it’s safe. They’d know damn well we’ll be looking at Grover and Cook, so they’ll bide their time and meanwhile that pair of arseholes can just bluff it out.’

  ‘Grover’s not exactly got a lot to lose by keeping his mouth shut, has he?’

  ‘Right. He’s never going to be convicted of doing Monahan without Cook’s confession. And Cook’s already done the smart thing and handed in his resignation, by the way. Claims his wife’s poorly.’

  ‘Well, there’s an admission of guilt.’

  ‘Yeah, you know that, and I know that . . .’