Mark Billingham - Scaredy cat

Karen glanced back. 'Jesus…'

Nicklin pointed at Palmer's crotch with a groan of disgust and Palmer's fist tightened instinctively around his soft, shriveled penis. Karen leaned against the doorframe. 'Jesus, Martin…'

'You've upset her now,' Nicklin said. Karen began to cry softly and the amusement vanished from Nicklin's voice in an instant. 'You really have upset her, you stupid bastard. Because you don't know a fucking joke when you hear one, you pervert…'

There was nothing left to do then but run, as he should have done that day in the park, and the summer before that, and a dozen or more times in between.

He ran without stopping to dress himself, clutching his trousers to his waist, bolting through the doorway, between the boy with the short black hair who was tugging with his teeth at the wrapper of a chocolate bar, and the girl in the blue dress who was sobbing. He ran away towards the grassy, green embankment. He ran, his head down, towards the housing estate. Wiping the tears away as he charged through the long couch grass and clattered across a rusting sheet of corrugated iron.

He ran far away from the nest of snakes.

'How are they working together?'

It was the first question Brigstocke had asked him the previous night on the phone, and it was the first question he put to them now as a group. They were gathered in the bigger of the two offices. Brigstocke, Thorne, Holland and McEvoy. The core of an investigation that had been sizeable before and overnight had become the biggest that London had seen in a long time. Thorne's answer now, was the same as it had been a few hours earlier. He had no idea, but he hoped that together, they might come up with something, anything, that might point the hundreds of officers and civilians working on the case in the right direction. The hundreds working in the industry of killing…

'It seems likely that they kill alternate victims.' Brigstocke looked as though he hadn't had a lot of sleep the night before. Thorne hadn't had a great deal himself, but he hadn't had Jesmond giving him grief at the same time. Thorne looked at his DCI and saw, as if he needed another one, an object lesson in the benefits of avoiding promotion. He didn't need a lecture from a desk jockey like Jesmond. He knew full well that those wondrous, imaginary places where the buck stopped and where credit, if any, would be due, were a long way apart.

Brigstocke leaned forward, his fingers interlocked in front of him on the desk, his voice a little hoarse but crackling with urgency all the same. 'The evidence suggests that they are different types, psychologically as well as physically, but we need to know how they.., interact. Do they attack their victims together and simply carry out the actual killing individually? Maybe one kills while the other keeps a lookout…

'I don't think that's likely.' Holland was the first to speak up. Thorne was as impressed as always at the confidence, at how far he'd come in a year.

Brigstocke nodded. 'Go on, Holland…'

'Margie Knight's statement made no mention of a second man… of anybody else at all in the immediate vicinity as far as I can remember, and nothing that Charlie Garner has said would indicate that there was more than one man.'

'Have another word with Margie Knight,' Brigstocke said. His eyes met Thorne's.

'I'll give the Enrights a ring.' Thorne was already hoping that he would not need to speak to them again in person. At least not until he had good news. 'Holland's right though, sir, the boy's said nothing at any time about two men…'

One was bad enough wasn't it, Charlie?

'I think we're forgetting about the time element here.' McEvoy sounded as tired as Brigstocke. Thorne looked across at her and thought that she didn't look a whole lot better.. 'They could have killed Carol Garner and Ruth Murray together, or at least both have been present when she was killed, but the stabbings in July almost overlap time wise and they were miles apart. Each of them has got to be working on their own.'

'I agree,' Thorne said. It was about as much as he was sure of.

'OK, so the chances are that, even though they kill on the same day, they kill separately, but we have to presume that they plan these murders carefully. For Christ's sake, they must get together to work everything out, discuss dates…'

Thorne shook his head. 'I don't think we can presume anything.'

It was possible that the men they were after might never even have met. Thorne had read about a pair of killers in the United States who did their butchering separately but who got their kicks out of communicating with each other. They discussed the selection of potential victims by phone and over the Internet. They egged each other on and then compared notes after the event. They shared the experience but never actually clapped eyes on one another. Thorne shivered as he recalled reading that one of the murderous pair had used his last breath to send best wishes to his partner in crime, seconds before they'd administered the lethal injection. If it was true, at least financially, that when the USA sneezed, the UK caught a cold, might it not also be the case when it came to one of the biggest growth industries of all?

McEvoy took out a cigarette and lit it. 'You said that the killers were probably different psychologically. What about bringing a profiler in?'

Brigstocke nodded first towards the cigarette and then the window. McEvoy sighed, stood up and strode across to the window while Brigstocke answered her question. 'I've already been on to the National Crime Faculty…' McEvoy opened the window and winced. Third floor, December, it was a little bit more than fresh air.

'Jesus…' Holland turned and grimaced at McEvoy. She took another drag, mouthed 'sorry' at him and blew the smoke out of the window.

Brigstocke continued. 'Both the profilers on the current recommended list are busy on other cases…'

Shivering, Thorne reached for the leather jacket he had slung across the back of his chair. 'Which kills you quicker, passive smoking or pneumonia? This is ridiculous…'

McEvoy took a last drag, flicked the butt out into the wind and closed the window. 'Bunch of girls,' she scoffed, moving back to the desk. As soon as she'd sat down again, she locked eyes with Brigstocke and carried on as if nothing had happened. 'Both the profilers, you said. Are you telling me that there are only two of them in the whole country? Two?'

'Two that are actually recommended, yes.'

'That is fucking ridiculous.' Brigstocke shrugged. McEvoy shook her head in disbelief. 'Oh come on… profilers aren't like psychics, you know. It's a recognised science. Sir?'

She looked at Thorne for support. She'd picked the wrong man. 'I don't think now's the time to discuss the pros and cons of profiling, Sarah. Whatever any of us think, there isn't one available anyway.'

'Couldn't we find our own?'

Holland grinned at her. 'I'll grab the Yellow Pages shall I?'

Brigstocke brought the discussion to a close. 'Listen, if we find somebody ourselves, if we use someone who's not on the NCF list and we fuck it up, we'll all be ironing uniforms again the next day. Nobody wants that kind of bad publicity.'

Thorne looked up from the notepad in front of him. He'd been doodling.

Three pairs of eyes. Two drawn in thick black strokes, the eyes big, heavy-lidded, cold. One pair finer, the dark eyes smaller, long-lashed…

'Talking of publicity,' he said, 'what kind do the Powers That Be think we do need?' Thorne could guess, but the mischief-maker in him wanted to hear the DCI say it. Such decisions of course were not for the likes of him. He just had to worry about catching the people that generated the publicity in the first place. Brigstocke answered in a voice that Thorne thought was no longer wholly his own. He'd mislaid it somewhere between the squad room and the Detective Superintendent's office. One on one with Thorne, there was no problem, he would say what he thought, but with lower ranks present, Brigstocke's tone was unreadable. 'I spoke to Jesmond first thing and a press conference is being organised for this afternoon. I gather that he will be telling the press about this latest development.'