‘Which you never thought was worth reporting to the police?’ Tanner asked. ‘What with Stuart Nicklin being on the run from the authorities.’

  For the first time Herbert began to look uncomfortable. ‘Well, I can’t swear the bloke was telling me the truth, can I? I mean, I wouldn’t want to waste anyone’s time.’

  ‘Very thoughtful,’ Tanner said.

  The doorbell went and, a few minutes later, a scrawny teenager sloped into the room. He tried and failed to look intimidating, then demanded to know who the fuck Thorne and Tanner were.

  They told him exactly who the fuck they were and ran through it all again; pressing on despite Herbert’s persistent heckling and her insistence that it was all pointless.

  Cameron perched on the arm of his grandmother’s chair, still doing a piss-poor impression of a hard case. ‘Yeah, so this bloke who was flogging the pill bottle definitely said he’d hung around with Nicklin in France, but that’s about all there is to it. I can check to make sure, but it’s like my nan told you. Everything’s anonymous and all the emails are encrypted end to end—’

  ‘Encrypted,’ Herbert said. ‘That’s it.’

  Cameron nodded. ‘Right, so there’s no way to trace anything. I’m talking serious security, because that’s what the people buying and selling this stuff want.’

  ‘What if you refused to do that?’ Tanner asked. ‘If you asked for real names and contact details?’

  Herbert smiled, like Tanner was a simpleton. ‘We’d lose customers very bloody quickly if we did that, love. If word got out our business wasn’t secure and . . . discreet, we wouldn’t be trusted, simple as that. It’s a strange old racket, I know, but those are the rules and it’s how I pay the rent, so . . . ’

  Cameron stood up. ‘Are we done, then?’

  Thorne told him to sit down again.

  ‘So, what happens now?’ Herbert shuffled forward in her chair. ‘I’ve still got my tea to put on.’

  Thorne took a few seconds, pretending to think about it. ‘Now, we arrest you.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Cameron said.

  ‘OK.’ Herbert sighed and sat back again. ‘But you know as well as I do that’s daft.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You’ll only be arresting me so as you can search the place and take my stuff away. It saves pissing about getting a warrant, but you know very well there’s nothing you can really arrest me for.’

  ‘Well, you’ve already admitted to thinking some of the stuff you sell is fake,’ Tanner said. ‘So we can start with fraud.’

  Thorne nodded at Cameron. ‘And we can nick you for possession of the weed she very kindly told us we’re likely to find at your place.’

  Cameron looked at his grandmother, horrified. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Yeah, but you know none of it’s going to stick, don’t you? It’s a lot of fuss for bugger all.’ Herbert smiled, waited. ‘Look, it sounds like you’ve got plenty of better things to do, so why don’t I save you a lot of pissing about?’ She held out her arms. ‘Help yourselves . . . take anything you want. Take anything you want from Cameron’s place, too.’

  Cameron turned again. ‘Nan!’

  ‘Shush, love.’ She looked back to Thorne and Tanner. ‘I mean it. Fill your boots.’ Groaning, she heaved herself to her feet. ‘Listen, why don’t you have a quick think about it? I’m going to the toilet, and that’ll take me at least ten minutes.’ She nodded at her grandson. ‘Cam, you make yourself useful and put the kettle on or something.’

  As soon as they’d left the room, Tanner said, ‘She’s got a point.’

  It rankled, because Thorne badly wanted anyone with so much as a tangential connection to Stuart Nicklin to suffer in one way or another, but he couldn’t disagree.

  ‘If we can take the stuff anyway, why the hell lumber ourselves with all that paperwork?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Thorne said. ‘But I don’t just think we should take it. I think we should use it.’

  Thorne told Tanner his plan, and when Herbert and her grandson came back in, he explained what was going to happen. ‘We’re hugely grateful for your cooperation and very happy to accept your offer. So, we’ll be taking everything. All your stock, all the computers, the lot. Oh, and Cameron needs to come with us, but I promise we won’t keep him very long. You ever been to Wembley, Cameron?’

  Cameron sucked his teeth and glared.

  ‘It’s very lovely,’ Tanner said.

  Suddenly, Herbert didn’t seem quite as relaxed about things as she had been. Her hands fluttered in her lap. ‘I’ll want it all back when you’re done.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything,’ Thorne said.

  ‘But it’s my living.’

  ‘Well, maybe, instead of pissing on the graves of murder victims, you should find something a bit more dignified to do at your age, Margaret. Like being a drug mule or a crack whore.’ Thorne got to his feet. ‘Actually, if you’ve got no objection to whipping old blokes for a few quid, there’s a website I can point you towards.’

  THIRTY

  Thorne called in a team of local uniforms who searched Herbert’s house and seized computer equipment from Cameron’s flat, while others cleared out the nearby lock-up which served as the murdermags48 stockroom. Having spent the best part of an hour carefully packing up cardboard boxes with dozens of items – including the less-than-uplifting poetry and artwork of several serial killers, numerous plastic bags containing hair, the all-important pill bottle and one dodgy dog lead – officers driving an unmarked van, with a disgruntled Cameron Herbert on board, followed Thorne’s car back towards London.

  Tanner was driving, so Thorne made the call.

  ‘So, just how sneaky are you, Greg?’

  ‘Oh, super-sneaky,’ Hobbs said. ‘If I need to be. Will I need to be?’

  ‘Only in a good way,’ Thorne said. ‘You reckon you can pull off a decent impression of a teenage toe-rag? I mean, you don’t have to dress up or anything.’

  ‘That’s a relief,’ Hobbs said.

  ‘It’s more about convincing people that you’re him online. The way he might word his emails or whatever. He’s the one who does all the techy stuff for Margaret Herbert’s website.’

  ‘Gotcha. Sounds simple enough.’

  ‘Good, because I’m bringing Cameron – he’s the teenage toe-rag in question – over to see you right now, so you can have a chat. Get the measure of him.’

  ‘OK, cool.’

  ‘Oh, and we’ll need to get my bosses talking to your bosses, to sort out the financial side of things. We’re going to be buying something that Cameron’s grandma’s the agent for. Then Cameron, by which I mean you pretending to be Cameron, can make the necessary arrangements with the actual seller.’

  ‘The pill bottle, right?’

  ‘Right.’ Hobbs was clearly way ahead of Thorne, who was starting to appreciate just how lucky they were to have him on their team. ‘So we’ll need to send the funds over, get all that arranged.’ He was already guessing that the simple budgetary liaison between departments would prove to be the trickiest part of the whole enterprise.

  ‘It’ll be Bitcoin,’ Hobbs said.

  ‘OK,’ Thorne said.

  ‘All these transactions are made using Bitcoin. Well, fractions of Bitcoin for a smallish purchase like this. What’s the bottle on for . . . seven hundred and fifty quid? You’re probably talking about . . . 0.034 Bitcoins, somewhere round there, but obviously the rate changes every few seconds—’

  ‘I’m already losing the will to live.’

  Hobbs laughed. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not complicated. I can open a Bitcoin account in five minutes.’

  ‘As long as we get it sorted,’ Thorne said. ‘We should be with you in about an hour.’

  Three hours later, just after eight o’clock, Thorne finally walked through his front door in Kentish Town. He’d picked up a lamb shish and chicken wings from the Turkish place round the corner. He felt as though he’d been working for several days straight.

  Once he’d eaten, he called Melita and then Phil Hendricks, to let them know how the trip to Colchester had panned out.

  ‘Sounds like it went well,’ Melita said.

  ‘Yeah, it could definitely have gone worse.’

  ‘I think it’s a good plan, too. Especially now you’ve managed to get your clever hipster friend to play along.’

  ‘He didn’t need to be talked into it,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I swear.’

  Melita didn’t know how keen Hobbs had been to get on board, so Thorne could guess what she might have been thinking and he was grateful she didn’t actually say it. That Thorne could be almost as persuasive as the man he was trying to catch.

  Hendricks was more concerned with why Margaret Herbert had not been taken into custody. Why, to his mind, she was getting away with it. Thorne tried to explain and voiced his own reservations, but however much sense he knew the decision had made, it didn’t cut any ice with the man that scalpel had been used on.

  ‘I just wish you had her in a cell for like . . . a day.’

  ‘I understand, Phil—’

  ‘Just ten fucking minutes, so I could march up to the bitch, turn my back and lift my shirt up.’

  Thorne was nodding off in front of some panel show on Dave when Greg Hobbs called.

  ‘Don’t you ever go home?’

  ‘I’m enjoying myself,’ Hobbs said.

  ‘I’m glad one of us is.’

  ‘I had a very useful session with young Cameron, not that he seemed to be having a lot of fun.’ Hobbs laughed. ‘In a slightly different world, he’d be working for us. I got what I needed, though. He’s in a car on the way back to Colchester, just so you know . . . and I’ve made contact with the seller.’

  Thorne wasn’t nodding off any more. ‘Great, so—’

  ‘Don’t get too excited . . . I’ve sent the first email, that’s all. As Cameron, I mean. I’ve told the seller – calls himself “K-Man” – there’s an offer on his pill bottle, but it’s less than he was asking. I thought it would be a good idea to string him along a bit.’

  ‘OK . . . ’

  ‘Look, if I just tell him I’ve got a buyer, then that’s it. He asks for the money, I transfer the Bitcoin and we’re done. I already explained, there’s absolutely no way of tracing this K-Man’s Bitcoin account without getting hold of his computer. We need to communicate with him as much as we can, see if we can find a crack in his security set-up somewhere.’

  ‘You’re even sneakier than you told me you were,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Trust me, I’m surprising myself,’ Hobbs said. ‘I’ll let you know when he gets back to me.’

  ‘Right, thanks,’ Thorne said. ‘Now, go home.’

  He had just got into bed when his phone rang again. He got up and padded across the bedroom to where the handset was charging. He saw who was calling and took it back to bed with him.

  ‘Everything OK, Nic?’

  The pause was enough to answer his question. ‘Sorry, I know it’s late.’

  ‘No worries.’

  ‘Just a bit . . . all over the place.’

  Thorne could guess what was on Tanner’s mind and it was already obvious she’d been doing as much drinking as thinking. ‘Come on, Nic, today was a good day, right?’

  ‘That’s usually the problem,’ she said. ‘It’s good days that make you think about bad ones, isn’t it? About the really bad one. That and your little speech today about pissing on victims’ graves. Well, I’m pissing on Graham French’s grave every day. Every day I’m walking around like nothing happened. Every day I try to do my job and uphold the law.’ She barked out a laugh, ragged and bitter. ‘It’s a fucking joke, Tom. We’re a joke.’

  ‘Come on, Nic.’

  ‘Come on what?’ She was getting angry and he knew where it was heading. This wasn’t the first time she’d had a wobble and it usually involved her lashing out at Thorne like it was his fault. It would end up with her crying or shouting and telling him that, were it not for the fact that she’d be destroying his career, and Phil’s, she’d have owned up to what she’d done a long time ago. ‘Come on what, Tom?’

  ‘You won’t always feel like this,’ Thorne said. ‘I know that sounds stupid right this minute, but you won’t. It’ll get easier.’

  ‘The three of us keeping our dirty little secret, you mean?’

  Yes, because that’s all we can do. Because at the time we did the only thing we could and yes it was wrong, and yes it was terrible, but the fact is our lives are still worth far more than that animal’s ever was.

  ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

  ‘Does it sound like I’m finding it any easier?’

  Now, Thorne was getting annoyed himself, but he knew better than to let it show. He said, ‘You need to stop drinking, OK? Or keep on drinking until you don’t give a shit. I’m tired, Nic, so I don’t really care which, right now.’

  There was a long silence before Tanner hung up.

  Their dirty little secret.

  Thorne closed his eyes, and for a few minutes at least he forgot all about Stuart Nicklin. A knot grew and tightened in his stomach as he sat up then lay down again; as guilty as Tanner was and even angrier with himself than he had been with her. Because the truth was that, thanks to him, it wasn’t just their secret any more.

  A month or so before, Hendricks had called late one night, every bit as wound up and pissed as Tanner had been. Eaten up by the small but significant lie he’d told on that crucial post-mortem report. Thorne had talked him down, eventually, but afterwards Melita had walked in from the next room and told Thorne that she’d overheard the conversation. Enough of it, certainly.

  So he’d told her.

  She’d been shocked, he could see that, but mercifully quickly she’d told him that she understood and that the last thing she would ever do was judge him; judge any of them. She’d wrapped her arms around him, in the very bed Thorne was lying in now, and told him she was there if he ever wanted to talk about it.

  ‘It helps,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  He’d thanked her, but had never taken her up on the offer. The last thing he needed was to watch her nodding, knowing, as he tried to explain that he had been saving a friend and that Phil had only been doing the same. That ten minutes before his death, Graham French had been torturing Nicola Tanner, with every intention of killing her afterwards. Thorne didn’t need a professional, least of all one he slept with, to tell him what self-justification was, or denial.

  Look them up in a dictionary, he thought, and there’s a picture of me.

  Now, Thorne could only lie there and feel the knot tightening, slippery and non-undoable. He thought about trust, and betraying it. He thought about blood clinging to a scalpel blade or running down the blackened body of a poker, and sleep was a long time coming.

  THIRTY-ONE

  At the same time, less than five miles away, someone else was considering the issue of trust, though Stuart Nicklin’s thought process was, unsurprisingly, very different from Tom Thorne’s. The light from the small television was more than enough to illuminate the overpriced shoebox he was renting and besides, he enjoyed the effect. The fades and the sudden flashes, the reds and the blues flickering across the walls. There was always plenty of colour in the quiz shows he now watched obsessively; picking a contestant to root for, getting annoyed at the host’s feeble jokes and speaking the answers out loud as though there was somebody listening.

  He said ‘Venezuela’, then sighed, exasperated at the moron who didn’t know where the world’s highest waterfall was. Thinking that never trusting anyone, while at the same time having an almost supernatural ability to make others trust you, had pretty much been his recipe for success.

  His signature dish.

  It was like having a superpower, he decided.

  He couldn’t remember ever trusting anyone. Not other kids at school, not his friends and not even his mother. Actually, least of all her . . . but he remained convinced that keeping that part of him smothered – if it had ever been there in the first place – was one of the things that had allowed him to stay safe. Not safe from getting caught or going to prison, which had been unfortunate, but safe from the simple, stupid feelings he saw people crippled by every day. Beaten into submission. It was a shield which had kept him happily immune from so many of those things that trust could lead to; would lead to when it was inevitably broken.

  Disappointment, pain, regret.

  On the other hand, getting others to trust him had always been something he’d found ridiculously easy. ABC. Candy and babies. It was just a question of seeing what other people wanted, even if often they couldn’t see it themselves. Letting them know there was nothing shameful about those dark thoughts they kept hidden and that he understood; bringing those thoughts and ideas scuttling into the light so they could breathe. It was about knowing which buttons to push and what nerves to poke at, that was all. It wasn’t complicated.

  It was ironic, he thought. Funny even, considering what was always trotted out about people like him, what it was they were supposed to lack. Funny because in the end, it was all about empathy.

  Actually, he wasn’t even sure that trust was the right word. It was about having enough belief in him and his . . . outlook on life to step up and do the things he was suggesting. The Driver girl had been a case in point. She’d believed in him long before he’d ever come across her or responded to the torrent of sycophantic messages she’d left on an assortment of forums. There was a degree of faith, of course, and he had always believed she would do what she needed to. That was something he’d clocked nice and early, because on those rare and wonderful occasions when he came across someone with the capacity for killing, he knew it at once.