Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Fucker . . .’

  Thorne glanced to his left. Detective Sergeant Sarah McEvoy stared down at the file in front of her. Thorne waited, but for the moment it seemed that she’d said everything that was on her mind. Of all of them, she was the officer who Thorne had known for the shortest time. And he still didn’t know her at all. Tough, no question, and more than capable. But there was something about her that made Thorne a little wary. There was something hidden.

  The voice of DC Dave Holland focused Thorne’s thoughts again. ‘Do we think he targeted her because of the child?’

  Thorne nodded. ‘It was her weakness. Yes, I think he probably did . . .’

  Brigstocke interrupted. ‘But it isn’t really significant.’

  ‘Not really significant?’ Holland sounded thoroughly confused and looked across at his boss.

  Thorne shrugged and threw him a look back. Wait and see Dave . . .

  It was just over a year since Thorne had first begun working with Dave Holland and he was at last starting to look like a grown-up. His hair was still far too blond and floppy, but the features it framed seemed set a little harder these days. Thorne knew that this was not so much to do with age as experience. Wear and tear. The most wholesome and guileless of faces was bound to cloud a little when confronted with some of the things the job threw up.

  The change had begun during their first case together. Three months in which Thorne had lost friends and made enemies, while Dave Holland grew closer to him, watching and absorbing and becoming someone else. Three months that had ended with the slash of a scalpel in a blood-drenched attic in south London.

  Holland had learned and unlearned a great deal, and Thorne had watched it happen, proud yet saddened. It was an argument that he had with himself on a regular basis. Were they mutually exclusive – the good copper and the good person?

  Learning a degree of desensitisation was all very well but there would be a price to pay. He remembered a warning poster he had seen in a dentist’s waiting room: the graphic image of a lip bitten clean off by a patient ‘testing’ the local anaesthetic. You could bite and bite and not feel a thing, but it was only a matter of time until the anaesthetic wore off and then the pain would certainly begin.

  The numbness would wear off too, for those colleagues who Thorne watched getting through their days inside their own brand of armour. Whether manufactured in their heads or from a bottle, it would surely wear off one day and then the agony would be unbearable. This was not Tom Thorne’s way, and despite the bravado and bullshit that he’d learned, he instinctively knew that it wasn’t Holland’s either.

  The good copper and the good person. Probably not mutually exclusive, just fucking difficult to reconcile. Like one of those things in physics that is theoretically possible but that nobody has ever seen.

  A silence had settled briefly across what was laughably described as the conference room. It was actually little more than a slightly bigger office, with a jug of coffee and a few more uncomfortable plastic chairs than normal. Thorne considered what he knew about the man who had killed Carol Garner. A man who liked, who needed to be in control. A coward. Perhaps not commanding physically . . . Christ, he was starting to sound like one of those forensic psychiatrists he thought were so overpaid. What he did know of course, was that this killer was far from ordinary. Extraordinary, and with a greater potential, than Holland or McEvoy yet understood.

  Then of course there was the why. Always the why. And, as always, Tom Thorne didn’t give a flying fuck about it. He would confront it if it presented itself. He would grab it with both hands if he could catch the killer with it. But he didn’t care. At least, not about whether the man he was after had ever been given a bicycle as a child . . .

  McEvoy was shifting on the chair next to him. She had finished looking through her file and he could sense that she had something to say.

  ‘What is it, Sarah?’

  ‘This is horrible, no question . . . and the stuff with the kid, it’s very fucking nasty, but I still can’t quite see why it’s us. As opposed to anybody else. I mean, how do we know she wasn’t killed by someone she knew? There were no signs of forced entry, it might have been a boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend . . . so, why us? Sir.’

  Thorne looked towards Brigstocke who, with the timing of an expert, lobbed another sheaf of photographs into the middle of the table.

  Holland casually reached out to take a photo. ‘I was thinking the same thing. I don’t understand what makes—’ He stopped as he took in the image of the woman on her back, her mouth open, her eyes bulging and bloodied. The woman lying among the rubbish bags in a cold dark street. The woman who was not Carol Garner.

  It was a dramatic gesture and meant to be. Brigstocke wanted his team fired up. He wanted them shocked, motivated, passionate.

  He certainly had their attention.

  It was Thorne who explained exactly what they were up against. ‘What makes this different, Holland’ – he looked at McEvoy – ‘what makes it us, is that he did it again.’

  Now, it was as if the previous silence had been a cacophony. Thorne could hear nothing but the distant echo of his own voice and the hiss of the adrenaline fizzing through his bloodstream. Brigstocke and Hendricks sat frozen, heads bowed. Holland and McEvoy exchanged a horrified glance.

  ‘It’s the reason we know he followed Carol Garner from Euston station. Because as soon as he’d finished killing her, that same day, he went to King’s Cross. He went to a different station, found another woman, and did it all over again.’

  Karen, it happened again.

  Please, let me tell you what happened. I couldn’t bear it if you thought badly of me. I know that you can’t possibly forgive or condone what I’ve done . . . what I’m doing, but I know that you’ll understand. I’ve always thought that if I had the chance to explain myself to you, confide in you, that you would be the one person who would truly understand. You always saw me for what I was. You always knew what I thought about you. I could see it in that shy smile.

  You knew that you had a power over me, didn’t you, but I was never angry with you because of it. Part of me enjoyed the teasing. I wanted to be the one you teased. It felt like I was needed anyway. It just made you more attractive to me, Karen . . .

  Jesus, though. Jesus. I did it again. What I was told.

  She was alone and frightened of nothing. I could tell by the way she was walking when I followed her out of the station. Not a cocky fearlessness, just a sort of trust. She saw the good in everyone, I could tell that. It was dark and she couldn’t see how weak and vile I was. There was no fear in her eyes when I spoke to her.

  She knew though, what was going to happen, when she saw the fear in mine.

  As soon as she knew, she struggled, but she wasn’t strong enough. She was less than half my size, Karen, and I just had to wait for her to fade a little. She was scratching and spitting and I couldn’t look at her. And when it was over, I couldn’t bear it that her face, which had been so open and warm like yours, now looked like something behind glass, or frozen for a long time inside a block of ice, and I was the one who had made it like that.

  And I was hard, Karen. Down there. While I was doing it, and again afterwards, while I was hiding her. I stayed excited until the hissing in my head began to die down and the scratches on my hands started to hurt.

  I was hard like I never am, even when I’m thinking about the past.

  I don’t want to embarrass you by talking like this, but if I can’t be honest with you about these things then there’s no point to anything. I never really told you what I was thinking when I had the chance, so I’m not going to hide things now.

  And I will never lie to you, Karen, I promise you that.

  Of course, you’re not the only one who knows what I really am but you’re the only one who can see what’s inside. I�
�m not making excuses, I know that I deserve nothing, but at the very least I’m being open about everything. Open and honest.

  She was nothing to me, this woman from the station. She was nothing to me and I squeezed the life out of her.

  I’m so very sorry, and I deserve what is surely coming.

  I hate to ask a favour, Karen, but if you see her, the woman I killed, will you tell her that for me?

  1982

  The kids called it ‘the Jungle Story’.

  The victim was pinned to the tarmac with one boy holding down each arm and another sitting astride his chest. The fingers were the weapons – tapping, prodding, poking – jabbing out the rhythms of the story on the breastbone. The steps of each new animal marching through the jungle. The story was a very simple one; a straightforward excuse to inflict pain.

  The wiry, black-haired boy leaned against the wall, his small dark eyes taking in every detail. Watching as the torment began.

  When it was just the monkeys, or whichever of the small creatures the storyteller introduced early on, it was not really much more than a tickle. The victim would writhe around, telling them to stop, to get off; the fear of what was to come worse than anything. Then would come the lions and tigers. Heavier steps, the fingers jabbing harder, tears beginning to prick in the corners of the eyes. Everything, of course, leading up to the seemingly endless herd of elephants tramping through the jungle, the fingers slamming into the chest, the pain excruciating.

  The big kid on the floor was screaming now.

  The boy pushed himself away from the wall, took his hands from his pockets and moved across the playground to where the crowd of onlookers stood in a circle, jeering and clapping. It was time to intervene.

  The one telling the ‘story’ was called Bardsley. The boy hated him. He shoved his way through the crowd, which was not difficult as most of the other third formers were scared of him. He was, after all, the ‘mad’ one, the one who would do anything. The kid who would throw a desk out of the window or wave his tiny cock around in class, or let a teacher’s tyres down. He’d had to suffer a great many detentions in his time to earn his reputation, but it was worth it in terms of the respect it won him.

  He didn’t care about geography or French grammar but he knew about respect.

  He reached down, casually took hold of Bardsley’s hair and yanked him backwards. There was a gasp from the crowd, which quickly turned to nervous laughter as Bardsley jumped up, furious, ready to transfer his aggression onto whoever was responsible for the terrible stinging on his scalp.

  Then he saw who was to blame. The boy, far smaller and slighter than he was, stared calmly back at him, eyes cold and dark as stones frozen in mud, hands once more thrust deep into his pockets.

  The crowd dispersed quickly into smaller groups. A kickabout was already starting as Bardsley backed away towards the changing rooms, promising some nasty revenge after school but not really meaning it.

  The boy on the floor stood up and began to rearrange his dishevelled uniform. He didn’t say anything, but eyed his saviour nervously while doing up his tie and dragging a sleeve across his snotty top lip.

  The black-haired boy had seen him around but they had never spoken. He was a year younger, probably only twelve, and the different years didn’t really mix. His sandy hair was usually neatly combed with a parting, and he was often to be seen in a corner somewhere, his pale blue eyes peeking out enviously from behind a book, observing the assorted games he had no part in. He was a big kid, at least a foot taller than most of the others in his year and brainy as hell, but he was slow in all the ways that counted. He probably hadn’t done anything specific to piss Bardsley off, but that wasn’t really the point.

  The older boy watched, smiling as a brown plastic comb was produced and dragged through the sandy hair, dislodging pieces of playground grit. He had a comb himself of course, but it was a metal one; far cooler, and used mostly for the lunch-time comb fights of which he was the acknowledged champion. These fights were a more brutal version of ‘Slaps’ or ‘Scissors, paper, rock’ and could leave a hand dripping with blood within a few seconds. He was the champion, not because he was quicker than anybody else, but because he could stand the pain for longer.

  He could put up with a great deal of pain when he had to.

  The sandy-haired boy carefully put away his comb in the inside pocket of his blazer, cleared his throat nervously and produced a rarely seen smile. It quickly disappeared when it was not reciprocated. In its place, a hand, notably free of scratches and scabs, was extended.

  ‘Thank you for . . . doing that. I’m Palmer. Martin . . .’

  The wiry black-haired boy, the mad boy, the boy who would do anything, nodded. He ignored the hand and spoke his name with a sly smile, as if revealing a dirty secret.

  As if giving a gift that was actually worth far more than it looked.

  ‘Nicklin.’

  TWO

  ‘A few less questions, when it’s all over, even one less than when a case begins, and you’re doing all right . . .’

  Thorne smiled as he carried his coffee through to the living room, remembering Holland’s reaction when he had first passed on this pithy piece of homespun wisdom. It had also, he recalled, been the first time that Thorne had managed to get him inside a pub. An auspicious day.

  Questions . . .

  In the pub, Holland had smiled. ‘What? You mean questions like, “Why didn’t I study harder at school?” and, “Isn’t there anybody else available?”’

  ‘I think I preferred you when you were an arse-licker, ­Holland . . .’

  Thorne put his mug on the mantelpiece and bent down to light the flame-effect gas fire in the mock-Georgian fireplace. The central heating was up as high as it would go but he was still freezing. And his back was playing up. And it was pissing down . . .

  There were plenty of questions that needed answering right now.

  Were the two killings genuinely connected? Apart from the date and the fact that both women were strangled, there seemed to be no other link, so was the station thing just a coincidence? King’s Cross threw up other possibilities. Had he mistaken the second victim for a prostitute? Why kill one at home and one on the street?

  And the biggest question of the lot: did he kill twice on the same day because he was out of control, or was killing multiple victims actually the pattern? Blood lust or compulsion? Right now, Holland and McEvoy were earning overtime trying to find out, but whichever it was, the answer was not going to be pleasant.

  In the eight months or so that the team had been together, they had only really worked on two major cases that were truly their own. Most of the time they’d been seconded – either individually or together – on to other investigations with other units, and then been reconvened when needed.

  The aftermath of the terrorist atrocities of September 11 had seen the teams from Serious Crime involved in an operation unlike any before. Some had expressed surprise that repatriating bodies from New York should be down to them, but it made sense to Thorne. These were British citizens. They had been murdered. It wasn’t complicated.

  The phone calls had been the hardest: thousands of people eager to trace husbands and wives, sons and daughters who hadn’t been in touch and who may or may not have been in the area. So far, of the hundreds whose missing relatives never did get in touch with them, only one had been given an identifiable body to bury . . .

  Three months on, and the Met was still stretched – tracking down Anthrax hoaxers, monitoring possible terrorist targets, chasing their tails while street crime grew to fill the hole that was left. If suddenly phone-jacking didn’t seem quite so important, there were still crimes, like those that Team 3 got handed, that needed to be taken very seriously indeed.

  The two cases were both . . . unusual. The first was a series of gruesome killings in so
uth-east London that bore all the hallmarks of gangland slayings. However, the bodies (when they’d been painstakingly re-assembled) were found to belong, not to drug-dealers or loan sharks, but to ordinary, law-abiding citizens. It quickly became clear that the murders were the work of one highly disturbed individual as opposed to an organised gang of them. Whether the killer – a happily married electrical engineer – had been simply trying to disguise his work, or had a psychotic fixation with the disposal methods of gangsters, was as yet unclear. He was still undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

  The other case was the more disturbing, despite the lack of bodies. Guests in hotels were being targeted and robbed in their rooms. The minor physical assaults that were part and parcel of the thefts had soon begun to escalate however. Those that willingly handed over cash, Rolexes and other valuables were being tortured anyway. The knife was produced and the PIN number was demanded. The number was given and the knife was used anyway. Small cuts, nicks: wounding for pure pleasure. Thorne knew that this one liked the feel of a blade on skin, enjoyed hearing the intake of breath, and watching the thin red line fill out on the flesh and begin to drip.

  The robbery was becoming something else: the robber, someone else. Behind his black balaclava, he was starting to enjoy his work a little too much and it was only a matter of time until people started to die.

  That was when Thorne had been brought in.

  With next to no physical evidence and no real description to work from, the case had quickly become hugely frustrating. Thorne, Holland and McEvoy, in an effort to trap this latent killer, this murderer-to-be, had spent nights in some very nice hotels but without success. Their efforts had evidently been noted and the individual responsible had gone to ground.