Page 15

FIFTEEN

Thorne had not found the opportunity to exchange more than a few words with Dave Holland after he’d got to the office at lunchtime, so via a series of short and snappy text messages they’d arranged to get together at going home time; to catch up over a drink which, by then, they both knew would be seriously needed. Tanner was only too happy to tag along.

‘Not the Oak, though,’ Thorne had said. ‘Somewhere there’s a chance we might be the only people in the room with warrant cards.’

They drove in separate cars to the Stag in Belsize Park.

It was a half-hour ride away, but was at least in the right direction: south towards Kentish Town, to Holland’s place in Clerkenwell and Tanner’s in Hammersmith.

It was too cold to sit upstairs on the smart roof terrace, so they nabbed a table in the bar, sitting beneath a blackboard displaying a tempting range of food on one side and an extensive wine and cocktail menu on the other.

‘This is a cut above,’ Thorne said. He touched his pint of Guinness to Holland’s ‘bold and hoppy’ IPA then to Tanner’s wine glass. ‘Closest you get to a cocktail in the Oak is lager and lime.’

They drank in silence for a minute or two, taking in their surroundings while listening to snippets of conversation from the nearest of their fellow drinkers.

Thorne reckoned that the three of them had upped the average age of the customers considerably and if there were any coppers in the place, they were all deep undercover as models and media types.

The music wasn’t too bad, though: Tyler Childers giving way to Margo Price.

It wasn’t Hank or Johnny, but you couldn’t have everything.

Thorne opened his mouth to speak but could do no more than stifle a yawn.

‘Yeah, me too,’ Tanner said.

It was just after nine o’clock and they’d all been working for seventeen hours straight.

‘She wasn’t alone,’ Thorne said. ‘The woman in the park.’

‘The bootprints, right?’ Holland sipped his drink. ‘It’s not a lot.’

‘Never said it was.’

‘All sorts of people could have been tramping about in those trees,’ Tanner said.

‘Not that recently, though. They look pretty fresh to me and they were very close to Callaghan’s body . . . a mess of them, you know?’

Holland considered it. ‘Like Callaghan and whoever was wearing the boots were struggling.’

‘Wasn’t much of a struggle,’ Thorne said. ‘Not once that knife was in his neck.’

The prints, discovered and photographed by CSIs at the scene, were more or less the only evidence of any sort that might eventually prove useful.

The fingertip search had turned up nothing of interest, the door to door had been no more productive and the murder weapon – which Hendricks had identified as a seven- or eight-inch serrated kitchen knife – had not been helpfully disposed of in any nearby drain or litter bin.

The woman they’d seen on Callaghan’s bodycam had been picked up on CCTV just a few minutes after his body had been discovered – that silver Puffa jacket moving quickly along Queens Road towards Hendon Central station – but had not been seen again after that.

‘She said there was a man in the park when she made the 999 call.’

‘Just maybe not a man she was scared of,’ Tanner said. ‘More like a man she was working with.’

‘I think that’s a strong possibility.’ Thorne yawned again. ‘Easy enough for him to leave the park a different way to her. The south end, maybe. He picks up a car he’s left somewhere he knows there’s no CCTV and he’s away up the North Circular in five minutes.’

Tanner nodded as she took a drink.

‘Which one of them killed Callaghan, though?’

‘Maybe she was the one wearing those boots,’ Holland said.

Thorne closed his eyes while he considered that, and it wasn’t until a minute or so later that he opened them again when a glass clattered loudly on a nearby table. Tanner was grinning at him. ‘Thought you’d gone off,’ she said.

He shook his head fast and widened his eyes, decided that a little more Guinness couldn’t possibly make him any more tired than he already was, then nodded across at Holland. ‘How did your suicide go?’

‘The wife’s refusing to believe he killed himself,’ Holland said. ‘Doesn’t want to believe it, whatever.’

‘Sounds pretty standard,’ Tanner said.

‘Yeah, I know, but all the same there’s one or two things bothering me about it.

For a kick-off, I know the drop from that viaduct is a pretty sure-fire way to get the job done, but it isn’t an easy spot to get to and I know because I did it myself.

’ He held up his hand to show the graze, which was redder than it was before and had begun to swell.

‘I mean, surely there are other ways to do it.’

‘No point bringing logic into this,’ Tanner said. ‘People spend hours getting trains and buses to Beachy Head even when they’ve got cabinets full of tablets at home.’

‘Granted, but who the hell goes to bed for a couple of hours, then gets up to top themselves?’ He waved away Tanner’s response before she could make it.

‘Yeah, I know suicides can do all manner of odd stuff . . . but he told his wife he had to go out for a work thing, which is weird enough in itself at that time because nothing like that had ever happened before, on top of which we can’t find his phone. ’

‘Why’s that a problem?’ Thorne asked.

‘Well, it’s not necessarily. Except it wasn’t on his body and it’s strange that we can’t find it anywhere else because his wife says he always had it on him. I mean, what if he did get a call telling him he needed to be somewhere and whoever made that call doesn’t want there to be a record of it?’

‘Talk to his mobile provider,’ Thorne said.

‘Already on it,’ Holland said. ‘Well, I’ve put the request in, but we all know what an arse-ache that is. It’s most likely a waste of time anyway.’

‘So, what are you going to do?’ Thorne asked.

Holland stared into his beer. ‘I don’t know . . . maybe I should just sign it off as done and dusted and get back to these murders.’

‘I tell you what you should do.’ Tanner grabbed Holland’s wrist, brought it towards her and studied his palm. ‘You need to get that hand looked at.’

Fifteen minutes later they were walking down Fleet Road towards their cars when Tanner took a call from Russell Brigstocke.

Thorne and Holland strained to listen over the noise of passing traffic, tightening their jackets against the cold. They heard Tanner say, ‘When?’ and watched her expression become serious. When the call had ended, they looked at each other, fearing the worst.

‘A woman walked into a station in Clapham an hour ago and said she was there when Adam Callaghan was killed.’ Tanner slipped her phone back into her bag. ‘She was wearing a silver Puffa jacket.’

‘Fuck,’ Holland said. ‘So . . . ’

‘Said she was there?’ Thorne waited. ‘That’s all?’

‘Russell sent the footage across to make sure and it’s definitely the woman we saw on the bodycam.’

‘Are they bringing her to us or are we going down there?’ Thorne asked.

‘She’s coming to us,’ Tanner said. ‘First thing tomorrow. Russell said she’s not going anywhere, plus a night in the cells won’t do her any harm, so it can wait until the morning.

He said he’d been thinking about heading over there himself then thought better of it, because he’s dead on his feet, same as the rest of us. ’

‘Some sleep would be nice,’ Holland said.

Thorne couldn’t argue, thinking that if this was the break in the case it sounded like, they might actually get some.