Mark Billingham - Scaredy cat

He'd made a lot of money in dirty hotel rooms and executive motor cars. He worked harder and more often than any of the others. He'd always been able to take a lot of pain and his disgust threshold was no lower. It had been easy. Half a dozen a day, ten on some days and all paying in cash. Seven days a week, rain or shine. His customers knew that they could always go to him.

He was like a 7Eleven.

He had more than enough now, and he'd spent time getting to know the people who could help with the paperwork. Now it was time for all that effort to pay dividends. What he was planning to do made sense of course. He needed to do it to be on the safe side, to make sure they couldn't find him, but he also liked the idea because he was bored. He'd been the same person for far too long. After nineteen years, he fancied a change.

It was time to reinvent himself.

He pulled his cock out of the old man's mouth and started to moan theatrically. The old man gasped and opened his mouth. He had a yellow tongue and sharp incisors and his nice clean work shirt was plastered to his neck with sweat.

He came, and for once it was more than the pitiful spasm and spurt he manufactured for punters on demand. Suddenly, the moan from deep in his throat was long and loud and deeply felt. He came…

Spunking away everything that was left of Stuart Nicklin. Out and away. Ridding himself of himself…

The sensation continued long after the ejaculation was finished. He was still moaning as he began to rain blows down on the head of the old man on the floor. He punched and he spat and he kicked, the effort causing sweat to run down between his naked shoulder-blades. He closed his eyes as he continued to lash out, and imagined himself re-made, a long way from where he was, and from who he was. It was comforting. It was everything he had ever dreamed about. He saw himself surrounded by people that liked and trusted him. He saw himself in a position of responsibility. He saw himself paid to control other people's lives. The old man had stopped screaming.

He opened his eyes and looked down at the pathetic figure in a nylon shirt, curled up at his feet, spitting out blood and yellow teeth. He gave him one more kick for good measure and began to gather up his clothes.

He still had some way to go of course, before his vision became a reality. The paperwork was fairly straightforward, but there was training to do. It would not be handed to him on a plate, he would need to work for it. And he would work hard because he wanted it more than anything. He pulled on his shirt and slammed the door of the dingy flat behind him. He jogged down the stairs and emerged, grinning, into the sunshine. Taking the first steps towards a brand new life. Considering everything that had happened, it was ironic that there was only one job that he'd ever really wanted to do.

Thorne woke from a dream filled with fountains of blood. He could barely make himself heard over the roaring of the arterial gush, as he shouted at the man with the scalpel. He fought to stop the blood falling onto the face of the young woman in the hospital bed, but she lay there unable to turn her head away, the dark red spots slowly obliterating the pink of her face, like the spatter from a paint roller. He sat up and waited for the dream to evaporate, which it did, quickly, leaving only the memory, which was far, far worse. The phone was ringing. Thorne glanced at the clock as he leaned over to grab it. Friday night had only just become Saturday morning. He'd barely been asleep for an hour.

'Tom Thorne…'

'It's Russell. Wide awake? Or d'you want to grab a coffee and call me back?'

Brigstocke's tone cleared Thorne's head in an instant. 'I'm fine, go ahead.'

'Our friend in the hotel trade is back.'

Thorne had always known that he would be, eventually. He guessed there would be bodies. He guessed right.

'A middle-aged couple in the Olympia Grand, been dead since early yesterday evening by the look of it…' Brigstocke paused, cleared his throat. For Thorne it was always a relief to hear colleagues hesitate to speak about violent death. A relief and a surprise. 'He tortured them, Tom. There are marks…'

'Who's picking this up, Russell?'

Another pause, for an altogether different reason. 'I was hoping you would.'

Thorne sat up, swung his legs out of bed. 'I don't think I like where this is going, sir.'

'Don't go off on one, Tom. There's nothing sinister happening, but this was our case and I just don't want strangers on it. Team Two are already down there but I'd like you to get across, see what you make of it. Hendricks is on his way. Go and give them a hand.'

'What about the Garner case?' He knew it then. He'd named it. Four women dead, but for Thorne it was the Garner case. All the murders distilled into one, the one which for a small child had taken away so much more than just his mother. The case would always be about that child, as the case a year ago had been about a woman in a hospital bed, unable to move.

The woman he'd been dreaming about.

'It's been nearly three weeks, Tom…'

'Seventeen days.'

'Look, I agreed to let you spend time looking for Margie Knight, to hold back on releasing the e-fit, but we're getting nowhere.'

'Sir…'

'I've backed every decision you've made on this…'

'Because they've been the right decisions…'

'Jesmond's getting fucking jittery, all right? Now,. I'm not talking about winding it down, so don't panic, but progress somewhere would go down a storm right now.'

Thorne was off the bed, catching glimpses of himself in the wardrobe mirror as he stomped around the room. He didn't look at all happy. He knew that Brigstocke was right of course, but his hackles were up all the same. 'Does he think we're sitting on our arses?'

'The hotel killings will be all over the paper in the morning.'

'What? How…?'

'The bodies were found by a housemaid who went to turn down the beds. She called the papers before she called us.'

'Jesus. Norman must be up in arms…'

'He isn't the only one. The couple were Dutch, from Amsterdam. Tourists, Tom.'

Thorne grunted sarcastically. 'Oh, I see…'

'I don't care what you think you can fucking see, Inspector.' The change in Brigstocke's tone was sudden, and shocking. Thorne felt a twinge of guilt. The DCI was clearly under some pressure. 'We could have a decent break here, so while we're waiting for the same thing to happen on the other case, I want you to see what you can do, all right?

So get down there and have a look.'

Ronald Van Der Vlugt had spent a fairly unremarkable fifty-eight years on the planet, until the night he answered the door to a stranger in a top London hotel. Now, he lay naked in the bath, an inch of bloody water slopping around his lifeless body, trussed up like a defrosting turkey.

'What about the cuts, Phil?'

Hendricks was kneeling by the side of the bath, measuring wounds, and muttering into a small Dictaphone. He grunted, and scratched his head through his distinctive yellow shower cap. 'Stanley knife, looks like. Something very sharp and very straight. Dozens of them, all over the poor bastard. Face, torso, genitals. Same in there.' He gestured towards the bedroom where Mrs. Van Der Vlugt lay stretched out on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, her body as sliced and chipped and stiff as a chopping board.

'No chance he did it post-mortem is there?' Thorne asked. The dead would stay dead, of course, but the living did no harm in searching for a crumb of comfort to offer the relatives. Thorne glanced down at the cuts on the mot-fled belly, the floating feces, the brain matter caked across the overflow. He had no idea whether the Van Der Vlugts had children, or grandchildren…