Lifeless Thorne 5

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne saw exactly.

  Just keeping it warm for you, obviously.

  Now his head was clear, but the rest of him was suddenly leaden. He could feel a prickly heat rising …

  There was a grunted laugh of relief before Holland spoke again. “I just wanted to be sure,” he said. “I thought it might be you …”

  Thorne leaned back against the wall, breathing heavily. He stared down at the discarded chicken bones and scattered flakes of leprous-looking batter.

  And was violently sick.

  Part Three

  Luck of the Draw

  TWENTYFIVE

  Holland and Stone stood on the platform at Stockport Station, waiting for their connection to Salford. Both had hands thrust deep into pockets, and as they gazed along the track in the hope of seeing the train’s approach, they could see the rain coming down in skewed, billowing sheets.

  “Fucking hell,” Stone said, miserable. “I’m still wet from the other night …”

  Holland nodded, remembering the downpour as they’d gathered at the crime scene, waiting for the sun to struggle up. The rain had hissed off the arc lights, and the only dry body there was curled up and stiffening in the theater doorway. As with the other victims, there hadn’t been a great deal that was recognizable about Terence Turner. He’d finally been identified by a friend thanks to the chain and padlock around his neck. Later, this had been removed with a hacksaw by a mortuary assistant, just prior to Phil Hendricks getting to work and doing some cutting of his own …

  “I’m going to see if I can grab some coffee,” Stone said. “D’you want some?”

  Holland eagerly accepted the offer and Stone walked toward the station concourse in search of what would be their third cup of the day. It was a little over twentyfour hours since they’d found the body, and Holland had slept for perhaps three of them.

  It was accepted that the first twentyfour hours were “golden”; that this was when they had the best chance of picking up a decent lead. As far as Holland was aware, at that moment they still had nothing, and he’d be surprised if anything changed. It wasn’t always just a killer they were up against. Care and caution could get thrown to the wind in the name of urgency, and adrenaline was easily swamped by fatigue and protocol.

  After they’d wrapped things up at the murder scene, a DS from the Intelligence Team had conducted the “hot debrief ” at Charing Cross police station. Every officer who’d been present had run through the notes in their incident report book and made a statement. These would need to be collated and added to the duty officer’s report and the log that would later be completed by the DCI. This was all part of the procedure instituted in the wake of the Lawrence Report. There were those who thought it would mean fewer mistakes. Others, including Tom Thorne, were more skeptical. They thought that it was less about doing the right thing than being seen to do it.

  Thorne …

  This was what, for some of them at least, had given the latest murder an unsettling significance; had brought it far closer to home. Those on the team who knew of Thorne’s role in the investigation had come to an obvious, and disturbing, conclusion. Holland, Brigstocke, and Hendricks had stared at the battered body of a man in a doorway; had watched it being bagged up and loaded into a wagon; had seen the progress of the pathologist’s blade through its flesh, and known, as they looked on, that it should have been the body of Tom Thorne that was suffering such indignities.

  Holland looked up, watched Stone walking back toward him with the drinks, and thought about the phone conversation two nights before …

  That’s thoughtful, but it’s a bit bloody early.

  He’d rung from home as soon as he’d been contacted about the discovery of the body. Sophie had been woken by the initial call, and he’d gone into the living room so she wouldn’t hear him talking to Thorne. He’d felt a little embarrassed at how relieved he’d been to hear the miserable git’s voice.

  It was strange: Thorne had taken longer than anyone else to grasp the importance of just where Turner’s body had been found. Maybe Holland had caught him at a bad time …

  “Train’s coming in,” Stone said, still a few feet away.

  Holland looked back and saw the train rounding a bend, moving toward them through rain that was getting heavier. The huge wipers were moving fast across the locomotive’s windscreen.

  Stone seemed to have cheered up a little. He put on a coarse, Hovis accent: “It’s grim up north,” he said.

  Holland smiled and took his coffee, thinking that it wasn’t exactly a bed of roses back where they’d come from.

  “Do you want me to tell you how many of those kicks could have killed Terry Turner on their own? How many different bones were broken? How many of his teeth were actually smashed up into his nose?”

  “Only if you want to put me off my lunch,” Thorne said.

  They were sitting in a dimly lit pub, south of the river near the Oval. A television was mounted high on one wall. Through the Keyhole served only to highlight the lack of atmosphere in the place. Aside from a couple in their thirties who scowled at each other across scampi and chips, Brigstocke and Thorne were the only customers.

  Brigstocke knew that, with Thorne looking the way he did, they’d have had a fair amount of privacy even if the place had been much busier. Though the bruises had faded to the color of nicotine stains, Thorne was still far from a pretty sight. That said, though, he had never been a GQ kind of man, and many had given him a wide berth even when he hadn’t looked like a battered sack of shit. Brigstocke had said as much to him as they’d collected drinks and cheese rolls from the bar.

  Thorne held up his Guinness and smiled. “Cheers, mate.”

  “Those clothes are actually starting to smell …”

  “I think you’re the one they’re worried about,” Thorne had said. He’d nodded toward the couple who’d given the two of them a long, blatantly curious look when they’d walked in. “They think I’m some sort of over-the-hill rent boy and you’re a very pervy businessman on a limited budget.”

  The jokey tone hadn’t lasted long …

  “You said that going undercover would just be about gathering information,” Brigstocke said. “We’ve got that information now. We know who the victims are, and we know why it’s happening, so give me one good reason for you to carry on.”

  “Because the killer hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  “We talked about this when you came to me with your stupid idea in the first place …”

  “Things are much different now,” Thorne said.

  “Fucking right they’re different.” Brigstocke glanced toward the couple, then across at the woman who stood smoking behind the bar. He lowered his voice. “The night before last, it was you he tried to kill …”

  Thorne put the half-eaten cheese roll back onto his plate. He wasn’t hugely hungry. He’d gone to the Lift early and put away a full breakfast while he waited in vain for Spike or Caroline to turn up. Thorne hadn’t seen either of them since the previous morning. He’d left the subway when Holland had called with news of the murder, then returned a few hours later to wake them; to tell them that he’d been into the West End and seen the police gathered outside the theater.

  To tell them that Terry was dead …

  “You’re not willing to consider the possibility that Terry Turner being kicked to death in that doorway was a bizarre coincidence, are you?” Thorne looked at Brigstocke. “I thought not …”

  “The killer knows who you are,” Brigstocke said.

  “Thanks to one too many cans of Special Brew, the world and his fucking wife knows there’s an undercover copper on the streets.”

  “Right, but this bloke knows it’s you.”

  “I’m well aware of that …”

  “Do you think he knows you personally? Is it someone you’ve met?”

  Thorne stared into his beer. “He mistook Terry Turner for me, so I doubt it.”

  “It was dark. It was pissing wi
th rain. Turner might well have been out of it, asleep, with his back to the killer …”

  “Terry was a foot taller than I am,” Thorne said. “I can’t see it.”

  The door opened and a man walked in leading a greyhound. He climbed onto a stool at the bar and the dog dropped flat at his feet. The man exchanged a word or two with the barmaid, ordered a pint, and turned to stare at the TV.

  “We can skirt around the obvious question all bloody day …” Brigstocke said.

  Over by the bar, the greyhound raised his head for a moment, yawned, and let it drop again. The dog looked like he couldn’t give a fuck, and so did his owner. The man seemed far more at ease than Thorne imagined him to be behind his own four walls: he looked at home; he looked like himself.

  “Tom?”

  “I’m listening …”

  “Why? That’s what we need to address. Why on earth does he come after you?”

  Thorne took a second to collect his thoughts. “Okay, this is the best I can come up with, and you’re not going to like it. I reckon he’s shitting himself.”

  “He’s shitting himself?”

  “I think he’s panicking. I think he knows we’re getting close. Maybe not to him, not as yet, but he doesn’t feel safe because he knows we’ve put the nuts and bolts of it together. Like you said, we’ve got the names and we’ve got a motive. If Eales is still alive, and we can find him, the killer knows he can be identified.”

  “So why not just kill Eales?”

  “Maybe he already has,” Thorne said. “Look, all I’m really saying is that I don’t think this bloke’s that bloody clever. He’s felt cornered, he’s started to panic, and he’s reacted, and I don’t think there’s a lot more to it than that. Who knows? Maybe he thinks I’m such a brilliant detective that he needs to get me out of the way.”

  “Now it’s getting really far-fetched.”

  “Whichever way you look at it, it wasn’t a very clever thing to do, but I think we’re talking about someone who works on instinct, you know? If we’re right about the blackmail angle, this whole thing is about him feeling threatened and trying to protect himself …”

  The pub’s business rocketed as a pair of lads came through the door. The dog barked halfheartedly and was silenced by a nudge from his master’s boot. The barmaid lit another fag from the butt of the last one, and on TV, a blonde with a smile as overcooked as her tan was promising to find an elderly couple their dream home in the sun.

  Brigstocke tore open a bag of crisps and leaned across the table. “All this stuff he knows. How exactly does he know it?”

  “That’s the bit you’re not going to like,” Thorne said.

  “We’re back to him being on the Job, are we?”

  “I’m starting to think it’s likely. If I’m right about why I was targeted, I can’t see how else he’d know what was going on, unless he was a copper.”

  “If you’re right …”

  “He knew more than who I was, Russell. He knew where I’d be.” Thorne pictured Terry T, fingering the padlock at his throat, offering to share the doorway that even now they were still trying to scrub the blood out of. “Where I was supposed to be.”

  Brigstocke said nothing for several moments. His face, distorted as it was through his glass of water, made it clear he was finding Thorne’s point a hard one to argue against. “So who are we talking about? How many people knew where you were sleeping?”

  “You, Holland, Hendricks. Brendan Maxwell at the Lift. McCabe and maybe one or two others at Charing Cross.”

  “Was McCabe’s name last for any particular reason?”

  “I just think he’s worth looking at. Him and a few of his team.”

  “Looking at?”

  “Maybe we could get a couple of Intel lads on it. Keep an eye on him … ?”

  Brigstocke looked drawn suddenly, like another weight had been added to a load that was already unbearable. “This kind of thing’s easy to suggest. It’s a piece of piss in a pub, but actually getting it done is a fucking nightmare. You don’t really grasp any of that, do you, Tom? Christ, putting a DI under surveillance on the strength of something like this, on the strength of very little, is asking for trouble.”

  Thorne remembered something he’d said to McCabe that still held true. “I can’t speak for you,” he said, “but some of us are in plenty of trouble already. I don’t think a bit more’s going to make a lot of difference.”

  Thorne stared and Brigstocke stared back at him; a grim expression that stayed frozen on the DCI’s face for several seconds, until he stuffed a handful of crisps into his mouth.

  Shireen Collins—Ian Hadingham’s ex-wife—was a petite, attractive black woman whom Holland guessed, once he’d seen her up close, to be somewhere just the right side of forty. She presented a fair bit younger— her hair cut in cornrows and her clothes suitably sporty—though with half a dozen kids under five running about, a tracksuit and trainers were probably the most practical choices.

  She worked as a child minder, and Holland and Stone had arrived to find that she was looking after four children that day. “Plus two of my own,” she told them, pointing out a boy and a girl. “Those are mine, the really evil ones …”

  “They’re nice-looking kids,” Stone said.

  “The older two, Ian’s two, are both at school.” The flat, on the southern side of Salford, was on the

  ground floor; one of three in a Victorian conversion. “The people upstairs work all day,” Collins said as she showed them in. “So we can make as much noise as we like, which is great. Four-and five-year-olds make a lot of noise.”

  From what Holland and Stone could make out, there were a couple of bedrooms and a large living room that ran off a kitchen-diner. They sat at a long kitchen table, from which Collins had been clearing the remains of lunch when they’d arrived. “There’s a bit left if you fancy chicken nuggets and potato faces,” she said. Having missed breakfast, Holland was seriously tempted, but the offer was declined. In the next room, visible through a serving hatch, the kids were gathered in front of a widescreen TV. Collins leaned through the hatch and issued gentle but firm instructions until there was something approaching quiet.

  “They get half an hour with a video after lunch,” she said. “So that’s about as long as we’ve got.”

  Holland threw his overcoat across a kitchen chair. “That’ll be plenty, Shireen.”

  The conversation was not without interruption— punctuated by high-pitched chatter, cartoonish music, and the occasional bout of tears from the next room—but Shireen Collins spoke openly enough. It was obvious that at some point she’d felt a great deal for Ian Hadingham. But it was equally clear that she’d moved on. From their marriage, and from his death …

  “Ian was always a waste of space unless he was in a uniform,” she said. “When he’d come home on leave or whatever, he’d just sit about feeling sorry for himself. He’d ignore me and he’d ignore the kids most of the time, and to be honest, after a couple of weeks, I couldn’t wait for him to get back to his bloody regiment. God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it?”

  “Have you been talking to my girlfriend?” Holland said.

  Collins laughed. She tried to explain how it had felt; how she’d once felt jealous of the bond he’d so clearly shared with his pals in the regiment. How she’d resented it, and fought for her husband’s attention, and then, in the end, how she’d simply given up competing.

  “What happened after Ian came back from the Gulf?” Holland asked.

  Collins laughed again, but rather more sadly this time. “I’m not sure how much of him did come back,” she said. “It was like he was somewhere else in his head and it wasn’t a place where I was welcome. Actually, I’m not sure it was a place I’d’ve liked very much. I know they all went through a lot out there.”

  Holland stared straight at Collins. He did not want to catch Stone’s eye; he knew Stone would be thinking the same thing he was: You have no bloody idea …

&n
bsp; “He left the army pretty soon after he came home,” Collins said. “It was all right for a while, for a year or so, and we even talked about having more kids, but something told me not to. That we’d’ve been doing it for the wrong reasons.”

  “What did Ian do,” Holland asked, “after he left the army?”

  “All sorts of things, but none of them for very long, you know? He worked in warehouses, did some security work, tried to retrain as an electrical engineer, but he couldn’t hold down a job. Had a bit of a problem with authority. It’d be fine for a few months, then he’d blow it. He was fired more than once for threatening people.” She opened her mouth to say something else, then changed her mind. “His head was basically messed up afterward.”

  Stone nodded his understanding. “So he moved out, right?”

  “Right. We decided to separate a few years on from that. He moved out and eventually I got this place. He never went far away, like—he wanted to stay close to the kids and that—but he moved around.”

  “He got a flat?”

  “Lots of different flats. He didn’t seem to like staying put too long; plus, he kept falling behind with his rent and getting chucked out of places.”

  “How did he react when you met somebody else?” Holland asked. “It can’t have been very easy …”

  There was a yell from next door. Collins stood to look in on the children, but sat down again quickly enough. “Ian wasn’t exactly thrilled and he had a bit of a problem with Owen.” She pointed toward her young children. “Owen’s their dad. Things got a bit ugly and Ian was a big bloke. He was handy, you know? So we got the police involved and we decided against actually getting married, and it was fine after that. It was fine for me and Owen, I mean, but things went downhill for Ian pretty quickly.”

  “Downhill?” Stone said.

  “He started dossing down all over the place. Sleeping on people’s floors and in shitty bedsits or whatever. Like he’d stopped caring, basically. He was drinking a lot and pissing off all his mates. Not that he had many left by then …”

  “Did he see any of his old mates from the army?”