Free Lifeless - 5 by Mark Billingham Page B

less impressive member and began to rub at the red marks around his bel y where his waistband had pinched.
    He heard movement in the doorway behind him. Her voice was
    almost enough to end it before it had even begun.
    'Ready then, Martin?'
    His hand had moved to his cock without him even realising it. He was moaning softly and stroking himself even as he was turning round to look at her, smiling...
    Karen and Nicklin stood in the doorway, their mouths open, clutching on to one another, waiting for the best moment to let the laughter out. Karen was the first to crack, but the laugh died almost as soon as it came out of her mouth and she looked quickly away. Nicklin began to howl, slapping his sides as Palmer had seen people do in films. Nicklin saw the look on his victim's face and spat out his scorn in
    between the laughs. 'Fuck, Palmer, it was a joke. I was joking...' Karen glanced back. 'Jesus . . .'
    Nicklin pointed at Palmer's crotch with a groan of disgust and
    Palmer's fist tightened instinctively around his soft, shrivel ed penis. Karen leaned against the doorframe. 'Jesus, Martin...'
    'You've upset her now,' Nicklin said. Karen began to cry softly and the amusement vanished from Nicklin's voice in an instant. 'You real y have upset her, you stupid bastard. Because you don't know a fucking joke when you hear one, you pervert...'
    There was nothing left to do then but run, as he should have done that day in the park, and the summer before that, and a dozen or more times in between.
    He ran without stopping to dress himself, clutching his trousers to his waist, bolting through the doorway, between the boy with the short black hair who was tugging with his teeth at the wrapper of a chocolate bar, and the girl in the blue dress who was sobbing.
    He ran away towards the grassy, green embankment.
    He ran, his head down, towards the housing estate. Wiping the tears away as he charged through the long couch grass and clattered across a rusting sheet of corrugated iron.
    He ran far away from the nest of snakes.
    FIVE
    'How are they working together?'
    It was the first question Brigstocke had asked him the previous night on the phone, and it was the first question he put to them now as a group. They were gathered in the bigger of the two offices. Brigstocke, Thorne, Hol and and McEvoy. The core of an investigation that had been sizeable before and overnight had become the biggest that London had seen in a long time.
    Thorne's answer now, was the same as it had been a few hours earlier. He had no idea, but he hoped that together, they might come up with something, anything, that might point the hundreds of officers and civilians working on the case in the right direction. The hundreds working in the industry of kil ing...
    'It seems likely that they kil alternate victims.' Brigstocke looked as though he hadn't had a lot of sleep the night before. Thorne hadn't had a great deal himself, but he hadn't had Jesmond giving him grief at the same time. Thorne looked at his DCI and saw, as if he needed another one, an object lesson in the benefits of avoiding promotion. He didn't need a lecture from a desk jockey like Jesmond. He knew ful wel that those wondrous, imaginary places where the buck stopped and where credit, if any, would be due, were a long way apart.
    Brigstocke leaned forward, his fingers interlocked in front of him on the desk, his voice a little hoarse but crackling with urgency al the same. 'The evidence suggests that they are different types, psychological y as wel as physical y, but we need to know how they.., interact. Do they attack their victims together and simply carry out the actual kil ing individual y?
    Maybe one kil s while the other keeps a lookout...
    'I don't think that's likely.' Hol and was the first to speak up. Thorne was as impressed as always at the confidence, at how far he'd come in a year.
    Brigstocke nodded. 'Go on, Hol and...'
    'Margie Knight's statement made no mention of a second man... of