To this day, she always carried a book in her bag, still grabbed every chance she could find to rummage around in one strange world or another. She wasn’t that messed-up teenager any more, but some things would never change, even if these days the headphones were only there to dissuade one of the other till-monkeys from disturbing her at lunchtime.

  What you reading for?

  What kind of a moronic question was that?

  Once upon a time it had been because she was desperate to get lost. On a dark and stormy night, in a land of fire and demons, whatever. Looking back now though, she knew damn well that it had been every bit as much about trying to find herself.

  Rebecca still loved a good story, but she was very happy she didn’t have to do that any more. She’d found out exactly who she was.

  EIGHT

  It was a dry afternoon and traffic was unusually light on the North Circular as Tanner drove towards Muswell Hill, but that was not why she and Thorne were feeling rather more positive than they had been twenty-four hours earlier. Or at any time since catching the case. The information found on Richard Sumner’s phone and laptop might well have eluded his wife, should she have been inclined to look for it, but the Digital Forensics Unit had found everything they needed easily enough.

  The nerds had come good.

  ‘So, he just swipes her?’ Thorne made the gesture as he asked the question.

  ‘Right, simple as that,’ Tanner said. ‘Then “Jasmine” or whatever her real name is swipes him back. We can’t confirm what the actual sequence was until we’ve talked to the people at the app, but that’s how I’m guessing it went. That Sumner made the first move.’

  ‘Well, he was obviously keen.’

  ‘Though there’s still a chance she was the one to swipe first.’

  ‘Either way,’ Thorne said. ‘He must have thought all his birthdays had come at once.’

  ‘Whichever way it went, why choose Sumner?’ Tanner was an extremely careful driver – certainly better than Thorne – and rarely took her eyes off the road, but now she glanced across at him. ‘I mean he wasn’t loaded and he wasn’t what I’d call great-looking.’

  ‘You’re hardly the best judge,’ Thorne said.

  Tanner took her hand off the wheel just long enough to give Thorne the finger.

  ‘Besides which, this “Jasmine” wasn’t actually after anything like that, was she? We don’t know what kind of bloke she was looking for.’ He thought about those severed ears. ‘What weird boxes she needed ticking.’

  ‘Still.’ Tanner shook her head. ‘I’m betting she had dozens of desperate blokes swiping, so why him?’

  Thorne turned to stare out of the window at a kid in the back of the car on their inside who was pulling faces at him. ‘I’m tempted to say that’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question, but you know how tight our budget is. I will say that if you come up with the answer, I’m willing to splash out on a pint and a pasty in the Oak.’

  Richard Sumner had registered with an online dating app called Sugar-Dad-E a month or so before. It appeared to be aimed squarely at married men and at women who were looking to be ‘taken care of’. Sumner had not chosen the premium option (£9.99 per month for unlimited swipes) which was probably because he had not wanted to hand over any payment details, but the basic service had done the trick.

  For the woman he’d found himself matched with, certainly.

  Once mobile phone numbers had been exchanged, there had been no further activity within the app itself, but the DFU had been able to retrieve the sizeable series of deleted text messages the victim had sent and received, between his wife leaving for Liverpool on Friday afternoon and Sumner setting off for an assignation in Muswell Hill the following evening.

  So, Jasmine, you fancy meeting up?

  ok

  How about Saturday?

  i think so

  Dinner?

  sounds good.

  You like Italian? I know a nice place in Muswell Hill . . .

  Nine times out of ten, that would have been job done: number, mobile provider, name, address and inside leg measurement. Thorne and Tanner might now be on their way to make an arrest had the woman they were looking for not been understandably keen to avoid such an outcome and taken precautions. The number from which ‘Jasmine’ had been texting was attached to a pay as you go burner phone and the line had been inactive since the night of the murder.

  Ten minutes later, Tanner turned on to Muswell Hill Broadway, and once they’d spotted Arturo’s, she began looking for somewhere to park. ‘Well, whatever the reason she chose him, the poor bastard did the chasing after that.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘You read those messages,’ she said. ‘He suggested a time, he picked the restaurant.’ She parked on double yellows and reached into the map pocket for the police business sign. ‘He was making all the running.’

  ‘She let him think that’s what he was doing,’ Thorne said. ‘She was always going to be the one doing the “taking care of”.’

  Calling ahead had given the owner plenty of time to line up the relevant footage from the restaurant’s security camera. Luca Gemelli, who had already let it be known that Arturo was actually his late father, sat down in a small office behind the kitchen and showed Thorne and Tanner how to scan through the footage on his computer. Attentive and helpful to the point where Thorne started wondering if the man was dealing coke in his calzones, Gemelli said that he and his staff would be more than happy to answer any questions the police might have when they had finished. Then, as soon as one of the waiters had brought in a pot of coffee and a plate of biscotti, which he urged Thorne and Tanner to ‘enjoy’, he left them to it.

  Tanner put on reading glasses and went to work, while Thorne sat down behind her and poured the coffee. He proffered the plate. ‘Want a biscotti?’

  ‘It’s biscotto.’ Tanner did not take her eyes from the screen, but reached for one. ‘Biscotti is plural.’

  Thorne told her she was a smartarse and would have been happy to elaborate had he not taken a mouthful of coffee and forgotten what he was going to say. ‘Bloody hell, that’s nice.’ As someone who thought that beans were something you had on toast, Thorne was not what anyone could call a coffee snob, but he was used to the liquefied slurry on tap at Becke House so knew nice when he tasted it. ‘Nic, you really need to try—’

  Tanner held up a hand. ‘There they are . . . ’

  It had only taken a minute or two. Thorne stood up and peered over Tanner’s shoulder. She had frozen the frame on a black and white image of the soon-to-be-murdered Richard Sumner, raising a glass and smiling at his dinner companion.

  ‘Poor sod,’ Thorne said.

  Tanner let the silent footage resume, then sped it up. Sumner did a lot more smiling as he ate. He listened and nodded, laughing once or twice at whatever his new friend was saying and topping up her glass when it was necessary. Unfortunately, the woman who would mutilate and kill him some time in the following few hours was sitting with her back to the camera and resolutely stayed that way until their meal was finished. There was one fleeting moment of hope when she rose from the table and turned, presumably to visit the Ladies. Tanner and Thorne leaned close to the screen, but on her short walk away from and, a few minutes later, back to the table, ‘Jasmine’ kept her head down and her face hidden.

  ‘She knows where the camera is,’ Tanner said.

  Thorne sat down again. He poured more coffee and helped himself to the last biscuit on the plate. ‘When did Sumner send the text where he mentioned the restaurant?’

  Tanner thought about it. ‘Friday afternoon.’ She grunted. ‘While his wife was still on the train to Liverpool.’

  Thorne stepped out to fetch Gemelli and told him that they’d need to look through the security footage from Friday early evening all the way through to the Saturday afternoon. The owner said that would not be a problem and, once he’d replenished the plate of biscuits, he lined up the footage then sat down with them to watch as Thorne and Tanner went through it.

  It took a little longer this time, but after half an hour or so, towards the end of the Saturday lunchtime service, Thorne told Tanner to stop and pointed to a woman in the back of shot, standing alone near the entrance to the restaurant. ‘What’s going on there?’

  Gemelli stood to peer at the screen. ‘That’s the takeaway counter. Looks like she’s picking up a pizza.’

  Unlike the woman in the footage they had already seen, the figure at the counter was wearing her hair down, a good deal of it conveniently masking her face. As if that wasn’t enough, she was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, though Thorne could not recall more than half an hour of sunshine at any time the previous week. The woman kept her head lowered this time too, but as her pizza was handed over and she pushed payment across the counter, she turned her head quickly to take in the restaurant’s interior. For a few seconds before she turned to leave, when she’d spotted what she was looking for, she was staring straight at the security camera.

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘Is it?’ Tanner stared.

  Thorne froze the frame and asked Gemelli if they could get a printout. The manager quickly obliged, stabbing at the keyboard until the printer began whirring into life. ‘She came to scope the place out once Sumner had suggested it. Chances are she went straight from here to Gospel Oak to get a good look at where all those cameras were, left her car near Sumner’s place then came back once, you know . . . she’d worked up an appetite.’

  Tanner said she wasn’t sure. Gemelli just shrugged.

  ‘I’m telling you.’ It had been something about the way the woman had held herself, Thorne said, the way she’d moved; at the counter, and later, when she’d stood up and turned away from the dinner table. The shape was the same, too. Short and . . . not heavy, but oddly solid.

  He asked Tanner to go back to the dinner footage to confirm what he was telling her, to move between the two images. As soon as she’d taken a second look, she told him that he was right.

  ‘It’s bugger all to do with how she held herself, mind you. Whatever that means. More about what she’s got on her feet.’

  Now, Thorne looked again. At lunchtime on Saturday, the blonde woman collecting her takeaway had been wearing a long coat, with – he was now certain – the smart red dress she would wear that evening for dinner underneath. But on both occasions she had been sporting a pair of shiny black DMs.

  Gemelli had asked his staff to gather around a table in the centre of the restaurant and the half a dozen men and women looked a little nervous, as though it was an episode of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and one of them might be about to get sacked. In Italian, then in English for Thorne and Tanner’s benefit, Gemelli told them what was required. Before leaving the office he had printed out a second image – of Sumner at dinner – and once that had been passed around, the young woman who had served them that night shyly raised a hand.

  Thorne asked her to tell them anything she could remember.

  ‘They were enjoying themselves.’ Though the girl clearly spoke Italian, Thorne heard no hint of an accent. ‘I really didn’t hear very much . . . I mean, it’s not nice to eavesdrop, is it?’ She looked towards her boss, who smiled and waved a hand, urging her to continue. ‘I remember the man telling the woman that his job was a bit boring and she said “mine too” . . . something like that.’ She nodded, thinking back. ‘Oh, I remember they were talking about books . . . favourite books or whatever.’

  Thorne glanced at Tanner. He remembered standing in that bedroom two nights before, taking it all in. As far as he could recall, the books had been on Andrea Sumner’s side of the bed.

  ‘It didn’t seem like a first date,’ the waitress said. ‘You can usually tell, but these two seemed very relaxed.’ She thought for a moment and shook her head. ‘Well, maybe she was a little more relaxed than he was.’

  ‘How did they settle the bill?’ Thorne asked. A signed credit card slip with the woman’s name on would have been lovely, of course, though he knew it was an extremely long shot.

  The young woman smiled. ‘They argued about it . . . you know, sort of jokey. It happens a lot with couples. She was offering to pay half, but he insisted.’

  Thorne saw Tanner rolling her eyes. Considering the app that had brought them together, Sumner’s insistence on paying the bill didn’t come as much of a surprise. It’s what any self-respecting sugar daddy would have done, knowing full well what the young lady wanted, that her protestations had merely been for show.

  Just a regular, giggling sugar baby.

  He thanked the waitress and asked if she would mind popping into the station later that day to help them put together an e-fit. He was still clutching the grainy printout of ‘Jasmine’ in cap and sunglasses, but guessed that a description from someone who’d had a good look at her up close would be a damn sight more useful. The waitress looked towards Gemelli who quickly nodded his permission.

  OK, so maybe not drugs, but the bloke was definitely fiddling his taxes.

  Five minutes later, Tanner pulled away from the restaurant and pointed the car back towards Becke House. ‘I wonder what she would have done if Sumner had agreed to go Dutch.’

  Thorne was checking messages on his phone. ‘She’d have paid in cash,’ he said. ‘She’s not stupid.’

  ‘Well, she reads books.’

  ‘Because of the cameras, all of that.’ Thorne reached into his pocket for the printout of the woman in the sunglasses. ‘I do wonder what kind of books she likes, though. Nothing too mushy, I’m guessing. Are there any rom-coms where one half of a couple savagely murders the other?’

  ‘Anyway we already knew she wasn’t stupid.’ Tanner was clearly growing impatient with the driver ahead of her, tutting and smacking the wheel. ‘Other than the fact that place does fantastic coffee, I’m not sure we found out anything we didn’t already know.

  ‘We’re getting there,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon so.’

  Tanner glanced at him. ‘Is this you being optimistic? Is there a hidden camera in here somewhere?’

  ‘Just saying, we need to stay positive.’

  Now Tanner was shaking her head.

  It was not an attitude with which most who knew him would readily associate Tom Thorne and he would be the first to accept that his glass was half empty much of the time. Most of the time. A half-empty glass of hot piss, more often than not. If he was ever going to feel . . . upbeat about a case, though, it would usually be at moments like this; when the person he was after began to live and breathe a little in his imagination. When it was no longer a simple matter of gathering together the traces of themself a killer had left behind, but had become about who that killer was.

  Thorne held up the printout again and stared at it.

  ‘Now we’ve got a sniff of her,’ he said.

  NINE

  Time might very well go like the clappers when you were having fun, Thorne thought, but it wasn’t as if it dragged its size nines when you weren’t. When life was anything but a bowl of cherries. When you woke up and suddenly it was six days since you’d caught a murder, and you were no nearer solving it than you had been when you were minding your own business and the poor bastard who’d been carved up was drawing his last breath.

  Well, nearer perhaps, but it was all relative, wasn’t it?

  I could take a step nearer to a beach in the Maldives, he thought, but I’d still be freezing my tits off in West Hendon.

  ‘Are you ever going to take your jacket off?’ Tanner asked.

  ‘Are they ever going to sort the heating out?’

  ‘Looks like you’re not stopping. That’s what my mother would say.’

  Thorne ignored her.

  ‘“Face like a slapped arse”. That’s something else she would say.’ Tanner waited. ‘At least take the bloody thing off before we go in to see Russell. He’ll think you’ve only just come in.’

  Mooching in their office, Thorne and Tanner were due to bring the DCI up to speed on the case, to talk about the progress the team was making and it was not a meeting either was looking forward to.

  ‘It is what it is,’ Tanner said.

  Thorne sighed. ‘Is that another one of your mother’s?’

  ‘The boss knows how it can go sometimes.’

  ‘Does he? OK, I feel much better now.’

  ‘Come on, it’s not like we’re sitting on our backsides, is it?’ Tanner tried hard not to sound as irritated as she was. This was the Thorne she knew best, that she missed if he was not around, then struggled to put up with every day that he was. Miserable as sin, but not nearly as much fun. Stubborn and over-inclined to feel sorry for himself, but with a good heart and the best intentions and . . . she tried, she really tried, but sometimes the temptation to slap the shit out of him was overwhelming. ‘Everyone’s been knocking their pipes out. We’ve done everything we can and we’re building a hell of a case, you know we are.’

  ‘They built the pyramids quicker.’

  ‘Listen to yourself.’ Christ, it was tempting. ‘It’s been a week, not even that. We’ll get a result.’

  ‘You just said it.’ Thorne shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, like a sulky teenager. ‘We’ve done everything we can. We need . . . something else.’

  Tanner looked at him.

  ‘No, not that.’ They were both thinking it, of course and had been since day one. The break in the case that nobody would ever wish for, that was unthinkable.

  Another body.

  Thorne checked his watch. He knew that Brigstocke was waiting. ‘Well, it won’t take very long,’ he said. ‘Small blessings, right?’ He looked at Tanner and the smile was one of resignation, but it was a smile at least. ‘So, what are we going to tell him?’