‘I’m Angie,’ she said.

Thorne shook the woman’s outstretched hand and felt himself redden a little as he told her his name.

‘What business you in then, Tom?’

‘I sell nuts,’ Thorne said. ‘Crisps, nuts… I’m basically a snack salesman.’

She nodded, smiling slightly, as though she wasn’t sure whether to believe him. When the barman had put down the drinks she picked up her glass and waited until he’d moved away. ‘Listen, Tom, it’s almost midnight, and we can sit here getting hammered if you want. Or we could just take these up to your room.’

She did not take her eyes from his as she sipped her drink. Now Thorne felt himself really redden. He could also feel the blood moving to other parts of his body and was grateful that he was sitting down.

He had called Louise earlier from the car-park, at the same time as Holland was speaking to Sophie. She’d said she had no problem with him staying over; had even sounded slightly annoyed that he would think she might have. She’d said that she’d be happy to get an early night and when he’d asked how her first day back had been, she’d told him it was fine; that he had been worrying for nothing.

‘I’ve… got a girlfriend,’ Thorne said. He nodded, like it was self-explanatory, but the woman just stared, as though waiting for him to elaborate. He was trying to swallow, dry-mouthed, thinking that he didn’t really fancy her very much and wondering how he would be reacting if he did. ‘You know, otherwise…’

The woman raised her hands and spun slowly away on her stool. ‘Not a problem.’

Thorne was still nodding like an idiot. She’d said it the same way that Louise had: casual and frosty. He opened his wallet and took out a ten-pound note to pay for the drinks; turned when he heard the woman cursing.

She pointed to the warrant card, shaking her head. ‘I can normally spot you bastards a mile away.’

From the corner of his eye, Thorne could see Trevor smirking as he dried glasses at the end of the bar. Realising now that the woman’s proposition had been a purely commercial one, Thorne did his best not to look overly shocked.

‘Don’t worry about it, love,’ he said. ‘I’m not local, and if it makes you feel any better, I think my professional radar’s working about as well as yours.’ He listened to the music for a few seconds, drumming his fingers on the bar, then he raised his glass. ‘Cheers, Angie.’

‘It’s Mary, actually.’

‘Slow night, Mary?’

‘Cata-fucking-tonic,’ she said.

They hit the rush hour coming out of Leicester, ran into the tail end of another as soon as they got within commuting distance of London, and the drizzle didn’t help. When Brigstocke called just before ten, they were still twenty miles from the city, and still regretting the hideously greasy breakfast they’d eaten two hours earlier.

‘Should have just had the muesli,’ Holland said.

Thorne turned down the radio. ‘And you take the piss out of rosé?’ He pressed the button on his phone that activated the loudspeaker, and passed it to Holland. It was the closest he came to hands-free.

‘How did it go with Paice?’ Brigstocke asked.

‘Nothing to get excited about,’ Thorne said. ‘Catherine Burke never told him about her mum, that’s all.’

‘Worth checking though,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Providing your expenses claims aren’t too stupid.’

‘There might be a claim later on for food poisoning,’ Holland said.

Brigstocke told them that Hendricks was due to perform the first of the Macken post-mortems later that morning, and that, as they had already confirmed a DNA match, he’d asked FSS to prioritise the examination of the two newest X-ray fragments, to see if they could get any more information.

‘Every chance, I reckon,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s leaving them for us to find, so he must want us to know what they are.’

‘Or waste our time trying to find out,’ Holland added.

Another phone had started ringing in the background and there was a hiatus while Brigstocke answered it; then a minute or two of muffled conversation over the loudspeaker.

‘Is that what you think?’ Holland turned to Thorne. ‘He’s leaving them for us. It’s not… ritualistic?’

Before Thorne could say that he had no idea, he was distracted by the car behind. ‘Look at this idiot up my arse,’ he said. He stared hard into his rear-view, stepping on the brake a few times until he thought the driver behind had got the message.

Brigstocke was back on the line, asking them how far away they were, then telling them not to bother coming into the office. ‘Get yourselves straight down to the Holloway Road,’ he said. He explained that they had done a door-to-door across some of the university accommodation first thing and managed to track down a few of the students who had been at the Rocket Club on Saturday night. ‘We may as well save ourselves some time and interview them all together.’

‘Makes sense,’ Thorne said. It would also be a chance to see the last place where anyone, save for their killer, had seen Greg or Alex Macken alive.

Brigstocke had an even stronger reason. ‘Several of them say they saw the brother talking to a man in the bar who he may have left with later on.’

‘Sounds promising,’ Holland said.

‘Well, I don’t know how sober any of them were, but between them, there’s a chance of getting a proper description. With luck… we might do even better than that.’

Thorne looked at Holland. ‘Cameras.’

‘Smart-arse,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Yeah, Yvonne’s going down to see if there’s any deccent CCTV.’

‘Probably have to wade through hours of students throwing up on the stairs and shagging in dark corners,’ Holland said.

Thorne laughed. ‘I’m sure there’ll be plenty of volunteers.’

‘I think I’ll save that footage for myself,’ Brigstocke said, before he hung up. ‘Keep it to show the wife when my eldest starts banging on about going to university.’

A few miles further on, the traffic thickened approaching the turn-off for the M25 and Thorne had to take the BMW down into first gear. He smacked the wheel harder than he might in time to the song on the radio.

‘Why don’t we shoot up the hard shoulder?’ Holland asked.

Thorne explained that they would be through the jam quickly enough once they got past the junction. That the students weren’t going anywhere, and that he didn’t really fancy getting done by one of the cameras and spending weeks writing letters to prove that he was on legitimate police business.

‘Just an idea,’ Holland said.

Thorne checked his mirror and eased the car into the inside lane, thinking about it, knocking the wipers up a notch as the rain grew heavier. Coming down in needles suddenly, from a sky the colour of wet cement.

Bearing in mind what they looked like now, pale and half dressed with hair like shit, Thorne could barely imagine how the students sitting in front of him had looked when uniformed coppers had banged on their doors at seven-thirty that morning. Even as he thought it, watching while Holland took down their names, Thorne could hear Louise making some crack about him turning into his father. Back before his dad had died, of course, and before the Alzheimer’s had really kicked in. Back when the old man could still string a sentence together without upsetting too many people.

Louise had never met Thorne’s father, but she knew enough about the man to enjoy teasing Thorne about how much his habits and attitudes were now becoming like those of his dad. Thorne tried fighting his corner, but could never muster a great deal of conviction.

A few weeks before, she’d said, ‘It’ll probably get even worse, now that you’re actually going to be a sodding dad!’

‘Greg doesn’t come in here much, not normally.’ The speaker was a young woman with blonde hair cut very short and a ring through her bottom lip that Phil Hendricks would have been proud of. ‘Don’t think I saw him in here at all last term.’