From The Dead (12 page)

‘Right, but I need to pick up this latest photo. And I want to talk to her about Langford. I know she hasn’t clapped eyes on him for ten years, but she still knows him better than anybody else.’ He caught Anna’s look. ‘What?’

‘You sure about that?’

It was a fair point. Donna Langford had not known too much about what her husband was thinking ten years earlier. She had not known that he had rumbled her, that he planned to fake his own death and skip off with everything, leaving her to rot in prison. She had not known he would come back years later and snatch their daughter. ‘OK, but she’s the closest thing I’ve got to him,’ Thorne said.

‘Sounds like a plan, then.’

‘This is what being a detective’s like, most of the time. Making it up as you go along.’

‘Can I come with you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Donna trusts me.’

‘I told you, you need to back away.’

‘Yes, I know, but—’

‘Langford found out we’d been to see Monahan, so he’ll also know we’re talking to Donna.’

‘I’m not scared,’ Anna said.

Thorne could see that she meant it. ‘Then you’re stupid,’ he said. ‘And I need to get home . . .’

When Thorne came out of the Gents’ she was waiting for him, standing by the bar’s main door, with her hands in her pockets. He offered to run her home, but she reminded him that her flat was only a five-minute walk away.

‘Good luck tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I mean obviously you’d get more out of Donna if I was there.’

‘Obviously.’

‘You wouldn’t have to make up quite so much as you went along.’

‘You don’t give up, do you?’

She pushed open the door to the street and they both grimaced at the blast of cold air.

‘That’s something we’ve got in common,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it?’

He carried a bottle of decent wine out on to the balcony, sat and poured himself a glass, hoping it might help him relax.

When he was younger, marauding around the pubs of Hackney and Dalston, playing the big man, booze always fired him up; made a bad temper worse and turned a minor niggle into something worth pulling a knife for. Once he’d got into his thirties, with a few quid and a reputation behind him, alcohol started to have the opposite effect. Now, much to his and everybody else’s relief, a good drink was more likely to put the brakes on and calm him down. He guessed that was because he was smarter than he used to be. Or just older. Then again, it could be down to the quality of what he was drinking these days.

Either way, it usually did the trick. And right now, he
needed
calming down.

He drank a glass, then another, and felt his mood gradually begin to lift a little. He stared down towards the lights of the town a few miles below, and the bright slice of moon reflected in the sea beyond.

Silly bastard, he was. Still playing the big man.

He had overreacted, he knew that. He should never have raised his hands, how stupid was
that
? He would apologise to the bloke, sort things out, send over a good bottle of single malt in the morning.

It wasn’t as if nobody ever called him by his real name any more, or that he didn’t occasionally hear it whispered in a bar. What did he expect? OK, it hadn’t been what he’d called himself for ten years, and the face and hair weren’t exactly the same, but ‘Alan Langford’ was still basically the bloke he saw when he looked in the mirror.

Only the name was dead.

Still, everyone close to him knew how it worked, same as those who had been here a while. They knew there were coppers and friends of coppers all over this stretch of coast like flies on a turd, and stupid things like the name you used could draw attention. Could end up getting you pinched. But a few faces occasionally got careless. Older types from the London days who turned gobby after a drink or two; or recent arrivals who were mooching about, looking to make the right contacts.

Tonight, it had been one of the older boys. A bloke he’d done some business with in the seventies. No harm in him, just a slip of the tongue, and the look on his face when he realised what he’d said was priceless. But still, he’d needed telling.

A week ago, he wouldn’t have reacted the way he did. A quiet word would have done it. Now though, with the business back home, with these photographs and everything else, he had every right to feel a bit jumpier than he would be otherwise.

To feel cornered.

Below him, lights drifted across the water as a couple of boats emerged from around the headland and moved into the bay. Night fishermen, probably, nets bulging with squid and sardines.

All this grief because of a
photograph
. Jesus . . .

He could just make out the music drifting up from his favourite club on the seafront, the bass-line anyway, like a racing heartbeat. He knew there’d be a few of those in the place tonight – sweaty punters revved up on coke and ecstasy. Soft-top Mercs and Bentleys parked outside and high-quality Russian hookers lined up around the dance floor.

He poured out what was left of the wine and lobbed the empty bottle into the swimming pool.

He was a long way from Hackney.

There had not been too much traffic on the way back from Victoria, and Thorne was home before ten o’clock. Louise had already gone to bed. He thought he had come in quietly enough, but standing in the kitchen, necking water from the bottle, he heard her call out from the bedroom.

He got undressed in the dark.

‘I just conked out in front of the TV,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t keep my eyes open.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I can smell Guinness.’

He got into bed and turned on to his side. Said, ‘I had a couple in the Oak with Russell.’

Had Thorne been asked there and then why he was lying, he could not have explained it. The night before, when Louise had asked about his first trip to Wakefield, he had felt as though he were lying when he was being truthful. Now, lying felt a lot less problematic than being honest.

He told himself that he was protecting her. That she was oversensitive at the moment, had been since the miscarriage.

He knew it was nonsense.

He did not want an argument, it was probably as simple as that. Yes, Louise was more easily hurt these days, was prone to see offence where there was none intended, but so was he. He was still raw, and he was not up to a fight.

Louise rolled over and her arm moved across his leg. ‘How many did you have?’

‘Only a couple,’ Thorne said.

‘That’s very responsible.’

‘I was driving.’

‘How early are you in tomorrow?’

Her fingers dropped to his groin and her breath was hot as she moaned softly into his shoulder. He had more or less stopped thinking about Anna Carpenter when he turned to her.

Thorne picked up Anna near Victoria Coach Station and they drove north, along Whitehall and around Trafalgar Square, across the Euston Road, up into Camden and beyond.

He did not bother warning her this time or issuing ground rules that he guessed she would break anyway. He was rather less cautious about this interview than he had been about the one in Wakefield Prison, on top of which he now thought she’d probably had a point the night before. He might well get more out of Donna Langford with Anna along for the ride.

Presuming there was anything to get.

They didn’t talk much in the car. Thorne content to listen to the radio and Anna appearing to get the message. Waiting to cross the Holloway Road, Thorne slipped a CD into the player; a vintage bluegrass compilation. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, the Louvin Brothers, Bill Monroe . . .

‘Oh, I love this sort of stuff,’ Anna said.

Thorne nudged the volume up as he accelerated away from the lights.

‘My dad used to have loads of these records.’

He glanced across and was pleased to see that she did not appear to be taking the piss; nodding her head in time to the music and smacking out the rhythm on her knees. She had made all the right noises when she had first seen the
BMW
, too; something Thorne was not accustomed to. Certainly not from work colleagues, most of whom delighted in describing the 1975, pulsar-yellow CSi as the ‘rusty banana’ or a ‘puke-coloured death-trap’. Anna told Thorne she thought it was ‘cool’. He told her she had very good taste, but couldn’t help wondering if she had held secret meetings with Holland or Hendricks, and had been comprehensively briefed on the best ways to wind him up.

‘My mum hates it, though,’ Anna said, smiling. She was still tapping along to the beat of the upright bass, the scratchy melody of the fiddle, and the syncopation, so delicately picked out on the resonator guitar.

‘This Weary Heart’ by the Stanley Brothers, honey-sweet and hell-dark, as the car turned off the Seven Sisters Road and slowed.

‘Most people do,’ Thorne said. ‘I think it’s one of the reasons I like it so much.’

Donna Langford did not seem overly keen on letting Thorne and Anna inside when they arrived. She was already pulling her coat on when she opened the door and stepped out quickly. ‘Kate’s got the right hump this morning,’ she said.

Thorne and Anna exchanged a look as Donna marched past them down the path.

‘It’s a nice day. Let’s go to the park.’

The day, though bright and sunny, was hardly warm, while the park, a five-minute walk from Donna’s block, turned out to be a scrubby patch of green and brown no bigger than a couple of tennis courts. There was a pair of rusted swings and a set of goalposts without a net. A fire had scorched what might once have been a penalty area, and there was a collection of discarded cans and bottles scattered among the long grass behind.

The three of them squeezed on to a metal bench.

‘What was your first thought?’ Thorne asked. ‘Back when you saw that first picture of Alan.’

A few leaves skittered half-heartedly at their feet, and for the few seconds before Donna answered they all watched as a battered Nissan Micra raced down the small road that ran behind the goalposts.

‘I thought it was typical,’ Donna said, laughing. ‘Once I’d got over the shock, I mean. I started wondering why I hadn’t thought he was alive before. Why I ever thought I’d actually managed to get rid of him.’

‘Why “typical”?’

‘Alan never did anything by halves,’ she said. ‘He planned things out, thought them through, you know?’

‘So, this is all part of a plan?’ Anna asked. ‘The photos . . .’

‘Christ, I don’t know.’ Donna suddenly looked very weary as she lit a cigarette. ‘He used to tell this story,’ she said, ‘when he’d had a drink.’ She turned to Thorne, rubbed her belly through her thick coat. ‘Remember I told you about that scar he’s got, where he was knifed?’

Thorne nodded.

‘He’d bang on about how that only happened because he hadn’t thought things through properly. Because he hadn’t thought about the details. Basically, he was a cocky sod and he hadn’t reckoned on the other bloke carrying a knife. But he always said it taught him an important lesson. After that he became obsessed with planning stuff out, working through every eventuality.’ She sat back and screwed up her face, against the cold or an unpleasant memory. ‘However vicious business got, however mental some of it seemed, it was all . . . thought through, you know?’ She looked at Anna. ‘My husband never did a spontaneous thing in his life, love. So, yeah, I reckon he knows exactly what he’s doing.’

‘Why did you want him dead?’ Anna asked.

Donna let out a long, slow breath, threw a half-smile at Thorne.

‘It’s a reasonable question,’ he said.

It was also one Thorne had never asked, not to Donna’s face at least. As with so many cases, once he had got his result, in the form of Donna Langford’s confession, he had moved on to something else. There had been speculation about her motive, of course, not least in the
Sunday People
and the
News of the World
. But with a conviction more or less in the bag, Thorne had had neither the time nor the inclination to care a great deal about the ‘Why?’ Donna had not spoken in her own defence at the trial, her counsel fearing that she might come across as somewhat hard-faced and spoiled. Instead, her brief had spoken passionately about ‘years of mental torment and domestic abuse’. In the end, though, the jury had been unconvinced.

Such provocation, the prosecution had countered at the time, might understandably lead victims to lash out with knives and hammers, or, at a push, to slip rat poison into the old man’s shepherd’s pie. But calmly planning and paying for a gangland-style execution was a very different matter.

‘Alan was spontaneous enough when it came to using his fists,’ Donna said. ‘But even then he was usually smart enough to avoid hitting me where it would show.’ She had been staring at her feet, but now glanced up towards Anna. ‘I didn’t like what it was doing to Ellie. What
he
might do to her.’ She shook her head, as though correcting herself. ‘I never saw him hit her, but I was starting to think it was on the cards, and there was no way I was going to let that happen.’

Anna placed a hand on Donna’s arm.

‘So, it wasn’t about the money, then?’ Thorne said. He saw the look from Anna but stared right back, hoping she would get the message.

I know this woman a lot better than you do.

‘Look, I’m not going to deny that I thought I’d be all right when Alan was dead. That I thought I’d be comfortable.’ Donna stared across the park. By now, the Micra was stationary and two young men, two
kids
, were leaning against it, smoking and laughing. ‘That wasn’t the reason I wanted him gone, though, I swear to you. I had money when I was with him and I was miserable as sin.’ She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t remotely surprised that there was nothing left, either. I always thought he might be squirrelling it away overseas, somewhere the taxman couldn’t find it. Now I know he’s still alive, I’m damn well sure that’s what he did. One more thing he was planning for.’

‘Why the contract killer, though?’ Thorne remembered the smell of cooked meat in the forest clearing, and the questions the prosecution had put to the jury during the trial. The same questions that were posed in a dozen magazine articles and a particularly salacious edition of
London Tonight
. ‘Why bother with Paul Monahan? Why not just take a knife to him or batter him while he was asleep?’