Lifeless - 5 (9 page)

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 kil ers in the United States who did their butchering separately but who got their kicks out of commuo nicating 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 actual y clapped eyes on one another. Thorne shivered as he recal ed 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 financial y, 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 al ?

McEvoy took out a cigarette and lit it. 'You said that the kil ers were probably different psychological y. 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 ...' Hol and 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 kil s 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 tel ing me that there are only two of them in the whole country? Two?'

'Two that are actual y 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?'

Hol and grinned at her. 'I'l grab the Yel ow Pages shal 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'l al 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 smal er, 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 whol y 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 wil be tel ing the press about this latest development.'

There was no such greyness in Hol and'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 smal part of Thorne was relieved that Hol and could stil be so naive. 'There you go again, Hol and, 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 fractional y 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-ofthe-mil , bog-standard murderers.

When the meeting was over, Thorne, Brigstocke, McEvoy and Hol and 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 col ating, of organising, of sod al behind him, Tom Thorne was at the headquarters of the Serious Crime Group (East). The teams based here policed ten boroughs' worth of kil ing, Haringey included.

Thorne, freezing in a smoke-f'filed room in Edmonton, sitting opposite one of the most arrogant little g0bshites 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, wel , it al 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 wel -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 col eagues, strol ing 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 Lovel , 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 Lovel had been stabbed to death, the case was as cold as she was.

Thorne could see that Lickwood's reaction was al pose. A typical y 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 al , a little diplomacy was cal ed for.

Cal it diplomacy. Basical y it was just bul shit.

'As far as Jane Lovel and Katie Choi, the victim in Forest Hil , go, sir, there was probably no link at al , 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 Lovel was kil ed by one single stab

wound, clean. The Choi girl was virtual y 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 careful y. 'The only link is the one we're now seeing retrospectively the fact that they were kil ed by two people who, in al probability, are at least known to each other...'

Lickwood, eyes wide, parroting. 'In al 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 kil ed. I think the kil ers 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. Srnartarse.

'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 real y was. At that moment, Thorne would have been happy with just one quick right-hander. Break the fucker's nose. A smal slap even...

'Where d'you want to start then?' Lickwood said, lighting up again. Thorne had, in fact, started already. McEvoy and Hol and were busy re-questioning al the key witnesses, notably Michael Murrel , who worked in the cinema at Wood Green shopping centre, which Jane Lovel had visited just before she was kil ed. Murrel 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 efit had been created, which was of course on file, but Thorne wanted to see what difference five months had made to Michael Murrel 's memory. He also wanted to see what DCI Derek Lickwood

had to say about one statement in particular.

'Tel 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 hel . 'Mad as a cut snake if you ask me. I think she enjoyed the drama of it al , 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 Lovel '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 real y know much about anything. Basical y, 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 ful wel what was in the file. He'd spent most of Saturday and Sunday ploughing through the reports on Jane Lovel 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 smal 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 al 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. 'Wel , 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 tel , Jane Lovel was the office gossip...'

Dave Hol and 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 out on something, one look at the seedy, sticky-carpeted interior of the Odeon, Wood Green told him he was better off with Blockbuster.

Michael Murrel was a tal , unnatural y 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 Hol and five minutes of his time at the most. It took a lot less than that for Hol and to realise that this man's job as From of House Manager was pretty much al he had going for him. What he lacked in warmth he made up for in efficiency and an unparal eled 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, Hol and was relieved. Whatever the cause of this strange devotion to work, he guessed it made Mr Murrel a reliable witness. He stil 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 Harbour 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 stil see his face.' Murrel spoke matter-of-factly, staring at Hol and 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 smal 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 spot2 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 stil 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.