Sleepyhead

Sleepyhead

Chapter 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 Boy Scouts 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?" Detective Constable 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 kickoff, 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 togethereighteen 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 center 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 Accident and Emergency at the Royal London."

Thorne winced. He knew the hospital. The memory of the pain that had followed the hernia operation there six months earlier was still horribly fresh. He glanced up as a nurse in blue uniform put her head around 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 tranquilizers. 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 specialized 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...