Mark Billingham - Scaredy cat

She screwed her eyes tight shut; tried to calm herself down a little. She knew that Thorne was only doing what he believed was right. She'd been feeling edgier by the day since the holiday. A couple of long, long days trapped in her parents' house in Mill Hill. Like she gave a toss about Chanukah anyway, with her tedious brother and his dull-as-ditchwater family. She had been desperate to get out, needing to be among strangers.

She'd found all the strangers she'd needed over New Year. The faces, strobed in white or lit up by the flashing reds and greens, had been reassuringly unfamiliar and the nights had become longer and louder, and altogether fucking fantastic, and suddenly – not in terms of the time, but in terms of her realising it – suddenly, dragging herself into work in the morning… some mornings, had become painful.

And Thorne and Brigstocke didn't fucking well like her anyway. The pair of them, commenting on her clothes and the way she looked, which she knew damn well they would never have done if she didn't have tits. She reached for the water bottle and unscrewed the cap. Her mobile rang.

'McEvoy.'

'It's Holland…'

She took a mouthful of water while she waited for Holland to say what it was he wanted, but he didn't. She listened to the hiss on the line, swallowed, and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her shirt.

'What?'

Another few seconds of hiss. 'Nothing urgent. Just touching base.' Touching base?

'What cop show did you see that in?'

'Sorry?'

'Forget it. Just being a snarky cow. Where's Thorne?'

'Trying to track down Nicklin's old teacher…'

As McEvoy listened, the DC she'd shouted at earlier walked past her desk. McEvoy smiled – an attempt at an apology. The DC gave her nothing back. 'You sound all echoey.'

'I'm in the toilets,' Holland said. 'Nice to see that posh kids piss on the floor as well.'

'They're not that posh, are they?'

'I didn't see many of them playing football in the playground.'

'Yeah, but not like… Biscuit Game posh.'

'Eh…?'

McEvoy laughed. 'I'll tell you later.'

'That's one thing they'll miss out on though,' Holland said. 'Being an all boys school…'

'What?'

'The sheer, unbridled pleasure of running into the girls' toilets and screaming your head off.'

McEvoy remembered the very same thing happening at her school. She suddenly pictured herself, twelve going on twenty-five, shaking her head in disgust as she listened to the whoops and cheers of half a dozen testosterone-crazed, adolescent boys. She grinned at the memory. This phone call was doing her a lot of good. 'Why did you do that anyway? I could never work it out.'

'I think it was a genetic thing. Marking your territory or something…'

McEvoy glanced up. On the other side of the incident room she could see Brigstocke talking to Steve Norman. Brigstocke looked across at her, then Norman. Weasely little fucker. She wondered whether they'd heard her laughing. She took another sip of water, her mouth still sticky. 'So, anything of interest?'

'Not really, you?'

'Nothing. Derek bloody Lickwood's been on the phone again, demanding to know what's going on. He reckons he's being kept in the dark, keeps threatening to come over and make trouble. Why should I have to deal with him?'

'Short straw. Lovell was his case so we've got to work with him. The boss reckons you'd be better at it than he would…' McEvoy grunted.

'What about Palmer?'

'At work.' She said no more than that, but there was an edge to her voice. The unspoken bit was obvious. At work, totting up figures and drinking coffee, when he should be sitting against a rough stone wall listening to keys turning in locks; his knees pulled tight against his chest, his heart thumping, his belt and shoelaces taken away. She would never criticise Thorne to Holland. Besides, she knew, somewhere, that her judgment was perhaps a little off these days. Her thinking was maybe a bit extreme…

'Right,' Holland said. 'Do you want to grab a beer later?'

She looked across at Brigstocke. He and Norman were still deep in conversation. 'I've never been propositioned by a man in a toilet before.' She could hear Holland blush. 'I'm joking Holland.'

'Yeah…'

She murmured huskily into the phone. 'I've been propositioned by men in toilets loads of times.'

Holland didn't laugh.

McEvoy puffed out her cheeks, blew out the air noisily. She reached for the bottle of water. It was empty. 'Listen, Dave.. '

'I just meant.., a beer. That's all.'

She tried not to snap at him, but couldn't help herself. 'I know.'

'If they were in my class it's because they had a particular aptitude for mathematics, but I don't remember either one of them covering himself in glory.'

Thorne nodded patiently. Ken Bowles didn't seem to remember a great deal about anything. He knew that teaching was a stressful profession but Bowles could not possibly be as old as he looked. He had hair the colour of confectioner's custard and leathery grey skin. Behind the wire-framed spectacles the eyes were watery, and he had big discoloured teeth, like old-fashioned sweets in a jar, which clacked noisily together when he spoke and sometimes when he didn't.

'You do remember Palmer and Nicklin being close?' Thorne asked. Bowles pushed himself away from the edge of the desk with a small grunt and moved across to the window. His tie was askew and there were chalk marks around his crotch. 'I don't recall a great deal about them at all. I don't think I liked either of them very much but that isn't unusual. Math is the lesson where the most disruption occurs. The taller one… was that Palmer?' Thorne nodded. 'He let himself get distracted by his friend. There…' He pointed to a corner of the room.

'The two of them messing about at the back. Passing notes and laughing. Palmer's homework was good, I think, but in class he was… somewhere else.'

'Could you not have split them up? Moved Palmer to the front…?'

Bowles shrugged, stared out of the window. 'I never really had them for that long, you see. They would probably have gone into different streams anyway that September, but of course they got expelled.' He raised his hand, rubbed with a finger at a dirty spot on the window.

'An older boy, can't remember his name. They grabbed him outside the school gates, dragged him into the park, I think…'

Thorne knew the story. Palmer had told him. His eyes filling behind his glasses, the nodding slow and sorrowful as he looked back at himself down the wrong end of the telescope, sweating as he relived it. Each detail preserved in the hideous aspic of shameful memory. The big feet in scuffed brogues, rooted t o the spot, refusing to carry him away. The thick fingers, closing slowly around the brown, pimpled grip of the air pistol.

Thorne knew then that this had been the moment when everything had changed. From then on it had been unavoidable. He thought about what Bowles had just told him. A couple more months and Palmer and Nicklin would have been in different streams, moving along different paths; Nicklin's influence on the younger boy not as strong. Would they have drifted apart then? Might a few months, all those years ago, have saved the lives of five women?

At least five women…

There was a knock at the door and Holland entered. Thorne nodded in his direction. 'This is Detective Constable Holland…'

Bowles peered theatrically across the room, feigning shock. 'Looks like a bloody sixth former.' Holland shrugged and smiled at the feeble joke.

'Did you follow their progress after they'd been expelled?' Thorne asked.

The teacher shook his head vigorously. 'Didn't miss either of them for a second. Nicklin was nothing but trouble and Palmer was just a big blob. Not his fault, I suppose. Boys his age can be terribly awkward, find it difficult to fit in. Like a lump of Plasticine that needs shaping. Palmer just got shaped by the wrong person, I think.'