Scaredy Cat (25 page)

Thorne had never made a habit of attending the funerals of his victims.., the victims of his cases - on his cases. He'd go on the occasions when they thought there was a fair chance of the kil er turning up. He'd stand at the back then, scanning the mourners, looking for one who didn't belong. There was no chance of the kil er attending the funerals of these victims, though. He wanted to forget the dead ones. They were his failures.

It suddenly struck Thorne like a hammer to the chest that he had no idea when Helen Doyle had been buried. Buried, of course, not cremated. Leaving it open for a second post-mortem, should one be needed, or demanded much later by the accused.

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Even dead, her body was not her own.

Thorne swung his feet to the floor, sat up and rubbed his eyes. The sweat was making them sting. He was starving. There was a headache starting...

It was time to stop hiding.

He'd emerged briefly to pay the respects he felt were due to Margaret Byrne, that he guessed she'd never received when she was alive. He'd hugged the daughter of a woman he'd known only in death. He'd held her close as she wept. He'd laughed as she talked about cats and waved as she climbed into the funeral car.

He'd looked across the al -but-empty church at Dave Hol and, who sat stony-faced and stiff, like a sixth-former in an uncomfortable col ar. They'd nodded to each other and looked away quickly. It was probably best to keep a little distance with so much accusation stil flying around. So much blame to be doled out.

Thorne had given himself a fair bit of explaining to do and hadn't made a particularly good job of it. They knew it was Hol and who'd told him about Margaret Byrne and given him her address. They couldn't prove it, but they knew. It didn't change anything. It didn't explain to anybody how the kil er had found out. Or how the kil er had known that Thorne was close to a positive identification. Or how the kil er had been able to pop round to snuff out the threat before calmly going .about the business of slaughtering Leonie Holden.

Nothing was easily explained, but what was obvious to everyone was that Thorne had no business being anywhere near Margaret Byrne. He looked unreliable.

He felt responsible.

Margaret Byrne had died because of what she knew

242 MARK BILLINGHAM

and what she could tel him. That was obvious. She'd died because Thorne knew who the kil er was and because she could identify him and because somewhere, in an inept operation that he'd once been a part of, there was a leak big enough to sink a battleship.

Thorne had an idea or two about who, but was at a loss to explain how or why. The press getting hold of stuff, which now they had, was never a mystery. The soluton was always there, lurking inside the bank balance of a constable with a gambling problem or some sergeant with too much alimony to pay. But this was something else entirely. This leak had led a kil er back to Margaret Byrne's door with an iron bar and a scalpel. This was something infinitely more sinister and something to be guarded much more fiercely.

Ranks were swiftly closed. Eyes turned outwards, fingers pointing. And now, for Thorne, everything was in the balance. Keable had just told him to sit and wait. Thorne had little argument. He was in trouble and decisions needed to be made at a higher level. It sounded good, k sounded like a plan of action, but Thorne knew that real y Keable just had no idea what to do with him.

And Thorne was already sick of sitting and waiting. The nagging headache was starting to scream. He stood and walked towards the bathroom in search of aspirin, but his eye was taken by the smal red light winking at him from the table near the front door. Messages on his answering-machine.

'It's only Dad. Cal me when you get a minute..."

' Tom... it's Anne. I'l cal back.'

Then a voice he didn't recognise. A woman's voice. Quiet. Reluctant. A catch in the throat...

'Hel o, we've never met. My name's Leonie Holden and I

SLEEPYHEAD 243 "

was murdered a week or so ago. I would have been twenty-four next week and now I'm alone and I'm cold and frankly I don't give a fuck about who told who what, or your career, or matching carpet fibres and I'd be grateful if you could try and sort al

this out, you know .... '

He opened his eyes.

A cold shower. And hot coffee. And real messages on a

real answering-machine.

Time to stop hiding.

Voices, al of them anxious. His father, twice. Anne, twice. Phil Hendricks, needing to talk. Keable, stil trying to save his career, or something. Sal y Byrne to check on the cat. Dave Hol and...

And Thorne needed to get out of his flat and talk to al of them, but in the spaces between the messages was a silence that spoke in a voice more insistent than any other. Murmuring the words that had exploded in his head a week or so before and now buzzed around his brain night and day, like aftershocks. He stil heard them as they had been spoken to him, announced to him, with undisguised triumph, in Tughan's cold and oddly characterless accent. Words that stil numbed him and would force their way, unspoken or otherwise, into any conversation with Anne Coburn or Phil Hendrihks or Frank Keable or Dave

Hol and or anybody else for that matter.

aeremy Bishop has a cast-iron alibi. Jeremy Bishop could not possibly have kil ed Margaret

Byrte.

Lunchtime. A sandwich and an energy drink from a nice deli and a strol around the choking streets of Bloomsbury to stare at the dying.

244 MARK BILLINGHAM

He could stil feel the shockwave up his arm as Margaret Byrne's skul had cracked. He'd felt it shatter like mint cracknel beneath the blow from the bar. That had shut her up. Sil y mare had been squealing and running from room to room from the moment he'd kicked open the flimsy back door. It had only been a few seconds but stil he wondered, as he fol owed her into the bedroom and moved towards her from behind, if the neighbours would be able to hear. As he locked his left arm beneath her chin to keep her upright, and his right hand reached into his pocket for the scalpel, he decided it would be al right. Probably just the TV up too loud. Nothing to get excited about.

He might have been seen too. There had been a noticeable bit of curtain-twitching as he'd walked past the house earlier, but it was al a bonus in the long run, despite the confusion it was bound to cause in some quarters. The jewel ery on the floor would probably have troubled them a little as wel . They could hardly have thought it was a bungled burglary, but perhaps there'd been a struggle? Perhaps the poor thing had thought he was going to rob her. It didn't real y matter.

Whatever they were thinking was vrong.

He could stil feel the rush as the blade moved across her windpipe. As the blood spurted and sprayed, soundlessly, on to the thick, ugly .carpet, he'd jammed a knee into the smal of her back and begun hoicking her towards the bed, wishing he'd had the time to do it al properly.

He could stil hear the purring of the cats, the only noise that disturbed the silence as he stdod watching the life run out of her. Given the time, he'd have liked to make it look like suicide.

That way there would have been no confusion. No problems with the timing of events.

SLEEPYHEAD 245

She'd needed dealing with quickly, however, and he'd done what was necessary. He now realisedthat the rushing, and the way his timetable had become compromised, had probably been responsible for the failure with the girl on the bus.

Leonie, the newspaper said her name was. They hadn't had time, of course, to get to know each other properly.

It hadn't helped, that much was cerin. He had not been calm enough during the procedure. The excitement of the earlier events had made him clumsy and thrown his timing.

He'd have done it careful y, of course, the suicide. The layman's way. The slash horizontal across the wrist, as opposed to the vertical cut, wrist to elbow along the radial artery, which is far more efficient but hugely suspicious. Mind you, they might not even have spotted that. Everything else was taking therfi an age.

But then there was Tom Thorne to consider. There was always him. He hadn't known exactly when Thorne was planning to visit Margaret Byrne, but he doubted she had many visitors, so there was a pretty good chance he'd get lucky. When the papers confirmed the name of the officer who'd discovered the body of 'Mrs Byrne - 43' he'd whooped with joy. The one good thing that had come out of al this was Thorne's.. i marginalisation. Looked at that way, he supposed that the timing could not have been any better. Now Thorne was more isolated than ever.

An isolated Tom Thorne, he guessed, was a very dangerous one.

And that was just how he wanted him.

It was a twenty-minute strol to Waterlow Park. Thorne had toyed with the idea of meeting at Highgate cemetery,.

246 MARK BILLINGttAM

but that was his and Jan's place. Or had been. It was a nice spot in which to waste a Sunday morning. She, desperate to feel like the heroine in some arty black-and-white film, and he, happy to kil an hour or two before a boozy lunch in the Old Crown or the Flask. Both content to spend time doing very little, and laugh every single time at the grave of the unknown Mr Spencer that sat opposite that of the far more famous Marx.

Adjoining the cemetery at its north end was Waterlow Park, a smal but much loved green space, which those who frequented it never tired of describing as a 'hidden treasure'. The clientele here was odd to say the least: a mixture of the chattering classes, drugged-up layabouts and community-care cases with a smattering of hugely pregnant women sent here from the Whittington hospital to walk about in the hope of bringing on labour.

Thorne was fond of it, not least because of Lauderdale House, the sixteenth-century stately home at its entrance. Now it housed kids' puppet shows, antiques fairs and exhibitions of hideous modern art. It had a decent restaurant and a nice, if overpriced, coffee bar. But four hundred years earlier Nel Gwynne had sayed there as mistress to Charles I . A snotty woman had once told Thorne that Lauderdale House was where Ms Gwynne had 'received.her King'. He told her that it was as good a euphemism as he'd ever heard, but the snotty woman had failed to see the funny side. Thorne decided she could have done with receiving a bit of King herself.

Now the place could always raise his spirits. This lovely listed building had basical y been a top-ofthe-range knocking shop. For this reason alone, the park had become SLEEPYHEAD 247

a favourite place for sitting and thinking, with soundtrack courtesy of Gram or Hank on a CD Walkman, an unexpected gift from Jan for his fortieth birthday.

He walked along the huge curving path that ran towards a pair of ropey tennis courts. Every hundred yards or so he came across a figure made of grass, or carved from a dead tree.

Organic sculptures. It was probably some Mil ennium project. What a waste of time and money that had been. He'd spent 31 December 1999 with Phil Hendricks, a chicken vindaloo and an obscene amount of lager. They were both asleep before midnight.

It was as good a place as any for a meeting. Thorne took off his leather jacket and sat on a bench, bolted on to the concrete pathway. He stared across the park at the huge green dome of St Joseph's. The weather was warm, considering that October was just round the corner.

A couple walked towards him hand in hand. They were young, in their early thirties, loose-limbed and straight backed. He wore baggy-fitting beige trousers and a white sweater. She wore tight white jeans and a cream fleecy top. They walked easily together in step, smiling at something said earlier.

As the pair came nearer to him, brash and bul etproof, Thorne felt envy burn th)ough his body like caustic soda dissolving the fat in a drain. They were somehow so light and so immaculate, the two of them. An advertiser's dream couple, walking off the coffee and c:oissants enjoyed in some beautiful y converted warehouse. Thorne knew that they had good jobs and cooked exotic meals for perfect friends and had great sex. They enjoyed everything and doubted nothing.

They were undamaged.

248 MARK BILLINGHAM

He thought of himself and Anne, and wondered if the

two of them were not just being utterly stupid.

Why was he finding it so hard to cal her?

He'd left a message the day after he'd found Maggie Byrne's body, saying that something had come up, but since then he'd ignored her cal s. It wasn't just about the connection with Bishop. It was about keeping something of himself back - that shadowy and indefinable part of himself that he'd need if he was going to get through this in one piece and stop the kil ing.

He was wil ing to risk everything for that, and he knew that if things with Anne Coburn got any more serious, pieces might start to come away. It was armour and it was also camouflage, and he knew that the smal est crack might render it useless. Given time it would probably renew itself. It would harden eventual y, but this was stil not a good time to be... vulnerable.

Yet stil he wanted her close. He wanted her closeness. He watched the young couple strol ing away from him towards the pagoda, much favoured by those keen on exchanging bodily fluids in the open air. He decided that he was being an idiot. He'd cal Anne as soon as he got back to the flat. What the hel was he thinking of, anyway?

He was just a copper, at least in theory.

Cracks in armour? Jesus...

He imagined himself briefly as a boxer, unable to fuck before a big fight. It was a ludicrous analogy, but the pictures in his head amused him so much that he was stil smiling five minutes later when his date arrived.

There were times when it seemed that a woman deprived of the power of speech was the only person Anne Coburn could real y talk to.

SLEEPYHEAD 249

Sitting alone in the hospital canteen and pushing a tasteless bit of salad around a paper plate, she contemplated her failings as a professional. The sessions with Alison were going wel , but Anne knew that if she wasn't careful there was a danger that they would become ful y fledged therapy sessions. And not for Alison.