Free Scaredy cat by Mark Billingham Page A

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, Holland 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 killing...
    'It seems likely that they kill 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 full well 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 all the same. 'The evidence suggests that they are different types, psychologically as well as physically, but we need to know how they.., interact. Do they attack their victims together and simply carry out the actual killing individually? Maybe one kills while the other keeps a lookout...
    'I don't think that's likely.' Holland 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, Holland...'
    'Margie Knight's statement made no mention of a second man... of anybody else at all in the immediate vicinity as far as I can remember, and nothing that Charlie Garner has said would indicate that there was more than one man.'
    'Have another word with Margie Knight,' Brigstocke said. His eyes met Thorne's.
    'I'll give the Enrights a ring.' Thorne was already hoping that he would not need to speak to them again in person. At least not until he had good news. 'Holland's right though, sir, the boy's said nothing at any time about two men...'
    One was bad enough wasn't it, Charlie?
    'I think we're forgetting about the time element here.' McEvoy sounded as tired as Brigstocke. Thorne looked across at her and thought that she didn't look a whole lot better.. 'They could have killed Carol Garner and Ruth Murray together, or at least both have been present when she was killed, but the stabbings in July almost overlap time wise and they were miles apart. Each of them has got to be working on their own.'
    'I agree,' Thorne said. It was about as much as he was sure of.
    'OK, so the chances are that, even though they kill on the same day, they kill separately, but we have to presume that they plan these murders carefully. For Christ's sake, they must get together to work everything out, discuss dates...'
    Thorne