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pub was spitting distance away from Thorne’s place and he had dropped the car off before walking back to meet Hendricks.
    ‘All settled in?’
    ‘Still in boxes, mate.’
    ‘Well it’s not too late to change your mind,’ Thorne said. ‘Admit you’ve paid way over the odds for what’s basically a tin shed.’
    Hendricks had bought one of the futuristic-looking, aluminium-clad flats on the banks of the Regent’s Canal. The flats – the work of the same designer responsible for the Sainsbury’s directly opposite – were highly prized, but Thorne thought they looked like space-age toilets and said as much.
    ‘I like it,’ Hendricks said. ‘Besides, it’s dead handy for the supermarket, or if I ever fancy throwing myself in the canal.’ He raised his beer. ‘Talking of which…’
    ‘Yeah,’ Thorne said. ‘I suppose we should get it over with.’
    ‘Hang on, I thought this was why you were so desperate to meet up.’
    It had been. Thorne had spent the day clinging to the hope that Hendricks might have found something to explain why the Cooper suicides had felt so wrong. That the bodies themselves might have provided the answer. Driving north though, the notion that double-checking the post-mortems could possibly vindicate him or somehow justify the unholy amounts of crap that had rained down in the last few days had begun to appear ridiculous. Worse than childish. By the time he was pulling up outside his flat, he was resigned to being there for no other reason than a simple and overwhelming need to see his friend. To get some sympathy and to get wasted.
    Now, twenty minutes and a pint and a half into it, he said, ‘Go on then.’
    ‘Your bog-standard insulin overdose,’ Hendricks said. ‘Nice easy one.’
    ‘Suicide, yeah?’
    ‘Nothing else going on that I could see.’
    Thorne nodded, drank.
    ‘I mean the old man had a touch of liver disease and some of his wife’s arteries were none too clever, but that’s what happens at their age. Well, you’ll find out yourself soon enough.’
    Thorne put his beer down. ‘What if someone gave them those injections?’
    ‘No signs of struggle,’ Hendricks said. ‘No tissue under fingernails.’
    Thorne grunted. That much had been obvious at the crime scene. ‘There’s something else.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Buggered if I know,’ Thorne said. He stared down at the table. ‘It’s doing my head in.’
    ‘This? Or the whole thing? The uniform, I mean.’
    ‘I don’t know. Bit of both.’
    Hendricks sat back, sighed. ‘Come on then, let’s hear it.’
    Thorne told him. The apparent suicide of an elderly couple for which there seemed no reason and the similarity to at least two other cases. The nagging doubt that had become a fixation. His clash with Neil Hackett and how it had all fallen apart the previous evening at that house in Stanmore. When he’d felt like an over-enthusiastic novice.
    ‘Jesus…’
    ‘“Jesus, that’s a really interesting theory” or “Jesus, how could you be such a knob”?’
    ‘Define “interesting”,’ Hendricks said.
    ‘There was no reason for the Coopers to do that,’ Thorne said. ‘No reason at all. There was something wrong in that bedroom.’
    ‘Yeah, but look at it from their point of view, Hackett and his lot. You’re not exactly giving them much to get worked up about, are you?’
    Thorne reached down and pulled out a sheaf of papers from his bag. He slapped a file down on the table and pushed it across. ‘No reason for it,’ he said. ‘No reason for Brian Gibbs to slash his wrists in the bath.’ Another file. ‘No reason for Fiona Daniels to drown herself in the reservoir. Look at the statements from the families for God’s sake.’
    Hendricks moved his beer as the paperwork piled up in front of him.
    ‘Look at it, Phil.’
    Hendricks picked up a file and flicked through the pages. ‘Yeah, but what does “no reason” actually mean, though? Most of the time we’ve got no idea why people