with more ease, about Nicklin – the meeting in the Brasserie, the proposal, the instructions for the killings. Early on in that conversation, when they were talking about how he and Nicklin had first met, Palmer had mentioned a name. Twice, perhaps three times, a girl's name had bobbed into view. She, or at the very least, her name, had appeared briefly, like a shape dredged up; something which you could almost place, appearing just below the surface of water before disappearing back into the depths. Now, that name floated to the surface of Thorne's swampy consciousness.
'Tell me about Karen.'
Palmer took a drink. He held the beer in his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing it down. 'Karen died.' More nodding. Thorne waited. 'She got into a car and died. On a sunny day, she climbed into a blue Vauxhall Cavalier – it was on the news, you can probably get the video. That was it. She was fourteen.' He downed nearly all that was left of his beer in three enormous gulps, put the almost empty glass carefully down on the floor and then looked up at Thorne. 'A blue Vauxhall Cavalier. Driven by a murderer. Like me.'
There was only one way Thorne could fill the pause that followed. He'd spoken the words aloud on a hundred different occasions. He'd felt the same sour taste of loss and longing then, hanging in the air, tart on his tongue.
'I'm sorry.'
Instinctively, he meant it. Then another instinct every bit as strong swept over him and he felt the need to qualify what he'd said.
'Not for you. For her, for her family. Not for you, Palmer.'
Then silence, and a nod or two, and the ticks and beeps from the swarm of animated clocks seemed suddenly much louder, filling the space between them.
Thorne jumped a little at the chorus of computerised chimes and turned to look at the screen. He glanced down at his watch. Midnight. Christmas day. When he looked back round, Palmer had shuffled forward to the very edge of the sofa. He was smiling awkwardly at him, holding his all but empty glass, just half a mouthful of beer in the bottom.
'Merry Christmas, Detective Inspector Thorne.'
Thorne stood up quickly, feeling as if he was going to be sick. The moment passed but he strode quickly across the room towards the door, belching the taste of vomit into his mouth and then swallowing it away again.
He opened the front door. The officer outside put down his newspaper and stood up. Thorne hovered for a second in the doorway, feeling a little woozy despite his untouched glass of beer. Behind him, in the living room, he heard the sofa creak and was aware of Palmer standing up.
'What did you come for?' Palmer asked.
Thorne beckoned the constable back inside. He leaned forward to take in a gulp of air from the hallway outside before stepping into it.
'Fuck knows…'
Palmer pressed his face against the window. Below him, Thorne emerged through the set of double doors and stood on the grass outside, breathing deeply.
He took a mouthful of beer from Thorne's glass and then another. As he drank it down, his enormous Adam's apple bobbed up and down and a little beer dribbled down his chin, and he closed his eyes to prevent the tears that were pricking at the corner of his eyes from forming.
When he opened his eyes and looked down again, Thorne had gone.
He'd always cried easily, even before he'd met Stuart Nicklin. Crying and blushing – he'd had little control over either of them for as long as he could remember. He recalled Smart dancing around him in the playground, singing, chocolate smeared around his mouth. Cherry ripe, cherry ripe…
And him, moving slowly towards the wall behind him, driven backwards by the heat coming off his own face, growing redder and redder…
He recalled the voice of an older Stuart, six months ago, that lunchtime in the brasserie; after those two from work had skulked away and Smart had spoken to him, and it had all begun again. The voice deeper now, and weathered, but still that laugh in it, the laugh that made you want to be near him, and still that ice inside the laugh.
'Do you ever think about Karen? I never told them you know, Mart. Not everything I mean. There was no need was there? It wasn't your fault, what happened. Her going off with that bloke was nothing to do with that other business. The business with you.' He'd stopped then and leaned in close, his face creased with concern. 'Do you think it was your fault? Course it wasn't. Yes, she was upset, but that doesn't mean anything, does it? Mind you, I wonder what people would think, now, if they did know? Do you think they'd blame you? You know what it's like these days, everybody going on about sex and protecting the kids. People getting hounded…'
Palmer had tried not to let the terror show on his face as Nicklin finished speaking, but he knew he'd failed miserably.
'I'm not saying I'd ever tell anybody Martin, but you know, some people have got fucking sick minds…'
Sally from Glasgow: 'We only do it for the children anyway, don't we?'
Arthur from Newcastle: 'Why shouldn't it be commercial?
Shopping means a damn sight more to a lot of these kids than Jesus Christ…'
Bridget from Slough: 'How can we celebrate anything with the world the way it is? People starving. Drug addicts. Folk living on the streets. What about the families of those two poor women shot dead a couple of weeks ago? What sort of Christmas are they going to have?'
The man who used to be called Smart Nicklin stuck a small gold bow on to the final parcel, leaned across and turned the radio up. This was a bit more like it. Bridget, up there on her high horse, had every right to be angry of course: it was a very nasty business. Even if one of the so-called 'poor women' was completely fictitious. Bob, the phone-in host, agreed with the caller. Absolutely. He said a big thank-you for the call, but he was keen to move on to Alan from Leeds who wanted to talk about the shocking increase in the cost of first-class post…
He turned the radio off, stood up and rubbed away the cramp in his legs from squatting on his heels the last half an hour, busy with Sellotape and scissors. This had become something of a tradition Caroline in bed nice and early, and him up late, wrapping presents. Just a few more hours now until it all kicked off. They'd have a houseful tomorrow: Caroline's parents, her sister, her sister's three kids running around like maniacs.
Maybe, this time next year, they'd have one of their own. Not if he could possibly avoid it of course, he was doing his best to duck the issue, but Caroline was bringing it up all the time. Not now though. Not yet. He had a great deal he wanted to do before he went down that road. When he saw himself as an observer might, when he imagined himself in his mind's eye, he was standing, straight and tall over a body, the blood fizzing through him, the light breaking over him like clouds across the wings of a powerful jet. He was cutting through life, slicing through it, capable of anything. He was mercurial. He would not be… lumpen. He would not potter around, hunched over a baby buggy with milky sick on his lapel. Fucked. That was not him. He carried his wife's presents across to the tree and slid them underneath. He straightened up, leaned forward and studied his dim, distorted reflection in a large silver bauble. He still got a shock seeing himself without the beard. He'd been a little worried shaving it off, but he needn't have been. The dramatically different hairline, the filled out cheeks and the nose-job he'd saved up for all those years ago, still gave him a face significantly different from the one he might be expected to have sixteen years on.
As it was, he could probably have kept the beard anyway. The pictures he'd seen in the papers and on TV had been so wide of the mark as to be laughable. Palmer's description must have been all over the shop. Maybe the hormone, or the endorphin or whatever, that was stimulated by fear – was it adrenaline? – Maybe it fucked up the memory circuits.
Perhaps that was how dictators thrived. A line from Robespierre to Pol-Pot, all using terror to keep themselves safe. Make your enemies, and better yet, your friends, so afraid of you that they forget all the terrible things you're doing to them. The question was, did it work the other way around?
If they stopped being afraid, would they remember?
He knelt down to the plug, switched off the lights and stayed there, breathing in the gorgeous smell of the tree and thinking about Palmer. He imagined him now, frightened and alone. Some boot-faced bobby keeping the watch, glaring at him, resentful, fantasising about hurting him and doing everybody a favour. He pictured Palmer's wide, soft, cushion face, his mournful, wide-eyed expression. Staring out into the night, thinking about Karen and
