Scaredy cat Thorne 2 Page 17

  Thorne stared at the first photo. He spotted Palmer almost straight away. He was a head taller than the boys around him, with the same hair, the same thick glasses. He studied the list of names at the bottom and eventually found Nicklin. The boy had moved as the shot was taken and his face was blurry, but it looked as though he was grinning. By nineteen eighty-three, Palmer and Nicklin were standing together. Palmer stared straight at the camera, his face flat. Nicklin's head, at the level of the taller boy's shoulder, was bowed slightly, but his eyes were up, dark and full of challenge.

  Thorne leaned in close to the photograph.

  'Hello, Smart...'

  After a moment, Thorne moved on to the 'eighty-four picture, pressing his nose up to the glass. Again, Nicklin's head was looking away from the camera as he whispered something to Palmer who stood stiffly beside him wearing an odd smile. Thorne moved on, scanned the 'eighty-five picture, but of course, neither Palmer nor Nicklin were there. He moved back, looked again at the blurred features, the face turned away. He knew that it wasn't possible, but he couldn't help imagining that seventeen years before, Nicklin had been deliberately trying to hide. Even then, as a thirteen year-old boy, he'd somehow foreseen the day when someone like Thorne would be staring at the picture, looking at him. Looking for him.

  Cookson turned to Holland. 'Probably a stupid question, but ... this is the first time you've seen him, right?' Holland nodded. 'Well, couldn't you have got pictures off his family?'

  It wasn't a stupid question.

  Nicklin's family had been traced quickly. Only the mother was still alive; nearly seventy and living in warden-controlled housing. Holland had made the call. The old woman's voice had been a little quivery, but clear. Holland had introduced himself and explained that her son's name had come up in connection with an enquiry and that he had a few simple questions. Her answers had been all but monosyllabic. Had she seen him? No. Had she had any contact with him? No. Holland had had no doubt that she had been telling the truth, but found it disturbing that she seemed to have no interest whatsoever in what her son, missing these last fifteen years, might have been doing or where he might be. She had asked nothing.

  It was her answer to Holland's last question, which he had thrown in as if it were an afterthought, that had been oddest. Chilling, even. He'd asked if she wouldn't mind letting them have a few photographs, she'd get them back of course, the most recent would be best, something taken just before Smart had left home maybe... That would not be possible, she'd said. Mrs. Nicklin had explained calmly that she didn't have any photographs at all of her son Smart. Not one. It was strange, but not the end of the world. Thorne had been unconvinced, in light of what Palmer had said, that a fifteen-year-old picture would have been a lot of use anyway. Holland asked the teacher where he could find the nearest toilet and excused himself.

  Cookson wore a moleskin jacket, button-down shirt and chinos. Thorne thought he looked rather preppy. The sound of expensive American loafers kissing the polished floor echoed as Cookson led him up a flight of stairs and down a long, straight corridor. It was a far cry from the lumbering sadists in corduroy jackets or tracksuits that Thorne remembered.

  Cookson stared through the window into every classroom they passed. They were looking for Ken Bowles, a math teacher, and the only member of staff who'd been here in the early eighties, at the same time as Palmer and Nicklin.

  Thorne wondered why so few teachers from that time were still here. It wasn't much more than fifteen years, after all.

  'Teachers used to stick around a lot longer in one place,' Cookson said, 'but not any more. It's easy to... stagnate, and money's always an issue. This is a good school. If you've done a couple of years here, there's a fair chance you can double your money in the private sector. The place up the road poaches a few every couple of years...'

  Thorne was leading the way. He looked into the next classroom, saw an old man with tufty white hair, sitting at a desk and staring out of the window. 'What about you?'

  'Been tempted, but.., well, I'm still here. Seven years this year, and I'm' already one of the old farts.' Cookson looked past Thorne into the classroom. 'Yep... here we go...'

  He knocked on the door, pushed it and held it open for Thorne. 'I'll maybe see you later then...'

  Sarah McEvoy took another swig from the bottle on her desk. She'd already got through a couple of bottles, but the water couldn't get rid of the dry mouth or the sour taste at the back of her throat any better than the cigarettes could.

  She was still feeling guilty, having harked at a DC five minutes before. She was taking it out on a junior officer, as it had already been taken out on her. She'd arrived late, feeling rough, and a bollocking from Brigstocke had done nothing to help her feel better. The bad mood was being passed around the investigation like a virus, while the man who'd caused it was off at some school chasing ghosts. They should all have been on a high since Palmer had fallen into their laps, but that would have been far too easy for Tom Thorne. It was as if he had some aversion to a morale that was anything except down in the fucking dust. As if every minute that passed without catching the second killer was their fault. As if he wanted to see shame etched onto the face of every officer and a hair shirt hanging in every locker. While he was content to let a murderer walk about, breathing the same air as normal people.

  She screwed her eyes tight shut; tried to calm herself down a little. She knew that Thorne was only doing what he believed was right. She'd been feeling edgier by the day since the holiday. A couple of long, long days trapped in her parents' house in Mill Hill. Like she gave a toss about Chanukah anyway, with her tedious brother and his dull-as-ditchwater family. She had been desperate to get out, needing to be among strangers.

  She'd found all the strangers she'd needed over New Year. The faces, strobed in white or lit up by the flashing reds and greens, had been reassuringly unfamiliar and the nights had become longer and louder, and altogether fucking fantastic, and suddenly - not in terms of the time, but in terms of her realising it - suddenly, dragging herself into work in the morning ... some mornings, had become painful.

  And Thorne and Brigstocke didn't fucking well like her anyway. The pair of them, commenting on her clothes and the way she looked, which she knew damn well they would never have done if she didn't have tits. She reached for the water bottle and unscrewed the cap. Her mobile rang.

  'McEvoy.'

  'It's Holland...'

  She took a mouthful of water while she waited for Holland to say what it was he wanted, but he didn't. She listened to the hiss on the line, swallowed, and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her shirt.

  'What?'

  Another few seconds of hiss. 'Nothing urgent. Just touching base.' Touching base?

  'What cop show did you see that in?'

  'Sorry?'

  'Forget it. Just being a snarky cow. Where's Thorne?'

  'Trying to track down Nicklin's old teacher...'

  As McEvoy listened, the DC she'd shouted at earlier walked past her desk. McEvoy smiled - an attempt at an apology. The DC gave her nothing back. 'You sound all echoey.'

  'I'm in the toilets,' Holland said. 'Nice to see that posh kids piss on the floor as well.'

  'They're not that posh, are they?'

  'I didn't see many of them playing football in the playground.'

  'Yeah, but not like... Biscuit Game posh.'

  'Eh... ?'

  McEvoy laughed. 'I'll tell you later.'

  'That's one thing they'll miss out on though,' Holland said. 'Being an all boys school...'

  'What?'

  'The sheer, unbridled pleasure of running into the girls' toilets and screaming your head off.'

  McEvoy remembered the very same thing happening at her school. She suddenly pictured herself, twelve going on twenty-five, shaking her head in disgust as she listened to the whoops and cheers of half a dozen testosterone-crazed, adolescent boys. She grinned at the memory. This phone call was doing her a lot of good. 'Why did
you do that anyway? I could never work it out.'

  'I think it was a genetic thing. Marking your territory or something...'

  McEvoy glanced up. On the other side of the incident room she could see Brigstocke talking to Steve Norman. Brigstocke looked across at her, then Norman. Weasely little fucker. She wondered whether they'd heard her laughing. She took another sip of water, her mouth still sticky. 'So, anything of interest?'

  'Not really, you?'

  'Nothing. Derek bloody Lickwood's been on the phone again, demanding to know what's going on. He reckons he's being kept in the dark, keeps threatening to come over and make trouble. Why should I have to deal with him?'

  'Short straw. Lovell was his case so we've got to work with him. The boss reckons you'd be better at it than he would...' McEvoy grunted.

  'What about Palmer?'

  'At work.' She said no more than that, but there was an edge to her voice. The unspoken bit was obvious. At work, totting up figures and drinking coffee, when he should be sitting against a rough stone wall listening to keys turning in locks; his knees pulled tight against his chest, his heart thumping, his belt and shoelaces taken away. She would never criticise Thorne to Holland. Besides, she knew, somewhere, that her judgment was perhaps a little off these days. Her thinking was maybe a bit extreme...

  'Right,' Holland said. 'Do you want to grab a beer later?'

  She looked across at Brigstocke. He and Norman were still deep in conversation. 'I've never been propositioned by a man in a toilet before.' She could hear Holland blush. 'I'm joking Holland.'

  'Yeah...'

  She murmured huskily into the phone. 'I've been propositioned by men in toilets loads of times.'

  Holland didn't laugh.

  McEvoy puffed out her cheeks, blew out the air noisily. She reached for the bottle of water. It was empty. 'Listen, Dave.. '

  'I just meant.., a beer. That's all.'

  She tried not to snap at him, but couldn't help herself. 'I know.'

  'If they were in my class it's because they had a particular aptitude for mathematics, but I don't remember either one of them covering himself in glory.'

  Thorne nodded patiently. Ken Bowles didn't seem to remember a great deal about anything. He knew that teaching was a stressful profession but Bowles could not possibly be as old as he looked. He had hair the colour of confectioner's custard and leathery grey skin. Behind the wire-framed spectacles the eyes were watery, and he had big discoloured teeth, like old-fashioned sweets in a jar, which clacked noisily together when he spoke and sometimes when he didn't.

  'You do remember Palmer and Nicklin being close?' Thorne asked. Bowles pushed himself away from the edge of the desk with a small grunt and moved across to the window. His tie was askew and there were chalk marks around his crotch. 'I don't recall a great deal about them at all. I don't think I liked either of them very much but that isn't unusual. Math is the lesson where the most disruption occurs. The taller one ... was that Palmer?' Thorne nodded. 'He let himself get distracted by his friend. There...' He pointed to a corner of the room.

  'The two of them messing about at the back. Passing notes and laughing. Palmer's homework was good, I think, but in class he was ... somewhere else.'

  'Could you not have split them up? Moved Palmer to the front... ?'

  Bowles shrugged, stared out of the window. 'I never really had them for that long, you see. They would probably have gone into different streams anyway that September, but of course they got expelled.' He raised his hand, rubbed with a finger at a dirty spot on the window.

  'An older boy, can't remember his name. They grabbed him outside the school gates, dragged him into the park, I think...'

  Thorne knew the story. Palmer had told him. His eyes filling behind his glasses, the nodding slow and sorrowful as he looked back at himself down the wrong end of the telescope, sweating as he relived it. Each detail preserved in the hideous aspic of shameful memory. The big feet in scuffed brogues, rooted t o the spot, refusing to carry him away. The thick fingers, closing slowly around the brown, pimpled grip of the air pistol.

  Thorne knew then that this had been the moment when everything had changed. From then on it had been unavoidable. He thought about what Bowles had just told him. A couple more months and Palmer and Nicklin would have been in different streams, moving along different paths; Nicklin's influence on the younger boy not as strong. Would they have drifted apart then? Might a few months, all those years ago, have saved the lives of five women?

  At least five women...

  There was a knock at the door and Holland entered. Thorne nodded in his direction. 'This is Detective Constable Holland...'

  Bowles peered theatrically across the room, feigning shock. 'Looks like a bloody sixth former.' Holland shrugged and smiled at the feeble joke.

  'Did you follow their progress after they'd been expelled?' Thorne asked.

  The teacher shook his head vigorously. 'Didn't miss either of them for a second. Nicklin was nothing but trouble and Palmer was just a big blob. Not his fault, I suppose. Boys his age can be terribly awkward, find it difficult to fit in. Like a lump of Plasticine that needs shaping. Palmer just got shaped by the wrong person, I think.'

  Thorne nodded at Holland. Time to make a move. 'Thanks Mr. Bowles.' Thorne handed over a card, which Bowles took without looking at it. 'If there's anything else that occurs to you...'

  'I taught myself to juggle when I was younger,' Bowles announced.

  'I'd do a bit for the class. Last day of term, that sort of thing. I can remember doing it for their class - Palmer and Nicklin's class. Cascade of five balls, six on a good day. Balancing a chair...' He pointed at a heavy looking wooden chair behind the desk on the platform. '... One of those chairs, on my chin. Do you know that Marsden's younger than I am?'

  Thorne was itching to get away. 'Sorry, sir?'

  'Headmaster. They brought Marsden in a couple of years ago, from outside. I'm ten years older than he is.' He threw his arms wide, as if the sense of what he was saying was obvious for all to see. 'Be glad to get out of here to tell you the truth. Can't even manage three balls these days...'

  Holland opened the door, and Thorne gratefully took a few steps towards it. 'We'll be on our way, sir.'

  Bowles nodded and spoke quietly. 'What's Nicklin done?'

  'I'm afraid we can't...'

  'Of course not, I'm sorry I asked. Do you know, I hadn't thought about either of those boys in years until I was told it was them you wanted to talk to me about? I've taught hundreds of boys. I can't remember most of them to be honest. I can recall the work sometimes, but not faces. Ever since I heard those two names again, I've been thinking about them a good deal. Thinking about him. There's a look on your face, Inspector Thorne, whenever you talk about him, did you know that?'

  Thorne knew it would be pointless to deny it, to express surprise. His face hid nothing. It never had. Not the scorn he felt for some, not the pity for others. The creases in his face folded as naturally into genuine expressions of horror, disgust and rage as those of a bad actor might shape themselves into their phony counterparts. His face fell easily into darkness; the scowl more at home there than the smile. Though the smile was the rarer, it was arguably the more powerful. Both had got him into plenty of trouble.

  Bowles moved to the door to show them out. 'I suspect that now I shall be thinking about Stuart Nicklin often.' The watery eyes studied Thorne's face. 'The boy's moved on from air pistols, hasn't he?'

  Thorne thought about Rosemary Vincent: the memory of an argument on the phone, the photograph turned over and over in her hand that day at the press conference. The hole in her precious daughter's head. The shadow moved across Thorne's face as he answered the teacher's question.

  'Yes. He's moved on.'

  He was thinking about something that had happened a long time ago. Years earlier, back when he'd still been Stuart Nicklin and supporting himself by tossing off sad old men and confused young ones, he'd learned about making th
e appropriate response to a situation. Another rent boy, a spiteful little prick who was older and uglier, had stolen some of his customers. Not his regulars, they were loyal, but some of the passing trade. The fucker was undercutting, a tenner here, twenty notes there, a bit more cash and we'll forget about the condom poaching punters to make some last ditch money before his looks went altogether. Understandable, but very bloody annoying. He was furious. He wanted to do something to punish the thieving toe rag, the little bitch, but he knew that the sensible thing, the appropriate thing to do would be to ignore it. Let it go and move on. There were plenty of punters to go around and there was no need to risk trouble with the police. No need to rock the boat. That would be stupid.

  He was also thinking about what was happening right now. They were afraid he was going to disappear. Scared shitless that, with his partner taken, he would pack up and head for the hills. If that was what they were afraid of, he knew that it was exactly what he should do. It was the appropriate response. They didn't want him to melt away and then resurface when the time was right to start again. So, that was the right thing for him to do. It was simple and sensible. It was self-preservation.

  It would be hard, there was no question of that. He loved what he was doing. He was very good at it and he loved that too. It was a rush like nothing he could remember, and even without the added buzz of the other, even without Palmer playing along for real, he knew that not doing it would be like dulling all his senses. Stopping would be like cutting off the oxygen to the very best part of himself. Giving it up would be like going to sleep for a while. It wouldn't be for ever, it might not even have to be for very long, but it would be very bloody hard. Still, it made sense. It was the appropriate thing to do, so he would have to try.

  He would try to stop.

  Years earlier, back when he'd still been Stuart Nicklin, having decided not to do anything stupid, he'd made a few calls and lured the thieving rent boy to an empty flat he sometimes used off Glasshouse Street. It was February and freezing. From the small window he could see the crowds in scarves and heavy coats, moving across Piccadilly Circus. He could just make out the icicles dangling from the bow of Eros and the frost on the steps leading up to the statue, sparkling in the multicoloured neon from the vast signs above. When the boy arrived, Nicklin beat him unconscious with a house brick, stuck a funnel in his mouth and poured a gallon of bright blue anti-freeze down his throat.