Scaredy Cat Read online

  ‘Just get it out. She’s probably got her pants off already. I’ll go and get her.’ Nicklin flicked his cigarette into the corner and strolled outside.

  After a few seconds, Palmer could hear him round the side of the building, whispering to Karen. He strained to hear the noise of clothing being removed, listened for the sounds that he always imagined he would hear before sex – a moan in the throat, a catch in the breath. The only breathing he could hear was his own; rapid, desperate, unsexy, as he loosened his belt and reached for his zip. He turned away from the doorway and stared at the wall, trying to calm down. Trying not to think of the things she was going to do to him. Someone had scrawled a cock on the dusty grey breezeblocks. He looked down at his own, far less impressive member and began to rub at the red marks around his belly where his waistband had pinched.

  He heard movement in the doorway behind him. Her voice was almost enough to end it before it had even begun.

  ‘Ready then, Martin?’

  His hand had moved to his cock without him even realising it. He was moaning softly and stroking himself even as he was turning round to look at her, smiling . . .

  Karen and Nicklin stood in the doorway, their mouths open, clutching on to one another, waiting for the best moment to let the laughter out. Karen was the first to crack, but the laugh died almost as soon as it came out of her mouth and she looked quickly away. Nicklin began to howl, slapping his sides as Palmer had seen people do in films. Nicklin saw the look on his victim’s face and spat out his scorn in between the laughs. ‘Fuck, Palmer, it was a joke. I was joking . . .’

  Karen glanced back. ‘Jesus . . .’

  Nicklin pointed at Palmer’s crotch with a groan of disgust and Palmer’s fist tightened instinctively around his soft, shrivelled penis.

  Karen leaned against the doorframe. ‘Jesus, Martin . . .’

  ‘You’ve upset her now,’ Nicklin said. Karen began to cry softly and the amusement vanished from Nicklin’s voice in an instant. ‘You really have upset her, you stupid bastard. Because you don’t know a fucking joke when you hear one, you pervert . . .’

  There was nothing left to do then but run, as he should have done that day in the park, and the summer before that, and a dozen or more times in between.

  He ran without stopping to dress himself, clutching his trousers to his waist, bolting through the doorway, between the boy with the short black hair who was tugging with his teeth at the wrapper of a chocolate bar, and the girl in the blue dress who was sobbing.

  He ran away towards the grassy, green embankment.

  He ran, his head down, towards the housing estate. Wiping the tears away as he charged through the long couch grass and clattered across a rusting sheet of corrugated iron.

  He ran far away from the nest of snakes.

  FIVE

  ‘How are they working together?’

  It was the first question Brigstocke had asked him the previous night on the phone, and it was the first question he put to them now as a group. They were gathered in the bigger of the two offices. Brigstocke, Thorne, Holland and McEvoy. The core of an investigation that had been sizeable before and overnight had become the biggest that London had seen in a long time.

  Thorne’s answer now was the same as it had been a few hours earlier. He had no idea, but he hoped that together, they might come up with something, anything, that might point the hundreds of officers and civilians working on the case in the right direction. The hundreds working in the industry of killing . . .

  ‘It seems likely that they kill alternate victims.’ Brigstocke looked as though he hadn’t had a lot of sleep the night before. Thorne hadn’t had a great deal himself, but he hadn’t had Jesmond giving him grief at the same time. Thorne looked at his DCI and saw, as if he needed another one, an object lesson in the benefits of avoiding promotion. He didn’t need a lecture from a desk jockey like Jesmond. He knew full well that those wondrous, imaginary places where the buck stopped and where credit, if any, would be due, were a long way apart.

  Brigstocke leaned forward, his fingers interlocked in front of him on the desk, his voice a little hoarse but crackling with urgency all the same. ‘The evidence suggests that they are different types, psychologically as well as physically, but we need to know how they . . . interact. Do they attack their victims together and simply carry out the actual killing individually? Maybe one kills while the other keeps a lookout . . .’

  ‘I don’t think that’s likely.’ Holland was the first to speak up. Thorne was as impressed as always at the confidence, at how far he’d come in a year.

  Brigstocke nodded. ‘Go on, Holland . . .’

  ‘Margie Knight’s statement made no mention of a second man . . . of anybody else at all in the immediate vicinity as far as I can remember, and nothing that Charlie Garner has said would indicate that there was more than one man.’

  ‘Have another word with Margie Knight,’ Brigstocke said. His eyes met Thorne’s.

  ‘I’ll give the Enrights a ring.’ Thorne was already hoping that he would not need to speak to them again in person. At least not until he had good news. ‘Holland’s right though, sir, the boy’s said nothing at any time about two men . . .’

  One was bad enough wasn’t it, Charlie?

  ‘I think we’re forgetting about the time element here.’ ­McEvoy sounded as tired as Brigstocke. Thorne looked across at her and thought that she didn’t look a whole lot better. ‘They could have killed Carol Garner and Ruth Murray together, or at least both have been present when she was killed, but the stabbings in July almost overlap timewise and they were miles apart. Each of them has got to be working on their own.’

  ‘I agree,’ Thorne said. It was about as much as he was sure of.

  ‘OK, so the chances are that, even though they kill on the same day, they kill separately, but we have to presume that they plan these murders carefully. For Christ’s sake, they must get together to work everything out, discuss dates . . .’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘I don’t think we can presume anything.’

  It was possible that the men they were after might never even have met. Thorne had read about a pair of killers in the United States who did their butchering separately but who got their kicks out of communicating with each other. They discussed the selection of potential victims by phone and over the internet. They egged each other on and then compared notes after the event. They shared the experience but never actually clapped eyes on one another. Thorne shivered as he recalled reading that one of the murderous pair had used his last breath to send best wishes to his partner in crime, seconds before they’d administered the lethal injection. If it was true, at least financially, that when the USA sneezed, the UK caught a cold, might it not also be the case when it came to one of the biggest growth industries of all?

  McEvoy took out a cigarette and lit it. ‘You said that the killers were probably different psychologically. What about bringing a profiler in?’

  Brigstocke nodded first towards the cigarette and then the window. McEvoy sighed, stood up and strode across to the window while Brigstocke answered her question. ‘I’ve already been on to the National Crime Faculty . . .’ McEvoy opened the window and winced. Third floor, December, it was a little bit more than fresh air.

  ‘Jesus . . .’ Holland turned and grimaced at McEvoy. She took another drag, mouthed ‘sorry’ at him and blew the smoke out of the window.

  Brigstocke continued. ‘Both the profilers on the current recommended list are busy on other cases . . .’

  Shivering, Thorne reached for the leather jacket he had slung across the back of his chair. ‘Which kills you quicker, passive smoking or pneumonia? This is ridiculous . . .’

  McEvoy took a last drag, flicked the butt out into the wind and closed the window. ‘Bunch of girls,’ she scoffed, moving back to the desk. As soon as she�
��d sat down again, she locked eyes with Brigstocke and carried on as if nothing had happened. ‘Both the profilers, you said. Are you telling me that there are only two of them in the whole country? Two?’

  ‘Two that are actually recommended, yes.’

  ‘That is fucking ridiculous.’ Brigstocke shrugged. McEvoy shook her head in disbelief. ‘Oh come on . . . profilers aren’t like psychics, you know. It’s a recognised science. Sir?’

  She looked at Thorne for support. She’d picked the wrong man. ‘I don’t think now’s the time to discuss the pros and cons of profiling, Sarah. Whatever any of us think, there isn’t one available anyway.’

  ‘Couldn’t we find our own?’

  Holland grinned at her. ‘I’ll grab the Yellow Pages shall I?’

  Brigstocke brought the discussion to a close. ‘Listen, if we find somebody ourselves, if we use someone who’s not on the NCF list and we fuck it up, we’ll all be ironing uniforms again the next day. Nobody wants that kind of bad publicity.’

  Thorne looked up from the notepad in front of him. He’d been doodling.

  Three pairs of eyes. Two drawn in thick black strokes, the eyes big, heavy-lidded, cold. One pair finer, the dark eyes smaller, long-lashed . . .

  ‘Talking of publicity,’ he said, ‘what kind do the Powers That Be think we do need?’ Thorne could guess, but the mischief-maker in him wanted to hear the DCI say it. Such decisions of course were not for the likes of him. He just had to worry about catching the people that generated the publicity in the first place.

  Brigstocke answered in a voice that Thorne thought was no longer wholly his own. He’d mislaid it somewhere between the squadroom and the Detective Superintendent’s office. One on one with Thorne, there was no problem, he would say what he thought, but with lower ranks present, Brigstocke’s tone was unreadable. ‘I spoke to Jesmond first thing and a press conference is being organised for this afternoon. I gather that he will be telling the press about this latest development.’

  There was no such greyness 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 Lovell, 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 of 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?’