Cry Baby Page 21

  Like a series, wasn’t that what it was called? The journey of it.

  There were people who needed to see these photos, after all, perhaps show them around. People who would enjoy every stage of the proceedings and get a real kick out of seeing just how much poor little Deano had suffered.

  The photographer stepped quickly forward and stabbed Meade again twice, short and sharp into the belly, left side and right. Then again, deep into each leg, just because it felt good.

  Meade screamed every time, but not very loudly, more like a whimper.

  He moaned something as the camera was raised again.

  ‘Don’t’, maybe, or ‘God’. ‘Mum’, most like.

  ‘Say cheese . . .’

  FORTY-FOUR

  Thorne had been woken by the call just after two-thirty in the morning.

  Now, a couple of hours later, he stood clumsily stripping off a plastic bodysuit outside a house in Dalston and, though the adrenalin had chased away the fatigue, he was feeling every bit as disconcerted, as alarmed, as he had been when the phone had rung.

  He’d known what to expect, of course. In the dark of his bedroom, scrabbling for the handset, he’d guessed there would be a body. Unless it was a wrong number or a family emergency, a call at that time of night rarely meant anything else.

  But he had not been expecting this one.

  It had been warm inside the ground-floor flat – the number of people, the arc lights – but now, in jeans and a T-shirt, Thorne shivered slightly as he leaned back against one of the support vehicles and stared around. Satellite dishes clung to the sides of houses like blank-faced gargoyles while, higher up, a ragged line of TV aerials was silhouetted against a sky just beginning to pink. England flags hung in every other window and crime-scene tape was tied off on trees and lamp posts, strung around the house in which Dean Meade had been murdered.

  ‘Not that we really needed to wear these.’ Paula Kimmel opened the boot of her car and tossed her own discarded bodysuit inside.

  ‘No point making things in there any worse,’ Thorne said.

  Kimmel wandered across to stand next to Thorne. ‘Not sure we could, because I’m damn sure the ladies and gentlemen of the press weren’t wearing them.’

  Just after midnight, anonymous calls had been made to the night desks of the Sun, Star and Daily Mirror. An address had been given, along with a promise that the door had been left open and the assurance that it would be very much in their interest to send reporters along immediately. An hour later, a journalist who had not wished to give his name rang to alert police to a murder on Kingsland Road, though by the time officers arrived to attend the scene, the journalist and however many of his colleagues had been there with him were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Got what they wanted and scarpered,’ Kimmel said.

  ‘Whatever our anonymous caller wanted, too.’ Thorne turned to her. ‘The killer, presumably.’

  ‘You think they took pictures?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Reckon they’ll run them?’

  Thorne thought about the scene inside. The stains and the spatter. ‘Well, only if they want people chucking up their cornflakes.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll what-do-you-call-it, pixellate them.’

  ‘Or print little stars over the blood,’ Thorne said. ‘Like some of them put over the models’ nipples.’

  Kimmel laughed. ‘The tasteful ones.’

  They waited, then both took plastic cups of coffee from a uniform heading inside with a tray of hot drinks from Teapot One, the catering vehicle on site even before the forensic team had shown up.

  ‘Could do with this,’ Kimmel said.

  Thorne slurped his own coffee, needing the jolt, the warmth, every bit as much. He watched as other uniformed officers dealt firmly, but politely, with the predictable handful of gawpers, all seemingly happy to stand and stare from doorways or perch on garden walls, even at this ungodly hour on a Sunday morning. Those of the victim’s near neighbours for whom the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle – better yet several vehicles – were like a hypnotist’s watch; irresistible as a SALE sign.

  He knew that, inside, the neighbour who lived in the flat above Dean Meade – an elderly and very talkative woman – was still being questioned, though Thorne had already been given the key information.

  The woman had heard Dean – she’d been told that was the poor young man’s name – come in at around eleven o’clock and she was positive about the time because the football had started on the BBC at a quarter to and she’d not long turned it off. She hadn’t been earwigging, she’d said, nothing like that, but she could have sworn she’d heard two voices. Dean and another man. About half an hour later, she’d heard the doorbell and it had all been quiet after that.

  ‘You think it might have been the reporters arriving?’ Kimmel asked now. ‘When the woman upstairs heard the doorbell?’

  ‘Too early,’ Thorne said.

  ‘We can’t be certain, though.’

  ‘They didn’t even know about it until gone midnight.’

  ‘Maybe the old woman got the time mixed up.’

  ‘She sounded pretty sure, and whoever called the press said they’d left the door open.’

  ‘So, what do you reckon, then? Two killers?’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Thorne said.

  That two murder victims had been directly connected to Kieron Coyne was clearly more than coincidence, and Thorne could see why Meade, as the boy’s father, would have a motive for killing Figgis. As far as killing Dean Meade went, though, only one motive sprang to Thorne’s mind, and only one person who might conceivably have it.

  Whatever Boyle might have said two days before, now it had to be time to pay Billy Coyne a visit.

  With impeccable timing, a squad car pulled up, doors were opened simultaneously and Boyle and Roth stepped out, like bad actors in an episode of The Bill. For obvious reasons, the DI had gone to bed the night before in a foul mood and being dragged out of bed clearly hadn’t helped.

  ‘When I find out who trampled all over my crime scene, I’ll have their cobblers for breakfast.’

  ‘There must be some way to find out,’ Roth said. ‘Surely the papers have to keep a record of which reporters were on call, or whatever.’

  ‘Do they have to tell us, though?’ Kimmel asked.

  Thorne nodded thoughtfully, enjoying himself rather more than was probably appropriate. ‘Right, yeah. Freedom of the press, protecting sources or something.’

  ‘I’ll make them tell me,’ Boyle said. ‘Fucking up my murder inquiry.’

  Now, Thorne bit his tongue. Your murder inquiry? So we’re definitely having one this time, are we? You quite sure you don’t want to pop inside and make sure the victim didn’t stab himself to death?

  Boyle was handed a bodysuit. ‘Right, best get in there and have a look.’

  As the DI stepped away, Thorne caught movement at the front door and turned to see Phil Hendricks leaving the house, which meant that the body would shortly be making the same journey. Boyle and Roth stared at the pathologist and exchanged a knowing smirk before they began walking towards him up the front path. Thorne was delighted to see that Hendricks had caught the look himself and gleefully gave both officers the finger as they passed him.

  Kimmel had wandered away to talk to one of the uniforms by the time Hendricks was helping himself to some of Thorne’s coffee.

  ‘Tea wagon’s over there,’ Thorne said, pointing.

  ‘Only wanted a mouthful.’

  ‘So . . . ?’

  ‘Well, just so you know all those years at medical school weren’t wasted, I can tell you categorically that he’s definitely dead.’

  ‘Hilarious,’ Thorne said.

  ‘No more than a few hours. The knife wound to the neck did for him and the rest just looks like someone was having a bit of fun.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Hendricks stretched and yawned. ‘I’ll have chapter and verse o
nce I’ve done my own bit of cutting. I shall be incisive with my manly yet delicate hands and then with my remarkable brain.’

  ‘Good to hear.’

  ‘Tomorrow with a bit of luck.’

  ‘Might not be me,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Oh? Had enough of me already?’

  Thorne looked back towards the house. ‘All being well, I’ll be talking to the bloke who probably did it. Had it done, anyway.’

  ‘Fun, fun, fun.’ Hendricks took Thorne’s coffee cup again and drank what was left. ‘Right, I’m going to get a few hours’ kip. Bit of a backlog to catch up on later today. A pensioners’ suicide pact in Golders Green and a drowning in Hampstead Pond.’

  ‘Lovely,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks swallowed, chucked the empty paper cup on to the floor and stared at it. ‘A seventeen-year-old.’

  Today was supposed to have been Thorne’s first day off in almost two weeks. Though catching a murder first thing meant that he wouldn’t have quite as much free time as he was due, he told Hendricks how he was planning to spend his Sunday afternoon. The little choice he had in the matter.

  Hendricks nodded. ‘Nice.’

  ‘I’ll happily swap you,’ Thorne said.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Cat could not remember the last morning she’d woken up hungry. For more than a week, she’d not thought about cooking herself a meal of any sort, had been existing on snacks, more or less – crisps and chocolate – and even they were no more than fuel, forced down to keep her on her feet and tasting of nothing. The same was true of the wine and beer, of which she’d drunk far more than she was used to, though without it she knew that even those few hours of sleep to which she gratefully succumbed every night would be impossible. She thought she was beginning to understand how alcoholics felt, what the booze they put away was actually for.

  Armagnac or aftershave, it didn’t really matter.

  As long as it did the job.

  She drank her tea at the window, smoked one of the cigarettes Angie had left for her, then went into the kitchen. There was food in the fridge – once again, courtesy of Angie – and Cat knew exactly what she wanted, what she’d woken up thinking about. She took out a pack of bacon, eggs and sausages. She opened a tin of baked beans. She turned the radio on, filled the kettle to make herself more tea and stuck a couple of slices of bread in the toaster.

  Suddenly, she was ravenous.

  On Radio 1, Kevin Greening talked about how great the weather was shaping up to be. He said something cheesy about a ‘quickie’ being all he could manage these days, then played ‘Fastlove’ by George Michael. Cat remembered singing along to the track in Maria’s car a few weeks before, on their way home from somewhere or other, and, for a few glorious seconds, while the beans bubbled and the bacon spat, she sang along now and the shoulders that moved in time, the fingers that tapped out a rhythm on the worktop, felt like they belonged to someone else.

  A mum cooking a Sunday fry-up, the way she usually did. Something they looked forward to. She would have the full monty, same as always, and she guessed that Kieron would just want a bacon sandwich with loads of ketchup, because that was his favourite, and it wasn’t until Cat opened her mouth to call him that she remembered.

  She turned the radio off.

  She buttered her toast, poured the contents of the frying pan on to a plate and carried it through to the table in the living room.

  She had barely managed a mouthful when the phone rang.

  ‘It’s Simon Jenner. I came over the other—’

  ‘Yeah,’ Cat said. ‘The card. That was really nice.’

  ‘I’m really sorry to be calling on a Sunday.’

  ‘No worries. I was just eating my breakfast.’

  ‘Oh, shit . . . sorry. I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Cat said.

  ‘I got your phone number from the school,’ Jenner said. ‘From the files. I hope that’s all right.’

  Cat couldn’t think of any reason why it wouldn’t be. Parents’ contact details were kept so that teachers could get in touch if they needed to, so . . .

  ‘I was just calling to see how you were, really.’

  Cat turned and leaned back against the wall, stared across a room that on any normal day should have been littered with toys, abandoned trainers and scattered video cases. A dusty TV screen that, by now, he would already have been sitting in front of. ‘Oh, you know, the same.’

  ‘Course.’

  Cat took a deep breath, two. ‘Thanks for asking though. People stop asking.’

  ‘I’m sure they’re thinking it,’ he said. ‘If they don’t ask, it’s probably only because it’s such a stupid bloody question.’

  ‘Are you going to start apologising again?’

  He laughed softly. ‘It’s just that the other day when I came round, it struck me how good it is to talk in these situations. I mean, it might be the last thing you want to do, of course.’

  ‘Sometimes it is.’

  ‘I’m a teacher not a shrink, but I do think it helps.’

  ‘Yeah, I think it probably does,’ she said. ‘I’m not much of a talker at the best of times, mind you.’

  ‘Listen, there’s something I’d like to give you. Would it be OK if I came over?’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Cat said.

  ‘That’s another thing, so better still . . . I mean, again, this might sound like a terrible idea, but maybe we could meet somewhere for lunch or something. You probably don’t feel remotely like being sociable or anything, but I reckon it would be good to get out.’

  Cat said nothing. Her breakfast was probably cold by now. Sociable?

  ‘You can tell me to sod off and mind my own business.’

  ‘Well, getting out of here for a bit might stop me going completely off my trolley, I suppose. I mean, doing something that’s not going to the launderette or nipping to the off-licence.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought,’ Jenner said.

  ‘Just . . . I wouldn’t want to go anywhere too far away.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘I need to stay close to home, in case there’s news.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you think of somewhere nearby?’

  ‘OK. There’s one or two nice places.’

  ‘Maybe one day next week? I won’t keep you out too long, obviously. I do still have these pesky kids to teach.’

  Cat felt as though the breath had been punched out of her. She doubled over, as though she might be sick.

  He might have heard her reaction or simply realised what he’d said. ‘God, what a stupid thing to come out with.’ There were a few seconds of silence. He swore under his breath. ‘I can’t believe I said that.’

  It took Cat half a minute or more. ‘Listen, it really doesn’t matter, so please don’t feel bad about it. People shouldn’t have to watch what they say all the time. Walk on eggshells or treat me like I’ve got cancer . . . hide their kids if they see me coming.’

  ‘Still . . .’

  ‘Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go for lunch one day next week.’

  ‘OK, great.’ Jenner sounded thrilled. ‘Which day works best for you?’

  Cat found herself smiling when she said, ‘Let me just go and check my diary.’

  FORTY-SIX

  Thorne sat with his father, drinking cans of Carlsberg in the living room while his mother was busy getting lunch ready. As always, she shouted through from the kitchen every few minutes, keeping them up to date with her progress – ‘I’m just putting the peas on . . . the chicken’s done, but I’m letting it stand for a bit’ – or to check that particular likes and dislikes established decades earlier had not inexplicably changed.

  ‘Tom, I presume you want mash and roasties?’

  Tom did.

  ‘I’m guessing you’ll be wanting the breast, Jim . . .’

  In the living room, once he’d shouted back to confirm that his wife had guessed correctly, Jim Thorne shook his head
. ‘Since when have I ever preferred the leg?’

  Thorne nodded, as though the whole thing was daft, but he knew that his old man would have been disappointed if the question hadn’t been asked. It was part of the Sunday roast ritual, one of the things they did. Same as how, if his father belched, his mother would always say ‘More tea, vicar?’ or, whenever his mother couldn’t find such-and-such a thing and asked his father if he knew where it was, he would always shrug and suggest, ‘Up the crack of my arse?’

  His father’s insistence on breaking into a terrible Frank Carson impression whenever anyone Irish was on the television.

  His mother laughing at it, every single time.

  All that stuff.

  Fifteen years before, Thorne might have found these tired routines and marital catchphrases more than a little irritating, but now he could see them for what they were. Harmless, comforting; as true an expression of love, he supposed, as diamonds or a dozen red roses. No, truer. He saw that, too, now, and realised it was probably just because he and Jan had never come close to that degree of trust and familiarity.

  Or, if they had, they’d both forgotten what it was like.

  Jim Thorne had switched on Sunday Grandstand, then turned the volume down, because it was Sue Barker talking about tennis, which he didn’t see the point of. ‘Watch the game yesterday?’

  ‘Yeah, course,’ Thorne said.

  ‘It’s no wonder our lads are doing so well. Spurs are the backbone of that team, you know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go quite that far.’

  Jim Thorne counted off on his fingers. ‘Darren Anderton, Teddy Sheringham . . . Sol Campbell when he came on. Gazza, obviously.’

  ‘Gascoigne went to Italy four years ago, Dad.’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘He plays for Rangers now.’

  Maureen Thorne shouted from the kitchen. ‘Just sorting the gravy and we’re about there.’