第3章 THE PROCEDURE

'Wake up, Sleepyhead…'

And lights and voices and a mask and sweet fresh oxygen in my nostrils…

And before?

Me and the girls are linking arms to belt out 'I Will Survive' and scare the shit out of every white-sock-wearing Camberwell Casanova in the club…

And now I'm dancing on my own. At a cashpoint, for God's sake! Unfeasibly pissed. Top night.

And I'm struggling to get the key in the door.

And there's a man in a car with a bottle of champagne. What's he celebrating? One more can't hurt on top of a bucketful of tequila.

And we're in the kitchen. I can smell some sort of soap. And something else. Something desperate.

And the man is behind me. I'm kneeling. If he wasn't holding me up I'd flop on to the floor. Am I that far gone?

And his hands are on my head and on my neck. He's very gentle. Telling me not to worry.

And… nothing…

ONE

Thorne hated the idea of coppers being hardened. A hardened copper was useless. Like hardened paint. He was just… resigned. To a down-and-out with a fractured skull and the word scum carved into his chest. To half a dozen Girl Guides decapitated courtesy of a drunken bus driver and a low bridge. And the harder stuff. Resigned to watching the eyes of a woman, who's lost her son, glaze over as she gnaws her bottom lip and reaches absently for the kettle. Thorne was resigned to all this. And he was resigned to Alison Willetts.

'Stroke of luck, really, sir.'

He was resigned to having to think of this small girl-shaped thing, enmeshed in half a mile of medical spaghetti, as a breakthrough. A piece of good fortune. A stroke of luck. And she was barely even there. What was undeniably lucky was that they'd found her in the first place.

'So, who fucked up?' DC David Holland had heard about Thorne's straight-for-the-jugular approach, but he was unprepared for the question so soon after arriving at the girl's bedside.

'Well, to be fair, sir, she didn't fit the profile. I mean, she was alive for a kick-off, and she's so young.'

'The third victim was only twenty-six.'

'Yes, I know, but look at her.'

He was. Twenty-four and she looked as helpless as a child.

'So it was just a missing-persons' job until the local boys tracked down a boyfriend.' Thorne raised an eyebrow.

Holland instinctively reached for his notebook. 'Er… Tim Hinnegan. He's the closest thing there is to next-of-kin. I've got an address. He should be here later. Visits every day apparently. They've been together eighteen months – she moved down here two years ago from Newcastle to take up a position as a nursery nurse.' Holland shut his notebook and looked at his boss, who was still staring down at Alison Willetts. He wondered whether Thorne knew that the rest of the team called him the Weeble. It was easy to see why. Thorne was… what? five six? five seven? But the low centre of gravity and the very… breadth of him suggested that it would take a lot to make him wobble. There was something in his eyes that told Holland that he would almost certainly not fall down.

His old man had known coppers like Thorne but he was the first Holland had worked with. He decided he'd better not put away the notebook just yet. The Weeble looked like he had a lot more questions. And the bugger did have this knack of asking them without actually opening his mouth.

'Yeah, so she walks home after a hen night… er, a week ago Tuesday… and winds up on the doorstep of A and E at the Royal London.'

Thorne winced. He knew the hospital. The memory of the pain that had followed the hernia operation there six months earl-ier was still -horribly fresh. He glanced up as a nurse in blue uniform put her head round the door, -looking first at them and then at the clock. Holland reached for his ID, but she was already shutting the door behind her.

'Looked like an OD when she came in. Then they found out about this weird coma thing, and she gets transferred here. But even when they discovered it was a stroke there was no obvious link to Backhand. No need to look for benzos and certainly no need to call us.'

Thorne stared down at Alison Willetts. Her fringe needed cutting. He watched as her eyeballs rolled up into their sockets. Did she know they were there? Could she hear them? And could she remember?

'So, if you ask me, the only person who's fucked up is, well, the killer really. Sir.'

'Find us a cup of tea, Holland.'

Thorne didn't shift his gaze from Alison Willetts and it was only the squeak and swish of the door that told him Holland had gone.

Detective Inspector Tom Thorne hadn't wanted Operation Backhand, but was grateful for any transfer out of the brand spanking new Serious Crime Group. The restructuring was confusing everybody and at least Backhand was a straightforward, old-fashioned operation. Still, he hadn't coveted it like some he could mention. Of course it was high profile, but he was one of that strange breed reluctant to take on any case he didn't seriously think could be solved. And this was a weird one. No question about that. Three murders that they knew about, each victim suffering death due to the constriction of the basilar artery. Some maniac was targeting women in their homes, pumping them full of drugs and giving them strokes.

Giving them strokes.

Hendricks was one of the more hands-on pathologists, but a week earlier, in his laboratory, Thorne had been less than thrilled at having those clammy hands on his head and neck as Hendricks tried to demonstrate the killing technique. 'What the bloody hell d'you think you're doing, Phil?'

'Shut your face, Tom. You're off your face on tranquillisers. I can do anything I like. I just bend your head this way and apply pressure to this point here to kink the artery. It's a delicate procedure this, takes specialised knowledge… I don't know. Army? Martial arts, maybe? Either way he's a clever bastard. No marks to speak of. It's virtually undetectable.'

Virtually.

Christine Owen and Madeleine Vickery both had risk factors: one in middle age, the second a heavy smoker on the pill. Both were discovered dead at home on opposite sides of London. That they had recently washed with carbolic soap was noted by the pathologists concerned, and though Christine Owen's husband and Madeleine Vickery's flatmate had considered this odd, neither could deny (or explain) the presence of a bar of carbolic in the bathroom. Traces of a tranquilliser were found in both victims, and were attributed in Owen's case to a prescription for depression, and in Vickery's, to an occasional drugs habit. No connection between these tragic yet apparently natural deaths was ever made.

But Susan Carlish had no generally accepted risk factors for stroke, and the tranquillisers found in the one-room flat in Waterloo, in a bottle with no label, were something of a mystery. It was down to the torn ligaments in her neck and one bloody clever pathologist that they'd 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 killer.

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

'Eh?'

'Still 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 hell of a slim chance that the victims will 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 called. 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 Holland and his -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 Willetts?'

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

Holland cleared his throat and swallowed. 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. Holland 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 tells him about Alison Willetts and he goes, "That's interesting because…"'

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

'Don't know, sir. You'll 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 thrust his untouched tea back at Holland.

'You stay here and wait for Hinnegan to show up.'

'But, sir, the appointment isn't until four-thirty.'

'So I'll be early.'

He trudged along a maze of cracked red linoleum-floored corridors in search of the quickest way to the exit and an escape from the smell 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 Neuro-surgery, but it still had the smell. 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 smell.

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 walls and the dusty wooden plaques inscribed with the names of the hospital consultants. Pride of place went to the full-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 umbrellas 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 was parked, tight against the railings that ran around Queen Square. People scurried through the rain, heads down, across the gardens or towards Russell 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.

He turned up his collar and prepared to make a dash for it.

At first he thought it was a parking ticket and he pulled 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 carefully inserted it back into its protective wrapping, wiped off the rain and peered at the neatly 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 sorry 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 pressure, detective inspector thorne, but then you'd know 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. All he could see were grim-set, rain-soaked faces, and Holland dodging the puddles as he loped across the road towards him.

'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, Holland.'

'Of course not, sir. All 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. Holland stared at Thorne open-mouthed 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 Willetts is not his first mistake. She's the first one he's got right.'

Tim's not handling this very well. He had that funny choke in his voice when he was talking to Anne. Anne? First-name terms and we've never met. 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 still somebody going on in here.

Did I mention the tests by the way? Absolutely fucking excellent. Well, some of them. Basically there's some sort of kit, literally 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 VPL but PVS is a bit more serious. They just test all your senses. Banging bits of wood together to see if you can hear, to see if you react. Not quite sure what I did, really, 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 really 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 well but that's the image I get of her. I'm not even seeing shapes, really. More like the shadows of shapes. And some of those shadow-shapes are definitely policemen. Tim sounded really 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 dull conversationalist but what else? Hurt me somewhere but nothing feels like a wound.

Everything feels like a scar.

Did he touch me? Will he be the last one ever to touch me?

Come on, Tim. I'm alive. It's still 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 all 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 Holland 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 tall 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 small, 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 still hear 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 bollocking. 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 Queen Square where she worked. Where she treated Alison Willetts.

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? Well, 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 Willetts. 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. Holland 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 all the way to the Royal London?'

Thorne had no idea, but he'd done some checking. 'Camberwell to Whitechapel, he'd have passed three major 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 pull 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 well-read physiotherapist at a hell of a stretch. I've no idea where you'd even begin.'

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

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

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

Every step that he and Dr Coburn took towards Alison's room filled 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.'

'Professionally 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 small operation last year.' But that wasn't it. 'And my mother was in hospital a long time before she died.'

Coburn nodded. 'Stroke.'

'Three of them. Eighteen months ago. You really 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 walls 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 full 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 filled with the casual chatter that Thorne would have associated with a large factory or office building. He wondered if they ever got that smell out of the food.

'What about doctors? Are we on your shit list?'

For a ridiculous second he wondered if she was coming on to him. Then he remembered the faces of those bloody medical students. This was not a woman about whom he could presume anything. 'Well, not at the moment anyway. Too many of them responsible for putting us on to this. You for a start.'

'I think my husband can take credit for that.' Her tone was brisk, without an ounce of false modesty.

She caught Thorne's fleeting glance towards where a wedding ring should have been. 'Soon to be ex-husband, I should say. It was a chance remark, really. One of the more civilised moments in a rather bloody how-shall-we-handle-the-divorce session.'

Thorne looked straight ahead, saying nothing. Christ, he was so English!

'What about the china? Who keeps the cat? Did you hear about the lunatic who's stroking out women all over London? You know the sort of thing…'

Phobia. Death. Divorce. Thorne wondered if perhaps they should move on to the crisis in the Middle East.

'Forty-eight hours after she was brought in we gave Alison an MRI scan. There was oedema around the neck ligaments – bright white patches on the scan. You see it in whiplash victims, but with Alison I thought it was unusual. On top of what my husband had told me-'

'What about the Midazolam?'

'His benzodiazepine of choice? It was a very clever choice, as a matter of fact, especially as there was every chance it would be the same drug given to Alison in A and E. How's that for muddying the waters?'

Thorne stopped. They were outside Alison's room. 'Can we check that?'

'I did. And it was. I know the anaesthetist who was on duty at the Royal London that night. The toxicology report showed Midazolam in Alison's bloodstream but it would have done -anyway – that's what was used to sedate her in A and E. But we also take blood -routinely, on admission, so I checked. Midazolam was present in that first blood sample too. That's when I decided to contact the police.'

Thorne nodded. A doctor. He had to be. 'Where else do they use Midazolam?'

She thought for a moment. 'It's pretty specialised. ITUs, A and E, Anaesthetics, that's about it.'

'Where's he getting it from? Hospitals? Can't you get this sort of stuff over the internet?'

'Not in these quantities.'

Thorne knew that this would mean contacting every hospital in the country for recorded thefts of Midazolam. He wasn't sure how far back to check. Six months? Two years? He'd err on the side of caution. Besides, he was sure Holland could use the overtime.

Coburn opened the door to Alison's room.

'Can she hear us?' Thorne asked.

She brushed Alison's hair off her face and smiled at him indulgently. 'Well, if she can't, it's not because there's anything wrong with her hearing.'

Thorne felt himself redden. Idiot. Why did people whisper at hospital bedsides?

'To be honest, I'm not sure. The early signs are good. She blinks to sudden noises but there are still tests to be done. I talk to her anyway. She already knows which registrar is an alcoholic and which consultant is doing it with three of his students.'

Thorne raised an inquisitive eyebrow. Coburn sat and took Alison's hand.

'Sorry, Detective Inspector, girls' talk!'

Thorne could do little but watch her among the mess of wires and machinery. Wires and machinery with a young woman attached. He listened to the hiss of Alison's ventilated lungs and felt the throb of her computerised pulse, and he thought about the one doctor out there somewhere who was most definitely on his shit list.

He sat on the tube trying to guess how much longer the businessman opposite him had to live. It was a game he greatly enjoyed.

It had been such a wonderful moment the day before when Thorne had looked straight at him. He hadn't really seen him: it had been no more than half a second and he was just a passer-by with his hood up, but it had been a lovely bonus. The look on the policeman's face had told him that he'd understood the note. Now he could relax and enjoy what had to be done. He'd lie in the bath when he got home and think about it some more. He'd think about Thorne's face. Then he'd grab a few hours' sleep. He was working later on.

The man opposite looked flushed. Another tough day at the office. He had a smoker's face, pale and blotchy. The broken veins on his cheeks were probably a sign of bad circulation and excessive drinking. The small, creamy blobs on the eyelids, the xanthelasma, almost certainly meant that his cholesterol was way too high, and that his arteries were well furred up.

The businessman gritted his teeth as he turned the pages of his newspaper.

He gave him ten years at most.

As his battle-scarred blue Mondeo moved smoothly through the early-morning traffic on the Marylebone Road, Thorne nudged the Massive Attack tape into the stereo and leaned back in his seat. If he'd wanted to relax and switch off he'd have plumped for some Johnny Cash or Gram Parsons or Hank Williams, but there was nothing like the repetitive, hypnotic thud of music he was twenty-five years too old for to concentrate his thoughts. As ever, when the mechanised beat of 'Unfinished Sympathy' started thumping from the speakers he pictured the incredulous look on the face of the teenage assistant in Our Price. Smug little git had looked at him like he was some old saddo trying to pretend he still had his finger on the pulse.

The spotty teenage face became the infinitely more attractive one belonging to Anne Coburn. He wondered what sort of music she liked. Classical, probably, but with a Hendrix album or two stashed away behind the Mozart and Mendelssohn. What would she make of his penchant for trip-hop and speed-garage? He guessed that she'd go for the saddo theory. He stopped at the lights and rolled down the window to let the beat blast out at the snooty-looking woman in the Saab next to him. Thorne stared straight ahead. When the light hit amber, he turned, winked at her and pulled gently away.

And when he got back to HQ? There would be a convincing babble of efficient-sounding voices, a scurrying back and forth with files, and the buzzing and beeping of faxes and modems. Thorne smacked out the rhythm on his steering-wheel. And as a backdrop to this montage of proper procedure there would be the wall; a blackboard detailing names, dates and actions, and lined up above it there would be the pictures: Christine, Madeleine and Susan. Their unmarked faces sharing a pallid blankness, but each, to Thorne, seeming to capture a dreadful final instant of some unfamiliar emotion. Confusion. Terror. Regret. All in extremis. He turned up the music. In factories and offices across London, workers were copping furtive glances at calendar girls – Saucy Sandra, Naughty Nina, Wicked Wendy. The days, weeks and months that lay ahead for Thorne would be counted off by the reproachful faces of Dead Christine, Dead Madeleine and Dead Susan.

'How's it going, Tommy?'

Christine Owen. Thirty-four. Found lying at the bottom of the stairs…

'Shake 'em up, will you, Tom, for fuck's sake?'

Madeleine Vickery. Thirty-seven. Dead on her kitchen floor. A pan of spaghetti boiled dry…

'Please, Tom…'

Susan Carlish. Twenty-six. Her body discovered in an armchair. Watching television…

'Tell us what you're going to do, Tom.'

They would make lists, no question, long lists they would cross-reference with different ones. DCs would ask hundreds of different people the same questions and type out their notes and DSs would take statements and make phone calls and type out their notes, which would be collated and indexed and, perhaps, several thousand fields full of cows' worth of shoe leather later, they might get lucky…

Sorry, girls, nothing yet.

They weren't going to catch this bloke with procedure. Thorne could feel it already. This wasn't the convenient copper's hunch of a thriller writer – he knew it. The killer might get himself caught. Yes, there was a chance of that. The profilers and psychological experts reckoned that, deep down, they all wanted to be caught. He'd have to ask Anne Coburn what she thought about that the next time he saw her. If that turned out to be sooner rather than later he wouldn't be complaining.

Thorne pulled into the car park and killed the music. He stared up at the dirty brown building in which Backhand had made its home. The old station on Edgware Road had been earmarked for closure months ago and was now all but deserted, but the vacant offices above had been perfect for an operation like Backhand. Perfect for the lucky buggers who didn't have to work there every day. An open-plan monstrosity – one enormous fishtank for the minnows with a few smaller bowls around the edges for the bigger fish.

For a moment he was deeply afraid to go in. He got out of the car and leaned against the bonnet until the moment passed.

As he trudged towards the door, he made a decision. He wasn't going to let anyone put a picture of Alison on the wall.

Fourteen hours later Thorne got home and rang his dad. They spoke as often as Thorne could manage and saw each other even less. Jim and Maureen Thorne had left North London for St Albans ten years before, but since his mum had died Thorne felt the distance between him and his dad growing greater all the time. Now they were both alone and their telephone conversations were always desperately trivial. His dad was always keen to pass on the latest dirty story or pub joke, and Thorne was always pleased to hear them. He liked to let his old man make him laugh – he liked to hear him laugh. Aside from the forced lightheartedness of these phone calls, he suspected that his father wasn't laughing a great deal. His father knew damn well that he wasn't.

'I'll leave you with a couple of good ones, Tom.'

'Go on then, Dad.'

'What's got a one-inch knob and hangs down?'

'I don't know.'

'A bat.'

It wasn't one of his best.

'What's got a nine-inch knob and hangs up?'

'No idea.'

His dad put the phone down.

He sat down and, for a few minutes, he said nothing. Then he began to speak softly. 'Perhaps, in retrospect, the note on the windscreen was a little… showy. It's not like me, really. I'm not that sort of person. I suppose I just wanted to say sorry for the others. Well, if I'm being truthful, I must admit that a part of me wanted to boast just a little. And I think Thorne's a man I can talk to. He seems like a man who will understand how proud I am about getting it right. Perfection is everything, isn't it? And haven't I been taught that? You can believe it. I have been well taught.

'I mean, it's been a struggle and I'm certainly not saying that I won't make any more mistakes, but what I'm doing gives me the right to fail, wouldn't you say? The one… frustration is that I can only imagine how good it feels on the machines. Safe and clean. Free to relax and let the mind wander. No mess. And if I feel proud at liberating a body from the tyranny of the petty and the putrid then I can't be condemned for that, surely. It's the only real freedom left that's worth fighting for, I'd say. Freedom from our clumsy movement through air. Our bruising. Our… sensitivity. To be released from the humdrum and the everyday. Fed and cleaned. Monitored and cared for. All our filthy fluids disposed of. And, above all, to know. To be aware of these wonders as they are happening. What does a corpse know of its washing? To know and to feel all these things must be wonderful.

'God, what am I thinking? I'm sorry. I don't have to tell you any of this.

'Do I, Alison?'

Sue and Kelly from the nursery came to see me yesterday. My vision's a lot better already. I could see that Sue was wearing far too much eyeliner as usual. There's plenty of gossip. Obviously not as much as usual with me in here, but still good stuff. Mary, the manageress, is really pissing everybody off, sitting on her arse and correcting the spelling on the happy charts. Daniel's still being a little sod. He cried for me last week, they said. They told him I'd gone to Spain on my holidays. They told me that when I came out we'd all go and get completely pissed and that they'd rather be in here any day than changing shitty nappies on three pounds sixty an hour…

There wasn't much else after that.

And, at last, a bit of real excitement. Some bedpan-washer or something got blocked up. I know it doesn't sound earth-shattering, but there was water everywhere and all the nurses were sloshing round and getting really pissed off.

Excitement is relative, I suppose.

I dreamed about my mum. She was young, like she was when I was at school. She was getting me dressed and I was arguing about what I was going to wear and she was weeping and weeping…

And I dreamed about the man who did this to me. I dreamed that he was here in my room, talking to me. I knew his voice straight away. But it was also a voice I recognised from after it happened. My brain has gone to mush. He sat by my bed and squeezed my hand and tried to tell me why he'd done it. But I didn't really under-stand. He was telling me how I should be happy. That voice had told me to enjoy myself as he handed me the champagne bottle and I took a swig.

I must have invited him in. I must have. I suppose the police know that. I wonder if they've told Tim?

Now that dreams are the closest thing I have to sensation, they've become so vivid. It would be fantastic if you could press a button and choose what you were going to dream about. Obviously someone would have to press the button for me, but a selection of family and friends with a healthy degree of filth thrown in would be nice.

Mind you, once you've been fucked to this degree, a shag is neither here nor there, really, is it?

THREE

Thorne had been wrong about the summer: after a fortnight's holiday of its own, it had returned with a sticky vengeance, and the siren call of the launderette could no longer be ignored. He was horribly aware of the smell coming off him as he sat sweltering in Frank Keable's office. They were talking about lists.

'We're concentrating on doctors currently on rotation in inner London, sir.'

Frank Keable was only a year or two older than Thorne but looked fifty. This was more due to some genetic glitch than any kind of stress. The lads reckoned he must have started receding at about the same time he hit puberty, judging by the proximity of his hairline to the nape of his neck. Whatever hormones he had left that stimulated hair growth had somehow been mistakenly rerouted to his eyebrows, which hovered above his bright blue eyes like great grey caterpillars. The eyebrows were highly expressive and gave him an air of wisdom that was, to put it kindly, fortunate. Nobody begrudged him this bit of luck – it was the least you could hope for when you looked like an overfed owl with alopecia.

Keable put one of his caterpillars to good use, raising it questioningly. 'It might be best to look a bit further afield, Tom. We'd be covering our bases, should the worst happen. We're not short of manpower.'

Thorne looked sceptical but Keable sounded confident.

'It's a big case, Tom, you know that. If you need the bodies to widen things out a bit, I can swing it.'

'Let's have them anyway, sir, it's an enormous list. But I'm sure he's local.'

'The note?'

Thorne felt again the heavy drops of rain that had crawled inside his shirt collar and trickled down between his shoulder-blades. He could still sense the polythene between his fingers and thumbs, as he'd read the killer's words while the water ran down into his eyes, like tears coming home.

The killer had known where Alison was being treated. He was obviously following the case closely. Theirs as well as hers.

'Yes, the note. And the locations. I think he'd want to be around to keep an eye on things.'

To monitor his work.

'Is it worth putting a watch on the hospital?'

'With respect, sir, the place is crawling with doctors… I can't see the point at the minute.' His eyes drifted to the calendar on the dirty yellow wall – views of the West Country. Keable was originally from Bristol… The heat was making it hard to concentrate. Thorne undid another button on his shirt. Polyester. Not clever. 'Is there any chance of moving that fan round a bit?'

'Oh, sorry, Tom.'

Keable flicked a switch on his black desktop fan, which started to swing backwards and forwards, providing Thorne with a welcome blast of cold air every thirty -seconds or so. Keable leaned back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. 'You don't think we're going to crack this, do you, Tom?'

Thorne closed his eyes as the fan swung back in his direction.

'Tom, is this about the Calvert case?'

Thorne looked at the calendar. Two weeks now since they'd found Alison, and they were nowhere. Two weeks of banging their heads against a wall, and getting nothing but headaches.

Concern, or what passed for it, crept into Keable's voice. 'Cases like this, it's completely understandable…'

'Don't be silly, Frank.'

Keable leaned forward quickly. In charge. 'I'm not insensitive to… moods, Tom. This case has a taste to it. It's not… in the run of things. Even I can sense it.'

Thorne laughed. Old colleagues. 'Even you, Frank?'

'I mean it, Tom.'

'Calvert is ancient history.'

'I hope so. I need you focused – and focused is not fixated.'

Keable wasn't sure but he thought that Thorne nodded. He continued as if the exchange had never happened.

'I think we'll make a case if we get him. We should be able to match up the note to the typewriter for a start.'

Keable sighed and nodded. The old-fashioned typewriter was a bit of luck, a lot easier to identify than a laser printer, but still, they needed a suspect first. He'd been in the same position plenty of times. It was hard to sound enthusiastic about evidence which was only of any use when someone was in custody. The procedure had to be followed, but at the end of the day they had to catch him first. Keable knew that procedure was his strong point. He was a good facilitator. It was this self-awareness that had allowed him to leapfrog other officers, Thorne included. It also ensured that those officers didn't resent it. He recognised the talents of others and the lack of them in himself. He was a forger of team spirit. He was well liked. He helped where he could and left the job at the office at the end of the day. He slept well and had a happy marriage – unlike other officers. Thorne included. 'He'll make a mistake, Tom. When we get a hit on a drugs theft we can start narrowing things down a bit.'

Thorne leaned in close to the fan. 'I'd like to get over to Queen Square, if that's okay. It's been a while and I'd like to see how Alison's doing.'

Keable nodded. This hadn't been his most successful attempt at one-on-one morale-building but, then, he hadn't expected a backslapping gagfest from Tom Thorne. He cleared his throat as Thorne stood up, walked to the door and then turned.

'That note was spotless, Frank. It was the shortest forensic report I've ever seen. And he doesn't wash the bodies in a ritualistic way. He's just very, very careful.'

Keable turned the fan back on himself. He was unsure exactly what Thorne expected him to say. 'I'd been wondering whether we should get the boys to chip in for some flowers or something. I mean, I thought about it but…'

Thorne nodded.

'Yes, sir, I know. It hardly seems worth it.'

'These are really lovely. It was a very nice thought.' Anne Coburn finished arranging the flowers and closed the blinds in Alison's room. The sun was streaming in through the window, causing the girl's face to flush a little.

'I meant to come in sooner, but…'

She nodded, understanding. 'You could have written a note to say congratulations, though.'

Thorne looked down at Alison and immediately understood. It was difficult to notice one less machine amid the confusion of life-preserving hardware. She was breathing. The breaths were shallow, almost tentative, but they were her own. Now a tube ran into a hole in her windpipe, covered with an oxygen mask.

'She came off the ventilator last night and we performed the tracheostomy.'

Thorne was impressed. 'Exciting night.'

'Oh, it's non-stop excitement in here. We had a small flood a while ago. Have you ever seen nurses in wellies?'

He grinned. 'I've seen the odd dodgy video…'

It was the first time he'd heard her laugh: it was filthy.

Thorne nodded towards the flowers, which he'd picked up at a garage on the way in. They weren't quite as lovely as Anne Coburn had said. 'I felt like such an idiot last time, you know, whispering. If she can hear I thought she must be able to smell so…'

'Oh, she'll smell these.'

Suddenly Thorne was aware again of the stickiness beneath his arms. He turned to look at Alison. 'While we're on the subject… sorry, Alison, I must really hum.' He was embarrassed at the silence where a response should have been. He hoped he could get used to talking to this woman with a tube in her neck and another up her nose. She was unable to clear her throat. She was unable to lift the hand that lay pale and heavy on the pink flowery quilt. She was… unable. And yet, selfishly, Thorne hoped that she thought well of him, that she liked him. He wanted to talk to her. Even now he sensed that he would need to talk to her.

'Just fill in the gaps yourself,' Coburn said. 'It's what I do. We have some cracking chats.'

The door opened and an immaculately suited middle-aged man walked in with what at first glance appeared to be candyfloss on his head.

'Oh…' Thorne saw Coburn's features harden in an instant. 'David. I'm busy I'm afraid.'

They stared at each other. She broke the uncomfortable, hostile silence. 'This is Detective Inspector Thorne. David Higgins.'

The soon-to-be-ex-husband. The helpful pathologist.

'Pleased to meet you.' Thorne held out a hand, which the immaculate suit shook without looking at him – or at Alison.

'You did say that this would be a good time,' said the suit, half smiling.

He was obviously trying hard to be pleasant for Thorne's benefit but clearly it did not come naturally. On further inspection the candyfloss was in reality a teased up and hairsprayed dyed vanilla quiff – a ridiculous affectation in a man who was at least fifty-five: he looked as if he'd walked off the set of Dynasty.

'Well, it would have been,' said Coburn frostily.

'My fault, Mr Higgins,' said Thorne. 'I didn't have an appointment.'

Higgins moved towards the door, adjusting his tie. 'Well, I'd better make sure I have an appointment in future, then. I'll call you later, Anne, and we can arrange one.' He closed the door soundlessly behind him. There was a muffled exchange outside and the door was opened again by a nurse. It was time for Alison's bedbath.

Anne Coburn turned to him. 'What do you usually do for lunch?'

They sat in the back of a small sandwich bar on Southampton Row. Ham and Brie on a baguette and a mineral water. A cheese and tomato sandwich and a coffee. Two busy professionals.

'What are Alison's chances of regaining any significant…?'

'Nil, I'm afraid. I suppose it depends a little on your definition of "significant" but we have to be realistic. There have been documented cases of patients regaining enough movement to operate a sophisticated wheelchair. They're doing a lot of work in the States with computers operated by headsticks, but realistically it's a bleak prognosis.'

'Wasn't there somebody in France who dictated an entire book with an eyelash or something?'

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – you should read it. But it's pretty much a one-off. Alison's gaze reacts to voices and she seems to have retained the ability to blink, but whether she has any real control over it is hard to say at the moment. I can't see her giving you a statement just yet.'

'That wasn't the reason I asked about… It wasn't the only reason.' Thorne took an enormous bite of his sandwich.

Anne had done most of the talking but had already finished hers. She looked at him, narrowing her eyes, her voice conspiratorial. 'Well, you've been privy to my disastrous domestic situation. What about yours?' She took a sip of mineral water and watched him chew, her eyebrows arched theatrically. She laughed as, twice, he tried to answer and, twice, had to resume his efforts to swallow the sandwich.

Finally: 'What – you mean is it disastrous?'

'No. Just… is there one?'

Thorne could not get a fix on this woman at all. A vicious temper, a filthy laugh, and a direct line of questioning. There seemed little point in going round the houses.

'I've moved effortlessly from "disastrous" to just plain "bleak".'

'Is that the normal progression?'

'I think so. Sometimes there's a short period of "pitiful" but not always.'

'Oh, well, I'll look forward to that.'

Thorne watched as she reached into her bag for a cigarette. She held up the packet. 'Do you mind?'

Thorne said no, and she lit up. He stared as she blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth, away from him. It had been a long time since his last cigarette.

'More doctors smoke than you'd imagine. And a surprising number of oncologists. I'm amazed that more of us aren't smackheads to be honest. Do you not, then?' Thorne shook his head. 'A policeman who doesn't smoke. You must like a drink, then?'

He smiled. 'I thought you worked too many hours to watch television.'

She groaned with pleasure as she took a long drag.

Thorne spoke slowly but was still smiling when he answered the question. 'I like more than one…'

'Glad to hear it.'

'But that's pretty much it, as far as the clichés go. I'm not religious, I hate opera, and I can't finish a crossword to save my life.'

'You must be driven, then? Or haunted? Is that the word?'

Thorne tried to hold the smile in place and even managed to produce a chuckle of sorts as he turned away and looked towards the counter. When he'd caught the eye of the woman at the till he held up his coffee cup, signalling for another.

'So, does "desperate" and "bleak" involve children?'

Thorne turned back round. 'No. You?'

Her smile was huge and as contagious as smallpox. 'One. -Rachel. Sixteen and big trouble.'

Sixteen? Thorne raised his eyebrows. 'Do women still get upset if you ask how old they are?'

She plonked an elbow on the table and leaned her chin on the palm of her hand, trying her best to look severe. 'This one does.'

'Sorry.' Thorne tried his best to look contrite. 'How much do you weigh?'

She laughed loudly. Not filthy, positively salacious. Thorne laughed too, and grinned at the waitress as his second cup of coffee arrived. It had barely touched the table when Coburn's bleeper went off. She looked at it, stubbed out her cigarette and grabbed her bag from the floor. 'I might not be a smackhead, but I do an awful lot of indigestion tablets.'

Thorne lifted his jacket from the back of his chair. 'I'll walk you back.'

On the way towards Queen Square things became oddly formal again. Small-talk about Indian summers gave way to an awkward silence before they were half-way there. When they reached her office, Thorne hovered in the doorway. He felt like he should go, but she held up her hand to stop him as she made a quick call. The bleep had not been urgent.

'So how is the investigation going?'

Thorne stepped into the office and closed the door. He had thought this was coming over lunch. His capacity to bullshit members of the public had once been endless, but he spent so much of his time exercising that particular skill on superior officers that he couldn't be bothered trying it on with those who had no axe to grind.

'It's a… bleak prognosis.'

She smiled.

'Every day there's some stupid story in the paper about armed robbers tunnelling into the shop next door to the building society or burglars falling asleep in houses they've broken into, but the simple fact is that most people who break the law give serious thought to not getting done for it. With murderers, you've got a chance if it's domestic, or when there's sex involved.'

She leaned back in her chair and took a sip from a glass of water.

Thorne watched her. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to make a speech.'

'No, I'm interested, really.'

'Any sort of sexual compulsion can make people sloppy. They take chances and eventually they slip up. I just can't see this bloke slipping up. Whatever's been driving him isn't sexual.'

Her eyes were suddenly flat and cold. 'Isn't it?'

'Not physically. He's perverse… but he's-'

'What he's doing is grotesque.'

There was a matter-of-factness about the statement that Thorne had no argument with. What shook him was her use of the present tense. There were those who thought or hoped (and, by Christ, he hoped) that perhaps there'd be no need for new pictures on the wall. But he knew better. Whatever mission this man thought he was on, whatever it was he hoped to achieve, he was actually stalking women and killing them in their own homes. And he was enjoying himself. Thorne could feel himself start to redden.

'There's no conventional pattern to this. The ages of the victims seem unimportant to him, as long as they're available. He just picks these women out and when he doesn't get what he wants he just leaves them. Shiny and scrubbed and slumped in a chair or lying on a kitchen floor for their loved ones to stumble across. Nobody sees anything. Nobody knows anything.'

'Except Alison.'

The awkward silence descended again, more stifling than the air trapped inside the tiny office. Thorne felt the retort of his outburst bouncing off the walls like a sluggish bullet. There was none of the usual irritation when his mobile phone rang. He grabbed for it gratefully.

DI Nick Tughan ran the Backhand office: an organiser and collator of information, another embracer of procedure. His smooth Dublin brogue could calm or persuade senior officers. Unlike Frank Keable, though, Tughan had the self-awareness of a tree-stump and little time for characters like Tom Thorne. The way the operation had been going up to now meant that it was very much his show and he ran it with an unflappable efficiency. He never lost his temper.

'We've got a fairly major Midazolam theft. Two years ago, Leicester Royal Infirmary, five grams missing.'

Thorne reached across the desk for a piece of paper and a pen. Anne pushed a pad towards him. He began to scribble down the details. Maybe there had been a slip-up, after all.

'Right, let's send Holland up to Leicester, get all the details, and we'll need a list of everyone on rotation from, say, ninety-seven onwards.'

'Ninety-six onwards. Already sorted it. It's been faxed through.'

Tughan was well ahead of him and thoroughly enjoying it. Thorne knew what he would have done next. 'Obvious question then… any matches?'

'A couple in the South-East and half a dozen in London. But there's an interesting one. Works at the Royal London.'

Interesting was right. Anne Coburn had spotted it straight away. Working on the assumption that Alison had been attacked in her home, then why the Royal London? Why not the nearest hospital? Thorne took down the name, kept the compulsory, if distasteful, backslapping brief and hung up.

'Sounded like good news.' She didn't apologise for eavesdropping.

Thorne was starting to like her more and more. He stood up and reached for his jacket. 'Let's hope so. Five grams of Midazolam. Is that a lot?'

'That's a hell of a lot. We'd use anywhere up to five -milligrams to sedate an average-sized adult. That's intravenously, of course.'

She stood up and moved round the desk to see him out. As she walked to the door she glanced at the scrap of paper, which Thorne had not yet picked up, and stopped dead in her tracks.

'Oh, God!' She reached for it just as Thorne did – he should never have let her see it, but a tussle would have been… unseemly. What harm could it do? He opened the door. 'Is this man your… match, Detective Inspector?' She moved back to her side of the desk and sat down heavily.

'I'm sorry, Doctor, I'm sure you understand. I can't really-'

'I know him,' she said. 'I know him extremely well.'

Thorne hovered in the doorway. This was starting to get awkward. Procedure dictated that he leave straight away and send someone back to get a statement. He waited for her to continue.

'Yes, he certainly worked in Leicester, but there's no way he'd have anything to do with stealing drugs.'

'Doctor-'

'And he's got something of a cast-iron alibi as far as Alison Willetts is concerned.'

Thorne shut the door. He was listening.

'Jeremy Bishop was the anaesthetist on call at the Royal London A and E the night Alison was brought in. He treated her. Do you remember? I told you I knew him. He told me about the Midazolam.'

Thorne blinked slowly. Dead Susan. Dead Christine. Dead Madeleine.

'Come on, Tommy, you must have something to go on?'

He opened his eyes. She was shaking her head. She'd seen the date on the piece of paper. 'I'm sorry, Detective Inspector, but much as you dislike Detective Constable Holland…'

Thorne opened his mouth and closed it again.

'… it's a waste of time to send him to Leicester. The man you're looking for is certainly clever, but there's no guarantee he ever worked at Leicester Royal Infirmary.'

Thorne dropped his bag and sat down again. 'Why am I starting to feel like Dr Watson?'

'August the first is rotation day. Normally it would be a reasonable assumption that in order to steal a large quantity of drugs from a hospital you'd have to work there. Yes, hospital staff are overstretched and occasionally inefficient, but as far as dangerous drugs are concerned there is a procedure in place.'

Thorne's favourite word again.

'But on rotation day, things can get a bit lax. I've worked in hospitals where you could walk out pushing a bed and carrying a kidney machine on August the first. I'm sorry, but whoever took these drugs could have come from anywhere.'

Susan. Christine. Madeleine. 'Something, Tommy. A lead. Something…'

Thorne took out his phone to call Tughan back.

It was Helen Doyle's first round of drinks, but already she was worrying about how much she'd spent. A few designer bottles and a couple of rum and Cokes and it was three times what she earned in an hour.

Sod it. It was Nita's birthday and she didn't do this very often.

She loaded the drinks on to a tray and looked across to where her mates were sitting at a corner table. She'd known three of them since school and the other two for almost that long. The pub wasn't busy and the few people in there were probably pissed off with the noise they were making. On cue the gang began to laugh, Jo's high-pitched cackle the loudest of all. Probably another one of Andrea's filthy jokes…

Helen walked slowly back to the table, the other girls cheering when she put the tray down and diving on to their drinks as if they were the first of the night.

'Didn't you get any crisps?'

'Forgot, sorry…'

'Dizzy bitch.'

'Tell her the joke…'

'How much fucking ice has he put in here?'

Helen took a swig and looked at the label on the bottle. It didn't actually say what was in it. She'd got through plenty already. Hooch, Metz, Breezers. She was never really sure what she was drinking, what the booze was, but she liked the colours and she felt fashionable with the slim, cold bottle in her hand. Sophisticated. Nita drained half of her rum and Coke. Jo emptied the remains of a pint of lager and belched loudly.

'What do you drink those for? It's like pop!'

Helen felt herself blush. 'I like the taste.'

'It's not supposed to taste nice, that's the point.'

Nita and Linzi laughed. Helen shrugged and took another swig. Andrea nudged her. 'Like you know what!'

There was a groan. Jo stuck two fingers down her throat. Helen knew what they were talking about, but part of her wished they wouldn't. Sex was pretty much all Andrea ever talked about.

'Tell us how big his cock was again, Jo.'

The strippergram had been Andrea's idea and Nita had seemed to like it. Helen thought he was really fit, all -covered in oil, and he made her go very red, but the poem about Nita hadn't been that good. She could tell that he'd been as embarrassed as her when Jo grabbed his crotch, and for a second he'd looked really upset. Then he'd smiled and grabbed his clothes from off the floor while everybody whistled and cheered. Helen had whistled and cheered too, but she wished she'd been a bit more pissed.

'Big enough!'

'More than a mouthful's a waste.'

Helen leaned across to Linzi. 'How's work?'

She was probably closest to Linzi, but they hadn't spoken properly all night.

'Shit. I'm going to chuck it in… do some temping or something.'

'Right.'

Helen loved her job. The money was poor, but the people were nice and even though she had to give her mum and dad a bit, it was still cheap living at home. She couldn't see the sense in moving out, not until she met someone. What was the point in renting a grotty flat like Jo or Nita? Andrea still lived at home anyway. God knows where she was having all that sex she was always on about…

'Let Me Entertain You' came on the jukebox. It was one of her favourite songs. She nodded her head to the rhythm and sang the words quietly to herself. She remembered a fifth-form disco, and a boy with an earring and sad brown eyes and cider on his breath. When the chorus came, the rest of the girls joined in and Helen shut up.

The bell rang and the barman shouted something incomprehensible. Andrea and Jo were all for another round. Helen grinned but she knew she should be getting back. She would feel bad in the morning and her dad would be waiting up for her. She was starting to feel woozy and knew that she should have gone home and had her tea before she came out. She could have changed too. She felt frumpy and self-conscious in her black work skirt and sensible blouse. She'd grab a bag of chips on the way home. And a piece of fish for her dad.

Andrea stood up and announced that they'd all put in for one more. Helen cheered along with the rest of them, drained the bottle and reached into her purse for a couple of pound coins.

Thorne sat with his eyes shut listening to Johnny Cash. He rolled his head around on his neck, enjoying every crack of cartilage. Now the Man in Black with the dark, dangerous voice was insisting that he was going to break out of his rusty cage. Thorne opened his eyes and looked around at his neat, comfortable flat – not a cage, exactly, but he knew what Johnny was talking about.

The one-bedroom garden flat was undeniably small, but easily maintained and close enough to the busy Kentish Town Road to ensure that he never ran out of milk or tea. Or wine. The couple in the flat upstairs were quiet and never bothered him. He'd lived here less than six months after finally selling the house in Highbury, but he already knew every inch of the place. He'd furnished the entire flat during one wretched Sunday at IKEA, spent the next three weeks putting the stuff together and the succeeding four months wishing he hadn't bothered.

He couldn't say he'd been unhappy since Jan had left. Christ, they'd been divorced for three years and she'd been gone nearly five, but still, everything just felt… out of kilter. He'd thought that moving out of the house they'd shared and into this bright new flat would change things. He'd been optimistic. However close to him the objects around him were, he had no real… connection to any of them. It was functional. He could be out of his chair and in his bed in a matter of seconds but the bed was too new and, tragically, as yet unchristened.

He felt like a faceless businessman in a numberless hotel room.

Perhaps it would have been better if Jan had gone because of the job. He'd seen it often enough and it was the stuff of interminable TV cop shows – copper's wife can't stand playing second fiddle to the job, blah blah blah. Jan had never been an ordinary copper's wife and she'd left for her own reasons. The only job involved in the whole messy business was the one she'd been on every Wednesday afternoon with the lecturer from her creative-writing course.

Until he'd caught them at it. In the middle of the day with the curtains drawn.

Candles by the bed, for Christ's sake…

Jan said later that she never understood why Thorne hadn't hit him. He never told her. Even as the scrawny bastard had leaped from the bed, his cock flapping, scrabbling for his glasses, Thorne knew that he wasn't going to hurt him. As he let the pain wash over him, he knew that, reeling and raw as he was, he couldn't bear to hear her scream, see the flash of hatred in her eyes, watch her rushing to comfort the little smartarse as he sat slumped against the wardrobe, moaning and trying to stop the blood.

A few weeks later he'd waited outside the college and followed him. Into shops. Chatting with students on the street. Home to a small flat in Islington with multi-coloured bicycles chained up outside and posters in the window. That had been enough for him. That simple knowing.

You're mine if I ever decide to come and get you.

But after a while even that seemed shameful. He'd let it go. Now it was the stuff of late nights and red wine and singers with dark, dangerous voices.

Yes, he'd brought the job home – especially after Calvert, when things had slipped away from him for a time – but they'd got married far too young. That was all, really. Perhaps if they'd had kids…

Thorne scanned the TV pages of the Standard. Tuesday night and bugger all on. Even worse, Sky had shown the Spurs–-Bradford game at eight o'clock. He'd forgotten all about it. At home against Bradford – should be three points in the bag. Teletext, the football fan's best friend, gave him the bad news.

She was slumped, her back against his legs, buttocks pressing down on her heels and knuckles lying against the polished wooden floorboards. He stood behind her, both hands on the back of her neck, readying himself. He glanced around the room. Everything was in place. The equipment laid out within easy reach.

Her mouth fell open and a wet gurgling noise came out. He tightened his grip, ever so slightly, on her neck. There was really no point in trying to talk and, besides, he'd heard quite enough from her already.

An hour and a half earlier, he'd watched as the group of girls had begun to thin out. A couple had wandered off towards the tube and a couple more to the bus stop. One tottered off down the Holloway Road. Local, he guessed. Perhaps she'd like to join him for a drink.

He'd taken a left turn and driven the car round the block, emerging on to the main road twenty yards or so ahead of her. He'd waited at the junction until she was a few feet away then got out of the car.

'Excuse me… sorry… but I seem to be horribly lost.' Slurring the words ever so slightly. Just the right side of pissed. And so well-spoken.

'Where are you trying to get to?'

Wary. Quite right too. But nothing to worry about here. Just a tipsy hooray lost on the wrong side of the Archway roundabout. Taking off his glasses, looking like he's having trouble focusing…

'Hampstead… sorry… had a bit too much… Shouldn't be driving, tell you the truth.'

'That's OK, mate. Hammered meself as it goes…'

'Been clubbing?'

'No, just in the pub – mate's birthday… really brilliant.'

Good. He was glad she was happy. All the more to want to live for. So…

'I don't suppose you fancy a nightcap?' Reaching through the car window and producing it with a flourish.

'Blimey, what are you celebrating?'

Christ, what was it with these girls and a bottle of fizz? Like a hypnotist's gold watch.

'Just pinched it from a party.' Then the giggle. 'One for the road?'

About half an hour. Thirty minutes of meaningless semi--literate yammering until she'd started to go. She was full of herself. Nita's boyfriend… Linzi's problems at work… a couple of dirty jokes. He'd smiled and nodded and laughed, and tried to imagine how he could possibly have been less interested. Then the nodding-dog head and the sitcom slurring, and it was time for the innocuous-looking man to tip his paralytic girlfriend into the back of his car and take her back to his place.

Then he'd made the phone call, and put her in position.

And now Helen wasn't quite so gobby.

Again the gurgling, from somewhere deep down and desperate.

'Ssh, Helen, just relax. It won't take long.'

He positioned his thumbs, one at either side of the bony bump at the base of the skull and felt for the muscle, talking her through it… 'Feel these two pieces of muscle, Helen?'

She groaned.

'The sternocleidomastoid. I know, stupidly long word, don't worry. These muscles reach all the way down to your collar-bone. Now what I'm after is underneath…' He gasped as he found it. 'There.'

Slowly he wrapped his fingers, one at a time around the carotid artery and began to press.

He closed his eyes and mentally counted off the seconds. Two minutes would do it. He felt something like a shudder run through her body and up through the thin surgical gloves into his fingers. He nodded respectfully, admiring the Herculean effort that even so tiny a movement must have taken.

He began to think about her body and about how he might have touched it. She was his to do with as he pleased. He could have slipped his hands from her head and slid them straight down the front of her and beneath her shirt in a second. He could turn her round and penetrate her mouth, pushing himself across her teeth. But he wouldn't. He'd thought about it with the others too, but this was not about sex.

After considering such things at length he'd decided that his was a normal and healthy impulse. Wouldn't any man feel the same things with a woman at his mercy? So easily available? Of course. But it was not a good idea. He did not want them… classifying this as a sex crime.

That would be easy, would throw them too far off the scent. And he knew all about DNA.

A growl came from somewhere deep in Helen's throat. She could feel everything, was aware of everything and still she fought it.

'Not long now… Please be quiet.'

He became aware of a drumming noise and, without moving his head, glanced down to where her fingers were beating spastically against the floorboards. Adrenaline staging a hopeless rearguard action against the drug. She might make it, he thought, she wants to live so much.

One minute forty-five seconds. His fingers locked in position, he leaned down, his lips on her ear, whispering: 'Night-night, Sleepyhead…'

She stopped breathing.

Now was the critical time. His movements needed to be swift and precise. He eased the pressure on the artery and pushed her head roughly forward until chin was touching chest. He let it rest there for a few seconds before whipping it back the same way so that he was staring down at her face. Her eyes were open, her jaw slack, spittle running down her chin. He dismissed the urge to kiss her and moved her head back into the central position. Back into neutral. Then he took a firm grip and entwined his fingers in her long brown hair before twisting the head back over the left shoulder.

And holding it.

Then the right shoulder. Each twist splitting the inside of the vertebral artery. Now it was up to her.

He laid her down gently and placed her body in the recovery position. He was sweating heavily. He reached for a glass of cold water and sat down on the chair to watch her. To wait for her to breathe.

His mind was empty as he focused, unblinking, on her face and chest. The breaths would be short and shallow, and he watched and willed the smallest movement. Every few seconds he leaned forward and felt for a pulse.

Helen's body was unmoving.

He reached for the bag and mask. It was time to intervene. Ten minutes of frantic squeezing, shouting at her: 'Come on, Helen, help me!' Screaming into her face. 'I need you to be strong.'

She wasn't strong enough.

He slumped back into the chair, out of breath. He looked down at the lifeless body. A button was missing from her shirt. He looked across at the plain black shoes, neatly placed one next to the other by her side. The small pile of jewellery in a stainless-steel dish next to them. Cheap bracelets and big, ugly earrings.

He mourned her and hated her.

He needed to move. Now it was just about disposal. Quick and easy.

He began to strip her.

Thorne picked up the bottle of red wine from the side of his chair and poured another glass. Maybe forty-year-old men were better off on their own in neat, comfortable but small flats. Forty-year-old men with bad habits, more mood swings than Glenn Miller and twenty-odd years off the market had very little say in the matter. A taste for country-and-western hardly helped.

Johnny was singing about memories. Thorne made a mental note to programme the CD player to skip this track next time. Had Frank been right when he'd asked if the Calvert case was still part of the equation?

Take one fresh and tender corpse…

Fifteen years was too long to be lugging this baggage around. It wasn't his anyway. He couldn't recall how it had been passed on to him. He'd only been twenty-five. Those far above him had carried the can, as it was their job so to do. He'd never had the chance to take the honourable way out. Would he have done it anyway?

One man, released…

He'd had no say in letting Calvert go after the interview. The fourth interview. What happened in that corridor and later, in that house, seemed like things he'd read about like everybody else. Had he really felt that Calvert was the one? Or was that a detail his imagination had pencilled in later, in the light of what he had seen that Monday morning? Once everything started to come out, his part in it all was largely forgotten anyway.

Four girls, deceased…

Besides, what was his trauma – God, what a stupid word – compared with the family of those little girls who should still have been walking around? Who should have had their own kids by now.

Memories are made of this.

He pointed the remote and turned off the song. The phone was ringing.

'Tom Thorne.'

'It's Holland, sir. We think we've got another body.'

'You think?'

His stomach lurching. Calvert smiling as he walked out of the interview room. Alison staring into space. Dead Susan, dead Christine, dead Madeleine, crossing their fingers.

'Looks the same, sir. I don't think they'd even have passed this one on to us but she hasn't got a mark on her.'

'What's the address?'

'That's the thing, sir. The body's outside. The woods behind Highgate station.'

Minutes away, this time of night. He downed the rest of the glass in one. 'You'd better send a car, Holland. I've had a drink.'

'Best of all, sir…'

'Best?'

'We've got a witness. Somebody saw him dump the body.'

I could sense that Tim really wanted to know who the flowers were from. He didn't say anything, but I know he was looking at them. He didn't ask me. Maybe that's because it was a question he actually wanted an answer to, and not just a pointless conversation with his ex-girlfriend who's now a retarded mong.

Sorry, Tim. But nothing can prepare you for this, can it? I mean, you go through all the usual stuff, holidays together, meeting each other's friends. He never had to deal with meeting the parents, jammy sod. His were a nightmare! But this was never part of the deal, was it? 'How would you cope if I was on a life-support machine and completely unable to move or communicate?' never really comes up in those early intimate little chats, does it?

Oh, and I've got an air mattress now, to stop me getting bed sores apparently. It's probably hugely comfy. Makes a racket, though. Low and electrical. Sometimes I wake up and lie in the dark thinking that somebody's doing a bit of late-night vacuuming in the next room.

Anne's got the hots for that copper, I reckon. He does seem nice, I grant you. Nicer than her ex anyway, who sounds like a tit. The copper's funny, though. I was pissing myself when he apologised for being a bit whiffy. I heard Tim asking one of the nurses about the flowers. There was no card and the nurse went away to ask one of her mates. Now I think Tim suspects I'm having an affair with a policeman. Obviously, he must be a fairly strange policeman with a taste for cheap yellow nighties and extremely compliant girlfriends who never answer back.

What's that old joke about the perfect woman? If I was a nymphomaniac and my dad owned a brewery, he'd be quids in…

FOUR

The Sierra pulled up behind the operations van. As soon as Thorne stepped out of the car he could see that things were going to be difficult. Even at two o'clock in the morning it was still muggy but there was rain coming. Valuable evidence would be lost as the scene turned quickly to mud. The various photographers, scene-of-crime-officers and members of the forensic team were going about their business with quiet efficiency. They knew they didn't have very long. Anything useful was usually found in the first hour. The golden hour. Tughan would still have everything covered anyway: he'd have rung for a weather forecast. This was their first sniff of a crime scene, and nobody was taking any chances.

Thorne set off down the steep flight of steps that led to Highgate tube station and gave access to Queens Wood – the patch of woodland bordering the Archway Road. As he walked he could see the glare of the arc lights through the trees. He could see the figures of forensic scientists in white plastic bodysuits, crouched over what he presumed was the body, in search of stray fibres or hairs from the girl's clothing. He could hear instructions being barked out, the hiss of camera flashes recharging and the constant drone of the portable generator. He'd been at many such scenes in the past, far too many, but this was like watching the A-team work. There was a determination about the entire process that he'd seen only once before. There was a distinct absence of whistling in the dark. There was no gallows humour. There wasn't a flask of tea to be seen anywhere.

It was only when he ducked under the handrail and began to pull on the plastic overshoes provided by a passing SOCO that Thorne realised just how difficult a crime scene this would be to examine. He also saw at once how callous the killer had been in his choice of dumping ground. The body lay hard against the high metal railings that bordered the pavement all the way down the hill. On one side lay the main road and on the other, some hundred feet of dense woodland on a steep hill leading down to the underground station at Highgate. The only access to the body was up the hill and through the trees. Though a well--trodden path had already emerged, it was still a slow process negotiating the route to the body. The ground was hard and dry but it would take only ten minutes of rain to turn it into a mud chute. By the time they'd got the scene protected with polythene tents it would hardly have been worth the effort. He hoped they got what they needed quickly. He hoped there was something to get.

Dave Holland came jogging down the slope towards him. He was backlit beautifully by the arc lights. Thorne could quite clearly make out the silhouette of a notebook being brandished. He doesn't look like a policeman, thought Thorne, he looks like a prefect. Even with a hint of stubble, his tidy blond hair and ruddy complexion made him the obvious target for comments of the aren't-policemen-looking-younger-these-days variety. Pensioners adored him. Thorne wasn't sure. Holland's father had been in the force and, in Thorne's experience, that was rarely without -problems. He doesn't even move like a copper, he thought. Coppers don't skip down hills like mountain goats. Coppers move like… ambulances.

'Cup of tea, sir?'

OK, perhaps he'd been a bit na?ve. There was always tea.

'No. Tell me about this witness.'

'Right, don't get too excited.'

Thorne's heart sank. It was obviously not going to be earth shattering.

'We've got a vague physical description, not a lot.'

'How vague?'

'Height, build, a dark car. The witness, George Hammond…'

That fucking notebook again. He wanted to ram it up the cocky little gobshite's arse.

'… was at the top of the path a hundred yards further up the main road. He thought the bloke was chucking a bag of rubbish over.'

That was what Thorne had already worked out. He must have pulled up and heaved the body over the railings. She might just as well have been a bag of rubbish.

'And that's it? Height and build?'

'There's a bit more on the car. He says he thinks it was a nice one. Expensive.'

Thorne nodded slowly. Witnesses. Another thing he'd had to become resigned to. Even the more perceptive ones gave conflicting accounts of the same event.

'Mr Hammond's eyesight isn't brilliant, sir. He's an old man. He was only out walking his dog. We've got him in the car.'

'Hang about, those railings are six feet high. How big did he say he was?'

'Six two, six three. She's not a big girl, sir.'

Thorne squinted into the lights. 'Right, I'll have a word with the optically challenged Mr Hammond in a minute. Let's get this over with.'

Phil Hendricks was crouched over the body, his pony-tail secured beneath his distinctive yellow showercap. The scientists had finished their scraping and taping, and Hendricks was taking his turn. Thorne watched the all-too-familiar routine as the pathologist took temperature readings and conducted what, until the body was removed, would be a cursory examination. Every minute or so he would heave himself on to his haunches with a grunt, and mumble into his small tape-recorder. As always, each tedious detail of the entire procedure was being immortalised on film by the police cameraman. Thorne always wondered about those characters. Some of them seemed to fancy themselves as film-makers – he'd actually had to bollock one once for shouting, 'That's a wrap.' Some had a disturbing glint in their eye that said, 'You ought to come round to my place and have a look at some of the footage I'll be showing the lads at Christmas.' He couldn't- help wondering if they were all waiting to be headhunted by some avaricious TV company eager for more mindless docusoaps. Maybe he was being too harsh. He was too harsh about Holland as well. Perhaps it was just the perfectly pressed chinos and loafers he didn't like. Maybe it was just that Holland was a young DC eager to please.

Hadn't he been like that? Fifteen years ago. Heading for a fall.

Hendricks began to pack away his gear and looked up at Thorne. It was a look that had passed between them on many occasions. To the untrained eye this 'handing over of responsibility' might have seemed as casual as two pool-players exchanging a cue. Pathologists were supposed to be colder than any of them but despite the Mancunian's flippant, nasal tones and dark sense of humour, Thorne knew what Hendricks was feeling. He'd watched him crying into his pint often enough. Thorne had never reciprocated.

'He's getting a tad fucking casual, if you ask me.' Hendricks began fiddling with one of his many earrings. Eight the last time Thorne had counted. The thick glasses gave him an air of studiousness but the earrings, not to mention the discreet but famous tattoos and the penchant for extravagant headgear, marked him out as unconventional to say the least. Thorne had known the gregarious goth pathologist for five years. He was ten years his junior and horribly efficient; Thorne liked him enormously.

'I didn't, but thanks for the observation.'

'No wonder you're touchy, mate. Two–one at home to Bradford?'

'Robbed.'

'Course you were.'

Thorne's neck was still horribly stiff. He dropped his head back and gazed up into a clear night sky. He could make out the Plough. He always looked for it: it was the only constellation he knew by sight. 'So, it's him, then, is it?'

'I'll know for sure by the morning. I think so. But what's she doing here? That's a hell of a busy road. He might easily have been seen.'

'He was. By Mr Magoo, unfortunately. Anyway, I don't think he was here very long. He just stopped and chucked her out.'

Hendricks moved aside and Thorne looked down at the woman who in a few hours would be identified as Helen Theresa Doyle. She was just a girl. Eighteen, nineteen. Her blouse was pulled up, revealing a pierced belly-button. She was wearing large hoop earrings. Her skirt was torn, revealing a nasty gash at the top of her leg.

Hendricks clicked his bag shut. 'I think the wound's from where she got caught on the railings as the bastard hoicked her over the top.'

Something caught Thorne's eye and he glanced to his right. Standing twenty or so feet away, staring straight at him, was a small fox. A vixen, he guessed. She stood completely still, watching the strange activity. They were on her territory. Thorne felt a peculiar pang of shame. He'd heard farmers and pro-hunt lobbyists ranting about the savagery of these animals when they killed, but he doubted that a creature killing to feed itself and its young could enjoy it. Bloodlust fed off a particular kind of intelligence. There was a shout from the top of the hill and the fox prepared to bolt but relaxed again. Thorne could not take his eyes from the animal as it stared into the artificially lit reality of a warped kind of human bloodlust. Of a genuine brutality. Half a minute passed before the fox sniffed the ground, its curiosity satisfied, and trotted away.

Thorne glanced at Hendricks. He'd been watching too. Thorne took a deep breath and turned back to the girl.

Conflicting emotions.

He felt revulsion at the sight of the body, anger at the waste. Sympathy for the relatives, and terror at the thought of having to confront them, their rage and grief.

But he also felt the buzz.

The rush of the crime scene. The first crime scene. The thing that might smash the investigation wide open might be under their noses, waiting, asking to be found.

If it was there, he'd find it.

Her body…

There were leaves in her long brown hair. Her eyes were open. Thorne could see that she had a nice figure. He tried to get the thought out of his mind.

'He's always taken a bit of time before, a'n't he?' mused Hendricks. 'Nice and easy. Taken the trouble to lay them down like they'd stroked out watching telly or cooking dinner. He didn't really seem to care this time. Bit of a rush job.'

Thorne looked at him, asking the question.

'An hour or two at the most. She's not even cold yet.'

Thorne bent down and took the girl's hand. Hendricks pulled off his showercap then snapped off his rubber gloves, releasing a small puff of talcum powder. As Thorne leaned forward to close the girl's eyes, the hum of the generator filled his head. Hendricks's voice seemed to be coming from a long way away.

'I can still smell the carbolic.'

Anne Coburn sat in the dark room at the end of a horrible day that by rights should have ended three hours earlier. The papers were forever banging on about the intolerable hours worked by junior doctors but senior ones didn't exactly have it easy. A meeting with the administrator that should have taken an hour, and lasted three, had given her a headache that was only just starting to abate. It had raged through two lectures, a consultation round, an argument with the registrar and a mountain of paperwork. And David was still on the warpath…

She sat back in the chair and massaged her temples. Christ, these chairs were uncomfortable. Had they been designed that way deliberately to encourage visitors to deposit their fruit and bugger off?

Maybe if David had still been at home she'd have left the paperwork, but not any more. The house would be quiet. -Rachel would be tucked up in bed by now, watching some emaciated drug casualty with too much eyeliner prancing about on MTV.

She thought about her daughter for a while.

They hadn't been getting on very well recently. The GCSEs had put them both under a lot of strain. Rachel was just letting off steam, that was all, having slogged her guts out. Anne had decided to buy her a present when she got her results, to say well done for working so hard. A new computer, maybe. She thought about getting it now instead.

And then she thought about Tom Thorne.

She looked at the flowers he'd brought with him and smiled as she remembered his apology to Alison for… what was the word he'd used? Humming. She'd thought he'd smelt good. She thought he smelt honest. He wasn't a hard man to find attractive. She probably had a few years on him, but knew instinctively that he wasn't the type that would be bothered by that. He was chunky. No… solid. He looked like he'd been round the block a few times. He was the sort of man to whom she'd found herself drawn since things had begun to fizzle out with David – many years ago, if she was being honest with herself.

It was odd that there was more grey in Thorne's hair on the left-hand side. She'd always liked brown eyes as well.

Anne was suddenly aware that she was voicing her thoughts. These late-night conversations with Alison were becoming routine. Nurses were used to discovering her wittering away in the middle of the night. She had begun to look forward to talking to Alison. Engaging with Alison's brain was vital as part of her treatment but Anne found it therapeutic too. It was strange and exciting to be able to speak your mind and not be… judged. It was confession without the spooky stuff. Perhaps somewhere Alison was judging her. She was probably full of opinions – 'Sod the crusty copper! Find yourself a tasty young medical student!'

One day Anne would find out exactly what Alison had been thinking. Right now, the hum of the machinery was making her sleepy. She stood up, reached across and gently squeezed the lubrication drops into Alison's eyes before taping them shut for the night. She took off her jacket, scrunched it up and put it beneath her head as she sat down again. She closed her eyes, whispered goodnight to Alison and was immediately asleep.

By seven thirty the next morning the body had been formally identified. Helen Doyle's parents had rung to report that she hadn't come home at about the same time as George Hammond was watching her tumble over the railings into Queens Wood. Within hours of that first concerned phone call, Thorne was leaning against a wall, watching them walk slowly down the corridor, away from the mortuary. Michael Doyle sobbed. His wife, Eileen, stared grimly into the distance and squeezed her husband's arm. Her high heels click-clacked all the way down the stone steps as they walked outside, to be greeted by the dazzling, crisp and completely ordinary dawn of their first day without a daughter.

Now Thorne stood with his back to a different wall. Dead Helen had taken her place alongside the others. She hadn't spoken up yet but it was only a matter of time. Now, forty or so officers of assorted rank, together with auxiliaries and civilian staff, sat waiting for Thorne to speak to them. As ever, he felt like the badly dressed deputy headmaster of a run-down comprehensive. His audience exchanged bored pleasantries or swapped laddish insults. The few women on the team sat together, deflecting the casual sexism of colleagues for whom 'harass' was still two words. The wisps of smoke from a dozen or more cigarettes curled up towards the strip-lights. Thorne might as well have been back on twenty a day.

'The body of Helen Doyle was discovered this morning in Queens Wood in Highgate at just after one thirty a.m. She was last seen leaving the Marlborough Arms on Holloway Road at eleven fifteen. The post-mortem is being carried out this morning but for now we're working on the assumption that she was killed by the same man responsible for the deaths of Christine Owen, Madeleine Vickery and Susan Carlish…'

The dead girls: 'Oh, come on, Tommy. You know it was him.'

'… as well as the attempted murder of Alison Willetts.'

But it wasn't attempted murder, was it? The killer was actually attempting to do something else. Thorne didn't know the word for it. They'd probably have to invent one if they ever caught him. He cleared his throat and ploughed on.

'George Hammond, who discovered the body, has given us a vague description of a man seen removing the body from his car and dumping it at the scene. Six feet one or two, medium build. Dark hair possibly. Glasses maybe. The car is a blue or possibly a black saloon, no make or model as yet. The victim was abducted at some point on her journey from the pub to her home on Windsor Road, which is no more than half a mile away, sometime between eleven fifteen and eleven thirty. Nobody's reported seeing anything but somebody did. I'd like them found, please. Let's get a make on that car and a decent description…'

Thorne paused. He could see one or two officers exchanging glances. It had taken him less than a minute to impart the essential information, the paltry scraps of fact that were supposed to shift the operation up a gear.

Frank Keable stood up. 'I don't really need to tell you, but the usual press blackout, please.' The media hadn't got hold of the killings, not as the work of one man at any rate. The fact that the murders hadn't been concentrated in one area and had been so well disguised had made it hard for them. It had taken the police long enough to put it together themselves. Still, Thorne was surprised: Backhand had been up and running for weeks now and they usually had sources within most high-level operations. In time there would be a leak and then the usual buck-passing would begin. The tabloids would come up with a lurid nickname for the killer, publicity-hungry politicians would bleat about law and order, and Keable would give him a speech about 'pressure being brought to bear'. But so far so good.

Keable nodded at Thorne. He was free to continue.

'Helen Doyle was eighteen years old…' He stopped and watched his colleagues nod with due disgust. He had not paused for effect. He was feeling the knot in his stomach tighten, slippery and undoable.

Helen was not much older than Calvert's eldest.

'Unlike the other victims she was not attacked in her home. It's a fair bet he didn't do it on the street and the method of killing would suggest that he couldn't do it in a car. So where did he take her?' Thorne talked some more. The usual stuff. Obviously they were still waiting on the results from the forensic team. These were the first real tests they'd been able to carry out and he was hopeful. They should all be hopeful. This might be the breakthrough. It was time to pull their fingers out. They were going to get him. Come on, lads…

The house-to-house was allocated. There was talk of a television reconstruction. Then chairs were scraped back, sandwiches ordered, and Frank Keable was summoned to the office of the detective superintendent.

'What's the point? He knows I'll have sod all to tell him until this afternoon.'

'Maybe he just wants to share a power breakfast with you. Mind you, you've already had yours.' Thorne pointed at the ketchup stain on Keable's shirt.

'Bollocks.' He spat on a finger and tried to rub out the bright red splodge.

'He got it wrong again last night and he doesn't like it,' Thorne said.

Keable looked up at him, still rubbing, reaching into his pocket for a handkerchief.

'The way he dumped the girl's body so quickly. He just wanted shot of her, Frank. He thought he'd cracked it after Alison and when he botched it again I think it really pissed him off. He's getting impatient. And he's getting arrogant. He took a big risk snatching this one off the street. These women, these girls, are just bodies to him, dead or alive. He's just carrying out a procedure on them and I think he blames them when he gets it wrong. There's no real violence, but he's angry.'

'If he's in such a hurry to get rid of them, what's the washing all about?'

'I don't know. It's… medical.'

'The fucker probably scrubs up.' Keable snorted. Thorne stared over his head. 'Oh, come on, Tom. Listen, isn't this what we want? If he's getting impatient or whatever, he's far more likely to screw up somewhere and give us what we need to get him.'

'Or just start killing faster. It's been twenty-two days since Alison Willetts was attacked. Susan Carlish was six weeks before that…'

Keable stroked the top of his head. 'I know, Tom.' It was a declaration of efficiency, a statement of competence, but Thorne saw something else: a quiet instruction to calm down. A warning. So often he glimpsed the same thing concealed behind a gentle enquiry or a concerned stare. He'd see it most, of course, when there was a suspect. Any suspect. It scalded him, but he understood. The Calvert case was part of a shared history. Folklore almost, like Sutcliffe. A guilt they all inherited at some level or other. But he'd been part of it and they hadn't. He'd been… in amongst it.

Keable turned and marched away towards the lift. A car would be waiting to take him across town for the -meeting. He pressed the button to go down and turned back to Thorne. 'Let me know as soon as Hendricks gets in touch.'

Thorne watched Keable get into the lift and each shrugged their way through the fifteen seconds of dead time waiting for the doors to close. Keable would tell the chief superintendent that while they were obviously waiting on the results of all the tests, there was the distinct possibility of a breakthrough. Somebody must have seen the killer taking the girl. This was definitely the break in the case that they needed.

Thorne wondered if they would bother broaching the subject that had hung in the air since the note was discovered on his car. It might have been saying 'come and get me', and dumping Helen Doyle's body so clumsily may well have been a taunt, but one thing was obvious: the killer was no longer bothering to disguise what he was doing because he knew they were on to him. If knowing the police had put it together was making him careless, then Thorne was happy that he knew. What really bothered him was how.

Why can't they fucking well fix this? They can stick a human ear on a mouse and clone a fucking sheep. They clone sheep, for Christ's sake, which is the most pointless thing ever since how the bloody hell are you supposed to tell when every sheep looks like every other sodding sheep and there's NOTHING REALLY WRONG WITH ME!

Nothing really… wrong.

A stroke. It sounds so soothing, so gentle. I don't feel like I've been stroked by anything. I feel like I've been hit with a jackhammer. My nan had a stroke, but she could talk afterwards. Her voice was slurred and the drugs made her go a bit funny. Up to then she'd just wittered on about… you know, old people's stuff. She never went as far as telling complete strangers how old she was at bus stops, but you know the sort of thing. The drugs they put her on turned her into a geriatric performance poet. She'd lie there ranting about how motorbikes were driving through the ward at night and how the nurses all wanted to have sex with her. Honestly, it was hysterical – she was eighty-six! But at least she could make herself understood. This man gave me a stroke. Anne told me what he did. Twisted some artery and gave me a stroke. Why can't they just untwist it, then? There must be specialists or something. I'm lying here screaming and shouting, and the nurses wander past and coo at me like I'm taking a lazy afternoon nap in the sun. They must have finished all the tests by now. They must know that I'm still in here, still talking to myself, ranting and raving. It's doing my head in! See? I've still got a sense of humour, for fuck's sake.

I was right about Anne and the copper. Thorne. I've met women like Anne before. Always go for the two types of men – the ones that spark something off in their brains or the ones that get it going in their knickers. A man who does both? Forget it. I think it's fairly obvious which category her ex falls into. Time to ring in the changes. So the copper's luck's in, if you ask me.

I reckon I might have to stick to the brainboxes from now on.

Tim just sat by the bed this morning and held my hand. He doesn't- even bother talking to me any more.

FIVE

Thorne sat perched on the edge of Tughan's desk in the open-plan operations room. As Tughan's hands manoeuvred his mouse and flew across his keyboard, Thorne could almost see the Irishman's back stiffen. He knew he was annoying him.

'Isn't there something you should be doing, Tom?'

Phil Hendricks had worked through the night, and even before Keable had settled down to coffee and croissants with the chief superintendent, Thorne had received the information he'd wanted. Helen Doyle had been heavily drugged with Midazolam and had died as a result of a stroke. In spite of the body's location and the apparent break with his routine, there was no doubt that she had been the killer's fifth victim. That was pretty much all they knew, other than that Forensics had gathered some fibres from Helen Doyle's skirt and blouse. Thorne got straight on the phone.

'Any joy on these fibres?'

'Give us a bloody chance.'

'All right, just give me your best bloody guess, then.'

'Carpet fibres, probably from the boot of the car.'

'Can you get a make?'

'Where do you think this is? Quantico?'

'Where?'

'Forget it. Look, we'll get on to it. Something to match it to would help…'

The change in the pattern bothered Thorne, but they were left trying to answer the same questions. How had he talked his way into these women's houses and perhaps, in Helen Doyle's case, talked her into getting into his car? Helen Doyle's body, like that of Alison Willetts and Susan Carlish, was unmarked yet full of drink and drugs. The tranquilliser had to have been administered with alcohol. But how? Had the killer been watching Helen all night and spiked her drink before she left the pub? That would have been difficult – she was with a large group of friends and, besides, to have got the timing of it right would have been near impossible. How could he have known exactly when the drug would start to take effect? It was still the best guess, so Thorne had set about rounding up as many people as possible who had been in the Marlborough at the time. This, on top of the general canvassing along Helen's route home, meant that they were going to need every extra body that Frank Keable could deliver. If he could deliver. Thorne was hopeful of finding somebody who'd seen Helen after she'd left the pub. He still couldn't fathom why the killer was being so brazen but it made him more optimistic than he'd felt in a long time.

'Is there something I can help you with?'

Tughan smiled a lot but his eyes were like something on a plate. He was as skinny as a whippet and fiercely intelligent, with a voice that could cut through squad-room banter like a scalpel. It was always Tughan's thin lips Thorne imagined whispering into the mouthpiece whenever some lunatic phoned Scotland Yard with a coded warning. It wasn't that Thorne didn't appreciate what Tughan was capable of or what he brought to the investigation: Thorne could just about find his way into a file, if he had to, but he couldn't type to save his life and always found himself strangely hypnotised by the screensavers. When new evidence came in, Tughan was the man to make sense of it with his collation programmes and filefinders. Thorne knew that if they'd had a Nick Tughan fifteen years earlier instead of a thousand manilla folders… if they'd had a Holmes computer system instead of an antiquated card index, then Calvert might not have done what he did.

'Hey, Tommy, bugger the Calvert case, what about our case?'

'Tom?'

'Right… sorry, Nick. Have you got a copy of the Leicester/London matches handy?'

Tughan grunted, scrolled and double clicked. The printer on the far side of the office began to hum. Thorne had actually been hoping that Tughan might have had a hard copy lying about. It would have been quicker to walk across to his own little goldfish bowl and fetch the copy on his desk, but he couldn't begrudge Tughan his little triumphs of efficiency. He begrudged him virtually everything else, and the feeling was entirely mutual.

Thorne stared at the list. Half a dozen doctors who had been on rotation at Leicester Royal Infirmary at the time of the Midazolam theft and now worked in local hospitals. Anne Coburn's information about the significance of the date had somewhat dampened any enthusiasm for this line of enquiry, and the discovery of Helen Doyle's body had rightly demanded everybody's attention, but Thorne still sensed that it might be important. It was possible to look at the date of the drugs theft as significant in quite the opposite way. Might not the killer (if indeed it was the killer) have chosen that date to make it look as if he might have come from anywhere when in fact he was working at the hospital? Besides, they were still working through the far bigger list of all doctors currently on rotation locally so they'd have to get round to this lot eventually.

Jeremy Bishop's name was second on the list.

Thorne was aware of what could only be described as a smirk on Holland's face as they rode the lift down to the car park. 'Isn't he Dr Coburn's friend?'

'She knows him, yes. And his alibi certainly checks out theoretically, yes.'

Jeremy Bishop had unquestionably been responsible for treating Alison Willetts in A and E.

'But Alison Willetts was taken to the Royal London for a reason,' Thorne explained, as if talking to a child. 'I want to check exactly when Bishop came on duty in relation to when she was brought in.'

The smirk stayed on Holland's face. He knew all about Thorne's visit to Queen Square. Was he visiting Alison Willetts or the doctor who was treating her? He was well aware that they could have checked out Bishop with a phone call or, at the very least, sent somebody else.

Thorne felt no compulsion to explain himself to Holland any further. As they stepped out at the ground floor and walked towards the car, he tried to convince himself that Bishop's friendship with Anne Coburn, about whom he was thinking more than he should, wasn't the main reason he was keen to eliminate him from the enquiry as quickly as possible.

As he tucked into a late breakfast, he thought about how tired Thorne had looked at eight o'clock that morning arriving at work. He'd watched him from the greasy spoon opposite as the policeman leaned against his car for a moment before plodding towards the door. He hadn't considered Thorne the plodding type at all. That was why he'd been so delighted when he discovered that he was on the case. That, and the other obvious reason. Thorne, he'd decided, was definitely dogged. And stubborn. These were qualities he required. Plus, of course, the capacity for being too clever for his own good. He certainly needed that. All in all, Thorne was perfect. But it had troubled him to see Thorne looking so worn out. He hoped that the fatigue was just physical and that the detective inspector wasn't burning out. No, he was justifiably exhausted after the… demands of the night before. They'd found her quickly. He was impressed. So Thorne had had a rough night. That made two of them.

One out of five. Down from twenty-five to twenty per cent. He'd known straight away, of course. He'd made the necessary phone call then gone about his business, but it was obvious within a minute or two that she'd let him down. Stupid drunken sow. His heart, which had been pounding with the oncoming rush of the dash to hospital with another one for the machines, had quickly slowed to its habitual steady thump. Her useless, cholesterol-soaked heart couldn't be bothered to thump at all. What an opportunity he'd given her. But she'd let her sad, silly little life ebb away. Oh, he'd almost certainly have been seen getting rid. They'd have a description of sorts by now. So what? They might even have seen the car. So much the better.

He chewed his toast and stared out of the window at the view across London. The mist was starting to lift. It would be another glorious day. Helen had been just as easy as the others to prepare. Easier. He was getting better at it. There had been those couple of disastrous attempts earlier on, but he was more relaxed about it these days.

Christine and Madeleine had been cautious at first. They were naturally reluctant to let him in but they were lonely women and he was an attractive man. They wanted to talk. And more. And he was very persuasive. Susan and Alison had both invited him in almost instantly and happily drunk themselves into oblivion. Literally. He giggled to himself. The champagne had been an inspired idea. He'd thought about a jab but it would have been messy and he didn't want any sort of struggle. The wait was a little longer with the champagne, naturally, but he liked watching them go slowly. He savoured the frisson of their impending malleability. The other one – the one whose name he hadn't had time to find out – had positively guzzled it down. But then he'd had to leave because the timing had not been… judicious. Still, he felt sure that she'd said nothing about it. She would have had a hard enough time explaining to her husband or boyfriend or girlfriend why she was so utterly out of it when they got home. She certainly wouldn't have mentioned inviting a strange man into the house.

It had been such a relief to be able to work on Helen in his own home. He so hated dissembling. He'd hated creeping about in those dreary houses. It had made his flesh crawl to leave the bars of soap and bottles of pills in those dirty, greasy bathrooms. Rolled-up tights and shit stripes in the lavatory bowls. He hated putting his hands on them. On their heads. Even through the gloves he could feel the dirt and grease in their hair. He could swear he almost felt things… moving. But now he could work in clean, comfortable surroundings. Now he knew that they knew that he knew that…

He whistled his own invented melody to accompany this comforting refrain as he tried his best to stay awake. Thorne wasn't the only one feeling the strain. He needed more coffee. For a moment he closed his eyes and thought about Alison. She hadn't let him down. She'd wanted to live. He thought about going to visit her again, but it was perhaps a little risky. Security in ITUs was fairly tight, these days. The flood had been an inspired idea but could only be a one-off. He began to drift away. Yes, he'd need to think of something else if he wanted to go and see Alison again without getting caught.

Without bumping into Anne Coburn.

'Are you in any pain, Alison?' Doctors Anne Coburn and Steve Clark watched the pallid, peaceful face intently. There was no response. Anne tried again. 'Blink once for yes, Alison.' After a moment there was the tiniest movement – the ghost of a twitch around Alison's left eye. Anne looked across at the occupational therapist who scribbled notes on his clipboard. He nodded at her. She carried on. 'Yes, you are in pain? Was that a yes, Alison?' Nothing. 'Alison?' Steve Clark put his pen away. Alison's left eyelid fluttered three times in rapid succession. 'OK, Alison.'

'Maybe she's just tired, Anne. I'm sure you're right. It's just a question of her gaining sufficient control.'

Anne Coburn had a lot of time for Steve Clark. He was a brilliant therapist and a nice man, but he lied very badly. He wasn't at all convinced. But she was. 'I feel like somebody who's called out the TV repairman and then there's nothing the matter, only the other way round… oh shit, you know what I mean, Steve.'

'I just think that maybe you're rushing things a bit.'

'I'm following well-established guidelines, Steve. The ECG shows normal brain activity.'

'Nobody's arguing with that but it doesn't mean she's got the ability to communicate. I agree that there is movement but I've seen nothing to convince me that it isn't involuntary.'

'This isn't just me, Steve. You can talk to the nursing staff. I'm sure she's ready to communicate.'

'She might be ready-'

'And she's able. I've seen it. She indicated to me that she was in pain, that she was tired. She… greets me, Steve.'

Clark opened the door. He was eager to be on his way. 'Maybe she's not comfortable with the pressure of… performing.'

Later, when she felt calmer, Anne would realise that he'd been trying to be genuinely sympathetic. At that moment she was angry and frustrated, for herself and for Alison. 'She isn't a performer and these are not cheap theatrics…'

But that's exactly what it felt like.

As Holland steered the unmarked Rover into a quiet tree-lined street in Battersea, he took a deceptively vicious speed bump just fast enough to take several layers off the underside of the car and to awaken his boss somewhat rudely.

'Jesus, Holland…'

'Sorry sir…'

'I know it's only a company car, but for Christ's sake!'

The sunshine was dazzling and Thorne felt every one of the twenty-eight hours since he'd last slept. Holland actually held the car door open for him! Thorne felt that it wasn't so much in deference to his rank as a subtle reminder that the fifteen years he had on the younger man were starting to show.

Jeremy Bishop lived in an elegant three-storey house with a small but well-maintained front garden. Probably four bedrooms. Probably tastefully decorated Thorne guessed, and crammed with what the slimier estate agents, if you could quantify slime, would refer to as 'periods'. Probably worth a piffling half a million. All this, and a nice Volvo parked outside. Clearly Bishop was not struggling.

Holland rang the bell. Thorne looked up at the windows. The curtains were still drawn. After a minute or two the door was opened, Holland made the introductions and he and Thorne were ushered into the house by a sleepy-looking -Jeremy Bishop.

While Holland stood efficiently with his notebook at the ready, Thorne slumped into a chair, gratefully accepted a cup of coffee and racked his brain as to why Jeremy Bishop looked so familiar. He was, Thorne guessed, in his mid-to late-forties and, despite the stubble and redness round the eyes, looked ten years younger. He was tall, six two or three, and he reminded Thorne of Dr Richard Kimble, the character played by Harrison Ford in The Fugitive. There was plenty of grey in the short hair, but along with the wire-rimmed glasses, it served only to make him look 'distinguished'. This irritated Thorne enormously: his own grey hair simply made him look 'old'. Bugger probably didn't even have grey pubes. Bishop would, without question, be a regular performer in student nurse fantasies – 'Oh, Doctor! Here in the sluice room!?' He thought about Anne Coburn. He tried not to think about her stripping in the sluice room. Weren't doctors ugly any more? He remembered the rancid old GP he'd been dragged to see regularly as a boy: a hideous crone with a man's haircut and moustache, who smelt of cheese and always had a Craven A dangling from the corner of her mouth as she mumbled in an incomprehensible eastern-European accent. No such worries with Jeremy Bishop. His modulated tones would have calmed a thrashing epileptic in an instant.

'I presume this is about Alison Willetts,' he said.

Holland looked at Thorne, who sipped his coffee. Let the constable handle it.

'And why would you presume that, sir?'

Thorne stared at Holland through the steam from his coffee-cup. Nice start: sarcasm, superiority and a hint of aggression. Make your subject feel at ease.

Bishop wasn't fazed at all. 'Alison Willetts was attacked and seriously injured. I treated her, and they don't send detective inspectors round when you haven't paid your parking fines.' He smiled at Holland who could do little else but move on to item two in the do-it-yourself guide to interviews.

'We are investigating a very serious crime, which-'

'Has he done it again?'

Thorne almost spilt his coffee as he sat bolt upright in his chair. Holland looked across at him, thoroughly nonplussed. Bishop's amusement at the look on Holland's face was not lost on Thorne. He guessed that Bishop had seen that look many times as a junior doctor found themselves suddenly out of their depth and sought reassurance, or preferably hands-on assistance, from a senior colleague. Thorne decided that the hands-on approach was best. 'Done what again, sir?'

'Look, I'm sorry if I'm not supposed to know about the other victims. As far as I'm concerned it's simply a question of putting my patient's condition in context. I was informed that there had been other attacks. Anne Coburn and I are very old friends, Inspector, as I'm sure you're well aware.'

Thorne was very well aware that, despite Frank Keable's best intentions, the lid was not going to stay on this case for very long. Not that he ever really thought of cases as having lids… saucepans had lids… cases had… what?… locks?… well, only open and shut ones. Mind you, was there any point in a case that didn't open and shut. God he was tired…

'I'm sorry if we got you out of bed, sir.'

Bishop spread his arms across the back of the sofa. 'Oh, well, I obviously look as rough as you, Inspector.' Thorne raised an eyebrow. 'I spend a lot of time with people who don't get much sleep for one reason or another. The eyes give it away instantly. I've been on call all night. What's your excuse?' His laugh was somewhere between a chuckle and a snort.

Thorne laughed back at him through a good impression of a yawn. 'Yep… busy night. What about you, sir?'

Bishop stared at him. 'Oh… no, not really. Went in to treat an -overdose at about three o'clock and got home about five thirty. But even when you're not called in, it's hard to relax when you're bleeper-watching. Thank God for cable TV.'

'Anything good on?'

'I'm a confirmed channel-hopper, I'm afraid. A lot of old sitcoms, the odd black-and-white film and a fair bit of smut.' He looked up and grinned in disbelief at Holland. 'Are you actually writing all that down, Constable?'

Thorne had been asking himself the same question. 'Only the bit about smut. Detective Constable Holland's life lacks excitement.' Thorne was astonished to see Holland actually blush.

Bishop stood up and stretched. 'I'm going to get another coffee. Anybody else?'

Thorne followed him into the kitchen and they chatted over the growing grumble of the kettle.

'So what time did you go in the night you treated Alison Willetts?'

'I was bleeped at about three o'clock, I think. One sugar, wasn't it?' Thorne nodded and waited for Bishop to continue. 'The patient was found outside by a service entrance… I'm sure you know all this… and brought straight into A and E.'

'Did you call in when you were bleeped?'

'No need. It was a message saying red trauma. You just go. Sometimes you might get an extension number to ring, or sometimes it's just a message to phone in, but with a trauma call you just get in the car.'

'And when Alison Willetts was brought in, you were the first person to treat her?'

'That's correct. I checked her pupils – they were reacting. I bagged and masked her, intubated her, Midazolam to sedate her, ordered a CT of her head and an ECG, and handed it over to the junior anaesthetist.' Bishop took a sip of his coffee. 'Sorry, I must sound like an episode of Casualty.'

Thorne smiled. 'More like ER. On Casualty it's usually a cup of sweet tea and a couple of aspirin.'

Bishop laughed. 'Absolutely right. And the nursing staff aren't quite so attractive.'

'So if you were bleeped at three o'clock you got there, what, about half past?'

'Something like that, I suppose.'

'And Alison, the patient, was brought in about quarter to four?' Bishop sipped and nodded. 'So why were you bleeped in the first place?'

'I really couldn't tell you, I'm afraid. It isn't unusual – sometimes you can spend ages trying to find out why you've been called in. I've been bleeped before when I shouldn't have been. As for that particular night, I've never really thought about it. I mean, if I'd known exactly what had happened – or, rather, what we'd later discover – I might have a better grasp of the sequence of events that night. It was just a routine emergency at the time. Sorry.'

Thorne put down his coffee-cup. 'Not to worry, sir. I'm sure we can find out.'

Bishop smiled as he picked up Thorne's cup, poured the unfinished coffee into the sink and opened the door of the dishwasher. 'Why I might have been bleeped four Tuesdays ago? Good luck, Inspector.'

As the car moved slowly through the traffic on Albert Bridge, Holland chose not to ask his superior officer a number of questions. Why did we bother driving all that way? Do you think Jeremy Bishop is giving Anne Coburn one? Why do you take the piss out of me all the time? Why do you think you're so much better than everybody else?

He looked across at Thorne, who was slumped in the passenger seat with his eyes shut. He was wide awake.

Thorne spoke only once, to tell Holland that they weren't going back to the office just yet. Without opening his eyes he told him to turn right and drive along the river towards White-chapel. They were going to call in at the Royal London Hospital first, to see just how cast-iron this alibi of Jeremy Bishop's really was.

Just call me the Amazing Performing Eyelid Woman! Only I can't sodding well perform, can I?

I went out with this actor once. He told me about a recurring dream where he was onstage ready to do his luvvie bit and then all the words just tumbled out of his head like water running really fast down the plughole. That's what it felt like when Anne was asking me to blink. Christ, I wanted to blink for her. No… I wanted to blink for me. I can do it, I know I can. I've been doing it all the fucking time when there's nobody there and I've been blinking when Anne's asked me to before. She asked me if I was in pain and I blinked once for yes. One blink. A fraction of a movement in one poxy eye and I felt like I'd just won the lottery, shagged Mel Gibson and been given a year's supply of chocolate.

Actually, I felt like I'd just run the London Marathon. A couple of blinks and I'm knackered. But when that therapist was watching I couldn't do it.

I was screaming at my eyelids inside my head. It felt like the signal went out from my brain. But slowly. It was like some dodgy old Lada beetling along the circuits, or whatever they're called. Neuro-highways or whatever. It was on the right road and then it just got stuck at roadworks somewhere. Like it lost interest. I know I can do it but I haven't got any control over it. When I'm not trying I'm blinking away like some nutter, but when I want to I'm as good as dead.

If blinking's all I've got left, I'm going to be the greatest fucking blinker you've ever seen. Stick with me, Anne. There's so much I want to tell you. I'll be blinking for England, I swear.

I could feel the disappointment in her voice. I wanted to cry. But I can't even do that…

SIX

'Where to, sir?'

'Muswell Hill, please.'

'No problem, sir. Where is that, please?'

Thorne sighed heavily as the simple journey from his flat in Kentish Town suddenly became an altogether trickier proposition. It was his own fault for calling a minicab. Why was he such a bloody cheapskate?

He was trying not to think about the case – this was a night off. He fooled himself for about as long as it took the cab to reach the end of his road. He would have loved to spend an evening without his curious calendar girls, but it was going to be hard, considering where he was going and who he was going to see. The subject of Jeremy Bishop might be strictly off limits with Anne Coburn. It was becoming clear that they were extremely close. Were they perhaps more than that? Thorne tried not to think about that possibility. Whatever, their relationship made things awkward in every sense, not least procedurally.

Thorne hated the cliché of the instinctive copper as much as he hated the notion of the hardened one. But the instinctive copper was only a cliché because, he knew, it contained a germ of truth. Hunches were nothing but trouble. If they were wrong they caused embarrassment, pain, guilt and more. But the hunches that were right were far worse. Policemen… good policemen, weren't born with these instincts. They developed them. After all, accountants were only good with numbers because they worked with them every day. Even an average copper could spot when someone was lying. A few developed a feel, a taste, a sense about people.

They were the unlucky ones.

'Here you go, sir.'

The minicab driver was thrusting a tattered A–Z at him. Christ on a bike, thought Thorne, do you want me to drive the bloody car for you?

'I don't need the A–Z. I'll give you directions. Straight up the Archway Road.'

'Right you are, sir. Which way is that?'

Thorne looked out of the window. Another warm late-August evening and a T-shirted queue of eager Saturday night concert-goers was waiting to go into the Forum. As the cab drove past he strained his head to see the name of the band but only caught the word '… Maniacs'. Charming.

He now lived no more than half a mile from where he'd grown up. This had been his adolescent stamping ground. Kentish Town, Camden, Highgate. And Archway. He'd worked out of the station at Holloway for six months. He knew the road Helen Doyle had lived in. He'd drunk in the Marlborough Arms. He hoped she'd enjoyed herself that night…

Jeremy Bishop.

Yes, it had started as a strange familiarity, which he still couldn't- fathom, but it had become more than that. In the few days since he'd first laid eyes on the man, his feelings had begun to bed themselves down on more solid foundations.

Thorne had found out quickly why Bishop had smiled when he'd told him he was going to check out why he'd been bleeped the night that Alison had come in. He was amazed to find that the calls put out to bleep doctors were untraceable. There were no official records. The call could have been made from anywhere by all accounts. It was even possible to bleep yourself. None of the likely candidates could recall bleeping Bishop on the night that Alison Willetts came in. He'd spoken to the senior house officer, the registrar and the junior anaesthetist and their recollection of events that night was as fuzzy as Bishop had known it would be. He was certainly there when she was brought into A and E but his alibi, as far as when she was attacked and when she was dumped at the hospital, was not quite as solid as Anne Coburn had first thought.

He couldn't put any of it together yet, nowhere near, but there were other… details.

The canvas of the area in which Helen Doyle had disappeared had started to yield results. She had been seen by at least three people after leaving the pub. One was a neighbour who knew her well. All the witnesses described seeing her talking to a man at the end of her road. She was described variously as 'looking happy', 'talking loudly' and 'seeming as if she was pissed'. The descriptions of the man varied a little but tallied in a number of areas. He was tall. He had short, greying hair and wore glasses. He was probably in his mid-to late-thirties. They thought he was Helen Doyle's new boyfriend. Her older man.

All the witnesses agreed on something else. Helen was drinking from a bottle of champagne. Now they knew how the drug was administered. So simple. So insidious. As the victims' capacity to resist had melted away they'd each felt… what? Special? Sophisticated? Thorne sensed that the killer thought of himself in exactly those terms.

The driver turned on his radio. An old song by the Eurythmics. Thorne leaned forward quickly and told him to switch it off.

The cab turned right off the A1 towards Highgate Woods.

'It's just off the Broadway, OK?'

'Broadway…'

Thorne caught the driver's look in the mirror. Apologetic yet not really giving a toss.

'If black-cab drivers do the Knowledge, what do you lot do?'

'Sorry, mate?'

'Doesn't matter.'

He'd waited a day before talking to Frank Keable. Stepping into the DCI's office he'd been thoroughly prepared to outline his suspicions – the details that pointed towards Bishop. Ten minutes later he'd walked out feeling like he'd just left Hendon.

'I have to be honest, Tom. No, he doesn't have a rock solid alibi but…'

'Not for any of the murders, sir. I checked with-'

'But all you've got is a lot of stuff that, well, it doesn't rule him out, and what about the description? Two of the witnesses say he's early-to mid-thirties.'

'The height's right, Frank, and Bishop looks a lot younger than he is.'

It was at that point that Thorne had become aware that it was all starting to sound unconvincing. He decided to stop before he said something that might make him look vaguely desperate. 'And he's a doctor! And I don't really… like him very much…'

The same night he'd walked into his flat and heard a woman's voice coming from the living room.

'… at the office. God, I hate these things – sorry. Anyway, please give me a call, I'm very excited about it.'

He grinned. How could a woman who probed about in people's brains be so out of her depth with an answering-machine? He found it endearing, then knew that she'd think he was being patronising. He picked up.

'Tom?'

What was she asking? 'Is that Tom?' Or 'Is it OK if I call you Tom?' Either way his answer was the same.

'Yes. Hi…'

'This is Anne Coburn – sorry, I was just waffling away. I tried to get you at the office, I hope you don't mind.'

He'd written his home number on the back of the card he'd given her. He threw his coat on to the sofa and dragged the phone over to the chair. 'No, that's fine. I've just this second walked in the door. So, what are you excited about?'

'Sorry?'

'You said you were excited. I heard it on the machine as I was coming in.'

'Oh, right. It's Alison. I think she's really starting to communicate.'

He was bending to retrieve the half-empty bottle of wine by the side of the chair but instantly sat up again. 'What? That's fantastic.'

'Listen, I do mean starting, and I have to say there are people who aren't quite as convinced as me that the -movements aren't involuntary but I think you should see it.'

'Yes, of course…'

'He's killed another girl, hasn't he?'

Thorne leaned back in the chair. He wedged the phone between ear and shoulder and started to pour himself a hefty glass of wine. Had it made the papers? He hadn't seen anything. Even if it had, there was no link to the other killings. So how did she…?

Bishop. He'd obviously told her they'd been round. And just how much had she told him about the other killings? He'd need to ask her about that, tactfully.

'Look, I understand if you don't want to discuss it. Tom?'

'No, I was just thinking about something. Yes. We've found another body.'

It was her turn to pause. 'I know I said that Alison wouldn't be giving you any statements and she won't, I mean not in any conventional sense, but perhaps… Listen, I don't want to raise any false hopes.'

'You think she might be able to respond to questions?'

'Not just yet, but I think so, yes. Simple ones. Yes and no. We could work out a system maybe. Sorry, I'm waffling again. Obviously we need to talk about it but I just wanted to let you know…'

'I'm glad you did.'

And then she invited him to dinner.

He proffered the plastic bag containing a bottle of his favourite red wine as soon as she opened the door.

'Thanks, but there was no need.'

'Don't get excited, it's only a plastic bag.'

She laughed and stepped forward to kiss him on the cheek. Her perfume was lovely. She was wearing a rust-coloured sleeveless top, cream linen trousers and training shoes. He was struck, not unpleasantly as it happened, by the fact that she was an inch or two taller than he was. He was used to that. He felt like he was going to enjoy himself. His good mood evaporated in an instant as he glanced over her shoulder and saw a man in the kitchen at the other end of the hall.

Jeremy Bishop was leaning against the worktop, opening a bottle of champagne.

Anne stepped aside to usher Thorne in and caught his look. 'Sorry,' she mouthed, shrugging.

As Thorne removed his leather jacket and made approving noises about the original coving, he was wondering what she meant. Sorry? She couldn't possibly have any idea what he -really thought about Bishop, so what was she sorry for? As he walked towards the kitchen he came to the heartening conclusion that she was sorry they weren't going to be alone. Bishop held out a hand, smiling at him. Thorne smiled back. Sorry? Thinking about it, he wasn't sure that he was sorry at all.

'Perfect timing, Detective Inspector.' Bishop offered him a glass of champagne. Thorne felt a chill pass through him as he took it. Bishop looked thoroughly at home, moving easily around a kitchen with which he was obviously familiar. He wore pressed chinos and a collarless shirt. Silk by the look of it. He probably called it a blouse. Thorne felt instantly overdressed in his tie, and instinctively reached up to undo the top button of his shirt, which he definitely called a shirt.

Bishop drained his glass. 'Has the hernia been giving you any more trouble?'

'Sorry?'

'It came to me just after you and your constable left. Come on – don't tell me it hasn't been driving you mad as well. Your hernia op last year… I was your gas man.' Without waiting for a response – he would have been waiting for some time – he turned to Anne. 'I've given your sauce a stir, Jimmy, and I'm off to the loo.' He handed Anne his glass and moved past Thorne towards the stairs.

They stood in silence until they heard the bathroom door close.

'Is this awkward for you, Tom? Tell me if it is.'

'Why should it be?'

'I didn't invite him.'

Some good news. Thorne smiled graciously. 'It's fine.'

'I had no idea he was coming. He just dropped by and it would have been rude not to ask him to stay. I know you've questioned him, which is bloody ridiculous…'

Thorne took a sip of champagne. It wasn't a drink he was fond of.

'So?'

'So what?'

'So is it awkward?'

Awkward was putting it mildly. Thorne couldn't recall the last time he'd had a cosy dinner with a prime suspect.

He remembered the scene in Keable's office. Make that his prime suspect.

Still, it might be interesting. He already knew the basic facts. The two children, the wife who'd died. But there was no question that it would be valuable to get another… slant on things. Anne was looking intently at him. He hadn't answered her question. So he asked one instead: 'Jimmy?'

'A nickname from med-school days. James Coburn. You know, The Magnificent Seven. He was the one with the knives.'

'Right. Was he any good with scalpels?'

She laughed. 'Whatever misguided reasons you had to question Jeremy, I can fully understand that this might be putting you in a compromising position, but there are two very good reasons why you should stay and have dinner.' Thorne had no intention of going anywhere, but was perfectly happy to let her persuade him. 'One, I would very much like it if you did, and two, I make the finest spaghetti carbonara in North London.'

Dinner was fantastic. It was certainly the best meal Thorne had eaten in a while, but that was to damn it with faint praise. That his eating habits had become a trifle sloppy had been brought home to him on receipt of his BT family and friends list. They might just as well have sent an embossed calling card saying, 'You Sad Bastard'. Thorne's ten most frequently dialled numbers had not exactly been what he'd call kith and kin. He could only hope and pray that he didn't win the holiday. Two weeks in Lanzarote with the manager of the Bengal Lancer and a posse of spotty pizza-delivery boys on mopeds was hardly a prospect that appealed.

'I hope my grilling proved useful, Detective Inspector.' The way Bishop emphasised Thorne's rank, he might have been reading the cast list of an am-dram whodunnit. His evident glee at the situation told Thorne that he was more than willing to play his part but Anne was quick to discourage his interest in the case.

'Come on, Jeremy, I'm sure Tom doesn't want to talk about it. He probably can't, even if he wanted to.'

This was fine with Thorne. He had no need to talk about the case. He wanted to let Bishop talk, and once the boundaries had been established he wasn't disappointed. Bishop was full of stor-ies. He seemed permanently amused, not only at his own patter but at the peculiarity of their cosy little threesome. Again, fine with Thorne. The anaesthetist dominated the conversation, occasionally making an effort to engage the policeman in trite chit-chat.

'Where do you live, then, Tom?'

'Kentish Town. Ryland Road.'

'Not my side of London. Nice?'

Thorne nodded. No, not particularly.

Bishop was a witty and entertaining raconteur – probably. Thorne did his best to laugh in all the right places, although he felt clumsy and cack-handed as he watched his fellow diners twirl spaghetti with professional deftness and delicacy.

'… and the two old dears were sat talking about the beef crisis and how they were going to exercise their rights as consumers and stick it to the French.'

'Politics in A and E?' Anne turned to Thorne. 'It's usually non-stop babble about football or soap operas or "I know it's a nasty cut but he's never hit me before, honest."'

'But get ready for the killer…' Bishop drained his wine glass, letting them wait for the punchline. 'I heard them saying how they were going to boycott French fries!'

Thorne smiled. Bishop raised his eyebrows at Anne and they both giggled before saying as one, 'NFN!'

Stifling her laugh, Anne leaned across to Thorne. 'Normal For Norfolk.'

Thorne smiled. 'Right. Stupid or inbred.' Bishop nodded. Thorne shrugged. I'm just a copper. Thick as shit, me.

Anne was still giggling. They'd already polished off two bottles of wine and hadn't finished the pasta yet. 'Somewhere there's a doctor with too much time on his hands thinking up these jokes. There's loads of them, not very nice usually.'

'Come on, Jimmy, they're just a bit of fun. I bet Tom's had to deal with a few JP FROGs in his time, haven't you, Tom?'

'Oh, almost certainly. That would be…?' Thorne raised his eyebrows.

'Just Plain Fucking Run Out of Gas,' Anne explained. 'When a patient is going to die. I hate that one…' She poured herself another glass of wine and leaned back in her chair, retiring momentarily as Bishop warmed to his theme.

'Jimmy gets a bit touchy and squeamish at some of the more ghoulish jokes that get us through the day. Seriously though, some of the shorthand is actually a useful way to communicate quickly with a colleague.'

'And keep the patients in the dark at the same time?'

Bishop pushed up his glasses with the knuckle of his index finger. Thorne noticed that his fingernails were beautifully mani-cured. 'Absolutely right. Another of Jimmy's pet hates, but by far the best way if you ask me. What's the point of telling them things they aren't going to understand? If you do tell them and they do understand, chances are it's only going to frighten the life out of them.'

Anne began to clear away the plates.

'So better a patient who's in the dark than a JP FROG?'

Bishop raised his glass to Thorne in mock salute. 'But that's not the best one. I get to deal with a lot of JP FROGs, but Jimmy, specialising as she does in lost causes, is very much the patron saint of TF BUNDYs.' He grinned, showing every one of his perfect teeth. 'Totally Fucked But Unfortunately Not Dead Yet.'

Thorne could hear Anne in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. He remembered the smug look on Bishop's face as he'd put the coffee cups in his dishwasher a few days before. He wore the same expression now. Thorne grinned back at him. 'So what about Alison Willetts? Is she a TF BUNDY?'

Thorne saw at once that if he'd thought this would throw Bishop then he was seriously underestimating him. The doctor's reaction was clearly one of undisguised amusement. He raised his eyebrows and shouted through to the kitchen. 'Oh, Christ, Jimmy, I think I'm outnumbered.' He turned back to Thorne and suddenly there was a glimmer of steel behind the flippancy. 'Come on, Tom, is the moral indignation that was positively dripping from that last comment really meant to suggest that you care about your… victims, any more than we care about our patients? That we're just unfeeling monsters while the CID is full of sensitive souls like your good self?'

'Christ, Tommy, what a smug bastard…'

Susan, Maddy, Christine. And Helen…

'I'm not suggesting anything. It just seemed a bit harsh, that's all.'

'It's a job, Tom. Not a very nice one at times and, yes, it's quite well paid after you've slogged your guts out training for seven years then spent a few more kissing enough arses to get to a decent level.' That certainly rang a bell. 'We're paid to treat, we're not paid to care. The simple truth is that the NHS can't afford to care, in any sense of the word.'

Anne put an enormous plate of cheesecake in the centre of the table. 'M and S, I'm afraid. Great with pasta. Crap at puddings.' She went back through to the kitchen leaving Bishop to start divvying it up.

'I always tell students that they have a choice. They can think of the patients as John or Elsie or Bob or whatever and lose what little sleep they get…'

Thorne held out his plate for a slice of cheesecake. 'Or…?'

'Or they can be good doctors and treat bodies. Dead or alive, they're bodies.'

What had Thorne said earlier to Keable?

'Are you going to let him get away with this shit, Tommy?'

I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Why don't you help me? Is it him? Is he the one?

The one question they never answer.

Thorne started to eat. 'So, what do most of your students decide?'

Bishop shrugged and took a mouthful. He chuckled. 'There's another one.'

'What?'

'CID. Another acronym.'

Thorne smiled at Anne as she sat back down and helped herself to a slice. Bishop grunted, demanding the attention of the audience. He'd obviously come up with something wonderful. Thorne turned to him and waited. Get ready for the killer…

'Coppers In Disarray?'

Bishop was the first to leave. He'd shaken Thorne's hand and… had he winked? Anne led him into the hall to get his jacket, leaving Thorne on the sofa with a glass of wine listening to them saying their goodbyes. Their obvious intimacy disturbed him in every way he could think of. The next part of the evening, whatever that was, would have to be handled very carefully. Their voices were lowered, but there was no mistaking Bishop's low hum of contentment as he kissed Anne goodbye. Thorne wondered how witty and garrulous he'd be with a detective constable's fist half-way down his throat. He wondered how smug he'd be in an airless interview room. He wondered what he'd have to do to get him into one.

He heard the front door shut and took a deep breath. Now he wanted to be alone with Anne and not just because of what she could tell him about Bishop.

She came back into the living room to find Thorne staring into space with a huge smile on his face. 'What's so funny?' Thorne shrugged. He didn't want to get off on the wrong foot by telling her that he'd just come up with his own little acronym for Jeremy Bishop. A highly appropriate one as it happened. GAS.

Guilty As Sin.

'Where's Rachel this evening? Have you locked her in her room with a Spice Girls video?'

'She's out celebrating her GCSE results.'

'God, of course, it was today.' The papers had been full of it. The increase in pass levels. The ever-widening gap between girls and boys. The six-year-old with an A* in maths. 'Celebrating? She must have done well?'

Anne shrugged. 'Pretty well, I suppose. She could maybe have tried harder in one or two subjects, but we were pretty pleased.'

Thorne nodded, smiling. We? 'Hmm… pushy mother.'

She laughed, flopping into the armchair opposite him and picking up her glass of wine. Thorne leaned forward to refill his own glass.

'Tell me about Jeremy's wife.'

She sighed heavily. 'Are you asking me as a policeman?'

'As a friend,' he lied.

It was a good few seconds before she answered. 'Sarah was a close friend. I'd known them both at medical school. I'm godmother to their kids, which is why I'm sure that your interest in him is a complete waste of time and I don't want to harp on about this, but it's starting to feel a bit… insulting actually.'

Thorne did not want to lie to her, but he did anyway. 'It's just routine, Anne.'

She kicked off her shoes and pulled her feet up underneath her. 'Sarah was killed ten years ago… you must know all this.'

'I know the basic facts.'

'It was a horrible time. He's never really got over it. I know he seems a bit… assured, but they were very happy and he's never been interested in anyone else.'

'Not even you?'

She blushed. 'Well, at least I know that this isn't an official question.'

'Completely unofficial and horribly nosy, I know, but I did wonder…'

'We were together once, a long time ago when we were both students.'

'And not since? Sorry…'

'My husband thought so, if that makes you feel a little less nosy. David always had a thing about Jeremy, but it was really just professional rivalry, which he liked to tart up as something else.'

Like his hair, thought Thorne.

He'd tried to pace himself and Anne had drunk far more than he had, but he was definitely starting to feel a little lightheaded.

'What do his kids do?'

James, twenty-four, and Rebecca, twenty-six, another doctor. These facts and many others filling three pages of a notebook in his desk drawer.

'Rebecca's in orthopaedics. She works in Bristol.'

Thorne nodded, interested. Tell me something I don't know.

'James, well, he's done all manner of things over the last few years. He's been a bit unlucky, if I'm being kind.'

'And if you're being unkind?'

'Well, he does sponge off his dad a little. Jeremy's a bit of a soft touch. They're very close. James was in the car when the-they had the accident. He was a bit screwed up about it for a while.' She blew out a long, slow breath. 'I haven't talked about this for ages…'

Suddenly Thorne felt terrible. He wanted to hug her, but instead volunteered to make another cup of coffee. They both stood up at the same time.

'Black or…?'

'Listen, Tom, I've got to say this.' Thorne thought she was starting to sound a bit pissed. 'I don't know what you think about Jeremy, I don't know why you had to go and question him… I dread to think, actually, but whatever it is I wish you'd stop wasting your time. This is one of my oldest friends we're talking about, and I know he likes to play the hard-bitten, cynical doctor but it's just a party piece. I've heard it hundreds of times. He cares very much about his patients. He's very interested in Alison's progress…'

Alison. The one person they were supposed to talk about and hadn't.

'I meant to have a word with you about that, actually. You know we're trying to keep some things out of the papers?'

Her face darkened. 'Am I about to get told off?' She wasn't remotely pissed.

'He seems to know a lot about the case and I just wondered if…'

She took a step towards him – not afraid of a fight. 'He knows a lot about the medical case, yes. We've spoken about Alison regularly and obviously he knows about the other attacks because that has a direct bearing on things.'

'Sorry, Anne, I didn't mean-'

'He's a colleague whose advice I value and whose discretion you can count on. I'd say take my word for it, but obviously there wouldn't be much point.'

She stared at him, his first reminder since that morning in the lecture theatre of just how scary she could look. Evidently he didn't have quite the same capacity to intimidate her. Something in his face, he had no idea what, suddenly seemed to amuse her and her expression softened.

'Well, what's it been? A few weeks? And we're already on to our second major row. It doesn't bode well, does it?'

Thorne smiled. This was highly encouraging. 'Well, I'd actually categorise the first one as more of a bollocking, if you want to be accurate.'

'Are you going to get that coffee or what?'

As he filled the mugs from the cafetière, she shouted through to him from the living room, 'I'll stick some music on. Classical? No, let me try and guess what you're into…'

Thorne added the milk and thought, never in a million years. He shouted back, 'Just put whatever you want on… I'm easy.' As he walked back in with the coffee, he almost laughed out loud as she turned round brandishing a well-worn and wonderfully vinyl copy of Electric Ladyland.

As the taxi – a black one, he wasn't going to make that mistake again – ferried him back towards Kentish Town, the evening's conversation rattled around in his head like coins in an envelope. He could remember every word of it.

Bishop had been laughing at him.

The cab drove down the Archway Road towards Suicide Bridge and he looked away as they passed Queens Wood. He pictured the fox moving swiftly and silently through the trees towards its earth. A rabbit still twitching in its jaws, trailing blood across leaves and fallen branches as the vixen carries its prey home. A litter of eager cubs -tearing their supper to pieces – ripping away pale chunks of Helen Doyle's flesh while their mother stands frozen, watching for danger…

Thorne stared hard at shopfronts as they flashed past. Bed shop, bookshop, delicatessen, massage parlour. He shut his eyes. Sad, soggy men and cold, brittle women, together for a few minutes that both would try later to forget. Not a pleasant image but… a better one. For now.

He knew that Helen and Alison and the rest of it would be with him again in the morning, lurking inside his hangover, but for now he wanted to think about Anne. Their kiss on the doorstep had felt like the beginning of something and that, together with the reliably pleasant sensation of being moderately off his face, made him feel as good as he had in a long time.

He decided that, late as it was, he'd ring his dad when he got in. It was ridiculous. He was forty. But he wanted to tell him about this woman he'd met – this woman with a teenage daughter, for God's sake. Rachel had arrived back just as he was leaving. He'd said a swift hello before making a quick escape once the inevitable argument started about how late she'd got back.

He wanted to tell his dad that 'maybe', with a large dollop of 'perhaps' and a decent helping of 'forget it, never in a million years', one of them might not be spending quite so much time alone any more.

He added a two-pound tip to the six-pound fare and headed up the front path, grinning like an idiot. It was always a risky business for cabbies, wasn't it, picking up pissed punters? A healthy tip or vomit in the back of the cab? That was the gamble. Well, one had just got lucky.

Thorne was humming 'All Along The Watchtower' as he put the key in the lock, and was only vaguely aware of the dark figure that emerged from the shadows and ran up the path behind him. He turned just as an animalistic grunt escaped from the mouth behind the balaclava and the arm came down. He felt instantly sick as a bulb blew inside his head.

And suddenly it was much later.

The objects in his living room were at the bottom of a swimming-pool. The stereo, the armchair, the half-empty wine bottle shimmered and wobbled in front of him. He tried desperately to focus, to get a little balance, but all his worldly goods remained upside down and stubbornly unfamiliar. He looked up. The ceiling inched towards him. He summoned every ounce of strength to roll himself over, face down on the carpet and vomit. Then he slept.

A voice woke him. Hoarse and abrasive. 'You look rough, Tom. Come on, mate…'

He raised his head and the room was full of people. Made-leine, Susan and Christine sat in a line on the sofa. Their legs were neatly crossed. Secretaries waiting for a job interview. Not one of them would look at him. To one side Helen Doyle stood staring at the floor and chewing nervously at a hangnail. Huddled into the single armchair were three young girls. Their hair was neatly brushed and their white nightdresses were crisply laundered. The smallest girl, about five years old, smiled at him but her elder sister pulled her fiercely to her breast like a mother. A hand reached towards him and dragged him to his knees. His head pounded. His throat was caked in bile. He licked his lips and tasted the crusty vomit around his mouth.

'Up you come, Tom, there's a good lad. Now, eyes wide open. Nice and bright.'

He squinted at the figure leaning against the mantelpiece. Francis Calvert raised a hand in greeting. 'Hello, Detective Constable.' The dirty blond hair, yellowed by cigarette smoke, was thinner now, but the smile was the same. Warm, welcoming and utterly terrifying. He had far too many teeth, all of them decayed. 'It's been ages, Tom. I'd ask how you were doing but I can see… Bit of a session, was it?'

He tried to speak but his tongue was dead and heavy. It lay in his mouth like a rotting fish.

Calvert stepped towards him, flicking his cigarette towards the carpet and producing the gun in one horribly swift movement. Thorne looked frantically round at the girls on the armchair. They were gone.

At least he was to be spared that.

Knowing what would inevitably follow, he turned his attention back to Calvert, his head swinging round on his hunched shoulders with the ponderous weight of a wrecking ball. Calvert grinned at him, those rotten teeth bared as he clattered them theatrically against the barrel of the gun.

He tried to look away but his head was yanked upwards by the hair, forcing him to watch.

'Ringside seat this time, Tom. All in glorious Technicolor. I hope that's not a new suit…'

He tried to close his eyes but his eyelids were like tarpaulins, heavy with rain.

The explosion was deafening. He watched as the back of Calvert's head attached itself to the wall and began a slow, messy descent like some comical, slimy child's toy. He moved an arm to wipe away the hot tears that stung his cheeks. His hand came away red, the bits of brain between his fingers. As he slumped towards the floor he was vaguely aware of Helen moving across to join the others on the sofa and lead them in a round of polite but sincere applause.

It was like being horribly drunk and massively hung-over at the same time. He knew he mustn't drift off again. The faces were still jumping around in his head like pictures in a child's flick book, but the speed was decreasing. The equilibrium had almost returned but the pain was beyond belief.

He was alone, he was himself, and he was crawling across the puke-ridden carpet, inch by agonising inch. He had no idea what time it was. There was no light coming through the window. Late night or early morning.

His fingers grasped at the nylon fibres of the cheap shagpile. He took a deep breath. Gritting his teeth and failing to stifle a cry of agony, he willed his knees to shuffle another few inches across the vast and merciless eight feet of carpet that separated him from the telephone.