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

celebrating, pissing it up the wall in some West End bar where there were far fewer police officers knocking around. He pictured the jubilant friends and family and supposed that, in a way, it was a let-off for them, too. There would be no need to lie to work colleagues or rewrite their personal histories. They would not have to duck difficult questions when journalists came knocking every year on Andrea Keane’s birthday, insisting that they must know something about what happened to her. Now they could happily let their own doubts about Adam Chambers’ innocence – and Thorne knew they had them – shrivel, until they seemed like something only dreamed or imagined.
    â€˜We’ve just got to crack on,’ Kitson said.
    â€˜Life’s too short, right?’ Thorne necked a third of his pint, swallowed back a belch. ‘But a lot shorter for some than it is for others.’ He thought about two eighteen-year-old girls. The memory of one sullied by injustice. A chance, perhaps, to find the other. And to make himself feel a damn sight better, to salve a conscience scarred by his failure to find the first.
    The horse that Jesmond thought he should get back on.
    They were joined by Sam Karim, who brought another round to the table just as Russell Brigstocke stood up and made a short speech. The DCI thanked everyone for their hard work, told the team they were the best he had ever worked with, and said that one day, if something new turned up, they might get another crack at it. There were cheers and some half-hearted applause, then the pub drank a toast to Andrea Keane.
    â€˜God bless,’ Thorne said. It was the kind of thing a copper with a drink inside him came out with at such a moment. Even one without a religious bone in his body.
    The Oak was hardly the sort of establishment to get done for after-hours drinking, but there was no more than fifteen minutes’ official drinking time left when Thorne spotted someone he knew walking out of the Gents’. Gary Brand had been a DS on the original Alan Langford inquiry; had sat in on a couple of the Paul Monahan interviews, if Thorne’s memory served him correctly. He had stayed in the Homicide Command for another eighteen months or so afterwards, until a vacancy for an inspector had come up elsewhere, and was now working south of the river, as far as Thorne could remember.
    Thorne thought it might be an idea to run a few things past someone who had been part of the team ten years earlier. Moving through the crowd, he felt the drink starting to take hold. He took a few deep breaths. There was no way he was driving home, but that didn’t matter a great deal. He had spent the afternoon on the phone, making the necessary arrangements, and he would not be needing the car much, if at all, the following day.
    Brand looked pleased to see him and immediately reached for his wallet. They made for the bar. Thorne took a half, though he knew it was already a little late for caution.
    â€˜Hardly your local any more this, is it, Gary?’
    Brand was a slim six-footer and a few years younger than Thorne. His light hair was cut close to the scalp and he wore the kind of thin, soft-leather jacket that Thorne thought looked better on a woman. ‘Well, obviously I know quite a few of the lads on the Chambers inquiry, and I’ve been following the case.’ He was originally from the West Midlands and it was still clear enough in the flattened vowels and the downward intonation at the end of each sentence. As a result, he often sounded despondent, even if he were in the best of moods. He shrugged. ‘Couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be tonight.’ He raised his glass, touched it to Thorne’s. ‘What an absolute shocker.’
    â€˜We’ve had a few of those.’
    â€˜Right enough.’
    â€˜Talking of which . . .’
    Thorne told Brand about the visit from Anna Carpenter and the photographs. About