The Killing Habit

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne nodded. Once he had returned from Canterbury, the rest of his and everyone else’s day had been taken up with the murder of Alice Matthews: combing through the material rushed across by the team from Thames Valley, sending officers to reinterview the victim’s two sons and ex-husband, then bringing all those involved in Operation Felix up to speed.

  Pinning another photograph to the whiteboard in the incident room.

  The interviews with Leila Fadel’s parents and Zoe McCausland had been written up and filed. Someone had finally managed to contact Patricia Somersby’s sister in Florida, but as she and Patricia had not been in regular contact, the woman had not been able to tell them anything they did not already know.

  ‘Pat disturbed a burglar,’ the woman had said on the phone. ‘Right? That’s what they told me.’

  The officer had told her that they were simply making further inquiries and had promised to keep her fully informed of developments.

  ‘Anyway, nothing earth-shattering,’ Tanner said. ‘Mason made a couple of interesting comments, but hopefully I’ll get a bit more out of Graham French.’

  Thorne spooned food into his mouth.

  ‘The barber.’ Tanner waited. ‘The one who was also in Pentonville with Andrew Evans. See if he can give us a lead on the Duchess.’

  ‘Right.’ The truth was that for a second Thorne had not been able to place the name, and he knew Tanner had seen it. The latest in what was almost certainly a series of murders now seemed to be taking up all his available headspace.

  ‘I’ll write up my meeting with Mason and you can look at it tomorrow.’

  Thorne knew that Tanner would probably do it as soon as he’d left, along with detailed reports on the rest of her day’s actions. Thorne would usually put that side of the job off until the last possible moment, like homework. He was not beyond dictating reports on to his iPhone, then bunging some super-keen trainee detective twenty quid to sit at a computer and type them up for him.

  ‘Four victims in six months.’ Tanner clearly had less of a problem than Thorne when it came to holding the details of two investigations in her head simultaneously. She pushed food around her plate. ‘We’re a long way past killing cats.’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon so.’ Thorne had already finished eating and sat back, cradling his beer. ‘Not that I’ve got any idea where we are.’

  ‘If it was easy, somebody would have caught him already.’ Tanner put down her fork. She took Thorne’s empty plate, slid it beneath her own, then laid both on the tray which she placed out of harm’s way on the low table in front of the sofa. He watched as she balled up the used pieces of kitchen towel then leaned across to drop them on to the tray, too.

  Thorne shook his head and used his fingers to list the victims Tanner had mentioned. ‘A widow in her late fifties, a mature student in her twenties, a doctor…’

  ‘Leila Fadel was thirty-one —’

  ‘Right… and now a semi-retired grandmother.’

  ‘All single.’ Tanner looked at him. ‘All living alone. We need to remember what they’ve got in common.’

  ‘In Norwich, Bristol, Kent —’

  ‘One forced entry, which was probably done afterwards to make it look like a burglary; in all the other cases the victims let him in, or he was able to get in.’

  ‘Or they knew him,’ Thorne said.

  Now Tanner sat back, too, though she looked rather less at home with a can of beer in her hand than Thorne did. ‘It’s the same as when I do jigsaws.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘You remember I like jigsaws?’

  Thorne nodded. He had bought one and left it by Tanner’s bed when she was in hospital the year before. ‘“Order out of chaos”. Yeah, I remember you saying something like that, but you were off your tits on morphine at the time.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is… but, if you’re only looking at the individual pieces, you’re never going to get anywhere. It’s just a mess. Yes, you might put some of them together, but all the time you’re trying to do that you need to keep looking over at the picture on the box, reminding yourself what that is. That’s the really important thing. Everyone always says there’s nothing worse than a jigsaw with a single piece missing, but a jigsaw that’s really useless is one that doesn’t come in a box. One that hasn’t got a picture.’ She looked at him, as though the answer to the question she was about to ask was obvious. ‘So, what’s our picture?’

  Thorne raised his can as though he were toasting something. ‘Well, personally, I’m seeing a lovely picture of this bastard in the dock at the Old Bailey.’

  ‘Now, I mean.’

  ‘Or maybe getting shanked in prison, if we’re really lucky.’

  ‘It’s a man who’s trying very hard not to get caught,’ Tanner said. ‘Simple as that. I mean, some of them want to, don’t they, deep down? That’s probably what your Dr Perera would say.’

  ‘Since when was she my Dr Perera?’

  Tanner smiled and picked up a crumb of something from the settee. ‘But we’re looking for someone who does what he does because he’s driven by… well, who knows what… but is still smart enough to take whatever steps necessary to ensure he can carry on doing it.’

  ‘The geography,’ Thorne said. ‘The travelling around.’

  ‘That’s part of it.’

  ‘And the things he takes.’

  ‘Right.’ Tanner turned to face him. ‘These aren’t… keepsakes for him to look at and stroke when he gets home. When a killer like this takes souvenirs, he takes locks of hair or items of clothing, small things that were precious to the victim. He doesn’t take phones and laptop computers.’

  Thorne nodded. ‘He’s trying to get rid of evidence. Texts or emails, whatever. He wants to destroy anything that would show us how he knew his victims.’

  ‘That’s certainly the picture I’m seeing,’ Tanner said.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes after that, and Thorne tried not to make it obvious that he was looking around the room; comparing it with the one he’d sat in once before. The furniture, though obviously new, looked much the same as that which had been destroyed in the fire, and Thorne was pleased to see that the arrangement of prints had been salvaged. There were only a few books on the shelves next to the fireplace, so it was too early to tell if they would end up colour-coded, as the previous ones had been.

  Thorne smiled and shifted forward on the sofa. He said, ‘Well then…’

  Tanner got to her feet.

  ‘I think I left my jacket in the kitchen.’

  ‘I hung it up,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Course you did.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When Thorne got back to the flat, Helen was sitting in front of a TV show she didn’t appear to be watching. Some men on an island, shouting at each other. Next to her, Alfie was stretched out on the sofa in his vest and pants, a flannel across his forehead.

  ‘He’s got a temperature,’ Helen said. ‘Not high enough for the doctor to get off her backside and come out, of course.’

  ‘You want to take him to A and E?’

  Helen shook her head. ‘Calpol and a cold flannel should do it.’ She leaned over and eased the thermometer into her son’s ear. He moaned softly. ‘All right, chicken…’

  Thorne slipped off his jacket and moved across to perch on the arm of the sofa. ‘How you feeling, Trouble?’

  Alfie pushed out his bottom lip, clearly feeling sorry for himself, and turned away as soon as Helen had removed the thermometer.

  ‘It’s gone down a bit,’ she said.

  ‘Think he’ll be all right for nursery tomorrow?’

  ‘Well, if he isn’t, I’ll just have to call Jenny. I mean, I’d rather not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I spoke to her on the phone earlier. We had words.’

  Thorne got up and walked across to flick the kettle on. ‘Not like you.’

  ‘Yeah, well, she was getting on my tits, and I didn’t know I might need her fo
r this, did I?’

  Thorne held up a mug, but Helen shook her head. ‘About me, I suppose.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The row with your sister.’

  ‘Not everything’s about you, you know.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He moved to the fridge and opened the door. A last beer before bed was tempting, especially as it looked as though it might be a while before that happened. He took the milk out.

  ‘Your name was mentioned, obviously.’

  Thorne turned back towards the worktop, so that Helen wouldn’t see him smile.

  ‘I spoke to Phil as well.’

  ‘How did that go?’

  ‘We’re friends again. I mean it wasn’t like we weren’t friends, but…’

  Thorne mashed his teabag. ‘So, which one of you said sorry first?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Thorne knew who his money would be on. Nobody knew better than he did how stubborn Hendricks could be when he felt like it, but Helen was in a different league. He carried his tea back to the sofa and squeezed in next to her.

  ‘He more or less admitted I was right.’ Helen was trying not to look too pleased with herself. ‘Said that he was just being difficult.’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

  Alfie began to grizzle and Helen reached to stroke his arm and straighten the flannel. ‘He said the main reason he didn’t think drugs should be legal was that taking them wouldn’t be as much fun.’

  ‘How can someone so smart be such an idiot?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t think Andrew Evans would think they were a lot of fun.’ Thorne slurped his tea. Now, on television, some actor he vaguely recognised was steering a narrowboat through the countryside. ‘Or Adnan Jandali’s kids.’

  ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘Yeah… Tanner’s working it, but she might need to do it on her own for a bit.’ He told her about Alice Matthews; a case that had begun just over a week earlier with a few terrible jokes about cats and was now a full-on serial murder inquiry.

  ‘You should get some sleep,’ Helen said.

  ‘No, I’ll wait up with you.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘You go and I’ll stay up with Alfie for a bit. There’s probably some football on —’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  Thorne nodded, happy to have offered, but happier still that Helen was not to be argued with. ‘Not sure I’ll sleep much anyway.’ He was still thinking about everything he and Tanner had talked about. A killer who was determined to stay one step ahead of them; the new picture and the briefing he would need to give the team first thing the next morning. He reached down for the bottle of Calpol on the floor and examined it. ‘This stuff knock you out a bit, does it?’

  ‘Not sure,’ Helen said. ‘It’s just liquid paracetamol, I think.’

  Thorne took the lid off and sniffed. ‘I wonder what it’s like in tea.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  There were a number of people moving at the edges of the incident room, going about their business, working different cases, while others – civilian staff for the most part – lingered and listened in, yet to become inured to this peculiar and perverse kind of excitement, because gatherings like this one were, thankfully, few and far between.

  As was the kind of killer they were gathered to talk about.

  Thorne stood, ready to address the dozen or so detectives assembled around the desks closest to him. The core members of the team. For many, this would be the biggest case they had worked, perhaps would ever work, and if Thorne could not quite taste the adrenalin or smell what was coming off those who lived in fear of dropping the ball, he could hear it.

  In pencils tapped against the edges of desks. In cleared throats and in hands wiped against stubble.

  ‘This operation is now focused on an individual who we strongly suspect has killed at least three times in the past seven months, and you all have details of those offences.’ Thorne watched as pages were turned, waited for the rustle of paper to die down. ‘But moving forward, we’re going to focus all our attention on his latest victim. Alice Matthews, aged fifty-four, was murdered four days ago. She was strangled at her home in Amersham.’ Though there was a picture of Alice Matthews contained in every officer’s briefing notes, Thorne was aware that most of them had now looked up from their pages and were staring past him to the glossy ten by eight on the whiteboard behind him.

  He turned to look at the picture himself.

  A photograph taken by one of Alice Matthews’s grown-up sons; a party to celebrate the christening of her first grandchild.

  ‘Most investigations need a bit of luck.’ Thorne stayed looking at the photograph, his back to his team. ‘They need a break. We’ve been lucky… this is ours, because now we’ve got a fresh case to work, new leads, new evidence.’ He turned round, saw all eyes on him. ‘But Alice Matthews wasn’t lucky, and neither were the people who care about her. Alice’s eighty-three-year-old mother, all her friends and her two kids… shit out of luck. Her granddaughter certainly didn’t get lucky, because now she doesn’t get to grow up knowing her grandma.’

  He stopped, nodded towards one of the newer members of the team who was scribbling in his notebook. ‘Yeah, write that down,’ he said. ‘Tell yourselves first thing every morning. Tattoo it on your arses if you have to, but remember it. Because these are the people we’re doing this for, and if we all do our jobs properly this is the moment when the man we’re after runs out of luck too.’ He let what he’d said sink in for a few seconds, then moved across to lean against a desk.

  ‘Right.’ Yvonne Kitson stood up. ‘We’re working on the assumption that our killer had made contact with Alice Matthews before the night she was killed, so we need to find out how.’

  Had Nicola Tanner not been out chasing leads on the Evans/Jandali case, Thorne would have handed the briefing over to her, but he was happy enough to leave the nuts and bolts to someone with whom most of the team were already familiar. In truth, Tanner’s absence at this point had its advantages. She was more than capable of cracking the whip, but it was often more effective if those on the receiving end had an established rapport with the person dishing it out. Aside from Dipak Chall and a couple of officers who’d been drafted in from Kentish Town, Kitson had worked with everyone in the room for several years.

  ‘Our suspect appears to have taken Alice’s phone and computer,’ Kitson said. ‘Same as with his earlier victims, and we think he does that because they would make it very clear how the contact was made. He’s not nicking those things on the spur of the moment, so what’s he trying to cover up?’

  A hand was raised. ‘Emails? Texts?’

  ‘That’s what we’re thinking. So we need to talk to Alice’s mobile provider, see what we can access.’ She nodded at the predictable groans from those who had trodden this tedious path before. Endless paperwork, a time-consuming and expensive set of protocols. ‘I know, a nightmare, and by the time we get anything out of them we’ll probably all be picking up our pensions, but let’s get the process started.’

  A female DS at the front said, ‘What about social media?’

  ‘That, too,’ Kitson said. ‘Alice’s ex-husband told the local team that she had a Facebook account, so that’s looking like a real possibility. Facebook and Google are going to be even harder nuts to crack, but we need to get on it.’

  ‘All the victims were single,’ Chall said. ‘So maybe we should be checking dating apps. Tinder or whatever.’

  The officer sitting behind Chall dropped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Know all about that do you, Dipak?’

  A voice from the back. ‘Grindr, maybe.’

  Kitson nodded through the laughter. ‘Absolutely, but it’s not going to be easy without any access to search history. We do have one possibility as far as that goes, though.’

  Chall turned to face the others. ‘Not all the victims’ computers were taken. Leila Fadel’s parents told
us that they passed hers on to her brother.’

  ‘Took it with him to university,’ Kitson said.

  ‘Why didn’t the killer take that one?’ the woman at the front asked.

  ‘No idea,’ Thorne said. ‘Let’s hope he messed up. Maybe it was hidden somewhere and he was in a hurry, but in any case, we need to get hold of the brother and get that computer back as quickly as possible.’

  There was more nodding and scribbling, an outbreak of chatter.

  Kitson raised her voice above it. ‘So, while some of you are working with all that, we need to trace Alice’s movements on the night she was killed. We’re presuming that she’d been out for the evening, that she may well have been meeting her killer, so where did she go? How did she get there? Obviously we need to be looking at CCTV; the Thames Valley team have made a start on that, so you’ll need to liaise with them.’

  ‘There was alcohol in Alice’s blood,’ Thorne said. ‘So chances are she didn’t drive, but check ANPR just in case, then talk to all the local cab firms.’

  Kitson glanced down at her notes. ‘The PM also identified what looked like semi-digested pasta in her stomach, so we need to get her picture to every restaurant in and around Amersham that serves Italian food. Again, you’ll need to work with local uniform to get this done quickly, but we need to find out where she went and who she was meeting.’

  ‘Got to have been a date.’ The officer behind Chall sat back and nodded knowingly. ‘Always Italian, isn’t it? More romantic.’

  The woman at the front turned to chip in. ‘I can’t stand Italian. Give me a Nando’s any day.’

  ‘That’s what I call a cheap date,’ someone said.

  The woman laughed. ‘Yeah, I’m anyone’s for a bit of spicy chicken.’

  Thorne turned to look at the photograph again. He wondered if the man Alice Matthews went to meet had seen that smile. If he had showed her a smile in return, the dark fantasies taking shape behind it.

  Kitson said, ‘Right, can you divvy that lot up, Sam?’