Scaredy cat (18 page)

Brigstocke closed his eyes and nodded. All right. Thorne acknowledged the nod with his eyes, then spoke the words quietly, but out loud.

'Oh, fuck.'

ELEVEN

The man who used to be called Smart Nicklin was not a big fan of Christmas shopping, but these things had to be done. He'd nipped out at lunchtime and was pretty pleased with the progress so far. He wouldn't be able to face the coming weekend, the last before the big day, the crowds of zombies milling around. Everyone pretending they were happy about handing out cash for disposable shit and shiny paper. His wife would brave the crush of course, but then she had that many more things to buy. For parents and friends, people at work. His colleagues never really bothered. Christmas was a time to forget about work for a while...

He carried his coffee to a table by the window and dropped his bags down beside the seat. She would like the necklace, he was certain, and the smelly stuff, but the sweater was a bit risky. He'd got the receipt: she could always take it back. They usually spent the morning of the twenty-seventh, or twenty-eighth, queuing up with dozens of others at the M&S exchange counter, everyone silently seething, horrified at what they'd become.

This was a time of day he looked forward to immensely. Normally he'd retire to his room about now, and maybe he'd get half an hour of peace with the papers. A chance to go through each story, each version, update or piece of breaking news. He watched the television as well, of course. He was a slave to Teletext in the days after one of his adventures, but there was nothing like getting it fresh. Seeing it laid out on the page in front of him. Feeling it on his fingertips for the rest of the day. He always bought two papers. A tabloid and a broadsheet. Needing both breadth and brevity, the detail and the distaste. He'd been waiting four days now for the latest ... coverage. The stories would always appear eventually, cheek by jowl with political analysis in the broadsheet, or jammed up against some piece of pouting, top-heavy jailbait in the Red Top. He fucking loved it all. The anticipation, as in the act itself, growing keener, almost unbearable as each day without news of what they had done, passed. Now, the waiting was over. Today was the day, and he was really looking forward to what they had to say this time. This time it was going to be very interesting.

He took a sip of his overpriced cappuccino and reached down for the two newspapers in the purple WH Smith carrier bag. An Independent and a Mirror today. An old woman sitting opposite tore a chunk away from a pastry with her teeth and grinned at him. He smiled back as he unfolded the Independent... There it was. There they were.

He looked at his watch. He didn't have to be back for at least a quarter of an hour. Fifteen blissful minutes in which to switch off, enjoy his coffee and immerse himself in the coverage of two brutal murders. One, of which he had first-hand knowledge, of course. One was so real, was so fresh in his memory, that he could still smell the girl's vomit. Acrid and boozy. She'd puked the second he'd raised the gun. Opened her mouth as if to scream and heaved instead. He'd had to step back smartish to save his shoes, then stretch to step over the stuff, and put the gun to her head.

The other one, Palmer's murder.., well, that was one the silly bastards had gone and made up.

The detail was good, it sounded convincing enough, but they had wasted their time. Palmer was motivated by fear, pure and simple, always had been. He was scared enough of Nicklin to kill in the first place, but what he was really scared of, was letting him down. Fucking up would be the only thing that could possibly have scared Martin enough to turn himself in. After Nicklin had shot the girl in her flat, he'd watched Palmer all the next day. He'd seen him come out of his flat like a man in a dream and followed him all the way to the station. Watched him totter inside like a drunk, failure as visible about him as the stained bandage on his fat head.

So, now they didn't want him to know that they had Palmer in custody. Too late. The real question of course, was just how to respond...

He'd think about it more later, while he was supposed to be working. Now he had ten minutes left to read all about the two murders. One true, one false...

He wondered which one he was going to enjoy reading about more. Thorne watched the rest of the world moving round him, over wound, frenetic, going about its business. He saw people, running around like blue-arsed flies, buying presents they didn't want to give, heaving bags crammed with food they wouldn't eat. Unable to stop themselves. Caught up in it. Peace, goodwill and socks to all men... He saw some absurdly happy.

He saw those that hated it, battening down the hatches. He saw a set of shell-shocked parents organising their daughter's funeral.

While all this was going on, Tom Thorne spent the last few days before Christmas working at his own speed. Slowly but very surely pissing off virtually everyone who knew him. To most coppers 'overtime' was a magic word, right up there, and in some cases, well above, 'conviction'.

But not at Christmas.

Coppers got a bit huffy come Christmas. Self-righteous and sentimental, and salt-of-the-earth indignant. Jesus ... (not used in any religious sense of course) ... didn't they deserve a break, them and their families, after the shit they waded through for the other fifty-one weeks of the year? To Thorne, it was a moot point. He didn't get overtime anyway. DI's and above had been bought out with a few grand extra on the annual salary. It was cases like this one that made it obvious how much they'd been shafted. As it was, despite gripes of his own, Thorne didn't blame anybody for feeling fired, for needing a rest from it, but there was one major stumbling block... Killers didn't stop for Christmas.

Suicide was the well-known one of course, but it wasn't the only pastime which became popular once the novelty singles began clogging up the charts. Crime figures tended to go up across the board during the seasonal period and murder was no exception. Domestics, incidents involving alcohol - all increasing, all leaving victims and the relatives of victims, demanding action. None of them giving a toss if your parents were coming down from the North, or if you'd put a reservation on a cottage in the Cotswolds, or if it was your kid's first Christmas.

Especially if their own kid was not going to see another one. Easy to think like that of course, when you were the one cancelling the holidays. No meticulously worked-out rota, no amount of overtime, was going to make the majority of officers on this case think any differently of Tom Thorne. Not Brigstocke. Not McEvoy. He wasn't even sure about Dave Holland. The simple fact was, that thanks to him, they would all be spending Christmas babysitting a double murderer.

Palmer would not be going back to work until the New Year now, but Sean Bracher had been well briefed, so that there would be no problem when he did. Palmer's absence just before Christmas would be put down to illness, and the issue of his resemblance to the man police were seeking would not be ducked. He had come forward and been immediately eliminated from enquiries. End of story. Bracher would assist in disseminating this information as well as smoothing the passage for the new Baynham & Smout employee who would be working very closely with Martin Palmer. One unhappy DC, seconded from SCG (South), would be spending their Christmas ploughing through Accountancy for Idiots...

Palmer's domestic situation would be easy to monitor. He lived on the second floor of a fifties mansion block in West Hampstead. There was one entrance. He would be followed to and from work, with permanent surveillance maintained outside his flat and at least one plain-clothes officer inside at all times, though at no time would Palmer be accompanied as he entered the building.

According to Palmer, he seldom went out anyway and had never invited anybody to his flat, so comings and goings shouldn't be a problem. Thorne was keen that Palmer's movements appeared normal and so, to a degree, this side of things would be played by ear. If he was asked out for a drink (which he had told them had happened, but not often), they'd decide at the time whether to cry off or not. Similarly, at work, he'd be accompanied to lunch by the undercover DC, with a backup team on hand should this start to become suspicious in itself. In fact, the only break from any kind of routine, involved Palmer ringing his parents to tell them that he couldn't make it home for Christmas Day. This was also the only part of the whole complex arrangement that Palmer seemed remotely uncomfortable with. Thorne wanted everything tied down tight. No mistakes. The man he was after was clever. He would, Thorne felt certain, be watching at least some of the time. He might well of course have seen enough already to tell him that Palmer was in custody. Stable doors and horses...

As Thorne had told Jesmond, it was a risk he felt they had to take. There were certainly plenty of risks...

Norman had spotted a couple of them straight away. He himself would handle the media, but the team had not responded well to the lecture Thorne had delivered, that he felt needed to be delivered, on leaking ships. He'd wanted Brigstocke to do the honours, but the DCI was still in no mood to do Thorne any favours. In terms of the bad feeling coming his way, the atmosphere that followed his speech was pretty much the icing on the cake, but Thorne knew that it was necessary. Besides, normally he only alienated the top brass. Now he was getting on everybody's tits. At least this was a change... Thorne wanted this to go right. He wanted nothing in the public domain, nothing, unless it could have come from a source other than Martin Palmer. They could, for example, go with Palmer's description of Nicklin - they could always invent a witness who might have come up with that - but any avenue of investigation that could only have originated with Palmer needed to be walked with the utmost care and discretion.

Thorne could handle the black looks, the comments subtle and otherwise, but the only real moment of doubt had come at the press conference on the Saturday, less than forty-eight hours after Miriam Vincent's body had been discovered.

It was the lies, naked in the light from a hundred flash guns and boldly sharing the stage with Miriam Vincent's grief-stricken mother, that were hard to bear. Someone, it might have been Steve Norman, had actually suggested that they hire actors to play the parents of Palmer's fictitious victim: Thorne was glad he'd drawn a line and said no to that one. This was bad enough...

Norman had led out an impressive looking party, consisting of Jesmond, Brigstocke, a young DC acting as Family Liaison, and Mrs. Vincent. After the predictable rhetoric from Jesmond, Norman introduced Rosemary Vincent. She was in her early fifties, tall and slightly awkward, with a face that had probably been open and easy to read until two days ago, when it had become the mirror of emotions that were alien to it.

The scalding in the belly, the scab to be picked at. Rage and guilt... She spoke movingly of her only daughter, clutching Miriam's picture and trying not to break down as she remembered their last conversation - a row about her not coming home. Thorne stood at the back of the room, behind the journalists, away from the cameras, unable to take his eyes off this woman. He had seen people in the same situation a hundred times, but rarely had he seen the freshly dead part of them so clearly. It was there in every nervous smile, every pull at the hair and quiver of the lip. He winced when she spoke about the grief that the parents of the other victim must be feeling. He felt the shame, like a cold hand at his throat, when she sent them her love and support, when she sympathised with their pain; an agony so crippling that they hadn't felt able to come along themselves... Thorne had made a promise to himself then that, whatever happened, when it was all over he would visit Rosemary Vincent and tell her the truth, and explain why he had done what he had done. That night, he watched the highlights of the press conference on half a dozen different channels and felt the fingers at his throat every time.

He was just about ready for bed when the phone rang.

'Yeah . . .'

'Tom? Is that Tom?'

'Who's this?'

'This is Eileen, love. Your dad's sister.'

'Oh...'

'Sorry if it's a bit late, but we were watching a film. You know, waiting for it to finish.'

'It's fine...' Thorne had actually been carrying a half-empty wine bottle and dirty glass back to the kitchen when the phone went. Now, he sat down on the sofa, stuck the bottle between his knees and yanked out the cork again.

'So how are you love?' She spoke as if he was ill, or a little slow. Thorne was about to fill his glass when he decided that, actually, he was in no mood to have this conversation. He knew what she wanted and he couldn't be arsed waiting for her to say it. Christ, how long had it been since he'd seen this woman? It was certainly before Jan had left. A funeral, but he couldn't remember whose. Maybe one of Eileen's husband's parents...

'Listen, Auntie Eileen--'

'I was sorry to hear about you and your wife...'

So Thorne poured the wine and made the tedious small talk, and waited for her to get to the point; to say what she'd obviously called to say. He'd warned his dad against ringing her, silly old bastard. Now it was going to be embarrassing. He started prompting her, getting tetchier, waiting to hear that she was ever so sorry but she really couldn't have Jim at Christmas. She had a houseful after all, and there wasn't the room to put him up and maybe if he'd given her a bit more notice...

Stuff you, Thorne thought. We'll be fine, the two of us...

'So we've talked about it and decided that your dad's coming to us this year.'

Thorne held the wine glass halfway between his knee and his mouth. He knew he'd heard correctly, but couldn't think of anything to say. 'Sorry? But...'

'If you drop him at Victoria, we'll pick him up at the other end.'

Thorne felt himself starting to redden a little. 'Listen, maybe I'd better have a word with dad...'