Scaredy Cat (41 page)

Divorce, the custody of children, domestic violence. The High Court Family Division held sway over a great many lives and Alison did not get priority. If anything, her case might be judged less important than some others. So, it was taking time. Alison had first spoken to her over two weeks ago now, and after the tears, the arguments, the doubts, had come a determination on Anne Coburn's part

to do what she'd been asked.

To help a friend.

She'd set everything in motion, but it was al too slow for Alison.

Anne walked towards ITU, wil ing one foot to go down in front of the other and keep moving. Steeling herself.

Jeremy was doing a lot better but it was going to take time. The relationship he'd been having with a junior

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doctor had ended only a few days before James's death, but even if there had been someone around for him to lean on, to take comfort from, Anne would have wanted to be there as wel . As it was, he was alone and desperate, and the twenty-five years she'd known him meant that she would always be nearby, ready to help.

Equal y, she could never see Tom Thorne again.

It was as if the two of them had survived the +rash of a plane Thorne had been flying. Relieved, but unable to look each other in the eye. Guilt and blame and bad memories were not the stuff of a future.

Her future was Rachel.

Alison had been moved to a side room a couple of weeks earlier. It could not be watched directly from the nurses' station, and they wouldn't disturb her.

Anne opened the door. Alison was awake, and pleased

to see her.

She moved across to the window and closed the blind. If anything, the room was even more sparse and functional than the one she'd been in before. Anne remembered the half-dead flowers that Thorne had brought from a garage and wondered for a moment where he was and how he might be feeling. She closed her eyes, wiped away the image of him and turned back to Alison.

They spent a few minutes !aughing, and crying, before Anne went to work. Her movements were quick, quiet, professional. She removed the oxymeter peg from the end of Alison's finger and clipped it, at a ninety-degree angle, to its own cable. It was unspoken, but most doctors knew that this would short-circuit the alarm and prevent it sounding when the ventilator was switched off. In twenty minutes or so, she would reattach it, when it was over, and

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she had turned the ventilator back on again. That had been

Alison's idea. Take no risks, make it look natural.

Don't fuck about with your career, pet...

Anne moved across to the ventilator and flipped back the plastic cover that protected the switch, as if it were the button that launched nuclear missiles. She looked over at the bed.

Alison had already closed her eyes.

Whatever the quality of the strange, laughable life that Alison had lived these last months, it had been lived to a permanent soundtrack of humming, hissing, beeping, dripping. Twenty-four hours a day. A life defined by noise.

James Bishop had condemned her to that, but Alison

had refused to let herself be his victim.

Now, final y, the noise had stopped.

More than anything, Anne Coburn hoped that Alison might hold on to life just long enough to enjoy the silence.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

My research into locked-in syndrome has made one thing abundantly clear: there is no such thing as a typical case. There is certainly no such thing as a typical recovery, if one is made at al .

That said, any liberties that might have been taken with timeframes, procedure and so on have been taken purely in the interests of the story or else are simple, honest mistakes.

No aspersions as to the efficiency, dedication or commitment of medical staff at any hospital mentioned in this book are intended. Any comment on the parlous state of the National Health Service is meant to reflect badly not on the workers within it but on politicians and bureaucrats who, while they happily purchase private healthcare, consistently refuse to fund the NHS adequately in the hope that it wil die a nice quiet death.

Mark Bil ingham, 2000

n extract from Mark Bil ingham's latest thril er

ASCAREDY CAT

SCAREDY CAT wil be available from July 2002

in Little, Brown hardback

Date: 25 November 2001

Target: Fern

Age: 20-30

Pickup: London railway station (Int or Ext)

Site: TBA

Method: Hands only (weapon permitted to subdue if necessary)

Nicklin watched unblinking as the two of them walked hand in

hand towards him across the station concourse.

She was perfect.

He was stil clutching the book he'd presumably been reading on the train and she was finishing a sandwich. The two of them were chatting and laughing. They kept moving. They looked straight at Nicklin but didn't see him. They weren't looking around for anybody. They were not expecting to be met.

He was sitting and sipping from. a can of Coke, gazing casual y towards the departure board every few minutes. Just another frustrated travel er monitoring the delays. He turned his head and watched them as they passed him. They were probably heading for taxi, bus or tube. If they were getting a cab then he'd settle back and wait.for someone else. Annoying, but 412 MARK BILLINGHAM

not the end of the world. If they were planning to continue

their journey by public transport, he would fol ow.

He was in luck.

Stil holding hands, the two of them stepped on to the escalator leading down to the underground. Nicklin put his half-empty can on the floor beside him and stood up, hearing his knee click loudly. He smiled. He wasn't getting any younger.

He reached into his coat pocket for the chocolate bar he'd bought earlier. Moving the knife aside, he took the chocolate out and began to unwrap it as he moved towards the escalator.

As he stepped on behind a backpacker, he took a large bite, and after checking that the two of them were stil there, twenty feet or so below him, he glanced out through the vast windows towards the bus depot. The crowds were thinning out now, the rush hour nearly over.

It was just starting to get dark. On the streets and in houses. Inside people's heads.

They took the Northern line south. He settled down a few seats away, and watched. She was in her early thirties, he though.t. Tal with dark hair, dark eyes and what Nicklin thought was cal ed an olive complexion. What his mum might have cal ed 'a touch of the tarbrush'. She wasn't pretty but she wasn't a dog either.

Not that it mattered real y.

The train passed through the West End and continued south. Clapham, he guessed, or'maybe Tooting. Wherever...

The two of them were al over each other. He was stil looking at his book, glancing up every few seconds to grin at her. She squeezed his hand and on a couple of occasions she actual y leant across to nuzzle his neck. People in the seats around them were smiling and shaking their heads.

He could feel the sweat begin to prickle on his.forehead and

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smel that damp, downstairs smel that grew so strong, so acrid, whenever he got close.

They stood up as the train pul ed into Balham Station.

He watched thegn jump giggling from the train and waited a second or two before casual y fal ing into step behind them.

He stayed far enough behind them to be safe, but they were so wrapped up in each other that he could probably have walked at their heels. Oblivious, they drifted along in front of him towards the station exit. She was wearing a long green coat and ankle boots. He was wearing a bhte anorak and a wool y hat.

Nicklin wore a long black coat with deep pockets.

On the street ahead of him, with the gaudy Christmas lights as a backdrop, they were silhouetted against a crimson sky. He knew that this was one of the pictures he would remember.

There would be others, of course.

They walked past a smal parade of shops and he had to fight the urge to rush into a newsagent for rnore chocolate. He only had one bar left. He knew that he could be in and out in a few seconds but he daren't risk losing them. He'd get some more when it was al over. He'd be starv#zg by then.

They turned off the main road into a wel -lit but quiet side street and his breath grew ragged as he watched her reach into her pocket for keys. He picked up his pace a little. He could hear them talking about toast and tea and bed. He could see their joy at getting home.

He slid his hand into his pocket, looking around to see who might be watching.

Hoping it wasn't a flat. That he'd get some privacy. Praying for a bit of luck.

Her key slid into the lock and his hand moved across her mouth. Her first instinct was to scream but Nicklin pressed the 414 MARK BILLINGHAM

knife into her back and with the pain came a little common

sense. She didn't turn to try and look at him.

'Let's go inside:

Tasting the sweat on his palm, feeling the piss run down her legs, she opens the front door, her hand flapping desperately, reaching down to her side for the one she loves. For the only one she cares about.

For her child.

'Please...'

Her voice is lost. He pushes her and the boy through the doorway, hurries inside after them and slams the door shut.

The toddler in the blue anorak is stil holding tight to his picture book. He looks up at the stranger with the same dark eyes as his mother, his mouth pui"sing into a tiny, infinitely confused

'0".

ONE

A little after nine thirty in the morning. The first grey Monday of December. From the third floor of Becke House, Tom Thorne stared out across the monument to concrete and complacency that was Hendon, wishing more than anything that he wasn't thinking clearly.

He was, unfortunately, doing just that. Sorting the material in front of him, taking it al in. Assigning to each item, without knowing it, emotional responses that would colour every waking hour in the months to come.

And many sleeping hours too.

Wide awake and focused, Thorne sat and studied death, the way others at work elsewhere were looking at computer screens or sitting at til s. It was the material he worked with every day and yet, faced with this, something to take the edge off would have been nice. Even the steamhammer of a hangover would have been preferable. Something to blunt the corners a little. Something to turn the noise of the horror down.

He'd seen hundreds, maybe thousands of photos like these. He'd stared at them over the years with the same dispassionate eye that a dentist might cast over X-rays, or an accountant across a tax return. He'd lost count of the pale limbs, twisted or torn, or missing altogether in black and

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white ten-by-eights. Then there were the colour prints. Pale bodies lying on green carpets. A ring of purple bruises around a chalk-white neck. The garish patterned wal paper against which the blood spatter is barely discernible.

An ever expanding exhibition with a simple message: emotions are powerful things, bodies are not.

These were the pictures filed in his office, with duplicates stored in the files in his head. Snapshots of deaths and portraits of lives lived to extremes. There were occasions when Thorne had gazed at these bodies in monochrome and thought he'd glimpsed rage or hatred or greed or lust, or perhaps the ghosts of such things, floating in the corners of rooms like ectoplasm.

The photographs on the table in front of him this morning were no more sickening than any he had seen before, but keeping his eyes on the image of the dead woman was like staring hard into a flame and feeling his eyebal s start to melt.

He was seeing her through the eyes of her child.

Charlie Garner aged three, now an orphan.

Charlie Garner aged three, being cared for by grandparents who wrestled every minute of every day with what to tel him about his mummy Charlie Garner aged three, who spent the best part of

two days alone in a house with the body of his mother, clutching at a chocolate wrapper he'd licked clean, starving and dirty and screaming until a neighbour knocked.

'Tom. o ?

Thorne stared out into the greyness for a few more seconds before turning back resignedly to DCI Russel Brigstocke.

As part of the major reorganisation of the Met eighteen

SCAREDY CAT 417

months earlier, a number of new squads had been established within the three nascent Serious Crime Groups. A unit consisting entirely of officers brought out of retirement had been set up expressly to investigate cold cases. This unit, quickly christened the Crinkly squad, was just one of a raft of new initiatives as part of a fresh and supposedly proactive approach to fighting crime in the capital. There were other squads specialising in sexual assaults, violence against children and firearms offences.

Then there was Team 3, Serious Crime Group (West). Official y, this squad was set up to investigate cases whose parameters were outside those which might be investigated elsewhere - cases that didn't fit anybody else's remit. There were those however, who suggested that SCG (West) 3 had been set up simply because no-one quite knew what to do with Detective Inspector Tom Thorne. Thorne himself reckoned that the truth was probably somewhere half-way between the two.

Russel Brigstocke was the senior officer and Thorne had known him for over ten years. He was a big man who cut a distinctive figure with horn-rimmed glasses and hair of which he was inordinately proud. It was thick and blueblack and the DCI took great delight in teasing it up into a quiff of almost Elvisolike proportions. But if he was a caricaturist's dream, he could also be a suspect's worse nightmare. Thorne had seen. Brigstocke with glasses off and fists clenched, hair flopping around his sweatdrenched forehead as he stalked around an interview room, shouting, threatening, carrying out the threat, looking for the truth.

'Carol Garner was a single mum. She was twenty-eight years old. Her husband died in a road accident three years 418 MARK BILLINGHAM