Sleepyhead tt-1

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne paused. He could see one or two officers exchanging glances. It had taken him less than a minute to impart the essential information, the paltry scraps of fact that were supposed to shift the operation up a gear. Frank Keable stood up. 'I don't really need to tell you, but the usual press blackout, please.' The media hadn't got hold of the killings, not as the work of one man at any rate. The fact that the murders hadn't been concentrated in one area and had been so well disguised had made it hard for them. It had taken the police long enough to put it together themselves. Still, Thorne was surprised: Backhand had been up and running for weeks now and they usually had sources within most high-level operations. In time there would be a leak and then the usual buck-passing would begin. The tabloids would come up with a lurid nickname for the killer, publicity-hungry politicians would bleat about law and order, and Keable would give him a speech about 'pressure being brought to bear'. But so far so good.

  Keable nodded at Thorne. He was free to continue.

  'Helen Doyle was eighteen years old…' He stopped and watched his colleagues nod with due disgust. He had not paused for effect. He was feeling the knot in his stomach tighten, slippery and undoable.

  Helen was not much older than Calvert's eldest.

  'Unlike the other victims she was not attacked in her home. It's a fair bet he didn't do it on the street and the method of killing would suggest that he couldn't do it in a car. So where did he take her?' Thorne talked some more. The usual stuff. Obviously they were still waiting on the results from the forensic team. These were the first real tests they'd been able to carry out and he was hopeful. They should all be hopeful. This might be the breakthrough. It was time to pull their fingers out. They were going to get him. Come on, lads…

  The house-to-house was allocated. There was talk of a division reconstruction. Then chairs were scraped back, sandwiches ordered, and Frank Keable was summoned to the office of the detective superintendent.

  'What's the point? He knows I'll have sod-all to tell him until this afternoon.'

  'Maybe he just wants to share a power breakfast with you. Mind you, you've already had yours.' Thorne pointed at the ketchup stain on Keable's shirt.

  'Bollocks.' He spat on a finger and tried to rub out the bright red splotch.

  'He got it wrong again last night and he doesn't like it,' Thorne said.

  Keable looked up at him, still rubbing, reaching into his pocket for a handkerchief.

  'The way he dumped the girl's body so quickly. He just wanted shot of her, Frank. He thought he'd cracked it after Alison and when he botched it again I think it really pissed him off. He's getting impatient. And he's getting arrogant. He took a big risk snatching this one off the street. These women, these girls, are just bodies to him, dead or alive. He's just carrying out a procedure on them and I think he blames them when he gets it wrong. There's no real violence, but he's angry.'

  'If he's in such a hurry to get rid of them, what's the washing all about?'

  'I don't know. It's… medical.'

  'The fucker probably scrubs up.' Keable snorted. Thorne stared over his head. 'Oh, come on, Tom. Listen, isn't this what we want? If he's getting impatient or whatever, he's far more likely to screw up somewhere and give us what we need to get him.'

  'Or just start killing faster. It's been twenty-two days since Alison Willetts was attacked. Susan Carlish was six weeks before that…'

  Keable stroked the top of his head. 'I know, Tom.' It was a declaration of efficiency, a statement of competence, but Thorne saw something else: a quiet instruction to calm down. A warning. So often he glimpsed the same thing concealed behind a gentle enquiry or a concerned stare. He'd see it most, of course, when there was a suspect. Any suspect. It scalded him, but he understood. The Calvert case was part of a shared history. Folklore almost, like Sutcliffe. A guilt they all inherited at some level or other. But he'd been part of it and they hadn't. He'd been.., in amongst it.

  Keable turned and marched away towards the lift. A car would be waiting to take him across town for the meeting. He pressed the button to go down and turned back to Thorne. 'Let me know as soon as Hendricks gets in touch.'

  Thorne watched Keable get into the lift and each shrugged their way through the fifteen seconds of dead time waiting for the doors to close. Keable would tell the chief superintendent that while they were obviously waiting on the results of all the tests, there was the distinct possibility of a breakthrough. Somebody must have seen the killer taking the girl. This was definitely the break in the case that they needed.

  Thorne wondered if they would bother broaching the subject that had hung in the air since the note was discovered on his car. It might have been saying 'come and get me', and dumping Helen Doyle's body so clumsily may well have been a taunt, but one thing was obvious: the killer was no longer bothering to disguise what he was doing because he knew they were on to him. If knowing the police had put it together was making him careless, then Thorne was happy that he knew. What really bothered him was how.

  Why can't they fucking well fix this? They can stick a human ear on a mouse and clone a fucking sheep. They clone sheep, for Christ's sake, which is the most pointless thing ever since how the bloody hell are you supposed to tell when every sheep looks like every other sodding sheep and there's NOTHING REALLY WRONG WITH ME!

  Nothing really.., wrong.

  A stroke. It sounds so soothing, so gentle. I don't feel like I've been stroked by anything. I feel like I've been hit with a jackhammer. My Nan had a stroke, but she could talk afterwards.

  Her voice was slurred and the drugs made her go a bit funny. Up to then she'd just wittered on about.., you know, old people's stuff. She never went as far as telling complete strangers how old she was at bus stops, but you know the sort of thing. The drugs they put her on turned her into a geriatric performance poet. She'd lie there ranting about how motorbikes were driving through the ward at night and how the nurses all wanted to have sex with her. Honestly, it was hysterical-she was eighty-six!

  But at least she could make herself understood. This man gave me a stroke. Anne told me what he did. Twisted some artery and gave me a stroke. Why can't they just untwist it, then? There must be specialists or something. Fm lying here screaming and shouting, and the nurses wander past and coo at me like I'm taking a lazy afternoon nap in the sun. They must have finished all the tests by now. They must know that Fm still in here, still talking to myself, ranting and raving. It's doing my head in! See? I've still got a sense of humour, for fuck's sake.

  I was right about Anne and the copper. Thorne. I've met women like Anne before. Always go for the two types of men the ones that spark something off in their brains or the ones that get it going in their knickers. A man who does both? Forget it. I think it's fairly obvious which category her ex falls into. Time to ring in the changes. So the copper's luck's in, if you ask me. I reckon I might have to stick to the brain boxes from now on. Tim just sat by the bed this morning and held my hand. He doesn't even bother talking to me any more.

  FIVE

  Thorne sat perched on the edge of Tughan's desk in the open-plan operations room. As Tughan's hands maneuvered his mouse and flew across his keyboard, Thorne could almost see the Irishman's back stiffen. He knew he was annoying him.

  'Isn't there something you should be doing, Tom?'

  Phil Hendricks had worked through the night, and even before Keable had settled down to coffee and croissants with the chief superintendent, Thorne had received the information he'd wanted. Helen Doyle had been heavily drugged with Midazolam and had died as a result of a stroke. In spite of the body's location and the apparent break with his routine, there was no doubt that she had been the killer's fifth victim. That was pretty much all they knew, other than that Forensics had gathered some fibres from Helen Doyle's skirt and blouse[Thorne got straight on the phone.

  'Any joy on these fibres?'

  'Give us a bloody chance.'

  'All right, just give me your best bloody
guess, then.'

  'Carpet fibres, probably from the boot of the car.'

  'Can you get a make?'

  'Where do you think this is? Quantico?'

  'Where?'

  'Forget it. Look, we'll get on to it. Something to match it to would help…'

  The change in the pattern bothered Thorne, but they were left trying to answer the same questions. How had he talked his way into these women's houses and perhaps, in Helen Doyle's case, talked her into getting into his car?

  Helen Doyle's body, like that of Alison Willetts and Susan Carlish, was unmarked yet full of drink and drugs. The tranquillizer had to have been administered with alcohol. But how? Had the killer been watching Helen all night and spiked her drink before she left the pub? That would have been difficult – she was with a large group of friends and, besides, to have got the timing of it right would have been near impossible. How could he have known exactly when the drug would start to take effect? It was still the best guess, so Thorne had set about rounding up as many people as possible who had been in the Marlborough at the time. This, on top of the general canvassing along Helen's route home, meant that they were going to need every extra body that Frank Keable could deliver. If he could deliver. Thorne was hopeful of finding somebody who'd seen Helen after she'd left the pub. He still couldn't fathom why the killer was being so brazen but it made him more optimistic than he'd felt in a long time.

  'Is there something I can help you with?'

  Tughan smiled a lot but his eyes were like something on a plate. He was as skinny as a whippet and fiercely intelligent, with a voice that could cut through squad-room banter like a scalpel. It was always Tughan's thin lips Thorne imagined whispering into the mouthpiece whenever some lunatic phoned Scotland Yard with a coded warning. It wasn't that Thorne didn't appreciate what Tughan was capable of or what he brought to the investigation: Thorne could just about find his way into a file, if he had to, but he couldn't type to save his life and always found himself strangely hypnotised by the screensavers. When new evidence came in, Tughan was the man to make sense of it with his collation programmes and file finders. Thorne knew that if they'd had a Nick Tughan fifteen years earlier instead of a thousand manila folders.., if they'd had a Holmes computer system instead of an antiquated card index, then Calvert might not have done what he did.

  'Hey, Tommy, bugger the Calvert case, what about our case?'

  'Right… sorry, Nick. Have you got a copy of the Leicester/London matches handy?'

  Tughan grunted, scrolled and double clicked. The printer on the far side of the office began to hum. Thorne had actually been hoping that Tughan might have had a hard copy lying about. It would have been quicker to walk across to his own little goldfish bowl and fetch the copy on his desk, but he couldn't begrudge Tughan his little triumphs of efficiency. He begrudged him virtually everything else, and the feeling was entirely mutual.

  'Thorne stared at the list. Half a dozen doctors who had been on rotation at Leicester Royal Infirmary at the time of the Midazolam theft and now worked in local hospitals. Anne Coburn's information about the significance of the date had somewhat dampened any enthusiasm for this line of enquiry, and the discovery of Helen Doyle's body had rightly demanded everybody's attention, but Thorne still sensed that it might be important. It was possible to look at the date of the drugs theft as significant in quite the opposite way. Might not the killer (if indeed it was the killer) have chosen that date to make it look as if he might have come from anywhere when in fact he was working at the hospital? Besides, they were still working through the far bigger list of all doctors currently on rotation locally so they'd have to get round to this lot eventually.

  Jeremy Bishop's name was second on the list. Thorne was aware of what could only be described as a smirk on Holland's face as they rode the lift down to the car park. 'Isn't he Dr Coburn's friend?'

  'She knows him, yes. And his alibi certainly checks out theoretically, yes.'

  Jeremy Bishop had unquestionably been responsible for treating Alison Willetts in A and E.

  'But Alison Willetts was taken to the Royal London for a reason,' Thorne explained, as if talking to a child. 'I want to check exactly when Bishop came on duty in relation to when she was brought in.'

  The smirk stayed on Holland's face. He knew all about Thorne's visit to Queen Square. Was he visiting Alison Willetts or the doctor who was treating her? He was well aware that they could have checked out Bishop with a phone call or, at the very least, sent somebody else. Thorne felt no compulsion to explain himself to Holland any further. As they stepped out at the ground floor and walked towards the car, he tried to convince himself that Bishop's friendship with Anne Coburn, about whom he was thinking more than he should, wasn't the main reason he was keen to eliminate him from the enquiry as quickly as possible.

  As he tucked into a late breakfast, he thought about how tired Thorne had looked at eight o'clock that morning arriving at work. He'd watched him from the greasy spoon opposite as the policeman leaned against his car for a moment before plodding towards the door. He hadn't considered Thorne the plodding type at all. That was why he'd been so delighted when he discovered that he was on the case. That, and the other obvious reason. Thorne, he'd decided, was definitely dogged. And stubborn. These were qualities he required. Plus, of course, the capacity for being too clever for his own good. He certainly needed that. All in all, Thorne was perfect. But it had troubled him to see Thorne looking so worn out. He hoped that the fatigue was just physical and that the detective inspector wasn't burning out. No, he was justifiably exhausted after the… demands of the night before. They'd found her quickly. He was impressed. So Thorne had had a rough night. That made two of them.

  One out of five. Down from twenty-five to twenty per cent. He'd known straight away, of course. He'd made the necessary phone call then gone about his business, but it was obvious within a minute or two that she'd let him down. Stupid drunken sow. His. heart, which had been pounding with the oncoming rush of the dash to hospital with another one for the machines, had quickly slowed to its habitual steady thump. Her useless, cholesterol-soaked heart couldn't be bothered to thump at all. What an opportunity he'd given her. But she'd let her sad, silly little life ebb away. Oh, he'd almost certainly have been seen getting rid. They'd have a description of sorts by now. So what?

  They might even have seen the car. So much the better. He chewed his toast and stared out of the window at the view across London. The mist was starting to lift. It would be another glorious day. Helen had been just as easy as the others to prepare. Easier. He was getting better at it. There had been those couple of disastrous attempts earlier on, but he was more relaxed about it these days. Christine and Madeleine had been cautious at first. They were naturally reluctant to let him in but they were lonely women and he was an attractive man. They wanted to talk. And more. And he was very persuasive. Susan and Alison had both invited him in almost instantly and happily drunk themselves into oblivion. Literally. He giggled to himself. The champagne had been an inspired idea. He'd thought about a jab but it would have been messy and he didn't want any sort of struggle. The wait was a little longer with the champagne, naturally, but he liked watching them go slowly. He savoured the frisson of their impending malleability. The other one – the one whose name he hadn't had time to find out – had positively guzzled it down. But then he'd had to leave because the timing had not been… judicious. Still, he felt sure that she'd said nothing about it. She would have had a hard enough time explaining to her husband or boyfriend or girlfriend why she was so utterly out of it when they got home. She certainly wouldn't have mentioned inviting a strange man into the house. It had been such a relief to be able to work on Helen in his own home. He so hated dissembling. He'd hated creeping about in those dreary houses. It had made his flesh crawl to leave the bars of soap and bottles of pills in those dirty, greasy bathrooms. Rolled-up tights and shit stripes in the lavatory bowls. He hated putting his hands on them. On their head
s. Even through the gloves he could feel the dirt and grease in their hair. He could swear he almost felt things.., moving. But now he could work in clean, comfortable surroundings. Now he knew that they knew that he knew that… He whistled his own invented melody to accompany this comforting refrain as he tried his best to stay awake. Thorne wasn't the only one feeling the strain. He needed more coffee. For a moment he closed his eyes and thought about Alison. She hadn't let him down. She'd wanted to live. He thought about going to visit her again, but it was perhaps a little risky. Security in ITU's was fairly tight, these days. The flood had been an inspired idea but could only be a one-off. He began to drift away. Yes, he'd need to think of something else if he wanted to go and see Alison again without getting caught.

  Without bumping into Anne Coburn.

  'Are you in any pain, Alison?' Doctors Anne Coburn and Steve Clark watched the pallid, peaceful face intently. There was no response. Anne tried again. 'Blink once for yes, Alison.' After a moment there was the tiniest movement – the ghost of a twitch around Alison's left eye. Anne looked across at the occupational therapist who scribbled notes on his clipboard. He nodded at her. She carried on.

  'Yes, you are in pain? Was that a yes, Alison?' Nothing.

  'Alison?' Steve Clark put his pen away. Alison's left eyelid fluttered three times in rapid succession. 'OK, Alison.'

  'Maybe she's just tired, Anne. I'm sure you're right. It's just a question of her gaining sufficient control.'

  Anne Coburn had a lot of time for Steve Clark. He was a brilliant therapist and a nice man, but he lied very badly. He wasn't at all convinced. But she was. 'I feel like somebody who's called out the TV repairman and then there's nothing the matter, only the other way round.., oh shit, you know what I mean, Steve.'