It didn’t stop the whingeing, though.

‘Not a single name on there more than once,’ Kitson said.

‘You’re wrong.’ Thorne ran his finger down the list, stopping to beckon Holland inside when he saw his face come around the door. ‘Three different people phoned to let us know they think it looks like the bloke who runs the garage in EastEnders.’

‘We should arrest him anyway,’ Kitson said. ‘For crimes against acting.’

Thorne looked up at Holland.

‘Had a call I think you might be interested in,’ Holland said.

‘Don’t tell me. The killer looks like someone in Emmerdale.’

Holland dropped a scrap of paper on to Thorne’s desk: a scribbled name and number. ‘He’s a DI in Leicester. Someone up there saw Jesmond on TV last night talking about the Walker murder and thought it sounded familiar.’

‘Sounded what?’

‘So, this DI was calling to check the details we didn’t give out to the press. See if they matched up with a murder they caught a few weeks back.’

‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Kitson said.

Thorne was already dialling…

Once the pleasantries were out of the way, DI Paul Brewer told Thorne that the body of Catherine Burke, a nurse aged twenty-three, had been discovered three weeks earlier in the flat she had shared with her boyfriend, on a quiet street behind Leicester City ’s football ground.

She had been struck on the back of the head with a heavy ornament and then suffocated with a plastic bag.

‘It was the suffocation bit that got the old antennae twitching,’ Brewer said, the East Midlands accent not as thick as Thorne had been expecting. ‘When your superintendent mentioned it on the box. Wasn’t me that saw it, but as soon as I heard I thought it would be worth following up. You know, just to make sure.’ He sounded pleased with himself. ‘Looks like I was spot on.’

‘Three weeks ago, you said?’

‘Right.’

‘And?’

A chuckle. ‘And… brick wall, mate. We’ve got a description of a bloke she was seen talking to outside the hospital the day before, but we’ve had sweet FA off that. She was an occasional drug user, tablets mostly, nicked them from her own hospital as it turned out, but that’s led us nowhere. To be honest, it was all going stone cold until your one turned up.’

‘Stroke of luck,’ Thorne said.

Brewer said something else, but Thorne was too busy mouthing obscenities at Kitson and Holland.

‘What about forensics?’

‘That was the easy bit,’ Brewer said. ‘Looks like she scratched him when he had the bag over her head. We dug plenty of blood and skin from under her nails, so we can match the bastard up as soon as we make an arrest.’

Thorne scribbled ‘GOT DNA’ on the piece of paper and pushed it across the desk for Holland and Kitson to see.

‘You still there?’

‘So, how are we going to work this?’ Thorne asked.

‘Not a clue, mate,’ Brewer said. ‘I know it won’t be anything to do with me, so it don’t matter what I think. My guv’nor’s probably on the phone to your guv’nor as we speak, carving it up. Politics, budgets, all that shit. We just do what we’re told, right?’

‘Right…’

‘Just so you know… I’m not bothered about territory, anything like that,’ Brewer said. ‘No need to worry about any of that crap. We can sort out who gets the credit once we’ve caught him, fair enough?’

Thorne knew that, whatever opinion he was rapidly forming about DI Paul Brewer – Job-pissed and probably disliked by all his colleagues – he was going to have to get along with him. He thanked him for his help, praising his initiative and insisting that the credit would most definitely go where it was due. He called him ‘Paul’ as often as he could manage without gagging, promising him a night on the town when they eventually got together and trying to sound pleased when Brewer promised to take him up on the offer.

‘It’s from an X-ray, by the way,’ Brewer said.

‘What is?’

‘The piece of plastic in her hand.’ Brewer sounded pleased with himself again. He waited. ‘There was a piece of plastic, right?’

‘An X-ray of what?’

‘They can’t tell us that just yet. There’s a few letters and numbers on it but they can’t make sense of them. If we’re lucky, your piece might help.’

When Thorne looked up he saw the expressions of confusion from Holland and Kitson who had only heard his side of the conversation.

‘X-ray?’ Kitson whispered.

Thorne put a hand over the mouthpiece, told them he’d be another minute. Brewer was saying he was on his way into a meeting but that he’d try to call again later. That his was a large Scotch and water.

‘Just before you go,’ Thorne said. ‘Is Catherine’s mother still alive?’

‘What?’

‘Her mother.’

‘No. Both parents dead, and an elder brother who was killed in a car accident a few years ago. Took us a while to trace a blood relative.’

‘How did she die?’

‘Sorry?’

‘How did the mother die, and when?’

‘No idea,’ Brewer said.

‘Could you find out and get back to me?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Cheers, Paul, I appreciate it. What kind of Scotch do you like?’

‘What’s all this about?’

‘Probably nothing,’ Thorne said. He looked up and locked eyes with Kitson. ‘Just covering my arse.’

Brewer had phoned back a few minutes before the briefing was due to start, and apologised for taking so long. He told Thorne that he’d spoken to Catherine Burke’s boyfriend, who had confirmed that her mother had died of cancer when Catherine was a young girl. Thorne had thanked him, unable to decide if he felt disappointed or relieved.

‘Oh, and by the way, any single malt will do nicely,’ Brewer had said.

Thorne passed the news on to Brigstocke outside the door of the Briefing Room as the troops were filing in. The DCI glanced up from the notes he had been working on for the last hour.

‘Worth a try,’ he said.

Thorne watched as unfamiliar faces drifted past; nodded to one or two of those drafted in quickly from other teams. ‘So, how’s this going to pan out?’

‘We take it from here,’ Brigstocke said.

‘Really?’

‘Well, no, not officially, but in terms of money and manpower we’re way more capable of doing it than they are. So, off the record, we get to run things.’

‘And off the record, what happens if we mess up?’

‘Then, obviously, it was always a fifty-fifty operation and the blame for any operational glitches gets shared out equally.’

‘Sounds fair,’ Thorne said.

Inside, it was standing room only. Muttered conversation no more than the preferred alternative to silence. One phone call had changed the complexion of the case entirely and suddenly the atmosphere was as charged as Thorne could remember in a while.

There weren’t too many like this.

Loss of life was never treated lightly, not if you looked beyond the banter and the off-colour jokes to what was in the eyes of the men and women at a crime scene. Thorne had met clever murderers and profoundly stupid ones. Those who had lost it and lashed out and those who had enjoyed themselves. Some had made him angry enough to come close to murder himself, while for others he had felt nothing but pity.

There were as many shades of killer as there were ways to end a life, but while it was Thorne’s job to catch them, the murderer was always taken seriously.

And when he murdered more than once…

‘Right, thanks for gathering so quickly,’ Brigstocke said. ‘There’s a lot to get through.’

From the back of the room, Thorne watched the notebooks open, heard fifty ballpoints click. He glanced at the door as a handful of late-comers hurried in, half expecting to see Superintendent Trevor Jesmond make a well-timed and inspirational appearance.

‘As some of you know already, we received a call this morning that has changed the focus of the Emily Walker inquiry. I’ve spent most of the day since then on the phone to various senior officers from the Leicestershire constabulary…’