Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne took a mouthful of beer and swallowed. “A series?”

  “Looks likely.”

  “And now there’s been another one?”

  “Night before last. Same area, same sort of age, but there are differences. There was no money left on the body.”

  “Unless it was taken.”

  “That’s possible, obviously. No money was found on the body.”

  “You said differences. What else?”

  “He’s still breathing,” Brigstocke said. Thorne raised his eyebrows. “Not that the poor bugger knows a great deal about it. Name’s Paddy Hayes. He’s on life support at the Middlesex…”

  Thorne felt a shudder, like cold fingers brushing against the soft hairs at the nape of his neck. He remembered a girl he’d known a few years earlier: attacked and left a fraction from death by a man who’d murdered three before her. Helpless, kept alive by machines. When they’d found her, the police thought that the man they were after had made his first mistake. It was Thorne who had worked out that this killer wasn’t actually trying to kill anyone. That what he’d done to this girl was what he’d been attempting with the rest of his victims. It was one of those ice-cold/white-hot moments when Thorne had realized the truly monstrous nature of what he was up against.

  There’d been far too many since.

  “So you think Hayes is part of the pattern or not?”

  “It’s a bloody coincidence if he isn’t.”

  “How did you get his ID?”

  “Again, nothing official on him, but we found a letter jammed down inside a pocket. Someone from the day center where he hung out took a look at him and confirmed the name. They had to take a damn good look, though. His head looked like a sack of rotten fruit.”

  “What sort of letter?”

  “From his son. Telling his father just how much of a useless, drunken bastard he was. How he couldn’t give a toss if he never set eyes on him again.” With a finger, Brigstocke pushed what was left of an ice cube around his glass. “Now the son’s the one who’s got to decide whether or not to pull the plug…”

  Thorne grimaced. “So I take it you’re not exactly on the verge of making an arrest?”

  “It was always going to be a pig,” Brigstocke said. “When the first one wasn’t sorted within a week it started to look very dodgy, and as soon as the second body turned up they were passing the case around like a turd. That’s when we ran out of luck and picked the bloody thing up. Just after you went gardening, as it happens.”

  “Maybe God was punishing you.”

  “Somebody’s fucking punishing me. I’ve had officers on fourteen-hour tours for three weeks and we’re precisely nowhere.”

  “Grief from above?”

  “Grief from everywhere. The commissioner’s on our back because he’s getting it in the neck from every homeless charity and pressure group out there. They seem to think because we aren’t making any obvious progress that we must be dragging our feet. That, basically, we don’t care.”

  “Do we?”

  Brigstocke ignored him. “So now it’s a political issue, and we’re fucked because the homeless community itself has bought into this idea that we’re not trying very hard. So they’ve more or less stopped talking to us.”

  “You can hardly blame them, though…”

  “I’m not blaming them. They’ve got every right to be suspicious.”

  “They’ve got every right to be scared, if there’s a killer out there. These are people who can’t lock the door, remember.”

  They said nothing for a few moments. Dido had given way to Norah Jones. Thorne wondered if there was an album titled Now That’s What I Call Scampi in a Basket.

  “There’s another reason they’re not talking to us,” Brigstocke said. Thorne looked up from the beer mat. “There was a statement taken early on from a kid sleeping rough. He reckoned that a police officer had been asking questions.”

  Thorne jammed a fist under his chin. “Sorry, I’m probably being a bit bloody thick, but…”

  “It was before the first murder. He claimed that a police officer had been asking questions the day before the first body was found. Showing a picture. Like he was looking for someone.”

  “Looking for who, exactly? I mean, this is the victim you still haven’t identified, right?” Brigstocke nodded. “So didn’t this person who was supposedly looking for him mention his name?”

  “We could check if we had such a thing as a name and address for the kid who gave the statement. Honestly, nothing about this is simple, Tom.”

  Thorne watched Brigstocke take a drink. Took one himself. “A copper?”

  “We’ve had to tread a bit bloody carefully.”

  “Keep it out of the press, you mean?”

  Brigstocke raised his voice, irritated. “Come on, you know damn well that’s not the only reason we don’t want it plastered all over the papers…”

  “‘It is considered good practice to deliberately withhold details of the MO used by the offender.’” Thorne yawned theatrically as he quoted from the most recent edition of the Murder Investigation Manual, the detective’s bible.

  “Right, like the money left on the bodies. So we know the other killings weren’t copycats.”

  “You can’t be sure about Paddy Hayes,” Thorne said.

  “No…”

  Thorne knew that there were certainly sound procedural grounds for keeping things quiet. But he also knew that even the possible involvement of a police officer in a case such as this would make the Job’s top brass extremely jumpy.

  Thorne could see that the next day’s press conference made sense. The third body had undoubtedly forced a swift and radical change in media strategy. Now the public had to be told—but only up to a point—what was going on. It was all spelled out in the Murder Investigation Manual: the public had to be reassured, advised, appealed to.

  The Met, of course, was also doing the smart thing by covering its arse. God forbid any more bodies should turn up and they had forgotten that the public also needed to be warned.

  “So, what do you think?” Brigstocke said. “Any bright ideas?”

  “I think you need to forget about mineral water and go and get yourself a proper drink. A beer gut’s the least of your worries.”

  “Seriously…”

  “Seriously?” Thorne swilled what little beer there was left around in the bottom of his glass. “You should have tried picking my brains before you bought me three pints of Stella, mate.” He puffed out his cheeks, let the air out slowly. “My afternoon of ‘recruitment demographics’ is shot to shit as it is.”

  THREE

  It was a forty-minute tube ride home from St. James’s Park. As soon as he walked through his front door that evening, he took the CD from his Walkman and transferred it into his main deck. It was part of a boxed set of outtakes and demos from the American Recordings sessions, released a few months after Johnny Cash had died in 2003. Thorne cued up “Redemption Song”—a cover of the Bob Marley classic that Cash had recorded with Joe Strummer. Neither of them had lived to see its release.

  Thorne moved around the kitchen, making tea, wondering at how Marley and Strummer could both have gone so young, while Mick Hucknall and Phil Collins were still walking around.

  Though he’d been joking with Brigstocke, Thorne hadn’t actually got a whole lot done that afternoon. He’d stared at columns of figures, had stabbed perfunctorily at his keyboard, but all the time he’d been thinking about Paddy Hayes and the machines that were keeping him alive. Thinking about the letter the man had carried in his pocket. About the damn good look those who knew him had needed before they were able to confirm his identity.

  Thorne carried his tea through to the sitting room. He sat and considered everything that Brigstocke had told him, and why. Now that those who were seemingly being targeted had stopped talking to the police, the investigation would stutter and stall very bloody quickly. In all probability, it would grind spectacularly to a halt.r />
  Russell Brigstocke had to have been pretty desperate to come to him for advice in the first place. From what Thorne had heard about the case, that desperation was well founded.

  So, what do you think?

  In the silence between the tracks, Thorne could hear the distant hum of traffic from the Kentish Town Road, the rumble of a train on the overground line that ran to Camden Town or Gospel Oak. He felt suddenly nostalgic for those few months earlier in the year when he’d shared the flat with Phil Hendricks, whose own place was being treated for damp. It had been cramped and chaotic, with Hendricks dossing down on the sofa bed, and there’d been a good deal of arguing. He remembered the two of them drunkenly rowing about football the day before Hendricks had moved out. That would have been a couple of weeks before the fire…

  Before the fire. Not “before my father died.”

  That was the way his mind tended to go: the comforting way, toward the absolute. There was a fire. The fire was a fact. So was his father’s death, of course, but even to form the phrase in his head was to invite in the doubt and the torment to fuck with him for a time. To crack open the carapace of everyday nonsense and force that fissure wider, until it gaped. Until Thorne could do nothing but shut himself down and wait for the churning in his guts and the pounding in his head to stop.

  He guessed that Hendricks had done the postmortems on Mannion and the first victim. That he’d also do the PM on Paddy Hayes when the time came. Hendricks hadn’t mentioned the case when they’d spoken, but then Holland had been a bit cagey about it, too. Thorne knew that they were trying to protect him. They believed he was better off where he was. Uninvolved.

  Grief and work, so everybody seemed to think, were mutually exclusive. Each got in the way of the other.

  Any bright ideas?

  Perhaps, though, he wasn’t sure how bright it was…

  Moving to the window, Thorne could feel the draft creeping beneath the sash. Not so long ago the country had been at a standstill for a week as temperatures climbed toward three figures. Now, three weeks into August, the summer was on its last legs. He thought about how those who lived on the streets were at the mercy of the seasons. How that first hint of autumn would change everything. For those who slept outdoors, who had no other options, a harsh winter could be far more serious than any amount of burst pipes or shunts on black ice.

  Not so long ago…

  Thorne blinked and remembered the feel of the pew beneath him. The smell of himself, sweating in a black suit. No more than three rows filled and most of them there to support him. Feeling a bead of perspiration roll behind his ear and creep down inside the tight, white collar. Knowing he would soon have to stand up and say something…

  He couldn’t carry on with what he was doing now. He wasn’t ready to go back to what he’d done before. He could work through grief, or he could grieve at work, but guilt choked the life out of everything.

  He moved quickly to the phone and dialed.

  “You should think about sending an officer in undercover. Among the rough sleepers.” Thorne wasn’t sure if Brigstocke was thinking about his suggestion or had just been stunned into silence. “It makes sense,” he continued. “Nobody’s talking to you. I can’t see there are many other options.”

  “It’ll take too long to set up.”

  “I don’t see why; it isn’t complicated. You’re sending one officer onto the streets, into that community. All we need to set up is a simple line of communication with him.”

  “I’ll talk to Jesmond, see what he thinks. See if he can find anybody. Thanks for the call, Tom…”

  “Give it some thought, will you?”

  A shorter silence this time and then a snort. “How much more have you had to drink since lunchtime?”

  “I can do this, Russell. I did the course…”

  “Don’t be so bloody stupid. An Undercover Two course?”

  “Right…”

  “And how many years ago was that?”

  Thorne tuned Brigstocke out momentarily. Elvis was rubbing herself against his shins. He wondered who would feed her if he was away for a while. The woman upstairs would do it if he asked her nicely. She had a couple of her own cats…

  “I’m hardly going deep inside an organized-crime firm, am I?” Thorne said. “I can’t see how this can be high risk. We’re talking about gathering information, that’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes…”

  “So you haven’t really thought about this bloke who’s going round kicking people to death?”

  “I want to help catch the fucker, yes.”

  “What, you think you can…draw him out or something?”

  “I don’t see how I could…”

  “Some crap like that?”

  “No.”

  “How does putting yourself in danger help anyone, Tom? How does it help you?”

  “I’m just going to sleep rough, for Christ’s sake,” Thorne said. “Presuming for a second that this killer is still around, how can it be dangerous if he doesn’t know I’m there?”

  He heard the click of a lighter on the other end of the phone. There was a pause and then the noisy exhalation of smoke.

  “The mouse doesn’t know there’s cheese on the trap,” Brigstocke said. “But we still call it bait…”

  FOUR

  If a man jumped out in front of him with a severed head in one hand and a blood-spattered ax in the other, gibbering about how the voices in his head had made him do it, Detective Superintendent Trevor Jesmond would be a little out of his depth. He was not, however, a man who thought the Murder Investigation Manual was boring, and when it came to “Communications Strategy”—Chapter Seven, Section Seven, Subsection Two (Managing the Media)—there was nobody to touch him.

  “Let me stress again that the victim of this despicable crime is among the most vulnerable members of our society. His attacker is someone whom we believe has killed twice already. Make no mistake, we will do whatever it takes to apprehend this man before he has a chance to kill again.”

  They were gathered in the press room at Colindale Police Station; five minutes away from the Peel Centre, where the Murder Squad was based in Becke House. Thorne watched from the back. Staring across the heads of several dozen assembled hacks. Leaning one way and then another to get a clear view of the stage between an assortment of camera tripods.

  “Is this latest victim expected to live?”

  “Mr. Hayes is in a critical condition. He is presently on life support at Middlesex Hospital. Without talking further to those doctors caring for him, I’m not in a position to give any more information than that.”

  There can’t have been too many people in the room who couldn’t work out that Paddy Hayes was fucked.

  “You’ve suggested that the attempted murder of Mr. Hayes is connected to the two other murders of rough sleepers. That this latest attack is part of a series—”

  Jesmond held up a hand, nodded. He was acknowledging that the journalist was right, but only up to a point. He was also stopping him before he ventured too far down that avenue of questioning. Of course, they’d had to come out and admit that the murders were connected. When the tabloids were putting two and two together, the Met could not afford to appear dim by looking as if they hadn’t.

  “We must assume there’s a connection, yes,” Jesmond said.

  “So we’re talking about motiveless killings, then? Random attacks?”

  A grim half smile. “DCI Brigstocke and his team believe that they are hunting a killer who has struck before. The investigation is proceeding, vigorously, along those lines.”

  He was playing it very nicely. Striking that essential balance between reassurance and warning. It was, of course, crucial not to alarm the public.

  Thorne knew, as Jesmond must have known, that, irrespective of what was said, the papers would print stories about a serial killer. It would shift copies quicker than Posh and Becks, and Fleet Street editors didn’t have
any qualms about alarming anybody.

  It was a phrase Thorne hated. He had caught, and not caught, a number of those who had murdered strangers, and none had borne the slightest resemblance to the creature conjured up by the words serial killer. All the men and women he’d known who had taken more than one life had done so with what they believed to be good reason. None had thought themselves superhuman, or hunted their victims when the moon was full. They had motives for what they did that had nothing to do with being locked in a cellar when they were children, or made to dress up in their mother’s clothes…

  “As always, we are seeking the cooperation of the public in helping to put an end to these appalling attacks.”

  The appeal was textbook stuff. Jesmond gave out the salient facts, insisted that anyone with information, anyone who was in the vicinity, had a duty to come forward. It would, more than likely, prove useless. There can’t have been many people hanging around in dark alleyways in the dead of night, and if there had been, it was unlikely, for one reason or another, that any of them would want to come forward. Still, it had to be done, and it had to be specific: dates and times and localities. The last thing they needed was a bland, generalized plea that gave out the wrong message.

  We haven’t got the first idea who’s doing this, but somebody out there must know something. Please help us…

  “We will catch this man,” Jesmond said, winding up. Public confidence was important but so was his own, and he made a point of showing it. Hearts and minds were not won by being mealymouthed. His body language and the expression on his face were determined and dynamic. Thorne could easily picture him learning how to project the image, on a weekend course at a country-house hotel. It was as though he were inviting those present to take a bloody careful note of the message, written in foot-high letters across the smart, blue Metropolitan Police backdrop: working for a safer london.

  Thorne knew that it was smoke and mirrors.

  The press conference was there as much as anything to project an image of confidence and efficiency, but Thorne knew that the investigation was in trouble. He knew it was easy enough to marshal resources, to gather significant numbers of officers and be gung ho about catching a killer when it was only for forty-five minutes in front of the media.