He didn't care about geography or French grammar but he knew about respect.
He reached down, casually took hold of Bardsley's hair and yanked him backwards. There was a gasp from the crowd, which quickly turned to nervous laughter as Bardsley jumped up, furious, ready to transfer his aggression onto whoever was responsible for the terrible stinging on his scalp.
Then he saw who was to blame. The boy, far smaller and slighter than he was, stared calmly back at him, eyes cold and dark as stones frozen in mud, hands once more thrust deep into his pockets. The crowd dispersed quickly into smaller groups. A kickabout was already starting as Bardsley backed away towards the changing rooms, promising some nasty revenge after school but not really meaning it. The boy on the floor stood up and began to rearrange his disheveled uniform. He didn't say anything, but eyed his saviour nervously while doing up his tie and dragging a sleeve across his snotty top lip. The black-haired boy had seen him around but they had never spoken. He was a year younger, probably only twelve, and the different years didn't really mix. His sandy hair was usually neatly combed with a parting, and he was often to be seen in a corner somewhere, his pale blue eyes peeking out enviously from behind a book, observing the assorted games he had no part in. He was a big kid, at least a foot taller than most of the others in his year and brainy as hell, but he was slow in all the ways that counted. He probably hadn't done anything specific to piss Bardsley off, but that wasn't really the point. The older boy watched, smiling as a brown plastic comb was produced and dragged through the sandy hair, dislodging pieces of playground grit. He had a comb himself of course, but it was a metal one; far cooler, and used mostly for the lunch-time comb fights of which he was the acknowledged champion. These fights were a more brutal version of 'Slaps' or 'Scissors, paper, rock' and could leave a hand dripping with blood within a few seconds. He was the champion, not because he was quicker than anybody else, but because he could stand the pain for longer.
He could put up with a great deal of pain when he had to. The sandy-haired boy carefully put away his comb in the inside pocket of his blazer, cleared his throat nervously and produced a rarely seen smile. It quickly disappeared when it was not reciprocated. In its place, a hand, notably free of scratches and scabs, was extended.
'Thank you for.., doing that. I'm Palmer. Martin…'
The wiry black-haired boy, the mad boy, the boy who would do anything, nodded. He ignored the hand and spoke his name with a sly smile, as if revealing a dirty secret.
As if giving a gift that was actually worth far more than it looked.
'Nicklin.'
TWO
'A few less questions, when it's all over, even one less than when a case begins and you're doing all right…'
Thorne smiled as he carried his coffee through to the living room, remembering Holland's reaction when he had first passed on this pithy piece of homespun wisdom. It had also, he recalled, been the first time that Thorne had managed to get him inside a pub. An auspicious day.
Questions…
In the pub, Holland had smiled. 'What? You mean questions like,
"Why didn't I study harder at school?" and, "Isn't there anybody else available?"'
'I think I preferred you when you were an arse-licker, Holland…'
Thorne put his mug on the mantelpiece and bent down to light the flame-effect gas fire in the mock-Georgian fireplace. The central heating was up as high as it would go but he was still freezing. And his back was playing up. And it was pissing down…
There were plenty of questions that needed answering right now. Were the two killings genuinely connected? Apart from the date and the fact that both women were strangled, there seemed to be no other link, so was the station thing just a coincidence? King's Cross threw up other possibilities. Had he mistaken the second victim for a prostitute? Why kill one at home and one on the street?
And the biggest question of the lot: did he kill twice on the same day because he was out of control, or was killing multiple victims actually the pattern? Blood lust or compulsion? Right now, Holland and McEvoy were earning overtime trying to find out, but whichever it was, the answer was not going to be pleasant. In the eight months or so that the team had been together, they had only really worked on two major cases that were truly their own. Most of the time they'd been seconded – either individually or together – on to other investigations with other units, and then been reconvened when needed.
The aftermath of the terrorist atrocities of September 11 had seen the teams from Serious Crime involved in an operation unlike any before. Some had expressed surprise that repatriating bodies from New York should be down to them, but it made sense to Thorne. These were British citizens. They had been murdered. It wasn't complicated. The phone calls had been the hardest: thousands of people eager to trace husbands and wives, sons and daughters who hadn't been in touch and who may or may not have been in the area. So far, of the hundreds whose missing relatives never did get in touch with them, only one had been given an identifiable body to bury…
Three months on, and the Met was still stretched – tracking down Anthrax hoaxers, monitoring possible terrorist targets, chasing their tails while street crime grew to fill the hole that was left. If suddenly phone-jacking didn't seem quite so important, there were still crimes, like those that Team 3 got handed, that needed to be taken very seriously indeed.
The two cases were both.., unusual. The first was a series of gruesome killings in south-east London that bore all the hallmarks of gangland slayings. However, the bodies (when they'd been painstakingly re-assembled) were found to belong, not to drug-dealers or loan sharks, but to ordinary, law-abiding citizens. It quickly became clear that the murders were the work of one highly disturbed individual as opposed to an organised gang of them. Whether the killer – a happily married electrical engineer – had been simply trying to disguise his work, or had a psychotic fixation with the disposal methods of gangsters, was as yet unclear. He was still undergoing psychiatric evaluation.
The other case was the more disturbing, despite the lack of bodies. Guests in hotels were being targeted and robbed in their rooms. The minor physical assaults that were part and parcel of the thefts had soon begun to escalate however. Those that willingly handed over cash, Rolexes and other valuables were being tortured anyway. The knife was produced and the PIN number was demanded. The number was given and the knife was used anyway. Small cuts, nicks: wounding for pure pleasure. Thorne knew that this one liked the feel of a blade on skin, enjoyed hearing the intake of breath, and watching the thin red line fill out on the flesh and begin to drip. The robbery was becoming something else: the robber, someone else. Behind his black balaclava, he was starting to enjoy his work a little too much and it was only a matter of time until people started to die.
That was when Thorne had been brought in.
With next to no physical evidence and no real description to work from, the case had quickly become hugely frustrating. Thorne, Holland and McEvoy, in an effort to trap this latent killer, this murderer-to-be, had spent nights in some very nice hotels but without success. Their efforts had evidently been noted and the individual responsible had gone to ground.
Two cases, one arrest. A fifty per cent hit rate, and the numbers would only get worse from here on in. Some had joked that the hotel case, given a few weeks, would get passed on to the Crinkly Squad anyway, but Thorne knew differently. Anybody who enjoyed inflicting pain to the degree this man did, would need to do it again. He would resurface somewhere. The MO might be completely different, but Thorne did not doubt for a second that one day soon he would be providing a pathologist somewhere with some overtime… Thorne took his coffee across to the sofa and picked up the file on Carol Garner. He sat for a few minutes, not opening it, just staring out into the rain and thinking about the hundreds, the thousands of different people across the capital who owed their employment to the violent death of another. Thinking about the money generated by murder.