nutcase.
He was just drifting off when the man appeared above him. Losing himself in the soporific hiss, with only the faintest of voices breaking in occasionally from far away, the words no more than a distant rhythm.
If the man spoke to him before he struck, Bob didn’t hear anything.
When it began, the shadow like a bludgeon, it was as if he could feel each part of it in isolation: the laces and the metal eyelets tearing the skin around his mouth and nose; the flesh of lips and nose flattening; the force that drove his head back against the wall shattering bones on both sides of his skull. Then, finally, those messages he had waited so long to hear began to come through.
Something had been booted loose or realigned and suddenly the wave of pain became a frequency he had never received before. He couldn’t make out all of his wife’s words, but the tone of her voice told him everything he needed to know. The lilt of sorrow was unmistakable.
He tried to shut out everything else- every other sound -and listen harder. The voices were still so familiar. There was something wet in his ear, something warm and sticky on his handset.
His daughter’s voice was deeper than he remembered, and that made sense because she would be older now. As it began to break up, only one word in three, and then in five, was clear, but it was more than enough. It had faded away, though, before he could try to answer. Before he could send out any message of his own.
Then, it was only the swing of his attacker’s leg.
Imagined, as he’d already ceased being able to see anything at all. The swing and the stamp and the desperate breath kicked out of him.
Aware, in those final few seconds before everything went dark. Aware, for the first time in as long as he could remember, that no one was talking to him.
TEN
The fat cafe owner had managed an even more miserable expression when he’d sloped across to deliver Holland’s change.
Holland watched him walk back and begin stabbing at the buttons on his till. “What are your plans for today?”
“No plans,” Thorne said. “I’ll just carry on drifting around, see who I run into.”
“So, much like you’d be doing if you were in the office, then?”
“The lack of any formal structure to the day is quite appealing, as a matter of fact. If it wasn’t for the cold, and the hunger, and the fact that you haven’t actually got anywhere to sleep, this homeless lark wouldn’t be too bad.”
“Some people’ll do anything to avoid paperwork.”
“That’s definitely a bonus.”
“When this is all over, you will have to write up a report,” Holland said. “You do know that, don’t you?”
Thorne’s arm snaked across the plastic tablecloth and he tipped the change from the plate into his hand.
Holland watched him pocket the cash. “That’s cheating. It’d take you a couple of hours’ begging to make that.”
“I’m only doing it to piss him off.” Thorne nodded toward the proprietor. “You think that’s bad?” he said. “He’ll have a face like a smacked arse when he doesn’t get a fucking tip…”
Outside, they stood on the pavement and stared across at a newsagent’s on the other side of the road. A blown-up front page from The Sun was stuck in the front window: homeless murders. the face of the first victim.
“He’s the key to this, you know?” Thorne said. “Let’s hope there is a key.”
“Well, it won’t be found by any profiler. I’m telling you, it’s all about the first victim. The killer was looking for him.”
“Speculation, based on highly unreliable hearsay.”
“Unreliable or not, it also suggests that the second victim wasn’t selected randomly, either. Mannion was killed because he’d seen something, because he knew something.”
They moved a couple of steps apart to let a woman in a smart business suit through and into the cafe behind them.
“Look, it’s understandable,” Holland said. “I see why you’re fixing on the unidentified victim.”
“I’m not fixing.”
“But three more people have been killed since then. Raymond Mannion, Paddy Hayes, Robert Asker. I know you don’t want to hear this, but whoever’s responsible is a serial killer, whether you like it or not. By definition, if nothing else.”
“There is nothing else,” Thorne said.
“There’s the money he leaves on the bodies. Like it’s all he thinks the victims are worth. It’s a signature.”
“If I was Ross Kemp and this was a two-part thriller on ITV, then maybe I’d agree with you. Come on, Dave, we’ve both been after people like this before and you know bloody well that the only signature most of them ever leave is a body. This is somebody saying, ‘Look at me! I’m a serial killer.’ ” Holland went to say something himself, but Thorne cut across him. “Yes, I know, he is.”
“Even if you’re right and the first victim was killed for a specific reason, that’s not what it’s about now, is it?” Holland got no response, pressed on. “Say he killed Mannion to cover up, and Hayes to make it look like something random. What about Asker, and whoever’s next? He’s obviously started to enjoy himself now, hasn’t he?”
“Maybe…”
They looked over at the picture in the newsagent’s window; at the face staring back at them from across the road. This was a face that had been generated by a computer, and yet it had something of the same expression Thorne had seen many times already in the previous couple of weeks. The postmortem had confirmed that this man was not a drug addict, and yet there was the same look Thorne had seen on Spike’s face, and on Caroline’s, and on a handful of others. It was a look that was difficult to describe. That he could best place at a tipping point, somewhere directly between terrified and dangerous.
Thorne knew he was projecting, yet he was sure he saw something around the mouth, and in the eyes, of course, that demanded a reckoning. Or perhaps it was a plea to be reckoned with…
“Where are you sleeping tonight?” Holland asked.
“Don’t know yet.” Thorne had spent the last week moving around, bedding down in a series of different locations, but in terms of shelter and security, his original choice had certainly been the best. “I might go back to the doorway at the theater.”
“That’s the closest you’ve been to culture for a while.”
“There’s an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical on. It’s as close as I ever want to get…”
As he watched Thorne go, Holland had to remind himself that the scruffy figure walking slowly back toward the West End was, theoretically at any rate, still his boss. There’d never been a great deal of “yes sir, no sir” flying about between them, except when Thorne was in a really bad mood. He was not normally the type to demand, or to dish out that type of deference. Even so, Holland was aware that over the last couple of weeks he’d begun speaking to Thorne differently and that it had nothing to do with his own recent promotion to sergeant.
It shamed him, but if Holland was being honest, his attitude had far more to do with what Thorne had become, with the part he was playing, than with anything that might have happened to him.
He watched Thorne pull the dirty red rucksack up on to his shoulder before turning the corner. It had never been easy to read the man, but physically at least he was pretty bloody close to being unrecognizable. Holland knew that it had only been a fortnight, and that it was probably his imagination, but had he seen a stoop there, and something genuinely shambling in the gait?
It worried him more than a little, because Tom Thorne might well be sleeping in a theater doorway, but he was no actor.
Peter Hayes sat on the train back to Carlisle, thinking of little but how desperate he was to get home and to
