Scaredy cat (31 page)

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

Palmer spoke casually, 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 will be life, won't it? I'll 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 usually on to the next one. Occasionally, more occasionally 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 will be life?' The emphasis on will. '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 Holland. Thorne thought he looked relieved. 'The other thing is, they'll separate me as well, won't they? When I'm in there? They do that, I read it somewhere, for prisoners who've killed women. They isolate them, because the other inmates, the honest, decent thieves and armed robbers, and contract killers will 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 normally 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 all 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 killed a schoolgirl, you're obviously worse than the animal who killed 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 tell you it's going to be tough inside, I'll tell 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 not!'

'Good.' Thorne stuck his foot down, 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 Holland 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'll be hated because you killed women. Doesn't matter why you killed them, the ones who'll want to hurt you for it will think it was a sex thing, whatever. They haven't really got a lot of time for psychology. Well they have, of course, loads of time, but they just can't be arsed. They'll just make presumptions.'

Palmer raised up his wrist, Holland's moving with it, and scratched the side of his head with a thumbnail. 'I suppose it would be stupid to ask if anybody ever puts them straight. Tells them the truth.'

'Very stupid. It gets a lot worse as well. They'll have two reasons to hate you.'

'What... ?'

'Two reasons to smash your face into a sink. To push you down a couple of flights of stairs, or knock something up in the tool shop to stick into you while you're queuing up for your dinner. Don't get me wrong, these people have got a moral code, it's just not a normal one.'

Thorne caught Palmer's eye in the mirror and held it. 'They hate men who hurt women, or pretend to hate them, doesn't much matter which, and if you're lucky, they might only piss in your tea. But if there's one thing they really do despise even more than that, it's a grass. With you, they'll be getting two for the price of one.'

Slowly, in the mirror, a clear view of the Vectra emerged, as Palmer's head dropped and he slumped down in his seat. Pleased as he was with his little speech, Thorne couldn't help but feel like a grown man who's played games with a small child and refused to let him win.

Ten minutes later, Thorne swung the car round and pulled up at a T-junction. The Vectra came alongside him, the four officers exchanging looks, both cars waiting for a gap in the traffic coming from his left. A thousand yards away on the other side of the road, across the expanse of reclaimed salt marsh, lay the prison. The slouching concrete warehouse...

Cons R Us. Kingdom Of Killers.

The driver of the back-up car gave Thorne the thumbs up and accelerated away into the stream of traffic heading back towards the city. Thorne pulled across the road and drove slowly towards the prison's main entrance, feeling the first twinges of a headache kicking in behind his eyes.

He looked at the clock on the dashboard as he rolled up the drive towards the barrier. It was just after half past one. He began to think about where he was due to be in less than an hour. The day was not going to get any better.

TWENTY

If someone told Thorne that he had a nice singing voice, chances are they'd be wearing black...

He did have a good voice, surprisingly high and light for someone who looked and spoke like he did, and usually coming as a shock to anyone who heard it for the first time. As he sang, it struck him, as it usually did on these occasions, that such events were actually the only time that he ever really sang, the only time most people sang properly: weddings, or more likely in his case, funerals. They finished singing 'The Lord Is My Shepherd' more or less together, and sat down. As Brian Marsden, the headmaster, made his way to the lectern, Thorne looked at the people around him. It was a large congregation. Sixty-five or seventy people maybe. The majority were friends and colleagues, several generations of teachers and ex-pupils, but a number of those who sat shuffling feet and orders of service were there in an official capacity.

There were more police than family.

Thorne and McEvoy were there, representing the key investigative team. Malcolm Jay, the DS from Harrow, was in church, and Derek Lickwood. Steve Norman was around somewhere, to liaise with any unwelcome reporters who might try to grab a few words with grieving relatives.

While respects were being paid, the mourners were being closely watched in case the killer himself decided to pop along and sprinkle soil on the coffin of his victim. He wouldn't be the first, but as always, Thorne thought it unlikely that he or anybody else would be able to spot him if he were to show up. He would hardly be the one dressed in bright colours or sniggering during the eulogy. He was unlikely to be looking shifty or coughing nervously when the vicar talked about the deceased being 'taken from us'. Nevertheless, it was a useful thing to do. They would ask discreetly for a guest list and, even more discreetly, someone would be filming those guests as they filed out of the church. Thorne craned his head round. There was a row of six or seven schoolboys in the rearmost pew. They were sixth-formers probably, sitting stiffly and wearing what in Thorne's day would have been called 'lounge suits'. One of them caught his eye and smiled. Thorne inclined his head non-committaly and turned away. The teachers, at least fifteen or twenty of them, sat together on the left-hand side. Some were wearing gowns and mortar boards. All of them watched the tall, white-haired man at the lectern. The headmaster's voice echoed round the church, as it did every morning round the main hall at King Edward's. Thorne looked at the sombre expression on Brian Marsden's thin face and guessed that he looked the same every day in assembly.

The family sat on the front row. The teenage nephew and niece. The sister in her forties. The father...

Thorne looked at the old man and saw the shadow of Charlie Garner's grandfather. Thirty years older perhaps, and a sight more frail, but with the same haunted expression. Like he'd been hollowed out and there was nothing of substance to hold the bones in place any more. The congregation was rising to sing again, the organist playing the opening bars of 'Abide With Me' badly. As Thorne stood, he caught the eye of the headmaster who had just returned to his place, his tribute to Ken Bowles paid. Thorne opened his mouth to sing and realised that he hadn't heard a word of what had been said.

Later, outside the church, people watched the coffin being loaded into the back of the hearse. With McEvoy away somewhere reapplying make-up, Thorne was joined by Malcolm Jay and Derek Lickwood. They both lit cigarettes hungrily and the three of them stood around, not knowing what to do with their hands and trying not to look too much like police officers.

'Inspector Thorne... ?'

Thorne turned at the familiar voice and found himself face to face with a smiling Andrew Cookson, the teacher who'd shown him around the school. The teacher who, two weeks earlier, Thorne had mistakenly assumed to have been the body they had today come to bury.

'Here mob-handed then?' Cookson said, laughing.

Thorne nodded and turned to his colleagues. They had obviously not been doing a great job of blending in. 'DS Jay, DCI Lickwood...'

'Andrew Cookson. I worked with Ken.'

While handshakes were exchanged, Thorne looked at the man who was hovering at Cookson's shoulder. His head was completely bald and spotted with brown patches. He leaned on a walking stick and stared at something in the distance, his lower jaw moving constantly, as if he were chewing something everlasting.

He turned his head suddenly, looked at Thorne. 'Thank you for coming.'

'I'm sorry about your son,' Thorne said.

Cookson stepped back and took the old man by the elbow. 'This is Leslie Bowles, Ken's father.'

Thorne saw Jay and Lickwood exchange an uneasy glance. Before they had a chance to mumble an awkward response, the old man spoke.

'Very kind of Andrew here, to look after me...

'Don't be silly,' Cookson said.

'Doesn't know me from Adam.'

'I knew Ken...'

'Not as well as some.'

Cookson shrugged and shook his head. Bowles took a slight step towards Thorne and the others. 'It's supposed to stop isn't it?' he said.

'Everybody says it switches around when you get old and they have to look after you. The parent becomes the child...' He sounded well educated. The voice was surprisingly strong and deep. Thorne knew that the old man was a lot tougher than he looked. 'It's nonsense though, it really is. Even when they're cooking for you and getting your shopping in, you know? Even when they're doing up the buttons on your pajamas and pretending to listen to your stupid stories, even ...' His eyes twinkled and he lowered his voice conspiratorially. '... Even when they're wiping your arse, you're still the father--' His voice faltered suddenly. He swallowed, took a breath and continued, the sentences now shorter, the words spoken between gulps of air. 'It never stops, never. You're still the father and he's still the son. Still the son...' He turned his head away from them. His jaw began its chewing movement again.

'Dad. They're ready...' Leslie Bowles's daughter appeared behind him. Thorne watched them move slowly away towards the line of cars, and saw McEvoy pass them on the narrow gravel path, walking towards him.

'He's amazing,' Cookson said, looking towards the old man. 'He must be pushing ninety.'

McEvoy arrived. She nodded to Lickwood and Jay, stepped in close to Thorne. 'Lippy re-applied. All's right with the world. What's happening?'

Thorne caught a look from Cookson and made the introduction.

'Andrew Cookson, he teaches at King Edward's. This is Detective Sergeant McEvoy...'

McEvoy and Cookson shook hands. 'I was wrong,' Cookson said.

'You don't all look alike.'

'Oh, you've noticed that, then?' McEvoy said, smiling sarcastically.

'And you're a teacher, are you?'

The cars were rolling sedately away from the church. The mourners began to drift after them, putting up umbrellas as a light rain began to fall. Thorne was pleased. He was still damp anyway from tramping about on the railway embankment and his feet were freezing, but he thought that, all things considered, it should rain at a man's funeral. There should be flurries of black umbrellas and rain hammering down on to the lid of the coffin, and a mysterious woman who nobody can identify, weeping.., and a dirty great shitload of alcohol. Maybe he was just thinking about his own funeral...

'Come on,' Thorne said, and he and the others began to move towards where the cars were parked. It was three or four miles to the cemetery. Graveyard of course, never crematorium. Always burial, in case the body should ever need to be exhumed and looked at again. 'I mean what about afterwards? The actual searching. The digging: He remembered what he'd been doing that morning, thought about

the dogs again. Barking, howling, pawing at the ground, sniffing out the stench of something long-dead below the Coke cans and the fag ends and the weeds.

The rain was really starting to come down by the time they reached the cars. Thorne and McEvoy climbed into the Mondeo. He started the engine, remembered that he still hadn't got the heater fixed, flicked on the squeaky wipers. He pulled the car out on to the main road and followed the line of bigger, blacker cars up ahead. I got Ken Bowles killed.

And Thorne knew that he had-that he would always be sorry for it, that he would catch the man who had done the killing. He knew that standing at the graveside, he would feel his guilt, hot and heavy inside him, curling round his innards and settling down to sleep fitfully in his gut. He also knew that as he watched the coffin going down into its grave, he would be thinking about Charlie Garner's mother Carol, in hers. About Katie Choi and Miriam Vincent in theirs. As they lowered Ken Bowles down, he would be thinking about Karen McMahon, in a grave as yet unknown and never tended.