From The Dead Read Online Free PDF

previous few months. He attended classes at a club in Watford and had started performing close-up magic for beer money at assorted Met parties and conferences. He also insisted on trying out new tricks on anyone who could not escape quickly enough.

    ‘Just think of a card,’ Brigstocke said, slipping into the patter. ‘Don’t tell me, though. I mean, what kind of a trick would
that
be?’

    The trick was pretty good, and Thorne did his best to sound encouraging, but he had never really seen the point of magic. He had no real interest unless the magician explained how a trick was done. Russell Brigstocke was a decent copper, but he was certainly not a wizard.

    ‘Who was the girl in your office?’ Brigstocke asked, putting away the cards.

    Thorne told him about Anna Carpenter and the Curious Case of the Suntanned Corpse. Brigstocke had not worked on the Langford inquiry, but he remembered the investigation well enough.

    ‘Coming back from the dead,’ he said. ‘Now
that’s
a decent trick.’

    ‘It would be impressive.’

    ‘Anything in it?’

    Thorne took the photograph from his pocket and passed it over. ‘God knows what Donna Langford’s up to,’ he said. ‘I just hope that detective agency’s screwing a decent wedge out of her.’

    ‘Does it even look like him?’

    Thorne stood at Brigstocke’s shoulder and looked again. The dyed hair, the squint, the grin. That faint bell was ringing a little louder now, but surely that was just because Anna Carpenter had told him who it was
supposed
to be. ‘Looks like a lot of people,’ he said. ‘Looks like a bad actor playing a gangster on his holidays.’

    ‘What did you tell her?’

    ‘That she was wasting her time and we couldn’t afford to waste any of ours.’

    ‘Absolutely right,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Not when we’ve got the latest Police Performance Assessment Framework to read and twelve-page reports on Standard Operating Procedure to complete by the end of the day.’

    Thorne laughed and felt it take the chill off.

    They talked about football for a few minutes, then families. Thorne asked after Brigstocke’s three kids. The DCI asked Thorne how on earth his 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.

    ‘How does she cope with all that pain and stress, day after day?’ Brigstocke asked.

    Thorne shook his head and let the punchline come.

    ‘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