Page 11

ELEVEN

Sunrise was still a couple of hours away, but it wasn’t hard to spot where the action was.

A trio of powerful arc lights had already been set up and anyone watching from the top floor of one of the houses opposite might have presumed they were seeing a movie being shot.

A cordon of uniformed officers at every entrance was there to prevent anyone getting close enough to realise that was not the case and, though there were cameras, the footage being shot was purely evidential.

Nothing here was fit for public consumption.

Thorne wound his way through the assembly of police and CSI vehicles, including one squad car that had been coned off, with plastic evidence markers placed at each corner.

He showed his ID to a uniform who nodded and swallowed, glassy-eyed.

Shivering a little, he hurried into the park, past the café and tennis courts towards the taped-off area.

He grabbed a coffee from the urn that had been set up on a trestle table and stooped to pick up a bodysuit and gloves from the box underneath.

There were maybe two dozen people on site already, carrying equipment, taking measurements, doing jobs they had all done countless times but, though Thorne had attended more murder scenes than he could count, something in the way these officers and civilian staff moved and interacted seemed unusual.

As far as he was aware, they were dealing with a single victim, but the strangely heightened atmosphere gave it the feel of a major incident.

It wasn’t panic, not quite that, but it was as though they were dealing with the aftermath of a terrorist attack and were concerned that a second bomb might be about to go off.

‘Tom.’

Fastening his bodysuit, Thorne looked up to see Brigstocke walking towards him, lowering the hood of his own. He could not remember the last time he’d seen the DCI looking quite so shaken.

‘PC Adam Callaghan.’ Brigstocke raised his voice a little, fighting the hum of the generator. ‘Pronounced dead twenty minutes ago.’

‘Do we know what he was doing here?’

‘A woman made a 999 call just after three, said that a man was threatening her in the park, getting aggressive and following her when she tried to leave. Callaghan was four hours into a night shift, having his dinner at a Turkish place just over there, same as always apparently.’ Brigstocke pointed back towards the main road.

‘He was the nearest officer, so Control instructed him to attend. “Task not ask”, right?’

Thorne nodded. There was a time when the call would have gone out requesting the assistance of any officers willing and able to respond.

Now, with the GPS functionality in police radios allowing control rooms to pinpoint every officer’s location, policy dictated that those who were closest were given no choice.

‘He was on his own?’

Brigstocke nodded. ‘Single crewing.’ Another recent initiative which, for reasons nobody could quite fathom, was officially termed ‘safer crewing’.

‘In what universe is it safer ?’ Thorne asked. ‘I mean, certainly not now, right?’

‘I think that particular policy might be about to change.’ Brigstocke looked as if he’d bitten into something sour, and turned to spit the bad taste out.

‘So, he arrives at the park ten minutes after the emergency call comes in, maintains radio contact for several minutes after that, then suddenly nothing. Another crew gets sent out to see what’s happening and they find the body at quarter to four. ’

Thorne thought about it. ‘If this bloke the woman said was threatening her killed Callaghan, what happened to the woman?’

‘No idea.’

‘Unless it was the woman that killed him, in which case . . . ’

‘Maybe there wasn’t any bloke in the first place.’

‘Just a story to get a police officer out here,’ Thorne said.

‘We could stand around all night speculating, but I haven’t had a chance to listen to the 999 call yet. So . . . ’

‘Bodycam?’

‘Yep, still on him, so we can look at that as soon as we’re done here.’

Brigstocke turned to stare towards the body, now partially obscured by those working to ascertain how it came to be there. ‘I’d better get back,’ he said. ‘Try and get ahead of this before the news gets out and everything goes stupid. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’

Thorne watched Brigstocke stride away, fighting to tear his bodysuit off as if the material was burning him, then walked towards the lights and ducked beneath the tape.

He couldn’t help but glance around as he got closer.

Waiting for that other bomb to go off.

The body of Adam Callaghan was splayed out on a dirty bed of mulch and black earth, ten feet or so into the trees.

His right leg was raised and flopping, suspended across a dead branch.

One arm lay across his face, while the other stretched out to the side as though grasping for the hat which lay just beyond its reach on the ground.

The arc lamps picked out every streak of mud on his stab vest and the cracked screen of his radio. They lit up the blood, which pooled around his collar and had already begun to soak into the fallen leaves at one side of his neck.

A CSI was taking pictures of what looked like footprints in the mud as Thorne squatted down next to the figure murmuring into a hand-held recorder. He raised his head and stared into the darkness beyond the lights while he waited for Hendricks to finish.

‘So . . . ?’

‘Well, VAR’s ruining football and Brighton’s centre-half is seriously fit, but I’m guessing you want to know about the body.’

Thorne just nodded. He understood that Hendricks was obliged to make the tasteless joke, to clutch at that straw, but he could tell that his friend’s heart was not really in it this time. ‘Anything you haven’t already told Russell?’

‘I don’t think so. Two, maybe three stab wounds .

. . here .’ He placed two fingers gently against one side of his throat and then the other.

‘Stab vests are all well and good until someone sticks a knife in your throat. No defence wounds as far as I can see, which would suggest he didn’t see what was coming, but I’ll know a bit more once I’ve got him laid out and we can wash all the blood and muck off him.

’ Hendricks reached across to delicately pick away a leaf fragment caught in Adam Callaghan’s hair.

‘He’s been dead about an hour, but you already know that. ’

‘Yeah.’ To be fair, they knew rather more than they usually did at this stage of the game. ‘Cheers, Phil.’

‘I’ll call you when I’m done,’ Hendricks said.

Thorne stood up, snapped off his gloves and walked back the way he had come, clambering out of his bodysuit as he went and stuffing it into one of the bins by the café. At the exit, the same officer who had checked his ID stepped across before Thorne had a chance to turn towards his car.

‘The fuck’s going on?’

Thorne stared at the PC, whose badge identified him as M. Healey. He was mid-thirties and stocky, and Thorne could see that he was fizzing with adrenalin. It might just have been the understandable buzz of the crime scene, but it looked rather more like fear. ‘I wish I knew, mate.’

The officer nodded back into the park. ‘I knew Adam a bit. Not well, like, but I knew him.’

‘Good lad?’

‘He was a top lad.’ There were a few seconds of nodding. ‘A cocky sod every now and again, but yeah.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Thorne said.

Healey straightened himself up and tugged down his stab vest. He touched his radio as though it was some kind of lucky charm. ‘So what . . . are we all targets now, then?’

Thorne glanced around and saw that several of the other PCs guarding the perimeter were looking expectantly at him. ‘It’s my job to find whoever’s responsible,’ he said. ‘That’s all. I’m not sure panicking is going to help.’

The officer squared his shoulders and jutted out his chin. ‘Yeah, well, if there are people who fancy coming after us, bring it on.’

‘You serious?’

‘Some of us have started to think about it, all I’m saying.

Every arsehole you nick for speeding, every bloke kicking off outside the pub at chucking out time .

. . he might be another one with a knife or whatever, decides you’re the enemy, thinks you’re fair game.

’ Healey turned to exchange a long look with one of his colleagues standing a few feet away, then turned slowly back to Thorne. ‘How else are we supposed to react?’

Thorne looked back at the cluster of uniformed officers gathered around the coned-off squad car which had been driven there by Adam Callaghan. He saw only blank expressions and plumes of breath hanging in the air and wondered how many of them had begun to think the same way.

Would refuse to be fair game.

There were some seriously bad apples in the Met, it would be stupid to pretend otherwise, but the simple fact was that an awful lot more were just idiots.

More worryingly, some of those idiots were authorised to carry firearms. Thorne did not know for sure that the murder of Adam Callaghan was connected to that of Christopher Tully and the others, but he was starting to wonder if, as far as catching those responsible went, time might not be on his side.

He turned back to the bullish PC. Healey’s eyes were wide, scouring the street for movement, a hand on the butt of his Taser like he was ready for anything.

Thorne was cold and tired and irritable.

‘Maybe some of you deserve to be fucking targets,’ he said.