Lifeless - 5 (32 page)

high. Palmer was a stranger in this place he had once known so wel . The handcuffs he was wearing hardly helped.

Thorne moved across to him, stood at his shoulder. 'Something tel s me this isn't going to be easy.'

'It's not the same place. It's completely different.'

'Nowhere's ever the way we remember it.'

'I know. But this ...' Palmer began to move towards a clump of trees. Thorne went with him. The sky was clear, but it had rained heavily overnight and the wind, which had picked up, blew water off the brown ferns and grey sycamores. The long grass clinging to their legs as they walked was heavy and wet. Thorne was wearing waterproof over-trousers and Palmer's jeans were already soaked.

'The curve of the bank, maybe,' Thorne said. 'A particular arrangement of trees. Anything that might at least narrow it down for us.' Palmer nodded. 'I'm looking.'

Thorne saw the confusion etched across his face, but beneath it, Palmer wore the same base expression, his key expression, that Thorne had seen often. The one he had seen staring out at him from the front page of most of the papers that morning. Palmer, six months earlier, blinking and blurry, cradling a soft drink at some doubtless horrendous office party or other.

Snapped hiding in a corner, his eyes wide, the pupils reddened by the flash; doing his best to look as if he was enjoying himself and failing dismal y.

Thorne's money was on Sean Bracher as the source of the photo. If the slimy wanker had been in front of him at that moment, he might have given him a dig, but he couldn't summon up the energy to be too pissed off about it. Bracher, like that cleaner in the hotel, cashing in on kil ing, making a little something. One person's tragedy and al that. One dog-eared snap.

One nice new sports car and a couple of weeks in Antigua with the girlfriend. It was only a picture. Fuck it, why not...

Palmer with that same expression now as he stared around him. Al at once, Thorne recognised the expression for what it actual y was: embarrassment. Embarrassed to be at that party.

To be walking into a police station confessing to murder. Embarrassed to be here. Palmer was, Thorne realised, embarrassed to be pretty much wherever he was.

Palmer let out a smal groan, his disorientation growing, and it struck Thorne that even the seasons were conspiring against him against both of them. Palmer would have remembered this place as it was in summer. Then the trees would have been heavy with fruit and flower. Today they dripped, dark and skeletal.

'It might help to think of the place in relation to the houses,' Thorne suggested. 'Can you remember which estate Nicklin used to live on?' They both looked up towards the top of the embankment. A healthy crop of TV aerials and satel ite dishes blossomed, just visible, beyond the treeline.

Palmer shook his head. 'They're different. Newer.'

'What about the bridge? Can you get your bearings from that?' Palmer looked up at the metal footbridge, a quarter of a mile away, high above the embankment val ey. 'That wasn't even there. They were stil building it. I can remember the noise...'

Thorne suddenly felt wetter and a damn sight colder as the thought hit him. How devious and clever could the fourteen-year-old Smart Nicklin have been? Was Karen McMahon buried under a hundred tons of concrete bridge support? If she was, they'd almost certainly never find her. Not that Jesmond or those above him would even agree to looking. He'd had enough of a job getting a search on this scale organised. The three magic initials had done the trick in the end. Having spoken to Hendricks he was far from sure whether it was even possible, but the outside chance of the kil er's DNA being salvageable had swung it. They'd got nothing from any of Nicklin's recent victims, but maybe he'd not been quite so careful back when he was stil a beginner.

DNA - a huge breakthrough in the struggle to catch and convict murderers. A useful weapon when it came to gett!ng the better of one's dimmer superiors...

Palmer's eyes moved from the bridge to the slopes that rose up on either side of them. He studied the smal troop of uniformed officers, positioned at various points along the bank on his right-hand

side. Some stood perfectly stil , radios in hand, and some of them were moving slowly, their steps mirroring those of himself and Thorne.

'What's going to happen?' Palmer asked. 'How's this going to work?' 'As soon as we get a fix, whenever you can give us somewhere to start, a team wil come in to clear the area - get the grass cut, bring in machinery to make it a bit more manageable. For a while, it'l be more like Ground Force than anything.'

Palmer nodded quickly. This wasn't what he wanted to know. 'I mean what about afterwards? The actual searching. The digging...'

Thorne puffed out his cheeks. Not having been involved in an operation like this for a number of years, he wasn't a hundred per cent sure himself. 'A team of special y trained officers.

With dogs probably...' Palmer flinched. Thorne wondered how on earth they trained dogs for this.., speciality. It wasn't something he bothered to think about for long. Sniffing out drugs was one thing, but sniffing out death? 'Cadaver dogs' they cal ed them in the States.

A vivid image caught him off guard for a second, took a little breath away...

Lol ing, leathery tongues, and paws scrabbling away at soil. Tearing through delicate cobwebs of skin and pressing down through chalk sticks of powdery bone.

Thorne waited a few seconds. 'Then, if we find a body, we'l bring in a forensic archaeologist...'

Palmer cut him off. 'You won't find anything.' He stopped and looked down at Thorne. His wrists were cuffed in front of him and his natural y stooping gait had become almost absurdly exaggerated. He looked like a hunchback. 'Why would she be here?'

The question, seemingly genuine and heartfelt, prompted Thorne to ask one of his own. One he'd asked before. Why had Palmer not considered the possibility that Nicklin might have had something to do with Karen McMahon's disappearance? 'Not back then, maybe,' Thorne said. 'That's fair enough. But'now, since he came back, and the kil ing began, now that you know about him. Don't you at least think it's possible?'

Something like a smile appeared on Palmer's face, as it had when Thorne had pressed him on this before, and he more or less repeated the only answer that he seemed prepared to give.

'Anything is possible, I suppose. If either of us was responsible for

what happened to Karen that day, it was me...'

'Tel me why.'

Palmer leaned forward as if he might fal , but at the last second he took a huge step and his momentum carried him away. Thorne watched him go for a second or two, thinking. Was it something about Karen, the thing which Palmer seemed to be keeping back? Or was there something else? Something he wasn't saying about Nicklin?

Thorne moved off after him, fol owing in his wake as Palmer noisily stamped down a path. The rust-coloured couch grass wind-whipped and sopping. Sharp enough to draw blood. The ground itself was sodden underfoot. Muddy water squelched up and into Whorne's boots as they walked.

'I talk to her sometimes,' Palmer said suddenly. 'I know that sounds very stupid.'

Thorne didn't think so. He'd enjoyed, or more accurately, endured,

a number of conversations with the dead down the years.

'What do you talk to her about?'

'I don't so much now, but before, I used to tel her what I'd done.' 'Confessing?'

Up ahead, Palmer grunted. 'She knew anyway, of course.'

'Did she forgive you?'

'You could never be sure what Karen was thinking. I don't think even Stuart knew a lot of the time...'

Palmer began to move wel ahead of Thorne. He veered off sharply to the left, away from the embankment that climbed steeply up to the new housing estates and towards the gentler slope on the other side. At the top, high metal fencing separated this wild, untended patch of

wilderness from a shiny new industrial park. Thorne glanced towards the embankment on his right. The officers were stil tracking their movements, one or two moving gingerly down the slippery bank.

'She knew what I was thinking al the time, of course. Al the time...' He said something else. Thorne strained to hear, but it was lost on the wind.

Palmer's strides were getting bigger, the distance between himself and Thorne growing with every step. Thorne started to move a little quicker, but they had come through the grass now and were heading into an area where progress, for him at least, was rapidly becoming far trickier. Though the ground was suddenly drier, the undergrowth was denser, his feet heavier.

He couldn't raise his legs high enough to step over the huge expanses of bracken and briar. He stumbled through masses of bare bramble, across a tangle of spiky dead thistle heads.

He swore as he caught his hand on something sharp, and bringing it to his mouth, he lost sight of Palmer for a second or two. He looked round quickly, in time to see a uniformed officer a hundred or more yards away, sliding down the embankment on his backside. He was on the verge of cal ing out, when he heard Palmer's voice...

'That's because I loved her, I suppose. I always loved her...' Thorne pushed aside the overhanging branches of a dead blackberry bush, and saw him standing thirty feet away. Thorne was breathing heavily. He suddenly felt rather stupid. He looked at Palmer up ahead of him, stock stil . What on earth had he been worried about?

He fol owed Palmer's tracks through a shin-high patch of dried-out ferns until he was standing alongside him.

'Was Karen the only woman you ever loved?'

'Yes. The only woman.' He turned to Thorne and smiled sadly, like an idiot. 'I always loved Stuart, of course.'

Palmer raised his handcuffed wrists and pointed as best he could towards the gnarled black roots of a sorry-looking oak tree a few yards away.

'This is it. I found a baby bird here once.' He turned around and began looking excitedly in different directions. 'The sheds we used to mess about in were over there. Stuart's house was up there.' He looked at Thorne, nodded. 'It was around here, where we used to come, the three of us. This was the last place I saw Karen.'

Thorne turned around. After a few seconds, he made out the figure of Dave Hol and at the top of the embankment, talking to two uniforms, drinking tea. Thorne stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly to attract Hol and's attention. When he had it, he started pointing.

Hol and waved and began to speak into his radio.

Checking in his rear-view mirror, Thorne saw that Palmer's head was bowed, as if he was looking down at the metal around his wrist and around that of Dave Hol and who was sitting next to him, and quietly reminding himself how the handcuffs came to be there. How he came to be in the back of this particular car. The detective driving the Vectra behind them caught Thorne's look and flashed his lights. Thorne raised a hand in acknowledgement.

The smal convoy turned left off the southern approach to the Blackwal Tunnel and made for Woolwich, heading back towards Belmarsh Prison.

Palmer spoke casual y, as if he were asking to have a window opened, but even over the rattle of the Mondeo and the roar of other cars on the road, Thorne could hear the need in his voice.

'It wil be life, won't it? I'l not be coming out...'

Thorne always tried to put the trial to the back of his mind. He'd need to give evidence of course, but his real job, if he'd done it properly, was over by then. He was usual y on to the next one. Occasional y, more occasional y in the last few years, some moron of a judge - some fossil, who didn't know what rap music was and thought that women in short skirts were asking for it - might fuck things up for everybody: make headlines and undermine months, maybe years, of police work by sentencing a murderer as if he'd neglected to take his library books back...

'It wil be life?' The emphasis on wil . 'Do you think... ?'

A glance in the mirror told Thorne that, now, Palmer's head was raised, his eyes fixed straight ahead. Thorne gave the only honest answer he could. 'I hope so, yes.'

Palmer nodded a few times to himself, to Hol and. Thorne thought he looked relieved. 'The other thing is, they'l separate me as wel , won't they? When I'm in there? They do that, I read it somewhere, for prisoners who've kil ed women. They isolate them, because the other inmates, the honest, decent thieves and armed robbers, and contract kil ers wil hurt the likes of me inside, if they get the chance. That's true isn't it?'

Thorne saw little point in denying it. 'Sometimes, yeah. It's normal y sex-offenders, stuff with kids...'

'I know, but I would be a target though.' It wasn't a question. Thorne shrugged, let Palmer continue. 'There's no way they can keep you apart al the time though, is there? Even if you're with ... other prisoners who are the same as you, the special ones. There's a pecking order of some sort, I imagine. If you're a pervert who's kil ed a schoolgirl, you're obviously worse than the animal who kil ed the old age pensioner. The man who's battered his wife to death is not quite as hated as the one who's murdered two women he didn't even know...'

Thorne did not want to listen to any more of this. In the beginning, it had sounded like an attempt at self-assurance. Now, it was sounding like self-pity. 'Listen Palmer, if you want me to tel you it's going to be tough inside, I'l tel you. Yes, you're going to hate it. Then again,

you're not a stupid man are you? Isn't that sort of the point?'

'Yes, of course...'

'If you're asking me to feel an Ounce of anything like fucking sympathy... ?'

'No. Absolutely noti'

'Good.' Thorne stuck his foot dowrY, gambled on amber and roared

across a mini-roundabout onto Woolwich Church Street, the river to the left of him. He checked in the mirror to be sure that the Vectra had made it through the lights behind him. His eyes flicked across to Hol and who'd said next to nothing since they got into the car. He stared out of the window, lost in thought. Just a body to handcuff a prisoner to.

'Something else you need to think about, Palmer. Yes, you're quite right, you'l be hated because you kil ed women. Doesn't matter why you kil ed them, the ones who'l want to hurt you for it wil think it was a sex thing, whatever. They haven't real y got a lot of time for psychology. Wel they have, of course, loads of time, but they just can't be arsed. They'l just make presumptions.'