Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  Bracher was in his mid-thirties, with rapidly thinning hair, which Thorne guessed he was not at all happy about. Clearly an Essex boy made good, he could probably turn on an acquired sophistication when it was needed. With Thorne and Holland, he’d obviously decided that matey was the way to play it: estuary vowels, laughter, innuendo. One of the boys.

  The coffee arrived quickly, and Bracher said his piece. ‘I can only really tell you what I told your colleague back in the summer. We’re a big company and I tend to pick up on most things that are going on, but there’s no way I can be on top of what the people here are up to in their own time. Having said that, there was no-one Jane had a problem with as far as I’m aware. I’m here for people to tell me stuff like that and Jane and I were good mates, you know, so, I think she’d have said something.’

  Holland placed his coffee cup back on the table. ‘I get the impression that Jane was pretty much the life and soul round here. That she liked to enjoy herself.’

  There was a resounding raspberry noise as Bracher shifted on the leather chair. ‘I think that’s why what happened hit everybody here so hard. It can get a bit dull around here if you’re not careful, and since everything went so bloody PC, some people can get a bit touchy if people try to . . . liven things up.’

  Thorne glanced across as a motorcycle courier came through the revolving doors, took off his helmet and strolled towards the reception desk.

  ‘Liven things up?’ Holland said.

  Bracher leaned forward, elbows on knees, fingers intertwined. He had a serious point to make. ‘Seventy-five per cent, at least, seventy-five per cent of people meet their husbands, wives, or long-term partners at work. That’s a fact. But if you so much as ask a woman out these days, you’ve got to be careful, you know? You used to be able to have some fun, men and women could wind each other up a bit, but now it’s all got a bit po-faced. Nobody really talks to anybody else now, except for five minutes when they’re making a coffee or whatever. “Water-cooler time” I think they call it in America. Anyway, Jane didn’t give a toss about any of that. She just enjoyed a laugh, and if people didn’t like it, then sod ’em, you know?’

  Thorne watched as the courier pulled a package from the bag over his shoulder and handed it to one of the girls at the desk. She laughed at something he said . . .

  ‘Was there anybody who didn’t like it?’ Holland asked in such a way as to imply that not liking it, whatever it was, would have been utterly stupid.

  ‘Well, there’s always a couple of arseholes anywhere, isn’t there? I bet you’ve got a few on the force, haven’t you?’ Holland smiled, but only with his mouth. ‘Yeah, there was the odd one, you know, couldn’t see the joke, but we’d just take the piss. You’ve got to have a sense of humour, haven’t you? I mean, we’re all fair game at the end of the day . . .’

  Thorne tuned Bracher out. The courier and the girls on reception were still flirting. Jane Lovell might have been killed by a complete stranger, and she might have been killed by someone she knew well. A third option was that her murderer was someone with whom she was casually acquainted – ­someone she saw regularly without ever really knowing. A courier, a shop assistant, someone she met at the tube station every morning.

  Call it a couple of thousand suspects . . .

  ‘Jane was always up for it, you know? Up for the crack.’ Bracher was still eulogising. ‘As far as I know, she got on with almost everybody.’

  Thorne spoke directly to him for the first time, his sarcasm undisguised. ‘And, as far as you know, Mr Bracher, did she ever get off with anybody?’

  Bracher reddened. He picked up a teaspoon and tapped it against the side of the table for a few seconds. ‘Look, I’m here to make sure that people can work together. Who they’re sleeping with is really none of my business.’

  ‘Even if it’s someone in the same office? I find that hard to believe.’

  Bracher’s mobile rang and he grabbed for it gratefully. As he murmured into it, he raised his eyebrows at Thorne, an apology for the tiresome interruption. Thorne looked at Holland. Time to go.

  Bracher shrugged and stood up. ‘I’m sorry, but unless there’s anything else . . .’

  As they all shook hands, gathering up jackets and overcoats, the thought crossed Thorne’s mind that Bracher had primed a colleague to ring him after ten minutes, giving him an excuse to get away. As he and Holland pushed their way out through the revolving door, a second thought entered his mind. A question. Had he developed finely honed, razor-sharp instincts, or was he just a cynical bastard?

  ‘What do you make of him, then?’ Holland asked. They were walking along Shaftesbury Avenue, towards the Cambridge Circus NCP on Gerrard Street, where Thorne’s F-reg Mondeo was busy lowering the tone. It was bright but freezing. Scarves and sunglasses weather . . .

  ‘I think he was sleeping with Jane Lovell, or had been at some point.’

  Holland nodded. ‘Worth looking at d’you think?’

  Thorne pulled a face. He was a cynical bastard, but those instincts he did have told him that Bracher, though an arrogant, unpleasant sod, was probably no more than that. He wondered how many more of them he was going to have to deal with before this case was finished.

  Back at Becke House, Thorne walked past McEvoy who was on the phone in the Major Incident Room. She waved at him, indicating that she needed to talk. He nodded and carried on through to his own office.

  He sat down at his desk, flicked the desktop calendar forward to Tue, Dec 11, and stared for a minute at the psychedelic screensaver that Holland had installed for him. The vivid colours swam and morphed and bled into one another, and he gazed at them until they began to blur and hurt his eyes. They were there, so he’d been told, to stop the computer screen burning out. Thorne wondered if they made something that could do the same for policemen.

  He stood up and marched briskly out of the office into the Incident Room, not looking at anybody, not speaking, grabbing a chair and taking it with him.

  He wasn’t burnt out yet . . .

  If he disliked his office, his feelings for the Incident Room were closer to pure hatred. There was so much more of it. A room of sharp corners and dead air. A long, dirty window, the light diffused through an off-white vertical blind, one blade permanently broken and crumpled onto the windowsill, where it lay among the corpses of a hundred long-dead bluebottles. A dozen or more desks. Sharp corners waiting to catch a thigh or tear the back of a hand. There was one in particular that caught Thorne several times a week, no matter how hard he tried to avoid it. The room was a feng shui nightmare. Not that he had any truck whatsoever with that kind of rubbish. The only rearrangement of furniture and personal belongings that he had any belief in, involved burglars and fences.

  He dragged the chair across the room behind him, steering well clear of the lethal desktop. He planted himself at the far end, in front of the wall, and stared.

  Jane Lovell. Katie Choi. Ruth Murray. Carol Garner. Photocopies of photos on a tatty, cork pinboard.

  And file names on a computer, sticky labels on jars in a ­mortuary . . .

  Arrows and swooping lines marked in thick, black felt-tip pen on a wipe-clean chart. Lines that linked grainy prints of the four victims to lists of dates, times and locations. Beneath these was another batch of names in a row of wonky columns. Margie Knight. Michael Murrell. Lyn Gibson.

  Charlie Garner . . .

  Witnesses. Friends. Family. Figures at the periphery of the case diagram. Thorne stared at the chart. A few nights before, he had sat and thought about the hundreds, the thousands of those whose livelihood depended on killing. Now, he thought about the more unwilling participants. Those who had not chosen to play any part in the process – a process that ended with their names scribbled on a wipe-clean board.

  Those hundreds of lives touched by a single death.

 
Jane Lovell. Katie Choi. Ruth Murray. Carol Garner. Four single deaths. Two twisted killers. Thorne stared at the names and pictures on the wall in front of him and felt it slipping away. The case was going cold. They were losing it.

  Thorne turned at a commotion behind him and saw Brigstocke marching across the office in his direction. A step or two behind the DCI was a man Thorne recognised from the press conference a few days earlier. He couldn’t remember the name . . .

  ‘Tom, this is Steve Norman, our new Senior Press Officer.’

  Norman, that was it. Soberly suited and suitably respectful as he’d welcomed the ladies and gentlemen of the media into the briefing room at Scotland Yard, and smoothed the way for Trevor Jesmond with a few easy jokes. Nothing that might compromise the seriousness of the investigation of course, or distract the attention of the cameras from their intended target. Clearly he was someone who could tailor his demeanour to any occasion.

  Thorne stood. Norman stepped smartly forward and reached for his hand. He was a smallish man, sinewy and energised. His black hair was gelled and swept back, and his dark eyes held Thorne’s as their hands met.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Tom.’

  There were perhaps forty people in the room – detectives, uniforms and civilian auxiliaries. The hubbub, the noise of phones ringing and printers whirring, was not inconsiderable. Thorne, for reasons he couldn’t explain, felt forty pairs of eyes upon him and imagined that the entire place had fallen silent.

  Brigstocke gestured towards the other side of the room. ‘Let’s go into the office shall we. You can’t hear yourself think in here . . .’

  Thorne led the way. Brigstocke and Norman walked a few paces behind, and despite his best efforts, Thorne could hear nothing of their murmured conversation. As he glanced back over his shoulder, he caught his thigh on the sharp corner of the deadly desktop.

  ‘Fuck!’

  The stab of pain was intense. He kicked the leg of the desk. The eyes of the woman behind it widened in alarm, her arms spreading to prevent a tottering tower of paperwork from collapsing.

  When Thorne reached the door to his office, still rubbing the top of his thigh, Holland, who was on a coffee run, caught his eye. The DC’s raised eyebrows asked the question. Thorne’s tiny shrug gave the answer. Your guess is as good as mine, mate . . .

  Once inside, Thorne poured himself into a chair and was a little disconcerted to see that Brigstocke was still standing and Norman was leaning casually against a desk. They were both looking down at him.

  ‘It’s clear that the media are not giving up on this until we’ve got a result . . .’ Brigstocke said. It was the voice he usually reserved for superior officers. ‘So it’s important that we keep Steve up to speed with everything.’ Thorne was hugely relieved that Brigstocke hadn’t gone as far as mentioning the fabled hymnsheet that they were all supposed to be singing from.

  Norman flashed the smile that Thorne had seen him use to such good effect when he’d introduced Jesmond at the press conference. ‘Russell’s already filled me in. I just wanted to introduce myself properly, and apologise in advance, because at some point I will become a pain in the arse.’

  Thorne, who didn’t doubt it for a second, did his best to summon up something like a smile in return. ‘I’m sure I’ll cope.’

  Norman nodded, pushed himself away from the edge of the desk, strolled across to the window. ‘If a media type says “off the record”, my advice usually would be to shut the fuck up very bloody quickly, but off the record, Tom . . .’ Brigstocke laughed. Thorne sort of joined in. ‘Anything I should know about?’

  ‘Impossible to say,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t know how many things you don’t know.’ Norman didn’t turn from the window so Thorne couldn’t judge his reaction, but Brigstocke’s was clear enough. Thorne knew that he’d better play along. ‘We’ll make sure you’re the first to know if anything significant breaks. We’re chasing up a few leads . . .’

  Norman turned from the window and looked straight at Thorne. ‘Listen, I don’t really expect to be the first person to know anything, but it’s always a good idea to use the press. If you don’t, give them a chance and they’ll have you . . .’ Thorne didn’t bother even trying to think of a smart-arse answer, because he knew Norman was right. He’d seen too many good policemen eaten up. If the appetite was to be satisfied, he needed to tolerate people like Norman.

  ‘Right now, they’re getting a bit impatient,’ Norman said. ‘We’ve made a major breakthrough, no question about it, but we need to follow it up.’

  ‘We should never have made it public. The fact that the killers are working together . . .’

  Norman dropped the matey tone as if it was a turd. ‘That was not down to me, Inspector, as you well know. My job was, and is, to implement the decisions taken at a far higher level than this, as far as they affect the Met’s relations with the media.’ He looked across at Brigstocke, cocked his head.

  Was that clear enough?

  Brigstocke took a few steps towards Thorne, put his hands on the back of the chair.

  ‘Anything from the meeting with Bracher?’

  Thorne was uncomfortable discussing the case as it was actually unfolding with Norman in the room, but he understood that Brigstocke was angling for something, anything, that he might be able to throw to the press office.

  ‘Not really.’ He turned to look at Norman. ‘But we should be able to let you have a definitive e-fit of the man we think killed Jane Lovell and Ruth Murray very soon.’

  Norman seemed inordinately pleased. ‘Great . . . that’s great. Excellent. I’m going to get us maximum exposure. Every front page in the country, every major news and current affairs show . . .’

  There was a knock and Sarah McEvoy stuck her head round the door. ‘Sir I . . . oh sorry, I’ll come back . . .’

  Norman threw up his hands. ‘I’m about done here, Russell . . .’ He started walking towards the half-opened door.

  Brigstocke beckoned McEvoy in. ‘It’s OK, Sarah.’ McEvoy stepped into the room and stood aside as Norman walked past her. Thorne could see him sizing her up, checking her body over, before he turned at the doorway.

  ‘Obviously a DNA match would have been fabulous, but just having a print is the next best thing. If you get him, when you get him, they’ll convict him. Media relations can help you get him, Tom.’

  Brigstocke nodded, looked at Thorne. ‘I’ll see you out, Steve . . .’

  Norman said something to McEvoy, and Brigstocke said something to both of them as he and Norman took their time leaving the office. Thorne stayed in his seat and watched them go, his mind wandering. He span his chair round and gazed out of the window. A glorious view of the industrial estate on the other side of the A5. Stores with names like Carpet Kingdom and Shoe World and Dictatorship of Leather. Vast, American-style warehouses. Everything becoming more American.

  Including the killings.

  Thorne watched the little square cars passing the big square superstores. From the windows on the other side of the building, he could gaze down at the college parade ground, occasionally see recruits being put through their paces.

  Either way, the view was depressing.

  ‘Looked interesting . . .’

  Thorne spun round. McEvoy was perched on the edge of his desk, waiting to be told everything. He couldn’t be arsed with telling her much more than was blatantly obvious from his expression. ‘Not really.’

  McEvoy wasn’t going to be fobbed off. ‘Seemed like a slippery customer.’ Thorne said nothing. She had one last crack at him. ‘I was especially impressed by the subtle way he managed to give my tits the once over.’

  Thorne laughed. ‘It wasn’t that subtle . . .’

  ‘Trust me, it’s relative. Is he going to be a problem?’

  ‘I don’t think so, as long as we let Mr Norm
an think he’s keeping the massed hordes of the press at bay. Right now, I’ve promised him this e-fit as soon as. We need to get Murrell and Knight in here . . .’ McEvoy edged herself off the desk. Thorne saw her eyes flick away from him for a second. Bad news. ‘What?’

  ‘That was actually what I needed to see you about.’ McEvoy tried to sound matter of fact. ‘We can’t find Margie Knight.’

  ‘Can’t find her?’ Thorne was shouting. He knew that heads would be turning outside the office door.

  ‘Look, she must have freaked out after she talked to us. Maybe she’s gone on holiday . . .’

  Thorne stood up, stomped across the small office. ‘For fuck’s sake, Sarah. We should have brought her in here straight away, got an e-fit then.’

  ‘She’s a prostitute. She has a natural dislike for the police because most of the time we’re trying to arrest her or stop her making a living. You reckon we should have dragged her across London, tied her to a chair?’

  McEvoy was reacting aggressively to the anger born out of Thorne’s frustration, but he knew that she was right. Co-­operation had to be just that. Memory was an untrustworthy thing at the best of times. Never a reliable ally. The last thing it needed was to be forced.

  ‘Couldn’t we just go with Murrell’s description for now?’ McEvoy asked. ‘Maybe give the press a couple of options. With and without glasses . . .’

  ‘No.’ Thorne knew only too well how much of a difference a description could make. He’d made costly mistakes before. Inaccuracies, inconsistencies, were unavoidable, but keeping them to a minimum could save lives. It was that horribly simple.

  ‘Murrell’s description is five months old. Margie Knight had a good look at this fucker two weeks ago.’ He walked back towards his desk, stopping opposite McEvoy, making it very clear. ‘I want to see the face she’s carrying around in her head. We’ll put it together with Murrell’s and then we’ll see what he looks like.’ She nodded. He moved across to his chair and sat down. ‘So, what are we doing?’