Scaredy Cat

I owe a huge debt of thanks to a great many people, for a variety of reasons:

Dr Phil Coburn, for his expert advice, sick mind and champagne moments; Carol Bristow, for help with matters of police procedure; Professor Sebastian Lucas at St 'Fhomas's Hospital; Nick Jordan, Bernadette Ford and David Holdstock at the Metropolitan Police Press Office; Caroline Al um; Hilary Hale, my bril iant editor, and al at Little, Brown for their boundless enthusiasm; Sarah Lutyens, my agent, for the furniture; Rachel Daniels at London Management; Peter Cocks for pictures; Howard Pratt for sounds; Mike Gunn for jokes; Paul Thorne for inflight reading.

And my mother, Pat Thompson, for thirty-nine years. Remember what you said about shouting in bookshops...

Roger Thomas. F.R.C. Path.

Dr Angela Wilson,

HM Coroner,

Southwark.

26 June 2000

Dear Angela,

Fol owing our recent telephone conversation, I write to summarise certain concerns which you might like to include as an addendum to my postomortem report (PM2698/RT) on Ms Susan Carlish, a twenty-six-year-old stroke victim discovered at home on 15 June.

The PM was performed at St Thomas's Hospital on 17 June. The deceased died as a result of a brainstem infarction due to basflar artery occlusion from what would appear to be spontaneous vertebral artery dissection. Exsnination being twelve hours post mortem, I was unable to test for Protein C and Protein S deficiency. This aside, and tking into consideration that Ms Carlish was an occasional smoker, there would stil appear to be an absence of conventional risk factors for stroke. I also discovered some minor neck trauma with ligamenteus dsnage at C 1 and C2 vertebral level though this would not be inconsistent with some previous whiplash or sporting injury. Traces of a benzodiazepine were discovered in the blood. Enquiries have produced a prescription for Valium made out to Ms Carlish's flatmate eighteen months ago.

While I remain in no doubt as to the cause of death, and concede that al police enquiries have drawn a blank, I sin consulting a number of col eagues and copying this letter to al pathology departments and Coroners Courts in the Greater London area. I would be interested to confer with -qvone who may have dealt with the body of a stroke victim (prob. female 2030) displaying any or al of the fol owing peculiarities:

Absence of conventional risk factors

Torn ligaments in neck

Benzodiazepines in the bloodstream

If you wish to discuss my findings, with a view perhaps to a second post-mortem examination, I would of course be delighted to chat with you further.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Roger Thomas FRC Path, Consultant Pathologist

P.S. The condition of the body (which honked like a pir of freshly scrubbed wel ies!), was as I told you, of no concern to the authorities sd delighted the morticians, but it was, to say the least, a little disconcerting!!

ART ONE

PTHE PROCEDURE

'Pke up, Sleepyhead...'

And lights and voices and a mask and sweet fresh oxygen in

my nostrils...

And before?

Me and the girls are linking arms to belt out 'I Wil Survive' and scare the shit out of every white-sock-wearing Camberwel Casanova in the club...

And now I'm dancing on my own. At a cashpoint, for God's sake! Unfeasibly pissed. Top night.

And I'm struggling to get the key in the door.

And there's a man in a car with a bottle of champagne. What's he celebrating? One more can't hurt on top of a bucketful of tequila.

And we're in the kitchen. I can smel some sort of soap. And something else. Something desperate.

And the man is behind me. I'm kneeling. If he wasn't holding me up I"d flop on to the floor. Am I that far gone?

And his hands are on my head and on my neck. He's very gentle. Tel ing me not to worry.

And... nothing...

ONE

Thorne hated the idea of coppers being hardened. A hardened copper was useless. Like hardened paint. He was just.., resigned. To a down-and-out with a fractured skul and the word SCUM carved into his chest. To half a dozen Girl Guides decapitated courtesy of a drunken bus driver and a low bridge. And the harder stuff. Resigned to watching. the eyes of a woman, who's lost her son, glaze over as she gnaws her bottom lip and reaches absently for the kettle. Thorne was resigned to al this. And he was resigned to Alison Wil etts.

'Stroke of luck, real y, sir.'

He was resigned to having to think of this smal girlshaped thing, enmeshed in half a mile of medical spaghetti, as a breakthrough. A piece of good fortune. A stroke of luck. And she was barely even there. What was undeniably lucky was that they'd found her in the first place.

'So, who fucked up?' DC David Hol and had heard about Thorne's straight-for-the-jugular approach, but he was unprepared for the question so soon after arriving at the girl's bedside.

'Wel , to be fair, sir, she didn't fit the profile. I mean, she was alive for a kick-off, and she's so young.'

'The third victim was only twenty-six.'

8 MARK BILLINGHAM

'Yes, I know, but look at her.'

He was. Twenty-four and she looked as helpless as a

child.

'So it was just a missing-persons' job until the local boys tracked down a boyfriend.' Thorne raised an eyebrow.

Hol and instinctively reached for his notebook. 'Er...

Tim Hinnegan. He's the closest thing there is to next-ofkin. I've got an address. He should be here later. Visits every day apparently. They've been together eighteen months - she moved down here two years ago from Newcastle to take up a position as a nursery nurse.' Hol and shut his notebook and looked at his boss, who was stil staring down at Alison Wil etts. He wondered whether Thorne knew that the rest of the team cal ed him the Weeble. It was easy to see why. Thorne was.., what? five six? five seven? But the low centre of gravity and the very.., breadth of him suggested that it would take a lot to make him wobble. There was something in his eyes that told Hol and that he would almost certainly not fal down.

His old man had known coppers like Thorne but he

was the first Hol and had worked with. He decided he'd better not put away the notebook just yet. The Weeble looked like he had a lot more questions. And the bugger did have this knack of asking them without actual y opening his mouth.

'�eah, so she walks home after a hen night.., er, a week

ago Tuesday... and winds up on the doorstep of A and E

at the Royal London.'

Thorne winced. He knew the hospital. The memory of

the pain that had fol owed the hernia operation there six months earlier was stil horribly fresh. He glanced up as a nurse in blue uniform put her head round the door, SLEEPYHEAD 9

looking first at them and then at the clock. Hol and reached for his ID, but she was already shutting the door behind her.

'Looked like an OD when she came in. Then they found out about this weird coma thing, and she gets transferred here. But even when they discovered it was a stroke there was no obvious link to Backhand. No need to look for benzos and certainly no need to cal us.'

Thorne stared down at Alison Wil etts. Her fringe needed cutting. He watched as her eyebal s rol ed up into their sockets. Did she know they were there? Could she � hear them? And could she remember?

'So, if you ask me, the only person who's fucked up is, wel , the kil er real y. Sir.'

'Find us a cup of tea, Hol and.'

Thorne didn't shift his gaze from Alison Wil etts and it was only the squeak and swish of the door that told him Hol and had gone.

Detective Inspector Tom Thorne hadn't wanted Operation Backhand, but was grateful for any transfer out of the brand spanking new Serious Crime Group. The restructuring was confusing everybody and at least Backhand was a straightforward, old-fashioned operation. Stil , he hadn't coveted it like some he could mention. Of course it was high profile, but he was one of that strange breed reluctant to take on any case he didn't seriously think could be solved. And this was a weird one: No question about that. Three murders that they knew about, each victim suffering death due to the constriction of the basilar artery. Some maniac was targeting women in their homes, pumping them ful of drugs and giving them strokes.

Giving them strokes.

10 MARK BILLINGHAM

Hendricks was one of the more hands-on pathologists,

but a week earlier, in his laboratory, Thorne had been less than thril ed at having those clammy hands on his head and neck as Hendricks tried to demonstrate the kil ing technique.

'What the bloody hel d'you think you're doing, Phil?'

'Shut your face, Tom. You're off your face on tranquil isers. I can do anything I like. I just bend your head this way and apply pressure to this point here to kink the artery. It's a delicate procedure this, takes specialised knowledge... I don't know. Army? Martial arts, maybe? Either way he's a clever bastard. No marks to speak of. It's virtual y undetectable.'

Virtual y.

Christine Owen and Madeleine Vickery both had risk factors: one in middle age, the second a heavy smoker on the pil . Both were discovered dead at home on opposite sides of London. That they had recently washed with carbolic soap was noted by the pathologists concerned, and though Christine Owen's husband and Madeleine Vickery's flatmate had considered this odd, neither could deny (or explain) the presence of a bar of carbolic in the bathroom. Traces of a tranquil iser were found in both victims, and were attributed in Owen's case to a prescription for depression, and in Vickery's, to an occasional drugs habit. No connection between these tragic yet apparently natural deaths was ever made.

But Susan Carlish had no general y accepted risk factors for stroke, and the tranquil isers found in the one-room flat in Waterloo, in a bottle with no label, were something of a mystery. It was down to the torn ligaments in her neck and one bloody clever pathologist that they'd