From The Dead by Mark Billingham Read Free Book Online Page B

would consider allowing visits when she turned sixteen. Meanwhile, I got photos.’ She reached for yet more pictures and passed them across to Thorne. ‘Three or four times a year. Occasionally they let her put a note or a drawing in with them.’

    Thorne saw the girl he remembered from Donna’s kitchen growing up over the course of a dozen or so finger-smeared photographs. A gawky-looking child cradling a puppy. A girl with long, blonde hair posing with her friends in netball kit. A sullen teenager, the hair now cut short and dyed black, the practised and perfected expression somewhere between boredom and resentment.

    ‘When she was sixteen,’ Donna said, ‘Social Services wrote and told me that, considering the severity of my offence, they had decided it would not be in my daughter’s best interests to visit until she was eighteen. Then, last August . . .’ She stopped and took a deep breath, swallowed hard. When she spoke again, it was barely above a whisper. ‘I got a letter telling me that she’d gone missing.’

    ‘What happened?’

    ‘She vanished, simple as that. According to her foster parents, she went out one night and never came home. They were upset, obviously, but since she was eighteen the police weren’t interested and that was that.’ She picked up the cigarette packet, then dropped it back on to the table. The whisper had darkened. ‘Social Services said they thought I’d like to know.
Thought I’d like to know
. Can you believe that?’

    ‘If she went missing last August,’ Thorne said, ‘that was only a few months before you received the first photograph.’

    ‘She didn’t go missing. She was
taken
.’

    ‘Don’t you think the two things might be connected?’

    If Donna heard the question, she showed no sign of it. She just stared at Thorne, her breathing heavy and her eyes filling as she reached for her cigarettes yet again, turned the packet over and over in her hands. ‘I need her back,’ she said. ‘I was taken from her. Now she’s been taken from me.’ She looked at Thorne. ‘Can you find her?’

    Thorne could not hold the look. He dropped his eyes to the tabletop, to the changing face of Ellie Langford.

    ‘Can you?’

    An eighteen-year-old girl, gone. Missing.

    Another one.

    The phone buzzed in Thorne’s jacket pocket and he stood up quickly. He saw that it was DS Dave Holland calling, told Donna he needed to take it, and stepped into the corridor.

    ‘It’s Chambers,’ Holland said. ‘It’s not good news.’

    ‘Oh, Jesus.’

    ‘Bastard’s on TV right now.’

    Thorne walked back into the living room and asked Donna if she would mind turning on her television.

    It was actually the bastard’s solicitor doing all the talking, posing on the steps outside the Old Bailey and issuing a statement on his client’s behalf because ‘Mr Chambers’ was ‘too overcome to speak’. Family and friends were thanked, as were those who continued to believe in his client and to have faith in a just outcome. Chambers himself stood a few feet behind and to the right. He kept his head down, nodding in agreement, looking up only once to wave at the rank of photographers who were shouting his name.

    He smiled shyly. He’d already taken off his tie.

    Kate had appeared in the doorway behind Thorne. ‘He definitely did it,’ she said, nodding towards the TV. ‘I said that right from the start, didn’t I, Don? He killed that poor girl and hid her somewhere. Look at him, you can
see
it.’

    ‘You can’t see anything,’ Donna said. ‘You can never tell.’ She shook her head. ‘Not everything’s what it seems, is it? I mean, I thought Alan was dead.’

    ‘Thanks for the tea,’ Thorne said.

SIX

    Unexpectedly running into his chief superintendent could provoke a wide range of emotions in Tom Thorne. Revulsion, horror and fury were among the most common. But seeing him with his feet under Russell Brigstocke’s desk, today of all days, caused Thorne to