Scaredy cat (23 page)

'When she was with Smart?'

'After. A bit after that. She was ahead of him and the car pulled up.'

'The blue Vauxhall Cavalier...'

She stared down at her blanket, clutched at it. 'You know all this.'

Thorne shook his head. She looked away. 'Smart must have been very upset. He saw it all happen, didn't he?'

She turned back to him quickly. 'Yes. He was upset. He never stopped crying afterwards. Smart saw everything. He saw her get into the car. He saw the man who was driving it. He told the police what the man who was driving the car looked like, you can check.'

'He told the police? Or he told you and then you told the police?'

'Both, both.' She rot-rotted and one liver-spotted hand began to rap lightly on the arm of her chair.

McEvoy was on her feet now, standing directly behind Annie Nicklin's chair. 'This man, the man that Stuart saw, did he grab Karen? Did he get out of the car? Force her?' McEvoy might just as well have been talking to herself. She stared at Thorne across the white hair of Annie Nicklin's bowed head. She shrugged. Enough?

Despite what Thorne had said to McEvoy in the car on the way over, he had an urge to shout at this old woman, to bully her. He raised his voice only slightly, but as soon as he began to speak, Annie Nicklin raised her head. She met his gaze for the first time, and held it.

'Did Smart have any idea why? If this man didn't force her, did Smart have any idea why Karen McMahon got into his car? Did he tell you that, Annie?'

Thorne could feel his hard stare being returned with interest. Then, as if the movement was painful, she dragged her eyes away from his and down towards the floor, one hand clasping the blanket for dear life and the other reaching for the walking stick. It was only after a few seconds that Thorne became aware of what was happening and glanced down. The knocking of the stick against his shin was almost imperceptible. The impact of the rubber tip against the bone was feeble, but the impulse behind the movement was anything but. Annie Nicklin was poking and prodding, trying to push him away, to poke and push him away. Jabbing and pushing at him... In time with the jerky movements of her withered arm and knotted stick, she spoke. Her voice was clear and high, and the tone of it took on a strange sing-song quality as she spoke the same five words over and over again.

'She got into a car...'

Urging the Mondeo back towards Hendon, along the bizarrely named Honeypot Lane, Thorne pictured a girl in a white dress - he had no idea what Karen McMahon had really been wearing, but it had been a summer's day - pulling open the door of a blue car, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear and climbing in.

At the edge of the picture stood a boy called Stuart Nicklin, blurry, with his head slightly bowed, but with those dark eyes taking in every detail. Absent, but very much there, like a phantom image or a double exposure, was a man named Martin Palmer, still utterly fucked up nearly twenty years later.

There was something wrong with the picture...

'So, nature or nurture?' McEvoy said, as they got near to Becke House.

Thorne smiled. 'I'm saying nothing.'

'A lot like the old woman then...'

Thorne had to agree. 'I've known armed robbers, rapists ... I've interviewed axe murderers who gave it up easier.' McEvoy laughed, but Thorne was being deadly serious. 'If Nicklin's got a fraction of that determination, or that.., cunning, we're in trouble.'

'What about Palmer's parents?'

Thorne shook his head. There was really no need, and besides, they would know what was happening soon enough. One phone call from Palmer, a day or two after he'd given himself up, had established how Nicklin had tracked him down. 'Oh yes, a nice boy you were at school with called, trying to get hold of you ... didn't leave his name.., wanted it to be a surprise, I think.' Beyond that, there was nothing useful to be had out of them. Eventually, it would just be about giving them the bad news.

He was intrigued, but also a little relieved that Annie Nicklin had shown no interest in news of any sort about her son or his whereabouts. That would have been decidedly tricky.

'Oh yes, he's turned up... But...'

At the Peel Centre, they pulled up to the security barrier and Thorne fished around for his ID. McEvoy leaned across him and showed hers to the officer on duty. After a moment, the barrier lifted and Thorne nudged the car towards the parking bays.

'Got plans this evening?' Thorne asked.

McEvoy turned away and stared out of the window. There were a dozen or so recruits working with dogs on the far side of the compound.

'Not really. Early night, I think. You?'

'Myself and Mr. Philip Hendricks have a hot date with Sky Sports and a Chinese takeaway.'

'Sounds good...'

'Yeah, if you don't mind being a relationship counselor when you're trying to watch the match.' He pulled a face for McEvoy's benefit, but really he was looking forward to Hendricks coming over. Unwinding. Letting a little of it go...

Thorne guided the car into a space next to Brigstocke's Volvo estate and killed the engine. He stared up at the dun-coloured walls and peeling olive paintwork of the three-storey sixties' monstrosity they had the misfortune to work in. If management had any sense, and a desire to maintain levels of recruitment, they would have instructed the film crew to make sure they kept the cameras well away from Becke House.

'It's a phenomenally ugly building,' McEvoy said, after a few moments.

Thorne nodded, thinking: We're in it, trying to catch people who do phenomenally ugly things.

McEvoy pushed in the button to release her seat belt. 'What's on this afternoon?'

Thorne took a deep breath. 'Well, I'm going to make a few calls, try and find out what's going to cost more, fixing the heater or replacing the car.'

'About bloody time. I'll be spending the next half an hour trying to get some feeling back into my feet...' Thorne laughed. 'It's ridiculous. Why don't you use the car you've been assigned?'

Thorne shrugged. 'I don't know.., it's brown.'

McEvoy was gob smacked by Thorne's answer, and by how much he suddenly looked like a confused and sulky teenager. 'So, get another one...

'I like this car,' Thorne said. 'It's got all my tapes and stuff.'

'Oh right, yeah. Dolly Patton and Tammy Wynette.'

Thorne sighed and opened the door. 'I'm going to kill Holland. No, I'm going to make him listen to some proper country music and taken I'm going to kill him...'

McEvoy climbed out of the car, snickering like the cartoon dog in Wacky Races. 'It wasn't his fault. He didn't say...'

'Actually, fuck that, the music would be wasted on him anyway. I'll just kill him.' Thorne turned the key in the lock, looked at McEvoy across the Mondeo's roof. 'While I'm busy killing Detective Constable Holland, I want you to do something for me.'

'I think I'm already doing quite enough keeping Derek Lickwood away from you. He knows you're avoiding him.'

Thorne smiled. 'Don't worry, it's a lot easier than that.' McEvoy waited. 'Get on the phone for me, and find out who was in charge of the Karen McMahon case.'

Alf from Stoke-on-Trent : 'Hanging's too good for these bastards. I'd happily pull the lever myself...'

He shook his head and broke off another big piece of the chocolate bar, thinking: Come on, Alf, you can't have it both ways. Still, he knew that this was how a fair proportion of the British public thought that he, and others like him, should be dealt with. This was what they considered an appropriate response.

The phone-in host, who was normally there to play devil's advocate, agreed wholeheartedly with All, and the two of them began to gleefully discuss whether or not, if we ever came to our senses and brought back capital punishment, we should stick to the noose or perhaps move into the twenty-first century and go for lethal injection.

He closed his eyes, tuned out the chat.

Others like him...

He couldn't say that he'd ever actually met anybody else like him. Not really. He'd run into his fair share of those for whom respect for the law was a luxury, and some whose moral framework had never existed or had been eaten away. He'd known plenty of men desperate enough to consider anything, but never an individual who was happy to consider everything. This fact didn't disturb him, but neither did it give him any great comfort. He just accepted it as the way of things. He wasn't arrogant enough to believe that he was completely unique. He accepted that one day he might stare across a street, or along a station platform, or even at a television screen and recognise a look in someone's eye.

It was a look he'd certainly never seen in Martin Palmer's eye. Now it was time to get in touch with his old friend again. He got up from the armchair and crossed the room to where the laptop computer, bought for cash in Dixons the day before, lay on the dining table. He switched it on, and while it was booting up, he fetched the freshly cloned mobile he'd picked up in south London on the way home. He'd ditch the computer and the phone the next morning on the way in to work.

He had always been careful to vary his methods. Opening up any one of a hundred free e-mail accounts was easy, and he always took care to make the hardware as near to untraceable as possible. The first few times, he'd simply walked into an Internet cafe. He preferred the smaller places - converted greasy spoons that advertised cheap photocopying, and had a couple of grubby, first-issue iMacs lined up in a back room. These places were tucked away, almost invisible between massage parlours and dodgy minicab firms: places that even the backpackers didn't know about, where no-one served cappuccino or gave a toss about what porn sites you accessed. These were places without CCTV. He'd moved on to laptops which were, of course, ideal for his purposes, and then it had just been a case of where to plug the things in. This wouldn't be the first time he'd used a stolen mobile - he had a contact who knocked them out for next to nothing - but in the past, he'd also enjoyed the telecommunications facilities offered by a number of shitty hotels in and around central London. Just a matter of checking in, logging on and fucking off. If, and it was a very big if, the place was ever traced, nobody would have any memory of the anonymous businessman with the small leather carry case. He connected the phone to the laptop and sat down in front of it. He began to give some thought to what he was going to write. He always liked to get the wording right.

It was funny, he'd almost predicted that something like this would happen, that in some strange way his hand would be forced, his mind made up for him. Now, he had no choice but to respond. The response, appropriate or not, was pretty much the only one he could make.

He logged on and the computer began to dial. In a matter of minutes he'd opened a new account, invented a name and created a password. He enjoyed assuming fresh identities whether they lasted many years or just a few hours in a dingy hotel room. He even relished those which, like this one, he would only ever need to assume in cyberspace for the few short minutes it took to send a handful of words across the city.

Pretty much the only response he could make... He wasn't sure exactly what Thorne had been hoping to gain by going to the school, but there it was. He snapped off another chunk of chocolate. The Detective Inspector was clearly not a man whose actions were predictable or immediately explicable. That was all right. Neither was he.

He laid out his instructions in the e-mail with the usual care. There was to be no misunderstanding. He had always strived to make it straightforward for Palmer, to make everything clear. Martin had always needed that.

Do this, now. Do that, only when I tell you. What was less clear, at least right now, was exactly why he was bothering to do this at all. Why was he sending these details to Palmer in the first place? Why was he issuing instructions which would never be followed, except in the creation of a newspaper story about a murder that had not taken place? Mind you, once the murder that would be taking place was discovered, they wouldn't bother making up any more stories anyway.

So why was he going through the motions like this? Why was he playing their game?

Palmer had chosen to remove himself from the equation and in doing so had taken away with him some of the ... mustard. Dulled that extra buzz. Maybe he could get a little of it back this way. He needed to get it back, to go along with their not-so-clever bit of let's pretend, and see where it led all of them.

But that wasn't the only reason.

If he was being honest, he liked his routines and only he would decide when they changed. So, yes, it was a refusal ... an absolute refusal to relinquish control, but it was also, he had to admit, because of a perverse desire to ... carry on as normal. Business as usual, at least for the time being. He'd always had a sneaking admiration for that very British breed of nutcase who treated flood, fire or pestilence as no more than a minor inconvenience and refused to adapt. There was never any need to move house, or see a doctor or make a scene. Stubborn and stupid. Brave and barking mad. It worked the other way round, of course. It was only ever in this country that people could win millions on the lottery and decide to carry on working in a factory. Of course, in the end, those morons always did adapt, and so would he, when he absolutely had to. It wasn't rocket science, after all. Go with the flow, or rot where you stood. Adapt or get caught. For now though, he'd suck it and see.

He heard Caroline coughing in her sleep upstairs. Poor thing had been feeling rough for a couple of days. As he checked his typing for spelling errors, he made a mental note to pick up some Benylin for her the following day.

He popped the last square of chocolate into his mouth and pressed

'send'.

They rolled apart from each other and lay there, sweating, exhausted. Holland leaned up on one elbow and whispered mock-seductively into the ear of the woman next to him.