The Killing Habit Read online

  While DS Samir Karim stood up and began allocating actions, Thorne and Kitson moved across to join DCI Russell Brigstocke, who had been listening from the far corner. They followed him out into the corridor.

  ‘Good stuff in there, Tom,’ Brigstocke said. ‘That business about being lucky. Got them nicely fired up.’

  ‘Haven’t seen you that fired up for a long time,’ Kitson said.

  Thorne grunted in thanks or acknowledgement, he wasn’t sure which. The truth was, he was feeling somewhat grubby and useless suddenly; a little afraid of being found out. He knew he’d made a good job of rallying the troops but, though he’d meant everything he’d said in the incident room, they were just words. These days, he found it hard to distinguish genuine passion from that which was simply… appropriate. Expected. He had not known Alice Matthews, had not seen the pain on the faces of those who had loved her. He could not even come close to imagining it, not really. It was his job to catch the man who had caused that pain, so he would do whatever was necessary, but being fired up, making sure everyone else was fired up, did not stop him feeling a little like a fraud.

  He said, ‘We’re going to need a lot more luck.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Sandwiched between a bank and a bookmakers, French’s Hair & Beauty was set back from the High Road in a row of shops and takeaways opposite Wembley Central station. Looking in through the plate-glass windows, Tanner could see that the place was busy, and she was a little surprised, having clocked the prices on a menu of available treatments on the door. She wondered how many of the customers had needed to visit one or other of the businesses on either side before venturing in.

  A short-term loan to get your roots seen to. A fiver on something in the three o’clock at Kempton Park, which might pay for a bikini wax, if you were lucky and had decent odds.

  Tanner was greeted warmly by a receptionist when she entered and shown to a seating area. There was a selection of newspapers available on a wicker table, but before she’d had a chance to take in the headlines a young woman wearing a branded polo shirt was standing in front of her brandishing a list of hot drinks.

  Tanner said, ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘They’re complimentary,’ the girl said.

  ‘I should hope so.’ Tanner took out her warrant card and said, ‘I’m here to have a word with Mr French.’

  The girl nodded, as though this was the most exciting thing that had happened to her all day, which it quite probably was, then turned and hurried across the salon, headed for the man Tanner knew to be Graham French, because he was the only man in there.

  He looked over at her, nodding as the girl leaned towards his ear.

  She almost certainly needed to get close, Tanner thought, to make herself heard above the noise. The hubbub of chat between stylists and their clients and the soft whine of hairdryers might almost have been soporific, were it not all but drowned out by MTV, playing simultaneously on three wall-mounted screens. She watched a girl walking from her workstation to the reception desk, moving in time to the music. Tinchy Tempah or Teeny Rascal or Dizzee Lizzee, whoever it was.

  Tanner remembered a joke she’d heard somewhere…

  So, how would you like your hair cut?

  In complete silence, please.

  Graham French was tall and thin; fiftyish, with gleaming teeth which Tanner guessed were false and a predictably luxuriant head of hair. It was bouffant and bouncy, suspiciously dark brown, but then Tanner had yet to meet a hairdresser with hair she approved of. She thought that bald men were probably the most reliable, pouring all their skill and dedication into something they didn’t have and could only remember fondly.

  He sat down next to her and spoke quietly: a thin, Midlands accent. The arm thrown casually across the back of his chair and the attempt at a smile could not quite mask the nervousness at speaking to a police officer that was hard-wired into most ex-cons. ‘What can I do for you?’

  Equally quietly, Tanner told him.

  ‘Would it be all right if we went into the office? Well, I say office…’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Tanner said.

  She stood and followed him behind the reception desk and along a corridor lined with boxes of conditioner and hair-wax into a small room where a desk, a computer and a pair of tatty chairs took up almost all the available space.

  French sat down. ‘Most of the people here know I was in prison,’ he said. ‘It’s never been a problem, because people understand that you make mistakes. Didn’t lose a single regular, matter of fact, and I’m perfectly happy to talk about it, you know, if anyone asks.’ He leaned over and pushed the door shut. ‘Still, no point broadcasting it, is there?’

  ‘Might have been trickier if you worked in a bank,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Yeah… fair point.’

  French had done the best part of two years in Maidstone and then Pentonville, for fraud. Tanner had not checked the details, but credit fraud was her best guess. Or perhaps he had tried to get one over on the Inland Revenue, though for a sentence that long, it needed to have been a serious amount of money.

  Tanner took her notebook from her bag and nodded back towards the salon. ‘Swanky place.’

  ‘Cheers.’ French looked genuinely pleased. ‘We really try to create a nice atmosphere, you know? Somewhere you can come and be spoiled, but not poncy.’

  ‘Poncy prices, though.’

  He smiled. Definitely false teeth, Tanner decided.

  ‘Well, you have to make the business work and the rent on the place is silly money. My sister’s the brains behind it all, does most of the hard graft.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘I’m just a scissors merchant who tries to keep my ladies entertained.’ He dropped his arms. ‘No, seriously though, she was the one who kept the salon up and running while I was away. Gave me something to come out to.’

  ‘You need that,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Bang on. Most of the blokes I knew in there had nothing once they’d done their stretch. Just a few months catching up on the beer and getting their ends away, then doing something daft and coming straight back.’

  ‘Andrew Evans told me you used to cut hair inside.’

  French nodded. ‘Oh yeah, I kept my hand in. Not like that was usually anything fancy, mind you, because most of the boys just wanted a number one, but now and again one of the black lads wanted stuff cut into the sides, gang symbols or whatever. Good way to make a bit of money as well… a few quid extra to spend on Canteen, which is always a result. Phone credit, chocolate or whatever. I mean, my sister sent a bit of money in, but it was hard enough for her running this place on her own. So…’

  ‘Chocolate and phone credit?’

  ‘Yeah, or fruit, you know. Writing paper, sometimes.’

  ‘Very good,’ Tanner said. ‘But I’m guessing some of the extra money came in handy for buying your Spice.’

  He sat back and nodded, a wry smile acknowledging that the chit-chat was over. ‘Well, yeah, obviously. It meant that most of the time I could pay for the stuff straight off and not have to get it on tick like some of the other lads. I mean I know how pear-shaped that can go when you get out.’ He leaned forward. ‘That what happened to Andy, is it?’

  ‘I can’t go into details,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Got in over his head, did he?’

  ‘Like I said.’

  French shrugged. ‘These people are your best friends when you’re banged up,’ he said. ‘Sending in whatever you need. But you really don’t want to get on the wrong side of them. It’s hard enough getting off that shit.’

  ‘Tell me about the Duchess,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Her?’ He laughed. ‘Well, piece of work she was.’

  Tanner waited.

  ‘She was… I was going to say pleasant, you know? Very friendly, liked to natter. But the truth is we were always pleased to see her, and she had a part to play, so who knows what sort of person she actually was.’ He ran a finger down one of his sideburns. ‘I cut her hair once, just a
fter I came out, and I remember her saying she was married to a prison guard once upon a time. Don’t know if that helps. Probably how she found out the way everything worked inside, don’t you reckon? Inside information, literally.’

  ‘Don’t suppose she mentioned her ex-husband’s name?’

  ‘Well, if she did I’ve forgotten it,’ French said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No worries,’ Tanner said. A nice solid lead had probably been too much to hope for.

  ‘She was always businesslike, I can tell you that. Good at what she did.’

  ‘I spoke to a man called Kyle Mason,’ Tanner said.

  French nodded. ‘I cut his hair plenty of times.’

  ‘He seemed to think she might have had a connection to somewhere by the sea. Something she said.’

  ‘Yeah?’ French stared up at the ceiling tiles and thought about it. ‘That rings a bell, I think, but I can’t remember her saying anything specific.’

  ‘You’re sure she never mentioned a place?’

  He shook his head. ‘She usually had a bit of a tan though, come to think of it, like she got a bit more sun than most people. Yeah, maybe she’s got a place on the coast.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ Tanner said. ‘I could do with narrowing it down a bit.’

  ‘I mean it definitely wasn’t spray-tan, because we do that here and I know what it looks like.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Like you’ve been dipped in gravy. I don’t put that in the brochure, obviously.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can think of? Anything she might have let slip about her family or friends?’

  ‘She had a kid. She definitely mentioned that.’

  ‘That’s what Kyle Mason thought.’

  ‘A daughter, I think.’

  Tanner wrote that down. Aside from the tip about the ex-husband, it was the only thing she had written down.

  ‘I can tell you this,’ French said. ‘She was always very… smooth, you know? Nothing rattled her. The trick with getting gear off her was always to hide what she gave you straight away. She could get it to you easy as you like… in a flash, you know, but you had to get rid of it just as fast. You couldn’t just hang on to it, stick it up your sleeve or whatever, because you’d be searched on your way out of the visiting hall, so you needed to put it where they wouldn’t find it. I don’t have to tell you where, right?’

  Tanner shook her head.

  ‘Well, she always found some way to give you the time to do that. I mean it only takes a few seconds, because you get good at it… your hand straight down the back of your sweatpants, like…’ He reached behind him, mimed a well-practised move. ‘But she’d know exactly when you needed to do it, could give you the signal. She had her eyes on the screws all the time and always knew what the cameras were doing. If they were working.’ He shook his head. ‘Yeah, the Duchess was a one-off.’

  Tanner put her notebook away. She didn’t know if anything French had told her would prove ultimately to be of any use, and was wondering if this had been worth missing Thorne’s briefing on Operation Felix for. When she looked up again, French was studying her.

  ‘You fancy popping back one day, I’ll do something with your hair.’

  Tanner looked at him.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice. They did a decent job. But I can do a better one.’

  ‘I don’t think I could afford it.’

  French smiled. ‘Mates’ rates.’

  ‘Against the rules,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Well, have a think about it,’ French said. ‘I promise you won’t be disappointed. The coffee’s good, too.’

  Tanner stood up. ‘Do you provide earplugs?’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  For the second time that day, Thorne outlined the ongoing investigation into the murder of Alice Matthews and the hunt for her killer’s three previous victims, though it was done somewhat less theatrically than it had been in the incident room at Becke House a couple of hours before. It was certainly not his job to gee up Detective Superintendent Simon Fulton, but looking at him, Thorne decided that would probably have been no easy task anyway. He could have walked into the man’s office with a posse of motivational speakers and a horse trough full of cocaine, and might still have struggled.

  Fulton listened, tapped out a few notes on his iPad, then sat back.

  ‘It’s very impressive, the way DI Tanner put all this together.’

  ‘Yeah, she did a great job,’ Thorne said.

  Fulton nodded, hummed. ‘Or perhaps some of the officers working these cases originally did a poor one.’

  ‘Not for me to say.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Easy to be critical with hindsight, isn’t it?’

  ‘The fact is, if any one of them had put in the extra work Tanner did and seen what she did, we might have a couple less dead women on our hands. A lot fewer dead cats.’

  There was perhaps a grain of truth in what Fulton was saying, Thorne knew that, but some people were simply better at their job than others and he had seen nothing to suggest negligence. He knew how easily mistakes got made, because he had made plenty himself, and it was always nice and easy to point the finger at the failure of others. It was why there were so many high-flyers, like Fulton, for whom finding someone to blame was a default position.

  ‘I think the truth is, this individual’s been very good at hiding the connections,’ Thorne said. ‘Up to now, at least.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Fulton shrugged as though the matter was closed, but Thorne knew it wasn’t. If the investigation was successful, he guessed that the DS would happily acknowledge his own part, marginal as it was, in putting a dangerous killer away, then try to earn a few brownie points by looking to expose and punish those who might have done so earlier.

  Justice done, a career or two screwed, and one rung higher up the ladder.

  A good day’s work at the office.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve got everything covered with Alice Matthews,’ Fulton said. He swiped at the screen of his iPad. ‘Thames Valley uniform fully on board?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Good. I’ll put in a word with the Deputy Commissioner. See if we can speed things up a bit with the mobile phone provider and the social media platforms.’

  ‘That would be useful,’ Thorne said.

  Fulton closed the cover on his tablet. ‘I’m grateful that you took the time to come down and fill me in.’

  While a whiny voice inside Thorne’s head was screaming Brigstocke made me do it, he said, ‘We’re all after the same individual, so why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Fulton said. ‘It’s professional courtesy.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But not everyone would have taken the trouble. It’s appreciated.’

  Fulton’s very white teeth were briefly on display, but something on his face suggested he knew perfectly well that the man smiling back at him had had his arm twisted. One dip into the DI’s voluminous file at the Directorate of Professional Standards would have made it perfectly clear where he stood on such matters.

  Tom Thorne probably thought courtesy was something women did when they met the Queen.

  On a staircase above the yard at the back of Kentish Town station, Thorne stood staring down at the lines of patrol cars and a few ordinary-looking saloons that could chase down a Porsche if need be, sucking in breaths like a man in need of fresh air, while happily taking in the smoke from Christine Treasure’s cigarette.

  ‘It’s not compulsory,’ Treasure said. ‘You don’t have to dislike anyone with more pips than you.’ She took a drag. ‘I mean you’re senior to me and I only think you’re a bit of a twat.’

  ‘It’s not about rank.’

  ‘Course it is.’

  ‘He’s slimy,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Yeah, well, you get covered in it, don’t you? Climbing up the greasy pole.’

  ‘It suits some people better than others.’

  A PC who’d been smoking below them cam
e trudging back up the stairs. He stopped to speak briefly to Treasure who was all business suddenly, talking him through the fall-out from a domestic disturbance he’d been called out to the night before. As the PC walked away, she turned back to Thorne and said, ‘I mean, I’m no fan of the greasy pole.’ She waggled her eyebrows like a cut-price Groucho Marx. ‘I’m talking sexually, of course, though I do have a few replicas in the bedside table.’

  ‘Shame,’ Thorne said. ‘I was hoping there might be a dildo or two on the wedding list.’

  ‘No, mate, that’s all covered. What we really need is crockery.’

  Thorne’s mobile pinged and he took it out to see that there was a message from Tanner.

  ‘Your bride-to-be does know you’re not a virgin, right?’

  Treasure coughed and spluttered out a laugh.

  Thorne opened the text:

  Spoke to Graham French. Will fill you in later. How did briefing go?

  ‘My other half’s been around the block,’ Treasure said, grinning. ‘Put it this way, I think between us we’ve had more pussies than an animal shelter.’ She nodded towards his phone. ‘Anything important?’

  Thorne shook his head and slipped the phone back into his pocket, smiling at what might happen were Christine Treasure and Nicola Tanner ever to come face to face. Yes, they had one thing in common, but aside from the fact that the people they chose to sleep with did not have penises, greasy or otherwise, he could not imagine two people less likely to hit it off. Treasure would surely dismiss Tanner as Job-pissed, while Tanner would think that the sergeant’s… up-front declarations about her sexual antics were distasteful. Tanner thought Phil Hendricks’s attitude to his sexuality was a bit ‘showy’, so Thorne’s mind boggled to think of what she’d make of Christine Treasure.

  Treasure took a final drag and flicked her fag-end down into the yard. She said, ‘Talking of pussies…’

  Thorne told her what he’d told Fulton: the headlines.

  ‘Well, if you need a few more bodies,’ Treasure said. ‘I mean, the right sort, obviously, happy to pitch in.’