Scaredy cat (30 page)

It took a little over half an hour from when Thorne first showed his warrant card at the desk in the visitors' centre to when he was sitting in the Category-A legal visit room, waiting to see Martin Palmer. It was a drawn-out and regimented procedure. From the Visitors'

centre, where Thorne had to leave all personal belongings in a locker, on to the main building where his authorisation was checked again and an ultraviolet mark stamped onto the back of his hand. Then out into a courtyard where his pass was re-checked, through an X-ray portal, a maze of glass and air-lock type passages - one door shutting before the next one opened. And then the wait for the van that transported visitors to the separate Category-A compound. Once there, a third check on credentials, another X-ray machine and a good deal more grunting and staring before Thorne was finally ushered into the small, rectangular visit room.

Then another wait that depended on nothing but the mood of the prison officers concerned. It was always the same and it always pissed Thorne off. Police officers and prison staff were old enemies. The finders and the keepers resenting each other. Screws were seen as failed coppers. Coppers were thought of as delivery boys with smart suits and clean hands. On a prison officer's territory, if anything could be done to make things that little bit more tedious and difficult, it usually was.

Ten minutes later, a heavily tattooed and deeply depressed prison officer led Martin Palmer into the room. Palmer walked across and took a seat at the table opposite Thorne. The prison officer, who Thorne thought looked like a shithouse with right-wing leanings, left to take up his position behind the door from where he could observe through the window.

Palmer was pale. He was wearing the orange hooded top that Thorne had seen him in at his flat on Christmas Eve. He stared at Thorne, blinking slowly. He looked more like a man who'd just woken up than one who, as a matter of policy, would be on suicide watch. Despite the time and trouble he'd taken to get there, Thorne wanted to keep it quick and simple. He was only really there to deliver a message.

'I'm going to find Karen,' he said.

PART FOUR

NEED

NINETEEN

Palmer looked lost.

He stared around in search of something that might anchor him, some familiar landmark from which he could navigate, but everything felt alien and unknown.

Thorne watched, trying to imagine the man as a boy in this place when the world was very different, but he was no more successful than Palmer at recapturing the past.

It was understandable, of course. The embankment was unrecognisable compared to how it must have been almost twenty years earlier. This stretch of line, which a mile or so further on ran past the bottom of the King Edward's playing fields, had been disused for years. It had been earmarked for a development which, luckily for this operation, was never quite funded properly. The railway buildings - maintenance sheds and equipment stores - had long been demolished. The track was overgrown and in pieces. In patches, the grass was over eight feet high. Palmer was a stranger in this place he had once known so well. The handcuffs he was wearing hardly helped.

Thorne moved across to him, stood at his shoulder. 'Something tells 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 dismally.

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 killing, making a little something. One person's tragedy and all 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. All at once, Thorne recognised the expression for what it actually 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 small 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 satellite dishes blossomed, just visible, beyond the tree line.

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 valley. 'That wasn't even there. They were still 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 killer'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 still a beginner.

DNA - a huge breakthrough in the struggle to catch and convict murderers. A useful weapon when it came to getting 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 small troop of uniformed officers, positioned at various points along the bank on his right-hand side. Some stood perfectly still, 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 will come in to clear the area - get the grass cut, bring in machinery to make it a bit more manageable. For a while, it'll 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 specially trained officers. With dogs probably...'

Palmer flinched. Thorne wondered how on earth they trained dogs for this.., specialty. It wasn't something he bothered to think about for long. Sniffing out drugs was one thing, but sniffing out death?

'Cadaver dogs' they called them in the States. A vivid image caught him off guard for a second, took a little breath away...

Lolling, 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'll 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 naturally 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 killing 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...'

'Tell me why.'

Palmer leaned forward as if he might fall, 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, following 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 Thorne'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 tell 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 well 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 still tracking their movements, one or two moving gingerly down the slippery bank.

'She knew what I was thinking all the time, of course. All 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 calling 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 still. What on earth had he been worried about?

He followed 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 Holland at the top of the embankment, talking to two uniforms, drinking tea. Thorne stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly to attract Holland's attention. When he had it, he started pointing.

Holland 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 Holland 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.