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FORTY

Andre Campbell sat down and studied his visitor. He was confused, but also curious, so he decided to go with it. However the hell it panned out, it would be preferable to just standing up again and asking to be returned to his cell.

He sat back and folded his arms. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

The visits hall was crowded and the dozen or so different conversations were taking place, as usual, in a variety of hushed tones.

Every so often there might be a raised voice – were a loved one to reveal their plans for leaving the country, or announce to a husband or boyfriend who’d been inside for several years that they were pregnant – but by and large, whatever was being discussed, the room was filled with a gentle hubbub of murmurs and mutterings.

Nobody in there wanted to be overheard, least of all those whose exchanges were of a rather more intimate nature.

So there was nothing unusual about the visitor leaning across to introduce himself nice and quietly.

Campbell shook his head, none the wiser. He said, ‘That’s not the name on the visiting order.’

‘You might remember my brother,’ the man said. ‘You did some time together in Belmarsh a few years back, when he was on remand.’

Campbell thought for fifteen seconds or so, chewing his nails until the name came to him. ‘Yeah, all right . . . so?’

‘So, we have a connection.’

‘What do you want?’

Alex Brightwell leaned a little closer and said, ‘It might be easiest if I tell you a bit about what I’ve been up to lately.’

He hadn’t got all day, so he gave the man he was visiting the condensed version – the arsenic, the knife, the car, the tally – and, when he’d finished, he sat back and watched Andre Campbell pretend that he wasn’t shocked; that he wasn’t scared shitless.

He watched his eyes dart nervously around for a while, and saw the effort it took to plaster on an expression he might wear if he’d been listening to the weather forecast or if someone had just told him the football scores.

‘So . . . what?’ Campbell asked eventually. ‘You want a round of applause or something?’

‘Only if you want to.’

‘Stab up the copper who put me in here and you might get one.’

‘I’m telling you all this so you’ll know who I am,’ Brightwell said.

‘So you’ll understand what I’m capable of.

I know that sounds like we’re in some stupid thriller, but there we are.

’ He glanced up and caught the eye of a prison officer.

He smiled, then turned back to Campbell. ‘Because I need you to do me a favour.’

Brightwell had barely begun outlining the nature of the required favour when Campbell started to shake his head, and he was shaking it even harder by the time it had been spelled out. ‘Not going to happen, mate,’ he said. ‘Not even possible. Specialist wing, innit.’

‘I’m sure you can find a way,’ Brightwell said.

‘Why the fuck should I?’

‘Because you’re in here and I’m not, which means I can always decide to branch out a bit from coppers and turn my attention to, I don’t know . . . supermarket workers?’ Brightwell saw Campbell’s expression harden. ‘That is what your girlfriend does for a living, right?’

Campbell glared, then lowered his head and talked quietly to the tabletop, doing his very best to sound menacing. ‘What’s to stop me calling a screw over here right now and telling him what you’ve just told me?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I’m sure the police are after you, yeah?’

‘Yes, of course, so go ahead and fill your boots.’ Brightwell looked across at the prison officer again and nodded.

‘It’ll only take one phone call, though, and I will be entitled to one, and a friend of mine will be waiting outside Ashworth Primary tomorrow afternoon when Marcus and Femi come out.

’ He waited until Campbell had raised his head.

He ignored the naked hatred coming off the man like a stink, knowing full well that the understandable urge Campbell felt to fly across the table at him would come to nothing.

‘Come on, Andre, why not? It’s not like he doesn’t deserve it and you’re not getting out any time soon, so what have you got to lose? ’

Campbell stared, his hands wrapped tight around the edge of the table.

‘I’ll make sure Marcus and Femi get something nice for Christmas.’

Thorne and Holland said very little as they drove north from Crystal Palace; little pertaining to the investigation, at any rate.

Thorne asked Holland how married life was suiting him and, after saying that it suited him very well, Holland asked Thorne if Helen was still happy about her decision to leave the Job.

Thorne told him that he thought she was, though in truth he wasn’t altogether sure.

Eventually, as Holland turned on to Vauxhall Bridge, he said, ‘I think I believe her.’

Thorne looked at him.

‘Mandy Brightwell.’

‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘Fuck.’ He slapped both his hands against the dash and leaned back. ‘I believe her too, but things would be a whole lot easier if we didn’t.’

Holland pulled out to take the pool car past a black cab. ‘You mean we’d have a few less difficult questions to answer.’

‘Yeah, just a few,’ Thorne said. ‘Like, if we’re right . . . if she’s right and Peter Brightwell was fitted up, who did the fitting?’

‘Not to mention why.’

‘I can’t see it being about Brightwell – someone having it in for him, I mean. I think he was just the mug who got unlucky.’

‘The mug who gets put in the frame for the Siobhan Brady rape so someone else doesn’t.’

It was exactly what Thorne was starting to believe; the only explanation that made any sense if Peter Brightwell was really innocent.

‘Whoever did it was protecting someone,’ he said.

‘Coppers taking care of coppers, I’m guessing, but if we’re going to have any chance of finding out who either of those people are, we’ll need to explain how they did it. ’

‘The DNA,’ Holland said. ‘Supposed to never lie, right?’

‘It can be economical with the truth, though.’ Thorne was remembering what Peter Brightwell had said when he and Tanner had visited him in HMP Woodhill.

‘ Like that stuff’s the holy fucking grail, like it’s never wrong and the people in those labs can’t possibly make a mistake.

’ Yes, what had happened to Brightwell could have been down to human error, but Thorne thought there was more chance of Tottenham winning the treble.

The people responsible were inhuman and they did not make errors.

The same people who had inadvertently lit a murderous fire under Peter Brightwell’s brother; whose efforts to protect one of their own had led to the deaths of half a dozen more.

It had started to drizzle as Holland weaved through the traffic; swanky hotels and showrooms full of expensive cars to one side and the expanse of Hyde Park on the other. ‘We never really pay as much attention as we should to the wives and partners,’ he said. ‘We don’t listen enough.’

‘We listened to Brightwell’s wife,’ Thorne said.

‘Not just her.’ Holland sighed and shook his head, like maybe he was being stupid. ‘I’ve been thinking about it, that’s all.’

‘I’m all ears, Dave.’

‘Brightwell’s wife, Craig Knowles’s wife . . . we think we know someone based on a couple of statements or an arrest report or a bloody interview, but if you’ve been living with someone for ten years, you’re going to know them a lot better than we ever will.’

‘You still thinking about your iffy suicide?’ Thorne asked. ‘About what Daniel Sadler’s wife said?’

Holland nodded. ‘I called her, for what it’s worth.

Yeah, I still feel guilty because I haven’t followed it up.

The boss said he was going to look into that arrest for indecent images that never went anywhere, but this case has just taken over.

He’s been too busy, I suppose.’ He jumped a light at Portman Square and put his foot down. ‘We’re all too fucking busy.’

‘The way it goes, mate.’ Thorne was thinking that they needed to catch up with Nicola Tanner and find out how the interview with Siobhan Brady had gone; the woman who, in all likelihood, had not been raped by Peter Brightwell.

He was thinking about that damning evidence, about those who had falsified it and the innocent men and women who had paid such a terrible price.

‘And we’re about to get a whole lot busier. ’