Read Online From the Dead by Mark Billingham - Free Book Online

shadow you?’
    â€˜You’re joking, right?’
    â€˜As long as she knows when to keep her mouth shut, it shouldn’t be a problem. Fair enough? Russell?’
    â€˜I can’t see it doing any harm,’ Brigstocke said.
    Thorne shook his head. ‘Yeah, well, you’re not the poor sod who’ll be stuck with her.’
    Jesmond stood up, said that he needed to crack on. To get into the incident room and do whatever he could to build morale, bearing in mind what had happened. On his way out of the door, he told Brigstocke and Thorne that he was pleased they were all singing from the same hymn sheet.
    â€˜What a racket that’s going to be,’ Thorne said.
    Â 
    The Royal Oak was unlikely to attract anyone for whom great service or a friendly atmosphere was important, but it was five minutes’ walk from both the Peel Centre and Colindale Station. As such, and with an ex-DI’s name above the front door, it was always going to be a pub where the Met’s finest, and its decidedly less fine, were in the majority. Tonight, though, any punter without a warrant card would have been well advised to open a few cans at home instead.
    It was wall-to-wall Job.
    The clientele could equally well have been bikers, football fans or braying, pissed-up City boys. Friends, colleagues or strangers, it hardly mattered. Something in their shared experience, in the unspoken bonds between these men and women, caused feelings to run high and wild as bewilderment turned to anger and sorrows were drowned many times over in white wine, Stella and Jameson’s. Had it not been for the stronger smell coming from the toilets, the whiff of testosterone might have been overpowering, drifting above the pockets of aggression and self-pity as Thorne pushed his way to the bar. Walking back to the table with another Guinness for himself and lager-tops for Dave Holland and Yvonne Kitson, he was accosted several times by those keen to give vent to one emotion or another; to pass comment on the only topic of conversation in the room.
    â€˜Bad luck, mate . . .’
    â€˜Don’t worry, he’ll get what’s coming to him.’
    â€˜Wankers!’
    Thorne handed Holland and Kitson their drinks and sat down, wondering exactly who that last half-cut philosopher had been talking about. The members of the jury? Adam Chambers and his legal team? Thorne and his? Himself and every other copper in the pub for not making a better job of the case?
    Whichever it was, Thorne wasn’t arguing.
    â€˜Cheers,’ Holland said.
    Thorne nodded and drank.
    â€˜They’re like arseholes,’ Kitson said.
    â€˜What are?’
    â€˜Opinions.’
    Holland swallowed. ‘Every bugger’s got one.’
    Thorne looked from one to the other. ‘So, what’s yours?’
    Thorne had spent a good deal of the morning with Russell Brigstocke, speculating as to what might have happened in that jury room, but he had yet to sit and talk things through with anyone else whose opinion he valued. He had tried to get hold of Louise, but she had been in and out of meetings all day and able to do no more than leave a message saying how sorry she was.
    Kitson was a damn sight less cautious than she had once been when it came to speaking her mind; and Holland, though not quite the wide-eyed innocent he used to be, could still usually be counted upon to say what he thought.
    â€˜It’s hard enough getting a conviction at the best of times,’ Holland said. ‘You’ve got the judge instructing the jury, banging on about reasonable doubt and the weight of evidence, all that.’
    Kitson nodded. ‘So, when you haven’t got a body and there’s a brief who knows what he’s doing, you’re really up against it.’ She looked at Thorne. ‘ We’re up against it.’
    â€˜Nothing else you could have done,’ Holland said.
    Thorne blinked slowly and imagined Adam Chambers