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girlfriend was handling her job on the Kidnap Unit and managing to share a flat with someone who supported Spurs and listened to country music.
    â€˜How does she cope with all that pain and stress, day after day?’ Brigstocke asked.
    Thorne shook his head and let the punchline come.
    â€˜And the kidnaps must be even worse . . .’
    They joked and chatted. Piss-takes and bullshit. Killing time and pretending not to think about the twelve strangers arguing in a room on the other side of the city.

FOUR
    Anna bolted her dinner.
    It was always fairly awkward when it was just her, Megan and Megan’s latest boyfriend – on this occasion the admittedly gorgeous, but palpably brain-dead, Daniel – and it didn’t help that Megan had done the cooking. Anna’s housemate could only really manage pasta, and usually just threw in whatever happened to be lying around in the fridge. Her latest creation involved carrots, tinned peas and hard-boiled eggs, and watching Daniel slather brown sauce all over it didn’t do much for Anna’s appetite. Half a plate was filling enough, in the end.
    It still tasted better than sushi, though . . .
    After ten minutes’ idle chat, during which nobody asked how her day had been, and ten more growing increasingly annoyed as Daniel sprawled on the sofa, smoking and dodging the washing-up, Anna went upstairs to her room. She lay on the bed and watched TV. Channel-hopped through the local news, a quiz show that left her utterly baffled, and a pointless remake of a sitcom that had been pointless first time around.
    That had to be a sign of getting old, Anna thought: when they remake something you’ve grown up watching. It had to be a bad sign, surely. Looked at objectively by almost anybody – her parents, for example – it made her present circumstances seem that much sadder.
    Working for peanuts and living like a student.
    The house was only a couple of minutes’ walk from the office which, along with the lower-than-average rent, justified for Anna the fact that she hated the area. It helped her forget, some of the time at least, that she had nothing in common with her nineteen-year-old housemate and had actually lived in a far nicer place when she was a student.
    Back then, of course, her parents had been happy to chip in a little and help her do the place up. They had arrived unannounced, beaming on the doorstep with the radio she was always borrowing when she was at home and a brand-new microwave. They sent funny letters and food-parcels. Later, though, all of that had changed.
    â€˜What the hell did you think you were doing?’
    Her father did not often lose his temper, and seeing him looking so lost, so genuinely confused, when Anna had announced that she had thrown in her job at the bank had been hugely upsetting. She felt ashamed just thinking about it; prickling with sweat and as close to tears as he had been when she’d told him.
    â€˜What are we supposed to think, your mum and me?’
    Her mother had risen slowly from her seat as soon as Anna had begun saying her piece, but had made no response. She had just stared, red-faced and breathing noisily, as though she were trying her very best not to march across the carpet and slap her daughter.
    â€˜I’m really sorry you’re upset,’ Anna had said. Standing in her parents’ overheated front room, she had heard her mother’s voice in her own. The tone that had been reserved for those occasions when Anna or her sister had done something more than usually idiotic. ‘But I think I’m old enough and ugly enough to make my own decisions, don’t you?’
    Her father had opened and closed his mouth. Her mother had just sat down again.
    My own seriously stupid decisions . . .
    Detective Inspector Tom Thorne knew nothing about Anna’s history or her questionable lifestyle decisions, but clearly he thought she had been stupid to take on Donna Langford as a