Mark Billingham: Scaredy cat

An ever expanding exhibition with a simple message: emotions are powerful things, bodies are not.

These were the pictures filed in his office, with duplicates stored in the files in his head. Snapshots of deaths and portraits of lives lived to extremes. There were occasions when Thorne had gazed at these bodies in monochrome and thought he'd glimpsed rage or hatred or greed or lust, or perhaps the ghosts of such things, floating in the corners of rooms like ectoplasm.

The photographs on the table in front of him this morning were no more sickening than any he had seen before, but keeping his eyes on the image of the dead woman was like staring hard into a flame and feeling his eyeballs start to melt.

He was seeing her through the eyes of her child. Charlie Garner aged three, now an orphan.

Charlie Garner aged three, being cared for by grandparents who wrestled every minute of every day with what to tell him about his mummy.

Charlie Garner aged three, who spent the best part of two days alone in a house with the body of his mother, clutching at a chocolate wrapper he'd licked clean, starving and dirty and screaming until a neighbour knocked.

'Tom…'

Thorne stared out into the grayness for a few more seconds before turning back resignedly to DCI Russell Brigstocke. As part of the major reorganisati0n of the Met a year or so earlier, a number of new squads had been established within the three nascent Serious Crime Groups. A unit consisting entirely of officers brought out of retirement had been set up expressly to investigate cold cases. This unit, quickly christened the Crinkly Squad, was just one of a raft of new initiatives as part of a fresh and supposedly proactive approach to fighting crime in the capital. There were other squads specialising in sexual assaults, violence against children and firearms offences. Then there was Team 3, Serious Crime Group (West). Officially, this squad was devised to investigate cases whose parameters were outside those which might be investigated elsewhere – cases that didn't fit anybody else's remit. There were those, however, who suggested that SCG (West) 3 had been set up simply because no-one quite knew what to do with Detective Inspector Tom Thorne. Thorne himself reckoned that the truth was probably somewhere halfway between the two.

Russell Brigstocke was the senior officer and Thorne had known him for over ten years. He was a big man who cut a distinctive figure with horn-rimmed glasses and hair of which he was inordinately proud. It was thick and blue-black and the DCI took great delight in teasing it up into a quaff of almost Elvis-like proportions. But if he was a caricaturist's dream, he could also be a suspect's worse nightmare. Thorne had seen Brigstocke with glasses off and fists clenched, hair flopping around his sweat-drenched forehead as he stalked around an interview room, shouting, threatening, carrying out the threat, looking for the truth.

'Carol Garner was a single mum. She was twenty-eight years old. Her husband died in a road accident three years ago, just after their son was born. She was a teacher. She was found dead in her home in Balham four days ago. There were no signs of forced entry. She'd arrived back at Euston station at six thirty p.m. on the twenty-seventh having been to Birmingham to visit her parents. We think that the killer followed her from the station, probably on the tube. We found a travel card in her pocket.'

Brigstocke's voice was low and accent less, almost a monotone. Yet the litany of facts simply stated was horribly powerful. Thorne knew most of it, having been briefed by Brigstocke the day before, but still the words were like a series of punches, each harder than the last, combining to leave him aching and breathless. He could see that the others were no less shocked.

And he knew that they had yet to hear the worst. Brigstocke continued. 'We can only speculate on how the killer gained entry or how long he spent inside Carol Garner's home, but we know what he did when he was there…'

Brigstocke looked down the length of the table asking the man at the other end to carry on where he had left off. Thorne stared at the figure in the black fleece, with shaved head and a startling collection of facial piercings. Phil Hendricks was not everybody's idea of a pathologist, but he was the best Thorne had ever worked with. Thorne raised an eyebrow. Was there yet another earring since he'd last seen him? Hendricks was fond of commemorating each new boyfriend with a ring, stud or spike. Thorne sincerely hoped that he would settle down soon, before he was completely unable to lift his head up.

Dr Phil Hendricks was the civilian member of the team. He was there at the beginning, obviously, as the discovery of a body was almost certainly what galvanised the team in the first place. The body that would yield to the knife; the story behind its journey to a cold steel slab whispered in secrets, revealed by its dead flesh and petrified organs. These were the pathologist's areas of expertise. Though he and Hendricks were good friends, from this point on, in the context of the investigation, Thorne would be happy if he did not see him again.

'Based on when we know she got on a train from Birmingham, we think she was killed somewhere between seven and ten p.m. on the twenty-seventh. She'd been dead for something like forty-eight hours when she was found.'

The flat Mancunian accent conveyed with a simple precision the tawdry and banal reality of genuine horror. Thorne could see the unspeakable thought in the faces of those around the table. What were those two days like for little Charlie Garner?

'There were no signs of sexual abuse and no indication that she put up any significant struggle. The obvious conclusion is that the killer threatened the child.' Hendricks stopped, took a breath. 'He strangled Carol Garner with his bare hands.'

'Fucker…'

Thorne glanced to his left. Detective Sergeant Sarah McEvoy stared down at the file in front of her. Thorne waited, but for the moment it seemed that she'd said everything that was on her mind. Of all of them, she was the officer who Thorne had known for the shortest time. And he still didn't know her at all. Tough, no question, and more than capable. But there was something about her that made Thorne a little wary. There was something hidden.

The voice of DC Dave Holland focused Thorne's thoughts again. 'Do we think he targeted her because of the child?'

Thorne nodded. 'It was her weakness. Yes, I think he probably did…'

Brigstocke interrupted. 'But it isn't really significant.'

'Not really significant?' Holland sounded thoroughly confused and looked across at his boss.

Thorne shrugged and threw him a look back. Wait and see Dave… It was just over a year since Thorne had first begun working with Dave Holland and he was at last starting to look like a grown-up. His hair was still far too blond and floppy, but the features it framed seemed set a little harder these days. Thorne knew that this was not so much to do with age as experience. Wear and tear. The most wholesome and guileless of faces was bound to cloud a little when confronted with some of the things the job threw up. The change had begun during their first case together. Three months in which Thorne had lost friends and made enemies, while Dave Holland grew closer to him, watching and absorbing and becoming someone else. Three months that had ended with the slash of a scalpel in a blood-drenched attic in south London. Holland had learned and unlearned a great deal, and Thorne had watched it happen, proud yet saddened. It was an argument that he had with himself on a regular basis. Were they mutually exclusive – the good copper and the good person?

Learning a degree of desensitisation was all very well but there would be a price to pay. He remembered a warning poster he had seen in a dentist's waiting room: the graphic image of a lip bitten clean off by a patient 'testing' the local anaesthetic. You could bite and bite and not feel a thing, but it was only a matter of time until the anaesthetic wore off and then the pain would certainly begin. The numbness would wear off too, for those colleagues who Thorne watched getting through their days inside their own brand of armour. Whether manufactured in their heads or from a bottle, it would surely wear off one day and then the agony would be unbearable. This was not Tom Thorne's way, and despite the bravado and bullshit that he'd learned, he instinctively knew that it wasn't Holland's either.