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anyone had been fol owing her. The station thing might yet prove to have been pure coincidence. The kil er could have picked her up on the underground or on the walk home from Balham tube station.
    Somehow though, Thorne was pretty sure that this was where he'd first seen Carol Garner. Chosen her.
    He'd sat through that CCT� footage a hundred times, scanning the faces of the people around her, as she and her son walked blithely towards the escalator. Men with briefcases, striding along and braying into mobile phones. Men with rucksacks, sauntering. Some meeting people or hurrying home, or hanging around for one of a hundred different reasons. Some who looked dangerous, and others who looked al but invisible. If you looked at them long enough you could see anything. Except what you needed to see.
    In the end, his eyes always drifted back to Carol and Charlie, hand in hand and deep in conversation. Charlie was laughing, clutching tightly to his book, the hood of his anorak up.
    Thorne always found something horribly poignant about these CCTV pictures; these utilitarian clips of people in public places. The figures seemed real enough, close enough, that you could reach out and help them, prevent what you knew was about to happen. The fact that you couldn't, the fact that this recent past would inevitably become a terrible future, served only to increase the sense of sheer helplessness. The fuzzy, jumpy quality of the film touched him in a way that no album of treasured photos or home-video ever could. The jerky footage of Jamie Bulger being led away through that shopping centre to his death; or ten-year-old Damilola Taylor, skipping along a concrete walkway, minutes away from bleeding to death in a piss-spattered stairwel on a Peckham estate; or even a Princess - and Thorne was no great fan - smiling and pushing open the back door of a Paris hotel.
    These pictures clutched at his guts, and squeezed, every single time. The images of the dead, just before death. Now, Carol and Charlie Garner strol ing across a busy station concourse; relaxed and happy in a way that could only ever be captured on film when the subject was unaware they were being filmed at al .
    Unaware that they were being watched. By a camera, or by a kil er. What should have been a ninety-minute train journey took closer to two hours, and nobody seemed hugely surprised.
    Thorne and McEvoy flicked through papers and chatted, and general y put the world to rights. The smal talk was easy and enjoyable. It passed the time, and besides, each of them knew instinctively that they would not feel much like chatting on the return journey.
    They were stil an hour from Birmingham, and McEvoy was on her way back from the solitary smoking carriage for the fourth or fifth time. She caught sight of Thorne, his head buried in the paper, as she weaved her way down the carriage and it struck her how, from a distance, he looked like somebody you would try and avoid sitting next to. Up close of course, once you'd been around him a while, there was a warmth in the eyes; something that drew you in, in spiteof yourself. But at first glance, he was, to say the very least.., intimidating.

    As she sat back down and picked up her magazine, Thorne glanced up and gave her the look of the reformed smoker - jealous as hel , but trying to be disapproving. She wondered what their fel ow travel ers made of the pair of them. They were both dressed reasonably smartly: she in a blue wool coat and skirt, and Thorne in his ubiquitous black leather jacket. She was carrying a briefcase, but she seriously doubted that anyone would mistake them for business types. Not Thorne anyway. Her minder perhaps. Dodgy-looking elder brother, or even
    her dad, at a real push...
    'What's so funny?'
    She looked up. Stil smiling. Maybe even her slightly older bit of rough. 'Nothing. Just an article in this magazine...'
    Robert and Mary Enright, Carol Garner's parents, lived a few miles south of Birmingham city centre,