Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  The shadow moved across Thorne’s face as he answered the teacher’s question.

  ‘Yes. He’s moved on.’

  He was thinking about something that had happened a long time ago.

  Years earlier, back when he’d still been Stuart Nicklin and supporting himself by tossing off sad old men and confused young ones, he’d learned about making the appropriate response to a situation. Another rent boy, a spiteful little prick who was older and uglier, had stolen some of his customers. Not his regulars, they were loyal, but some of the passing trade. The fucker was undercutting, a tenner here, twenty notes there, a bit more cash and we’ll forget about the condom – poaching punters to make some last ditch money before his looks went altogether. Understandable, but very bloody annoying.

  He was furious. He wanted to do something to punish the thieving toerag, the little bitch, but he knew that the sensible thing, the appropriate thing to do would be to ignore it. Let it go and move on. There were plenty of punters to go around and there was no need to risk trouble with the police. No need to rock the boat. That would be stupid.

  He was also thinking about what was happening right now.

  They were afraid he was going to disappear. Scared shitless that, with his partner taken, he would pack up and head for the hills. If that was what they were afraid of, he knew that it was exactly what he should do. It was the appropriate response. They didn’t want him to melt away and then resurface when the time was right to start again. So, that was the right thing for him to do. It was simple and sensible. It was self-preservation.

  It would be hard, there was no question of that. He loved what he was doing. He was very good at it and he loved that too. It was a rush like nothing he could remember, and even without the added buzz of the other, even without Palmer playing along for real, he knew that not doing it would be like dulling all his senses. Stopping would be like cutting off the oxygen to the very best part of himself. Giving it up would be like going to sleep for a while. It wouldn’t be for ever, it might not even have to be for very long, but it would be very bloody hard. Still, it made sense. It was the appropriate thing to do, so he would have to try.

  He would try to stop.

  Years earlier, back when he’d still been Stuart Nicklin, having decided not to do anything stupid, he’d made a few calls and lured the thieving rent boy to an empty flat he sometimes used off Glasshouse Street. It was February and freezing. From the small window he could see the crowds in scarves and heavy coats, moving across Piccadilly Circus. He could just make out the icicles dangling from the bow of Eros and the frost on the steps leading up to the statue, sparkling in the multicoloured neon from the vast signs above.

  When the boy arrived, Nicklin beat him unconscious with a housebrick, stuck a funnel in his mouth and poured a gallon of bright blue anti-freeze down his throat.

  In its own way, an appropriate response. After all, it was a very cold night.

  He was thinking.

  He would try to stop . . .

  Thorne, too, was thinking about something that had happened a long time ago . . .

  The boy he’d last seen trudging towards school sporting a feather cut, though he wasn’t an awful lot taller, had at least filled out a little.

  It was three years later. It was twenty-five years ago.

  Boxing Day. Nineteen seventy-six. A two-all draw at home against Arsenal, ground out on a snowy pitch with an orange ball. An acceptable result in a season that was going from bad to worse.

  His dad had stayed up near the ground for a pint with his mates, leaving him to make his own way back. He trudged up the Seven Sisters Road, the dark slush soaking through his boots, filling his turn-ups. The black and white scarf worn as much for warmth as to declare allegiance.

  They looked like grown men from a distance, but as they got close, he could see that they were only a year or two older than he was. They were bigger too, with green Harrington jackets, and red and white scarves.

  He brushed shoulders with one as they passed and a look was exchanged. He had shrugged slightly and smiled.

  Two apiece. A fair enough result, don’t you reckon?

  A few minutes later he heard the footsteps thumping behind him and before he had a chance to react, the first of them was on his back, an arm around his neck, driving him face first on to the icy pavement.

  Cars roared past, spraying water and light across the three figures, but not slowing down.

  He pushed himself up on to his knees and got the first of ­several punches in the face. As the fists came down, he deflected some with his arms, feeling something crack in his hand at the same time as something long and heavy smashed across his shoulder blades. He was crying and straining to get down on to the floor so he could pull his knees up to his chest. He could no longer tell which were the grunts of pain and which were the dull sounds of fists clubbing into cheekbone and shoulder.

  He heard a voice and saw the shadow of an arm reaching across him. The biggest of the Arsenal fans stepped over him, cursing, and finally, he was free to drop back to the floor. He rolled over, moaning, and as he began to crawl away, he turned to see them laying into an older man in shirt sleeves. One of them had him by the hair while the other casually brought his forehead down into the man’s face. The man was Greek, he thought, maybe Cypriot. Difficult to tell with all the blood. Perhaps he was a shopkeeper who had heard the noise and stepped out to intervene. He shouted and swore as the two thugs pushed him down into the wet gutter and drew back their feet.

  Tom Thorne began to shout too, then, for someone to come. Shouting for help as the first kicks went into the groin and stomach. Shouting even louder than the man on the floor as the boots flew in again and again. Shouting for help and running away, fast . . .

  He moved around the flat, turning off the lights, very ready for bed. He smiled, remembering the way his dad had ranted from the terraces: foul-mouthed and usually wide of the mark. ‘Hoddle, you’re fucking useless!’

  He wondered what had become of the man who’d tried to help him and got a good kicking for his trouble. He probably hadn’t made the same mistake again.

  He still felt guilty that he hadn’t gone back. He’d scanned the papers for days afterwards but found nothing. The man was probably not seriously hurt, but the boy couldn’t forget the pain and fury on his face. Twenty-five years on and Thorne could still see it, and hear the soggy thump as the man had crashed down on to his back in the slush.

  Thorne closed the bedroom door, sat down on the side of the bed and started to undo his shoelaces. Twenty years a copper and he still couldn’t understand why they’d attacked him.

  He’d only smiled at them.

  FOURTEEN

  Thorne thought: so this is old age.

  A heavy chair near the television, with its shit-coloured seat covered in plastic and panic buttons everywhere. Handles around the bath and piss-soaked knickers in the sink, and a woman who couldn’t really give a toss, popping round twice a day to see if you’re dead yet.

  ‘Do you take sugar, Mrs Nicklin?’ McEvoy stuck her head round the kitchen door.

  Annie Nicklin shook her head at nobody in particular and Thorne relayed the answer to McEvoy with a more obvious gesture of his own. Though she hadn’t said a lot, the woman in the heavy chair, with her clawed hands resting on top of a green blanket, was still fairly sharp mentally, but her body was on the way out. Arthritis, diabetes, angina . . . the catalogue of diseases had been reeled off cheerfully by the warden – a hard-faced article named Margaret – as she’d shown them into Annie’s flat and explained that they wouldn’t get a great deal out of her. Nobody ever did.

  McEvoy brought the tea through, and as she handed round the mugs, Thorne continued to ponder the question that had absorbed him since he’d walked through the door. Which was preferable? A good brain and a body that was f
ucked? Or hale and hearty flesh and bone, with nothing left up top? Obviously, nobody ever really got the choice, but still, Thorne couldn’t help weighing it up. Considering the options. It looked as if his old man was heading down the second road, but Thorne reckoned that when it came to it, he’d prefer to go to pieces upstairs and downstairs. At least that way, if he were sitting in his own mess, he’d be blissfully unaware of the fact . . .

  He sipped his tea and thought about meeting Ken Bowles the day before. There was a man who could see pain and loneliness just up ahead. He took a biscuit and thought about the Enrights. As if the everyday agonies of old age weren’t bad enough.

  He had the same old thoughts about the boy, Charlie Garner, who was no age at all. His life still ahead of him and already blighted. His mother taken away by the son of the old lady sitting a few feet away, slurping tea in a shit-coloured chair covered with plastic.

  Thorne stared at Annie Nicklin. When she had looked at her son, at Stuart, back when he was no older than Charlie Garner, what had she seen in his future? What had she dreamed he might become?

  ‘That all right for you, Annie?’ McEvoy asked.

  Mrs Nicklin nodded again, slurped a bit more, continued to stare at the television screen, even though it wasn’t switched on.

  Thorne hoisted his behind from the depths of the soft, springless sofa and leaned forwards. ‘We just wanted to ask you about Stuart.’

  Nothing. Just the noise of the drinking. The endless beep beep of a lorry reversing somewhere. A dog howling in one of the other flats.

  Thorne looked across at McEvoy, raised an eyebrow. You have a crack, and keep it nice.

  McEvoy, much to her annoyance, had won that morning’s toss-up. Thorne had not been able to decide which would work better with the old woman – Holland’s boyish, floppy-haired charm or the empathy of a younger woman? The coin had picked McEvoy and in the car on the way out to Stanmore, with Thorne driving and trying to coax any kind of warmth out of the Mondeo’s knackered heater, she’d not been shy about why she was pissed off about it . . .

  ‘I don’t particularly feel like wheedling stuff out of a sweet old lady whose son happens to be a psychopath. You don’t need to have read a lot of textbooks to figure that she might have something to do with that.’

  Thorne hadn’t read a single textbook and he was having none of it. ‘What? Did she lock him in the coalshed? Make him wear women’s clothes and lipstick? We need to talk to this woman, and frankly, I couldn’t be less interested in a debate on nature versus nurture . . .’

  McEvoy clearly didn’t care whether he was interested or not. ‘Nurture, every time. Every time.’

  Thorne stopped at traffic lights and yanked up the handbrake. ‘Supposing you’re right. You aren’t, but supposing you are . . .’ – McEvoy said nothing, stared out of the window – ‘what about Nicklin’s father? Why can’t he have been the one who beat poor little Stuart with a coathanger or whatever?’ Palmer had already told him that Nicklin’s father had left home when he was still a toddler. Nobody knew, or by all accounts cared, if he was alive or dead.

  For a few moments, McEvoy thought about what Thorne had said, or at least pretended to. ‘No. Mothers and sons. Fathers and daughters . . .’

  Thorne leaned on the horn as a white van roared away from the lights and swerved in front of him. ‘You’ve never met my father, have you?’ McEvoy didn’t laugh, so Thorne stopped being nice about it. ‘Listen, if there’s anything this woman can tell us that might help, I want to hear it OK? You’re a copper, not an amateur shrink, so go in there and do your job . . .’

  McEvoy had been laying it on with a trowel ever since they’d got there.

  ‘Maybe we could start with when Stuart left home, Annie.’

  The old woman cleared her throat. Her chest rattled for a second or two after she’d finished. Then she spoke. ‘That’s where it starts and where it finishes. He left. The end.’ It was her longest sentence so far. Thorne looked at McEvoy. Carry on . . .

  ‘So you never heard from him?’

  Annie Nicklin picked up an empty teacup, looked at it, put it down again. ‘There was a letter once, from London.’

  ‘Do you still have it?’

  She turned her head slowly round to look at them and smiled, though she was clearly in some pain. ‘I never opened it.’

  ‘Did you not want to know where he was?’ Thorne asked.

  He couldn’t be sure whether she was choosing to ignore him or the question. Either way, she wasn’t answering.

  McEvoy moved on. ‘He left in September 1985, is that right?’

  The old woman nodded.

  ‘Just like that? Out of the blue?’

  ‘I wasn’t . . . hugely surprised.’

  Thorne thought: or bothered . . .

  ‘This was a month or so after the disappearance of Karen McMahon?’ Mrs Nicklin licked her lips, stared ahead. McEvoy tried again. ‘When Stuart left, that would have been about a month after . . . ?’

  With a small moan, Mrs Nicklin reached for the stick that was propped against her chair and, grunting with the effort, she pointed with it to a bottle of pills on top of the television. Thorne stood up and fetched the bottle. ‘These?’ He opened the bottle. ‘How many? Just one?’ Mrs Nicklin nodded and he handed her a tablet. There was a glass of water on the tray attached to her chair and he passed it to her. She swallowed.

  Thorne sat down again. Pills for Annie’s body which was giving up the ghost. Still sharp up top though. Sharp enough to understand everything. To decide when might be a good moment to take a tablet in order to avoid a question she didn’t want to answer . . .

  ‘Was he upset about Karen? Was that why he left?’ McEvoy was craning her head round, trying to make eye contact. ‘How much was he seeing of Martin Palmer before he left?’ Somewhere, the dog was still crying, and now, Annie Nicklin was avoiding McEvoy’s questions as well.

  Thorne pushed himself up, stepped in front of her. She began to click her tongue and tried to move her head. Thorne stood solid, between the old woman and the television that wasn’t on.

  The gentleness had gone from Thorne’s voice. ‘Tell me about Karen, Mrs Nicklin.’ There was a low moan from deep in her throat but that was as communicative as she was getting. Thorne leaned down close to her, very little patience left. ‘Tell me about Karen McMahon.’

  The case had begun to ring a bell when Palmer had first mentioned the name. Thorne remembered it of course, but not well – a missing girl, a nationwide search – the details were vague. When he found out the date he realised why. The summer of 1985. He had been . . . absorbed by a case of his own at the time. Johnny Boy. Francis John Calvert, a killer of gay men, who felt that the police were getting too close. So close that he had had no choice . . .

  The nightmare a young DC called Thorne had walked into . . .

  ‘Tell me about Karen.’

  He could see the pale, paper-thin flesh around her jaw constrict across the wasted muscle as she gritted her false teeth. With what little movement was left in her clawed fingers, she grasped at the blanket across her lap, pulling it close to her.

  ‘Tell us and we’ll go, Annie,’ McEvoy said.

  ‘She got into a car.’ She spoke slowly and with emphasis, as if explaining something terribly complicated. Just to make sure Thorne understood, she said it again. ‘She got into a car.’

  ‘When she was with Stuart?’

  ‘After. A bit after that. She was ahead of him and the car pulled up.’

  ‘The blue Vauxhall Cavalier . . .’

  She stared down at her blanket, clutched at it. ‘You know all this.’

  Thorne shook his head. She looked away. ‘Stuart must have been very upset. He saw it all happen, didn’t he?’

  She turned back to him quickly. ‘Yes. He was upset. He
never stopped crying afterwards. Stuart saw everything. He saw her get into the car. He saw the man who was driving it. He told the police what the man who was driving the car looked like, you can check.’

  ‘He told the police? Or he told you and then you told the police?’

  ‘Both, both.’ She tut-tutted and one liver-spotted hand began to rap lightly on the arm of her chair.

  McEvoy was on her feet now, standing directly behind Annie Nicklin’s chair. ‘This man, the man that Stuart saw, did he grab Karen? Did he get out of the car? Force her?’ McEvoy might just as well have been talking to herself. She stared at Thorne across the white hair of Annie Nicklin’s bowed head. She shrugged. Enough?

  Despite what Thorne had said to McEvoy in the car on the way over, he had an urge to shout at this old woman, to bully her. He raised his voice only slightly, but as soon as he began to speak, Annie Nicklin raised her head. She met his gaze for the first time, and held it.

  ‘Did Stuart have any idea why? If this man didn’t force her, did Stuart have any idea why Karen McMahon got into his car? Did he tell you that, Annie?’

  Thorne could feel his hard stare being returned with interest. Then, as if the movement was painful, she dragged her eyes away from his and down towards the floor, one hand clasping the blanket for dear life and the other reaching for the walking stick.

  It was only after a few seconds that Thorne became aware of what was happening and glanced down. The knocking of the stick against his shin was almost imperceptible. The impact of the rubber tip against the bone was feeble, but the impulse behind the movement was anything but. Annie Nicklin was poking and prodding, trying to push him away, to poke and push him away. Jabbing and pushing at him . . .

  In time with the jerky movements of her withered arm and knotted stick, she spoke. Her voice was clear and high, and the tone of it took on a strange sing-song quality as she spoke the same five words over and over again.