Someone who had made plans for her future.
Someone with no reason to run away or take her own life.
The media had, of course, been utilised extensively, but as was often the case, had proved to be more trouble than it was worth. A good deal of time and effort had been wasted chasing up dozens of ‘sightings’ phoned into the incident room every week after appeals on TV or in the newspapers. Each one, including those from overseas, had to be thoroughly checked out and discredited, but that had not stopped Chambers’ defence team seizing upon them. Had not stopped his bullish, female solicitor suggesting in court that while Andrea Keane was still being spotted on a regular basis, it would be frankly ridiculous to convict anyone of her murder.
Thorne had stood his ground, drawing the jury’s attention to the ‘Presumption of Death’ chart – a fourteen-page document outlining every inquiry undertaken to support the assertion that Andrea Keane was no longer alive. He had brandished his copy, looked hard at Chambers’ solicitor, and told her it was frankly ridiculous to believe that Andrea Keane had
not
been murdered.
He had lain the document down again as calmly as was possible, aware of the movement, the noise of a muffled sob or grunt from the public gallery. He had kept his eyes on the chart, swallowed hard as they fixed on a highlighted bullet-point in the clinical psychologist’s report:
Hopes and Aspirations
The missing girl was variously described by friends as ‘happy’, ‘full of beans’, etc.
She was looking for a flat to rent.
She was training to be a nurse.
‘Stick some music on, Sam.’
Karim leaned across and flicked on the radio. It was pre-tuned to Capital, and Karim immediately began nodding his head in time to some soulless remix. Thorne toyed with pulling rank, but decided he could not be arsed. Instead, he closed his eyes and kept them shut, tuning out the music, tuning out everything, for the rest of the journey north.
When they finally turned into the car park at the Peel Centre, it was almost lunchtime. Walking towards Becke House, Thorne was trying to decide between braving the canteen or a pub lunch at the Oak when an officer on his way out told him that he had a visitor waiting.
‘A private detective.’
‘What?’
‘Good luck.’
The officer clearly thought this was hilarious, and that Thorne’s reaction made it funnier still: a groan and a slump of the shoulders as Thorne continued, with no enthusiasm, up the steps and into the foyer at Becke House.
Thorne spotted his visitor immediately and made his way towards him. Fifty-ish and unkempt, a symphony in brown and beige with dirty hair and Hush Puppies, confirming just about every prejudice Thorne had about sad little men who drove Cavaliers and stuck their noses into other people’s business for a living.
‘I’m DI Thorne,’ he said.
The man looked up at him, confused. ‘And?’
‘You’re not much of a detective, are you?’
Thorne turned at the voice from across the foyer. He saw a young woman take a step towards him, reddening as she did so.
‘I think you’re looking for me.’
Thorne reached instinctively for his tie and loosened it. ‘Sorry.’ He could sense the man he had spoken to smirking behind him. ‘I’ve been in court all morning, so . . .’
‘Did you get off?’
Thorne just stared as the woman reddened still further.
She mumbled, ‘Sorry, stupid joke,’ and proffered a business card. ‘My name’s Anna Carpenter, and—’
Thorne took the card without looking at it and gestured towards the security door. ‘Let’s go up to my office.’ He swiped his ID and gave the finger to the desk sergeant, who was still chuckling as Thorne ushered Anna through the door.
Thorne stared down at the card and the photograph on the desk in front of him. He tapped a finger against the dog-eared business card. ‘F.A. Investigations’. The name ‘Frank Anderson’ beneath and an address in Victoria. It looked like one of those you could get printed up in batches of fifty from
DIY
machines at railway stations. Thin card and a font that made the lettering look like broken-down typing. A cheesy picture of a bloodhound with a magnifying glass.
‘Don’t you get your own card?’ Thorne asked.
The woman sitting opposite picked at her thumbnail. ‘Mr Anderson keeps saying he’ll get around to it,’ she said. ‘And he makes the administrative decisions. Right now, I think he’s got more important things to spend his money on.’
Thorne nodded his understanding. Like keeping his Cavalier on the road, he thought.
‘This is my case, though.’ She waited until Thorne looked up and across at her. ‘I mean, Donna’s
my
client.’
Thorne could see the determination clearly in Anna Carpenter’s face, could hear it in her voice. A desire to impress, to impose herself, even if she didn’t quite look the part in jeans and a black corduroy jacket. Like a superannuated student, Thorne’s father would have said. She was late twenties, Thorne guessed; round-faced and pretty. When she wasn’t picking at her fingernails, she tugged at a strand of long, dirty-blonde hair and shifted around in her chair like someone who found it difficult to keep still for more than a few seconds at a time.
‘I never said she wasn’t,’ Thorne said. He looked down again, turned his attention to the photograph. A man was squinting into the sunshine, grinning at the camera and holding up a glass of beer. He was probably mid-fifties, with the hair on his head a little darker than it would have been naturally, judging by the grey tangle on his flabby, nut-brown chest. The sky behind him was cloudless, with the jagged line of a mountain sloping down to a dark blue streak of sea in the background, a small sail-boat in the far distance. He might have been sitting on a boat himself, or at the end of a pier. In a restaurant near the water’s edge, perhaps.
‘Greece? Spain? South of France?’ Thorne shook his head. ‘Florida, maybe? Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘It’s not Birmingham,’ Anna said. ‘That’s about as far as I’ve got.’
The man’s eyes were all but closed against the glare, but the grin seemed unforced, effortless. ‘He looks happy enough.’
‘Got every reason to be,’ Anna said. ‘Actually, I thought you might recognise him.’
Thorne looked closer. A bell was ringing, but faintly. ‘What’s your client’s name?’
There was a pause, the hint of a satisfied smile. ‘She was sent that picture last December.’ Anna moved her chair forward until she was tight against the desk. ‘That was two months before she was released from prison.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Conspiracy to murder her husband.’
‘How long?’
‘Twelve years. She served ten.’
‘
Langford?
‘ Thorne stared at her. The penny had dropped, hard, but it made no sense. ‘Your client is Donna Langford?’
Anna nodded. ‘She’s using her maiden name now, but, yes, she was.’
‘Somebody’s winding you up, love.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You know what she did?’ Thorne stabbed a finger at the photograph. ‘Why this can’t possibly be who she thinks it is?’
‘She told me some of it.’
‘Let me tell you all of it,’ Thorne said. ‘Then we can both stop wasting our time.’
Thorne had worked on cases within the last six months that he could not remember as clearly as this one, even though it had been more than a decade since Alan Langford was murdered.
They’d called it the ‘Epping Forest Barbecue’ in the office.
Langford had always been a man who made news. He had kept a good few journalists busy over the years, crime and business correspondents both; his property empire growing as fast as his competitors retired suddenly, vanished or met with unfortunate accidents. He finally became front-page fodder when his charred remains were discovered in his burned-out Jag in Epping Forest. Then the column inches became feet and yards when it emerged that his wife had arranged his murder.
Donna Langford, an immaculately turned-out businessman’s wife, patron of several local charities and lady who lunched, had paid someone to kill her husband.
‘She used her old man’s own contacts,’ Thorne said. ‘Maybe the bloke she hired was in Langford’s address-book . . . under “H” for “Hit-men”.’
‘Look at the picture again,’ Anna said. ‘It’s him. You must remember what he looked like back then. You can see that he’s aged, surely?’
Thorne glanced down. ‘Yes, well, he’s certainly looking a lot better than the last time I saw him.’
‘If you’re talking about the body in the car, that wasn’t him.’
‘Donna
identified
him.’ Thorne was doing his best not to sound patronising, but it was a struggle. ‘It was
his
car and
his
jewellery. That was pretty much all that was left, mind you . . .’
‘She never knew that was how he was going to do it,’ Anna said. ‘The man she hired.’
‘She never asked.’ Thorne leaned back in his chair. ‘She calmly paid an Irishman called Paul Monahan twenty-five thousand pounds. He used a few quid of it to buy some petrol and a pair of handcuffs.’
‘When did you know she had been involved?’
‘About thirty seconds after I met her,’ Thorne said. ‘When she came in to identify the body. I’ve seen people react in all sorts of ways, but she just stood and . . . shook. I asked her if she was all right, and she more or less made a confession on the spot, with her old man still stinking like overcooked meat in the corner.’
‘How did you catch Monahan?’
‘Donna gave us his name and then we matched his
DNA
to a cigarette butt we found at the crime scene. It couldn’t have been more straightforward in the end.’ Thorne slid the picture across the desk towards Anna. ‘Trust me, cases as piss-easy as that one don’t come along every day.’
Anna nodded and cleared her throat. ‘Donna’s served ten years in prison, Inspector.’
Thorne took a few seconds, gathered together some papers on his desk. He summoned the same calm expression he had been relying on in court all morning, but he could still remember the smell of that Jag, the taste of the smoke and the ash that was not just ash, and the pale globules of fat that were stuck to the seats.
‘She got off pretty lightly, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘She pleaded guilty, which always does you a favour, and it didn’t hurt that her old man was a scumbag who was probably knocking her about when he wasn’t busy having people’s legs broken. Yeah, Alan Langford got what was coming to him, probably, but it was still a seriously nasty way to go.’
‘Look at the date,’ Anna said, She pushed the photo back towards Thorne. ‘Bottom right . . .’
Thorne picked up the photo. The date had been stamped automatically by the camera: a little over three months earlier. ‘They can do that sort of thing with Photoshop,’ he said. ‘Besides which, this could be a photo of
anybody
.’
‘Donna says it’s her husband,’ Anna said. She shook her head, searched for something else, but in the end she just shrugged and said it again. ‘She swears it’s Alan.’
‘Then she’s lying.’
‘Why?’
‘Because . . . Look, maybe she went a bit funny inside. She wouldn’t be the first. Maybe she wants money. Maybe she’s trying to get some big “miscarriage of justice” thing off the ground.’
‘She doesn’t even know I’m here,’ Anna said. ‘She came to me because she
doesn’t
want the police involved.’
Thorne was taken aback. ‘OK, so how are you going to explain this conversation to your client?’ He could not suppress a smile and felt more than a little guilty as he watched her start to fidget and redden again.
‘I’ll just be honest and tell her that I was getting nowhere,’ Anna said. ‘That I couldn’t think what else to do. I’ll tell her I’ve spent a fortnight staring at that sodding photo and that I’m none the wiser.’
‘Why
did
you come to see me?’ Thorne asked.
‘I thought you might be able to get a bit more information from the photograph.’ She looked at Thorne, but got no response. ‘Don’t you have ways of . . . enhancing pictures, or whatever? I mean, there must be some way to tell where this picture was taken. I don’t know, geographical profiling, a computer programme or
something
?’
‘This isn’t
CSI
,’ Thorne said. ‘We haven’t even got a photocopier that works properly.’
‘I also thought you might be
interested
.’ Anna was leaning towards him suddenly. ‘Stupid of me, I can see that, but it seemed like a decent idea at the time. It was your case, so I hoped that if you saw the photo you might at least think that maybe it wasn’t . . . finished.’ She stared at Thorne for a few seconds longer, then sat back and reached for a strand of hair to pull at.
‘It’s a waste of time,’ Thorne said. ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve got more important things to worry about. Actually, I can’t think of anything that
isn’t
more important than this.’ He pushed back his chair and, after a moment or two, Anna got the message and did the same.
‘I’ll get out of your way, then,’ she said.
She took a step towards the door.
Thorne thought she looked about fourteen. ‘Look . . . I’ll run it past my boss, all right?’ He saw her expression change and raised a hand. ‘He’ll only say the same as me, though, so don’t hold your breath.’ He picked up the photograph again, nodded down at it. ‘Could do with a bit of that myself,’ he said. ‘Sun and sand.’
‘Tom?’
Thorne looked up to see DI Yvonne Kitson standing in the doorway. They shared the office and most of the time Thorne was happy enough with the arrangement. He certainly liked her a lot more than he had back when she was a high-flier, and suspected that she felt the same way about herself. Like Thorne, she could still put noses out of joint without much effort, but it was hard not to admire the way she had rebuilt a career that had plunged so calamitously off the tracks after an extra-marital affair with a senior officer.
‘Like a self-assembly wardrobe,’ she had once said to Thorne. ‘One loose screw and the whole thing fell to pieces.’