‘What do you
want
?’
‘Like I said, I just wanted to see how things were going.’ Thorne eased himself on to the floor. ‘I don’t know . . . I thought it might help.’
‘Help you or me, Mr Thorne?’
Howard Cook held the car door open, waited as his wife walked slowly down the path from the restaurant, then gently took her arm and guided her as she leaned down and folded herself painfully into the passenger seat.
‘In you go, love.’
The arthritis had been getting steadily worse, so there had been at least an ounce or two of truth in what he’d told that copper. He had known for a while that Pat would need a lot more care as time went on. What had happened at the prison might have speeded up his decision, but he had been thinking about retirement anyway.
It was basically a pub, but they did good food and it was only a ten-minute drive, so they treated themselves to dinner there a few times each month. Now and again, they came with friends – a couple Pat knew from the library or one of the other prison officers and his wife – and once they’d brought their eldest and his girlfriend, on one of the rare occasions when he’d deigned to visit. But they were happy enough on their own.
‘How was your lamb, love?’ she asked.
‘Very tender. What about your steak?’
‘A bit rare for me, if I’m honest, but they’re so nice in there you don’t like to say anything, do you? And the pudding was lovely.’
‘Let’s get home, shall we?’ he said.
Heading back through the narrow, unlit lanes towards the village, they left the radio off, same as always. Happy enough to chat. In thirty-two years of married life they had never run out of things to say to each other. Plenty of people envied them, told them it was the secret to a long and happy marriage.
That and knowing when
not
to talk about certain things.
Driving home, they continued the conversation that had begun back in the pub, over steak and lamb and a bottle of rose. They talked about the kids, and where they might go for a holiday this year and what they were going to do with Pat’s mother, who was eighty-five and barely able to leave the house. They talked about almost everything except where the money was going to come from and the retirement which had been taken out of the blue, several years too early. Cook was relieved that his wife knew him well enough to leave it alone. When he had told her about his decision a few days before, he had made it clear that he was not at all keen to discuss it further. She had nodded, concerned but understanding, and he had drawn her into a reassuring hug.
‘It’s done and dusted, love, so what’s the point?’
Just
how
done and dusted any of it really was remained to be seen, but he didn’t think that Boyle and his team would be going away any time soon. Cook had brazened it out when they had first confronted him, not knowing what else to do. He had told that London copper to dig away to his heart’s content, cocky as you like, but now he lived in fear of the knock at the door and a smiling Andy Boyle on the other side of it.
‘Good news, Howard. Not for you, mind
. . .
’
The money he’d been given for those first few ‘favours’ – the mobile phone business and what have you – was already long gone, and there would certainly be no more cash until things had quietened down. But he had no way of knowing how careful everyone else involved had been. One slip and they’d all be buggered.
Pulling up outside the house, Pat was talking about making them both tea as soon as they got indoors, and Cook told himself to try to relax. These were people who knew what they were doing, course they were, who did their homework. He had often wondered if they knew him even better than his wife did. Asked himself if, back when they had made their first approach, they had known exactly how worried he was about making ends meet on a prison officer’s pension.
That he would be unlikely to refuse their offer.
‘Here we are, love . . .’
Christ, though, now he wished he’d refused. Back then, it had seemed like a lot of money for very little work or risk. A few bits and pieces of business in and out of the prison, and a bag full of tenners in the boot of his car.
‘Wait there and I’ll help you out.’
No talk of anybody being killed. No cell floors running with blood and homemade blades to get shot of. And no way for him to stay clear of it.
He was theirs by then, wasn’t he?
He got out of the car and walked around to open Pat’s door. She held out a hand and he was about to take it when the headlights broke across the brow of the hill.
The car was travelling at such a speed that he knew what was coming for no more than a few seconds. Just enough time to squeeze his wife’s hand once before letting go. Before the car took him and the open door, then accelerated away, the roar of its engine dying as Patricia Cook’s screams grew louder.
A few minutes later, kneeling over the body in the road, a neighbour phoned 999 while his wife tried to calm the distraught woman in the car. Once an ambulance was on the way, the emergency call was relayed to the on-call Homicide Assessment Team and one of their cars was immediately dispatched. Within an hour, as soon as the pathologist had made his initial examination and the identity of the dead man had been established, contact was made with the relevant unit of the West Yorkshire Homicide and Major Inquiry Team. Once the name had been run through the computer, details of the incident were passed to the senior investigating officer of the investigation with which Howard Cook appeared to be closely connected. Within two hours of the incident in Kirkthorpe, the case had been given a number and the necessary files had been opened.
A second murder inquiry had been launched.
Just before 11.30 p.m., driving towards the crime scene from his home on the other side of Wakefield, Andy Boyle called Tom Thorne.
‘There’s so much to do,’ she said. ‘To be organised and what have you. I haven’t even had the chance to go to the shops yet or cook anything and the house is a pigsty. I wish you’d let me make some tea or something. I could easily nip down to the end of the road and pick up some cake . . .’
Pat Cook stopped, the thought trailing away as though she had just remembered something, and turned to look at the woman sitting next to her on the sofa. She seemed surprised to see the local
WPC
– sent to stay overnight and by her side ever since – and shook her head. For a moment or two, she appeared to be trying to work out what the woman, and two other police officers, were doing in her front room.
At least one of those officers was not entirely sure himself.
‘Honestly,’ Thorne said. ‘We’re fine.’
It was Monday lunchtime, but the curtains were drawn at the large windows and the only light struggled from behind the fringed, brown shade of a standard lamp. Pat Cook wore a padded blue housecoat and was clutching what looked like a man’s pyjama jacket. She spoke slowly, each thought an effort, like someone who was not quite awake yet.
‘Did you get any kind of a look at the car?’ Andy Boyle asked. He was standing near the door, a similar position to the one he had taken when he and Thorne had interviewed Jeremy Grover. Thorne wondered if he did it deliberately, if it was some kind of status thing. ‘The make or the colour?’
‘It was dark,’ Pat Cook said. ‘And it was all so quick.’
‘Not even when it was driving away? A glimpse of the number plate, maybe?’
‘I wasn’t watching the car, I was watching Howard. He seemed to roll over and over, for ages. Then, when he stopped, I could just see the door lying beyond him in the grass.’ She turned to look at the
WPC
. ‘It took the door clean off the car, did you know that?’ The
WPC
nodded, confirmed gently that she did. ‘I was looking at it, lying there all twisted, and I was thinking that they’d have one hell of a job to fix it back on the car. It’s ridiculous, now I come to think about it. Don’t you think that’s ridiculous?’
‘It’s not ridiculous,’ Thorne said.
He knew from experience that the strangest thoughts could fly into people’s heads at the most extreme moments. He remembered a woman who had taken a carving knife to her husband and would not stop talking about how bad she felt for ruining his favourite shirt. A father whose young son had been the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting who became obsessed with finding the football his son had had with him at the time. ‘It was his best ball,’ the man kept saying. ‘He would have been so upset if that had gone missing.’
‘Could you even see if the car had one occupant or two?’ Boyle asked.
As inconspicuously as possible, Thorne rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and loosened his collar. The room was far too hot, but none of the visitors had been brave enough to make any comment.
‘I didn’t see anything.’
Thorne found himself wondering if Howard Cook had been the one responsible for turning the radiators down; the one who complained about it being too stuffy and marched around the house adjusting the thermostat and throwing open windows. Thorne had yet to encounter a couple who agreed about such things.
Boyle asked a few more questions about the incident, but Thorne knew that it was all academic. The car would almost certainly have been stolen and, when it finally turned up, they would be very lucky if it yielded anything remotely useful. Based on the pattern of the inquiry thus far, even if they were to get
super
-lucky and pull in whoever was responsible, they would probably not be able to identify the third party who paid them to murder Howard Cook. Thorne knew who was ultimately responsible, of course, and he had it on very good authority that this was a man who considered all eventualities. These would surely include the arrest and questioning of the people he hired.
‘It’s to do with his job, isn’t it?’ Pat Cook asked suddenly. ‘The money.’
Boyle took half a step away from the door. ‘What about it?’
‘When I asked him, and this is going back to last year now, he said he was doing a lot more overtime.’ She shook her head at what she clearly believed was the littlest and whitest of lies. ‘But I knew all his comings and goings, because I always cooked for him, always had a hot meal ready, you know? I knew his hours better than he did and it wasn’t overtime.’
‘What did you think it was, then?’ Thorne asked.
‘I knew it . . . wasn’t overtime.’
Thorne nodded. ‘So, how did you become aware of it?’
‘A few little things, really. He bought me one of them
TENS
machines for the arthritis, and an orthopaedic bed, one of those as goes up and down. And they’re not cheap. I checked. When the service was due on the car, there was none of the usual moaning, you know? Because they’ll rob you blind, those garages, won’t they? Crooked, the lot of them.’
Thorne and Boyle exchanged a look. The death of her husband had clearly not quite sunk in yet, so irony would almost certainly be lost on her.
‘So you just accepted it? You didn’t say anything?’
‘I as good as forgot about it, tell you the truth. Howard always looked after things financially. He didn’t like me to worry.’
I bet he didn’t, Thorne thought.
‘The bills were paid, we had our holidays. Everything went on as normal, you know?’
‘Did you ever see him with anyone suspicious?’ Boyle asked.
Pat Cook seemed to find that pretty funny. ‘He was a prison officer, love,’ she said. ‘He spent eight hours a day with some of the most suspicious characters you’d ever come across.’
‘Right . . .’
Once again, Thorne wondered what Andy Boyle was expecting:
Oh
,
yes, come to think of it
,
there was this one man
. . .
very shifty-looking he was, making sure nobody was watching, then slipping Howard this big brown envelope bulging with cash. Funny, because I didn’t really think anything of it at the time
. . .
‘So, what now?’ she said.
‘Well, we’ll do everything we can to bring those responsible for your husband’s death to justice . . .’ It was the start of a small speech that Thorne had made many times before, one that he knew sounded convincing, but he stopped when he saw Pat Cook shaking her head.
‘No, love, I mean about Howard.’ She folded her hands together in her lap. ‘
Now
, will you leave him be?’
Afterwards, Andy Boyle drove them into Wakefield, then on to where his team was based in a sprawl of interconnected units on an industrial estate to the south of the city. Police facilities were rarely beautiful, but this one was grimmer than most, making Becke House seem positively charming by comparison. Thorne wondered if each force had some kind of exclusive deal with the same people who designed slaughter-houses and multi-storey car parks. Did these places really need to be quite so dismal? He wasn’t holding out for thatched roofs or artfully incorporated water features, but Jesus . . . wasn’t the job bad enough already?
It could hardly help the cause if those
doing
it felt depressed just walking into the place.
Thorne said as much on their way in, but the Yorkshireman said he’d never really thought about it and didn’t give a toss either way. Thorne asked if he’d heard of sick-building syndrome, but Boyle just shook his head and led him into the incident room, gesturing towards the dozen or so men and women who were busy at cluttered work-stations.
‘Sick-
bastard
syndrome, more like,’ he said, pleased with himself. ‘You want to hear some of the stuff this lot come out with.’
As he was being introduced, Thorne could see that, for all the curmudgeonly posturing, Boyle was not only proud of his team but rather fond of most of them. Certainly more fond than Thorne was of some he had the misfortune to be working with.
He was also struck, as he had been in similar situations before, by how coppers brought together in teams always seemed to fall into distinct and recognisable categories. There were the can-do types and the moaners. There were arse-lickers, loners and thugs. Thorne recognised an Yvonne Kitson and a couple of Dave Hollands and after a few bad jokes and off-colour comments, was able to identify the team’s Samir Karim. Having spoken to almost everyone, he was unsure which of those he had met was the closest approximation to himself. He wondered if it might be Andy Boyle, but even as he considered it his eyes drifted towards a surly DS who was sitting slightly away from the others. He had just grunted when Thorne was introduced and then turned back to his computer screen. He seemed vaguely disturbed.