Scaredy cat Thorne 2 Read online

  There was no such grayness in Holland's response. 'That's stupid. Surely we should be keeping this out of the press. Knowing that there are two of them is the only advantage we've got...'

  A small part of Thorne was relieved that Holland could still be so naive. 'There you go again, Holland, thinking like a policeman. Detective Superintendent Jesmond, on the other hand...'-Brigstocke smiled at this, in spite of himself-'has his job to consider and he's realised, quite cleverly, that to the great British public, two separate murderers sounds fractionally scarier than one pair of them...'

  Even as he spoke, Thorne could feel an old, instinctive dread beginning to settle over him. He was certain that the two men they were after would prove to be a whole lot scarier than any number of run-of the-mill, bog-standard murderers.

  When the meeting was over, Thorne, Brigstocke, McEvoy and Holland left the room in silence, each in their own ways coming to terms with the importance, the urgency of the job ahead. If there were plenty of unanswered or unanswerable questions, one thing was horribly evident. They needed to catch these men quickly before there were more bodies for Phil Hendricks to deal with. Because he would be dealing with them two at a time. Jane Love11, a thirty-nine-year-old divorcee, had bled to death on a warm July evening on a patch of wasteland in Wood Green, N22, in the London Borough of Haringey. That was why, five months later, on a bitterly cold Monday afternoon, a long weekend of collating, of organising, of sod all behind him, Tom Thorne was at the headquarters of the Serious Crime Group (East). The teams based here policed ten boroughs' worth of killing, Haringey included. Thorne, freezing in a smoke-filled room in Edmonton, sitting opposite one of the most arrogant little gobshites he'd had the misfortune to encounter in a long time.

  'Are you saying we should have seen a link? Christ knows why. Buggered if I can see a link between your two.., what are the names?'

  'Carol Garner and Ruth Murray. Sir.'

  DCI Derek Lickwood nodded and spat out the smoke from his latest cigarette. 'Right. Yeah, well, it all seems a bit far-fetched to me, but that's your business.' He wore an expensively cut blue suit and leaned back on his grimy plastic chair as if it were a well-upholstered leather recliner. His hair was black and swept back from a face that was almost, but not quite, handsome. Both chin and nose were a little big, as was his Adam's apple, which bobbed furiously up and down as he spoke. He addressed his comments, curiously, to a point six inches above Thorne's head.

  'When it starts becoming my business though, I get a bit nervous,'

  Lickwood said. 'I'm not mad keen on people who are supposed to be colleagues, strolling in here and intimating that maybe my team, and by implication, me, could have done a better job of something. That upsets me.'

  Thorne, even after a cursory glance at the file on Jane Lovell, had realised that it would have been hard to have made a worse job of it. Everything that needed to have been done, had been, but no more. It was by the book and not from the heart. Two days after Jane Lovell had been stabbed to death, the case was as cold as she was. Thorne could see that Lickwood's reaction was all pose. A typically spiky and defensive response from an officer who feared that his shortcomings were going to be exposed. Thorne knew that he wanted, very badly, to punch Lickwood in his smug mouth, and he knew that he would have made a very tidy job of it. He also knew that, if he was going to get anywhere at all, a little diplomacy was called for.

  Call it diplomacy. Basically it was just bullshit.

  'As far as Jane Lovell and Katie Choi, the victim in Forest Hill, go, sir, there was probably no link at all, other than...'

  'Right.' Lickwood leaned forward and jabbed at the file on the desk in front of Thorne. 'We looked at the Katie Choi murder, of course we did, but she was butchered. Jane Lovell was killed by one single stab wound, clean. The Choi girl was virtually unrecognisable. He'd almost cut her head off. Why should anybody think they were connected?'

  Thorne nodded. Connections. When 'sick' connected with 'warped' they gave the job to him.

  'Ostensibly they aren't.., weren't.' Thorne was picking his words carefully. 'The only link is the one we're now seeing retrospectively the fact that they were killed by two people who, in all probability, are at least known to each other...'

  Lickwood, eyes wide, parroting. 'In all probability.'

  'There aren't so many murders in London that we can put it down to coincidence. Two women stabbed to death on the same evening. Four months later, two women strangled to death, both of whom had passed through main-line stations just before they were killed. I think the killers are narrowing their parameters as they go. Increasing the number of specifics...'

  Lickwood looked at the spot above Thorne's head. 'Sorry, I'm not with you.' Thorne could guess what he was thinking. Smartarse.

  'If it's some sort of game, it's as if they're trying to make it harder for themselves.' Thorne couldn't help smiling at Lickwood's nod. The tiny gesture, given to signal his understanding and agreement, indicated perfectly just how obtuse he really was. At that moment, Thorne would have been happy with just one quick right-hander. Break the fucker's nose. A small slap even...

  'Where d'you want to start then?' Lickwood said, lighting up again. Thorne had, in fact, started already. McEvoy and Holland were busy re-questioning all the key witnesses, notably Michael Murrell, who worked in the cinema at Wood Green shopping centre, which Jane Lovell had visited just before she was killed. Murrell had given a description of a man he'd seen hanging around outside the cinema who looked as if he'd been waiting for someone. After tracing most the people in the cinema that night, this man could not be accounted for. An e-fit had been created, which was of course on file, but Thorne wanted to see what difference five months had made to Michael Murrell's memory. He also wanted to see what DCI Derek Lickwood had to say about one statement in particular.

  'Tell me about Lyn Gibson.'

  Lickwood blew smoke out of his nose in a dramatic gesture of exasperation. He clearly enjoyed using his cigarette as a prop, but he was hammy as hell. 'Mad as a cut snake if you ask me. I think she enjoyed the drama of it all, you know, maybe she had a thing for coppers. She was round here every ten minutes, hassling us, demanding to know what we were doing.'

  'She was Jane Lovell's friend...'

  'So she said...'

  'She thought that Jane was being pestered by someone at work?'

  'Pestered one minute, doing the pestering the next. Gibson couldn't make her fucking mind up, which made it obvious to me that she didn't really know much about anything. Basically, she thought that there was some bloke Jane worked with who we should be looking at, but she had no idea who he was. Jane never mentioned his name apparently, which was one more reason not to take it particularly seriously...'

  'Did you not even check it out? Talk to the people she worked with?'

  'It's in the file.'

  Thorne knew full well what was in the file. He'd spent most of Saturday and Sunday ploughing through the reports on Jane Lovell and Katie Choi. Patterns of dried blood on wasteland. Stab wounds running into the hundreds. Another weekend of light reading. He waited Lickwood out.

  'Without a name it was a waste of time. It's not a small company. We asked around, got a feel of the place, looked at a couple of people, but short of asking if anybody there was harassing a woman who'd just been found murdered, there was bugger all we could do.'

  Thorne was finding it hard to maintain even a pretence of respect for the man's rank. 'What about company politics? There's always rumours. Couldn't you find the office gossip?'

  Lickwood leaned back in his chair again, striking a pose, only inches from tumbling arse over tit. 'Well, that was the problem, mate. We'd already found her, hadn't we? Dead as mutton, a hundred yards off the Wood Green High Road. As far as we could tell, Jane Lovell was the office gossip...'

  Dave Holland rarely went to the cinema. He and Sophie were much fonder of a night in with a rented video, and if he sometimes wondered whether or not he was missing ou
t on something, one look at the seedy, sticky-carpeted interior of the Odeon, Wood Green told him he was better off with Blockbuster.

  Michael Murrell was a tall, unnaturally skinny black man in his late thirties, who coughed to announce his presence, brushed nonexistent lint from the sleeve of his blazer, and announced curtly that he could give Holland five minutes of his time at the most. It took a lot less than that for Holland to realise that this man's job as From of House Manager was pretty much all he had going for him. What he lacked in warmth he made up for in efficiency and an unparalleled knowledge of popcorn sales. He could doubtless have told him how many buckets of salty or sweet had been sold in the last calendar month, and whether men or women were the biggest consumers of cheese-covered nachos. Though not exactly charmed, Holland was relieved. Whatever the cause of this strange devotion to work, he guessed it made Mr. Murrell a reliable witness. He still had, or at least claimed to have, a vivid memory of the man he'd seen hanging about outside the cinema five months earlier.

  'Pearl Harbor with Ben Affleck and Kate Beckinsale. The programme started at eight twenty, the main feature at eight thirty-five and the audience began leaving at twenty past ten. I've got a good memory, Detective Constable, I can still see his face.' Murrell spoke matter-of-factly, staring at Holland from behind thick, oversize glasses.

  'You see, what sticks in my mind is that he didn't look shifty or suspicious.., as much as scared.'

  Sarah McEvoy could smoke for England, but Lyn Gibson made her look like a lightweight. She worked for a small PR firm in Putney, in a building with a strict No Smoking policy. They'd been standing in the car park, freezing their arses off for twenty minutes and already there were cigarette butts scattered around their feet. Lyn Gibson's were easy to spot. The ones with the bright red lipstick. Four of them.

  The fact that her mouth was otherwise occupied, was only one reason why she wasn't saying much to begin with about her friend's death. It was obviously still difficult to talk about in any depth. McEvoy knew better than to push. Five months was a long time in Serious Crime. A lot of bodies. To the friends and relatives of the dead, five months was a moment.

  'Jane wasn't a saint, you know, but there was never any malice in her.' When Lyn did speak, she spoke slowly, in a series of disconnected statements, as if seeking some reassurance in this catalogue of things that were true, this solid analysis of her dead friend's character.

  'She was always laughing. With me at any rate. I know she had a good old cry on her own sometimes though...'

  It was only when McEvoy mentioned Jane Lovell's job that Lyn Gibson became animated. Then, she spoke passionately about a man that her friend had said was bothering her. Jane had admitted that she'd flirted with him, maybe even led him on a little, but it was only teasing. She'd never really been interested.

  'Something about him worried her though. She could never really say what it was and when I tried to find out more she shut up, like it was something spooky. I never even knew the bloke's name. But you should try and find him. I know that wanker Lickwood thought I was some kind of nutter, but I knew Jane. You know... ?'

  McEvoy was impressed. The woman was angry, but as far as McEvoy could tell, she had no axe to grind. There was a burst of throaty laughter as Lyn Gibson put another cigarette in her mouth, but as she lit it, McEvoy could see the flame reflected in the tears that were gathering, ready to drop.

  'I told her to come and stay at mine, you know. Stupid cow was too fond of her own bed.' She laughed again, and the laugh became a cough. She took a deep drag and pressed the heel of her hand to an eye. 'I'll tell you the really stupid thing. The film we went to see that night. It was shit. It was a shit film...'

  It was amazing how much a simple thing like the Christmas lights in Kentish Town could raise Thorne's spirits. They were a long way removed from the gaudy display of Oxford Street or Brent Cross, just simple strings of white bulbs stretching from one side of the main road to the other, but he found them bizarrely uplifting after two hours in the company of Derek Lickwood.

  Thorne liked Christmas. He didn't get as excited as he had when he'd been a kid, but then who did? As an only child, it had always been special. Now, he could afford to be cynical when the decorations started appearing in shops sometime just after Easter, and marvel at how much money was spent, but he always hoped for a white Christmas, and a kids' choir singing The Bleak Midwinter still made him teary.

  This brief, early flowering of seasonal cheer was more than a little pissed upon when Thorne arrived home and opened his post to discover that his one and, thus far, only Christmas card was from the Bengal Lancer, thanking him for another year of custom. Now seemed like as good a time as any to thank them for their card-cum-calendar, by ringing to order a home delivery.

  Moving to get the phone from the table by the front door, Thorne noticed the light blinking on the answering machine. He pressed play and then, a few seconds later, hit the Stop button as soon as he heard his father's voice. Thorne knew that the message itself would almost certainly be unimportant; just the latest in a long line of thinly veiled hints about his failure to ring.

  Thorne took the hint and picked up the phone. Since the death of his mother two and a half years earlier, the relationship between Tom and Jim Thorne had settled into one defined by the father's absurd, almost pathological fondness for pointless quizzes and stupid jokes, and the son's grim acceptance of blame for the fact that the distance between them was far more than the twenty-five miles from North London to St Albans.

  Forced laughter and instant guilt.

  It was usually the joke that came first. 'Tom, what is ET short for?'

  'Go on dad...'

  'Because he's only got little legs.'

  Then the guilt, which tonight took the form of the annual amble round the houses to decide where Thorne's father was going to spend Christmas. He'd spent the last two with Thorne in London, and the couple before that, when there'd been three of them. The days when there had been four of them to exchange socks and perfume, eat dry turkey, argue over the Queen's speech and then fall asleep in front of The Great Escape, seemed like a long way away. The days before strokes and hospital visits and a grief that changed people for ever. The days before affairs.

  Now, there was just the father and the son, and it was as if the old man needed to be wooed, like a girl. He had a sister in Brighton, whose name would go unmentioned all year and would then be mysteriously dropped into the conversation around the same time that the first Christmassy Woolworths adverts appeared on television. Thorne knew his dad's 'I know you're busy, let's not bother' routine by heart. Like Santa, it came once a year and Thorne had started off believing it. Yes, he might go to Eileen's... maybe it would be easier for everybody.., he didn't want to put anybody to any trouble.., he promised to tell him as soon as he knew what he was doing... Thorne was well aware that the old sod knew exactly what he was doing.

  By the time two cans of Sainsbury's premium Belgian lager had washed down a plateful of Kentish Town's finest Kashmiri food, Thorne had stopped being pissed off with his father. It was time to catch up with McEvoy and Holland.

  Holland told Thorne that he'd gone through Margie Knight's description with Michael Murrell, and even though they were similar, Murrell maintained that the man he'd seen had been wearing glasses.

  'Right, let's get Knight and Murrell together,' Thorne said, 'Come up with something definitive.'

  McEvoy confirmed that Lyn Gibson's story needed checking out. Something had gone on with somebody at Jane Lovell's office and it was worth looking into. After all, might not at least one of the killers have started close to home? Started with somebody he knew? Thorne had been thinking exactly the same thing and despite what Lickwood had said about it being a waste of time, he'd already decided to see what he could find out. He'd have done it anyway, whatever DS

  McEvoy had thought of Lyn Gibson, just to annoy Derek Lickwood. If he couldn't punch him, he could at least piss him off. As he spoke to
McEvoy, Thorne gathered up the takeaway cartons off the floor. Elvis, his cat, squirmed around his ankles, yowling. He'd inherited her, stupid name and all, a year earlier in unpleasant circumstances, during the hunt for the 'Sleepyhead' killer. Elvis was a nervous moggy, but it never seemed to affect her appetite. Thorne carried the rubbish through to the kitchen. He couldn't say that he actually liked his flat very much, but it was at least tidy, most of the time.

  He scraped the dried remains of his dinner into the bin, thinking that it would be nice to hear a woman say how tidy his flat was. Sarah McEvoy told Thorne that she'd see him tomorrow and switched off her phone. She smiled across a Dave Holland who, not two minutes before, had said and done exactly the same things. The bell rang for last orders. Holland looked first at his watch and then at McEvoy. She nodded and reached for a cigarette as he picked up their empty glasses and began pushing his way through the crowd towards the bar.

  Thorne sat thinking about the day, no crowds keeping him from drink. It had been a day when sirens had wailed. When he'd been aware of the all too familiar noise, more so than usual; every few minutes, moving towards or away from him. The Doppler effect of one barely registering, before another took its place. Perhaps there'd been some horrible incident. A train crash. A fire in a tube station. Or perhaps it was just another day in a city Thorne loved and hated in pretty much equal measure.

  Police cars, ambulances, screaming their way around the streets of the capital.

  The sound of London.