Scaredy Cat (2 page)

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even got a sniff of it. Even Hendricks had to admire that

particular bit of path. work. Very sharp.

But not as sharp as the kil er.

'He's playing a percentage game, Tom. Loads of people are walking about with high-risk factors for stroke. You for a start.'

'Eh?'

'Stil got a gold card at Threshers, have you?'

Thorne had started to protest but thought better of it. He'd been out on the piss with Hendricks often enough.

'He picks three different areas of London knowing there's a hel of a slim chance that the victims wil ever be connected. He goes about his business and we're none the wiser.'

Now Thorne stood listening to the persistent wheeze of Alison's ventilator. Locked-in syndrome it was cal ed. They didn't know for sure but she could probably hear, see and feel. Alison was almost certainly aware of everything going on around her. And she was completely and utterly unable to move. Not the tiniest muscle.

Syndrome wasn't the right word. It was a sentence. And what about the bastard who'd passed it? A martial-arts nutcase? Special Services? That was their best guess. Their only guess.

None the wiser...

Three different areas of London. What a mess that had been. Three commanders sitting round a table playing 'Whose Knob's the Biggest?' and putting Operation Backhand together.

He had no worries as far as the team was concerned. Tughan was efficient at least, and Frank Keable was a good DCI, if at times a little too.., cautious. Thorne would have to have a word with him about Hol and and his

12 MARK BILLINGHAM

notebook. He never put the bloody thing down. Couldn't the division take on a single detective constable with a memory span greater than the average goldfish?

'Sir?'

Goldfish Boy was back with the tea.

'Who put us on to Alison Wil etts?'

'That would be the consultant neurologist, er... Doctor...'

Hol and cleared his throat and swal owed. He had a plastic cup of hot tea in each hand and couldn't get out his notebook. Thorne decided to be nice and reached out to take a cup.

Hol and groped for the notebook.

'Dr Coburn. Anne Coburn. She's teaching over at the Royal Free today. I've made you an appointment for this afternoon.'

'Another doctor we've got to thank.'

'Yeah, and another bit of luck as it goes. Her old man's a consultant pathologist, David Higgins. He does a bit of forensic work. She tel s him about Alison Wil etts and he goes, "That's interesting because..."'

'What? And he says and she says? Bit of a casual postnookie chinwag, was it?'

'Don't know, sir. You'l have to ask her.'

Standing aside to let a pale ginger-haired nurse through to change Alison's feeding line, Thorne decided there was no time like the present. He th{ust his untouched tea back at Hol and.

'You stay here and wait for Hinnegan to show up.' 'But, sir, the appointment isn't until four-thirty.' 'So I'l be early.'

He trudged along a maze of cracked red linoleumfloored corridors in search of the quickest way to the exit

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and an escape from the smel that he and every right minded person in the world hated so much. The Intensive Therapy Unit was in a newer wing of the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, but it stil had the smel . Disinfectant, he reckoned. They used something similar in schools but that just took him back to forgotten gym kits and the horror of PE in underpants. This was a different smel .

Dialysis and death.

He took the lift down to the main reception area, whose imposing Victorian architecture made a surprising contrast with the modern, open plan style of the hospital's newer parts, There was a faded grandeur about the stone tablets that lined the wal s and the dusty wooden plaques inscribed with the names of the hospital consultants. Pride of place went to the ful -length portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales, a former patron of the hospital. The painting was accomplished, unlike the bust of the Princess that stood on a plinth next to it. Thorne wondered if it had been sculpted by a patient.

As he neared the exit, the muttered curses and dripping umbrel as coming towards him through the main doors told him that summer was at an end. A week and a half into August and it was over: He stood beneath the hospital's elaborate red-brick portico and squinted through the downpour towards where his car wa.s parked, tight against the railings that ran around Queen Square. People scurried through the rain, heads down, across the gardens or towards Russel Square tube station. How many were doctors or nursing staff?. There were a dozen hospitals or specialist units within a mile of him. He could just see Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital from where he stood.

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He turned up his col ar and prepared to make a dash for

it.

At first he thought it was a parking ticket and he pul ed

it roughly from beneath the wiper blade. As soon as he removed the single sheet of A4 from the polythene wrapper and unfolded it, he saw it was something else. He careful y inserted it back into its protective wrapping, wiped off the rain and peered at the nearly typed message. After the first four words he was no longer aware of the rainwater running down the back of his neck.

DEAR DETECTIVE INSPECTOR THORNE. WHAT CAN I SAY? PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT. AND DON'T YOU JUST ENVY HER THAT PERFECT... DISTANCE? I INVITE YOU

TO CONSIDER THE CONCEPT OF FREEDOM. TRUE FREEDOM. HAVE YOU EVER REALLY CONSIDERED IT? I'M SOftY ABOUT THE OTHERS. TRULY. I SHALL NOT INSULT

YOUR INTELLIGENCE WITH PLATITUDES ABOUT ENDS AND MEANS BUT OFFER IN MITIGATION THE THOUGHT THAT A MASSIVE UNDERTAKING OFTEN HAS AN

APPROPRIATE MARGIN OF ERROR. IT'S ALL ABOUT PRESSUBE, DETECTIVE INSPECTOR THORNE, BUT THEN YOU'D IfNOW ALL ABOUT THAT. SERIOUSLY, THOUGH, TOM, MAYBE I'LL CALL YOU SOMETIME.

Pressure...

Thorne looked around, his heart thumping. Whoever left the note must be close - the car hadn't been there long. Al he could see were grim-set, rain-soaked faces, and Hol and dodging the puddles as he loped across the road towards him.

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'Sir, the boyfriend's just arrived. You must've passed him on your way out.'

The look on Thorne's face stopped him dead in his tracks.

'Alison is not a fuck-up, Hol and.'

'Of course not, sir. Al I meant was--'

'Listen. This is what he wants.' He pointed back towards the hospital. 'Do you understand?' His shirt was plastered to his back. Rain and sweat. He could barely understand it himself. He could hardly believe what was struggling to come out of his mouth. Hol and stared at Thorne openmouthed as he spoke the words that would cost him so much. Words which even as they formed on his lips, told him he should never have agreed to become part of this.

'Alison Wil etts is not his first mistake. She's the first one he's got right.'

Tim's not handling this very wel . He had that funny choke in his voice when he was talking to Anne. Anne? First-name terms and we've nevermet. She sounds nice, though. I like our chats in the evening. Obviously a bit one-sided but at least somebody knows there's something going on in here. There's stil somebody going on in here.

Did I mention the tests by the way? Absolutely fucking excel ent. Wel , some of them. Basical y there's some sort of kit, literal y a kit, in a special case, which tests if you're a complete veggie or not. To see if you're in Persistent Vegetative State. PVS. Which I keep mixing up with I/'PL but PVS is a bit more serious. They just test al your senses. Banging bits of wood together to see if you can hear, to see if you react. Not quite sure what I did, real y, but they seemed pleased. I could have done without the pinpricks and that stuff they waft under your nose that's like the stuff you inhale if you've got a real y bad cold. But the taste test makes up for it. They give you whisky. Drops of whisky on your tongue. This is my kind of hospital.

Anne did the tests. She looks dead attractive for somebody quite old. I can't see her very wel but that's the image I get of her. I'm not even seeing shapes, real y. More like the shadows of shapes. And some of those shadow-shapes are definitely policemen. Tim sounded real y nervous when he was talking to one of them. He was pretty young, I reckon.

The man outside the house with the bottle of champagne did.., what? Turned me into a pretty dul conversationalist but what else? Hurt me somewhere but nothing feels like a wound.

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Everything feels like.a scar.

Did he touch me? Wil he be the last one ever to touch me? Come on, Tim. I'm alive. It's stil me. More or less. You're cracking up and I'm the one singing 'Girlfriend In A Coma' to myself...

It was nice that Carol and Paul came.in. Christ, I hope al this business didn't bugger up the wedding.

TWO

'Are we looking at a doctor?'

As soon as he had asked the question, Thorne knew what Hol and would be thinking. It was undeniable that Anne Coburn was the sort of doctor most men would look at. About whom most men would contrive painful jokes about cold hands and bedside manners. She was tal and slim. Elegant, he thought, like that actress who was in The Avengers and plays the old slapper in that sitcom. Thorne put her in her early forties, maybe a year or two older than he was. Although the blue eyes suggested that her hair might once have been blonde, he liked it the way it was now - short and silver. Perched on the edge of a smal , cluttered desk, drinking a cup of coffee, she seemed almost relaxed. By comparison with the day before at any rate.

She'd sent him away from the Royal Free with a flea in

his ear. Thorne could stil h+ar the laughter of thirty-odd medical students as he'd trudged away up the corridor. It was evidently a treat to take a short break from brain scans to watch the teacher give a high-ranking police officer a thorough bol ocking. Anne Coburn did not like to be interrupted. She'd apologised for the incident over the phone when Thorne rang to rearrange their appointment back at

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Queen Square where she worked. Where she treated Alison Wil etts.

She took another swig of coffee and repeated Thorne's question. Her speech was crisp, efficient and easy on the ear. It was a voice that could certainly wow impressionable medical students or frighten middle-aged policemen. 'Are we looking at a doctor? Wel , certainly someone with a degree of medical expertise. To block off the basilar artery and cause a stroke would take medical know-how. To cause the kind of stroke that would induce locked-in syndrome is way beyond that... Even if someone knew what they were doing, the odds are against it. You might try it a dozen times and not succeed. We're talking about fractions of an inch.'

Those fractions had cost three women their lives. Thorne flashed on a mental image of Alison Wil etts. Make that four women. Perhaps they should count their blessings and thank God for this lunatic's expertise. Or, more likely, worry that now he thought he'd perfected his technique he'd be eager to try again. Dr Coburn hadn't finished. 'Plus of course, there's the journey to consider.'

Thorne nodded. He'd already started to consider it. Hol and looked confused.

'From what I can gather, you're presuming that Alison had her stroke at home in south-east London,' said Coburn. 'He would have had to. keep her alive until he could get her to the Royal London, which is at least...' 'Five miles away.'

'Right. He'd have passed any number of hospitals on the way. Why did he drive al the way to the Royal London?'

Thorne had no idea, but he'd done some checking. 'Camberwel to Whitechapel, he'd have passed three major

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hospitals, even on the most direct route. How would he have kept her alive?'

'Bag and mask's the most obvious way. He might have had to pul over every ten minutes or so for half a dozen good squeezes on the bag but it's fairly straightforward.' 'So, a doctor, then?'

'I think so, yes. A failed medical student possibly - chiropractor, perhaps.., a wel -read physiotherapist at a hel of a stretch. I've no idea where you'd even begin.'

Hol and stopped scribbling in his notebook. 'A hypodermic needle in a haystack?'

Coburn's expr6ssion told Thorne that she'd found it about as funny as he had.

'You'd better start looking for it then, Hol and,' Thorne told him. 'I'l see you tomorrow. Get a cab back.'

Every step that he and Dr Coburn took towards Alison's room fil ed Thorne with something approaching dread. It was a terrible thought but he would have found it easier had Alison been one of Hendricks's 'patients'. He couldn't help but wonder if it might not have been easier for Alison too. They walked through to the Chandler Wing then took the lift to the second floor and Medical ITU.

'You don't like hospitals, do you, Detective Inspector?'

An odd question. Thorne couldn't believe that anybody liked hospitals. 'I've spent tOO much time in them.'

'Professional y or...?' She didn't finish the question because she couldn't. What were the right words? 'On an amateur basis?'

Thorne looked straight at her. 'I had a smal operation last year.' But that wasn't it. 'And my mother was in hospital a long time before she died.'

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Coburn nodded. 'Stroke.'

'Three of them. Eighteen months ago. You real y do know how brains work, don't you?'

She smiled. He smiled back. They stepped out of the lift. 'By the way, it was a hernia.'

The signs on the wails fascinated Thorne: Movement and Balance; Senility; Dementia. There was even a Headache Clinic. The place was busy but the people they passed as they moved through the building were not the usual walking wounded. He saw no blood, no bandages or plaster casts. The corridors and waiting areas seemed ful of people moving slowly and deliberately. They looked lost or

bewildered. Thorne wondered what he looked like to them. Much the same, almost certainly.

They walked on in silence past a canteen fil ed with the casual chatter that Thorne would have associated with a large factory or office building. He wondered if they ever got that smel out of the food.