Lifeless - 5 (3 page)

The big kid on the floor was screaming now.

The boy pushed himself away from the wal , took his hands from his pockets and moved across the playground to where the crowd of onlookers stood in a circle, jeering and clapping. It was time to intervene.

The one tel ing the 'story' was cal ed Bardsley. The boy hated him. He shoved his way through the crowd, which was not difficult as most of the other third formers were scared of him. He was, after al , the 'mad' one, the one who would do anything. The kid who would throw a desk out of the window or wave his tiny cock around in class, or let a teacher's tyres down. He'd had to suffer a great many detentions in his time to earn his reputation, but it was worth it in terms of the respect it won him.

He didn't care about geography or French grammar but he knew about respect.

He reached down, casual y took hold of Bardsley's hair and yanked him backwards. There was a gasp from the crowd, which quickly turned to nervous laughter as Bardsley jumped up, furious, ready to transfer his aggression onto whoever was responsible for the terrible stinging on his scalp.

Then he saw who was to blame. The boy, far smal er and slighter than he was, stared calmly back at him, eyes cold and dark as stones frozen in mud, hands once more thrust deep into his pockets.

The crowd dispersed quickly into smal er groups. A kickabout was already starting as Bardsley backed away towards the changing rooms, promising some nasty revenge after school but not real y meaning it.

The boy on the floor stood up and began to rearrange his dishevel ed uniform. He didn't say anything, but eyed his saviour nervously while doing up his tie and dragging a sleeve across his snotty top lip.

The black-haired boy had seen him around but they had never spoken. He was a year younger, probably only twelve, and the different years didn't real y mix. His sandy hair was usual y neatly combed with a parting, and he was often to be seen in a corner somewhere, his pale blue eyes peeking out enviously from behind a book, observing the assorted games he had no part in. He was a big kid, at least a foot tal er than most of the others in his year and brainy as hel , but he was slow in al the ways that counted. He probably hadn't done anything specific to piss Bardsley off, but that wasn't real y the point.

The older boy watched, smiling as a brown plastic comb was produced and dragged through the sandy hair, dislodging pieces of playground grit. He had a comb himself of course, but it was a metal one; far cooler, and used mostly for the lunch-time comb fights of which he was the acknowledged champion. These fights were a more brutal version of 'Slaps' or 'Scissors, paper, rock' and could leave a hand dripping with blood within a few seconds. He was the champion, not because he was quicker than anybody else, but because he could stand the pain for longer.

He could put up with a great deal of pain when he had to.

The sandy-haired boy careful y put away his comb in the inside

pocket of his blazer, cleared his throat nervously and produced a rarely seen smile. It quickly disappeared when it was not reciprocated. In its place, a hand, notably free of scratches and scabs, was extended.

'Thank you for.., doing that. I'm Palmer. Martin...'

The wiry black-haired boy, the mad boy, the boy who would do anything, nodded. He ignored the hand and spoke his name with a sly smile, as if revealing a dirty secret.

As if giving a gift that was actual y worth far more than it looked. 'Nicklin.'

TWO

'A few less questions, when it's al over, even one less than when a case begins, and you're doing al right...'

Thorne smiled as he carried his coffee through to the living room, remembering Hol and's reaction when he had frst passed on this pithy piece of homespun wisdom. It had also, he recal ed, been the first time that Thorne had managed to get him inside a pub. An auspicious day.

Questions...

In the pub, Hol and had smiled. 'What? You mean questions like, "Why didn't I study harder at school?" and, "Isn't there anybody else available?"'

'I think I preferred you when you were an arse-licker, Hol and...' Thorne put his mug on the mantelpiece and bent down to light the flame-effect gas fire in the mock-Georgian fireplace.

The central heating was up as high as it would go but he was stil freezing. And his back was playing up. And it was pissing down...

There were plenty of questions that needed answering right now.

Were the two kil ings genuinely connected? Apart from the date and the fact that both women were strangled, there seemed to be no other link, so was the station thing just a coincidence? King's Cross threw up other possibilities. Had he mistaken the second victim for a prostitute? Why kil one at home and one on the street?

And the biggest question of the lot: did he kil twice on the same day because he was out of control, or was kil ing multiple victims actual y the pattern? Blood lust or compulsion? Right now, Hol and and McEvoy were earning overtime trying to find out, but whichever it was, the answer was not going to be pleasant.

In the eight months or so that the team had been together, they had only real y worked on two major cases that were truly their own. Most of the time they'd been seconded - either individual y or together - on to other investigations with other units, and then been reconvened when needed.

The aftermath of the terrorist atrocities of September 11 had seen the teams from Serious Crime involved in an operation unlike any before. Some had expressed surprise that repatriating bodies from New York should be down to them, but it made sense to Thorne. These were British citizens. They had been murdered. It wasn't complicated.

The phone cal s had been the hardest: thousands of people eager to trace husbands and wives, sons and daughters who hadn't been in touch and who may or may not have been in the area. So far, of the hundreds whose missing relatives never did get in touch with them, only one had been given an identifiable body to bury...

Three months on, and the Met was stil stretched - tracking down Anthrax hoaxers, monitoring possible terrorist targets, chasing their tails while street crime grew to fil the hole that was left. If suddenly phone-jacking didn't seem quite so important, there were stil crimes, like those that Team 3 got handed, that needed to be taken very seriously indeed.

The two cases were both.., unusual. The first was a series of gruesome kil ings in south-east London that bore al the hal marks of gangland slayings. However, the bodies (when they'd been painstakingly re-assembled) were found to belong, not to drug-dealers or loan

sharks, but to ordinary, law-abiding citizens. It quickly became clear that the murders were the work of one highly disturbed individual as opposed to an organised gang of them. Whether the kil er - a happily married electrical engineer - had been simply trying to disguise his work, or had a psychotic fixation with the disposal methods of gangsters, was as yet unclear. He was stil undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

The other case was the more disturbing, despite the lack of bodies. Guests in hotels were being targeted and robbed in their rooms. The minor physical assaults that were part and parcel of the thefts had soon begun to escalate however. Those that wil ingly handed over cash, Rolexes and other valuables were being tortured anyway. The knife was produced and the PIN number was demanded. The number was given and the knife was used anyway. Smal cuts, nicks: wounding for pure pleasure. Thorne knew that this one liked the feel of a blade on skin, enjoyed hearing the intake of breath, and watching the thin red line fil out on the flesh and begin to drip.

The robbery was becoming something else: the robber, someone else. Behind his black balaclava, he was starting to enjoy his work a little too much and it was only a matter of time until people started to die.

That was when Thorne had been brought in.

With next to no physical evidence and no real description to work from, the case had quickly become hugely frustrating. Thorne, Hol and and McEvoy, in an effort to trap this latent kil er, this murderer-to-be, had spent nights in some very nice hotels but without success. Their efforts had evidently been noted and the individual responsible had gone to ground.

Two cases, one arrest. A fifty per cent hit rate, and the numbers would only get worse from here on in. Some had joked that the hotel case, given a few weeks, would get passed on to the Crinkly Squad anyway, but Thorne knew differently. Anybody who enjoyed inflicting pain to the degree this man did, would need to do it again. He would resurface somewhere. The MO might be completely different, but Thorne did not doubt for a second that one day soon he would be providing a pathologist somewhere with some overtime ....

Thorne took his coffee across to the sofa and picked up the file on

Carol Garner. He sat for a few minutes, not opening it, just staring out into the rain and thinking about the hundreds, the thousands of different people across the capital who owed their employment to the violent death of another. Thinking about the money generated by murder.

Thinking about the industry of kil ing.

Dave Hol and stared over the top of his computer screen at Sarah McEvoy who was avidly studying hers. He thought about his girlfriend, Sophie.

The ongoing argument which they had been having in instalments for the past year, had flared up again. Sophie had a problem with Thorne. She had only met him once and had formed an opinion based entirely on what Hol and himself had said about Thorne in the early days of their working relationship. So the man described by Hol and over a year ago as 'obsessive'

and 'arrogant' had become, in the strange folklore of Sophie's imagination, a pigheaded, self-serving lunatic whose refusal to fol ow procedure would one day cost him not only his career, but those of the people around him. Those who didn't know any better...

It wasn't that she didn't want Hol and to do the job. She just wanted him to do it in a particular way; to be the sort of copper who keeps his head down and gets promoted, and who is universal y liked. A copper who does just enough.

A copper like his father.

Once, she'd intimated that if he chose to go a different route then he would be going it alone. He had been furious at the threat and the ultimatum had been quietly forgotten. At least, they both pretended that it had.

The arguments were never heated. The two of them were sulkers, bottlers-up. It was more a series of snipes and barbed comments, and the intensity had increased as soon as the new case had started. Yesterday evening, after a hectic day that had begun with the team briefing, Sophie had looked up at him across the kitchen table, smiled, and opened her account.

'So how many people did the great Tom Thorne piss off today then?'

He wasn't sure what upset him most about the whole thing. The assumption that as far as his career was concerned, she knew best? The lack of support? Or the fact that when it came to her assessment of Thorne, most of the time she was absolutely right?

McEvoy glanced up from her monitor and fixed him with bright green eyes. Caughtyou.

She was tal , 5" 7" or 5" 8", with shoulder-length, curly brown hair, a broken nose and ful lips which smiled easily and, so it seemed to Hol and, often. Right now, he reckoned the smile had at least three different meanings.

He didn't understand any of them.

'I heard something very strange today.' Despite the surname, she was pure North London Jewish. Her accent was flattish, hard. Sexy. 'A vicious rumour about the Weeble...' The nickname was a reference to Thorne's shape, to how hard people thought it would be to make him fal down.

Hol and raised his eyebrows. Another rumour? When it came to Thorne, he'd heard most of it, but he enjoyed a good story or bit of gossip as much as anybody else.

'I heard that he likes country-and-western. Is that true?'

Hol and nodded, as if confirming a terminal diagnosis. 'Yeah, he loves it.'

'What, al that yee-hah and Dol y Parton and stuff?. Does he go line dancing?'

Hol and laughed. 'I think it's a bit more obscure than that. He used

to listen to a lot of techno and garage stuff as wel , but I think that was just a phase.' He blinked slowly, remembering the almost hypnotic' noise. Remembering the case it had helped to blot out.

McEvoy looked disappointed. 'Shame. He was starting to sound

interesting there for a minute.'

'Oh he's.., interesting.'

Hol and believed that about Thorne, if he believed anything. If interesting meant unpredictable and stubborn. If it meant refusing to admit that you might be wrong. If interesting meant determined, and vengeful, and knowing the difference between right and wrong whatever the poxy rules said. And refusing to suffer fools. And possessing the kind of passion that would always make something happen. A passion that Dave Hol and, whatever other people might want him to do and be, would have kil ed to have even the tiniest fucking bit of...

He thought about his father. A man who died a sergeant at sixty.

Having done just enough.

McEvoy shrugged and her eyes dropped back to her screen. Back to

the computerised catalogue of suffering and death from which the

two of them were supposed, hopeful y, to come up with some answers.

Hol and had believed that relatively, London could not be that violent a city and that their search would not be overly time-consuming.

He had been wrong on both counts.

Looking for murders committed on the same day had sounded

fairly straightforward, but Thorne was not a man who did things by half. Both time-frame and search criteria were broadening al the time. McEvoy and Hol and had begun by looking for strangulations first and then widened things from there. They couldn't rule out assaults as they might be the work of the same man who had now perhaps graduated to ful -blown murder.

Even discounting domestics and gang-related attacks, it was a big jobl To check thoroughly, to go back far enough to find a pattern - if indeed there was one - was going to take time.