Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  Palmer slipped his finger out of the trigger guard. Rested it against the outside. Safe.

  He needed to do it now. He wasn’t sure he’d seen McEvoy move for a while . . .

  ‘It’s called adrenochrome. Did you know that?’

  Thorne shook his head. He didn’t know the name, but he knew the taste very well.

  As Palmer screamed and raised his arm, Thorne saw what was happening. As Palmer levelled the gun at him, Thorne saw exactly what he was trying to do.

  He saw everything, far, far too late.

  The bullet from the marksman’s rifle had ripped through Palmer’s throat before any of them had even heard the shot.

  Palmer dropped to his knees with an odd slowness, but then pitched forward fast on to his face. Thorne thought, or perhaps imagined, that he could hear nose, cheekbones and glasses shattering as the face hit the ground.

  Thorne went down quickly, put his hands on the gun that was lying a foot or so away from Palmer’s corpse. He looked across towards McEvoy, hoping . . .

  ‘Congratulations on being alive, Thorne.’ Cookson smiled, slowly raising his hands into the air. ‘Being alive’s the easy bit though, isn’t it?’

  From somewhere behind them, a distorted voice boomed through a loudspeaker. Cookson took a step towards it, his arms high and straight. ‘It’s feeling alive, that’s the hard part . . .’

  In one smooth movement, Thorne stood up and whipped his arm round hard, smashing the butt of the gun across Cookson’s mouth. He could feel the lips burst. He saw the teeth shatter and split the gums an instant before the hand moved to stop the gush of blood.

  Thorne heard the thump of feet behind him. He turned to see officers pouring in through the gate, and Dave Holland sprinting across the playground towards Sarah McEvoy’s body.

  THIRTY

  The pitch was frozen. A lot of mistimed tackles, flare-ups, silly mistakes. All the game needed was a dubious penalty and a sending-off, and Thorne would feel that this month’s subscription to Sky had been justified.

  He wondered whether his dad would be watching, shouting at the screen as if he were still on the terraces. His dad who had taken him to his first Spurs game over thirty years before, back in the days of Martin Chivers and Alan Gilzean. Thorne wondered how much longer his old man would be able to watch, able to follow the game.

  The call had been typical of him. He’d dealt with the situation in a predictable way.

  ‘Remember the joke I told you about the bloke who goes to the doctors?’

  Thorne laughed. There had been plenty. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The doctor says to him, “Bad news I’m afraid. You’ve got cancer and Alzheimer’s disease . . .”’

  Thorne felt something tighten. ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘So the bloke looks at the doctor . . .’ The voice on the phone, starting to waver a little. ‘He looks at the doctor and says, “well, at least I haven’t got cancer.”’

  ‘What are you on about, Dad?’

  There was a long pause before the old man repeated the punchline, said what he’d called to say.

  ‘At least I haven’t got cancer, Tom.’

  Then Thorne had understood what it was his father did have.

  The hiss of a ring-pull brought Thorne out of it, and he turned to look at Hendricks. He was stretched out as usual, shoes off, feet up on the sofa.

  ‘You said something interesting once,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Only once?’

  ‘You said you thought the smell of formaldehyde put people off. You don’t reckon your feet might have anything to do with it?’

  ‘Piss off,’ Hendricks said.

  Things were pretty much back to normal.

  Nearly a month since Thorne had walked away from the playground at King Edward’s. Watching the stretchers sliding into ambulances. The arms of teachers wrapped around crying children. The look on Dave Holland’s face . . .

  Nearly a month since he’d walked back up that long drive, wondering idly what might have happened to his car.

  How long it would take to scrub blood off asphalt . . .

  Palmer had known exactly what he was doing, when he’d pointed that gun. Thorne should have seen it coming earlier – when Palmer had been so keen to tell him where the gun had come from. A last attempt at a good gesture, before the most desperate one of all.

  Was suicide, which is what it was, the act of a coward or a brave man? Thorne thought, in the end, that Palmer had done what he did, not out of self-disgust, but simply because he knew, emotionally at least, that he would never survive prison.

  The school’s former Head of English, on the other hand, was made of sterner stuff. Of far stranger stuff.

  Andrew Cookson would do very nicely. While the true-crime cash-ins were being scribbled, he would carve out a niche for himself in Belmarsh or Broadmoor. Number one nutter in the nick. Fear was all-important in prison. In a place where getting through a day unscathed was hard enough, robbers and rapists would probably scare just as easily as Martin Palmer had done.

  Palmer, scared stiff all his life, whose one act of anything like bravery had gone so tragically wrong.

  The words of the speech, the platitudes that had rattled around in his head that day, were close enough to those that were needed. To those that were eventually used.

  ‘All of those who worked with her, of whatever rank, will miss her dedication and good humour . . .’

  The faces of Lionel and Rebecca McEvoy had joined those of Robert and Mary Enright, Rosemary Vincent and Leslie Bowles. The flaking portraits of those that had lived to bury their children.

  Leslie Bowles had put it simplest, and best.

  It never stops. Never.

  ‘By the way,’ Hendricks said. ‘If Brendan rings, I’m not here . . .’

  Thorne turned and stared at the scruffy article sprawled on the sofa, at the open and expectant face of the man who had performed the post-mortem on Sarah McEvoy.

  Who afterwards had somehow managed to misplace the toxicology report.

  ‘Oi . . . I’m not here. If he rings. Is that OK?’

  ‘I see another piercing coming,’ Thorne said. ‘What’s happened now?’

  Hendricks swung his feet on to the floor and sat up. ‘You remember when I thought he was freaked out by the job, yeah? Well, it turns out he actually quite likes it.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, now I’m the one that’s a bit freaked out . . .’

  ‘You’re never happy.’

  ‘Me! What about you?’

  Thorne stood and strolled towards the kitchen to get a couple more beers. ‘I’m fine.’

  Hendricks leaned back grinning, his hands behind his head. ‘Yeah, well, so you should be. Fantastic mate like me, beer, Spurs one-nil up away from home. It doesn’t get much better than this really, does it?’

  With his back to him, Hendricks had no way of knowing if Thorne was smiling as he spoke.

  ‘Christ, I sincerely hope so . . .’

  EPILOGUE

  23, Dyer Close

  Kings Heath

  Birmingham

  B14 3EX

  West Midlands

  28 February, 2002

  Dear Inspector Thorne,

  I know it’s taken a while to drop you a line, but I’m sure you appreciate that there’s a lot going on and that it’s been quite difficult for us since the arrest.

  We were very sorry to hear about Detective Sergeant McEvoy. She must have been about the same age as Carol. Please pass on our condolences to her family.

  Charlie is really starting to do well now. He’s settled in very well at school and is sleeping a lot better. The child psychologist is very pleased with him. My wife thought you’d like to know.

  The
real reason I was writing, was to say a belated ‘thank you’ for the tool set you sent Charlie at Christmas. It was thoughtful. I hope you don’t mind, but we didn’t tell him that the present came from you. We’re not sure if he remembers you anyway and we thought it best, considering, to just tell him it was from us. I’m sure you understand.

  Yours sincerely,

  Robert Enright

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As always, a great many people have helped, cajoled, suffered . . .

  Special thanks are due to DI Neil Hibberd of the Serious Crime Group for his patience and informed creativity and also to Pauline O’Brien (Senior Press officer) and Selina Onorah (Office Manager) at the Metropolitan Police Area West Press Office, for their time and considerable trouble.

  For invaluable advice on their own very different subjects, I must thank Jason Schone, Glenda Brunt, Yaron Meron and, as always, the correctly spelled Phil Cowburn.

  At Little, Brown special thanks are due and in some cases overdue to: Filomena Wood, Alison Lindsay and Tamsyn Berryman.

  There are those whose names, for many reasons, are destined to appear on this, and the corresponding page of all books to come . . .

  Hilary Hale and Sarah Lutyens, obviously; Mike Gunn, for his past and his present; Alice Pettet, for notes and a name; David Fulton, for digging me out of a hole; Paul Thorne, for being unconvinced; Howard Pratt, for knowing most things; Wendy Lee, for missing nothing . . .

  And especially Peter Cocks, whose eyes and ears are sharper than most and whose instincts are rarely wrong.

  And Claire, for being both Dave and Carmela.

  Read on for the opening chapters of

  The Dying Hours, the eleventh novel in

  the Tom Thorne series

  “Billingham is one of the most

  consistently entertaining, insightful

  crime writers working today.”

  —Gillian Flynn

  Available in Hardcover August 2013!

  Prologue

  How much blood?

  When he’d finally found the right website, once he’d waded through all the mealy-mouthed crap about having something to live for and trying to seek some kind of professional help, once he’d found a site that really told him what he needed to know, that was the one question they hadn’t answered. All the other stuff was there: how and where to cut, the bathwater helping when it came to raising the body temperature and engorging the veins or whatever it was. Keeping the flow going . . .

  It was irritating, because once he’d decided what he was going to do he was keen to get everything right. To have all the information at his fingertips. So, how much blood did the body have to lose before . . . the end? Pints of the stuff, presumably. It certainly looks to have lost a fair amount already. He watches the clouds of claret swirl in the water, sees it sink and spin until finally there isn’t an inch of water that isn’t red. Until he can’t see the knife on the bottom of the bath any more.

  Shocking, just how much of it there is.

  He thinks about this for a few minutes more and finally decides that in the end, it doesn’t really matter. He might not know exactly how much blood will need to be lost, how many pints or litres or whatever it is now, but there is one obvious answer and it’ll certainly do.

  Enough.

  Not painful either, at least not after the initial cuts which had definitely stung a bit. He’d read that it was a pretty peaceful way to go, certainly compared to some and they weren’t an option anyway. This was perfect. Messy, but perfect.

  There’s another question he’s been wrestling with on and off since he’d made his mind up and as far as he knows there isn’t any website that can give him so much as a clue with this one.

  What comes afterwards?

  He’s never been remotely religious, never had any truck with God-botherers, but right now he can’t help wondering. Now, sitting where he is. Christ on a bike, had the water level actually risen? Was there really that much blood?

  So . . . the afterwards, the whatever-ever-after, the afterlife.

  Nothing, probably. That was what he’d always thought, just darkness, like when you’re asleep and not dreaming about anything. No bad thing, he reckons, not considering the shit most people wade through their whole lives, but even so, it might be nice if there was a bit more going on than that. Not clouds and harps, choirs and all that carry-on, but, you know . . . peace or whatever.

  Yeah, peace would be all right. Quiet.

  He looks up when the man in the bath, the man who is actually doing all the bleeding, starts to moan again.

  ‘Shush. I’ve told you, haven’t I?’

  The man in the bath moves, his pale body squeaking against the bottom of the tub. He begins to thrash and cry out, blubbing and blowing snot bubbles, spraying blood across the tiles and sending waves of bright red water sloshing out on to the bathmat.

  The man watching him adjusts his position on the toilet seat and moves his feet to avoid the water. ‘Take it easy,’ he says. He gently lays his magazine to one side and leans towards the figure in the bath. ‘Why don’t you calm down, old son, and have another mouthful of that Scotch?’ He nods towards the blood-smeared bottle at the end of the bath. ‘It’ll help, I read that. Just have another drink and close your eyes and let yourself drift off, eh?’ He reaches for his magazine.

  ‘Soon be over, I promise . . . ’

  PART ONE

  Crossing the Bridge

  ONE

  Tom Thorne leaned down and gently picked up the small glass bottle from the bedside table. It was already open, the white cap lying next to the syringe, a few drops of cloudy liquid pooled beneath the tip of the needle. He lifted the bottle and took a sniff. The faint smell was unfamiliar; something like sticking plasters or disinfectant. He offered it up to the woman waiting behind him, raised it towards her face.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  He had spent the last half an hour taking a good look around the house. In the bathroom he had found plenty of medication, but that was not particularly surprising given the ages of those involved. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed and there were no signs of forced entry, save for the broken window in the back door. That was down to the woman now taking a good long sniff at the bottle, a young PC named Nina Woodley. She and her partner had been the first officers at the scene after the dispatch had been sent out.

  ‘That’s insulin,’ Woodley said, finally. ‘My brother’s a diabetic, so . . . ’

  Thorne put the bottle back. He pulled off the thin plastic gloves and stuffed them back into the pocket of his Met vest.

  ‘Thing is,’ Woodley said, ‘it’s normally prescribed.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘There’s no label on the bottle.’

  They both turned as the bedroom door opened and one of the PCs who had been stationed downstairs stuck his head around it. Before the officer could speak, the on-call doctor pushed past him into the room; young, rosy-cheeked and rugger-bugger-ish. He spent no more than a few minutes examining the bodies, while Thorne watched from the corner of the room. Downstairs, Woodley hammered a small piece of MDF in place across the broken window downstairs while another PC made tea for everyone.

  ‘Right then,’ the doctor said. He closed his bag and checked his watch to get an accurate time for the pronouncement. ‘Life extinct.’ He sounded rather more cheerful than anyone had a right to be at quarter to four on a drizzly October morning.

  Thorne nodded, the formalities out of the way.

  ‘Nice easy one for you.’

  ‘How long?’ Thorne asked.

  The doctor glanced back at the bodies, as though one final look might make the difference. ‘At least twenty-four hours, probably a bit more.’

  ‘Sounds about right,’ Thorne said. The emergency call had come in just afte
r 1.00 a.m. One of the children – a man, now living in Edinburgh – was concerned that he had not been able to get either of his parents on the phone since teatime the previous day. Neither of his parents was reliable when it came to answering their mobile phones, he had told the operator, but there was no reason why they should not be picking up at home.

  Searching the house an hour before, Thorne had found both mobiles, side by side in the living room. Half a dozen missed calls on each.

  ‘Assuming they go to bed nine, ten o’clock,’ the doctor said, ‘dead pretty soon after that, I would have thought. Obviously it depends on what they did, how long they waited before . . . you know, but insulin’s a good way to do it. The right dosage and it’s all over in about an hour.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Very popular with doctors, as a matter of fact. As a way to go, I mean. If you’re that way inclined.’

  Thorne nodded, thinking that coppers were more likely to be ‘that way inclined’ than almost anybody else he could think of. Wondering how most of them would choose to do it.

  How he would choose to do it.

  The door opened again and Woodley appeared. ‘CID’s here.’

  ‘Here we go,’ Thorne said. ‘Fun and games.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ the doctor said.

  Thorne said, ‘Right, thanks,’ and watched the doctor gather up his jacket from the corner of the bed and leave the room without bothering to close the door. Pills, most probably, Thorne decided, but he guessed that if he were feeling desperate enough, then he might have other ideas.

  Just a shame that the quickest ways were also the messiest.

  He turned back to look at the bodies on the bed.

  They look tired, Thorne thought. Like they’d had enough. Paper-thin skin on the woman’s face. The man: spider webs of cracked veins on his cheeks . . .

  He could already hear the voices from the hall below; a bored-sounding, mockney twang: ‘Up here, is it?’ Heavy footsteps on the stairs, before the man appeared in the doorway and stood, taking a cursory look around the room.