‘You’re kidding me, right?’

  ‘I don’t want to take any chances, Phil, that’s all I’m saying—’

  ‘You bear in mind what happened on Bardsey. I was never on Bardsey. I was busy being tasered and handcuffed to a bed in a freezing fucking basement. That’s what I’ll be bearing in mind, if it’s all the same to you.’ Hendricks looked down at the table. ‘What I’ve been bearing in mind ever since those arseholes cut me.’

  Thorne knew when to shut up and take a drink.

  They sat in silence for a minute or more. Hendricks tore a beer mat into a dozen pieces, then said ‘Fuck’ again.

  ‘Trust me, Phil,’ Thorne said. ‘I wish this wasn’t happening every bit as much as you do. I’d be perfectly happy if I never heard that sick bastard’s name again, even if that meant him staying out of prison.’

  ‘Don’t talk shit to me,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘No you don’t, and you should really remember who you’re trying to kid, mate. Nicklin’s been messing with your head for as long as I can remember, so I know full well how badly you want to catch him and bang him up for the rest of his unnatural. How much you want to hurt him.’ Now, there was the trace of a smile. ‘Every bit as much as I do.’

  Thorne also knew when he’d been rumbled. How easily he’d been seen through. He nodded, then slowly pushed his glass across the table and touched it to his friend’s.

  ‘There you go,’ Hendricks said. ‘No point living in denial.’

  ‘That’s a bit rich coming from an Arsenal fan,’ Thorne said.

  ‘So, two things.’ Hendricks ignored the dig and raised his glass. ‘First off, congrats on charging the Driver woman. That’s a proper result and, whatever else might kick off, you shouldn’t forget that.’ They touched glasses once again and Hendricks finished off what remained in his. ‘Second of all . . . and we can talk about this when you get back from the bar, is the big question.’ Against all expectations, Hendricks picked up half a sausage roll and pushed it into his mouth. ‘Where did she get that scalpel from?’

  TWENTY-SIX

  It was, of course, the first question Thorne had asked Rebecca Driver when the interview had recommenced the previous day, but it quickly became clear he was never going to get an answer. If not struck exactly dumb, the woman had suddenly become a lot less keen to talk – about anything – than she was when she’d first been arrested. She had merely shrugged or grunted, impatient and keen to crack on, throwing in a ‘no comment’ now and again to keep herself entertained while she waited to be charged with three murders. She had simply sat there, seemingly content with her doomed lot, as if her role in proceedings had come to its perfectly scripted end. Like her job had been done.

  Thorne was starting to suspect that it had.

  With no possibility of offering Driver a reduction in sentence in return for her cooperation, and no indication that she’d accept such an offer anyway, Thorne had been left with little option but to go back to basics. To continue sifting through the evidence gathered at Driver’s home address.

  There was plenty of it.

  Aside from her own frozen ‘souvenirs’, the search team had recovered a small trove of items related to the crimes of other serial killers past and present: crime scene pictures and photocopies of autopsy reports; a letter from Peter Sutcliffe to a roofing company; a doodle signed by Ted Bundy; a bag which, according to the label, contained the toenail clippings of John Cooper, a man who had committed a series of murders in Wales in the 1980s and whose crimes had been made into a TV drama a couple of years before. If these were not enough to highlight the extent of Rebecca Driver’s macabre interests, there were always the books.

  Hundreds of them. A collection of true crime studies, ‘shocking’ exposés and dog-eared murderer’s memoirs that, judging by their sheer number, must have accounted for the majority of Driver’s supermarket wages. It was these that a small team of unlucky officers had been given the thankless task of meticulously poring through, paying particular attention to those passages that had been underlined and the notes that had been scrawled in the margins.

  Wow, he was so clever!

  That’s SO brilliant.

  LOVE how he’s making the police look stupid.

  On the second day, the search paid off. A chapter towards the end of a tawdry paperback ‘biography’ of Fred and Rose West described how certain ghoulish individuals had stolen patio stones and other items from the killers’ property on Cromwell Street, the writer commenting with just enough self-righteousness – and clearly unappreciative of the irony – on the growing trade in such grisly souvenirs. This passage had been underlined and, in the margin next to it, a name had been scribbled.

  Margaret Herbert.

  At the same time, the Digital Forensics Unit had been working on the computer equipment taken from Driver’s flat. The laptop had revealed plenty of evidence about her online dating and escort activities, but no more than that. They had a bit more luck with the clumsily hidden USB drive, found to contain an autonomous operating system that would have allowed its user to visit any site on the web without leaving a trace; the sort of site where she could freely purchase Rohypnol as well as the required murder weapon. Predictably, it was impossible to access the system to see the search history, and with Driver – already on remand in HMP Bronzefield – cheerfully refusing to disclose the necessary password, the nerds had quickly run out of road.

  Thorne was every bit as frustrated. The only Margaret Herbert on the Police National Computer was a thirty-three-year-old in Cornwall who had once poured paint over her partner’s car when she discovered he’d been sleeping with her sister. She had been interviewed and quickly eliminated from the inquiry. Thorne was well aware that, as far as leads went, a name scribbled in a book might be stretching the definition, but in something like desperation he had passed it across to the Digital Forensics Unit in the hope that it might open up other avenues.

  Initial feedback suggested that it had done, and now he was about to find out if those avenues had proved to be dead ends.

  Thorne and Tanner showed their warrant cards at reception, and were escorted to a vast, open-plan office on the third floor of a nondescript block in Wembley. Thorne had visited DFU hubs before, in Islington and Charing Cross, but was always amazed at the sheer number of computers on display. At the number of screens, at any rate. He presumed that the computers themselves were the sort of huge, powerful machines that you’d find at NASA or the Pentagon and were probably hidden away beneath desks or in locked rooms. He muttered as much to Tanner as they were led through the office and she looked at him like he was an idiot.

  ‘So, what . . . you thought it would be a couple of teenagers with iPads?’

  ‘Just . . . it’s impressive, that’s all.’

  A man waved from a desk in the corner and beckoned them across.

  ‘Best let me do most of the talking,’ Tanner said.

  Like most of those working at the DFU, Greg Hobbs was a member of the civilian support staff. He and Thorne had spoken a couple of times on the phone and he certainly hadn’t sounded like a nerd. As Thorne and Tanner shook his hand, then sat down on either side of his wheelchair in front of three enormous screens, Thorne decided that he didn’t look much like a nerd either. He had an impressive and neatly sculpted beard, slicked-back hair and a row of large silver earrings that was only revealed when he removed an equally oversized set of headphones. He wore skinny jeans and a mouse-brown waistcoat over a shirt and tie. He was probably pushing forty.

  ‘Right, so I think I know what we’re doing, but I just need to clarify a couple of things.’ He talked fast, with the trace of a northern accent. ‘We’re still thinking murderabilia, yeah?’

  ‘Looks that way,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Nasty word, but it does what it says on the tin. OK, cool . . . now second, before we get too far into this, are we absolutely sure that Rebecca Driver wrote that name in the book?’ He looked at them, drumming his palms on the arms of his wheelchair. ‘I mean, if she bought it second-hand, it might already have been there.’

  ‘She wrote it,’ Thorne said. ‘We matched the handwriting with the signatures from her arrest paperwork. We’re not daft.’

  ‘Course you’re not, you caught her, didn’t you?’ He shook his head, reddened a little. ‘I’m an idiot. OK, cool, so . . . Margaret Herbert.’ He leaned towards the centre screen and began typing. Pages appeared and disappeared faster than Thorne or Tanner could take them in. ‘I reckon she’ll be easy enough to trace, in terms of current address and what have you, and I’ll show you how in a minute, but there’s not much point going after her just yet, is there?’

  ‘Isn’t there?’ Thorne asked.

  Tanner could see what Hobbs was getting at. ‘We need to prove she sold that scalpel.’

  ‘I want to know where she got it in the first place,’ Thorne said.

  Hobbs was still typing. ‘Yeah, course, and that’s obviously more your job than mine . . . once we’ve established that she’s the one who sold it and you can interview her or whatever.’

  ‘Show me,’ Thorne said.

  ‘OK, cool.’

  After a few more seconds of clicks and keystrokes, a familiar-looking page appeared on the screen. Thorne and Tanner leaned forward to look.

  ‘eBay?’ Tanner said. ‘Looks different.’

  ‘Because it’s an archived page,’ Hobbs said. ‘Twenty years old. They made it illegal to sell this kind of stuff on eBay and the other big retail sites back in 2001, but this wasn’t too hard to find.’ He moved his mouse to highlight the seller’s name. murdermags48. ‘There she is.’ He scrolled down. ‘She was mostly selling paperwork back then . . . photocopies of bus passes, utility bills . . . look, Ian Brady’s old school report. Nothing too gruesome and nothing very pricey. She was flogging this kind of stuff on here for a few years, but once they made it illegal . . . ’

  ‘She moved somewhere else,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Right, and I’ll give you three guesses where. I mean, there are still plenty of legitimate sites in the US selling the really nasty stuff . . . Murder Auction, Serial Killers Ink . . . plenty of them. I suppose Driver could have got the scalpel from one of those, but Margaret Herbert certainly used to trade from the UK, so let’s work on the assumption that she still is. Now, the only sites still operating in this country are probably a bit tame, judging by some of the things you found at Driver’s flat. It’s all kitschy repro stuff . . . Manson’s face on a T-shirt or a mug or Ted Bundy on a phone case . . . serial killer colouring books, all that. I could buy any of those things on Amazon right now, if I was, you know, weird . . . but the kind of site we’re looking for, that Margaret Herbert’s selling from, has gone underground.’

  ‘The dark web,’ Tanner said.

  Hobbs smiled and nodded, like those were the magic words. ‘It’s tailor made for it.’ He tapped his mouse and the old eBay site disappeared. A few clicks and pastes later, they were looking at a very different sort of page. Hobbs began to navigate through sites that were predominantly black with white print, but Thorne knew that was not where the dark web’s name had come from. A series of search categories appeared: Financial Services, offering crypto and fake currencies; Commercial Services, including hackers for hire, weapons and ammunition and any fake ID you could think of; page after page of illegal drugs for sale.

  ‘I can get Margaret Herbert’s old details from eBay records,’ Hobbs said. ‘And from there it shouldn’t be too difficult to get a current address. Like I said, though, there’s not much point right now. What she’s doing isn’t actually illegal, so there’s nothing you can arrest her for.’

  ‘We need to find the site she’s selling from now,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Obviously,’ Tanner said.

  ‘We’ll have our link to Nicklin if we can establish that she sold that scalpel.’

  ‘Right, but I’m not sure there’s anything we can nick her for even then.’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ Thorne said.

  They watched as Hobbs loaded more pages, navigating various sites and mini-sites as though he was giving them a tour. Thorne’s exposure to the workings of the dark web up to this point had been very limited, but even he knew it wasn’t as simple as typing a name into a search engine. He wasn’t even sure there were conventional search engines, certainly not without a compatible browser, but he knew that there were rarely names to look for and that traders did not tend to advertise or care much about promoting themselves in search results. He knew that hunting Margaret Herbert down online was unlikely to be straightforward.

  ‘You reckon you can find her?’

  Hobbs cocked his head, confirming Thorne’s suspicions, but then a smile appeared. ‘I’ll need to be sneaky,’ he said. ‘But that’s fine, because I am sneaky. I’m a snake on wheels.’ He began typing again and a different page appeared. Social Networks; Message Boards; Hidden Answers; Intel Exchange. ‘It’s just a question of lurking about on the right forums and in the right chat rooms, making a few comments to let people know what kind of stuff you’re interested in buying. Websites like the one we’re after might only be online for an hour or two a day and they’re not easy to find any other way. I’ll need a recommendation, someone to vouch for me. If I hang around long enough in all the likely places and make the right noises, I reckon I can get someone to point me in the right direction.’

  ‘So, do it,’ Thorne said.

  Hobbs put his headphones back on and eased his chair forward, as if Thorne and Tanner had already gone. ‘OK, cool . . . ’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  They picked up a takeaway from the Bengal Lancer and ate at the table in Thorne’s kitchen. Melita asked Thorne if his masala prawn was better than the curry she had made. He lied and assured her it wasn’t. She told him she knew he was lying, but that she didn’t mind. It was three days since Rebecca Driver had been charged, since her connection with Stuart Nicklin had come to light and the first evening Thorne and Melita had spent together in over a week.

  Later, in the living room, Thorne told her about the trip he and Tanner had made to the Digital Forensics Unit. Their meeting with Gregory Hobbs.

  ‘Do you think you can be a nerd and a hipster?’

  ‘I’m not really sure what either of those look like,’ Melita said.

  ‘Well a nerd looks like . . . a nerd,’ Thorne said. ‘And a hipster’s one of those twats in Dalston or Shoreditch, with wax moustaches like they’re sergeant majors and shirts buttoned up to their necks.’

  ‘So, did he look like that?’

  ‘No, not really.’ Thorne took a swig from his bottle of Kingfisher, watched Melita turn a page of the Standard and reach for her wine glass. She hadn’t yet made any objection to the Margo Price album he’d chosen and there was even a little foot-tapping going on. ‘Do I look like a copper?’

  She turned and stared at him, weighing it up. ‘You don’t not look like a copper.’

  ‘Well, that clears that up,’ Thorne said.

  They sat in silence for a while. Melita looked as if she was thinking about something. ‘So, do you think he can find Margaret Herbert?’ She kicked off her shoes and pulled her feet up. ‘Mr Hobbs, who’s not really a hipster-nerd.’

  ‘I think he knows what he’s doing.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘Well, if she is the one who sold Rebecca Driver that scalpel, we pick her up and find out where she got it from.’

  ‘You’re making it sound very easy.’

  ‘Best-case scenario.’

  ‘What if she refuses to tell you?’

  ‘I’ll find a way to make sure she does.’

  ‘Really?’ Melita did not look convinced. ‘You should remember what you might be up against, Tom. If Margaret Herbert has had direct dealings with Nicklin, she might be someone else who’s only willing to do or say what he’s allowing her to. You know better than anyone how good this man is at getting people to do what he wants, however much they might be the only one who suffers as a result. I saw what he’d done to Rebecca Driver myself, don’t forget that. How much . . . in thrall to him she was. If you’re right about their relationship, she was willing to butcher three complete strangers and spend the rest of her life in prison, because that’s what he wanted. Because he’d made her believe it was what she wanted. I just think you should be prepared for something that might not be . . . best-case.’

  ‘Is this professional advice, or . . . ?’

  ‘Both.’ Melita looked away for a few seconds. ‘Obviously I care about catching this man, but I care a lot more about you.’

  ‘Like a caring voice of doom,’ Thorne said.

  ‘That’s not fair.’ She sounded angry.

  ‘OK.’ Thorne took another swig. ‘Sorry.’ He knew that she was right, of course. She usually was. If not necessarily about how things might go with Margaret Herbert, then right about how close Thorne was to committing the cardinal sin of over-promising.

  He pushed himself up from the armchair, walked across and dropped down next to Melita on the sofa.

  He leaned into her and said, ‘Shove up.’

  Melita grunted and scowled as she reluctantly made room, but Thorne caught the glimpse of a smile when she said, ‘This music’s terrible, by the way.’

  Any impartial post-coital analysis would probably have concluded that both participants had performed better and with rather more commitment in the past. That, were they being honest, neither had really had their head in the game.

  Melita put her latest murder mystery down and said, ‘One of my clients spends hours on the dark web every night.’

  Thorne looked at her.

  ‘He’s got a thing about privacy, that’s all. Thinks people are spying on him.’