Page 64

SIXTY-THREE

They talked until the sun came up.

Talked, shouted and shed a few more tears between them. There were long periods of silence too, when they did nothing but stare; at the walls, at the floor, at one another. Each of them struggling to make sense of a situation that, to Thorne at least, still seemed unbelievable.

That had certainly been his initial reaction when Tanner told him what Emily had said after hearing the message Brigstocke had left.

The young woman’s certainty that his was the voice she’d heard while Adam Callaghan was raping her.

The urgent conversation had quickly become heated while Thorne made coffee, the two of them snapping back and forth between hallway and kitchen.

‘She’s wrong,’ Thorne had said. ‘She must be.’

‘Trust me, I wish she was.’

‘It’s just . . . a voice, on a crappy phone speaker. A voice that sounds similar to one she thinks she can still remember.’

‘It’s a voice she’s never been able to forget—’

‘And Russell has a voice that sounds a bit the same, that’s all.’ Thorne was trying not to sound desperate. ‘That’s all it can be, right?’

‘You didn’t see her.’

They reconvened in the living room, the pair of them shivering not only at the cold, but at the thought of what might lie ahead if Tanner was right.

‘OK, let’s try to imagine for just a minute that Emily’s not .

. . mistaken.’ Thorne looked at her. ‘That it was Russell’s voice she heard while she was being raped six months ago.

That it’s actually Russell who’s been behind all of this.

Let’s go completely mad and put everything together and say that it was Russell who did the same thing while Priya Kulkarni and Siobhan Brady were being raped, who arranged for those rapes to happen.

Who planted the evidence that got Peter Brightwell imprisoned and destroyed the evidence that might have got Craig Knowles convicted.

’ Thorne was ranting now, gabbling every bit as frantically as his mind raced.

‘Russell who aided and abetted Alex Brightwell in the murder of Christopher Tully and three innocent officers, who was almost certainly involved in the staged suicide of Daniel Sadler and subsequently arranged to have Alex Brightwell murdered in custody. Have I left anything out?’

‘Needham,’ Tanner said quietly. ‘The security guard.’

‘Oh, yeah, my mistake. Needham. It’s quite hard to keep track when your boss . . . your friend is apparently such a master fucking criminal, but—’

‘Tom—’

‘Let’s just see if we can get our heads around that little lot, shall we?’

‘What do you think I’ve been doing for the last few hours?’ Tanner said.

‘Well, forgive me if I’m finding it the teensiest bit tricky to catch up, all right?’ Thorne stared hard. ‘So, you’re saying that’s where we are?’ He waited. ‘That’s the current state of play, is it, Nic?’

‘I wish it wasn’t.’ Tanner was on the verge of tears again. ‘Christ, have you any idea how much I don’t want this to be true?’

Thorne shook his head, closed his eyes and waited until his breathing had settled a little. He said, ‘I’m sorry for getting . . . worked up.’

‘We’re both worked up,’ Tanner said. ‘Course we are.’

‘Right, but in terms of actually doing something about it . . . ’

‘We have to.’ Tanner stared at him. ‘Tom, we have—’

‘What Emily says about the voice she heard isn’t enough. It isn’t proof.’

‘I know that.’

‘It’s nowhere near enough.’

‘There’s more,’ Tanner told him. She took a sheet of paper from her bag and showed him.

There wasn’t anything said for a while after that.

Thorne went into the bedroom to fetch a sweatshirt and dressing gown.

He flicked on the heating and made more coffee.

Then he sat down again and the two of them avoided looking at one other, trying separately to process the shock and to manage their apprehension of what was to come; a wholly unexpected resolution to an investigation that had grown steadily darker and more dangerous at every turn.

The end of the uncertainty and suspicion.

The end, however things panned out, of so much more than that.

‘How long have you worked with him?’ Tanner asked eventually. She had been part of the team for a fair few years herself, but knew that Thorne’s relationship with Russell Brigstocke went back a good deal further.

‘Twenty years, give or take,’ Thorne said.

‘I’m sorry . . . ’

‘And nothing, in all that time. I mean, not a sniff of anything that was even remotely . . . off. He’s always been .

. . ’ Thorne stopped speaking and shook his head, well aware that he sounded like any number of thunderstruck individuals he’d interviewed over the years.

The family, friends and neighbours of those who’d committed the most terrible of long-undiscovered crimes, whose nearest and dearest subsequently pronounced themselves entirely amazed.

Each one of them shocked, all of them deluded.

He seemed like such a nice bloke .

He was always lovely with me .

Bloody hell, you think you know someone . . .

There was a time when Thorne had considered himself a decent judge of character.

It was, he’d believed, a handy gift to have as a detective.

He’d thought himself better than most at marking out those who lied or dissembled, at seeing why the men and women who did so skirted around the truth or actively sought to bury it.

He’d been lying to himself; or, at the very least, had simply been an idiot.

It was less than a year since he’d fatally misjudged the woman with whom he was having a relationship.

Her betrayal had ultimately cost Melita Perera her life and had very nearly cost Thorne his own, but it had certainly put paid to the notion that he was any better than the next mug at working people out.

There were those to whom it came naturally and those who learned it as a matter of necessity, but the simple fact was that some people were horribly skilled at hiding their true nature.

Even so . . .

It didn’t make Thorne feel any better, knowing he was far from being the only one Russell Brigstocke had fooled.

Once the light had begun to bleed into the room, milky around the edges of the living room curtains, they talked tentatively, with as much purpose as they were capable, about what they were going to do.

An immediate plan of action.

The innumerable ifs and buts that might easily derail it.

When they’d got as far they could usefully get, Tanner announced that she was going home to change. ‘I’ll see you in a couple of hours,’ she said.

‘I’ll send a message to Dave,’ Thorne said. ‘Tell him we need to meet good and early.’

They hugged fiercely on the doorstep and, once they’d released each other, Tanner apologised again. Thorne told her not to be stupid. ‘No point being sorry until we’ve got something to be sorry for,’ he said. ‘It might be sooner than we think, but let’s see what happens in the morning.’

He watched Tanner head towards her car, a somewhat forlorn figure against a brightening sky streaked with red and amber, then went back inside and walked straight through to the bathroom, shedding his clothes as he went. He stepped into the shower and turned it up good and hot.

Tried and failed to scald away some of the horror.