Mark Billingham - Scaredy cat

He saw those that hated it, battening down the hatches. He saw a set of shell-shocked parents organising their daughter's funeral.

While all this was going on, Tom Thorne spent the last few days before Christmas working at his own speed. Slowly but very surely pissing off virtually everyone who knew him. To most coppers 'overtime' was a magic word, right up there, and in some cases, well above, 'conviction'.

But not at Christmas.

Coppers got a bit huffy come Christmas. Self-righteous and sentimental, and salt-of-the-earth indignant. Jesus… (not used in any religious sense of course)… didn't they deserve a break, them and their families, after the shit they waded through for the other fifty-one weeks of the year? To Thorne, it was a moot point. He didn't get overtime anyway. DI's and above had been bought out with a few grand extra on the annual salary. It was cases like this one that made it obvious how much they'd been shafted. As it was, despite gripes of his own, Thorne didn't blame anybody for feeling fired, for needing a rest from it, but there was one major stumbling block… Killers didn't stop for Christmas.

Suicide was the well-known one of course, but it wasn't the only pastime which became popular once the novelty singles began clogging up the charts. Crime figures tended to go up across the board during the seasonal period and murder was no exception. Domestics, incidents involving alcohol – all increasing, all leaving victims and the relatives of victims, demanding action. None of them giving a toss if your parents were coming down from the North, or if you'd put a reservation on a cottage in the Cotswolds, or if it was your kid's first Christmas.

Especially if their own kid was not going to see another one. Easy to think like that of course, when you were the one cancelling the holidays. No meticulously worked-out rota, no amount of overtime, was going to make the majority of officers on this case think any differently of Tom Thorne. Not Brigstocke. Not McEvoy. He wasn't even sure about Dave Holland. The simple fact was, that thanks to him, they would all be spending Christmas babysitting a double murderer.

Palmer would not be going back to work until the New Year now, but Sean Bracher had been well briefed, so that there would be no problem when he did. Palmer's absence just before Christmas would be put down to illness, and the issue of his resemblance to the man police were seeking would not be ducked. He had come forward and been immediately eliminated from enquiries. End of story. Bracher would assist in disseminating this information as well as smoothing the passage for the new Baynham amp; Smout employee who would be working very closely with Martin Palmer. One unhappy DC, seconded from SCG (South), would be spending their Christmas ploughing through Accountancy for Idiots…

Palmer's domestic situation would be easy to monitor. He lived on the second floor of a fifties mansion block in West Hampstead. There was one entrance. He would be followed to and from work, with permanent surveillance maintained outside his flat and at least one plain-clothes officer inside at all times, though at no time would Palmer be accompanied as he entered the building.

According to Palmer, he seldom went out anyway and had never invited anybody to his flat, so comings and goings shouldn't be a problem. Thorne was keen that Palmer's movements appeared normal and so, to a degree, this side of things would be played by ear. If he was asked out for a drink (which he had told them had happened, but not often), they'd decide at the time whether to cry off or not. Similarly, at work, he'd be accompanied to lunch by the undercover DC, with a backup team on hand should this start to become suspicious in itself. In fact, the only break from any kind of routine, involved Palmer ringing his parents to tell them that he couldn't make it home for Christmas Day. This was also the only part of the whole complex arrangement that Palmer seemed remotely uncomfortable with. Thorne wanted everything tied down tight. No mistakes. The man he was after was clever. He would, Thorne felt certain, be watching at least some of the time. He might well of course have seen enough already to tell him that Palmer was in custody. Stable doors and horses…

As Thorne had told Jesmond, it was a risk he felt they had to take. There were certainly plenty of risks…

Norman had spotted a couple of them straight away. He himself would handle the media, but the team had not responded well to the lecture Thorne had delivered, that he felt needed to be delivered, on leaking ships. He'd wanted Brigstocke to do the honours, but the DCI was still in no mood to do Thorne any favours. In terms of the bad feeling coming his way, the atmosphere that followed his speech was pretty much the icing on the cake, but Thorne knew that it was necessary. Besides, normally he only alienated the top brass. Now he was getting on everybody's tits. At least this was a change… Thorne wanted this to go right. He wanted nothing in the public domain, nothing, unless it could have come from a source other than Martin Palmer. They could, for example, go with Palmer's description of Nicklin – they could always invent a witness who might have come up with that – but any avenue of investigation that could only have originated with Palmer needed to be walked with the utmost care and discretion.

Thorne could handle the black looks, the comments subtle and otherwise, but the only real moment of doubt had come at the press conference on the Saturday, less than forty-eight hours after Miriam Vincent's body had been discovered.

It was the lies, naked in the light from a hundred flash guns and boldly sharing the stage with Miriam Vincent's grief-stricken mother, that were hard to bear. Someone, it might have been Steve Norman, had actually suggested that they hire actors to play the parents of Palmer's fictitious victim: Thorne was glad he'd drawn a line and said no to that one. This was bad enough…

Norman had led out an impressive looking party, consisting of Jesmond, Brigstocke, a young DC acting as Family Liaison, and Mrs. Vincent. After the predictable rhetoric from Jesmond, Norman introduced Rosemary Vincent. She was in her early fifties, tall and slightly awkward, with a face that had probably been open and easy to read until two days ago, when it had become the mirror of emotions that were alien to it.

The scalding in the belly, the scab to be picked at. Rage and guilt… She spoke movingly of her only daughter, clutching Miriam's picture and trying not to break down as she remembered their last conversation – a row about her not coming home. Thorne stood at the back of the room, behind the journalists, away from the cameras, unable to take his eyes off this woman. He had seen people in the same situation a hundred times, but rarely had he seen the freshly dead part of them so clearly. It was there in every nervous smile, every pull at the hair and quiver of the lip. He winced when she spoke about the grief that the parents of the other victim must be feeling. He felt the shame, like a cold hand at his throat, when she sent them her love and support, when she sympathised with their pain; an agony so crippling that they hadn't felt able to come along themselves… Thorne had made a promise to himself then that, whatever happened, when it was all over he would visit Rosemary Vincent and tell her the truth, and explain why he had done what he had done. That night, he watched the highlights of the press conference on half a dozen different channels and felt the fingers at his throat every time.

He was just about ready for bed when the phone rang.

'Yeah…'

'Tom? Is that Tom?'

'Who's this?'

'This is Eileen, love. Your dad's sister.'

'Oh…'

'Sorry if it's a bit late, but we were watching a film. You know, waiting for it to finish.'