Scaredy cat tt-2

by Mark Billingham

  He looked at her. The handprint was clear, a livid scarlet across her jaw and the top of her neck.

  Silly bitch. Waffling on about babies. When he needed a bit of peace and quiet so that he could think about death. For Thorne, the mug of tea before bed had become something of a ritual. The stroll down to the late-night grocers, after discovering he'd run out of milk, was not uncommon either.

  He was in this shop half a dozen times a week, minimum. The three brothers that ran it were Turkish, he thought, maybe Cypriot. He didn't know any of their names. They smiled, sometimes, when he bought his bread, paper and beer, but they didn't seem that interested in getting to know him.

  As Thorne reached into his pocket to pay for the milk, he imagined finding that he'd left his wallet at home. He wondered if they'd let him owe them the money until next time. Seeing as he'd been in their shop six times a week for the past eighteen months. Would they? Probably not. Maybe if he produced his warrant card, showed them he was a policeman.

  Outside the shop, Thorne stood waiting for the lights at the pelican crossing to change, studying the adverts in the window. The one that caught his eye was scribbled in red felt-tip on the back of a postcard. It was misspelled, but the services offered were plain enough. It had been a long time.

  Thorne took out a pen and scribbled down the number on the side of the milk carton.

  TWENTY-ONE

  They'd found Karen McMahon within twelve hours. From the top of the embankment it was obvious where the team was working. The white tented-off area around the grave stood out starkly against the browns and dark greens of the long grasses and tangles of fern. A white square billowing above the bones. Holland began to move down the hill towards the site, McEvoy ten feet or so away. The two of them had driven there together, along with another DC and a trainee detective. The conversation in the car had been sparse and far from sparkling. Now they moved slowly down the slope, their white plastic bodysuits rustling. Aliens descending, unsure of their footing.

  The grave had been found in one of the drainage ditches that ran alongside the embankment at the foot of each slope. Once the overgrown and overhanging greenery had been cu[back, it had not been hard to see or to reach. The ditch was about four feet wide but movement was restricted. The sides were muddy and in danger of collapse, and hours of hard work which had revealed the remains of Karen McMahon could be undone by one clumsy step.

  Holland and McEvoy pulled up their masks and ducked down inside the tent. It was cramped and crowded. There were already half a dozen people in there, crouched or stooping, the tent not high enough to stand up straight in. The sun had not been up long and the morning wasn't warm, but the heat beneath the canvas was stifling. Though the lamps had been turned off outside the tent, there were still two powerful ones inside and the temperature was climbing all the time. Inside the bodysuit, Holland could already feel the sweat trickling down his back as he stepped carefully past Phil Hendricks who was on his haunches at the graveside, and moved towards where Thorne was deep in conversation with Doctor James Pettet. Thorne glanced towards Holland and McEvoy as they entered the tent. Instantly, and for a second or two, he wondered if something might be going on between them. There was an atmosphere… He dismissed the thought, and returned to a conversation about death and decay.

  As forensic archaeologists went, James Pettet was probably as good as they came, but he was no great shakes as a human being. If Thorne never saw him again, he wouldn't lose a great deal of sleep.

  '… moisture is the enemy of composition. Moisture and heat together is just about as bad as it gets. Or good of course, depending on which way you look at it.'

  Behind his mask, Thorne let out a long slow breath and very quickly took another one in. Which way you look at it?

  'Buried in a drainage ditch, as you say, at the height of summer, it's remarkable we have anything at all.' Pettet's voice was deep and he spoke as if he was constantly on the verge of nodding off, worn out by the effort of explaining things to idiots. 'There is a complete absence of fleshy matter and you can see that the bones themselves are mushy.'

  Thorne had never met Pettet before and could only guess at what lay beneath the plastic hood wrapped tightly around the face and the mask that covered the nose and mouth.

  'The non-organic material has been better preserved of course.' As Pettet catalogued it, an assistant moved carefully around the grave, occasionally dropping to his knees or onto his chest to gather up a fragment with long forceps and drop it into a plastic evidence bag.

  'The material of the dress, the refuse bags, what's left of the carpet she was wrapped up in. The rope, or cord, around the neck remains remarkably intact…'

  Thorne imagined Pettet to be balding, perhaps with a Bobby Charlton comb-over and very bad skin.

  Thorne turned away and looked down into the grave, the buzzing arc lights casting a harsh and unforgiving light across its grisly contents. Mushy was about right. Pea-coloured bones sunk down into mud and slime. Tattered remnants of a blue dress, not white, thank heavens, and matted clumps of carpet, all floating in a brown soup. Tufts of hair, plastered to the bobbing skull like worms. The white bleached bones of the human skeleton existed nowhere but under the skin, where they belonged, and in the imaginations of television scriptwriters. Dem bones dent bones, hanging, grinning and unreal in doctor's surgery sketches.

  Not like this. This human stew.

  At the foot of the grave, Hendricks stood back to let one of the team come in close, to stoop down and pluck something long and greasy from the mud. Thorne caught his eye. Hendricks winked at him. He turned back to Pettet.

  'What about DNA?'

  The archaeologist puffed out his cheeks. 'Don't hold your breath.'

  Thorne grunted – as close as it was possible to get to a laugh. The smell inside the tent was overpowering, and, masks or not, holding their breath was exactly what everybody around the grave was trying to do. Everybody but Petter, anyway. The archaeologist failed to see any irony in what he'd said. 'The victim's DNA, yes, perhaps. Get me some comparable material – hairs, fingernail clippings. Sometimes the parents hang on to those things for sentimental reasons.'

  Of course they'd go through the motions, run the tests, but Thorne knew he was looking at what was left of Karen McMahon. 'Any chance of anything from the killer?'

  Pettet almost managed a smile. 'Always a chance. There's a chance you'll win the lottery isn't there? Only possibility is the rope. Bits of skin caught in there, perhaps, but any cellular material will have been destroyed by the creosote.'

  Thorne turned, raised his eyebrows.

  Pettet explained, slowly. 'Creosote is used to weatherproof the railway ties. Same stuff you put on your garden fence. Over the years it's leached into the water running along these ditches. Ironically, if she'd been buried on higher ground, somewhere drier, the creosote in the soil might have acted as a preservative and we might have had a lot more of her left.'

  To Thorne, the disappointment in Pettet's voice sounded strictly professional. Not sentimental like those silly parents with their jewelry boxes full of hair and fingernails…

  Thorne glanced over to the other side of the tent where a small pile of dirty rocks stood in the corner. Petter caught Thorne's look. 'At least all the bones are there. The killer took the trouble to make sure the foxes didn't get at them.'

  A layer of rocks laid carefully on top of the grave. Rocks too heavy to be shifted by the snout of something hungry. Rocks, then a layer of mud two feet or so thick and underneath it all, the body of a 14year old girl shrouded in bin-liners, rotting beneath an old carpet. Safe from foxes.

  Safe from everything.

  A few minutes later outside the tent, Thorne dropped a hand on to Phil Hendricks's shoulder. 'Don't get big-headed, but it's a treat to talk about death with someone who doesn't behave like he's suffering from it…'

  'Wish he was,' Holland muttered. 'Miserable sod.'

  Hendricks grinned. 'He was hard work, wasn
't he?'

  'Like I don't know what fucking creosote is!' Thorne shook his head, the wounded expression just what was needed to set them off. They all laughed then, as they desperately needed to. They laughed and shook their heads as they stepped clumsily out of their bodysuits. McEvoy lost her footing and her hand reached out to Holland for support. The laughter stopped quickly after that, and they all stood in silence for a few moments, taking in lungfuls of wonderful dirty London air.

  'I don't understand,' Hendricks said, looking around. 'He obviously didn't want her disturbed, you know, by animals…'

  Holland nodded. 'Must have taken him ages to find all those rocks. There's not many of them anywhere round here.'

  '… but he didn't seem to much care where he buried her. She wasn't very well hidden.'

  'She wasn't hidden at all,' Holland said. 'She wasn't hard to find. Nobody'd ever bothered to look for her, that's all.'

  McEvoy lit a cigarette, spoke as she exhaled. 'Obviously he didn't think anyone would look for her.'

  'Oh, he knew they wouldn't,' Thorne said. 'He made sure of it.' She got into a blue car, sir. A Cavalier I think they're called…

  'He did this when he was fourteen,' McEvoy said. 'Then he disappears, and pops up again over fifteen years later. Fifteen years.'

  Thorne nodded. He knew what was coming. He asked the question out loud, the one he'd asked himself as he'd stared down at Karen McMahon's remains. 'How many more bodies are there out there?'

  It was warming up. There was no wind at all where they stood at the foot of the embankment and the smoke from McEvoy's cigarette rose straight up, blue against the concrete-coloured sky.

  'No chance on the DNA then?' she asked.

  Thorne shook his head.

  'I told you,' Hendricks said.

  Thorne shrugged. Worth a try. It was all academic anyway. They knew who it was lying back there inside the tent, in a hole they dignified with the word grave, and they knew who had put her there. There would be nothing in the way of concrete evidence on the Palmer-Nicklin case, on the Garner case, to present to anybody. But they had found a body. Bulls eye. Thorne had a corpse to offer up to his superiors. He saw himself rather like a cat, dropping a dead bird at the foot of its master. Stroke me. See? Look at how clever I am. Thorne had never felt less clever in his life.

  They turned at a rustle of canvas from behind them, and saw Pettet emerge from the tent carrying a small plastic evidence bag. He pulled down his mask and strolled across to them. Thorne was pleased to see that he had been right about the bad skin.

  'I thought you might want to see this.'

  He held out the bag, and Thorne and the others clustered around, staring at what was inside. Whatever it was had once been a bright colour, but was now faded and thick with black mud. It was Holland who first made sense of the broken down and barely legible lettering.

  'Bloody hell, I used to love those. Can you still get them?'

  Hendricks leaned in a little closer, peering at the plastic bag. Its sides were streaked with muck. The bottom filled with dirty water, gritty with tiny stones and traces of bone marrow. 'What is it?'

  'It's the wrapper off a chocolate bar,' Thorne said. 'And no, I don't think you can get them any more.' He guessed not anyway, unless Nicklin's tastes had changed. It wasn't the same brand as the one they'd found licked clean and clutched in Charlie Garner's hand, but its presence chilled him every bit as much.

  Thorne took a few steps up the slope of the embankment towards the cars, stopped and looked back. He spoke to Pettet, staring over his head at the small white tent. 'Be careful taking her out of there, will you?'

  Pettet opened his mouth to reply, but Thorne was already turning and climbing away up the hill. He clutched the white plastic bodysuit in his fist, wondering just how much protection it provided against what Hendricks had called the little pieces of death. Back in that tent, there would have been millions of c-hem floating around, settling unseen against the bright white material. Some would have got through and ended up sitting on the skin, nestling in the cuffs and trapped on the soles of shoes. Waiting to sparkle when the time was right.

  When it was dark enough.

  Thorne took a breath and started to climb faster. He was starting to feel the ache in his thighs as he took out his phone and dialed Vic Perks's number.

  He would have liked to have stayed and waited until they brought her out. That would have been interesting. He wondered how she would look. Probably just one more stain on that manky old carpet he'd wrapped her up in and tossed across his shoulder. The outline of her reduced down and imprinted on it. Bodily fluids marking out her skinny frame in the cheap nylon pile.

  He would have liked to have stayed, but he needed to get to work. He was annoyed but he was not letting it get to him. He was angry that his past was being disturbed, examined, when he had taken such great care, always, to ensure that to all intents and purposes, it had never really existed. He was in control of what lay behind him, every bit as much as he was of what lay ahead. It wound him up to see them taking a little of that control away. He felt usurped. But he wasn't going to let it spoil things.

  Let them uncover a small piece of who he used to be. It wouldn't do them any good at all. He was about to take another leap into the future. He'd felt close to it the night before. It had been there, almost within his reach when Caroline had been going on about kids. Then afterwards, as she had sobbed and shouted, as he'd reached out to draw her into an embrace, it had come to him.

  The way forward.

  Two major changes to the way he was going to go about things, now that he was working alone again. Two. And each on its own enough to ratchet up the excitement, to get whatever it was that spewed out adrenaline working overtime. Even as he considered what he had decided to do, his exhilaration was tempered by the thought that he would never be able to top it. How could he?

  He was being far too modest, of course. Hadn't he thought the same thing with his hands around a woman's neck, imagining Palmer's hands around another doing as he'd been instructed? When he'd put the gun to that young girl's head and pictured another gun being raised? A gun, as it turned out, in somewhat shakier hands. Now, things were about to change. He had his new motor. Never stay still and never go back.

  This time, the victim would not be chosen at random. She, and it would be a she, would not be plucked from the crowd. She would be carefully selected.

  The second change was the breathtaking one – the part of his plan that really raised the stakes. It was so beautifully brazen.

  The woman who he was going to kill next would be invited to die. Now it was just a question of deciding on a guest list. Sarah McEvoy slammed the door behind her with such force that Holland braced himself, waiting for the sound of shattering glass, which thankfully never came. The windows were equally lucky to survive the onslaught of McEvoy's fury, which moved in front of her like a swinging bludgeon as she stomped across the office.

  ' You wanker, You self-righteous, tight-arsed little wanker!'

  'Listen…'

  'What was it? WD40? Motor oil?'

  Holland felt like he'd been punched in the stomach, winded by the force of her anger, sick because of what had caused it. Gutted that what he'd done had been proved to be necessary. 'It was cooking oil. Just cooking oil…'

  A thin layer across the top of the cistern in the Ladies, invisible unless you were looking for it. The cocaine gone in a second. A trick they used in some of the more drugs-conscious clubs. He'd picked up the oil on the way to work. He hadn't wanted to be seen taking the bottle from the cupboard at home…

  'Think you're clever, don't you?'

  'No.'

  'Any idea what it costs? Come on smartarse, you've got your finger on the pulse, haven't you? Any idea how much it is a gram?'

  Holland had had quite enough of being lectured at. He stood up, took a step towards her. 'Listen to yourself…'

  'I can't afford to waste it…'

  'I don'
t think you can afford not to.'

  McEvoy laughed. It wasn't a pleasant sound. 'Which fucking seminar did you pick that one up at?'

  Holland looked at her. She was shaking her head, breathing heavily. Her speech had been machine-gun fast. Though the oil had stopped her, it clearly hadn't held her up for very long. She'd probably just done a line off the back of her hand.

  'You said you didn't do it at work.'

  'You really think I've got a problem, don't you?' She was laughing again, looking anywhere but at him. 'You go on like I'm some fucking junkie. It's just an occasional thing. Just now and again, Jesus…' 'You said you didn't do it at work, Sarah.'

  She coughed, wincing a little as something came up into her mouth.

  'Yes, well, it hasn't exactly been a normal sort of day, has it?' She pushed past him and dropped into the chair behind her desk. 'I needed something after spending all morning staring into that hole, all right with you?'

  Holland realised that at that moment there was almost nothing about this woman, whose body he knew intimately, that he recognised.

  'No. It isn't all right.'

  She glanced up, threw him a twisted smile. 'Are you still here?'

  'That is the sickest piece of self-justification…'

  'Bollocks! I don't need to justify what I do to you.'

  'No, but you obviously need to justify it to yourself…'

  McEvoy picked up a sheet of paper and studied it. 'The gun that Palmer failed to shoot Jacqui Kaye with. He says that Nicklin delivered it, left it outside his door. The boss thinks that's bullshit, reckons Palmer's lying for some reason…'

  'I know. Sarah-'

  'So we don't know why Palmer's not telling us, but he must have got the gun from somewhere. From somebody who made it very clear that he better keep the who's and where's to himself.'