Mark Billingham - Scaredy cat

Palmer had agreed in principle to all of it. Now, he sat waiting, as Thorne waited, for approval of what at the very least was an unorthodox move, and at the very worst, would end a career or two.

Jesmond shuffled his chair a little closer to the table, sat up straight.

'I have to tell you, I'm not convinced.'

You don't have to tell me anything, thought Thorne. It's written all over your pointless, pinched face. Spelt out in the red veins across your nose and cheeks…

Jesmond continued. 'Palmer is a multiple murderer, a serial killer if you want to be sensationalist about it…'

Norman nodded. 'Why not? It's what the press want.'

'Right. Now, we can give him to them. Now, we have a chance to ease what I assure you, Detective Inspector, is a great deal of pressure to get some results, and I must say I'm inclined to take it.'

Thorne tried to make it as clear-cut as he knew how. 'If we announce that we've got Palmer, we lose a far more dangerous killer.'

Jesmond flicked a finger across his thin lips, glanced down at the notes in front of him on the table. 'Smart Anthony Nicklin. As was.'

Thorne nodded. 'Yes, sir.'

'"Far more dangerous" is a little bit over the top isn't it? Nastier, agreed, but he and Palmer have each killed twice, so…'

'That we know of, sir.'

Brigstocke nodded. 'I have to agree with DI Thorne, sir. Nicklin seems to be the more predatory of the two. Certainly the more violent.'

Thorne thinking, thank fuck, about time. 'Nicklin is the one that has arranged these killings. Without him the killings would stop. Without Palmer… I think he'll simply go to ground.'

There was a pause. Thorne looked over at Brigstocke but the DCI was looking at the table. Thorne shifted his gaze to the window. The sky was the colour of a long-dead fish. It was quietly drizzling. It was Norman who spoke up. 'And that's.., bad is it? Nicklin just disappearing?'

Thorne tried to sound informative, tried not to make Norman feel too stupid. 'He won't disappear for ever. He'll wait until he thinks it's safe, then start again. He'll do it differently. Maybe he'll move and start killing somewhere else.'

Norman nodded, but Thorne caught something in his look that told him he hadn't tried hard enough. Norman felt stupid… Brigstocke took off his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose. Thorne had a sudden, disconcerting memory of seeing him do the same thing, right before he punched the front teeth out of a pedophile's mouth. 'I'm not sure the papers will go for it, Tom. Knowingly running false murder stories could get them into deep shit with their readers later on. They'll only play along up to the point that their circulation gets hit.'

'Nicklin needs to think that Palmer's still out there killing for him. Can't we make the papers print what we want them to?'

Jesmond glanced at Norman. 'Steve?'

Norman looked across at Thorne. Now who's asking stupid questions? 'There's something in what DCI Brigstocke is saying. A balance would need to be struck. We'd have to let them feel that they were being altruistic, at the same time as offering them the big story if it works. If we get Nicklin.'

Thorne nodded. It sounded like a way forward. Norman hadn't finished. 'There would of course be other, bigger problems. There could be… almost certainly would be, leaks from within the investigation, not to mention the odd, slightly unusual journalist with a strange compulsion to tell the truth.' He smiled at Thorne a little sadly, and shrugged.

'Perhaps I'm being a bit dim,' Jesmond said, flashing sharp incisors, 'but I'm still not quite sure why we don't just print the truth in the papers. About the failed attack on Ms Kaye I mean.'

Norman was nodding halfway through Jesmond's speech, and didn't stop. 'Right. "Twin killers strike again. One strikes out.'"

'Or something of that sort,' Jesmond agreed. 'Might not reporting the failure frighten Nicklin a little? Prompt him to contact Palmer perhaps?'

All eyes on Thorne now. He seriously doubted that much would frighten Nicklin, but despite seeing some sense in what Jesmond was saying, he stuck to his guns. 'I'm convinced that the most dangerous thing would be to disrupt the pattern.'

Jesmond was stubborn as well. Stubborn, and with pips on his shoulder. 'He might know about it anyway. He might have watched Palmer mess it up. He might have seen him fail to kill Jacqueline Kaye. What then?'

'Obviously, we can't rule that out completely until the missing body turns up and we establish time of death, but the Lovell and Choi killings would indicate that isn't part of his pattern. I think Nicklin does his bit and then gets another jolt from sitting back later, and watching the reports of Palmer's killings on TV and in the papers. Sir.'

Jesmond shook his head, slowly. 'We must have other options. More conventional avenues of investigation. We have a description for a start and it certainly sounds as if a decent description is what got us Palmer in the first place.'

'You're right, sir,' Thorne said, thinking, Yes, and who was that down to? 'Unfortunately, the description Palmer has given us, based on the single meeting the two of them had in the brasserie, is hardly decent. Nicklin had a beard. For all we know he doesn't have it any more. All Palmer really has is an impression of this man, a description based on his memory of him, rather than on the way he looks now.' Thorne pictured the look of confusion on Palmer's face, as he'd tried, with very little success, to recall how the boy he used to know had looked that day he'd strolled up to his lunch table and turned his dull little world on its head. 'Palmer can describe the fifteen-year-old boy like he saw him yesterday, but he can't give us an accurate picture of the man who walked into that brasserie six months ago. We've got height and a rough idea of weight, clothes, colouring, but we don't have a face. We sat him down with the CCTV footage from Euston, but he couldn't pick Nicklin out.'

'Or wouldn't; Jesmond said. 'We can't be certain he wants his friend caught as much as he says he does.'

Thorne shook his head. 'I am certain of that, sir.'

And yet…

There was something that Palmer was keeping hidden. He appeared to be co-operating fully, to be answering every question, but Thorne sensed there were secret places he was unwilling to go, pictures he was wary of painting too fully.

Thorne would keep digging. If they'd let him…

'What about these e-mails?' Jesmond opened a green folder and began pulling out copies of the messages Nicklin had sent to Palmer. The tech boys had printed them out from Palmer's home PC.

'They're untraceable,' Thorne said, emphatically. 'Anonymous servers. Accounts set up on stolen credit cards. He was very careful.'

Jesmond quickly re-read a couple of the mails, clenching his jaw at the most chilling – the ones that had issued Palmer with his instructions: the dates, venues and methods of the killings.

'Can't we just monitor his e-mails?' Jesmond asked. 'Have them forwarded on to one of our computers?'

Thorne leaned forward. 'We will be watching for any communication from Nicklin, of course, and using the description we've got, but I still don't think it's enough sir. It's got to be all or nothing.' He pulled one piece of paper away from the others, slid it in front of Jesmond.

'Look at that one, it pre-dates the first killing by a few weeks.'

Jesmond picked it up, started to read.

Received: (qmail 27003 invoked by alias); 28 Jun 2001

11:35:29 -0000

Date: 28 Jun 2001 11:35:29 -0000

Message-ID: ‹921065729.27000@coolmail. co. uk› To: martpalmer@netmail. org. uk

Subject: THINKING OF SUMMER

From: Old Friend.

Martin. Any thoughts yet? I can see you're thinking about it. You look miles away sometimes and I know that you're picturing it. Soon it will be a lot more than a picture. I'm presuming (as I could always presume with you) that you're on board. I will give you details in the fullness etc., etc. Your face tells me that you're remembering those summers. Think about the summers to come…