Folklore almost, like Sutcliffe. A guilt they all inherited at some level or other. But he'd been part of it and they hadn't. He'd been.., in amongst it.
Keable turned and marched away towards the lift. A car would be waiting to take him across town for the meeting. He pressed the button to go down and turned back to Thorne. 'Let me know as soon as Hendricks gets in touch.'
Thorne watched Keable get into the lift and each shrugged their way through the fifteen seconds of dead time waiting for the doors to close. Keable would tell the chief superintendent that while they were obviously waiting on the results of all the tests, there was the distinct possibility of a breakthrough. Somebody must have seen the killer taking the girl. This was definitely the break in the case that they needed.
Thorne wondered if they would bother broaching the subject that had hung in the air since the note was discovered on his car. It might have been saying 'come and get me', and dumping Helen Doyle's body so clumsily may well have been a taunt, but one thing was obvious: the killer was no longer bothering to disguise what he was doing because he knew they were on to him. If knowing the police had put it together was making him careless, then Thorne was happy that he knew. What really bothered him was how.
Why can't they fucking well fix this? They can stick a human ear on a mouse and clone a fucking sheep. They clone sheep, for Christ's sake, which is the most pointless thing ever since how the bloody hell are you supposed to tell when every sheep looks like every other sodding sheep and there's NOTHING REALLY WRONG WITH ME!
Nothing really.., wrong.
A stroke. It sounds so soothing, so gentle. I don't feel like I've been stroked by anything. I feel like I've been hit with a jackhammer. My Nan had a stroke, but she could talk afterwards.
Her voice was slurred and the drugs made her go a bit funny. Up to then she'd just wittered on about.., you know, old people's stuff. She never went as far as telling complete strangers how old she was at bus stops, but you know the sort of thing. The drugs they put her on turned her into a geriatric performance poet. She'd lie there ranting about how motorbikes were driving through the ward at night and how the nurses all wanted to have sex with her. Honestly, it was hysterical-she was eighty-six!
But at least she could make herself understood. This man gave me a stroke. Anne told me what he did. Twisted some artery and gave me a stroke. Why can't they just untwist it, then? There must be specialists or something. Fm lying here screaming and shouting, and the nurses wander past and coo at me like I'm taking a lazy afternoon nap in the sun. They must have finished all the tests by now. They must know that Fm still in here, still talking to myself, ranting and raving. It's doing my head in! See? I've still got a sense of humour, for fuck's sake.
I was right about Anne and the copper. Thorne. I've met women like Anne before. Always go for the two types of men the ones that spark something off in their brains or the ones that get it going in their knickers. A man who does both? Forget it. I think it's fairly obvious which category her ex falls into. Time to ring in the changes. So the copper's luck's in, if you ask me. I reckon I might have to stick to the brain boxes from now on. Tim just sat by the bed this morning and held my hand. He doesn't even bother talking to me any more.
FIVE
Thorne sat perched on the edge of Tughan's desk in the open-plan operations room. As Tughan's hands maneuvered his mouse and flew across his keyboard, Thorne could almost see the Irishman's back stiffen. He knew he was annoying him.
'Isn't there something you should be doing, Tom?'
Phil Hendricks had worked through the night, and even before Keable had settled down to coffee and croissants with the chief superintendent, Thorne had received the information he'd wanted. Helen Doyle had been heavily drugged with Midazolam and had died as a result of a stroke. In spite of the body's location and the apparent break with his routine, there was no doubt that she had been the killer's fifth victim. That was pretty much all they knew, other than that Forensics had gathered some fibres from Helen Doyle's skirt and blouse [Thorne got straight on the phone.
'Any joy on these fibres?'
'Give us a bloody chance.'
'All right, just give me your best bloody guess, then.'
'Carpet fibres, probably from the boot of the car.'
'Can you get a make?'
'Where do you think this is? Quantico?'
'Where?'
'Forget it. Look, we'll get on to it. Something to match it to would help…'
The change in the pattern bothered Thorne, but they were left trying to answer the same questions. How had he talked his way into these women's houses and perhaps, in Helen Doyle's case, talked her into getting into his car?
Helen Doyle's body, like that of Alison Willetts and Susan Carlish, was unmarked yet full of drink and drugs. The tranquillizer had to have been administered with alcohol. But how? Had the killer been watching Helen all night and spiked her drink before she left the pub? That would have been difficult – she was with a large group of friends and, besides, to have got the timing of it right would have been near impossible. How could he have known exactly when the drug would start to take effect? It was still the best guess, so Thorne had set about rounding up as many people as possible who had been in the Marlborough at the time. This, on top of the general canvassing along Helen's route home, meant that they were going to need every extra body that Frank Keable could deliver. If he could deliver. Thorne was hopeful of finding somebody who'd seen Helen after she'd left the pub. He still couldn't fathom why the killer was being so brazen but it made him more optimistic than he'd felt in a long time.
'Is there something I can help you with?'
Tughan smiled a lot but his eyes were like something on a plate. He was as skinny as a whippet and fiercely intelligent, with a voice that could cut through squad-room banter like a scalpel. It was always Tughan's thin lips Thorne imagined whispering into the mouthpiece whenever some lunatic phoned Scotland Yard with a coded warning. It wasn't that Thorne didn't appreciate what Tughan was capable of or what he brought to the investigation: Thorne could just about find his way into a file, if he had to, but he couldn't type to save his life and always found himself strangely hypnotised by the screensavers. When new evidence came in, Tughan was the man to make sense of it with his collation programmes and file finders. Thorne knew that if they'd had a Nick Tughan fifteen years earlier instead of a thousand manila folders.., if they'd had a Holmes computer system instead of an antiquated card index, then Calvert might not have done what he did.
'Hey, Tommy, bugger the Calvert case, what about our case?'
'Right… sorry, Nick. Have you got a copy of the Leicester/London matches handy?'
Tughan grunted, scrolled and double clicked. The printer on the far side of the office began to hum. Thorne had actually been hoping that Tughan might have had a hard copy lying about. It would have been quicker to walk across to his own little goldfish bowl and fetch the copy on his desk, but he couldn't begrudge Tughan his little triumphs of efficiency. He begrudged him virtually everything else, and the feeling was entirely mutual.
'Thorne stared at the list. Half a dozen doctors who had been on rotation at Leicester Royal Infirmary at the time of the Midazolam theft and now worked in local hospitals. Anne Coburn's information about the significance of the date had somewhat dampened any enthusiasm for this line of enquiry, and the discovery of Helen Doyle's body had rightly demanded everybody's attention, but Thorne still sensed that it might be important. It was possible to look at the date of the drugs theft as significant in quite the opposite way. Might not the killer (if indeed it was the killer) have chosen that date to make it look as if he might have come from anywhere when in fact he was working at the hospital? Besides, they were still working through the far bigger list of all doctors currently on rotation locally so they'd have to get round to this lot eventually.
Jeremy Bishop's name was second on the list. Thorne was aware of what could only be described as a smirk on Holland's face as they rode the lift down to the car park. 'Isn't he Dr Coburn's friend?'
