Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  ‘I’ve called in a few favours at Vice and every uniform in the area is carrying a description. We’ll find her.’

  Thorne looked at her. Her face was often difficult to read, but at that moment it told him that whether McEvoy found Margie Knight or not, she’d tear every dodgy sauna, massage parlour and tin-pot knocking shop in the city apart trying. He leaned back in his chair and tried to sound as if he was still a little pissed off.

  ‘Go on then . . .’

  The doubts swept over him with the draught from the door that McEvoy slammed behind her. For a minute or two with McEvoy, when the anger had taken hold, he’d sounded almost decisive. It had almost been as if he actually had an idea what he was doing. Two weeks since Ruth Murray and Carol Garner had died and they were going backwards fast. Scrabbling about for leads from two murders committed five months before that.

  Thorne knew that he was going to spend the rest of the day working by numbers and fighting away two horrible thoughts. The first was that probably, no, almost certainly, the only thing that would help the case move forwards now, that could provide a springboard that might lift the investigation on to another level, was another pair of bodies.

  The second was not so much a thought as a feeling; like a virus or an infection lurking within him, waiting to burst into life, clammy and clinging, and immune to treatment.

  A feeling that they wouldn’t have to wait too long.

  The police came to the office today, Karen. Two of them, hunting in pairs. Like the men they’re after . . .

  They were just sniffing around really. It wasn’t at all dramatic. There was no smashing down of doors or snipers on the rooftops opposite. It’s difficult to know just how much they’ve worked out. I’ve been racking my brains ever since they left but it gives me a headache just thinking about it. They wouldn’t have come if they hadn’t made a connection between Jane and the other one, you know . . . Ruth, the one behind the railway station. They must know about that. But how much do they know about the others? About his? I can’t work it out at all . . .

  All the time they were here, I knew that I could have ended it with a word. It would have been so easy to fall on the floor in front of them and confess. This is complete fantasy, I know. If I hadn’t been terrified of the police, I would never have begun this in the first place, would I? So, I’m left, as usual, confessing to you, Karen. I must tell you that your face, the face I see in my mind’s eye as I’m confessing, is full of understanding, and warmth. Full of love.

  My work’s really starting to suffer now and people have noticed. I got a warning the other day. I don’t think they’d ever sack me or anything but if I want to carry on moving up in the company, you know, the intimation was that I’d better buck my ideas up. How can I concentrate on anything, Karen? How can I think about anything, with what’s in my head? I’m amazed that I can still breathe. I’m astonished, all the time, that I can eat, and walk and dress myself.

  All I can see are open mouths and red eyes and spit on teeth.

  All I can hear are grunts and gulps and the sound of blood bubbling out of holes.

  All I can feel is dead flesh against my fingers.

  This is not even the worst, Karen. There is something much, much worse. All this, the sensory memories of these acts, might fade I suppose, given time, but time is something I am not being given.

  Two weeks, no more, only two weeks since I pushed that girl into the shadows and put my clumsy, great hands on her. It’s only been two weeks, Karen. Fourteen days, that’s all. Hardly time to catch my breath and already there is a new set of . . . instructions.

  Soon, I’ve got to do it again.

  1989

  He knew, even before he’d come, that this would be the last time.

  He’d glanced down at the head of the man on his knees in front of him and seen the bald patch and the grease and the bits of scurf in his hair, and decided. This was probably as good a time as any to call it a day. He’d put enough money away in the last three years. Now, he could move on.

  He’d only spent a short time begging, and even then he’d done it properly. He’d gone about things professionally. It was the same with this. He wasn’t doing it to finance a smack habit like most of the other boys in the same line of work. His earnings were not wasted on drink or gambling. He used what he needed for the very minimum of food and shelter, and salted the rest away.

  He’d made a lot of money in dirty hotel rooms and executive motor cars. He worked harder and more often than any of the others. He’d always been able to take a lot of pain and his disgust threshold was no lower. It had been easy. Half a dozen a day, ten on some days and all paying in cash. Seven days a week, rain or shine. His customers knew that they could always go to him.

  He was like a 7-Eleven.

  He had more than enough now, and he’d spent time getting to know the people who could help with the paperwork. Now it was time for all that effort to pay dividends. What he was planning to do made sense of course. He needed to do it to be on the safe side, to make sure they couldn’t find him, but he also liked the idea because he was bored. He’d been the same person for far too long. After nineteen years, he fancied a change.

  It was time to reinvent himself.

  He pulled his cock out of the old man’s mouth and started to moan theatrically. The old man gasped and opened his mouth. He had a yellow tongue and sharp incisors and his nice clean work shirt was plastered to his neck with sweat.

  He came, and for once it was more than the pitiful spasm and spurt he manufactured for punters on demand. Suddenly, the moan from deep in his throat was long and loud and deeply felt.

  He came . . .

  Spunking away everything that was left of Stuart Nicklin. Out and away. Ridding himself of himself . . .

  The sensation continued long after the ejaculation was finished. He was still moaning as he began to rain blows down on the head of the old man on the floor. He punched and he spat and he kicked, the effort causing sweat to run down between his naked shoulder-blades. He closed his eyes as he continued to lash out, and imagined himself re-made, a long way from where he was, and from who he was. It was comforting. It was everything he had ever dreamed about. He saw himself surrounded by people that liked and trusted him. He saw himself in a position of responsibility. He saw himself paid to control other people’s lives.

  The old man had stopped screaming.

  He opened his eyes and looked down at the pathetic figure in a nylon shirt, curled up at his feet, spitting out blood and yellow teeth. He gave him one more kick for good measure and began to gather up his clothes.

  He still had some way to go of course, before his vision became a reality. The paperwork was fairly straightforward, but there was training to do. It would not be handed to him on a plate, he would need to work for it. And he would work hard because he wanted it more than anything.

  He pulled on his shirt and slammed the door of the dingy flat behind him. He jogged down the stairs and emerged, grinning, into the sunshine. Taking the first steps towards a brand new life.

  Considering everything that had happened, it was ironic that there was only one job that he’d ever really wanted to do.

  SEVEN

  Thorne woke from a dream filled with fountains of blood. He could barely make himself heard over the roaring of the arterial gush, as he shouted at the man with the scalpel. He fought to stop the blood falling onto the face of the young woman in the hospital bed, but she lay there unable to turn her head away, the dark red spots slowly obliterating the pink of her face, like the spatter from a paint roller.

  He sat up and waited for the dream to evaporate, which it did, quickly, leaving only the memory, which was far, far worse.

  The phone was ringing. Thorne glanced at the clock as he leaned over to grab it. Friday night had only just become Saturday morning. He�
��d barely been asleep for an hour.

  ‘Tom Thorne . . .’

  ‘It’s Russell. Wide awake? Or d’you want to grab a coffee and call me back?’

  Brigstocke’s tone cleared Thorne’s head in an instant. ‘I’m fine, go ahead.’

  ‘Our friend in the hotel trade is back.’

  Thorne had always known that he would be, eventually. He guessed there would be bodies. He guessed right.

  ‘A middle-aged couple in the Olympia Grand, been dead since early yesterday evening by the look of it . . .’ Brigstocke paused, cleared his throat. For Thorne it was always a relief to hear colleagues hesitate to speak about violent death. A relief and a surprise. ‘He tortured them, Tom. There are marks . . .’

  ‘Who’s picking this up, Russell?’

  Another pause, for an altogether different reason. ‘I was hoping you would.’

  Thorne sat up, swung his legs out of bed. ‘I don’t think I like where this is going, sir.’

  ‘Don’t go off on one, Tom. There’s nothing sinister happening, but this was our case and I just don’t want strangers on it. Team Two are already down there but I’d like you to get across, see what you make of it. Hendricks is on his way. Go and give them a hand.’

  ‘What about the Garner case?’ He knew it then. He’d named it. Four women dead, but for Thorne it was the Garner case. All the murders distilled into one, the one which for a small child had taken away so much more than just his mother. The case would always be about that child, as the case a year ago had been about a woman in a hospital bed, unable to move.

  The woman he’d been dreaming about.

  ‘It’s been nearly three weeks, Tom . . .’

  ‘Seventeen days.’

  ‘Look, I agreed to let you spend time looking for Margie Knight, to hold back on releasing the e-fit, but we’re getting nowhere.’

  ‘Sir . . .’

  ‘I’ve backed every decision you’ve made on this . . .’

  ‘Because they’ve been the right decisions . . .’

  ‘Jesmond’s getting fucking jittery, all right? Now, I’m not talking about winding it down, so don’t panic, but progress somewhere would go down a storm right now.’

  Thorne was off the bed, catching glimpses of himself in the wardrobe mirror as he stomped around the room. He didn’t look at all happy. He knew that Brigstocke was right of course, but his hackles were up all the same. ‘Does he think we’re sitting on our arses?’

  ‘The hotel killings will be all over the paper in the morning.’

  ‘What? How . . . ?’

  ‘The bodies were found by a housemaid who went to turn down the beds. She called the papers before she called us.’

  ‘Jesus. Norman must be up in arms . . .’

  ‘He isn’t the only one. The couple were Dutch, from Amsterdam. Tourists, Tom.’

  Thorne grunted sarcastically. ‘Oh, I see . . .’

  ‘I don’t care what you think you can fucking see, Inspector.’ The change in Brigstocke’s tone was sudden, and shocking. Thorne felt a twinge of guilt. The DCI was clearly under some pressure. ‘We could have a decent break here, so while we’re waiting for the same thing to happen on the other case, I want you to see what you can do, all right? So get down there and have a look.’

  Ronald Van Der Vlugt had spent a fairly unremarkable fifty-eight years on the planet, until the night he answered the door to a stranger in a top London hotel. Now, he lay naked in the bath, an inch of bloody water slopping around his lifeless body, trussed up like a defrosting turkey.

  ‘What about the cuts, Phil?’

  Hendricks was kneeling by the side of the bath, measuring wounds, and muttering into a small dictaphone. He grunted, and scratched his head through his distinctive yellow showercap. ‘Stanley knife, looks like. Something very sharp and very straight. Dozens of them, all over the poor bastard. Face, torso, genitals. Same in there.’ He gestured towards the bedroom where Mrs Van Der Vlugt lay stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, her body as sliced and chipped and stiff as a chopping board.

  ‘No chance he did it post-mortem is there?’ Thorne asked. The dead would stay dead, of course, but the living did no harm in searching for a crumb of comfort to offer the relatives. Thorne glanced down at the cuts on the mottled belly, the floating ­faeces, the brain matter caked across the overflow. He had no idea whether the Van Der Vlugts had children, or grandchildren . . .

  Hendricks shook his head. ‘Too much blood, mate. He cut ’em up for a while, then smashed the back of their heads in. End of story.’ Hendricks switched his dictaphone back on and returned to work. Thorne turned and wandered into the bedroom, exchanging nods with a couple of the SOCOs who crawled and crept slowly around the room, pressing tape into carpet, dusting surfaces, collecting fibres and hairs; working in a silence broken only by the click of knee joints, the snap of evidence bags and the rustle of white plastic bodysuits.

  Thorne stood at the foot of the bed and looked at Sonja Van Der Vlugt. She was younger than her husband, he guessed. Early fifties with a roundish face. Silver hair cut into a stylish bob, a well-kept figure. And torture marks.

  Thorne had no evidence to support him, none whatsoever, but he knew without any shadow of a doubt that the man responsible had made each watch as he took a knife to the other; the muffled screams behind improvised gags and the straining against bonds exciting him as much as the feeling of the blade nicking the skin, the blood running.

  The small safe in the bottom of the wardrobe had been opened; there might have been jewellery taken, watches and cash perhaps, but this wasn’t about theft.

  Not any more.

  Walking across the lobby towards the manager’s office, Thorne was struck by how much it reminded him of the one at Baynham & Smout. The killer must have been impressed by the marble and the leather. Impressed and excited by the expense. If he was going to steal, he’d want to steal from people that could afford the finer things in life.

  Thorne knocked on the manager’s office door, wondering if the killer was motivated by envy. Dismissing the thought. No, not about theft . . .

  DI Colin Maxwell of Team 2 at SCG (West) had a wide, thin mouth which turned upwards at each end, giving the impression of a permanent smile, rather like a dolphin. His workmates would have laughed at this anyway, but the fact that he was almost always miserable made it even funnier.

  ‘Tom.’ They shook hands. Maxwell turned to the short, plump man standing against the desk. ‘Mr Felgate, this is Detective Inspector Thorne.’ Felgate stood up and Thorne stepped across to shake his hand. It was only then that he noticed the woman sitting in a chair near the door. ‘And this is Mary Rendle, who found the bodies.’

  At the mention of her name, the woman raised her head and stared at Thorne. She was in her forties, with short black hair and a scar across her chin. It was Thorne who looked away first.

  ‘How much longer do you think it will be until the bodies are removed?’ Felgate’s question sounded matter of fact, as if bodies turned up in his hotel on a daily basis.

  ‘We’re working as fast as we can, sir,’ Maxwell said.

  ‘So . . .’ Thorne waited until Felgate was looking straight at him. ‘The Van Der Vlugts had ordered room service. Exactly what time was that?’

  Felgate opened his mouth and looked at Maxwell. Thorne tried not to sound overly impatient. ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’ve already gone over all this with Mr Felgate,’ Maxwell said. ‘I’ll fill you in later.’

  For someone who, theoretically at least, had been sent to help, Thorne was not feeling particularly welcome.

  It was a feeling he knew pretty well.

  Thorne turned to look at Mary Rendle. ‘Tell me about finding the body.’ He caught her glance towards Maxwell and took a step closer to her. ‘And I’m sure you�
�ve already gone over this with DI Maxwell.’ Another step. ‘Go over it with me.’

  ‘I went to turn down the bed at about seven o’clock.’ She had a smoker’s voice, parts of the top range missing. ‘There was no reply, so I used the pass key.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘It’s perfectly normal.’

  ‘Nobody’s saying it isn’t.’

  ‘That’s it, all right? She was lying on the bed, and he was in the bath. I don’t know what else you want me to say . . .’

  ‘You could start with why you didn’t call the police straight away.’

  Thorne could have sworn she smiled slightly, as if this was a question she’d been expecting. One to which she’d rehearsed a good answer.

  ‘They were dead, it was obvious. What difference was it going to make? If they’d been alive I would have called an ambulance, but they weren’t, so I sat down and thought about it . . .’

  Thorne was gobsmacked. ‘You sat down and thought about it?’

  She glared at him. ‘I get three pounds sixty an hour to pick up dirty towels and scrub toilets. I didn’t have to think about it for very long.’

  Thorne and Maxwell walked across the lobby in silence.

  Thorne was resigned to violent death. Most of his colleagues were, at the very best, resistant to its effects. Now, members of the public were reacting in the same way, and for the third or fourth time since he’d got out of bed, Thorne wondered what it would be like to knock it all on the head; to run a pub, or work in a shop, or maybe just sit around doing fuck all, until concerned neighbours started banging on the door.

  They stopped at the lifts. Maxwell lit a cigarette, shaking his head. ‘Fucking unbelievable.’

  Thorne shrugged. He hoped the newspapers had agreed to give Mary Rendle a decent whack. She was going to need something to tide her over. The look Felgate was giving her as Thorne and Maxwell left the office told him that she wasn’t going to be picking up dirty towels for very much longer.