Mark Billingham - Scaredy cat

It had been over a year since his last relationship. No sign of another one. Was he too carrying a little of the stuff around with him? A handful of sparkling death, visible to those with an eye for it? He pictured his jacket lying across the back of the kitchen chair in the darkness. He closed his eyes and imagined them, luminescent, caught in a beam of moonlight coming through the kitchen window… A few tiny fragments, glittering at his collar and in the folds of the sleeves. Like malignant diamonds.

Karen, I didn't do it.

I wish I could tell you that it was because I refused. Because I stood up and said no to any more of it. I wish I could tell you that I was strong, that I decided not to go through with it.

The truth is, I tried to go through with it and I failed. Thank God. Thank God, I failed. Perhaps, a big enough part of me wanted to fail, wanted it to go wrong so badly that I made it happen. Perhaps I just chose the wrong girl. Or the right one. I sat in the pub and watched her, wanting to run, wanting to stay, counting each drink she had, listening to her laughing and feeling the thing heavy in my pocket. I sipped water and hummed along with the music and willed it all to be over quickly.

It was late when she finally left; they were virtually the last to leave the place and it was horribly perfect, Karen. They could have gone in the same direction, all of them heading home together and me needing to look again, to head into town and find a club, but she went her own way and I could do nothing but follow.

I don't often use bad language, Karen, but when I took out the gun, I was fucking terrified. It hung at the end of my arm like a dead thing and her mouth just opened so wide then, and I stood and watched her mouth and listened to her scream for a while. I don't know how long we stood therefore, but instead of doing it quickly, instead of firing, instead of doing it… the thing I was therefore, I just stared as she ran at me, and I bowed my head as she hit and hit. I backed away and I could see her bending down like she was picking something up. Then she came at me again and it started to really hurt and I know it sounds stupid but I almost laughed, because I suddenly realised that now, the sound of screaming was coming from me. I watched her running off towards the lights and shouting and I wiped away the blood that was running from my head on to my face. I put the gun back into my pocket and I left that place. It has to end now, Karen.

I wish I was brave enough to come to you, but you already know that I'm not. I think the poison inside me has eaten away every ounce of courage there might ever have been.

I need to find just a little more.

One phone call to the loving parents, a few weeks earlier, had been all that was necessary. He wasn't surprised that they hadn't moved. Probably never would. A bit of flannel, the charm turned full on and after a few minutes he had addresses for home and work, phone numbers, everything.

He stood outside the brasserie and peered in through the window. A fashionable expanse of exposed copper piping and deep leather sofas at the front, with tables tucked away towards the back. He couldn't see him. He'd watched him come in alone, but perhaps he'd met someone inside and they were eating…

His own lunch was starting to melt. He pushed the rest of the chocolate into his mouth, stuffed the wrapper into his trouser pocket and stepped through the door. The barman looked up and smiled, but Nicklin shook his head, kept walking slowly towards the back of the room, the tables out of sight around the corner. The fluttery feeling in the pit of his stomach wasn't nerves, exactly. He didn't suffer from that particular condition, certainly not in any fearful sense. He never had. For as long as he could remember, he'd done things that he knew few others would have done, or dared to do, not because he was brave, but because he wasn't scared. He knew there was a very important difference.

What he was feeling now was excitement. The possibility of something new and more intense than anything he'd felt before. And in a way of course, he'd be picking up where he left off a long time ago. Something old and something new…

He reached the back of the room, glanced to his left and saw him immediately. Sitting at a table with two others – men without chins, in shirt-sleeves, guzzling wine, yapping – expense account wankers. He began walking towards the table.

When he was ten feet away, Palmer looked up, clocked him and went back to his conversation. Of course, he hadn't recognised him. Nicklin had been almost certain he wouldn't. He would have been more than a little disappointed if he had. No fucking point if it wasn't dramatic.

He stopped. So did the conversation. He took a final step forward, his thighs flush against the edge of the table, their wine glasses wobbling.

'Can we help you with something?' One of Palmer's friends, nervous but trying very hard to sound edgy. He ignored him, his eyes only on Palmer, waiting for them to be met. When they were, and the tiny spark of recognition flared up into an inferno, it was a moment equal to anything he'd imagined in the preceding weeks.

'Martin? Are you feeling all right, mate?' The second man now, the concerned colleague, pushing back his chair, looking around. Palmer, eyes wide, mouth dropping, yes.., actually dropping open. Skin the colour of old newspaper.

Nicklin nodded, showed his teeth. 'Hello, Mart. This is great, isn't it?'

Palmer, struck dumb, his face frozen. Drool running from the corner of his slack mouth and running gently down onto the immaculate white tablecloth.

Staring, terrified, at his past.

Nearly three weeks since Charlie Garner had watched his mother die. A fortnight to the day since the case had officially begun. Eight days before Christmas.

An office full of people waiting…

Thorne watched as they moved around him, heads down mostly, exchanging smiles of resignation when pressed. Carrying files, answering phones, tapping at keyboards a little harder than was necessary. Frustrated, bored, some of them pissed-off for reasons of their own, others wiped out by the weekend, but all aware, to some degree, that they were doing no more than going through the motions. The e-fit of the man seen by Margie Knight and Michael Murrell, the suspect in both the Jane Lovell and Ruth Murray murders, was on the front page of most of the papers today. But Thorne wasn't waiting for the phones to start ringing. He wasn't waiting for helpful punters, eager to pass on the news that the man in the picture might be the brother of a friend, or was like a workmate's husband, or looked a little bit like the man in the flat upstairs.

Thorne was waiting for the bodies.

Since it had become clear that they were looking for two killers, violent crime against women was being carefully monitored right across the city. Monitored and sifted. They were looking for the murder, the attempted murder, the assault perhaps.., then waiting for its hideous mirror image to appear. Looking for both halves. Thorne remembered a kids' card game: the object was to collect as many pairs as possible.

I've got two stabbings, two stranglings… what have you got?

It hadn't been a particularly busy Sunday night, thank god. A lot of stuff had come in, but almost all of it was quickly dismissed. Of those cases that raised even a modicum of interest, none looked very promising. A woman attacked by another woman with a bottle outside a pub in Canning Town. A stabbing in Willesden, almost certainly a domestic. A woman threatened with a gun in Clapham, probably a botched robbery or an attempted rape…

The picture was also being shown on every news bulletin and it quickly began generating results. The calls came in. By midmorning there was a list of names. None of them appeared more than once. Brigstocke did his best to rally the troops and stop sweating. Thorne tried to stay busy. All of them, wading through treacle. Over two pints and a tomato juice at lunchtime, Holland tried, a little clumsily, to articulate the frustration they were feeling.