'So I'm in a bit of bother, which, if I accept this offer to become some sort of consultant or whatever bollocks title Frank Keable's come up with, might go away. Is that it?'
'He didn't exactly say that, sir.'
Consultant. He wondered what the catches were. Beyond the obvious one.
Leonie Holden was last seen on a night bus bound for Ealing and her body was discovered four hours later on waste ground in Tufnell Park.
Less than a quarter of a mile from Thorne's flat. The significance of this latest message from the killer to his favourite detective inspector was not lost on anybody. Consultant? A better word might have been 'bait'.
'What do you think about Jeremy Bishop?'
Holland phrased his answer carefully. 'I don't think he killed Margaret Byrne, sir.'
'He was supposed to have had a cast-iron alibi for Alison Willetts as well, and we found holes in it.'
'I still don't understand any of it, though. I still can't figure out how he could have done what he did to Alison and got her to the hospital in the time. Not to mention why. Why did he go to all that trouble just to give himself an alibi that didn't hold water?'
'I'll work it out, Holland. And I'll work out how he killed Margaret Byrne as well.'
'He didn't, sir.'
'A man fitting his description was seen acting suspiciously outside her flat earlier in the day.'
'Coincidence. Got to be. Besides, that woman opposite is a nutter. She thought I was suspicious.' Holland spoke calmly, no element of letting Thorne down gently, just stating the facts. 'I've been to the Royal London and spoken to everybody except the patients in deep comas. She was killed sometime mid-to late-afternoon, and Bishop was at the hospital, working through a routine theatre list. There's dozens of witnesses. Whitechapel to Tulse Hill and back without being missed is impossible.'
Thorne was grateful to Holland for having made the effort. He'd almost certainly done it in his own time, and in the knowledge that if Tughan had found out he'd have been in deep shit.
'No alibi for Leonie Holden.' Thorne was thinking aloud now.
'Sir…'
No alibi for Leonie Holden. Because he killed her. The fucker killed her and dumped her on my doorstep.
'So you think I'm barking up the wrong tree as well, then, Holland? Or maybe that should just be barking?'
Holland sighed. The questions just kept getting harder.
'I had been sort of coming round to the idea of Bishop as a prime suspect, sir. There's certainly nobody else in the frame, and even though it's all circumstantial I was willing to… go with it as an avenue of inquiry. But Maggie Byrne – her and Leonie Holden had to have been killed by the same man.'
They stood in silence. Thorne had nothing to say. Holland had plenty, but thought most was better kept to himself. Behind them, a child tumbled from the roundabout and began to scream.
Holland cleared his throat. 'All the same, as a theory it does have one thing going for it, sir.'
'Yeah?' mumbled Thorne. 'What's that?'
'It's yours.'
Thorne couldn't look at him. He clenched his jaw. He was scared for a second or two that if he looked at Holland his face would show far too much gratitude. It would be shining and desperate and pathetic.
The face that showed too much of everything. He turned and began to walk towards the gate. His sudden movement caused the rat to bolt again with a small squeal of alarm. The cheeky little bastard had been sitting on its haunches and cleaning its whiskers. They were so unafraid. Thorne had stood there before now and watched one scamper across his shoes.
He glanced over his shoulder. Holland was half a dozen paces behind him.
Whatever journey was ahead, Thorne had no intention of slowing down but sensed that Holland might be the sort of man, the sort of copper, who would close the gap and walk alongside him.
And perhaps, together, they would bring down Jeremy Bishop.
They reckoned that, in London, you were never more than six feet away from a rat. Thorne knew that you weren't a whole lot further from an altogether nastier breed of vermin.
More diseased. More human.
There is definitely no God. Or if there is, he, she or it is a right sick bastard. Like this isn't bad enough.
The way Anne explained it to me is like this. They have to keep pulling me about every ten bloody minutes so I don't get pressure sores, even on my lovely vibrating bed. So one of the nurses, don't know which one but my money's on Martina as revenge for the neck-coughing incident, accidentally dislodges the nasogastric feed, that's 'tube up nose' to you and me, as she's moving me. Just an inch or two, but that's all it takes. What happens then is that the feed, which is this tasteless white shire that's supposedly full of proteins and other great stuff, instead of going where it's supposed to go, pours into my chest. Loads of it. Now, you and other people who can cough and splutter, just cough and splutter this crap back up and pull a face, and a few days later you might develop a mild chest infection.
Not me, though. Oh, no.
This feed is like nectar to fucking bacteria. They love it. They swarm all over it and, hey presto, I get bastard pneumonia. This sort of thing was bound to happen sooner or later. I'm prone to infection apparently. Well, isn't that Just marvelous?
So, here I am back on the ventilator. Big mechanical bellows doing my breathing and l feel like I did when I'd just come in here.
Everything else stops now until I recover. Occupational therapy gets put on hold. The communication was going pretty well, it has to be said. l'd worked out a pretty good system using an alphabet that's based on how many times a certain letter is likely to be used. So it doesn't go, A, B, C, D, E. It's not an, A-Z so much as an E-X. We've also got shortcuts forgoing back, for skipping forward, to repeat words, and, 4nne has become the human equivalent of that thing on my mobile phone that guesses what I'm going to say. She finishes words for me and most of the time she's spot on. She's just about got used to my swearing as well.
Now all that's got to stop until I'm a bit stronger. Until I'm better.
Yeah, well, when you're like this, better is a relative term. The blackboard's gone from the end of the bed. I am so fucking frustrated.
To be honest, I say the communication was going well and it was compared to a few weeks ago but it didn't make things any easier with them. All the things I'd planned to say went out of the window once we got down to it.
He just stood there with the pointer in his hand, looking lost. Even if you can spell the most complicated words in the world as fast as anything, they're just words, aren't they? You can't spell out feelings with an eyelid and a pointer. I couldn't really make him understand.
In the end all I could do was spell out the one word and say it over and over again.
G.O.O.D.B.Y.E.
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye…
'I shall be glad to have you around, Tom, but having said that…'
Keable was behind his desk making a speech. Tughan leaned against the wall, greasy-haired and gimlet- eyed. Ostensibly Keable was welcoming Thorne back to Operation Backhand, albeit in an unorthodox and somewhat undefined role, but in reality he was laying down ground rules. What those rules were, Thorne would need to clarify later. Now he had one eye on his old friend the Exmoor stag.
He saw new things in this dreary piece of ersatz West Country dross each time he looked at it. Today he glanced up from his chair and was drawn by something in the set of the animal's jaw that seemed overtly aggressive. It was probably just fear, or the readiness to charge the photographer at any moment, but Thorne was mentally adding a thought bubble to the side of the stag's head which read, 'We don't like your sort round here.' It was only a matter of days now until the stunning view that encapsulated October would be unveiled. He was sure that Keable looked forward to this moment every month. What riveting image might Thorne find himself
