Lifeless Thorne 5

by Mark Billingham

  The first conclusion, based on the fact that the recently deceased are often fairly easy to locate, was that Ryan Eales was probably still alive. The second conclusion was not quite so comforting.

  “He doesn’t want to be found,” Kitson said.

  Holland knew she was right. He also knew that if Eales was lying low, he had very good reason for doing so. “He’s hiding from the killer.”

  Kitson wasn’t arguing. “There’s every chance. If he reads the papers, if he’s been in any sort of contact in recent years with the rest of them, or their families, it’s odds on he knows at least a couple of the other three are already dead. If so, he’d be justified in thinking he might be next.”

  “And he might well have worked out that we know why …”

  If Eales knew that the police were looking for him, he could guess that they had seen the videotape, so he would not be in any great hurry to step forward; to face the music for what had happened in 1991.

  “It’s another thing they’re going to be good at,” Holland said.

  “What?”

  “They’re ex-soldiers. The training means that they’re better equipped to survive life on the streets, like Bonser and Jago, but it also means they’re good at making themselves invisible, if they need to.”

  “Like being behind enemy lines,” Kitson said.

  Holland thought of something. He walked to the board and pointed to the name Poulter. “Remember what he was saying when we went down to Taunton? If Eales ever served with the SAS, or one of those other intelligence units, he’d be even better at all that undercover stuff. And it would explain why we can’t find any half-decent records on him …”

  They looked again at the photograph of Lance Corporal Ryan Eales.

  His was one of those faces whose expression had been softened by a smile. He was square-jawed, with wide, blue eyes and a sprinkling of freckles across a flattish nose. Sandy hair dropped into precisely trimmed sideburns; perfect rectangles below the maroon beret.

  “He doesn’t look all there to me,” Kitson said.

  “They all look a bit weird,” Holland said. “But maybe that’s because we’re looking at it after the fact. Because we know what happened later on.”

  “I think you’ve got to be slightly odd to join up in the first place.”

  “Not a lot of choice for some people,” Holland said.

  Kitson shrugged, conceding the point. “No stranger than wanting to become a copper, I suppose.”

  “At least they get to travel …”

  “Why did you join up, Dave?”

  Behind them, Stone finished telling Mackillop the same, vaguely offensive joke he’d been telling everyone for days. The TDC laughed on cue.

  “The mental stimulation, I think,” Holland said. ***

  “Don’t tell me. It’s the Spurs–Arsenal game.”

  “Well, as you mention it …”

  “You want tickets for the match next weekend.” Alan Ward sounded amused rather than pissed off at the imagined imposition. “I seem to remember I told you I could get them.”

  “It’s not the tickets,” Thorne said. “Actually, I just wanted to pick your brains about something. Have you got a minute?”

  “Glad to get out of this bloody edit, tell you the truth. Hang on …”

  Thorne could hear Ward’s own voice being broadcast in the background. Then he heard the man himself talking to someone: telling them he wouldn’t be long, that he’d be outside if there was any problem.

  Thorne had walked east to Holborn and then kept going toward the City. Past Smithfield Meat Market and into the ossified heart of the Barbican. This was the only residential estate in the City. Almost as free from pedestrians as it was from traffic, its looming tower blocks were connected by a series of elevated walkways. Despite the arts center, the museums, and the smattering of trendy shops and restaurants, there was a strangely hostile feel to the place; something humming in the endless walls of concrete that rose up at every turn.

  “Right, I’m all yours,” Ward said.

  Thorne stepped into shadow, pooled with water beneath an overhang. Pressed the phone to his ear. The small talk was about as small, and over about as quickly, as it could be. Both said they were very busy without going into any detail. Ward said he’d seen Steve Norman quite recently and asked if Thorne had. Thorne told him that he hadn’t, and they chatted about football for another minute or two.

  “I wanted to ask you about the Gulf,” Thorne said. “Did you go over? The first time …”

  “Yeah, I was there. I was a baby reporter back in ’91.”

  “Right, good.”

  “I wasn’t a baby by the time I came back, mind you …”

  “No, I bet.”

  “It was fairly heavy,” Ward said. “You know? I’d not been involved in anything remotely like that until then. Not that I was doing a great deal other than poncing around in front of the camera. But you still see stuff …”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, really. Not about things you might have seen necessarily, but things you might have heard about.”

  There was a pause. “Is this connected to the roughsleeper murders?”

  Thorne had been right when he’d thought this would need careful handling. Ward was sharp; worse, he was a journalist. It hadn’t taken much to pique his professional interest. Thorne guessed that Ward had got a sniff of something straightaway; the minute he’d answered his phone, and a copper he’d met once, for five minutes, had reintroduced himself.

  “What makes you say that?” Thorne asked.

  “Nothing particularly. It’s the case I’d presumed you were working on, bearing in mind that we met after the press conference.”

  It was Thorne’s turn to be professional: “I’m sure you understand that I can’t comment on an active investigation.”

  “Of course. But I’m seriously intrigued …”

  Ward laughed then, and so did Thorne.

  “While you were out in the Gulf, did you ever hear anything about war crimes or atrocities?”

  “Atrocities?”

  “On our side …”

  Another pause.

  “There was some stuff that came out a few years

  ago,” Ward said. “In an American magazine— The New Yorker, I think. There was an incident, an alleged incident, on the road from Kuwait to Basra a few days after the cease-fire, when retreating Iraqi columns were attacked by Apaches and tanks. They called it the Battle of Rumailah, but it was just a massacre, by all accounts. A ‘turkey shoot,’ the magazine said. There were civilians in trucks, there was supposedly a bus filled with schoolkids …”

  “Jesus …”

  “There was another one just before the cease-fire, when four hundred Iraqi troops surrendered to a U.S. scout platoon. Some of them were wounded, bandaged up, in clearly marked hospital trucks. They were gathered together, fed and what have you, then, according to reports, another unit turned up in Bradley Armored Vehicles and just shot the lot of them. Opened up with machine guns. This is supposedly based on evidence given by soldiers who were there at the time, but having said all that, I don’t think anybody’s ever been prosecuted.”

  Thorne moved into sunlight again. He looked up as a jet roared overhead. From where he was standing, the plane appeared and disappeared between the tower blocks before emerging into a muddy sky and banking toward City Airport.

  “What about U.K. troops?” Thorne asked.

  “In terms of war crimes, you mean?”

  “Did you ever hear anything?”

  “Stuff goes on,” Ward said. “It always does. Some of the troops were based in Dubai for a lot of the time. I was there myself later on. You could buy sets of photos in corner shops, you know? Soldiers posing with bodies; with arms and legs. Trophies …”

  “But you were never aware of any specific incidents?”

  Ward suddenly sounded a little wary. There was an amused caution in his voice, as if Thorne had changed
the steps to the dance they were performing. “I think you’re going to have to be a bit more specific yourself …”

  Thorne had known he might have to venture into this kind of territory, and he wondered for a second or two if it was worth plunging into the murk. He hardly knew Alan Ward, and couldn’t be certain that anything valuable would be gained from talking to him.

  But he was equally unsure there was a great deal to lose …

  “Did you ever hear of anything involving a British tank crew?” Thorne said. While he waited Thorne watched a couple on a walkway ahead of him. They seemed to be arguing.

  When Ward finally answered, his voice was close to a whisper, and Thorne could hear the excitement in it.

  “What have you found?”

  “Like I said before, I can’t—”

  “Okay, I get it. Look, there were one or two rumors about something. No more than that, as far as I can remember.”

  “About a tank crew?”

  “Yeah … I think so.”

  “So, here’s the thing,” Thorne said. “If someone else was involved, someone apart from the four men in a tank crew, who might it be?” He glanced up again. The couple on the walkway were now embracing.

  “I’m not with you,” Ward said. “It could be virtually anybody. You’re not really giving me a great deal to go on.”

  “Another individual. A fifth man, present when this incident took place.”

  “A fifth soldier, you mean?”

  “I suppose so …”

  “Where precisely are we talking about?”

  “I don’t really know. We have to presume it’s somewhere off the beaten track.”

  “Everywhere was off the beaten track, mate,” Ward said. “You just mean that geographically, the incident happened in isolation, right?”

  That much, Thorne could be fairly certain of. “Yes.”

  “So we’re talking about someone with access to a vehicle, then. An officer, perhaps?”

  Perhaps, thought Thorne. They were certainly talking about someone who’d had no problem telling the four crewmen what to do. Someone whose orders had been followed.

  Perhaps …

  It was as positive as they were going to get.

  “I have to make a small professional plea at this point,” Ward said. “Can you make sure I’m first in line if this ever comes out?”

  Thorne was slightly nonplussed. Ward was clearly every bit as ambitious as he was sharp. Still, bearing in mind that Thorne had called him, it was a reasonable enough request. “I’m not sure I’ll have a lot of say in it, to be honest …”

  “This is what I do, Tom. Seriously, if there does come a time when whatever this is can be made public, I hope to hell you’ll come to me. Like I said before, I’m seriously bloody intrigued.”

  “Right …”

  “Whenever you like, Tom. And it goes without saying that my sources always remain confidential. No names, no pack drill.”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “And there are perks, of course.”

  “Are there?”

  “Do you want to see the game next week or not?”

  Thorne could think of nothing he’d like more. Cursing bad luck and worse timing, he explained to Ward that, much as he’d love the tickets, he’d be far too busy to use them.

  Russell Brigstocke viewed the prospect of a conversation with Steve Norman in much the same way as a trip to the dentist: it was something necessary but usually unpleasant. You could put it off and put it off, but you always had to go through with the bloody thing in the end.

  And you had to wash your mouth out afterward …

  The nature of the investigation meant Brigstocke had been forced to endure a good deal more contact with the Press Office than would normally have been the case. The media had been all over them since Jesmond’s first press conference, and Norman—whatever anyone thought of him personally—had proved extremely adept at his job. He’d kept the media’s appetite for information sated, and had called in favors from reporters when they were needed. And one was very definitely needed now.

  Using the press had brought them, circuitously, to Chris Jago. Now, as the hunt for Ryan Eales ran out of steam, using it again might be the team’s last hope of a result. They had already run a fifteen-year-old picture of Eales in the Standard—inside the issue with the photo of Terry Turner on the front—describing the soldier as someone whom “the police would very much like to talk to in connection with …”

  The calls were coming in, but they needed more, and they needed them faster.

  “I think I can swing Crimewatch again,” Norman had said.

  “Tonight?”

  Over the phone, the senior press officer’s voice had sounded even more nasal, more irritating, than it did face-to-face. “This is still a major inquiry, Russell, so I think it should be doable. They’ll bump something else off until next week …”

  They’d broadcast a reconstruction of Paddy Hayes’s killing on the show—which BBC1 put out live on a Friday evening—a month or so before, and there had been a further appeal for information after Robert Asker’s murder. In itself, this had gone down as something of a coup. The program makers were notoriously squeamish, with a distaste for anything overtly graphic. The sensitivities of the viewers had to be their primary concern. Murder was acceptable, but only if it was tastefully done, and not too scary.

  Taking the case onto such a show was usually a last resort, but most senior officers still considered it worth doing. It was television, so when they were asked for help, people reacted in much the same way as they would to a phone-in question on a quiz show: the answer might not be the right one, but there was always a healthy response.

  “So what do we think?”

  “That’s great, Steve,” Brigstocke had said. “Thanks.” The platitude had screamed inside his skull like the squeal of a dentist’s drill.

  “Just a quick update, yes? Something in the ‘urgently need to trace’ roundup toward the end of the show.”

  “That’s all we need.”

  “We’ll get Eales’s picture in vision for as long as possible. Wait for the phone lines to light up.” “Let’s hope so …”

  “Well, even if nothing concrete comes of it, it’s as much about being seen to do something a lot of the time, right?”

  Brigstocke had been desperate to hang up by this point. To rinse and spit. “I’d better go and talk to the chief superintendent,” he’d said. “We probably need to put our heads together …”

  “How clean is your suit?” Norman had asked.

  Brigstocke had spoken to Trevor Jesmond after that, talked about tone and message and budget. Then he’d phoned home and asked his wife to set the video. Now he stepped into the incident room and called for hush. The TV appeal would generate a lot of calls. A fair few nutters would come crawling out of the woodwork, but they would all have to be listened to, their information transcribed as if it were the Word of God, and every lead, no matter how iffy it sounded, would need chasing up.

  “Usual good news, bad news routine,” he said. “Most of you can forget about your weekend. Fishing, football, feet up, trip to B and Q with the missus. Not going to happen …”

  A voice from the back of the room: “Is this the good news or the bad news?”

  Brigstocke shouted above the laughter. “But the overtime’s been approved …”

  Thorne felt happier, more sure of himself and his surroundings, as the noise of traffic began to grow louder; as people moved around him in all directions and he could taste the fumes. Moving away from the Barbican’s eerie sprawl, he walked up what had once been Grub Street, and thought about his conversation with a man whose profession, in its worst excesses, had come to be associated with the name.

  There’d been no thunderbolts of insight, of course; nothing to quicken the pulse overmuch. But there was enough to think about. Thorne had already considered the possibility that the man behind the video camera had been an officer. It was
a reasonable enough supposition, but it was still interesting to hear it from Ward; to have the notion validated by someone who’d actually been there. There was no room for more than four men in a Challenger tank. The fifth man had to have got there under his own steam. If Brigstocke could eke any more information out of the army, it might be worth asking which ranks would have routinely had access to vehicles back then.

  And there was something else to interest the DCI: There were one or two rumors about something …

  If rumors of an atrocity had reached the press at the time, then it was safe to assume that the army would have been fully aware of them. Thorne felt pretty sure that they were every bit as aware fifteen years on. If the army knew at least something of what might have gone on on February 26, 1991, that would certainly explain the call from the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police.

  He would enjoy telling Russell Brigstocke that he wasn’t completely paranoid …

  The light changed on the pavement ahead of him, and Thorne looked up to see the sky darkening rapidly. He watched a ragged finger of cloud point its way behind a glass high-rise on Farringdon Road, and he followed it back toward the West End.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Good of you to have made an effort,” Thorne said. “Eh?”

  Thorne looked over at Hendricks, straight-faced.

  “The dosser’s outfit …”

  “Cheeky fucker.”

  “Honestly, it’s nice of you to try and blend in.

  Maybe you should knock all this medical stuff on the head and try working undercover yourself. You’ve obviously got a gift.”

  “I’m glad one of us has,” Hendricks said.

  Save for the metallic aftertaste of bargain burgers, they might have been relaxing over a takeaway from the Bengal Lancer. Were it not for the rain, and the view of huddled bin bags, they might have been watching TV in Thorne’s front room; arguing about football like a grossly unfit Gary Lineker and a shaven-headed, multipierced Alan Hansen.