Mark Billingham: Scaredy cat

Thinking about the industry of killing.

Dave Holland stared over the top of his computer screen at Sarah McEvoy who was avidly studying hers. He thought about his girlfriend, Sophie.

The ongoing argument which they had been having in installments for the past year, had flared up again. Sophie had a problem with Thorne. She had only met him once and had formed an opinion based entirely on what Holland himself had said about Thorne in the early days of their working relationship. So the man described by Holland over a year ago as 'obsessive' and 'arrogant' had become, in the strange folklore of Sophie's imagination, a pigheaded, self-serving lunatic whose refusal to follow procedure would one day cost him not only his career, but those of the people around him. Those who didn't know any better…

It wasn't that she didn't want Holland to do the job. She just wanted him to do it in a particular way; to be the sort of copper who keeps his head down and gets promoted, and who is universally liked. A copper who does just enough.

A copper like his father.

Once, she'd intimated that if he chose to go a different route then he would be going it alone. He had been furious at the threat and the ultimatum had been quietly forgotten.

At least, they both pretended that it had.

The arguments were never heated. The two of them were sulkers, bottlers-up. It was more a series of snipes and barbed comments, and the intensity had increased as soon as the new case had started. Yesterday evening, after a hectic day that had begun with the team briefing, Sophie had looked up at him across the kitchen table, smiled, and opened her account.

'So how many people did the great Tom Thorne piss off today then?'

He wasn't sure what upset him most about the whole thing. The assumption that as far as his career was concerned, she knew best? The lack of support? Or the fact that when it came to her assessment of Thorne, most of the time she was absolutely right?

McEvoy glanced up from her monitor and fixed him with bright green eyes. Caught you.

She was tall, 5" 7" or 5" 8", with shoulder-length, curly brown hair, a broken nose and full lips which smiled easily and, so it seemed to Holland, often. Right now, he reckoned the smile had at least three different meanings.

He didn't understand any of them.

'I heard something very strange today.' Despite the surname, she was pure North London Jewish. Her accent was flattish, hard. Sexy. 'A vicious rumour about the Weeble…' The nickname was a reference to Thorne's shape, to how hard people thought it would be to make him fall down.

Holland raised his eyebrows. Another rumour? When it came to Thorne, he'd heard most of it, but he enjoyed a good story or bit of gossip as much as anybody else.

'I heard that he likes country-and-western. Is that true?'

Holland nodded, as if confirming a terminal diagnosis. 'Yeah, he loves it.'

'What, all that yee-hah and Dolly Parton and stuff? Does he go line dancing?'

Holland laughed. 'I think it's a bit more obscure than that. He used to listen to a lot of techno and garage stuff as well, but I think that was just a phase.' He blinked slowly, remembering the almost hypnotic' noise. Remembering the case it had helped to blot out. McEvoy looked disappointed. 'Shame. He was starting to sound interesting there for a minute.'

'Oh he's.., interesting.'

Holland believed that about Thorne, if he believed anything. If interesting meant unpredictable and stubborn. If it meant refusing to admit that you might be wrong. If interesting meant determined, and vengeful, and knowing the difference between right and wrong whatever the poxy rules said. And refusing to suffer fools. And possessing the kind of passion that would always make something happen. A passion that Dave Holland, whatever other people might want him to do and be, would have killed to have even the tiniest fucking bit of… He thought about his father. A man who died a sergeant at sixty. Having done just enough.

McEvoy shrugged and her eyes dropped back to her screen. Back to the computerised catalogue of suffering and death from which the two of them were supposed, hopefully, to come up with some answers. Holland had believed that relatively, London could not be that violent a city and that their search would not be overly time-consuming. He had been wrong on both counts.

Looking for murders committed on the same day had sounded fairly straightforward, but Thorne was not a man who did things by half. Both time-frame and search criteria were broadening all the time. McEvoy and Holland had begun by looking for strangulations first and then widened things from there. They couldn't rule out assaults as they might be the work of the same man who had now perhaps graduated to full-blown murder. Even discounting domestics and gang-related attacks, it was a big job. To check thoroughly, to go back far enough to find a pattern – if indeed there was one – was going to take time.

Holland looked up at the clock. Another twenty minutes and they could call it a night. He tried to picture Thorne in a Stetson and cowboy boots but the image wouldn't stick.

Thorne was too dangerous to be a figure of fun. Johnny Cash made good music to read post-mortem reports by. This, after all, was someone who once famously sang about shooting a man just to watch him die. Whether this was big talk or just a very bad case of boredom, he sang as if he knew a great deal about death. Thorne wondered, as he read the words Phil Hendricks had used to describe the manner of Carol Garner's death, how much he really knew. Now, the man with a voice like the long, slow tumble towards hell was singing about flesh and blood needing flesh and blood. Thorne certainly didn't require it, but the proof was there on his lap, right in front of him – the proof that sometimes, flesh and blood needed to destroy flesh and blood, too. The body of the second victim, Ruth Murray, had been examined by another pathologist. Thorne had seen the initial report which confirmed strangulation as the cause of death and revealed that tissue had been removed from beneath the victim's fingernails for DNA-testing. He wasn't going to get too excited just yet. It sounded promising, but he would wait to see what Hendricks had to say once he'd carried out a second PM.

Thorne had once thought strangulation, as ways of dying went, to be a fairly soft option. It could surely not be as terrible as being repeatedly stabbed or bludgeoned. It was certainly not on a par with drowning, or suffocating or swallowing bleach. He'd thought this, until he'd read his first PM report on a victim of manual strangulation. In many ways, the use of the bare hands to throttle – the flesh on flesh – made it the very worst type of killing. There was no weapon to separate killer from victim. In most cases the victim would lapse into unconsciousness quickly, but the damage inflicted could be massive, often leaving the victim as bloody and bruised as if they had been attacked with a hammer. Carol Garner had died from asphyxia due to the compression of the carotid arteries, her body displaying virtually every classic trait consistent with violent strangulation.

The eyes were open, the eyeballs distended, the corneas and skin around the eyes showing signs of hemorrhage. The neck was a mass of bruises, some nearly an inch in diameter and there were bloody, half-moon-shaped indentations from the nails on the fingers and thumbs of the killer.

Thorne's hands drifted towards his throat. He closed his eyes. Was that chocolate bar his, Charlie? Did he give it you to keep you quiet? Or did he produce it himself, afterwards, and eat it slowly, watching her, while you were crying?

There was massive bruising and abrasion to the floor of the mouth, the epiglottis and the lining of the larynx. The tongue had been all but bitten clean through. The crocoid cartilage was crushed, the thyroid cartilage virtually unrecognisable and the hyoid bone was fractured. It was this internal damage which most clearly indicated the severity of the attack which led to Carol Garner's death. Did you see it happen, Charlie? Did he shut you out of the room, or did you stand and scream, and beat your tiny fists on his back and watch your mummy's eyeballs bulging out of their sockets?