Having ignored the cardboard croissants that had been passed around before the briefing, Thorne was suddenly starting to feel the absence of breakfast. He reached for a biscuit.

‘Why did anyone think it was necessary to warn him?’

‘He wasn’t warned.’ Roper sighed. ‘It was our policy to keep the offender – the “client”, or whatever he would be called now – abreast of significant developments. Clearly, that involved him being made aware of who had been told about his criminal record. The landlord he rented the flat from knew. So Freestone was told that he knew. Some people believed that it was his right.’

‘Some people?’

Roper stared hard at Thorne. It was as though he was about to insist on a little respect and deference to rank; to point out that a ‘sir’ would not have gone amiss, irrespective of whether he was a high-ranking police officer. In the end, he seemed to decide that to ask for it might have appeared needy, more than anything else. ‘It’s a question of emphasis,’ he said. ‘If you were to ask those involved with MAPPA now, whether the arrangements were there to protect the public or to rehabilitate the offender, chances are you wouldn’t get a straight answer. The party line is that one is very much dependent on the other, that each is part of the overall strategy.’

‘But not back then, right?’

‘There was a certain… conflict between points of view. To some, it was all about a commitment to the victim, about the protection of future victims. Others had a more sympathetic attitude to the offender. Believed that once a sentence had been served the offender should be given every opportunity to rejoin the community; that they should perhaps be given the benefit of the doubt, rather than suspected at every turn.’ Roper leaned back in his chair, folded his arms. ‘Those people believed we could play some small part in helping Grant Freestone to do something decent. Others were just waiting for him to fuck up again.’ He held up a hand at Thorne, then lowered it to his trouser-leg, where it gently smoothed out the material. ‘And let’s be clear. Which side of the argument I was on is definitely not relevant to your investigation, Inspector.’

It was as bleak a way of separating those who thought the glass was half full from those who believed it was half empty as Thorne had ever heard. ‘How did you work these… conflicts out?’

Roper’s eyes flicked away from Thorne’s face as he answered. ‘We made compromises.’

‘Who made them? Who took the decisions?’

‘They were discussed.’

‘Were they voted on?’

‘There was nothing that formal. The opinions of certain departments carried more weight than others, perhaps. Look, I can’t remember exactly who was responsible for which decision, or when, and I honestly can’t see that it’s of any interest now.’

‘No, probably not.’ Bearing in mind what had happened to Sarah Hanley, Thorne guessed that there was comfort to be gained from a fading memory.

From where he was sitting, Thorne could see a Met helicopter slowly circling a mile or so away; the same height from the ground as he was, perhaps even a little lower. He knew that any pictures it was taking were being fed live to Central 3000, and suddenly he had an image of the chopper’s movements being dictated from long distance, as if it were a toy being flown by remote control. He imagined a commander’s thumb whitening against a joystick, sending the helicopter round and round.

Roper turned to look. ‘You been up in one?’

Thorne shook his head. It was right up there with bungee jumping or scrubbing a corpse.

‘I went out in one the other day. It’s a hell of a view.’

‘Everything looks better from a distance,’ Thorne said.

Roper turned back round to look at him, then down at his watch. ‘I don’t have much longer, I’m afraid…’

‘What do you think about Grant Freestone as a kidnapper?’

‘I’m not even convinced he’s a murderer,’ Roper said.

Thorne had not yet had a chance to look over the case notes, but he could see Roper’s point. It was hard to put ‘throwing someone through a coffee table’ down as a deliberately murderous act. ‘You think it was an accident?’

‘It’s possible. I’m certainly not convinced he meant to kill her, which was the way some people were thinking at the time, but there were signs of a struggle. His prints were all over the show.’

‘Who discovered the body?’

‘A neighbour was on the school’s contact list. When Hanley didn’t arrive at pick-up time, the neighbour was called. She collected the kids, then went round to drop them off at home. She had a key, and the eldest child opened the door.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Accident or not, Freestone left the woman to die. I think manslaughter would have been the very least he would have been looking at, and with his record I can’t see that he’d have come out again in a hurry. That’s why he ran.’

The idea came at Thorne like a brick through plate glass. If Freestone had made threats against Tony Mullen before he’d gone to prison, wouldn’t Mullen have been uncomfortable about his being released? With cause to fear for his safety, or for that of his family, it would certainly have suited him to have the slimy little sod well out of the way. Was it possible that Mullen could have had Grant Freestone fitted up?

Other thoughts, other considerations…

Mullen resigned from the force the same year that Grant Freestone disappeared.

If the motive for the kidnapping of Luke Mullen was based on a grudge against his old man, Grant Freestone might well have had a better reason than anyone thought for holding one.

It was Roper who brought Thorne down to earth with a bump.

‘As far as kidnapping anyone goes, I really can’t see it,’ he said. ‘If Freestone’s been happily staying out of our way all this time, why would he suddenly make himself visible again? If it is because this kid’s father put him away all those years ago or whatever, why risk being caught for something as stupid as revenge?’

Thorne had to agree that it was a bloody good point.

Louise Porter picked up the photograph, stared at the faces of the three boys, and lost herself for a moment or two.

In terms of its layout, the Area West Murder Squad HQ was a very different set-up from the one she was used to back at Scotland Yard. The Major Incident Room, on the third floor of Becke House, was an open-plan goldfish bowl, with smaller offices dotted along the corridor that curled around one side of it. It was into one of those occupied by Team 3 personnel that Porter had wandered looking for Yvonne Kitson.

An hour or so short of lunchtime, she felt as though she’d already put in a full day’s work. Since arriving at Becke House, everyone had been going flat out; and though it was early days, and operationally a little ad hoc, things seemed to be rubbing along smoothly enough. In terms of the two units working together, both DCIs had been insistent on going in at the deep end. This was evident in the pairings that had been sent after the two men whose names had yet to be crossed off the original ‘grudge’ list: Holland had been teamed up with a Kidnap Unit DC to pay a call on a career armed robber turned mature student named Harry Cotterill; while Stone and Heeney were trying to track down a second-division pimp and occasional arsonist called Philip Quinn. The latter was a former snout, who Mullen had put away when he had outlived his usefulness and who had, at the time, been resentful enough to try to burn down Mullen’s house.

While these four – and Tom Thorne – were on the street working the grudge angle, Porter and others were office bound, letting fingers do the walking at computer keyboards while a dead woman pointed the way.

One look at Amanda Tickell’s wasted body – the skin like wax-paper where it wasn’t covered in blood – had told Phil Hendricks that she was an addict, and he’d called twenty minutes into the post-mortem to confirm it, giving Porter and the others a direction in which to start moving. The rest of the morning had been spent making connections: talking to rehab centres and borough drug squads; chasing up her family and friends to try and shake loose the name of a dealer or fellow users; anyone who might give them a lead from Tickell to Conrad Allen, and from there to the possibility of a third party with whom, or at whose instruction, the pair had taken a major step up, and kidnapped Luke Mullen.