Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  ‘What about you anyway? Much going on horizontally?’

  ‘Sod all. Turn the sound back on . . .’

  ‘You never rang Anne Coburn, did you?’

  Thorne shook his head and pictured the woman he’d been involved with a year ago.

  ‘Why don’t you call her?’

  A question Thorne had asked himself often enough. ‘No, mate. Far too complicated.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re better off on your own.’ Hendricks made a wanking gesture. ‘That’s . . . not complicated.’

  ‘Right, but the conversation’s awful.’

  Hendricks turned the volume back up, but not very high. They said nothing for a minute or two, listened to the pundits doing much the same thing.

  ‘You haven’t said a lot about the case . . .’ Hendricks said.

  Thorne hadn’t even mentioned it, but he didn’t need to. It was there all the time, the synapses sparking, the associations bursting into life in his brain and forcing themselves upon him, in spite of his best efforts.

  Katie Choi’s mother and father owned a Chinese restaurant in Forest Hill . . .

  The programme on television, sponsored by Vauxhall . . .

  Would Charlie Garner grow up supporting Aston Villa now that he lived in the Midlands? Or had he already begun to cheer for a London club? Was Charlie an Arsenal fan like the man lying on the sofa? The man who performed the post-mortem on his mother . . .

  Thorne shifted in his chair, looked across at Hendricks. ‘Not much to say.’

  Hendricks nodded. ‘Just waiting . . .’

  ‘Yep, for a lot of things. Some tiny piece of fucking luck. Waiting for them to run out of patience and hand me back my uniform. Waiting for a body to show up.’

  ‘Make it a warm one, will you?’

  Thorne raised his eyebrows, snorted. ‘We’ll do our best, Phil.’

  ‘I want the bastard fresh on her, you know?’

  Thorne did know. A warm body, a crime scene crawling with evidence. That was what they all wanted.

  He nodded at Hendricks and raised his can to him. His friend was someone you could measure yourself against. Someone Thorne did measure himself against. Hendricks’s voice was flat, and the words could often sound harsh and ill thought through, but they sprang from somewhere deep and very clean, somewhere passionate and honest.

  ‘Do you think he’s still around?’ The tone was casual, as if he was asking whether Thorne could see a goal on the cards, second half.

  ‘Oh yeah . . . he’s around,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s just a question of whether he decides to let us know about it.’

  Hendricks considered this for a moment. ‘I think we can count on it. Man who enjoys slicing and dicing as much as he does . . .’

  Thorne almost spilt his beer. Even for Hendricks, that was a good one. ‘Slicing and dicing? Fuck, and they let you near grieving relatives?’

  ‘Only when they’re very short-staffed.’

  ‘Turn it up.’ The teams were about to kick off. They let a silence fall between them as they stared at the television, both trying to think about anything but warm bodies and cold slabs.

  After about ten minutes Thorne turned to Hendricks again.

  ‘Fucking “chunky”?’

  The second forty-five minutes was, if anything, less entertaining than the first. This, combined with beer and central heating, and the general level of fatigue that was creeping over everybody on the case, ensured that they were both asleep at just after eleven, when the phone rang.

  It was Martin Palmer.

  ‘There’s more instructions. He wants to do it again.’

  It was as if Thorne had been jolted awake with a cattle prod. ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Fuck.’ He looked across at Hendricks who was already walking towards the kitchen mouthing ‘coffee’. Thorne nodded.

  ‘He’s going to do it again tomorrow.’ Palmer sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. ‘Can you stop him?’

  ‘Just shut up, Palmer, OK? Shut up. Shit . . .’

  Thorne could hear the beep on the line. That would be the boys in IT trying to reach him. They were monitoring Palmer’s computer and would have seen the email at the same time he had.

  ‘Palmer . . .’

  The beep on the line stopped, and immediately the landline began to ring. Hendricks came through from the kitchen and picked up the phone.

  Thorne could have hung up and talked to the technicians, but he wanted to hear it now, that second, from the man it had been sent to. ‘Palmer, is there anything else? What does the message say exactly?’

  Palmer held back the sobs just long enough to tell him.

  FIFTEEN

  Date: 9 January

  Target: Male (Let’s not be predictable)

  Age: You’re as old as you feel

  Pickup: Immaterial

  Site: Indoors, target’s home

  Method: Blunt instrument . . . in conjunction with a sharp mind

  The man had once observed the same routine every morning. Moving from room to room and getting himself ready for the day with great care and precision. These days, the effort was all too much. Where once the clean white shirt would have been laid out ready the night before, now he just grabbed another un-ironed one from the pile and often turned the previous day’s socks inside out. He put on the kettle and radio, cut himself shaving, then pulled on his rumpled cardigan in front of the heavy, free-­standing oak mirror that had been a wedding present, many years earlier. He placed his battered and bulging briefcase next to the front door, made himself a slice of toast and settled down to listen to ten minutes or so of Today on Radio 4.

  The knock at the door was puzzling, but nothing to be alarmed about. He checked his watch. It was too early for the post. Perhaps it was a neighbour, or the man to read one or other of the meters. He put down his toast, rose slowly from the kitchen chair, and moved towards the front door.

  His wife had always used to tease him about his passion for routine, and the way that any disruption to the order of things could put him in a bad mood. Then, perhaps, it had been true, but not any more. These days, a surprise of any sort could be an unexpected fillip. Something to be welcomed with open arms. There was a second knock, a fraction louder, just before he reached the door.

  ‘Just a moment . . .’

  When the door was opened, the man with the leather sports bag at his feet smiled, cleared his throat, and punched the man in the creased white shirt, full in the face.

  Then he picked up his bag and stepped inside.

  The man on the floor held his hand to his shattered nose, but the blood ran through his fingers on to his shirt and on to the carpet. The blood felt strange and warm. It was oddly smooth against his freshly shaved cheeks. He was crying, which annoyed him greatly, and he was desperately trying to clear his head just a little, so that he might reach his shattered spectacles and work out where the noise was coming from. The noise that was like a drumming, like a thumping, like a train passing beneath the floor. The noise that drowned out the sound of the sports bag being opened.

  Zzzzzzip . . .

  Then a gentle rustle as something was removed from the bag, and the man on the floor suddenly realised that the mysterious noise was the sound of his own heart smashing against his chest like a trapped animal. He was pleased that he’d worked it out.

  Now, there was just the pain in his face, and the terror . . .

  He glanced up and his body spasmed, and he cried out a girl’s name as he saw the long, dark shape coming down. His eyes screwed shut and his hands flew from his face to his head. Every one of his fingers was broken, a fraction of a second before his skull was shattered.

  The man with the cricket bat in his hand needed to get abou
t his business quickly and that annoyed him. It distracted him. With him, the looking . . . the considering, had always been as much a part of it as anything. After he killed, he could rarely remember the details of the act itself. His mind had been elsewhere when that was happening.

  Today, there wasn’t much time for enjoyment.

  With a grunt, he swung the bat.

  The man on his knees seemed to jump then, and he screamed a name which the man with the bat knew belonged to his dead wife, and the noise of the bat making contact was like jumping on egg boxes.

  The man who used to be simply Stuart, lifted up the bat which came away wet and a little sticky. He hoisted the dripping wooden blade high above his head and brought it back down again with every ounce of strength in his body. He felt the shudder up his arm and across his shoulders. He closed his eyes, and the colours and shapes that swam about in the blackness were like the blood flying into the dirt, and the pulped body of the frog sailing gloriously across the blue and into the long grass . . .

  The man who was variously First Friend and Blast From The Past and occasionally Ghost Of Summer, lifted and swung, lifted and swung, and each time he thought would be the last, but each new contact, each vibration, shook loose some new desire in him, liberated the hunger again and he felt the urge in his head and the action down his arms . . .

  Finally, after many minutes, the man who had signed his most recent email Night Watchman stopped and looked down at the swirls of bone and brain and blood making new patterns in what was already a somewhat garish carpet.

  It took him thirty seconds or so to regain his breath, and then he was moving, quickly. He removed the gloves, wiped down the bat and put it back into the bag, having already taken out the fresh set of clothes. He stepped away from the body, taking care to mind his shoes. He didn’t want to be walking bloody footprints all round the place for the rest of the day.

  In less than ten minutes he was changed and ready to go, with plenty of time left to get to work. As he closed the front door behind him he checked his wristwatch. He tut-tutted at his carelessness.

  The face of the watch was flecked with blood.

  Someone, he wasn’t certain who, had once said something Thorne was particularly fond of. A phrase he’d heard and never forgotten.

  Knock hard, life is deaf.

  It was a sentiment he did his best to live by, but there were occasions, many of them in fact, when those around him might have been happier had he tried to keep the noise down a little. Times when they seemed unwilling to discover what might be on the other side of the door.

  Usually, this would only make Tom Thorne knock harder, bang louder. Today, even he was not sure he wanted to see that door opened.

  Today, a man was going to die a violent death. A man who, but for Thorne, but for the course he had chosen to follow, might otherwise live. It was pretty much that simple, and it was not a pleasant thought to be bouncing around in your head from the second you opened your eyes in the morning.

  Thorne rushed into work like a madman, but if he had imagined it might be . . . easier, with people around him, among the team – at the heart of things – he was wrong.

  It was as if his colleagues, no, not just his colleagues – the woman in the newsagent, the postman, every driver he’d cut up on the North Circular on the way into work – all of them, could see his guilty thought, his dark admission. It was as though it had become visible, like a tiny spot floating across his eyeball. They all saw the terrible thought and processed it, and instantly, they all produced their own thought to keep it company:

  You’re right. It was/is/will be your fault . . .

  Wednesday, 9 January. A wet and windy and godforsaken fucker of a Wednesday, when it was easy to see why its children were full of woe. A shitty, dreary, dry wank of a day. A day for watching clocks and losing tempers, and listening for phones.

  A day for talking about it.

  Thorne, Brigstocke, Holland and McEvoy. Sitting around a table, the rain beating against the windows. Talking about it.

  ‘A man, this time. Is that important?’

  ‘Like he said in the mail, ringing in the changes.’

  ‘It feels like he’s playing a game.’

  ‘With Palmer, or with us?’

  ‘What the fuck does “Night Watchman” mean anyway?’

  ‘Like a security guard . . .’

  ‘Or in cricket, you know? Someone they send in late on. Someone who’s dispensable.’

  ‘Sounds a bit odd. Does he think he’s dispensable?’

  ‘I doubt it . . .’

  ‘I’m not sure how seriously we should take any of it.’

  ‘Any of it,’ Thorne said, ‘except for the killing.’

  Talking about it, because that’s all they could do. Everybody keen to make their contribution.

  Jesmond on the phone to Brigstocke: ‘This will probably be our only chance, Russell. Make sure you don’t blow it.’

  Steve Norman, who Thorne was disliking more and more each time he encountered him, on a cheery visit from the press office, annoyingly only spitting distance away above the station at Colindale: ‘Well, everything’s geared up at our end, Tom.’ He laughed then. ‘Bloody press have been making up stories for years anyway, about time we had a go.’ Thorne neglected to laugh along, but Norman seemed not to notice. ‘Just to let you know, ready and waiting when it goes off . . .’

  Waiting.

  To an extent of course, they were always waiting: Thorne, Brigstocke and the rest of them. Those at the shitty end of it. Waiting for the next call, the next case. Waiting for the one that would do their heads in, or fuck their lives up. Waiting to open the wrong door or pull over the wrong motor – the one with the mad fucker in it. Waiting for the knife or the bullet, or if they were clever and lucky, just waiting it out. Waiting for the pension.

  This was a different kind of waiting though. This was far crueller. Now they had been given . . . parameters.

  They knew when, sort of. They knew the sex of the victim. Christ they even knew how he was going to be killed – the death to which this man, whoever he was, had been doomed. They had been shown what few have seen, and yet, at the same time they were powerless to change the picture. It was like being some not quite all-knowing, not quite all-seeing force, hamstrung by the missing pieces of the jigsaw. Omnipotent and impotent.

  Like being God with Alzheimer’s.

  It was just a matter of exactly when and exactly where. Then, yes, then, they would move. Then, the springs tightened beyond endurance would be released and they would move like streaks of fucking lightning, blazing to wherever this man’s violent compulsions led them, praying that it would turn out to be worth it.

  Thorne sat at his desk wondering whether anything could be worth this, remembering the conversation he’d had a few short hours earlier. He stared out through the rain-streaked windows into the glowering, grey sky. Into the face of Phil Hendricks, those dark eyes lit up.

  Make it a warm one, will you?

  At lunchtime, a fleet of mopeds delivered a mountain of pizzas. Thorne and Brigstocke shared an extra large Spicy Meat Feast, but not equally. Brigstocke’s reply when this fact was pointed out was not one Thorne felt like arguing with, even if the DCI did have a broad grin plastered across his greasy chops as he spoke.

  ‘If I’m going to sit on fences, I’ll need a fatter arse, won’t I? So stop moaning.’

  Thorne wasn’t very hungry anyway.

  The small talk didn’t feel forced or awkward, just a little inappropriate. Like a bad joke at a funeral where everyone’s turned up way too early and they’re standing around waiting for the body to arrive.

  Which was, of course, exactly what they were doing.

  ‘How’re the kids?’

  Brigstocke’s eyes widened as he slurp
ed up a string of red-hot mozzarella. He had four kids under six and was often to be found spark out at his desk in the middle of the afternoon. Often, but not during this case.

  ‘Little bastards,’ Brigstocke mumbled. ‘Glad to be here if I’m honest, whatever the circumstances.’

  Thorne knew what he meant. He’d come into work more than once for pretty much the same reason, except that in his case, the only person he was escaping from was himself.

  ‘Everybody reckons it gets easier, but fucked if I can see when. The time they’re old enough to start making their own breakfasts and sticking on Cartoon Network, so you can stay in bed for a bit longer, is just about the same time they start bunking off school and doing crack. Just a different set of things to worry about. Do you want that last bit?’

  Thorne shook his head and watched as Brigstocke pushed the entire slice of pizza into his mouth. He grunted with satisfaction, then started looking around and waggling his oily fingers.

  ‘I’ll grab some paper towels from the Gents,’ Thorne said. He could hear Holland and McEvoy laughing about something in the adjacent office as he moved across to the door.

  He stopped and turned, his hand on the metal door handle. His palm slippery with sweat and grease. ‘I know this was what I wanted. Flushing him out.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It still feels shit though.’

  Brigstocke swallowed the last of the pizza, pushed up his glasses with a clean knuckle. ‘Course it does, and you’re not the only one feeling bad.’

  ‘I know, but . . .’

  ‘I’m the only DCI in this room, Tom. Nobody’s got a gun to my head on this one. Jesmond gave me the chance to say no.’

  ‘Why didn’t he just say no himself?’

  Brigstocke stood, jammed the pizza box into the wastepaper basket and crushed it down hard with a size eleven brogue. ‘Fear.’

  Thorne opened the door. ‘I’ll get us a couple of coffees while I’m out there . . .’

  All day at work he thought about what the police might be doing.

  He imagined them in their offices, in their incident room. Some of them staring at the carpet, waiting for the news to come in. Others reacting differently, scurrying about the place, trying to feel useful, keeping themselves busy. Just another day on the investigation.