'It's like having sex, without ever coming…'
Thorne puffed out his cheeks. It was an… interesting analogy. McEvoy grinned. 'Yeah, well now you know what it's like then.' She laughed, and Thorne joined in. Holland blushed, took a sip of his tomato juice. 'I'm talking generally of course, Dave,' McEvoy added,
'I'm sure Sophie has no complaints.'
Holland said nothing. Thorne heard him say it.
'Sorry. Have I…?' She looked from Thorne to Holland and back again. 'What, am I not talking like a proper lady?' She emphasised the last word comically, as if it were spelt with a 'y' in the middle and two e's on the end.
Thorne smiled. 'Well at least you're in a better mood than you were on Saturday. Good weekend?'
It was McEvoy's turn to redden. 'Yeah, I'm sorry about that. Just woke up feeling arsey. Weekend was.., fine. Great, actually. Thanks.'
Before the silence had a chance to make itself uncomfortable, Thorne caught sight of Brigstocke in the pub doorway, scanning the crowd, looking for them. Thorne waved and the DCI came over. Before he arrived at the table, Thorne could tell from his face that there was news.
Simply a question of how bad…
'Got a fax through ten minutes ago. The description of a man who threatened a woman with a gun near Clapham South tube station last night…'
Thorne's shoulders lifted. A reflex as the jolt ran through him. The tingle. Not bad news at all…
McEvoy could see where Brigstocke was going. 'Not attempted robbery or rape then?'
Thorne answered her, quietly. 'Attempted murder.'
Brigstocke nodded. 'Sounds like our man. Tall, thickset, sandy hair, glasses. Better add bleeding as well. Woman he pulled a gun on says she beat the shit out of him with a high-heeled shoe.'
McEvoy swallowed a mouthful of beer. 'Fucking good.'
'When can we talk to her?' Holland asked.
'I'm trying to arrange it. She's being looked after by her family obviously she's still upset.' Brigstocke moved to sit down. Thorne shuffled along to make room for him. 'Hopefully by the end of the day
…' Brigstocke sighed and allowed himself the first smile that Thorne had seen for a few days.
Thorne stood up and reached for his jacket. If the man with the gun was one of the men they were looking for, then thankfully, one killer had failed. Thorne felt certain that the other one would not have done…
The object: to collect pairs.
Thorne disliked being the one to remove the smile from Brigstocke's face, but didn't hesitate to do so.
In his head it was a scream. It came out like a whisper.
'Somewhere, there's a woman who's been shot to death. I want to find her.'
London was a city of ghosts, some deader than others. Thorne knew that in this respect, it wasn't unlike any other major city – New York or Paris or Sydney – but he felt instinctively that London was.., at the extreme. It was probably down to the history of the place. The darker side of that history, as opposed to the parks, palaces and pearly kings' side that made busloads of Japanese and American tourists gawk and jabber. The hidden history of a city where the lonely, the dispossessed, the homeless, wandered the streets, brushing shoulders with the shadows of those that had come before them. A city in which the poor and the plague-ridden, those long-since hanged for stealing a loaf or murdered for a shilling, jostled for position with those seeking a meal, or a score, or a bed for the night. A city where the dead could stay lost a long time. Thorne had known about London's skill at concealing its cadavers for as long as he had been a police officer, but it still disturbed him. Those that died peacefully at home, could lie rotting in their front rooms for weeks and months, attracting the rats and the flies, and eventually the attention of the neighbour with the well-developed sense of smell.
Those that died violently, those whose killers did not want them found, could lie alone and out of sight for far longer. Buried, burned or bricked up, dismembered, dumped or weighted down in water, until those that looked for them were only memories themselves. Until the dead were no more than a page in a yellowing file, or a name on a set of dental records.
Of course, such things happened in small towns and in villages, in places where they were still remarkable, but there was something about London which, Thorne felt, suited anonymous death. There were those that bleated on about how their particular area of the city was a little community, no really it was, friendly and welcoming… Thorne knew that, in reality, this meant little more than the newsagent calling you by your first name and the barman in your local maybe knowing what your tipple was. When it came down to it, you could still lose touch with your best friend if he lived more than two streets away, and the reaction of many Londoners to a woman being raped on their train would be to raise their newspapers a little higher. Thorne's depressing reflections on the city where he had been born, where he lived and worked, were prompted by the simple and not unexpected fact, that by the end of the day, they had still not found the body they knew was out there. They had of course been monitoring missing persons' reports but nothing had come in. The victim had not been missed yet. There could be a hundred reasons why. Now, as he and Holland drove towards Wandsworth to question the woman who had survived the attempted murder the night before, Thorne tried to stop thinking about the woman who hadn't. Her body, wherever it lay, might hold vital clues that even now were disappearing as the corpse changed shape, texture, consistency; popping and sighing gently.
The city would give it up when it was ready. In the meantime, Thorne had a whole list of things to worry about. A real cause for concern was the fact that the killings were speeding up. It had been nineteen days since Carol Garner and Ruth Murray. Jane Lovell and Katie Choi died over four months before that. A shortening of the intervals between killings was a predictable pattern, but this was dramatic. Unless of course there were murders in between the two sets that they'd missed… Thorne quickly dismissed this chilling thought, setting for the slightly less disturbing one that for the killers, the hunger was really starting to take hold. The killers…
Thorne's other major worry. Two killers but one of them was, as yet, no more than theoretical. A shadow. They were on their way to talk to a woman who'd come face to face with one of them. The same one seen by Margie Knight and Michael Murrell. The one whose face was all over every newspaper and TV screen. Was he the careless one?
The sloppy one? Or was his partner just so much better at covering his tracks, at killing and killing, and staying invisible?
The killer who had given them their only leads, the one whose blank, bespectacled face now stared out from a hundred thousand posters, was the one who killed quickly and efficiently; the single stab wound, the sustained pressure on the neck.., the killer that wept. He was not the one who butchered and walked unseen into the darkness covered in blood. He was not the one that throttled the life out of Carol Garner, smashing and squeezing while her little boy watched. He was not the one…
Thorne wanted the killer on those posters. He wanted him very badly. But he wanted his partner more.
Sean Bracher glanced at his watch as he stood at the bar waiting for the useless wanker behind it to bring his drink. She was late.
He wasn't worried that she wouldn't come, just slightly annoyed that he'd have to get up again to fetch her a drink when she finally deigned to arrive. He handed over the money for his beer without a word, grabbed a huge handful of peanuts from a bowl on the bar and strolled across to a table.