Scaredy cat (12 page)

Thorne was off the bed, catching glimpses of himself in the wardrobe mirror as he stomped around the room. He didn't look at all happy. He knew that Brigstocke was right of course, but his hackles were up all the same. 'Does he think we're sitting on our arses?'

'The hotel killings will be all over the paper in the morning.'

'What? How... ?'

'The bodies were found by a housemaid who went to turn down the beds. She called the papers before she called us.'

'Jesus. Norman must be up in arms...'

'He isn't the only one. The couple were Dutch, from Amsterdam. Tourists, Tom.'

Thorne grunted sarcastically. 'Oh, I see...'

'I don't care what you think you can fucking see, Inspector.' The change in Brigstocke's tone was sudden, and shocking. Thorne felt a twinge of guilt. The DCI was clearly under some pressure. 'We could have a decent break here, so while we're waiting for the same thing to happen on the other case, I want you to see what you can do, all right?

So get down there and have a look.'

Ronald Van Der Vlugt had spent a fairly unremarkable fifty-eight years on the planet, until the night he answered the door to a stranger in a top London hotel. Now, he lay naked in the bath, an inch of bloody water slopping around his lifeless body, trussed up like a defrosting turkey.

'What about the cuts, Phil?'

Hendricks was kneeling by the side of the bath, measuring wounds, and muttering into a small Dictaphone. He grunted, and scratched his head through his distinctive yellow shower cap. 'Stanley knife, looks like. Something very sharp and very straight. Dozens of them, all over the poor bastard. Face, torso, genitals. Same in there.' He gestured towards the bedroom where Mrs. Van Der Vlugt lay stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, her body as sliced and chipped and stiff as a chopping board.

'No chance he did it post-mortem is there?' Thorne asked. The dead would stay dead, of course, but the living did no harm in searching for a crumb of comfort to offer the relatives. Thorne glanced down at the cuts on the mot-fled belly, the floating feces, the brain matter caked across the overflow. He had no idea whether the Van Der Vlugts had children, or grandchildren...

Hendricks shook his head. 'Too much blood, mate. He cut 'em up for a while, then smashed the back of their heads in. End of story.'

Hendricks switched his Dictaphone back on and returned to work. Thorne turned and wandered into the bedroom, exchanging nods with a couple of the SOCO's who crawled and crept slowly around the room, pressing tape into carpet, dusting surfaces, collecting fibres and hairs; working in a silence broken only by the click of knee joints, the snap of evidence bags and the rustle of white plastic bodysuits. Thorne stood at the foot of the bed and looked at Sonja Van Der Vlugt. She was younger than her husband, he guessed. Early fifties with a roundish face. Silver hair cut into a stylish bob, a well-kept figure. And torture marks.

Thorne had no evidence to support him, none whatsoever, but he knew without any shadow of a doubt that the man responsible had made each watch as he took a knife to the other; the muffled screams behind improvised gags and the straining against bonds exciting him as much as the feeling of the blade nicking the skin, the blood running. The small safe in the bottom of the wardrobe had been opened; there might have been jewelry taken, watches and cash perhaps, but this wasn't about theft.

Not any more.

Walking across the lobby towards the manager's office, Thorne was struck by how much it reminded him of the one at Baynham & Smout. The killer must have been impressed by the marble and the leather. Impressed and excited by the expense. If he was going to steal, he'd want to steal from people that could afford the finer things in life. Thorne knocked on the manager's office door, wondering if the killer was motivated by envy. Dismissing the thought. No, not about theft...

DI Colin Maxwell of Team 2 at SCG (West), had a wide, thin mouth which turned upwards at each end, giving the impression of a permanent smile, rather like a dolphin. His workmates would have laughed at this anyway, but the fact that he was almost always miserable made it even funnier.

'Tom.' They shook hands. Maxwell turned to the short, plump man standing against the desk. 'Mr. Felgate, this is Detective Inspector Thorne.' Felgate stood up and Thorne stepped across to shake his hand. It was only then that he noticed the woman sitting in a chair near the door. 'And this is Mary Rendle, who found the bodies.'

At the mention of her name, the woman raised her head and stared at Thorne. She was in her forties, with short black hair and a scar across her chin. It was Thorne who looked away first.

'How much longer do you think it will be until the bodies are removed?' Felgate's question sounded matter of fact, as if bodies turned up in his hotel on a daily basis.

'We're working as fast as we can, sir,' Maxwell said.

'So ...' Thorne waited until Felgate was looking straight at him.

'The Van Der Vlugts had ordered room service. Exactly what time was that?'

Felgate opened his mouth and looked at Maxwell. Thorne tried not to sound overly impatient. 'Sir?'

'I've already gone over all this with Mr. Felgate,' Maxwell said. 'I'll fill you in later.'

For someone who, theoretically at least, had been sent to help, Thorne was not feeling particularly welcome. It was a feeling he knew pretty well.

Thorne turned to look at Mary Rendle. 'Tell me about finding the body.' He caught her glance towards Maxwell and took a step closer to her. 'And I'm sure you've already gone over this with DI Maxwell.'

Another step. 'Go over it with me.'

'I went to turn down the bed at about seven o'clock.' She had a smoker's voice, parts of the top range missing. 'There was no reply, so I used the pass key.' Her eyes flashed. 'It's perfectly normal.'

'Nobody's saying it isn't.'

'That's it, all right? She was lying on the bed, and he was in the bath. I don't know what else you want me to say...'

'You could start with why you didn't call the police straight away.'

Thorne could have sworn she smiled slightly, as if this was a question she'd been expecting. One to which she'd rehearsed a good answer.

'They were dead, it was obvious. What difference was it going to make? If they'd been alive I would have called an ambulance, but they weren't, so I sat down and thought about it...'

Thorne was gob smacked. 'You sat down and thought about it?'

She glared at him. 'I get three pounds sixty an hour to pick up dirty towels and scrub toilets. I didn't have to think about it for very long.'

Thorne and Maxwell walked across the lobby in silence. Thorne was resigned to violent death. Most of his colleagues were, at the very best, resistant to its effects. Now, members of the public were reacting in the same way, and for the third or fourth time since he'd got out of bed, Thorne wondered what it would be like to knock it all on the head; to run a pub, or work in a shop, or maybe just sit around doing fuck all, until concerned neighbours started banging on the door. They stopped at the lifts. Maxwell lit a cigarette, shaking his head.

'Fucking unbelievable.'

Thorne shrugged. He hoped the newspapers had agreed to give Mary Rendle a decent whack. She was going to need something to tide her over. The look Felgate was giving her as Thorne and Maxwell left the office told him that she wasn't going to be picking up dirty towels for very much longer.

Maxwell pressed the button to call the lift. He needed to go back to the murder scene. 'Listen, you'll be in on it when we get this fucker, all right?'

Thorne looked at the smiley dolphin face, unable to read it. The offer at least sounded genuine. 'Thanks, Colin. Anything you need, give us a bell...'

'The DCI's given us full access to the files, but you lot have done the donkey work, so it's only fair, you know.'

'Going at the staff first?'

They'd been convinced six months earlier, before the killer had gone underground, that he had to have some sort of contact with someone on the inside. Their best guess was that a member of staff at each hotel was feeding him information. They had no idea how he made these contacts, but they had to be telling him which guests were in their rooms, which had ordered room service, where he needed to avoid CCTV cameras...

Now, one of these contacts was an accessory to murder.

'Yes, I think so.' Maxwell nodded, but he narrowed his eyes slightly. Not liking to be told what to do. Not enjoying being patronised, however unintentionally or subtly Thorne was doing it. The lift arrived and Maxwell stepped inside. 'Cheers then...'

Thorne stepped forward and put his hand against the closing door.

'Listen, has anybody looked into a drugs angle here? Just to be on the safe side. The torture, the Dutch connection... ?'

Maxwell moved back inside the lift, leaned against the ornately mirrored back wall. 'Ronald Van Der Vlugt was a rare book dealer. Over here for an exhibition of antique books and manuscripts at Olympia. My bet is, only drugs he ever took were sleeping tablets or laxatives. Viagra maybe...'

In spite of himself, Thorne laughed a little. He stepped back and waited for the doors to shut.

Maxwell was definitely smiling. His turn to patronise. 'I'm surprised at you, Thorne. Clutching at straws...'

Thorne looked at him hard as the doors began to close.

'Always, mate. Always.'

'You look like shit,' McEvoy said.

Thorne took a swig of coffee. 'So do you, and I've been looking at dead Dutch people all night. What's your excuse?'

It was just after nine o'clock in the morning and Thorne had been up eight hours already. He'd got back to the flat at quarter to five, failed to get any more sleep and come into work. The drive in, through the virtually empty Saturday morning streets, had been the best part of his day by a long way. Thorne was guessing that, by the time he got to bed again that evening, it still would be.

Now, he was utterly exhausted and in as foul a temper as he could remember. He obviously wasn't the only one.

'What I look like isn't really any of your business, sir.'

'What?' Thorne wasn't so wiped out that he couldn't start to get angry.

'Forget it.' McEvoy stared at him for a few seconds, her eyes cold and challenging, before spinning on her heels and marching out of the office.

'Jesus...' Thorne took a deep breath. He opened his desk drawer, stared blankly at the stapler for a moment and slammed it shut again. He picked up the paper from his desk, leaned back in his chair and read the Tourist Slaying story for the third time since getting to the office. It was predictable fare, hinting at the unspeakable horror in Room 313 while laying on the 'city no longer safe for visitors' stuff with a trowel. A smattering of gory detail, a heavy dose of outrage.

The newsprint began to dance in front of Thorne's eyes, so he closed them. It might have been a few minutes, it might have been an hour, when he heard Holland's voice.

'Sir...'

Thorne didn't open his eyes. 'If you've got fresh coffee for me, Holland, promotion's in the bag.'

'It's better than coffee.'

Thorne sat up as Holland dropped into a chair opposite him. It struck Thorne, looking at him, that maybe he'd had a rough Friday night as well.

'Margie Knight's turned up.'

It was the instant jolt of adrenaline that Thorne needed. 'Where?'

'Uniform found her last night. Noshing off some solicitor in a parked car on the Caledonian Road.'

If it was what Thorne needed, it might also be the bit of luck that the investigation needed. A simple piece of London business after dark. A wooden top with a torch, a working girl cleaning up on a Friday night and a brief who couldn't keep it in his pants. Cases had hinged on a lot less.

'Right, get her and Murrell in here today. I want pictures of this bloke on the streets as soon as possible. Let's move this thing forward, Dave.' Holland nodded and stood up. 'What's wrong with McEvoy this morning, anyway?'

Holland stopped at the door and turned. 'Sorry?'

'Somebody's rattled her bars. I made some crack about what she looked like and she bit my head off.'

'Right.' Holland looked away, shook his head thoughtfully. 'Probably just being over-sensitive. Maybe it's her...'

Thorne held up a hand to stop him. 'The mood she's in right now, Holland, if you so much as suggest that it might be her time of the month, I'm guessing she'll kill you on the spot.' Thorne was making light of it, but he sensed that it was more than just a bad mood. His original comment had been tit-for-tat, but there was no question, McEvoy did look rough.

'I'll try to find out if there's anything up with her.' Holland spoke as if Thorne had asked him to perform an autopsy.

'Are you OK, Dave?'

There was a long pause, and the few mumbled words that Holland managed before hurrying out of the office obviously did not come easily. 'Bit of trouble at home...'

Thorne had wondered about it before, but this was the first time that Holland had so much as hinted that things between him and Sophie might not be hunky-dory. His reticence told Thorne that now was probably not the time to dig any deeper. Whatever was going on, he hoped they could work it out quickly. Thorne had only met Sophie once; she had seemed nice enough.

Thorne glanced up at the clock. Nearly ten. Brigstocke was due back from a meeting with Jesmond any time, and chances were it would not have been a barrel of laughs. Thorne would bring him up to speed about last night and then give him the good news about Margie Knight's miraculous reappearance.

Take some of that pressure off.

McEvoy... Holland... Brigstocke. Thorne got up, left his office and walked across to the coffee machine, thinking that perhaps he wouldn't be the first one to crack up after all. Duddridge always waited for the customer to leave before counting the cash. It was only polite. Besides, knowing that nobody ever tried to rip him off had made him fairly relaxed about payment. People were always told gently that if their accounts weren't settled to his satisfaction, he could find them.