Lifeless - 5 (30 page)

Thorne looked up, the desk nice and tidy, the eyes nice and dead. 'Like you said, it's theoretical. Now fuck off.'

Norman did as he was bid, and was replaced almost immediately by a far friendlier face. Hol and leaned against the doorframe and watched Norman as he made his way across the incident room.

'Cheer me up,' Thorne said. 'Tel me the Desk of Doom has got him, gouged a big hole in his leg. Better yet, taken one of his bol ocks off.'

'Sorry, no luck. You padded it with al that paper anyway.' Thorne grunted. He'd completely forgotten doing it. 'What was al that about?' Hol and asked. 'I could hear it from next door) Thorne got up and walked across to join Hol and in the doorway.

'Your guess is as good as mine. Something got up hi; arse though.' 'Wel , whatever it is, it looks like it's gone now...'

The two of them watched as Norman stood talking to Sarah McEvoy. He was smiling, gesturing with his hands. She smiled back, leaned towards him, briefly placed a hand on his arm. Her eyes darted towards Thorne and Hol and. Half a second later, they were looking at the floor in front of her.

Hol and moved into the office. Thorne fol owed him.

'Oh, listen, I'm sorry about the other morning on the phone,' Hol and said. 'You asked about McEvoy, how she was doing, or something, and I was a bit stroppy. Didn't get much sleep...'

Thorne had been wondering if Hol and would say anything. His reaction had been so out of character. He shrugged. 'I don't know what you're on about.'

Hol and breathed in, let it out. Like he'd got something out of the way. 'Norman got it in for you then?'

'Looks that way,' Thorne said. Buggered if I know why though. Worst thing about it is, I can't real y argue with him. Most of what he was saying was spot on.'

Hol and opened his mouth to argue but Thorne cut him off. 'He's a little tosser, don't get me wrong, but he knows what he's talking about.'

'No need to make it personal though, is there?'

Thorne sat down. 'He's a smal man, you know? Al got big chips on their shoulders.' Hol and looked at him, eyebrows raised, a grin threatening to appear. Thorne's face crinkled, sarcastical y, in return. 'He's smal er than me, OK? I'm average...'

Hol and held up his hands. 'I'm not arguing. What about chips though?'

Thorne thought for a second, then smiled, like he'd suddenly remembered an old friend.

The? More than Harry Ramsden, Dave.'

Hol and laughed loudly, and at that moment, Thorne would have been happy, Jesus, he would have been deliriously happy, to just close his eyes and listen to the sound of it al day. He would have been delighted to shut the door and do fuck al of any use to anybody and just sit and wait for the darkness outsile the window. To let the night come and grow thick around him. To sit in his office and drink tea and talk to Hol and about nothing: about Sophie, his girlfriend and his last holiday, and Tottenham's pointless push for a place in Europe, and what films he'd seen lately and how bloody awful they both thought

public transport was...

Whatever.

But he knew that every few seconds, his voice, even as he spoke, would grow quiet to his ears, as if the Mute/Fade button on his brain's remote control were being fingered, and a new sound would take its place. A sound that he had to invent. One that could only exist in his imagination. A sound that very few people, very few people living, could ever have heard. The dul , wet smack of a bat striking a skul . Over and over again. I got Ken Bowles kil ed.

The phone rang. Thorne reached for it absently, picked it up without looking, said nothing.

After a moment or two, a voice. Tight, impatient, a faint Midlands accent.

'Is this Thorne?'

'Yes...'

'This is Vic Perks. You've been trying to get hold of me.'

'Have I?'

Perks sighed. 'Wel somebody there has. Ex-DCI Vic Perks. I was in

charge of the Karen McMahon investigation in 1985:

Thorne grabbed a notepad and began to write...

As he jotted down details, as he and Perks made arrangements, an image began to form at the back of Thorne's mind. There one second and gone the next. Then back again, like the picture glimpsed in a cloud formation or an odd arrangement of shadows.

He saw a stranger leaning down and reaching out ahand to pul him up - to drag him from the cold, dark water at the very moment he was about to go under.

EIGHTEEN

They met in a pub cal ed The Mariners' Arms on the Isle of Dogs.

It was a basic kind of place. Thick nylon carpets, a dart board, beer. Wednesday lunchtime, and aside from Thorne and Perks, there were only two people in there: the barman - a student by the look of things with dyed blond hair and bad skin - who stared intently at the smal television above the bar; and a wizened old man in a battered brown trilby who sat in the corner with a newspaper, half a Guinness and a fierce-looking Alsatian at his feet.

While they worked their way through their beers and waited for two cheese rol s to appear - there must have been somebody else there, in the kitchen, because the rol s materialised eventual y - they talked about their respective journeys. The pub had been Perks's idea. He hadn't wanted to travel too far from the smal flat in Epping to which he and his wife had retired. When the older man mentioned where he lived, Thorne had glanced up from his pint, only for a second, but Perks stil knew what he was thinking. That part of the world did have something of a reputation.

'That's right. Retired to the same place where most of the vil ains I

spent al those years chasing ended up. I see one or two of them now and again. Buying the paper or down the garden centre. We say hel o...'

Thorne had been right about the Midlands accent: Birmingham was his best bet, or Coventry maybe. Perks was a tal man. His face was thin and deeply lined, but Thorne guessed that laughter was probably just as responsible as worry. He was in his early sixties, with his grey hair cut short and a neatly trimmed moustache, a col ar and tie beneath the padded car coat.

Perks finished his last mouthful of cheese rol , wiped the crumbs from around his mouth with a wax-paper serviette and looked Thorne in the eye.

'You haven't found her. You haven't found Karen, else you'd have said by now.'

Thorne was stil eating. He swal owed quickly. 'No. But I intend to.'

Perks stood up, scanned the room for the entrance to the toilet. He

looked down at Thorne before making a move.

'So did I...'

Later, they walked east, along the river. The fine rain was annoying more than anything - not enough to warrant an umbrel a, but enough to necessitate screwing up the eyes and hunching the shoulders. The Thames was wide here. They walked within feet of cheaply built sixties' council housing, drab and depressing. On the other side of the river, at the top of the hil was Greenwich Observatory, the Royal Naval Col ege and the Cutty Sark.

They walked slowly; Thorne moving a little slower than he might normal y have done. The river belched and slid and slurped beneath them, oily and gunmetal grey. Ahead and across from them, the bizarre monstrosity that was the Mil ennium Dome rose up through the drizzle, rusting and ridiculous. A mil ion and more a week, so they reckoned, just for it to sit empty.

'That's a decent hospital every couple of months,' Perks said. 'A school every few weeks.'

'Did you think she was alive?' Thorne asked. 'When you were looking for her?'

Perks turned his face away towards the river, towards the wind. When he final y spoke, Thorne had to strain to hear the words. 'For a week, perhaps a fortnight, we hoped. I probably thought so longer than anyone else. That was my job I suppose.'

Thorne went another step or two before he realised that Perks had stopped. He turned and walked back towards him. 'There were sightings weren't there?'

'Several. Always plenty of sightings though. People are wel meaning or else they're being plain malicious. Hard to tel at the time.

One though in particular...'

'Carlisle?'

Perks nodded, wiped rain from his face with the back of a brown leather glove. 'A few miles outside actual y. Three days after she went missing. That one was hard to ignore. The clothes were spot on - we never released everything but the description was perfect. Hair, clothes, the car. That one felt right.' Perks said something else but it was lost as a screaming gul passed just overhead, its cry mingling with the clatter of a nearby helicopter. Thorne looked up and saw a bulky, tomato-red chopper swooping down towards City Airport.

Perks moved past him. Thorne fol owed, but kept an eye on the helicopter, unable to explain the sudden, morbid thought, but not wanting to miss a moment should it burst into flame and plunge into the river.

'So that's why you never searched local y?' 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 kil 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 cal 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. Nicldin.'

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. Al of it pig ugly. A disused power station, a grain processing plant, the scrapyard where the Marchioness was final y 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...

'Tel 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 real y 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. Actual y there was another kid, Martin Palmer. They were a bit of a threesome. They'd al been together earlier that day, but then they'd had some kind of fal ing out and Palmer had gone home.'

'Any idea what they'd fal en out about?'

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

'You knew that Nicklin had been expel ed 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 wel , but real y.., 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 al could live in it.' Thorne was not surprised. Al 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, iel yfish. 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 il ustrated for him, right there. White against the dark water, a heron, standing motionless in the shal ows, looking for lunch.

Thorne took a breath, and started. 'Stuart Nicklin has murdered at least four people. He ... manipulatel Martin Palmer into kil ing 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 cal s himself now, whoever he is... he's a man who kil s for pleasure.' He waited just a second or two before saying the hardest thing of al . 'That said, you won't be surprised when I tel 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 al egations of incompetence. This was far from that, but stil , 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 al .