Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne took a breath, and started. ‘Stuart Nicklin has murdered at least four people. He . . . manipulated Martin Palmer into killing another two. I’m sorry if this is hard for you to listen to. I can only say that I want to catch him, every bit as much as you wanted to catch the man you thought abducted Karen McMahon. Nicklin, whatever he calls himself now, whoever he is . . . he’s a man who kills for pleasure.’ He waited just a second or two before saying the hardest thing of all. ‘That said, you won’t be surprised when I tell you that I don’t think he told you the truth about what happened to Karen.’

  Thorne stopped, waited. It was impossible to gauge exactly how Perks was going to react. In most cases, being told, however sensitively, that something you had done was wrong, or at the very best, a touch misguided, was likely to provoke a defensive reaction. Thorne remembered Lickwood’s anger: a predictable response to allegations of incompetence. This was far from that, but still, a similar reaction would be entirely understandable.

  Perks turned and looked at him, looked at his eyes. Thorne had been wrong in thinking he’d get an angry response. The tone was gentle, comforting almost. Vic Perks did no more and no less than voice thoughts that were familiar to him. These were words that passed through his mind daily: simple and straightforward words he’d heard many years before, and now spoke easily and without hesitation. As Perks talked, Thorne knew that he’d been wrong about something else. The passion wasn’t missing at all.

  ‘She got into a blue car, sir. A Cavalier, I think they’re called. Blue with rust on the front bumper and a sticker on the back window, and a six and a three in the number plate. She had a strange look on her face. I remember wondering what she was thinking, but she didn’t seem frightened. Just before her head disappeared, down behind the door, I think she might even have waved at me. Just a little wave. Either that or she might have been pushing the hair back behind her ear. She did that a lot. It was hard to tell because the sun was in my eyes . . .’

  Perks stopped, screwed up his own eyes. He was trying to remember something else, or perhaps he was simply recreating the face of the boy who’d first spoken these words. Thorne couldn’t­ be sure.

  ‘He was fourteen, Thorne. A few weeks older than she was, that’s all. Karen had just turned fourteen. 17 July, 1985.’ He blinked twice, slowly. ‘Karen would be thirty-one this year.’ Thorne nodded. It was clearly a calculation Perks could do in his sleep. ‘He was still a child. I had no reason not to believe him.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Christ, people saw the car. Bloody idiots thought they saw the car, thought they saw Karen . . .’

  Thorne was a fraction of a second from reaching out a hand and placing it on the old man’s arm, when Perks turned away, shaking his head. He leaned on the wall, fixed his gaze on the shoreline.

  The tide was almost fully out. Thorne stared down at the assorted detritus revealed by the retreating water, squatting in the sludge. Tyres, dozens of them, broken crates and of course the ubiquitous supermarket trolleys. How the hell did these things get here? He couldn’t imagine anybody unloading the weekly shop into the back of the car and then merrily hoiking their trolley off the nearest bridge. Yet here they were, probably deeply symbolic of something or other, but to Thorne, right at this minute, just a bunch of old trolleys stuck in the mud.

  This was a fairly typical bankside treasure trove, though Thorne had often come across more exotic items. A number of artificial limbs. A 1968 Harley-Davidson. A dead white bull-­terrier, bloated and snarling like a hideous spacehopper.

  And of course, the occasional body.

  Every so often the river gave them up. Gently laid them out on a sandy bank, coughed them up into a tangled bed of weeds or spat them onto the mud. Most were never identified, never claimed, remaining as anonymous as the supermarket trolleys. Many still waited to be discovered, moving up and down the river far below the surface. Their eyelashes and fingernails, the flakes of their skin, snacked upon by sea trout, salmon and seahorses.

  Thorne wondered how quickly, if at all, the body of Karen McMahon would be given up, released into his care so that he could learn things from it . . .

  ‘Two things,’ Perks said suddenly. Thorne turned to him, waiting. ‘I know I won’t be the first person you call, or the second. Probably won’t be high up on the list at all. Get to me as quickly as you can though, will you? When you find her?’

  Thorne nodded. He hadn’t needed to be asked.

  ‘What’s the other thing?’

  Perks turned to him, shivering, tucking his scarf down inside his car coat. ‘I want to be the one that tells Karen McMahon’s mother.’

  Holland stood in the doorway, blocking it. McEvoy moved to go past him. He moved to prevent her.

  She laughed without a trace of humour. ‘This is stupid.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Holland said. ‘If you come into the office and I’m here, you turn around and leave. I come in when you’re already here, you get up and go . . .’

  ‘So, ask the DCI if you can move offices.’

  ‘Right. What am I supposed to tell him?’

  ‘Anything you like.’

  ‘. . . that we’re suddenly not getting on?’

  Holland sighed and stepped forwards, giving McEvoy little choice but to move back a step or two. He closed the door.

  ‘We’re not doing our jobs properly, Sarah.’

  McEvoy narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. ‘You’re on that one again, are you?’

  ‘I said we, Sarah. Both of us need to sort this out before it goes too far.’

  ‘Is that a threat? Going to grass me up, Holland?’

  Holland brushed past her, sank into a chair. ‘Jesus, Sarah, you’re so paranoid.’

  ‘Yeah? Well you should see me when I’ve done a few lines.’ She glared at him, standing her ground but wanting more than anything to throw open the door and run. Wanting to bolt into the toilets and open her bag and sniff up a little confidence . . .

  It was almost as if Holland could see the need in her face. ‘And have you? Done a few today?’ McEvoy said nothing, but felt the burning start behind her eyes. ‘Where do you keep it? When you’re here I mean. In your bag is it? In here somewhere . . . ?’ Holland’s eyes scanned the room. ‘Better pray none of the trainee sniffer dogs ever gets loose in here . . .’

  She cried easily these days. The tears could come at almost any time. They were just gathering in the corners of her eyes, only a drop or two, and easily pressed back with the heel of her hand, but still enough to stop Holland dead in his tracks.

  ‘Sarah . . .’

  ‘No!’

  Her hands dropped back to her sides and she raised her head. Not a trace of softness remained in the set of her features. The anger always followed the tears and she welcomed it. She was on safer ground then. A clenched fist and a tightness in the chest felt more comfortable than the taste of saltwater in her mouth.

  ‘Listen, I don’t want your help and I don’t need your advice. I certainly don’t need telling what’s good for me, work-wise or any other fucking-wise.’

  ‘Nobody’s trying to tell you . . .’

  ‘A few fucks and a grope in the car park does not give you any rights at all, OK? And I didn’t hear you complaining the other day when you were giving me one on the bathroom floor. Grunting and pushing me into the side of the toilet . . .’

  ‘I only want . . .’

  ‘Just leave it alone. I don’t do it at work.’

  The single knock was followed instantly by the noise of the door opening and they both turned at the same time. ­McEvoy instinctively took a step towards the door. Neither she nor Holland had a clue whether the man in the sharp suit with the slicked-back hair who was walking into the office had heard any of their conversation, but it was all either of them was thinking during the exchang
e that followed.

  ‘I’m looking for McEvoy.’

  ‘I’m DS McEvoy. Do you not know how to knock?’

  ‘I knocked.’

  ‘You knock, you wait, you get asked to come in, you come in. It’s pretty bloody straightforward.’

  ‘Who’s got time? I’m DCI Derek Lickwood from SCG east.’ He dropped an overcoat on to a chair, held out a hand. ‘You’re nothing like you sound on the phone.’

  Thorne got on to the Docklands Light Railway at Island Gardens which straddled the Greenwich Meridian. Here, a tiled Victorian walkway ran right under the river, connecting with the south shore near the Cutty Sark.

  In no time at all, the train was rattling through the heart of Canary Wharf; the view as breathtaking to Thorne as any he had just seen staring across the Thames.

  It was a bizarre journey. A matter of minutes separated one of the oldest parts of London from the brand new developments that were changing the skyline for ever: from ­nineteenth-century tea clipper in Greenwich dry dock to forty-foot yacht in Limehouse Basin; from the classical elegance of the Queen’s House to the very different beauty of the new skyscraper, days away from becoming the tallest building in the city; from stucco and slate to steel and mirrored glass in a couple of minutes.

  The DLR was as close as the city got to a time machine.

  Now Thorne needed to make a far shorter journey back in time. Just the tiniest hop back, seventeen years to the summer of 1985.

  A hot summer. Live Aid, French nuclear testing, Brixton ready to boil over. DC Tom Thorne, newly married, standing in a stuffy interview room with a man named Francis Calvert, everything about to change.

  And a young girl who, while Thorne was fighting to get the smell of death off his clothes, may or may not have climbed into a car. A girl whose picture grew smaller and finally dropped off the front pages as bigger stories exploded on to them. A girl who almost certainly died alone and afraid on a warm night when perhaps people danced at Wembley stadium or threw petrol bombs on Electric Avenue, or sat at home like Tom Thorne, trying to keep the rest of the world well away.

  Thorne put his head back and looked out of the window. Walls and windows and endless stretches of spray-painted metal moved past him in a blur. Seventeen years ago when Karen McMahon had disappeared, he’d been somewhere else. Now, perhaps they could finally help each other.

  The train rumbled on towards Bank where he would change: Northern line back to Hendon and a few hours in the office before driving back out to south-east London again later on.

  He closed his eyes and pictured himself twenty years down the road – being sat down in a grotty pub or walked along the river by some spunked-up wannabe; a fast-track thirtysomething DI only too eager to tell him how he’d got it so very wrong all those years before, how he’d screwed up and how they were re-­opening the case and how, finally, now, they could put his mistakes right . . .

  He pictured himself smiling and saying, fair enough mate, but you’ll have to tell me which case you’re talking about. Which particular fuck-up.

  It’s a bloody long list . . .

  Later, approaching HMP Belmarsh, Thorne’s mind turned to DIY or gardening as it usually did. The place couldn’t help but put him in mind of a B&Q, or any one of those other shop-cum-warehouse monstrosities he could see from his office window, if he was unlucky and it was a clear day. Belmarsh looked as if it had been modelled on an American-style penitentiary: utilitarian, functional. Though the big old Victorian prisons like Strangeways and Brixton were doubtless grimy and overcrowded, Thorne couldn’t help thinking that they had a little more . . . character.

  Not that character was really the point, of course.

  That bizarre London mix of old and new was there again, sandwiching Thorne on his drive south, from the Greenwich marshes, through Charlton towards where the prison squatted, somewhere indistinct between Woolwich and Thamesmead. It was a straight road running alongside the river, and though the scenery on either side was hardly picturesque, it was certainly contrasting. On the right, set back from the road, were a number of converted Victorian barracks and army buildings. Dark and dirty, and on land most probably poisoned by a hundred years of oil and ordnance. To Thorne’s left as he drove along beneath a sky already dour and darkening at four o’clock, stood plot after plot of new housing developments. They were the sort that used to be advertised by that bloke with the square chin and the deep voice who swooped down in a helicopter. Red bricks and green roofs, which would almost certainly fall down long before the somewhat darker buildings on the other side of the road.

  Then there was the prison itself. Its security level was as high as anywhere in the country. Home at one time or another to Jeffrey Archer, Ronnie Biggs and any terrorist worth their salt. Nobody had ever escaped. Low and grey and grim, and itself overlooked by yet another housing development. Thorne wasn’t sure who had the worst view: the unhappy families in their lovely new red-brick houses, or the prisoners . . .

  It took a little over half an hour from when Thorne first showed his warrant card at the desk in the visitors’ centre to when he was sitting in the Category-A legal visit room, waiting to see Martin Palmer.

  It was a drawn-out and regimented procedure. From the visitors’ centre, where Thorne had to leave all personal belongings in a locker, on to the main building where his authorisation was checked again and an ultraviolet mark stamped onto the back of his hand. Then out into a courtyard where his pass was re-checked, through an X-ray portal, a maze of glass and air-lock type passages – one door shutting before the next one opened. And then the wait for the van that transported visitors to the separate Category-A compound. Once there, a third check on credentials, another X-ray machine and a good deal more grunting and staring before Thorne was finally ushered into the small, rectangular visit room.

  Then another wait that depended on nothing but the mood of the prison officers concerned. It was always the same and it always pissed Thorne off. Police officers and prison staff were old enemies. The finders and the keepers resenting each other. Screws were seen as failed coppers. Coppers were thought of as delivery boys with smart suits and clean hands. On a prison officer’s territory, if anything could be done to make things that little bit more tedious and difficult, it usually was.

  Ten minutes later, a heavily tattooed and deeply depressed prison officer led Martin Palmer into the room. Palmer walked across and took a seat at the table opposite Thorne. The prison officer, who Thorne thought looked like a shithouse with right-wing leanings, left to take up his position behind the door from where he could observe through the window.

  Palmer was pale. He was wearing the orange hooded top that Thorne had seen him in at his flat on Christmas Eve. He stared at Thorne, blinking slowly. He looked more like a man who’d just woken up than one who, as a matter of policy, would be on suicide watch.

  Despite the time and trouble he’d taken to get there, Thorne wanted to keep it quick and simple. He was only really there to deliver a message.

  ‘I’m going to find Karen,’ he said.

  PART FOUR

  NEED

  NINETEEN

  Palmer looked lost.

  He stared around in search of something that might anchor him, some familiar landmark from which he could navigate, but everything felt alien and unknown.

  Thorne watched, trying to imagine the man as a boy in this place when the world was very different, but he was no more successful than Palmer at recapturing the past.

  It was understandable, of course. The embankment was unrecognisable compared to how it must have been almost twenty years earlier. This stretch of line, which a mile or so further on ran past the bottom of the King Edward’s playing fields, had been disused for years. It had been earmarked for a development which, luckily for this operation, was never quite funded properly. The railway buildings – maintenance
sheds and equipment stores – had long been demolished. The track was overgrown and in pieces. In patches, the grass was over eight feet high. Palmer was a stranger in this place he had once known so well.

  The handcuffs he was wearing hardly helped.

  Thorne moved across to him, stood at his shoulder. ‘Something tells me this isn’t going to be easy.’

  ‘It’s not the same place. It’s completely different.’

  ‘Nowhere’s ever the way we remember it.’

  ‘I know. But this . . .’ Palmer began to move towards a clump of trees. Thorne went with him. The sky was clear, but it had rained heavily overnight and the wind, which had picked up, blew water off the brown ferns and grey sycamores. The long grass clinging to their legs as they walked was heavy and wet. Thorne was wearing waterproof over-trousers and Palmer’s jeans were already soaked.

  ‘The curve of the bank, maybe,’ Thorne said. ‘A particular arrangement of trees. Anything that might at least narrow it down for us.’

  Palmer nodded. ‘I’m looking.’

  Thorne saw the confusion etched across his face, but beneath it, Palmer wore the same base expression, his key expression, that Thorne had seen often. The one he had seen staring out at him from the front page of most of the papers that morning. Palmer, six months earlier, blinking and blurry, cradling a soft drink at some doubtless horrendous office party or other. Snapped hiding in a corner, his eyes wide, the pupils reddened by the flash; doing his best to look as if he was enjoying himself and failing dismally.

  Thorne’s money was on Sean Bracher as the source of the photo. If the slimy wanker had been in front of him at that moment, he might have given him a dig, but he couldn’t summon up the energy to be too pissed off about it. Bracher, like that cleaner in the hotel, cashing in on killing, making a little something. One person’s tragedy and all that. One dog-eared snap. One nice new sports car and a couple of weeks in Antigua with the girlfriend. It was only a picture. Fuck it, why not . . .