FOUR

Thorne stayed at the house for another few minutes, but he felt awkward, and more than a little voyeuristic. He was starting to wonder why he had bothered coming at all. He had thought Helen would want the company, but it was quickly becoming clear that she did not really need it. That he was surplus to requirements. He told Helen that she should call when she was ready to leave and he would come back to collect her. She said that she would probably be there a while and would catch up with him later.

‘It’s a small place,’ she told him. ‘I’ll find you.’

He did not speak to anyone else in the house on his way out. Sophie Carson was still on the radio.

The cameras went into overdrive as he walked out and several journalists shouted predictable questions at him as he ducked back beneath the crime tape and picked up his pace. He said nothing, kept his eyes forward. He doubted that he would stay anonymous for very long. Some eagle-eyed journo on a crime desk would almost certainly recognise him eventually. He had made the papers often enough himself, had been plastered all over them just a few months before.

When a prisoner he had been escorting had escaped. When four people had died. When Thorne had almost lost his closest friend.

He walked back to the centre of town and saw that most of the market traders had all but given up and were packing their things away for the day. It was starting to rain again. Walking along the high street, he could see that Helen had been right to say how little the place had in common with the middle-England market town they had left that morning. There seemed to be a proliferation of nail bars and hairdressers. There was an internet café and a small games arcade and Thorne counted four fast food outlets within fifty yards of each other. Not an antiques shop to be seen.

He stopped at a newsagent for a local paper and carried it across the street to a café called Cupz. He ordered coffee and a sausage sandwich and began to read. The first four pages of the newspaper were dominated by the latest on the missing girl and carried the now widely circulated picture of Stephen and Linda Bates on their wedding day. The headline was typically crass and undeniably powerful:

LOVE, HONOUR AND ABDUCT?

Several pages were devoted to the flooding in villages on lower ground to the north. There were pictures of the swollen River Anker, of dirty water lapping at front doors, of a family going to the shops in a small dinghy. The misery was only set to worsen, one story said, with more bad weather forecast and resources stretched to breaking point.

Thorne glanced out through the window, watched people hurrying to find shelter, the rain dancing off multicoloured umbrellas.

A young girl brought his food to the table. She nodded down at the newspaper in front of him. ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it?’

‘Which?’ Thorne asked. ‘The missing girls or the flooding?’

The waitress looked a little uncertain. ‘Well, both,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’m obviously not trying to compare them. God knows what those families must be going through.’ She reddened slightly. ‘The families of those poor girls, I mean.’

Thorne took a sip of coffee which was not as hot as he, or anyone else would have liked. ‘Did you know them?’

‘I’d seen them both in here a few times,’ she said. ‘After school, groups of friends, you know?’

Thorne turned back to the front page of the newspaper and pointed at the picture from the Bates’ wedding. ‘What about him?’

The waitress pulled a face and shook her head. ‘Thank God.’

‘He hasn’t been charged with anything,’ Thorne said.

‘He will be.’

Thorne took a bite of his sandwich and waited.

‘Well, there were witnesses, weren’t there? A couple of Poppy’s mates saw her get into his car.’

Poppy Johnston. The most recent girl to have gone missing. Her name was still mentioned rather more often in the newspaper reports than the girl who had vanished three weeks earlier. Just ‘Poppy’ though now, even to those who had not known her personally.

‘Doesn’t prove he abducted her though.’ Thorne looked at the girl, but she had clearly made up her mind.

‘I meant to ask, do you want ketchup?’

‘Brown sauce,’ Thorne said.

When he had finished his lunch, Thorne walked back through the market square and followed the signs that led to the single-storey Memorial Hall just behind it. The building, adjacent to a small community library and health centre, had been commandeered and was now functioning as the Police Control Unit. Signs were prominently displayed near the entrance showing the phone number for the incident room and there were uniformed officers talking to members of the public just outside. It was from the PCU that the search teams would be co-ordinated; volunteers organised, or more likely dissuaded, since their usefulness was often outweighed by their capacity to unwittingly destroy evidence. It was where locals would come to pass on information or share tittle-tattle, helping themselves to free tea and biscuits while they did so, and it was usually where the media gathered for any official press briefings.

Thorne wandered inside.

He had often heard stories about journalists who had returned from war zones, only to find themselves unable to handle the ordinariness of normal life and desperate to go back. There was, it seemed, a powerful craving for the rush that went with danger. It was a drug, pure and simple. Thorne would not describe his own feelings in quite those terms, but just sensing the excitement, the urgency around a major investigation such as this one, had already got those endorphins kicking in.

Driving from that twee hotel, he had told himself that he was doing no more than keeping Helen company, that this was nothing to do with him. It wasn’t just a matter of jurisdiction either. He was supposed to be on holiday; a much-needed one since the events on Bardsey Island a few months before. He was rather better at kidding others than he was himself. That slow drive around the market square had been enough, and now the chatter in this place, the smell of stewed tea and damp uniforms, had got his blood pumping a little faster. It was a long way from a Major Incident Room back at home, but that buzz was universal. The urge to poke around and to get a taste of it all was as strong as a drowning man’s impulse to push himself towards the surface.

Thorne simply could not help himself.

A uniformed officer, stocky and red-faced, stepped in front of him and asked if he needed any help.

‘Can you tell me where they’re holding Stephen Bates?’ Thorne asked.

The young PC sighed. ‘Move along, would you, sir?’

It was Thorne’s turn to sigh as he took out his warrant card.

‘Oh. Sorry, sir.’ An altogether different ‘sir’. He stepped a little closer and lowered his voice. ‘He’s at Nuneaton, far as I know.’

‘Thank you.’

Thorne was about to walk away, when it suddenly dawned on the PC that any detective involved in the investigation would surely have known the answer to the question Thorne had asked.

‘Can I see your warrant card again, sir?’

Thorne fished for it, held it close to the officer’s face.

‘Since when were the Met involved with this?’

‘I’m just here to advise,’ Thorne said.

‘Right.’ The PC looked dubious.

‘Look, I know the guv’nor, all right?’

‘And he would be . . . ?’

Thorne tried his best to look merely exasperated, while he racked his brains trying to remember the name of the senior detective he had heard talking on the radio. It came to him. ‘I’m a mate of Tim Cornish’s.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Happy?’ The copper nodded and stepped away. ‘Good lad,’ Thorne said. ‘Now go and help some old people across the road or something . . . ’

Walking back to his car, Thorne began to feel guilty about the way he had spoken to the young constable. He had long ago resigned himself to the person the Job could so easily turn him into; the side-effects of that buzz. The impatience, the intolerance, the capacity to behave like a major-league arsehole.

He pulled out of the car park, turned the music up good and loud and tried to forget about it.