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her bag.
    The team’s DCI, a quietly spoken Geordie who needed to lose a few pounds, appeared at Porter’s shoulder, brandishing a sheaf of papers and tel ing her that he needed five minutes with her before she disappeared. Though Barry Hignett had met Thorne and Hol and briefly first thing, he took the chance to welcome them again, explaining that there was bugger-al room for niceties on the teeth of a case such as this one.
    Hignett walked Porter to a nearby desk and spread out the papers in front of her. Hol and watched for a minute, then turned around, his back to them, and spoke low to Thorne: ‘Did you want to go to the school?’
    Thorne looked at him as though he were speaking Chinese. ‘What?’
    ‘With Porter, I mean.’ He lowered his voice further stil . ‘Only I thought you looked a bit pissed off before, when I said that I’d go.’
    ‘Don’t be so bloody sil y,’ Thorne said.
    When Porter had finished with Hignett, she arranged to meet Hol and later at the school. Then Thorne took the stairs with her down to ground level.
    ‘ They’re being fairly nice to me .’ Thorne said it quietly, nodding as an officer he’d spoken to once or twice moved past him, coming up. ‘That’s what Luke said on the tape.’ It had been a dramatic moment when the figure with the syringe had emerged from behind the camera. The picture had remained unsteady, the camera clearly handheld rather than mounted on a tripod. Whatever Luke had said or not said, that was when it had become clear that he was being held by more than one person. That they were looking at a conspiracy to kidnap.
    ‘Two of them, d’you reckon? Or more?’
    ‘If it’s just two, I’d put money on the other one being the woman Luke was seen with.’
    ‘Is that common? A man and a woman working as a team?’
    ‘I’ve come across it a few times,’ Porter said. ‘For obvious reasons, the woman’s most often the one involved in the abduction itself. The trust figure.’
    ‘Right.’
    For obvious reasons .
    Thorne wondered why, in the light of so many highprofile cases, those reasons remained obvious, but clearly they did. Hindley was always more hated than Brady. Maxine Carr, despite being found not guilty of even knowing that her boyfriend had murdered two young girls, was, if anything, the more vilified of the two.
    ‘A couple of the kids reckoned they’d spotted them together before, didn’t they?’ Thorne said. ‘Luke and this woman. She obviously took her time to get close to him.’
    ‘It paid off,’ Porter said. ‘Talking of which, there’s stil no sign of a ransom demand. No talk of anyone getting paid off.’
    ‘Maybe that’l be on the next tape.’ But as they came out into the lobby on the ground floor, and moved towards the revolving doors, Thorne was stil thinking about the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’. Imagining a woman getting close to her victim; smiling and touching and always attentive. Thinking that trust was nurtured, like bodies and minds; that it was abused at the same time that they were. He remembered the smile that faltered a little as the boy on the screen had done his best to crack jokes. He remembered the emptiness in the stare. He wondered if Luke Mul en would ever trust anyone again.
    The drizzle hadn’t stopped al morning, but there were stil plenty of people mil ing around outside the entrance. A couple sat eating sandwiches, perched on adjacent concrete stumps. Rows of these bol ards, instal ed to deter car-bombers, had sprung up outside most of the city’s public buildings, and Thorne often wondered if cement companies might be secretly funding some of the terrorist groups. He shared the theory with Porter and they paused for a minute, enjoying the joke; Thorne, on his way towards the tube station at St James’s Park and Porter headed for the Yard’s underground garage.

    ‘How much does it bother you?’ Thorne asked. ‘That nobody’s asking the Mul ens for any money. That nobody’s