From The Dead (28 page)

Thorne nodded. ‘So. Just the thought of him out there, or Langford, or a dozen others who are walking around because they got lucky or someone screwed up. I imagine them sitting in the pub, watching TV like the people in those flats we passed,
sleeping
. I remember the things they did and I’m full of it. Full to the fucking brim with hate.’ He conjured a half-smile, then an unconvincing laugh to go with it. ‘And I hate it.’

They both stared ahead for half a minute, legs stretched out in front of them, hands pushed into jacket pockets. The temperature was dropping and there was more rain in the air.

‘Look, I’m not saying I want to be your shadow or anything,’ Anna said.

‘That’s a relief.’

She moved a little closer to him. ‘Seriously, I’m not expecting an access-all-areas pass and a promise that I can be there when you make an arrest.’

‘Good, because you wouldn’t get it.’

‘Just keep me informed, OK?’

Thorne turned to her. He could see that this was as big a concession as she was prepared to make.

‘I’d rather hear what’s going on from you than from Jesmond.’

‘Fair enough,’ Thorne said.

‘I’ve got a feeling I wouldn’t get the full story from your boss. He sounds a bit slimy.’

Thorne said, ‘More than a bit,’ and looked out at the river. In one way at least she showed remarkably good judgement. But he still felt uneasy about the situation.

Perhaps he was just unused to giving so much of himself away.

He stared at the shifting, black water, at the lights moving slowly in both directions under Vauxhall Bridge, and for the second time that day, he wondered if life would be easier aboard one of those boats. He could turn his face to the wind and empty his mind of all this. The notion was just as incongruous as it had been earlier, staring down from the briefing room at
SOCA
, not least because Thorne was anything but a natural when it came to the water. He had first learned that as an eight-year-old on a mackerel-fishing trip with his father, when he had thrown up ten minutes out of Brixham harbour. Since then, anything but a millpond would have his guts churning, make him crave solid earth beneath his feet. Yet he still loved the
idea
of boats, of drifting away on one, however disappointing the reality always proved to be.

Like so many other things in his life, it was a good idea on paper.

He let his head fall back, felt the first spatters of drizzle on his face, but it was not unpleasant.

‘We should probably go,’ Anna said.

‘Right.’

‘I should let you get back to . . . Sorry, I still don’t know her name.’

Like so many other things
. . .

‘Louise,’ Thorne said.

Walking back, they talked easily, taking their time as the streets narrowed and grew quieter. They argued about football when it emerged that Anna was a closet
Match of the Day
viewer. Like far too many Londoners, she was a Manchester United supporter, but Thorne tried not to take it too hard.

‘Could be worse,’ he told her. ‘Could have been Chelsea.’

Their pace slowed even further when they reached Louise’s road, walking back towards the flat at a fraction of the speed they had left it.

‘Sorry for being such a nightmare,’ she said.

‘I’ll get over it,’ Thorne said.

Halfway along the street, a pizza-delivery scooter beetled past, its engine whining like a swarm of angry wasps.

‘Bloody hairdryer on wheels.’ Thorne spoke without thinking. It was something his father used to say.

Anna laughed. ‘Pizza sounds good, though. My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.’

The rain was coming down far heavier now, and they were no more than half a minute from Louise’s flat. Thorne thought about asking her inside and cooking her something. ‘Do you want me to call you a cab?’ he asked.

‘It’s fine. I can jump on the tube.’

Thorne watched the scooter reach the end of the road, turn around and start moving back the way it had come. He reached out instinctively towards Anna. ‘You sure?’ He kept one eye on the scooter. He had presumed that the driver could not find the right address, but there was no attempt to look for house numbers.

‘Honestly, it’s not a problem.’

Thorne felt a tingle build and spread at the nape of his neck. ‘Let’s get inside.’

The scooter slowed, wobbling a little as it edged towards the pavement; as Thorne moved his hand to the small of Anna’s back and pushed.

‘
What?
‘ she said.

The man on the scooter, his face obscured by a blacked-out visor, was now steering with one hand, and without needing to see what was in the hand that was hidden by the fuel tank, Thorne urged Anna forward. ‘
Move!
’

The rider raised the gun and Anna shouted, took hold of Thorne’s arm and told him to watch out. Thorne half shoved, half dragged her the last few feet until they were level with the low railings that ran along the front of the building, Louise’s door was still ten feet below them as the first shot was fired.

Just a pop, no louder than the scooter backfiring.

Anna said, ‘Christ,’ then spoke Thorne’s name as the scooter accelerated, a few more seconds of wasp-whine, until it was all but level with them. There was no time to move those last few feet to where the steps wound down from the pavement and, in the end, Thorne could do nothing but push himself against her; pressing her back against the railings, feeling the tremble take hold in his arms and legs, and the rain running down his neck.

He heard his own name screamed again as he turned to see the gun come up a second time.

A few minutes before beginning its descent into Malaga, the plane hit a patch of clear-air turbulence and dropped suddenly. Thorne sat back hard and opened his eyes, aware from the look on the face of the woman next to him that his gasp had been audible. He felt embarrassed, knowing – because he’d read it somewhere – that such fraction-of-a-second drops were actually of no more than a few feet and were insignificant in the scheme of things.

He mouthed a ‘sorry’ and smiled at the woman. She nodded and went back to her magazine.

Thorne closed his eyes again and waited for it to get a little less bumpy. Although he knew well enough that the sick feeling, the wet and peppery knot in his stomach, had nothing to do with turbulence. He had not been asleep, but the images and snatches of remembered conversation might easily have been fragments of a nightmare.

Eight weeks since the shooting.

Before the man on the scooter could fire again, Thorne and Anna had gone crashing together over the metal railings and down hard on to the steps. He felt a searing pain in his shoulder, guessing as he struggled to move that his collarbone had gone and dimly aware of the engine noise, the high-pitched drone as the scooter accelerated away. Aware of Anna moaning beside him, the cold, wet step against his face, Louise opening the door and screaming when she saw the blood.

Eight weeks . . .

Two since the funeral.

Thorne had felt stared at; observed, at the very least. Inside the church, in the grounds outside, and most of all afterwards, at the Carpenters’ house in Wimbledon. It was probably all in his head and certainly nobody had said anything. None of those with every right to do a damn sight more than stare at the copper who had spent two weeks with his arm in a sling while the girl beaming out at them from the order of service had bled to death in the back of an ambulance.

I don’t back away from a row. Always been my problem.

One person who
did
stare was Frank Anderson, recognising Thorne as the man who had stood in his office with a cock-and-bull story about a skirt-chasing girlfriend. But even Anderson resisted the temptation to say anything, while Thorne, in turn, fought the urge to say a few of the things
he
had been bottling up. All the same, he imagined it, standing in the church and staring at the dandruff speckling Frank Anderson’s collar. He imagined taking a handful of the man’s hair, ramming his face down into the pew and demanding an explanation for the way he had treated Anna. For the things he had made her do.

Do you know how much she hated it, you spineless little twat? How it made her feel? Have you got the slightest idea?

Instead, Thorne stood and sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ and listened to a moving eulogy from an elder sister he had known nothing about. He spoke to her afterwards at the house, learned she was a successful lawyer. Thorne asked himself if, in taking the job she had hated at the bank, Anna had been trying to compete with her, or be different from her, every bit as much as she had been trying to please her mother. He silently rebuked himself. What right did he have to pass any sort of judgement, to jump to any conclusions about what had been going on in Anna’s head?

Walking slowly out of the church, he had seen Donna up ahead of him. Outside, while people talked quietly and lit cigarettes, the two of them exchanged nods, but she seemed in a hurry to get away and Thorne was grateful to avoid the conversation. The clumsy dance around guilt and blame.

At the Carpenters’ house, he downed a glass of beer and helped himself to another. After all, he was not there in any official capacity, so he could put away a drink or two. Surely he had every reason to put away more than a few and make an arse of himself.

It was a bright day, and out in the garden Thorne spoke to Anna’s friends, Rob and Angie. They were sitting on a low wall, balancing plates of cold ham and salad on their laps.

‘She mentioned both of you,’ Thorne said. ‘Said what a good laugh you always had.’

Rob nodded and pushed his coleslaw around.

‘She mentioned you, too,’ Angie said.

There was not too much more to say after that. Had someone older died, someone whose death had not been totally unexpected, one of them might have said, ‘It was a nice service, wasn’t it?’ or told a funny story. But it was simply too hard for any of that, for the pleasant lies, and instead, they focused all their energy on keeping themselves together.

Thorne had watched the mother and father all day. The man’s hand on the woman’s arm almost every time Thorne caught sight of them: stepping out of the shiny Daimler; moving into the church; drifting between the groups of friends and relatives in their kitchen and sitting room, glassy-eyed, as though they could not quite believe they were able to put one foot in front of the other.

To stay upright and engaged. To speak without howling.

There had been a cursory greeting at the church, but back at the house, hovering between the buffet table and the sitting-room door, Thorne finally got a chance to speak to them properly. With Thorne in hospital, other officers had dealt with Robert and Sylvia Carpenter in the days following the shooting. So, although he felt sure they knew exactly who he was, this was his first opportunity to introduce himself.

‘You’re the one who was there,’ Sylvia said. ‘The one who broke his collarbone.’

Thorne swallowed. Said that he was.

The one who failed to protect my daughter.

The one they were after.

The one who should be in that box.

‘How is it now?’ Sylvia asked. She reached a hand out towards him. ‘They can be a pig to set. A cousin of mine had all sorts of trouble.’

Thorne stared. If she were intending to be snide or sarcastic, it was not there in her voice or her eyes. On the contrary, her face was set in an expression of almost manic concern.

‘Clavicle.’ She said the word slowly, emphasising each syllable. Her hand was still stretched out, the fingers fluttering a few inches from Thorne’s chest. ‘That’s the proper name for it.’

‘Sylvia . . .’ Robert Carpenter gently laid a hand on his wife’s arm. She turned her head slowly to look at him, then abruptly moved away, staring intently at the platters of cheese and cold meat as she walked the length of the buffet table.

The two men watched her go, then Robert Carpenter turned back to Thorne. He looked down at his shoes for a few seconds then raised his eyes. ‘It’s hit her very hard,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ Thorne said.

‘I mean, obviously, it’s hit all of us.’

Thorne could say nothing, aware of the inadequacy of the platitudes he might have been expected to trot out. Indeed,
had
trotted out in countless similar situations. Looking at Anna’s father then, it struck him that, in recent years, the influence of American TV shows had crept into the language of condolence every bit as much as it had been felt elsewhere.

I’m sorry for your loss.

That final word set Thorne’s teeth on edge. Surely it implied the possibility that, some day, whoever had been lost might be found. Keys were lost and mobile phones. Dogs and wallets and telephone numbers. Those wrenched from their families by violent death were
gone
– plain, simple and terrible, but they were anything but
lost
.

Thorne and the rest of those under Robert Carpenter’s roof had gathered together to mourn Anna’s absence.

‘Did she tell you she was not her mother’s favourite?’ Robert asked suddenly.

‘No,’ Thorne said.

‘She always thought that. The stupid thing is that she was.’ He shook his head and lowered his voice still further. ‘She really was . . .’

Thorne wondered what else Anna might have told him, given time.

‘There’s no news, I suppose?’

‘I’m sorry?’ Thorne said.

‘Your colleagues have all been very good, keeping us informed and what have you. But I haven’t heard anything for over a week, so . . .’

‘We’re doing everything we can.’

‘Of course, I do understand that.’

Thorne had been at home for a fortnight following the shooting – compulsory leave in the wake of an incident involving a firearm, if not strictly merited by the severity of his injury. There would be counselling sessions too, a little further down the line, the thought of which filled Thorne with horror. Reminded him of a few other things that you could lose.