‘Was it?’ Thorne asked.

‘I can’t even remember. It was just bloody silly because those two never argue, you know? They’re really close. It’s that whole father-son thing?’ It sounded like a question at the end, as though she were making sure Thorne knew what she meant.

‘Right.’

‘See you later.’

Thorne watched her leave. He knew exactly what she’d meant and, more importantly, he now also knew what had bothered him about the video.

What it was that Luke had said… or hadn’t said.

He stopped on his way out, seeing that the corner of a poster near the door had come unstuck, and when he reached across to press it back in place, he noticed the writing beneath. He peered at the words, at the small, neat letters written in black ink on the wallpaper. A stark and secret litany of frustration, impatience or rage.

Fuck off

Fuck off

Fuck off!

From the school, Holland had gone straight back to Central 3000 and found himself a desk out of the way. He needed ten or fifteen minutes to gather his thoughts, to get into the Police National Computer system and to go over the relevant material. It was only when he’d done both, when he was as certain as he could be that he had something worth shouting about, that he called Becke House and spoke to Yvonne Kitson.

‘How’s your kidnap going, Dave?’

‘Fine.’

‘Missing us?’

‘Listen, Guv, I need to talk to you about the Amin Latif murder.’

It was a little over six months since the eighteen-year-old Asian, an engineering student at a local sixth-form college, had been beaten to death by three white youths at a bus stop in Edgware. It had been, for all the obvious reasons, a high-profile investigation, but despite the media coverage, an extensive enquiry and even a witness who had provided a detailed description of the main attacker, the case had quickly gone cold.

Cold, but still tender. Still embarrassing.

Russell Brigstocke had been the nominal senior investigating officer, but, day to day, Yvonne Kitson had run things. To all intents and purposes, it had been her case, and – at least as far as she was concerned – her failure. She’d known from the moment she’d first looked at the boy’s body – at a bloodied hand, knuckles down in a puddle across double yellow lines – that his death would stay with her, irrespective of whether she caught those responsible. Hate crimes tended to do that. And the Amin Latif murder was about as hateful as they came.

Holland had her attention immediately.

He told her that he’d seen a seventeen-year-old, spoken to a seventeen-year-old, whose resemblance to her chief murder suspect was simply too close to be ignored. As he described the boy he and Parsons had interviewed an hour or two earlier, he stared at the picture which he’d called up and printed out from the PNC. The E-fit had been based on the description given by a friend of Amin Latif, a fellow student who had been present at the time of the attack but had escaped with a few broken bones and six months of nightmares. The picture wasn’t identical to the image in his mind’s eye: the blond hair was lank and lay flat against the head, much as it would have done on a night in October when it had been pissing down with rain. But below the hairline, everything else was spot on.

The face was Adrian Farrell’s.

‘Shit… shit!’ The exclamation of surprise had quickly been followed by a far harsher one. By annoyance aimed at no one but herself. ‘Butler’s Hall?’

‘I know. Who’d’ve thought?’

‘We should,’ Kitson snapped. ‘We fucking-well should have thought.’

Butler’s Hall was several miles from the street where Amin Latif had died, but it was certainly close enough; well within the thick red circle that had been drawn on the map in the Major Incident Room. Well within the scheme of things. There would probably have been ‘Can You Help?’ posters near by, and perhaps a number of its pupils lived at addresses that were canvassed during the house-to-house enquiries. Of course, it would have been impossible to question every student at every school and college in the area, but plenty had been, and Yvonne Kitson would not have bet on too many of them being pupils at Butler’s Hall.

Assumptions, by their very nature, went unspoken. And racist thugs did not go to public school.

‘What was he like, Dave? I don’t mean physically…’

‘Arrogant, aggressive. Full of himself.’

‘You sure you weren’t just seeing that? Projecting it? Are you positive you weren’t making this boy’s behaviour fit because of what you thought?’

‘It wasn’t until afterwards that I thought anything,’ Holland said. ‘I was watching the little fucker walk away from us, and when he turned round I knew he was the kid in the picture. The kid with the earring.’

Kitson said nothing for a few moments. Holland could hear her slurping her coffee, swallowing, deciding. There was a flutter of panic as he realised that, in the past, he’d watched her, Brigstocke and others judging similar pronouncements of certainty from Tom Thorne. He’d also seen the fallout later, when such certainty had proved to be horribly misguided.

‘Fair enough,’ Kitson said.

Holland let out the breath he’d been unconciously holding. ‘What should we do?’

‘You’re still working on a kidnap, as far as I know, but I want to have a look at him.’

‘You going to bring him in?’

‘I want to see him first, just to double-check you’re right to be so worked up about it.’

Holland had been afraid that talking to Kitson, or anybody else, might shake his conviction a little, but it had done the opposite. As he ran through each detail of the conversation with Adrian Farrell, as he described the look the boy had given Kenny Parsons, he could feel his certainty settling into determination. And now that her initial anger had worn off, he could hear the exhilaration in Kitson’s voice too.

And she had every right to be excited.

Finding a murderer was one thing of course, and convicting him was quite another, but what had made this particular killing so uniquely barbaric was also what gave them their best chance of doing just that.

Before he’d been kicked to death, Amin Latif had been the victim of a serious sexual assault. Semen samples had been taken from his body, had given up the gift of their DNA. Now, on a frozen slide in an FSS lab in Victoria, curled the double helix that might identify a killer; the sequence of letters on every rung of its elegantly twisting ladder just waiting for a match.

Downstairs, it felt like a bad wake after a good funeral; there was a sense of that sort of desperation.

In many of the rooms, bright against the darkness that was descending outside, a decent enough effort was being made to generate a degree of conversation and activity; of ordinariness. To keep at bay the tide of gloom that threatened to rush through the house at any moment, as if a black and swollen river were about to burst its banks.

There were perhaps a dozen people in the Mullens’ home, split fairly evenly between family and friends on the one hand, and police officers on the other. Thorne spoke through a cloud of cigarette smoke to Maggie Mullen and to a DS with a big mouth who drivelled on about a ‘gang snatch in Harlesden that had gone monumentally tits up’. He had to spend five minutes talking football with Tony Mullen’s brother, and fuck-all with the second family liaison officer, before he finally got the chance to speak privately to Louise Porter. He’d collared her as soon as he’d arrived back at the house and passed on what Carol Chamberlain had told him about Grant Freestone. That was half an hour ago, before he’d wandered upstairs and run into Juliet Mullen.

As soon as he saw the opportunity, he ushered Porter into a good-sized utility room that ran off the kitchen.