Mark Billingham - Scaredy cat

'So that's why you never searched locally?' Thorne asked.

'We searched everywhere…'

'Sorry, I mean.., looked for a body, looked for it in the area where she disappeared. The country park, the railway line…'

'The sightings were one reason; certainly. Didn't make sense for whoever took her to kill her and bring her back to dispose of the body. Not that these animals do anything normal…'

Perks's gaze was steady but despite the disgust in his voice, Thorne thought that there was something missing from the eyes. It was something Thorne saw in the bathroom mirror every morning, flickering into life. On a good day he might call it passion. On a bad one, panic.

'Then there was the lad's statement,' Perks said. 'The boy that saw her get taken. We had an eye witness who watched Karen get into that car.'

'Stuart Nicklin.'

Perks's eyes narrowed for a moment. 'Yes. Nicklin.'

They walked on in silence for a few minutes. A varied panorama of heavy riverside industry moved slowly past them on the other side of the water, some of it flourishing, some of it long dead. All of it pig ugly. A disused power station, a grain processing plant, the scrap yard where the Marchioness was finally broken up and melted down, wharves piled high with gravel and aggregates, rusting cranes poking skywards.

The sky, the shore, the water, the buildings. Black, grey and brown…

'Tell me about Nicklin.'

'He was a strange kid…'

Thorne nodded, thinking, Jesus…

'You don't know how much things like that are going to affect kids down the road, do you? He was really upset. Seeing her get into that car. He knew it was wrong, you see. I think he knew he should have done something to try and stop it. He never said that but.., he knew. Seeing her taken like that, it shook him. They were close, not boyfriend and girlfriend, but close. Best friends, you might say. Actually there was another kid, Martin Palmer. They were a bit of a threesome. They'd all been together earlier that day, but then they'd had some kind of falling out and Palmer had gone home.'

'Any idea what they'd fallen out about?'

Perks squinted at him, his mind racing ahead, aching to work it out. 'No…'

'You knew that Nicklin had been expelled from school before this?

Him and Palmer?' The look on Perks's face – the confusion, the desperate desire to know – made Thorne feel suddenly guilty. He was going round the houses. Pissing a decent ex-copper around for no good reason he could think of. He should have just said what he had to say back there in the pub, told Perks what he wanted – what he wanted confirmed. Thorne put a hand on Perks's arm. 'I wanted to talk to you about Stuart Nicklin. Palmer as well, but really.., this is about Nicklin. I wanted to check that his statement was the only reason why you didn't look for Karen closer to home; how much what he said to you at the time had to do with that…'

They couldn't walk any further. They'd reached Saunders Ness, the end of the riverside walk. A spit, or nose, of land formed by the huge curve of the river as it swept round the Isle of Dogs and out towards the estuary.

Perks leaned on the handrail and stared out across the river. 'The Thames was more or less dead a couple of years ago. Did you know that? Bugger all could live in it.' Thorne was not surprised. All manner of shit got dumped in the river and most people didn't know or didn't much care. To the average Londoner, the Thames was just something you had to cross sometimes. Perks looked at him as if reading his thoughts. 'The few people who gave a toss did something about it though. There's nearly a hundred different types of fish in there now sea trout, salmon, jellyfish. They found seahorses up past the Dartford crossing. They've brought this thing back to life. Nice you can do that; isn't it?'

Thorne nodded, acknowledging that yes, it was nice. Perks smiled and pointed towards the water. Thorne peered at the shoreline and saw what he was so pleased about; his tale of life after death being illustrated for him, right there. White against the dark water, a heron, standing motionless in the shallows, looking for lunch. Thorne took a breath, and started. 'Stuart Nicklin has murdered at least four people. He… manipulated Martin Palmer into killing another two. I'm sorry if this is hard for you to listen to. I can only say that I want to catch him, every bit as much as you wanted to catch the man you thought abducted Karen McMahon. Nicklin, whatever he calls himself now, whoever he is… he's a man who kills for pleasure.'

He waited just a second or two before saying the hardest thing of all.

'That said, you won't be surprised when I tell you that I don't think he told you the truth about what happened to Karen.'

Thorne stopped, waited. It was impossible to gauge exactly how Perks was going to react. In most cases, being told, however sensitively, that something you had done was wrong, or at the very best, a touch misguided, was likely to provoke a defensive reaction. Thorne remembered Lickwood's anger: a predictable response to allegations of incompetence. This was far from that, but still, a similar reaction would be entirely understandable.

Perks turned and looked at him, looked at his eyes. Thorne had been wrong in thinking he'd get an angry response. The tone was gentle, comforting almost. Vic Perks did no more and no less than voice thoughts that were familiar to him. These were words that passed through his mind daily: simple and straightforward words he'd heard many years before, and now spoke easily and without hesitation. As Perks talked, Thorne knew that he'd been wrong about something else. The passion wasn't missing at all.

'She got into a blue car, sir. A Cavalier, I think they're called. Blue with rust on the front bumper and a sticker on the back window, and a six and a three in the number plate. She had a strange look on her face. I remember wondering what she was thinking, but she didn't seem frightened. Just before her head disappeared, down behind the door, I think she might even have waved at me. Just a little wave. Either that or she might have been pushing the hair back behind her ear. She did that a lot. It was hard to tell because the sun was in my eyes…'. Perks stopped, screwed up his own eyes. He was trying to remember something else, or perhaps he was simply recreating the face of the boy who'd first spoken these words. Thorne couldn't be sure.

'He was fourteen, Thorne. A few weeks older than she was, that's all. Karen had just turned fourteen. 17 July, 1985.' He blinked twice, slowly. 'Karen would be thirty-one this year.' Thorne nodded. It was clearly a calculation Perks could do in his sleep. 'He was still a child. I had no reason not to believe him.'

'l know.'

'Christ, people saw the car. Bloody idiots thought they saw the car, thought they saw Karen…'

Thorne was a fraction of a second from reaching out a hand and placing it on the old man's arm, when Perks turned away, shaking his head. He leaned on the wall, fixed his gaze on the shoreline. The tide was almost fully out. Thorne stared down at the assorted detritus revealed by the retreating water, squatting in the sludge. Tyres, dozens of them, broken crates and of course the ubiquitous supermarket trolleys. How the hell did these things get here? He couldn't imagine anybody unloading the weekly shop into the back of the car and then merrily hoisting their trolley off the nearest bridge. Yet here they were, probably deeply symbolic of something or other, but to Thorne, right at this minute, just a bunch of old trolleys stuck in the mud.

This was a fairly typical bankside treasure trove, though Thorne had often come across more exotic items. A number of artificial limbs. A 1968 Harley-Davidson. A dead white bull-terrier, bloated and snarling like a hideous space hopper.