The Killing Habit Page 4

  ‘You need to cool down after a workout, mate.’ Hendricks grinned at him, then began to walk. ‘It’s like you throwing the empties away.’

  They went to the Spread Eagle on Camden Parkway and Hendricks offered to get the drinks in. Thorne feigned shock, then asked for a pint of Guinness. ‘I’ll enjoy watching you drink your orange juice.’

  ‘I like keeping fit,’ Hendricks said. ‘I’m not mental.’ He ordered two pints, then pointed to a selection of home-made sausage rolls and Scotch eggs on the bar. ‘Fancy one of them?’

  Thorne explained that he was only staying for one drink and that he had a takeaway from the Lancer in the boot of his car.

  ‘Nice,’ Hendricks said. He picked up the drinks and carried them across to a table by the window. ‘So, what’s the plan? Helen going to take one mouthful of the rogan josh, decide you need to move back up here and stick her flat on the market?’

  ‘I can dream, can’t I?’ Thorne said.

  They touched glasses and drank. On an adjacent table, a pair of media types discussed some exhibition they’d both seen recently, while clearly taking part in a ‘who’s wearing the stupidest glasses?’ competition.

  ‘So, what’s with this gym business?’

  Hendricks stared at him, wiped the froth from his top lip.

  The assorted bits of metal decorating almost every part of his body imaginable meant that Hendricks was probably a damn sight heavier than he might have been otherwise, but he had always been muscly and fit. He might have been mistaken for a somewhat exotic-looking bouncer, though this had never seemed to require much in the way of conventional effort. For most of the time Thorne had known him, his friend’s idea of a workout had involved dancing himself stupid in a darkened club, followed, if he was lucky, by a marathon bout of sexercise with whoever he managed to pick up. Since settling down a year or so ago with his partner Liam, however, he had become something of a gym bunny.

  ‘Those nice arses in tight shorts, is it?’

  Hendricks shrugged. ‘Not interested,’ he said. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s a bonus, but I go to the gym because I care about staying with Liam.’

  ‘What, you reckon he’d bugger off if you put a few pounds on?’

  ‘No chance. He knows he got lucky.’

  ‘So, what then? I thought once you’d settled down with someone you could sort of… give up. You know, if you weren’t on the pull any more.’

  ‘He likes that I’m fit, that’s all. I like that I’m fit.’

  Thorne grunted, took another drink.

  ‘That what you’ve done then, is it? Given up?’

  ‘No —’

  ‘Does Helen know that?’

  ‘No… it’s just she doesn’t mind if I don’t look like an underwear model, that’s all.’

  Hendricks nodded. ‘She told you that, has she?’

  Thorne said nothing.

  ‘Well, there you go. Would you say anything to her if you thought she was getting a bit chunky?’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’

  ‘Right. But you’d be thinking it.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to say anything,’ Thorne said. ‘I know she’s not that shallow. Anyway, she doesn’t need to totally love my body, because she’s got my amazing mind and my winning personality.’

  Hendricks laughed. ‘Blimey, you really are in trouble.’

  Thorne muttered, ‘Piss off’ into his Guinness.

  ‘Seriously, though, I’m asking. You think she prefers it that you’ve let yourself go?’ Hendricks leaned towards him. ‘Obviously, I’m using that phrase loosely, because it implies you had hold of yourself to begin with, but you know what I mean. You really reckon Helen likes having you bouncing around on top of her, that she wouldn’t prefer a six-pack to a Watneys party seven? I’m telling you, mate, she’s started eyeing me up lately, and that means she must be desperate.’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’

  ‘You could start by throwing that curry away.’

  ‘Not going to happen.’

  ‘Or you could give it to me. Luckily, I’m gorgeous, and I’ve got an amazing metabolism.’

  ‘Can we change the subject?’

  ‘Not to mention what you’re doing to your heart and your blood pressure… the risk of diabetes and stroke. I cut open a bloke who looked a bit like you the other day. He had a layer of fat all over him thicker than Lurpak, a liver that might just as well have been pâté and a heart like a bag of melted lard.’

  ‘You done?’

  ‘Wasn’t pretty, all I’m saying.’

  ‘What part of “change the subject” didn’t you understand?’ He watched as a barman delivered huge plates of posh fish and chips to the pair on the next table. However stupid their glasses were, they were both as skinny as sticks and Thorne guessed that neither had much to worry about as far as body mass index or cholesterol went.

  Hendricks smiled and said, ‘Touchy.’ Then, ‘So what are you doing back up here, anyway? I know the Lancer’s good, but…’

  Thorne told him about the cats.

  ‘The sort of thing that could get nasty,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘That’s the worry.’

  ‘You ever thought it could be more than one killer?’

  Thorne waited.

  ‘You know, a team of angry mice, working together?’

  ‘Hilarious,’ Thorne said, though it made about as much sense as Fulton’s psychotic bird-fancier. ‘Like I haven’t had the jokes up to here.’

  ‘Not as good as that one though, I bet.’

  As was so often the case in these situations, the words coming out of Phil Hendricks’s mouth – the perfectly timed punchlines, the flat Mancunian accent – suggested a glibness and lack of concern that were in stark contrast to the grace and skill with which he worked daily upon the bodies in his care. These had included the victims of several serial killers and Thorne knew he understood the implications of the case they were discussing perfectly well. It was simply Thorne’s turn to be the straight man, that was all. The grown-up. While Hendricks provided the same kind of smartarse remarks he himself had already made, Thorne was there now to shake his head and look serious.

  Because it was serious, he was certain of it.

  He had known before he’d walked into Fulton’s office in Kentish Town and now realised he’d had a fair idea what lay ahead even when he’d been sitting in Russell Brigstocke’s office the day before; complaining and making the same jokes.

  Whistling in the dark.

  ‘The forensic psychiatrist that Fulton’s been liaising with seems to think it’s pretty clear-cut,’ Thorne said. ‘She’s not quite staking her reputation on it, but near enough.’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t,’ Hendricks said. ‘I mean, they can get it wrong, you know.’

  ‘Textbook step-up, she reckons.’

  ‘Yeah… have to admit it looks that way.’ Hendricks nodded slowly and stared at his glass. ‘I thought that months ago, when the papers started covering it. Some nutter flexing his muscles, seeing how he likes it.’

  ‘Oh, I think we can be fairly sure he likes it,’ Thorne said.

  ‘When was the most recent one?’

  ‘Last one for definite was a couple of weeks ago, but it’s hard to keep track. Sometimes it takes a while for someone to be sure their pet’s missing and even if it is, it might just be because it’s run away. Sometimes it turns out the cat’s just been run over.’

  ‘Well, if he is still warming up, it sounds like we might have a chance.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’ Thorne was pleased to hear the we. The answer to a question he had not needed to ask. He and Hendricks had worked closely together on almost all those cases where Thorne had been hunting a serial offender, and he did not want this one to be any different.

  For all the wind-ups, there was an understanding between them that generated results. A spark and a shorthand.

  Hendricks downed what was left of his pint and raised the glass. ‘You sure you d
on’t want another one?’

  Thorne could happily have put away several more, but told Hendricks he was keen to get home, and not just because of the takeaway he was looking forward to so much. He lifted his glass as Hendricks walked to the bar, but by the time the seat opposite him was occupied again, he had yet to take a drink.

  Hendricks laid his fresh glass down. ‘What?’

  ‘What you said.’

  ‘When?’ Hendricks watched Thorne’s hand move up to his neck: an unconscious gesture the pathologist had seen several times over the years and learned not to ignore.

  Thorne scratched, grimacing through the momentary shudder; the whisper moving through the fine hairs at the nape of his neck. ‘Back at the gym.’ He leaned towards Hendricks and lowered his voice. ‘What if he isn’t warming up? Why couldn’t we be looking at someone who’s already done his exercise and this business with the cats is… something else?’

  ‘Hang on.’ Hendricks raised his hands. ‘Textbook, you said.’

  ‘So, maybe we need a different textbook.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a leap, mate…’

  Thorne shook his head and quickly finished his pint, having suddenly decided that another one was a very good idea. He smacked the empty glass on to the table loudly enough to provoke a look from the two men at the next table. He stared at them until they turned away again.

  ‘Just think about it, Phil. What if this fucker’s cooling down?’

  SIX

  Considering she spent a good part of her professional life burrowing into the twisted psyches of some extremely damaged individuals, Dr Melita Perera sounded remarkably chipper and light-hearted. The notes she had made for Fulton in the case file Thorne had been given were, as was often the case with expert opinion, a little dry and academic, but that was certainly not the way she came across on the phone. Reading her psychiatric assessment of their unidentified suspect, Thorne had pictured a middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun and, quite probably, wearing a tweed skirt. Having Googled her, however, Thorne now knew the woman to be in her early forties, with photographs suggesting someone who knew exactly what a workout was. Who probably visited a gym daily and went ice-climbing in her spare time.

  ‘It’s an interesting idea,’ she said. Thorne knew that she was of Sri Lankan origin, but he heard no trace of an accent.

  ‘Is it?’ Thorne sat at his desk, doing his best to tune out the office hubbub on the other side of the door and doodling on the back of an expenses form. ‘I mean, seriously… just tell me if I’m being stupid and I can stop wasting everybody’s time.’

  It was more or less what Hendricks had said the previous evening, though it had been couched in rather gentler terms. A few sarky remarks as he put his second pint away. He had said he was simply playing devil’s advocate and had seemed more concerned that Thorne might make a fool of himself than anything else.

  ‘It’s certainly counter-intuitive,’ Perera said. ‘But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s often the way to come up with a thesis that changes everything.’

  ‘If you say so.’ Thorne decided it was probably best not to mention that his ‘thesis’ had popped into his head while he had a drink in his hand, though something in the woman’s tone suggested that she might not altogether have disapproved of that.

  ‘Look, if there’s one thing I know about this somewhat… niche area of the profession I’ve mysteriously ended up in, it’s that you need to keep an open mind. Obviously we have guidelines, but there’s no real… orthodoxy. How could there be? Every killer I’ve studied or interviewed has brought something different to the table.’

  ‘One way of looking at it,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Yes, and quite literally, in the case of at least one individual I can think of. What I’m saying is, they’re never the same, not completely. Yeah, there are usually certain common factors or signifiers, I mean that’s how the Macdonald triad came to be so widely accepted, but these kinds of killers always have something that marks them out as different. That’s the point. They don’t want to be the same as anyone else. They need to feel they’re special.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ Thorne continued to doodle; faces and shapes he decided he would not have wanted the likes of Melita Perera to see. He was not too keen on the idea of anyone rummaging around in his twisted psyche. He said, ‘I was ready for you to shoot me down in flames.’

  The woman chuckled. ‘I had a patient who did that once. Ex-army bloke up in Scotland, got hold of a military-grade flame-thrower and barbecued his mother.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Listen, Tom, I could sit here and piss on your chips if I felt like it, and there are probably plenty of others with letters after their names who would have done, but they aren’t the ones who are good at the job.’

  ‘To be honest, part of me wanted you to.’

  ‘I get that.’

  ‘Like this thing isn’t messed up enough as it is.’

  ‘You have to be ready to adapt your thinking, that’s all I’m saying. You never know what’s around the corner, do you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Or who.’

  ‘OK, well thanks,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s good to hear, I think.’

  Perera laughed again, high and easy, and Thorne decided that when this was all over he’d happily offer to buy the woman a drink or two, if she fancied it; spend an evening listening to a few more of her nightmarish war stories. ‘Yeah… I know what you’re saying. Obviously, if you’re right, if our killer’s in a cooling down period, it’s because he’s already had his workout. It means there are some murders that you’ve missed.’

  Thorne drew a big, fat question mark. ‘Yeah, some,’ he said. He screwed up the piece of paper and lobbed it just wide of the bin. ‘Murdered women, you think?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘You said you thought our cat killer was almost certainly male, so what does that tell us about his human victims?’

  ‘If there are any.’

  ‘Yeah, obviously,’ Thorne said. ‘Female?’

  ‘You want an expert opinion?’

  ‘Look, I’m not going to hold you to it, but we need to start somewhere.’

  ‘Probably,’ Perera said, eventually. ‘Best I can do.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But let’s not ignore the elephant in the room.’ Another laugh. ‘Well, the giant cat in the room.’

  Then, as though she was stating what any child would understand, Perera said something Thorne had known to be true when Hendricks had casually thrown it into their discussion the night before. Something Thorne had blithely skated over in his excitement, but which now lodged in his head like a dreadful image from a nightmare he thought he’d forgotten.

  Something he would not forget again any time soon.

  A few minutes later, the psychiatrist’s words were still clattering round his brain, like an angry rat in a bucket, as he walked towards Brigstocke’s office.

  ‘I’ll have to run it by Fulton,’ the DCI said.

  He explained that, going forward, they, or rather he, would have to run everything past the detective superintendent at Kentish Town. Though they had been tasked with picking up a case that had become too unwieldy for one team, Fulton remained the nominal SIO. ‘We’ll run an incident room here, and we’ll probably have several members of the original team joining us, but Fulton needs to be kept in the loop. Fair enough?’

  Thorne nodded, letting the logistical details wash over him, as they usually did; impatient for Brigstocke’s reaction to what he had told him. The suggestion that their killer-in-training might not actually be training at all. He had decided against running his ‘thesis’ past Brigstocke first thing, but as soon as it had been validated – or at least not dismissed out of hand – by the forensic psychiatrist attached to the investigation, he had felt more confident about voicing it. Brigstocke had plastered on a look Thorne had seen plenty of times before, but his senior officer’s naturally defensive inst
incts had begun to weaken as Thorne recounted his conversation with Dr Melita Perera.

  The DCI had nodded and made unfamiliar noises of approval. He had scribbled notes while Thorne used words like orthodoxy and dropped counter-intuitive into the discussion whenever he had the chance.

  ‘I always knew that’s what you were.’ Brigstocke leaned back. ‘Only I just call it “being an awkward bastard”.’

  ‘Well, now you know there’s a proper term for it,’ Thorne said.

  ‘So… we’re going to have to go back a bit,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Presuming Uncle Fester’s OK with all this.’ He ran a hand through his own, relatively luxuriant head of hair.

  ‘I’m sure he will be,’ Thorne said. ‘Especially now the psychiatrist’s approved it.’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘As good as.’ Thorne watched Brigstocke scribbling again and said a silent prayer that his well-intentioned exaggeration would not come back later to bite him on the backside.

  ‘Well, if you’re right, we need to find out what our killer’s been up to already,’ Brigstocke said. ‘And as you’ve been fully briefed on the cat killings, I’m sure you understand that won’t be easy.’

  Thorne nodded again. Logistics. Though this time he had something up his sleeve. Someone.

  ‘If the way he’s expanded the area of these cat killings is anything to go by, we’ll have our work cut out.’ Brigstocke shook his head. ‘Have we even got any idea where to start looking?’

  Thorne said nothing.

  ‘Or how many we’re looking for? Maybe we’ll be lucky and discover this bloke needs this cooling off period after each murder.’ He looked up at Thorne. ‘Might only be one.’

  ‘No chance,’ Thorne said. ‘The number of animals he’s killed, I think we might be looking at several human victims already.’

  Brigstocke nodded and let out a slow breath, well aware he’d been clutching at straws. ‘OK… let’s start looking closer at the cat killings, the various areas and methods he’s used. See if anything corresponds with unsolved murders.’ He leaned back. ‘Talking of which…’