Lifeless Thorne 5

by Mark Billingham

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Any of the lads on his tank crew, maybe?”

  “He never talked about it,” she said. “I wouldn’t know if he had, but to be honest I’d stopped really listening to him, you know? He went funny the last few years. He talked a lot of rubbish. Before he died he came round to tell me that he was going to turn it all round. Banging on about how he was going to look after me and the kids, how he was going to see us all right. I never told Owen any of that, by the way. He’d’ve gone mental.”

  Holland couldn’t resist a glance at Stone this time. “Did he say how he was going to turn it round? Was he talking about money?”

  “Yeah, I think so, but he always had some stupid scheme or other on the go. He was always on about getting himself sorted again. Silly bastard …”

  “Tell us about when Ian died, Shireen?”

  A boy came to the hatch and asked for a drink.

  Shireen smiled; told Holland and Stone about her ex-husband’s death as she mixed orange squash. “It was booze and pills,” she said. “He emptied a couple of bottles of both in some pissy little room just round the corner from here. They didn’t find him for a week because the poor sod had nobody to miss him by then.”

  “They never found a note, did they?”

  “No …”

  “You never thought it was odd that Ian killed himself?” Stone said. “Bearing in mind what he’d said about turning his life around and all that.”

  She looked at them, unblinking, and Holland thought he could see the unasked question in her confused expression. He thought it said a lot about how Shireen Collins was getting on with her life that she hadn’t really asked them why, a year after her ex-husband had died, they wanted to talk to her about him. He also thought that if Hadingham was as big, as handy, as she’d said he was, then it couldn’t have been easy for whoever had killed him to have forced those tablets down his throat. Mind you, if Hadingham had been pissed before it happened …

  Suddenly there were other children demanding drinks and attention and it was clear that half an hour had been a generous estimate.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could come back …”

  They’d taken a cab from the station. Stone asked if there was a number they could call or somewhere they could pick up a taxi. She gave them directions to a minicab office five minutes’ walk away.

  Holland started pulling on his coat. “Do you mind me asking what you did with all Ian’s things?”

  “All the stuff he’d left here had gone long before he died,” she said. “I gave the clothes and a few of his old CDs to a charity shop. A lot of it just went in the rubbish, to be honest.”

  “Were there any videotapes?” Stone asked.

  She seemed slightly thrown by the question. “We had … blank tapes for recording stuff on. We still use them, I think, for taping the football or Corrie or whatever …”

  “What about the things Ian took with him when he left?”

  “No, they gave me everything that was in the room where they found him; all his personal belongings.”

  “You don’t remember a videotape?”

  She suddenly looked embarrassed. She lowered her voice, and tried to look Stone in the eye, but couldn’t quite manage it. “D’you mean like porno?”

  Handing Stone his jacket, Holland turned to her. “It doesn’t matter, really. It’s nothing …”

  It was dry outside, but from the look of the sky it was no more than a lull, so they did their best to make the five-minute walk in much faster time.

  “She’s going to find out what he did eventually,” Stone said.

  Holland shook his head. “It’s not up to us.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be that devastated somehow …”

  “Maybe she will. On her kids’ behalf.”

  “Right. I suppose it’s going to piss on their old man’s memory somewhat. Blow the whole war-hero thing.”

  “Just a bit …”

  “We’re bang on about the fucking blackmail, though. That’s for definite. Hadingham as good as told her he was coming into money.”

  “Yeah. I just wish we had something more than what she says he told her.”

  “You’ve become a damn sight harder to please since you became a sergeant, do you know that?”

  “You’re always hoping there’ll be like … I don’t know, a photocopy of the blackmail demand he made to whoever topped him or something. You know, by some miracle …”

  “Her testimony’s a confirmation, though, isn’t it?”

  “It’s just circumstantial, at the end of the day. I mean, it all helps, I’m not saying it doesn’t. It’s another piece of it. It’s a big piece. But it’s way too late to get any physical evidence, any forensics or whatever, so I can’t see us actually pinning it on the bloke when we get him.”

  “What about the tape?”

  “Maybe he had it with him, which makes sense if he thinks he’s going to make some major money out of it, and the killer took it. Or he never had one, which doesn’t really pan out if we’re sticking with the blackmail idea. Or it’s lost …”

  “Or he left it at home when he moved out and the bloke his wife was shagging taped Match of the Day over it.”

  “You know, this is one of the many reasons why I’m a sergeant and you’re not.”

  “Bollocks!”

  The rain came then, suddenly; blowing into them from behind and quickly soaking the backs of their legs. Stone carried on swearing, and though they couldn’t have been too far from the minicab office, he started to run.

  Holland just kept walking and watching Stone disappear into the distance. He couldn’t be arsed to try to catch up.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Thorne tried and failed to make himself comfortable in the doorway of a tatty souvenir shop on Carnaby Street. There were half a dozen of these places knocking out multicolored Doc Martens and overpriced Tshirts on a street that hadn’t been fashionable in donkey’s years.

  He could remember when London had been the center of everything. When the city could still get away with it, and swing without looking like someone’s dad at a school disco. Once or twice around that time, when he’d have been six or seven, his parents had brought him into town to do some shopping, and though they’d tended to avoid the likes of Carnaby Street and had made straight for the department stores, Thorne could still recall seeing young women in floaty dresses and men wearing bright military jackets. Or perhaps he only thought he could. He knew that memory tended to work like that. Maybe he was just filling in the gaps with pictures of Terence Stamp and Julie Christie …

  Either way, because he had at least been there in the sixties, Thorne had viewed the whole “Cool Britannia” movement of a few years before with a certain degree of cynicism. With Union Jacks on frocks and cars and album covers, what started as a trend had quickly become little more than a marketing bandwagon to be hijacked by everyone from Marks & Spencer to New Labour. Still, Thorne had to admit that bands had at least rediscovered guitars, that tourist numbers had picked up, and that it had given a creative spark to many kids of Spike and Caroline’s age.

  It remained to be seen if tourists would be flocking to the West End for very much longer. Beneath a headline that read the latest victim, a photo of a younger and altogether healthier-looking Terry Turner dominated the front page of the day’s Standard. The news was well and truly out that Theatreland had become a killing ground.

  Thorne wondered if the killer had seen the newspaper. Did he know yet that he’d killed the wrong man?

  Before settling down for the night, he’d been along to Marble Arch, had gone down into the subway to see if he could find Spike or Caroline. He’d got little change out of Ollie, who, if anything, had eyed him with even more suspicion and hostility than when they’d first encountered each other.

  “I’m looking for my mates,” Thorne had said. He’d pointed along the corridor, to the corner that was now deserted, but w
here he’d slept alongside Spike and Caroline a couple of nights earlier.

  The old man had glanced up from his book. Narrowed his eyes. “Look somewhere else …”

  It wasn’t as though Thorne had been expecting to find them. He was well aware that Spike and Caroline kept strange hours. He knew what woke them and what put them to sleep.

  In his doorway, Thorne pulled himself upright and moved his arms to the outside of his sleeping bag. He stared at the lit window displays across the street and listened to the dance music that was coming from one of the flats above.

  He thought again about where the leak might have come from. He had to consider McCabe, whatever Brigstocke thought of the idea. Who else knew exactly where he would be sleeping? It was inconceivable that the information could have come from anyone closer to him. What ate away at Thorne was that, somewhere, he knew that he already had the answer. It couldn’t be too hard to figure out who had been responsible; it was a basic two-piece jigsaw. Of course, other rough sleepers knew where he was, but they didn’t have the other piece of it. None of them knew that he was an undercover police officer. At least, he presumed none of them knew. Certainty, of any sort, was a luxury he’d given up along with the rest of them, when he’d taken the decision to sleep on the street.

  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 … ?

  Earlier, with Brigstocke, he’d played it down. He’d had to. But now there was no point pretending that what jumped in his guts and sucked away at his breath was anything other than fear. He’d felt it from that first moment underground, when he’d heard about Terry T’s death, and it had settled, content inside him. It had quickly made itself at home, coating the walls; clingy and seeping …

  Thorne had felt afraid a lot more lately. In the recent weeks and months there had been a general apprehension that he could not name, as well as a perplexing, irrational fear of specific things. He’d become jumpy in crowds; he was suddenly scared of escalators and of heights; he’d started feeling increasingly wary in cars. Thorne knew that some people became more nervous about flying the more frequently they walked on board a plane, and he wondered if he was moving along the same lines.

  Or perhaps this susceptibility to fear in all its forms was simply a part of getting older. His father had been afraid of all sorts of bizarre things. Thorne wondered if he was simply turning into his old man. He’d known it would happen eventually, it happened to just about everyone, but the process seemed to have put on a burst of speed with his father’s death. It was as though he were part of some twisted, cosmic equation. He felt like he was changing to fill the hole left by his father’s passing.

  And there was the other thing: the trick that was played on you after the death of a parent. After the death of your last parent, when you became an orphan. The switch that was thrown …

  For the first time in his life, Thorne was starting to comprehend the pain of being childless; not to feel it, not quite yet, but to understand it. He now knew why those desperate for children spoke of it as a hole that needed to be filled. He had started to feel as though that hole might be inside himself somewhere; growing, but still hidden, waiting only for what covered it to drop away. He’d wondered if having children simply to stop the pain of not having them was a good enough reason. Was it the reason why most people became parents? Certainly, he could now begin to guess at the agony that Caroline must feel at being both childless and a mother at the same time.

  Losing parents, and losing children …

  Thorne’s mind shifted to the man behind that video camera. The man who had filmed the deaths of four men: four sons; quite possibly four fathers.

  How were they ever going to find him if they didn’t trace Ryan Eales? The most obvious place to start would have been the army, of course. They might at least have been able to shed some light on what sort of person was out there. What manner of individual might have stood on the black sand, soaked in shadow and petrol rain alongside that tank crew. It would be very difficult to make advances to the army now of course; not after certain important facts material to the case had been withheld. Brigstocke had confessed to Thorne in the pub that keeping the existence of the videotape secret was a decision he was starting to regret.

  Thorne had done his best to be sympathetic. “We’re all Sherlock Holmes with hindsight, mate. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it.”

  “If we don’t get a result,” Brigstocke had said, “there’ll be plenty ahead of me in the queue …”

  The music from the flat above the shop opposite had stopped. It was replaced by the tuneless singing of a trio of football fans, who came down the street from the side of the Shakespeare’s Head and began to move in Thorne’s direction. He shrank a little farther back into the doorway and watched them pass.

  They didn’t see him. Or, if they did, they didn’t give a toss …

  In those few, brief moments of clarity that come before sleep, Thorne thought of someone he could perhaps speak to, a person who might at least provide some insight into what had happened on February 26, nearly fifteen years before. Thorne would have to be careful how he handled it of course, but nobody had come up with anything better.

  He drifted off to sleep, deciding that he’d had worse ideas; thinking that he still had the business card stuffed inside his wallet back at the Lift. Hoping that he’d remember all this in the morning.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  DS Sam Karim, who took responsibility for such things, had almost finished rejigging the layout of the whiteboard for the umpteenth time.

  Still arranged at its center were the photographs recently provided by the Army Personnel Centre: Chris Jago, Ian Hadingham, Ryan Eales, and Alec Bonser. Portraits of four young men, all taken before they’d first been posted to the 12th King’s Hussars.

  Holland stood and watched while the shape of the case as it stood that day was laid out. It was hard to equate the quartet of fresh faces—scrubbed and set square, a hint of a smile on one or two—with those whom he knew had been hidden behind rain-streaked goggles and muddy kerchiefs; sweating, contorted; the eyes tight shut at the moment when the trigger was pulled.

  Elsewhere on the board …

  The list of those victims who had been murdered simply to disguise the true nature of the crime: Hayes, Mannion, Asker.

  Terry Turner: murdered, it would seem, in error; sharing nothing but initials with the man for whom he’d been been mistaken.

  The names of those on the fringes of the investigation: Susan Jago, Shireen Hadingham.

  Those who had provided information, statemented or otherwise: Spiby and Rutherford at Media Ops; Brendan Maxwell; Major Stephen Brereton; Poulter and Cheshire at the 12th King’s. One name had now been removed from this list, and from the contact sheet circulated to all officers: Paul Cochrane. The services of the National Crime Faculty profiler had been dispensed with, now that the motive for the killings had become apparent even to those without letters after their names.

  “Last but not least …”

  Karim drew a thick, black line down to a crudely drawn square that contained the only remaining question mark on the board. It was largely symbolic: a simple representation of their prime suspect; the man behind the video camera whom they now thought to be the reason why they were all there in the first place.

  Karim stepped back and examined his work. It was far from the whole story, of course …

  There was a side to the investigation that could not be encapsulated in crude capital letters or delineated by magnets and felt-tip pens. Thorne’s contribution to the case was missing: information that had originated from him, or from sources close to him, would remain absent. This was also the case with details of the secondary intelligence operation, the small-scale surveillance that had just been mounted on DI John McCabe and several other officers from the Homeless Unit based at Charing Cross. The authorization for such surveillance was need-to-know
information that Brigstocke had passed on to none but his core team. As with any “blue-on-blue” operation, there was very good reason.

  Somebody always knew somebody …

  Karim walked away, and Holland approchaed the board. “You’re an artist, Sam.”

  Stone was on his way back from the gents’. “Piss-artist,” he said.

  Jason Mackillop looked up from his computer and grinned. Stone moved across to join him, laughing at his own joke.

  The whiteboard should have been replaced long ago. Countless murders had been mapped out across its surface over many years. As Holland looked, he could see, in what few white spaces were left, the faintest outline of old markings; the swoops and stabs of the pen just visible beneath the scratched and pitted metal. Death, terrible and tawdry; fury, loss, grief reduced to scribbled lines and letters; to names and numbers now long since wiped away and replaced. Holland licked the tip of a finger and reached over to rub at one of the ghost names. A name that had refused to fade completely …

  “Dave?”

  Holland started slightly and drew his finger quickly away. He hadn’t been aware of Yvonne Kitson moving alongside him. He turned to acknowledge her, then shifted his gaze back to the board.

  They both stared at it for a while.

  They looked at the sweep of it; the way that so many were ensnared by the tendrils that snaked from its poisonous root. The names of all those it had touched: the innocent and the guilty and the dead. But one name was now prominent.

  Coming back again, both of them as they stared, to the same name.

  “How the hell are we going to find Eales?” Kitson asked.

  Holland considered the question. “Does the Home Office have any psychics?”

  If they’d been lucky in tracing Ian Hadingham quickly, it had been more than balanced out by the complete lack of anything even resembling progress in the hunt for Ryan Eales.

  The team had run “full research.” Both the CRIS and CRIM-INT systems had been scanned a number of times but had yielded nothing. Traces had been run via the National Voters Register, the DSS, the DVLC, and every local housing authority in the country. All major store-card and mobile-phone companies had been contacted, while the Equifax system—a software package giving access to a huge number of financial databases—was being run repeatedly without success. Thus far, save for a driving license, a National Insurance number, and a lastknown address that were all equally moribund, full research had come up empty.