Bishop shook his head and stared out of the doorway at the huge stream of people still flowing round Piccadilly Circus in the early hours of a cold October morning. Without a word he stepped into it, and was immediately gone.
Thorne stood for a few seconds, watching the red Puffa jacket disappearing into the distance, before turning and heading in the opposite direction to pick up his car. Thorne stopped when he saw the shape in the doorway. He froze when it began to move.
He breathed out, relieved, when the shape revealed itself to be the somewhat wobbly figure of Dave Holland. Thorne's first thought was that he'd been hurt. 'Jesus, Dave…' He moved quickly, reaching to gather up the DC by the arms, and then he smelt the booze.
Holland stood up. Not paralytic, but well on the way.
'Sir… been sitting waiting for you. You've been ages…'
Thorne had given up the whisky a long time ago, at the same time as the fags, but it was still a smell he'd recognise anywhere. Instinctively he reeled from it, just needing a second or two. It was a smell that could overpower him. Pungent and pathetic. The smell of need. The smell of misery. The smell of alone.
Francis John Calvert. Whisky, piss and gunpowder. And freshly washed nightdresses.
The smell of death in a council flat on a Monday morning. Holland stood, leaning against the wall, breathing too loudly. Thorne reached into the pocket of his leather jacket for his keys. 'Come on, Dave, let's get inside and I'll make some coffee. How did you get here anyway?'
'Taxi. Left the car…'
There was really no point in asking where Holland had left his car. They could sort it out later. The key turned in the lock. Thorne nudged open the front door with his foot, instinctively turning the bunch of keys in his hand, feeling for the second key that would open the door to his flat. There was a white envelope lying on the doormat in the communal hallway.
Thorne looked at it and thought: There's another note from the killer.
Not 'What's that?' or 'That's odd' or even 'I wonder if…?'. He knew what it was immediately and said as much. Holland sobered up straight away.
Thorne knew that neither the envelope nor the note inside it would trouble a forensic scientist greatly. They would be clean – not a print, not a fibre, not a stray hair. But he still took the necessary precautions. Holland held down the envelope with fingers wrapped in kitchen towel while Thorne used two knives to improvise as tongs and remove the piece of paper.
The envelope had not been sealed. Thorne would probably have steamed it open anyway, but the killer had left nothing to chance. He'd wanted his note read straight away. By Thorne.
He used the knives to flatten the paper out. The note was neatly typed like the others. Thorne knew it was only a matter of time before the typewriter it had been written on was being wrapped up, labeled and loaded into the back of a Forensic Science Services van.
This would be Jeremy Bishop's last note.
TOM, I HAD CONSIDERED SOMETHING DIFFERENT, AN EMAIL PERHAPS, BUT I'M GUESSING THAT YOU'RE SOMETHING OF A LUDDITE AS FAR AS ALL THAT'S CONCERNED. SO, INK AND PARCHMENT IT IS. CONGRATULATIONS ON THE TV PERFORMANCE BY THE WAY, VERY INTENSE. DID YOU MEAN WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT IT ALL BEING OVER SOON, OR WAS THAT JUST HOT AIR FOR THE CAMERAS? THERE'S NOTHING LIKE CONFIDENCE, IS THERE? OR ARE YOU JUST TRYING TO MAKE ME JITTERY IN THE HOPE THAT I'LL MAKE A MISTAKE ONE QUESTION…WHAT I WAS WONDERING IS, WHAT WAS IT LIKE FINDING HER? BEING THE FIRST ONE THERE? WAS THAT YOUR FIRST TIME, TOM. YOU GET USED TO BLOOD, DON'T YOU? ANYWAY, IF YOU'RE RIGHT, I SUPPOSE I'LL SEE YOU VERY SOON. REGARDS…
Holland slumped on to the settee. Thorne read the note a second time. And a third. The arrogance was breathtaking.
There seemed no great point to it. There was no revelation or announcement. It was all on display.
He went into the kitchen, flicked on the kettle and swilled out a couple of coffee-cups. Why did Bishop feel the need to do this? Why was he baiting him about Maggie Byrne, when Thorne had so clearly risen to the bait a long time ago?
He spooned in the instant coffee.
There was something skewed about the tone of the note that Thorne couldn't put his finger on. Something almost forced. Maybe the killer was starting to lose the control he had over everything. Maybe his latest failure had tipped him over the edge. Or maybe he was starting to work towards the insanity plea he would obviously try to cop when the time came.
And the time was most certainly coming.
He stirred the drinks. There was nothing artificial about the madness. Nobody sane could do as this man had done, but still Thorne would fight tooth and nail to prevent it cushioning his fall.
He wanted him to fall hard.
There would be pressure, of course, from those who would want to treat his illness, to care for him. There were always those. There were always plenty for whom violent death was a hobby, or a study option or a gravy train. The lunatics who would write to him inside with requests for advice, or signed pictures, or offers of marriage. The campaigners. The writers of books – bestsellers before the bodies had started to decompose. The makers of films. The old women with pastel hair hammering on the side of the van, spitting…
And the policemen who remembered the smell of the blood.
Was that your first time?
Thorne carried the coffee into the living room, but stopped in the doorway the second he looked at Holland, who was sitting on the settee and staring at the wall opposite. It was not the faraway look of drunkenness, or tiredness, or boredom.
Thorne felt his heartbeat increase.
He hadn't asked why Holland had come here in the first place.
Holland turned to him. 'We were trying to get hold of you…'
Thorne remembered his phone, chucked into the back of his car. 'What's happened, Dave?'
Holland tried to shape an answer and now Thorne recognised the look. He'd seen it fifteen years before, in the bottom of glasses and in shop windows and in mirrors. The look of a young man who's seen far too much death. Holland spoke, his voice, his eyes, his expression dead.
'Michael and Eileen Doyle… Helen Doyle's mum and dad. The next-door neighbour noticed the smell.'
Apparently, the stroke affected only a very small part of my brain. In the brainstem.
The 'inferior pons' this particular bit's called, if you can believe that.
It's just unfortunate that it happens to be the bit that controls things. All the communications pass through it. If your brain's Paddington station, this bit's the signal box. Basically, the signals still get waved or switched on or whatever. When I want to wiggle a toe or sniff or speak, the instruction still goes out. This thing called a relay cell is supposed to make it happen: it fires the signal down the line to the next cell and then the next one. It's like a microscopic version of 'pass it on' all the way to my toe or my nose or wherever. Unfortunately, somewhere in the middle, some of the cells aren't playing the game properly and that's the end of that. In layman's terms, this is me. Bizarrely, though, as one part of my brain is fucked, it feels like other parts are compensating and changing. The bit that deals with sound. It feels like that bit's been upgraded. I can distinguish between sounds that are very similar. I can place a nurse by the squeak of her shoe and tell how far away things are. The sounds give me a picture in my head, like I'm turning into a bat.
And it's helping me to remember.
Those underwater sounds are getting clearer every day. Words are sharpening up. I can make out a lot of what we said to each other now, me and the man who put me in hospital. Fragments of a soundtrack.
A lot of it's me, of course, no real surprise there, waffling on about the party and the wedding and stuff. Christ, I sound very pissed. I can hear the champagne going down my throat and I can hear him laughing at my dismal, drunken jokes. I hear myself playing with the front-door keys. Inviting him inside to finish the drink. Slurred and stupid words. Words that are hardly worth remembering. The last words ever to come out of my mouth.
I'm still groping for the words that came out of his.
