Scaredy cat (37 page)

GIVE UP . . .

A stomach rumbled, breaking the silence, dispersing the tension. They all had a good laugh. Somebody suggested calling room service, ordering up a bit of dinner on expenses.

Holland and McEvoy pushed through the revolving door and made their way across the lobby towards reception. Holland was wearing a blue suit. McEvoy wore a soft leather jacket over a black dress. They were hand in hand.

'Room 133, please,' Holland said.

McEvoy took a small hand mirror from her bag and checked her makeup.

The woman behind the reception desk plastered on a fake smile that was almost, but not quite, the same fake smile she plastered on the rest of the time. The tremble in her hand was almost imperceptible as she handed over the key.

'Do you need a call in the morning?' she asked. McEvoy shook her head.

'Would you like a newspaper?'

Holland smiled. She was very good. 'No thanks. Goodnight.. ?

They waited for the lift. McEvoy stared at her reflection in the metal doors. Holland turned round casually, had a quick look. A man smoking a cigar on the armchair by the main entrance, fifty-ish, waiting for someone. A party of noisy business types spilling out of the bar. A younger man on the phone.

The lift arrived, bringing with it half a dozen more jabbering businessmen. Holland and McEvoy stepped inside. Holland pressed the button for the first floor.

It was only when the doors had closed fully that they stopped holding hands.

Jason Alderton moved quickly along the corridor, his feet in soft black training shoes that made no noise on the deep carpet. A woman came around the corner. He grinned as they passed each other, got a smile in return.

He stopped outside the door and readied himself. He placed the bag soundlessly at his feet, looking left and right every few seconds, pulling on the gloves. It was important to step up close to the door, to get your face right up against the spy hole. The clothes were utilitarian enough anyway, but up close all anyone could see was the smiling face that looked away unconcerned, whistling.

Jason breathed in and out very fast a dozen times, then knocked. It gave him a little kick that inside the gloves, his palms were perfectly dry. He was getting very good at this.

Footsteps from inside the room. He tensed up, ready for it. It was the surprise that gave him the edge. They were always so completely stunned. He saw that expression on every face. They'd felt safe.

'Who is it?'

'Hotel maintenance, sir. Problem with one of your radiators...'

When the door was opened, in the half a second before he struck, Jason took in every detail necessary.

Fucker in a suit, about thirty, here for the conference like the girl had told him.., average size, not big.., fit-looking, but that wouldn't matter... full of himself most probably, but he would cry like a baby when it came to it... the look on his face, the shock, starting to sense much too late that something isn't right.., a woman, the wife or girlfriend, behind him, sitting on the edge of the bed...

He raised both hands and pushed the man in the suit hard in the chest, shoved him back down on to the floor. He was moving in then, picking up the bag and shutting the door in one clean, quick movement, and the man in the suit was on his hands and knees moaning, and as Jason stepped forward to kick the fucker in the stomach, he saw the woman on the bed jump up, really jump up in the air, just like the old Dutch woman had done. She jumped up in the air and screamed...

McEvoy screamed.

The scream of the terrified wife. The scream of the good copper giving the signal for everyone to move.

Thorne stepped quickly out from his hiding place behind the right angle formed by a line of built-in wardrobes. He saw the look of sudden panic on the suspect's face, watched it grow as he turned, looking for a way out, only to see two more men bursting out of the bathroom behind him.

It would be five seconds, no more, from the moment Thorne stepped out into plain view, to the moment he would find himself staring down at the man on the floor, amazed at the fact that he wasn't punching him into unconsciousness.

As Thorne moved towards him, the suspect tried to run but Holland moved fast from his hands and knees, tackled him around the waist and drove him back across the room. McEvoy moved out of the way, and Holland and the suspect crashed down onto the edge of the bed. Thorne and Maxwell were right behind them, and together they lifted the suspect clear off the floor and threw him across the bed into the wall on the other side.

Before the suspect had hit the carpet, Thorne was stepping round the bed after him.

Up for it.

Ready to do some damage to that face.

The face not hidden by a balaclava, because the fucker hadn't been planning on leaving anybody alive to identify him. The bag over his arm - the bag that contained the knife and the tape, and Christ alone knew what else...

Thorne remembered the last time he'd been in a hotel room. He thought about the bodies in the bath and on the bed. Now he was ready to kick and punch and smash away a little frustration. Half a yard behind him, Maxwell and Holland moved just as quickly, reading the look on Thorne's face, ready to stop him. They wouldn't have to.

Thorne saw something like amazement on the face of the man lying crumpled on the floor between the wall and the bed. In the tussle, his trousers had got pulled down to the top, of his thighs, exposing grey underpants. A livid scratch ran across his forehead. His hair, thick with gel, lay plastered to his scalp like the legs of fat black spiders. Beneath, a thin, bland face, the small eyes wide, the mouth hanging open as he panted for breath. Thorne came around the bed at him, his fists clenched, his discoloured face a disaster area. Thorne could see the man on the floor wondering if his was going to end up the same way...

Thorne stopped dead. He stopped and stared down at the pig-shit thick piece of pond scum, who'd more or less handed himself over to them. The vicious moron who wasn't quite careful enough and who would grow old in prison thinking about it. A tick in a plus column, a feather in a commander's cap. A killer caught for the same simple reasons that most of them got caught.

Blind luck and stupidity.

Sutcliffe, West, Nielsen, Shipman. Virtually everybody on that list his father had asked for. All of them tripped up by a piece of good fortune, or coincidence, or carelessness. Not just the big ones either: Killer A and Rapist B too. Everyday maniacs on any street corner, and the majority of them a long way from the bright, refined psychopaths of popular fiction. All killing for ordinary, dull reasons. Anger, envy, lust, greed. Malign individuals, yes, but also every bit as stupid as some of those that hunted them...

Thorne and the rest of them stumbling around, having good days and bad. Hot streaks and shitty patches. Following procedure or not following it, depending on who they were and how much they gave a fuck. Detectives hoping that this one wanted to get caught and failing that, praying for the sharp-eyed witness, the conscience-stricken relative, the dim-witted accomplice.

Needing all the help they could get.

Thorne knew it, of course. He knew it very well, but once in a while it would slap him in the face. A moment, an image, would remind him. How lost he was. How much he was reliant on fortune and luck-ups. Detective? They needed to invent a new name for it. Thorne couldn't remember the last time he'd detected anything but the smell of bullshit or beer on a colleague's breath. It was five seconds, no more, since he'd stepped out of his hiding place. Thorne felt an arm on his sleeve, heard something high-pitched and unpleasant. Came out of it...

The man on the floor was not looking at him, but past him, across the room at something else. The arm on his was pulling him away not from the suspect, there had been no violence - but towards something else, something that demanded his attention. Thorne turned at the same time as he started to really hear it. He turned, wincing, and looked in the same direction as everybody else in the room. They had their hands over their ears. They stared at where Sarah McEvoy sat slumped against the wall near the door. She was still screaming.

TWENTY-FIVE

When she lifted her head up to look at him, Holland could see that his shirt was sopping, with snot, and tears.

McEvoy had been crying for over an hour.

She'd kept it together until moments after they'd climbed into his car and driven away from the hotel. She'd been hysterical from there, all the way back to Wembley, and when he'd pulled up outside her flat, she'd leaned across, crying so hard she was almost unable to speak, and demanded to be held.

They hadn't moved since.

At the hotel, the two of them plus Thorne had moved downstairs once Jason Alderton had been taken away. They'd gone silently down in the lift and moved to a sofa and chairs in the deserted reception area. Thorne had found somebody, ordered coffee and then looked at them, demanding answers. Holland had been gob smacked at how quickly McEvoy had recovered her poise, how easily she was .able to look Thorne in the eye and lie to him. She told him that her mother was ill, that she was finding it hard to cope. She laughed and said that the business up in the hotel room was probably just down to her subconscious getting a lot of pent-up shit out of her system. Just a one-off thing. A bit of a wobbler, sir...

Thorne had fucking believed her. Talked about her taking a bit of time off. Asked a bit more about her mother. Or maybe he hadn't believed her. Holland had looked in the rearview mirror as they'd pulled out of the hotel car park and seen Thorne standing there, watching them leave. It struck him then, watching Thorne standing with his hands in his pockets, that look on his face... . perhaps he was just leaving it all for another day.

Holland tried to shift his position a little. McEvoy was all but on top of him, her weight making him uncomfortable, but every time he tried to move, she began wailing again. It had started and stopped half a dozen times since they had arrived at her flat, unbearably loud; the noise dredged up from somewhere deep down in her guts. An emotion so raw and unformed, that it screamed when it met the fresh air. Each time, the sobbing seemed to tear through her whole body, and through his, for long minutes at a time until it finally settled down.

With the engine off, the clock on the dashboard wasn't lit, but it must have been well after midnight. A man walking his dog looked into the car and quickly looked away again. Holland didn't know if he understood what he was seeing.

'Sarah...'

She moaned and raised her head. She looked like she'd been dunked in paint-stripper. When Holland opened his mouth, she pushed her tongue into it and he felt the stirring in his groin. It took a major effort to pull away from the kiss.

'Sarah, let's get you inside.'

'No...'

She squeezed his neck so hard that he had to fight not to cry out. He reached up and wedged a hand between her fingers and his skin. 'You need to stop this. You need to get to bed and go to sleep.'

Her voice was hoarse and punctuated, by desperate, absurd intakes of breath. 'Was it nice.., to be proved right? To see me... fuck up at work... ?'

'Don't be stupid.'

'In front.., of everybody...'

'What you said to Thorne was.., good enough.'

'If he believed me...'

Holland realised that he'd been stroking her hair for a while. 'Listen, what you said about me being proved right. I don't give a toss about that, but maybe it's enough of a warning for you to want to do something about it...'

She burrowed her head deeper into his shoulder. She might have been nodding, but he couldn't be sure.

'Sarah?'

She whimpered. It sounded like there might be another attack of hysterics on the way. His hand stopped stroking her hair, grabbed a handful of it. 'This might be the last chance you get, you know?'

She raised her head and stared at him, with something strange in her bloodshot eyes which he couldn't come close to reading. She looked up at him for maybe fifteen seconds. Challenging... apologising.., accepting.., saying something without words; something he would spend a long time afterwards trying to interpret. Then, in the early hours of the morning, with the first few drops of rain crashing onto the windscreen, he could say very little which didn't sound pat and pointless. 'I'll be here to help you, if you try and change things...'

He pulled her head gently back down on to his shoulder, and the two of them sat there, holding on to each other for all the wrong reasons. McEvoy needing to go through this but wanting him to go. Wanting to get inside, on her own, and turn on her computer. Holland shushing her like a child. Changing his position ever so slightly, moving his arm just a little to get a look at his watch. Mary from Rickmansworth: 'He should never be let out. What about the life sentence the parents have been given? What about the parents of that little girl?'

Alan from Leicester: 'It isn't about vengeance, Bob, it's about justice. It's just too soon.'

A child jailed for the murder of a little girl now a grown man eligible for parole. The debate had raged eight months before, over the parole for the boys that killed Jamie Bulger. It was raging again. The phone-lines, as Bob kept reminding everybody, were red-hot... Susan from Bromley: 'That boy should be kept in prison for his own good. If he comes out, someone will find him and kill him.'

That one was his favourite. Let's not talk about releasing our own demons back into society. Let's not say we want them locked away for the rest of their lives because it makes us a bit less guilty about not protecting our children. Let's pretend we're concerned for the safety of the murdering bastards. Priceless.

He weighed up the arguments, as he always did, and in the end, he was firmly with the majority on this contentious issue. The man should never be set free. Killing kiddies was evil. Caroline had gone to bed nice and early, and he'd had .most of the evening to sit and think, and assure himself that he'd thought of everything. He'd considered abandoning the whole thing when Palmer had escaped. He thought about trying to find him, starting their little partnership up again. He bore him no ill will for weakening the last time, for turning against him. That was the way it went with characters like Martin. The fear could be harnessed, but it was sometimes a bit unpredictable.