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thought.., you were my mate that's al . If you don't want to be mates, just say, and I'l go. Just say...'
    Palmer felt light-headed. A trickle of sweat was running down his back. He couldn't bear the thought of Nicklin feeling like this. Nicklin was his best mate. He would far rather he was angry with him than feel let down. He felt himself reaching down for the cricket bat, and was
    elated to look up and see Nicklin beaming at him.
    'That's it, Martin. I knew you would. Ready?'
    Palmer nodded slowly and Nicklin started running towards him, concentrating, his tongue poking between his teeth.
    The frog spread its arms and legs out as soon as Nicklin let it go and for a second it looked as if it was flying. Nicklin began to cheer as soon as he opened his hand.
    'Now Mart... now.'
    Palmer shut his eyes and swung the bat.
    It was a wet sound. Dul and sloppy. A smal vibration up his arm. Nicklin watched the whole thing, wide-eyed and yel ing. His eyes never moved from the glorious blur of blood and green guts that flew graceful y into the nettles on the other side of the railway line.
    He spun round, his black eyes bright in expectation of the sick, shit-a-brick look on Palmer's pale spotty face. The expression that he always saw afterwards. He froze and narrowed his eyes, focusing on something else: something behind Palmer and above him.
    Palmer dropped the bat and turned away without looking at the stain on the blade to climb back up the bank. He stopped dead in his tracks. Next to the hole in the chain-link fence, the tal grass past her knees, stood a girl with long blonde hair. She looked the same age as him, perhaps a little older. Palmer had never seen anyone as beautiful in his whole life. The girl put two fingers into her mouth and whistled. Then she started to clap, grinning her pretty little head off.
    THREE
    Both Thorne and McEvoy felt distinctly uneasy as they walked across the concourse at Euston station. Neither admitted this to the other and both later wished that they had. Both, as they bought magazines and papers, grabbed last-minute teas or cold drinks, imagined the eyes of a kil er on them.
    He had watched Carol Garner in this same place, and fol owed her. Perhaps he'd been standing where they now stood when he first saw her. Reading a newspaper or listening to a walkman, or gazing through the window of a shop at socks and ties. Thorne looked at the faces of the people around him and wondered if Carol Garner had looked into the eyes of the man who would later murder her. Perhaps she'd smiled at him or asked him the time, or given him a cigarette...
    They walked towards the platform, past their own tattered posters requesting help and information from the public. There were similar posters at King's Cross and these had given them their only real lead thus far - a partial description. A forty-one-year-old prostitute named Margie Knight had come forward and told them about seeing a woman who she thought might have been Ruth Murray, talking to a man on York Way, a road running along the side of the station. She'd
    remembered because for a minute or two she'd thought it was a new girl muscling in on her patch.
    It had been dark of course, but there was some light from the shop fronts on the other side of the road. 'An ordinary kind of face real y. He was a big bloke though, I can tel you that.
    Leaning over her, talking to her about something. He was tal . Not fat, you know, just big...' She'd claimed that the look she'd had was not good enough to make it worth her trying to do an e-fit. Helping the police was not something Margie felt particularly comfortable with.
    Thorne stared at the poster. Carol Garner's death distil ed into a single grainy photograph and a phone number. They'd shown a picture from the Railtrack CCTV footage on the local news and though there had been plenty of sightings, nobody had picked up on anyone who might have been fol owing her.
    They couldn't be one hundred per cent sure of course, that