Katie Choi's mother and father owned a Chinese restaurant in Forest Hill…
The programme on television, sponsored by Vauxhall… Would Charlie Garner grow up supporting Aston Villa now that he lived in the Midlands? Or had he already begun to cheer for a London club?
Was Charlie an Arsenal fan like the man lying on the sofa? The man who performed the post-mortem on his mother…
Thorne shifted in his chair, looked across at Hendricks. 'Not much to say.'
Hendricks nodded. 'Just waiting…'
'Yep, for a lot of things. Some tiny piece of fucking luck. Waiting for them to run out of patience and hand me back my uniform. Waiting for a body to show up.'
'Make it a warm one, will you?'
Thorne raised his eyebrows, snorted. 'We'll do our best, Phil.'
'I want the bastard fresh on her, you know?'
Thorne did know. A warm body, a crime scene crawling with evidence. That was what they all wanted.
He nodded at Hendricks and raised his can to him. His friend was someone you could measure yourself against. Someone Thorne did measure himself against. Hendricks's voice was flat, and the words could often sound harsh and ill thought through, but they sprang from somewhere deep and very clean, somewhere passionate and honest.
'Do you think he's still around?' The tone was casual, as if he was asking whether Thorne could see a goal on the cards, second half.
'Oh yeah… he's around,' Thorne said. 'It's just a question of whether he decides to let us know about it.'
Hendricks considered this for a moment. 'I think we can count on it. Man who enjoys slicing and dicing as much as he does…'
Thorne almost spilt his beer. Even for Hendricks, that was a good one. 'Slicing and dicing? Fuck, and they let you near grieving relatives?'
'Only when they're very short-staffed.'
'Turn it up.' The teams were about to kick off. They let a silence fall between them as they stared at the television, both trying to think about anything but warm bodies and cold slabs. After about ten minutes Thorne turned to Hendricks again.
'Fucking 'chunky'?'
The second forty-five minutes was, if anything, less entertaining than the first. This, combined with beer and central heating, and the general level of fatigue that was creeping over everybody on the case, ensured that they were both asleep at just after eleven, when the phone rang.
It was Martin Palmer.
'There's more instructions. He wants to do it again.'
It was as if Thorne had been jolted awake with a cattle prod.
'When?'
'Tomorrow.'
'Fuck.' He looked across at Hendricks who was already walking towards the kitchen mouthing 'coffee'. Thorne nodded.
'He's going to do it again tomorrow.' Palmer sounded as if he was on the verge of tears. 'Can you stop him?'
'Just shut up, Palmer, OK? Shut up. Shit…'
Thorne could hear the beep on the line. That would be the boys in IT trying to reach him. They were monitoring Palmer's computer and would have seen the e-mail at the same time he had.
'Palmer…'
The beep on the line stopped, and immediately the landline began to ring. Hendricks came through from the kitchen and picked up the phone.
Thorne could have hung up and talked to the technicians, but he wanted to hear it now, that second, from the man it had been sent to.
'Palmer, is there anything else? What does the message say exactly?'
Palmer held back the sobs just long enough to tell him.
FIFTEEN
Date: 9 January
Target: Male (Let's not be predictable)
Age: You're as old as you feel
Pickup: Immaterial
Site: Indoors, target's home
Method: Blunt instrument… in conjunction with a sharp mind The man had once observed the same routine every morning. Moving from room to room and getting himself ready for the day with great care and precision. These days, the effort was all too much. Where once the clean white shirt would have been laid out ready the night before, now he just grabbed another un-ironed one from the pile and often turned the previous day's socks inside out. He put on the kettle and radio, cut himself shaving, then pulled on his rumpled cardigan in front of the heavy, free-standing oak mirror that had been a wedding present, many years earlier. He placed his battered and bulging briefcase next to the front door, made himself a slice of toast and settled down to listen to ten minutes or so of Today on Radio 4.
The knock at the door was puzzling, but nothing to be alarmed about. He checked his watch. It was too early for the post. Perhaps it was a neighbour, or the man to read one or other of the meters. He put down his toast, rose slowly from the kitchen chair, and moved towards the front door.
His wife had always used to tease him about his passion for routine, and the way that any disruption to the order of things could put him in a bad mood. Then, perhaps, it had been true, but not any more. These days, a surprise of any sort could be an unexpected fillip. Something to be welcomed with open arms. There was a second knock, a fraction louder, just before he reached the door.
'Just a moment…'
When the door was opened, the man with the leather sports bag at his feet smiled, cleared his throat, and punched the man in the creased white shirt, full in the face.
Then he picked up his bag and stepped inside. The man on the floor held his hand to his shattered nose, but the blood ran through his fingers on to his shirt and on to the carpet. The blood felt strange and warm. It was oddly smooth against his freshly shaved cheeks. He was crying, which annoyed him greatly, and he was desperately trying to clear his head just a little, so that he might reach his shattered spectacles and work out where the noise was coming from. The noise that was like a drumming, like a thumping, like a train passing beneath the floor. The noise that drowned out the sound of the sports bag being opened.
Zzzzzzip…
Then a gentle rustle as something was removed from the bag, and the man on the floor suddenly realised that the mysterious noise was the sound of his own heart smashing against his chest like a trapped animal. He was pleased that he'd worked it out. Now, there was just the pain in his face, and the terror… He glanced up and his body spasmed, and he cried out a girl's name as he saw the long, dark shape Coming down. His eyes screwed shut and his hands flew from his face to his head. Every one of his fingers was broken, a fraction of a second before his skull was shattered. The man with the cricket bat in his hand needed to get about his business quickly and that annoyed him. It distracted him. With him, the looking.., the considering, had always been as much a part of it as anything. After he killed, he could rarely remember the details of the act itself. His mind had been elsewhere when that was happening. Today, there wasn't much time for enjoyment. With a grunt, he swung the bat.
The man on his knees seemed to jump then, and he screamed a name which the man with the bat knew belonged to his dead wife, and the noise of the bat making contact was like jumping on egg boxes. The man who
