know this was what I wanted. Flushing him out.' He took a deep breath. 'It still feels shit though.'
Brigstocke swallowed the last of the pizza, pushed up his glasses with a clean knuckle. 'Course it does, and you're not the only one feeling bad.'
'I know, but…'
'I'm the only DCI in this room, Tom. Nobody's got a gun to my head on this one. Jesmond gave me the chance to say no.'
'Why didn't he just say no himself?.'
Brigstocke stood, jammed the pizza box into the wastepaper basket and crushed it down hard with a size eleven brogue. 'Fear.'
Thorne opened the door. 'I'll get us a couple of coffees while I'm out there…'
All day at work he thought about what the police might be doing. He imagined them in their offices, in their incident room. Some of them staring at the carpet, waiting for the news to come in. Others reacting differently, scurrying about the place, trying to feel useful, keeping themselves busy. Just another day on the investigation. He pictured them in their toilets. The joshing, pudgy types at the stinking urinal, heads bowed and cocks out. Other less experienced, alone in cubicles, elbows jammed on knees and legs going to sleep after too long on a warm lavatory seat. Staring at a cracked tile floor, breathing heavily. The shit pouring out of them like water. Arseholes red, raw.
Plenty of lame jokes to ease the tension. The bog door kicked as their colleagues took the piss, the echoing sound of jeers and hollow laughter to chase away the feeling of dread. Hopefully, yes, a feeling of dread…
He saw the pale and puffy faces of these men and women who were so very desperate to catch him. These police officers – fat and unhappy, skinny and dried-up, soft as puppies or hard as house bricks. He saw them all, as they sat at their desks and stared out of windows, and spoke into the grubby mouthpieces of grey telephones. As they passed in corridors and shared illicit cigarettes by open windows. The smell of the fags never quite managing to cover up that sour smell of sweat, trapped, rich and rank in the weave of cheap shirts and rumpled jackets. '
All day at work he imagined it, alone or with colleagues, at his desk or about the place. Each new thought, each fresh image, entertaining the hell out of him.
He couldn't quite conjure up an image of Thorne, though. His face, yes, but not its expression. Not the set of him. Thorne was definitely not the headless chicken type, but neither was he the sort to brood and wait, powerless and hog-tied. He knew that Thorne would be the one to feel it the most when the body was found. When the call came through and the sparks started to fly.
That certainly couldn't be too far away.
For him, the day was just rushing by. He doubted that it was passing quite as quickly for Tom Thorne.
'Fuck fuck bollocks fuck…'
On the way back to his office with two steaming cups of coffee, Thorne had been ambushed by the lethal corner of the desk that hated him. The pain of a bloody graze across an already existing bruise along with the scalding to both hands was intense. For a second, he felt as though he was going to be sick.
'Hand me that fucking Sellotape.'
The passing uniform did as he was told while Thorne grabbed a handful of paper from the desk and sank grimacing to the floor. Brigstocke, alerted by the industrial-strength exclamations, emerged from his office to find Thorne on his knees, screwing up wads of A4 and taping them clumsily across the corner of the offending desk.
'I'll get my own coffee then, shall I?'
'Bollocks!'
Brigstocke laughed. This was a piece of slapstick that would probably do them all a lot of good. 'I hope you've checked that isn't important…'
'What?'
Brigstocke pointed to the corner of the desk. 'That paper. Six months from now we don't want the prosecution case collapsing because a vital witness statement is taped to the corner of a desk in Hendon.'
'I don't care…'
There was more laughter, this time from Holland and McEvoy, who stood giggling like children in the doorway of the smaller office. Thorne stood up and threw them a filthy look. He rubbed his leg.
Christ it hurt…
Thorne realised abruptly that this pain, laughable though the cause of it might be, was actually the first thing he'd really felt in hours. The agonising stab woke him up and reminded him where he was. All at once, the sting of the graze, the tingle of the burn, shook something loose in his brain and shoved it roughly into focus. A jumble of indistinct words and blurred images formed themselves into a question. Something slippery became graspable and he seized upon it.
Suddenly, Thorne was knocking hard.
'Keeping Palmer on the outside, keeping him visible, was so as the pattern wouldn't change. So that the other killer wouldn't panic and bolt. So that he might carry on as normal. Now he's changed the way he does things. Why?' Gritting his teeth, Thorne marched back into his office. Brigstocke, Holland and McEvoy followed him.
'He hasn't changed it really,' Brigstocke said, shutting the door behind them. 'I mean the details have always changed, from one killing to the next. The murder weapons, the locations…'
Thorne crossed to the far side of the office. He leaned back against the window, looked hard at the other three. 'Always a woman though.'
Holland shrugged. 'Three times, yeah. I suppose that's always.'
'Yes, Holland, that's always.' He spoke slowly, emphatically, his next sentence as complete a description of the man they were after as he needed or cared about. 'He kills women. He got Palmer to kill women. So why a man suddenly?'
McEvoy sniffed, then replied, her voice casual, her answer much the same as it had been earlier. 'I think he likes to vary things, keep them fresh. He makes that stupid joke about being predictable in the email…'
'That's another thing. The joke feels wrong. The tone of the whole thing is forced. None of what he's doing is casual. He wants us to think it's random, like it's whimsical, like it doesn't matter to him who he targets. He doesn't want us to know that maybe, for the first time, he's got an agenda.' He made eye contact with each of them. 'I think there's a good reason for this, for today…'
McEvoy was the first to see it. 'Fuck!'
Brigstocke and Holland looked at her, desperate to know what she was thinking, annoyed they weren't already thinking it.
'We were too late,' McEvoy said.
Thorne nodded, pushed himself away from the window and moved quickly across to his desk. 'He's pissing around. He knows we've got Palmer.'
Brigstocke stiffened. 'What?'
Thorne grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair and headed quickly for the door. The pain in his leg was gone. 'I got it wrong. He knows all about Palmer. We need to get him away from work now, get him home. It's Martin Palmer who Nicklin's planning to kill today…'
Brigstocke picked up the phone, shouted after him. 'Hang on, Tom. There must be at least half a dozen officers there…'
Thorne walked out without looking back. 'I'm not there.'
SIXTEEN
Thorne thought that Palmer looked scared, then realised it was the way he always looked. Certainly, Palmer's laughter when Thorne told him what was going on – why he'd been forced to take the rest of the day off 'sick'-seemed genuine enough.
He'd taken off his thick glasses, wiped his eyes and squinted at Thorne. 'Whatever else he is, Inspector, he's
