business. Put all the pictures together and stick them in the post… He enjoyed working at the computer, now that he felt like he'd mastered it. He'd needed to learn, so he'd learned. In just a couple of years he'd gone from being a novice to being more than comfortable with pretty much any machine.
He opened the bookmark, drummed his finger against the mouse as he waited for the page to appear…
Once you became skilled at something, it was easy to enjoy it. Like the work he did on those fuckers' with the knife and the washing line. He was certainly enjoying that. It was funny, he thought, that the word 'skilled' had 'kill' sitting right there in the middle of it. He'd first found the site when he was looking for inspiration, for help with the photos of Jane. Now he just popped back every now and then to keep abreast of it all. Just to see…
It had been a strange week, all in all. By rights he should have been doing other stuff, but he'd been forced to tweak the schedule, to rearrange things a bit in view of the hiccough with Dodd. That's all it had been. It was easily fixed.
There were several new links from the site since the last time he'd been here. One or two were begging to be checked out. He pointed and clicked, held his breath…
He was itching to get back to the serious work. In part from anything else there was the challenge of a change in routine. Now that the prisons had been warned, there couldn't be any more letters.
Jesus..,
The woman's head was shaved and she had been hog-tied. A chain ran from a ring in her collar down to the leather strap between her ankles. The buckled harness snaked across her face like a spider's web, her mouth at its centre, filled by a large, red ball-gag…
It was a shame. If he was going to use more pictures, this was just the sort of thing he might have gone for, but now it was academic, With Remfry and Welch it had been a lovely, long, slow tease. With the next one things would have to be simple and direct. A bit more 'in your face'. He hoped it would be as much fun as wooing.
THIRTEEN
'I was wondering how much it would cost to send a bouquet of flowers…'
'Well, we charge five pounds fifty for delivery, and the bouquets start at thirty pounds.'
'Christ, I don't want to spend that much. I haven't even snogged her yet…'
Eve laughed. 'Are you sure there's snogging on the cards?'
'Definitely,' Thorne said. 'She's well up for it…'
'Shit, I've got a customer. Better go…'
'Listen, I'm sorry about cancelling last night. I couldn't…'
'It's fine. Hold that thought, all right? The snogging, I mean. I'll see you later.'
'Yeah… I can't say what time, though.'
'Call me when you're about to leave. We can just grab a quick drink or something…'
'Right…'
'Seriously, if you are ever tempted, flowers wouldn't guarantee a snog. Chocolates, on the other hand, will get you just about anything…'
She hung up.
Smiling, Thorne reached inside the bodysuit, dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. He took a long swig from a bottle of mineral water and turned, to find himself confronted by a family of backpackers. Mum, Dad and two blonde children were all sporting rucksacks of decreasing size, and staring at him expectantly from the other side of the cordon. Thorne stared back at them until eventually, having decided that nothing much was going to happen, they wandered away. Six hours earlier, when there had been something they might have been able to tell their friends back home about, the onlookers had been a little harder to dissuade. With the nightclubs emptying and the streets buzzing, a sizeable crowd had quickly gathered and gawped from behind the lines of police tape. A hundred yards back towards Wardour Street one way and Regent Street the other, they had stood and watched excitedly. The drunks heckled and the tourists took pictures, as the body of Charles Dodd was carried out.
Once the body had been loaded up and taken away, the cordon had been relaxed a little. Now there was just a square of blue tape running from the narrow doorway leading up to Dodd's studio, around to the furthest side of the fishmonger's shop next door. Fluttering ever so gently…
'What's going on in there, mate?'
Thorne looked up at a small, skinny individual with birdshit highlights and an improbable amount of jewellery, nodding at him from behind the tape. The man, who was wearing satin tracksuit bottoms and a sleeveless camouflage vest, took three drags of a cigarette in quick succession then flicked it into the gutter.
'It's a raid,' Thorne said. 'Fashion Police. I'd be on my way, if I were you…
The man bounced twice on the balls of his feet, grimaced and jogged away. On the other side of the narrow street, a girl in a tiny leather skirt and crop top was leaning against the kiosk of a peep show, eating a bacon sandwich. She grinned over at Thorne, having clearly heard the exchange. Thorne smiled back at her. It was a little after nine in the morning but evidently not too early to try and get something going inside the shorts of the passing male trade. Already warm enough for the tables of a pavement cafe to be filled with customers downing cappuccino and scoffing pastries. Pretending they were somewhere more exotic.
Thorne watched them. Wishing he was somewhere else. Thinking of things that would put anybody off their breakfast… When they'd battered down the door early the previous evening, Thorne had known exactly what they would find. The smell, thick against his face-mask, would have told him anyway, but as he'd climbed the narrow staircase, Thorne had been very well aware of what was waiting for him at the top. He'd already seen the pictures. The real thing, several long, hot days after the event, was a whole lot worse.
The body had been strung up. The washing line had been tied in a makeshift noose around Dodd's neck and thrown over one of the lighting bars above the studio floor. It was tied off around the foot of the bed, the weight of the body lifting one end of the bed twelve inches off the ground. The pictures, taken while Dodd was still alive, had shown the spasms, the desperate clawing at the neck and kicking of the legs. Several days dead, the corpse hung, stiff and still. It was only the rumble of the tube trains passing beneath them on the Bakerloo Line, that caused the slightest tremor, that made the body start to swing just a little…
Each time, Thorne had fought a bizarre urge to stop the movement. To step across and grasp the legs that protruded from dirty shorts like bloated blood sausages. To clutch the feet, purple with lividity, straining against the straps of the plastic sandals.
Thorne had stood by the bed in the middle of the studio, remembering a pair of pale girls, writhing on nylon sheets.
He had watched a SOCO leaning across the mattress, scraping at whatever had dripped down from the body that dangled above it.
He had looked up at the tongue that stuck out from Dodd's mouth. Blue, and big as a man's hand. Telling him to fuck off. Once it had been cut down and loaded up, Thorne had been only too grateful to do precisely as Dodd's corpse had seemed to be requesting. Home for a change of clothes, and food he couldn't finish. Four hours not sleeping, and then back to the murder scene. Opposite him, the girl finished the last mouthful of her sandwich. She wiped the back of a hand across her mouth, reached down behind the kiosk for her handbag. She shrugged at Thorne and began to apply lipstick.
Thorne turned at the sound of the door opening. Holland stepped out. He moved across to join Thorne, unzipping his bodysuit and gulping down the fresh air as he walked.
'Fuck, it's hot in there.'
Thorne handed Holland the bottle of water. 'How much longer?'
'Almost done, I think.'
Holland stood next to Thorne, leaning back against the window of the fishmonger's shop. They stared across at the peep show and t pavement cafe. A waiter smiled across at them. They might just have been friends enjoying the good weather, their plastic outfits far from being the most outlandish on display.
'So he's probably just cleaning up after himself,' Holland said. 'He kills Dodd to make sure he can't say anything.'
'Maybe…'
