Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  Palmer with that same expression now as he stared around him.

  All at once, Thorne recognised the expression for what it actually was: embarrassment. Embarrassed to be at that party. To be walking into a police station confessing to murder. Embarrassed to be here. Palmer was, Thorne realised, embarrassed to be pretty much wherever he was.

  Palmer let out a small groan, his disorientation growing, and it struck Thorne that even the seasons were conspiring against him – against both of them. Palmer would have remembered this place as it was in summer. Then the trees would have been heavy with fruit and flower. Today they dripped, dark and skeletal.

  ‘It might help to think of the place in relation to the houses,’ Thorne suggested. ‘Can you remember which estate Nicklin used to live on?’ They both looked up towards the top of the embankment. A healthy crop of TV aerials and satellite dishes blossomed, just visible, beyond the treeline.

  Palmer shook his head. ‘They’re different. Newer.’

  ‘What about the bridge? Can you get your bearings from that?’

  Palmer looked up at the metal footbridge, a quarter of a mile away, high above the embankment valley. ‘That wasn’t even there. They were still building it. I can remember the noise . . .’

  Thorne suddenly felt wetter and a damn sight colder as the thought hit him. How devious and clever could the fourteen-year-old Stuart Nicklin have been? Was Karen McMahon buried under a hundred tons of concrete bridge support? If she was, they’d almost certainly never find her. Not that Jesmond or those above him would even agree to looking. He’d had enough of a job getting a search on this scale organised. The three magic initials had done the trick in the end. Having spoken to Hendricks he was far from sure whether it was even possible, but the outside chance of the killer’s DNA being salvageable had swung it. They’d got nothing from any of Nicklin’s recent victims, but maybe he’d not been quite so careful back when he was still a beginner.

  DNA – a huge breakthrough in the struggle to catch and convict murderers. A useful weapon when it came to getting the better of one’s dimmer superiors . . .

  Palmer’s eyes moved from the bridge to the slopes that rose up on either side of them. He studied the small troop of uniformed officers, positioned at various points along the bank on his right-hand side. Some stood perfectly still, radios in hand, and some of them were moving slowly, their steps mirroring those of himself and Thorne.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ Palmer asked. ‘How’s this going to work?’

  ‘As soon as we get a fix, whenever you can give us somewhere to start, a team will come in to clear the area – get the grass cut, bring in machinery to make it a bit more manageable. For a while, it’ll be more like Ground Force than anything.’

  Palmer nodded quickly. This wasn’t what he wanted to know. ‘I mean what about afterwards? The actual searching. The digging . . .’

  Thorne puffed out his cheeks. Not having been involved in an operation like this for a number of years, he wasn’t a hundred per cent sure himself. ‘A team of specially trained officers. With dogs probably . . .’ Palmer flinched. Thorne wondered how on earth they trained dogs for this . . . speciality. It wasn’t something he bothered to think about for long. Sniffing out drugs was one thing, but sniffing out death? ‘Cadaver dogs’ they called them in the States.

  A vivid image caught him off guard for a second, took a little breath away . . .

  Lolling, leathery tongues, and paws scrabbling away at soil. Tearing through delicate cobwebs of skin and pressing down through chalk sticks of powdery bone.

  Thorne waited a few seconds. ‘Then, if we find a body, we’ll bring in a forensic archaeologist . . .’

  Palmer cut him off. ‘You won’t find anything.’ He stopped and looked down at Thorne. His wrists were cuffed in front of him and his naturally stooping gait had become almost absurdly exaggerated. He looked like a hunchback. ‘Why would she be here?’

  The question, seemingly genuine and heartfelt, prompted Thorne to ask one of his own. One he’d asked before. Why had Palmer not considered the possibility that Nicklin might have had something to do with Karen McMahon’s disappearance? ‘Not back then, maybe,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s fair enough. But now, since he came back, and the killing began, now that you know about him. Don’t you at least think it’s possible?’

  Something like a smile appeared on Palmer’s face, as it had when Thorne had pressed him on this before, and he more or less repeated the only answer that he seemed prepared to give.

  ‘Anything is possible, I suppose. If either of us was responsible for what happened to Karen that day, it was me . . .’

  ‘Tell me why.’

  Palmer leaned forward as if he might fall, but at the last second he took a huge step and his momentum carried him away. Thorne watched him go for a second or two, thinking. Was it something about Karen, the thing which Palmer seemed to be keeping back? Or was there something else? Something he wasn’t saying about Nicklin?

  Thorne moved off after him, following in his wake as Palmer noisily stamped down a path. The rust-coloured couch grass wind-whipped and sopping. Sharp enough to draw blood. The ground itself was sodden underfoot. Muddy water squelched up and into Thorne’s boots as they walked.

  ‘I talk to her sometimes,’ Palmer said suddenly. ‘I know that sounds very stupid.’

  Thorne didn’t think so. He’d enjoyed, or more accurately, endured, a number of conversations with the dead down the years.

  ‘What do you talk to her about?’

  ‘I don’t so much now, but before, I used to tell her what I’d done.’

  ‘Confessing?’

  Up ahead, Palmer grunted. ‘She knew anyway, of course.’

  ‘Did she forgive you?’

  ‘You could never be sure what Karen was thinking. I don’t think even Stuart knew a lot of the time . . .’

  Palmer began to move well ahead of Thorne. He veered off sharply to the left, away from the embankment that climbed steeply up to the new housing estates and towards the gentler slope on the other side. At the top, high metal fencing separated this wild, untended patch of wilderness from a shiny new industrial park. Thorne glanced towards the embankment on his right. The officers were still tracking their movements, one or two moving gingerly down the slippery bank.

  ‘She knew what I was thinking all the time, of course. All the time . . .’ He said something else. Thorne strained to hear, but it was lost on the wind.

  Palmer’s strides were getting bigger, the distance between himself and Thorne growing with every step. Thorne started to move a little quicker, but they had come through the grass now and were heading into an area where progress, for him at least, was rapidly becoming far trickier. Though the ground was suddenly drier, the undergrowth was denser, his feet heavier. He couldn’t raise his legs high enough to step over the huge expanses of bracken and briar. He stumbled through masses of bare bramble, across a tangle of spiky dead thistle-heads. He swore as he caught his hand on something sharp, and bringing it to his mouth, he lost sight of Palmer for a second or two. He looked round quickly, in time to see a uniformed officer a hundred or more yards away, sliding down the embankment on his backside. He was on the verge of calling out, when he heard Palmer’s voice . . .

  ‘That’s because I loved her, I suppose. I always loved her . . .’

  Thorne pushed aside the overhanging branches of a dead blackberry bush, and saw him standing thirty feet away. Thorne was breathing heavily. He suddenly felt rather stupid. He looked at Palmer up ahead of him, stock still. What on earth had he been worried about?

  He followed Palmer’s tracks through a shin-high patch of dried-out ferns until he was standing alongside him.

  ‘Was Karen the only woman you ever loved?’

  ‘Yes. The only woman.’ He turned to Thorne and smiled sadly, l
ike an idiot. ‘I always loved Stuart, of course.’

  Palmer raised his handcuffed wrists and pointed as best he could towards the gnarled black roots of a sorry-looking oak tree a few yards away.

  ‘This is it. I found a baby bird here once.’ He turned around and began looking excitedly in different directions. ‘The sheds we used to mess about in were over there. Stuart’s house was up there.’ He looked at Thorne, nodded. ‘It was around here, where we used to come, the three of us. This was the last place I saw Karen.’

  Thorne turned around. After a few seconds, he made out the figure of Dave Holland at the top of the embankment, talking to two uniforms, drinking tea. Thorne stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly to attract Holland’s attention. When he had it, he started pointing.

  Holland waved and began to speak into his radio.

  Checking in his rear-view mirror, Thorne saw that Palmer’s head was bowed, as if he was looking down at the metal around his wrist and around that of Dave Holland who was sitting next to him, and quietly reminding himself how the handcuffs came to be there. How he came to be in the back of this particular car. The detective driving the Vectra behind them caught Thorne’s look and flashed his lights. Thorne raised a hand in acknowledgement.

  The small convoy turned left off the southern approach to the Blackwall Tunnel and made for Woolwich, heading back towards Belmarsh Prison.

  Palmer spoke casually, as if he were asking to have a window opened, but even over the rattle of the Mondeo and the roar of other cars on the road, Thorne could hear the need in his voice.

  ‘It will be life, won’t it? I’ll not be coming out . . .’

  Thorne always tried to put the trial to the back of his mind. He’d need to give evidence of course, but his real job, if he’d done it properly, was over by then. He was usually on to the next one. Occasionally, more occasionally in the last few years, some moron of a judge – some fossil, who didn’t know what rap music was and thought that women in short skirts were asking for it – might fuck things up for everybody: make headlines and undermine months, maybe years, of police work by sentencing a murderer as if he’d neglected to take his library books back . . .

  ‘It will be life?’ The emphasis on will. ‘Do you think . . . ?’

  A glance in the mirror told Thorne that, now, Palmer’s head was raised, his eyes fixed straight ahead. Thorne gave the only honest answer he could. ‘I hope so, yes.’

  Palmer nodded a few times to himself, to Holland. Thorne thought he looked relieved. ‘The other thing is, they’ll separate me as well, won’t they? When I’m in there? They do that, I read it somewhere, for prisoners who’ve killed women. They isolate them, because the other inmates, the honest, decent thieves and armed robbers, and contract killers will hurt the likes of me inside, if they get the chance. That’s true isn’t it?’

  Thorne saw little point in denying it. ‘Sometimes, yeah. It’s normally sex-offenders, stuff with kids . . .’

  ‘I know, but I would be a target though.’ It wasn’t a question. Thorne shrugged, let Palmer continue. ‘There’s no way they can keep you apart all the time though, is there? Even if you’re with . . . other prisoners who are the same as you, the special ones. There’s a pecking order of some sort, I imagine. If you’re a pervert who’s killed a schoolgirl, you’re obviously worse than the animal who killed the old age pensioner. The man who’s battered his wife to death is not quite as hated as the one who’s murdered two women he didn’t even know . . .’

  Thorne did not want to listen to any more of this. In the beginning, it had sounded like an attempt at self-assurance. Now, it was sounding like self-pity. ‘Listen Palmer, if you want me to tell you it’s going to be tough inside, I’ll tell you. Yes, you’re going to hate it. Then again, you’re not a stupid man are you? Isn’t that sort of the point?’

  ‘Yes, of course . . .’

  ‘If you’re asking me to feel an ounce of anything like fucking sympathy . . . ?’

  ‘No. Absolutely not.’

  ‘Good.’ Thorne stuck his foot down, gambled on amber and roared across a mini-roundabout onto Woolwich Church Street, the river to the left of him. He checked in the mirror to be sure that the Vectra had made it through the lights behind him. His eyes flicked across to Holland who’d said next to nothing since they got into the car. He stared out of the window, lost in thought. Just a body to handcuff a prisoner to.

  ‘Something else you need to think about, Palmer. Yes, you’re quite right, you’ll be hated because you killed women. Doesn’t matter why you killed them, the ones who’ll want to hurt you for it will think it was a sex thing, whatever. They haven’t really got a lot of time for psychology. Well they have, of course, loads of time, but they just can’t be arsed. They’ll just make presumptions.’

  Palmer raised up his wrist, Holland’s moving with it, and scratched the side of his head with a thumbnail. ‘I suppose it would be stupid to ask if anybody ever puts them straight. Tells them the truth.’

  ‘Very stupid. It gets a lot worse as well. They’ll have two reasons to hate you.’

  ‘What . . . ?’

  ‘Two reasons to smash your face into a sink. To push you down a couple of flights of stairs, or knock something up in the tool shop to stick into you while you’re queuing up for your dinner. Don’t get me wrong, these people have got a moral code, it’s just not a normal one.’ Thorne caught Palmer’s eye in the mirror and held it. ‘They hate men who hurt women, or pretend to hate them, doesn’t much matter which, and if you’re lucky, they might only piss in your tea. But if there’s one thing they really do despise even more than that, it’s a grass. With you, they’ll be getting two for the price of one.’

  Slowly, in the mirror, a clear view of the Vectra emerged, as Palmer’s head dropped and he slumped down in his seat. Pleased as he was with his little speech, Thorne couldn’t help but feel like a grown man who’s played games with a small child and refused to let him win.

  Ten minutes later, Thorne swung the car round and pulled up at a T-junction. The Vectra came alongside him, the four officers exchanging looks, both cars waiting for a gap in the traffic coming from his left. A thousand yards away on the other side of the road, across the expanse of reclaimed saltmarsh, lay the prison. The slouching concrete warehouse . . .

  Cons R Us. Kingdom Of Killers.

  The driver of the back-up car gave Thorne the thumbs up and accelerated away into the stream of traffic heading back towards the city. Thorne pulled across the road and drove slowly towards the prison’s main entrance, feeling the first twinges of a headache kicking in behind his eyes.

  He looked at the clock on the dashboard as he rolled up the drive towards the barrier. It was just after half past one. He began to think about where he was due to be in less than an hour.

  The day was not going to get any better.

  TWENTY

  If someone told Thorne that he had a nice singing voice, chances are they’d be wearing black . . .

  He did have a good voice, surprisingly high and light for someone who looked and spoke like he did, and usually coming as a shock to anyone who heard it for the first time. As he sang, it struck him, as it usually did on these occasions, that such events were actually the only time that he ever really sang, the only time most people sang properly: weddings, or more likely in his case, funerals.

  They finished singing ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ more or less together, and sat down. As Brian Marsden, the headmaster, made his way to the lectern, Thorne looked at the people around him.

  It was a large congregation. Sixty-five or seventy people maybe. The majority were friends and colleagues, several generations of teachers and ex-pupils, but a number of those who sat shuffling feet and orders of service were there in an official capacity.

  There were more police than family.

  Thorne and M
cEvoy were there, representing the key investigative team. Malcolm Jay, the DS from Harrow, was in church, and Derek Lickwood. Steve Norman was around somewhere, to liaise with any unwelcome reporters who might try to grab a few words with grieving relatives.

  While respects were being paid, the mourners were being closely watched in case the killer himself decided to pop along and sprinkle soil on the coffin of his victim. He wouldn’t be the first, but as always, Thorne thought it unlikely that he or anybody else would be able to spot him if he were to show up. He would hardly be the one dressed in bright colours or sniggering during the eulogy. He was unlikely to be looking shifty or coughing nervously when the vicar talked about the deceased being ‘taken from us’. Nevertheless, it was a useful thing to do. They would ask discreetly for a guest list and, even more discreetly, someone would be filming those guests as they filed out of the church.

  Thorne craned his head round. There was a row of six or seven schoolboys in the rearmost pew. They were sixth-formers probably, sitting stiffly and wearing what in Thorne’s day would have been called ‘lounge suits’. One of them caught his eye and smiled. Thorne inclined his head non-committally and turned away. The teachers, at least fifteen or twenty of them, sat together on the left-hand side. Some were wearing gowns and mortar boards. All of them watched the tall, white-haired man at the lectern. The headmaster’s voice echoed round the church, as it did every morning round the main hall at King Edward’s. Thorne looked at the sombre expression on Brian Marsden’s thin face and guessed that he looked the same every day in assembly.

  The family sat on the front row. The teenage nephew and niece. The sister in her forties. The father . . .

  Thorne looked at the old man and saw the shadow of Charlie Garner’s grandfather. Thirty years older perhaps, and a sight more frail, but with the same haunted expression. Like he’d been hollowed out and there was nothing of substance to hold the bones in place any more.

  The congregation was rising to sing again, the organist playing the opening bars of ‘Abide With Me’ badly. As Thorne stood, he caught the eye of the headmaster who had just returned to his place, his tribute to Ken Bowles paid. Thorne opened his mouth to sing and realised that he hadn’t heard a word of what had been said.