Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  When he answered the phone and the caller introduced himself by stating his rank, Brigstocke presumed it was the Army Personnel Centre, or perhaps someone from the regimental HQ in Somerset. He was about to pass on his gratitude for their sterling work in getting the details sent across so quickly.

  But he was not speaking to an ordinary soldier.

  The Special Investigations Branch of the Royal Military Police was the army’s equivalent of the CID. It was their job to investigate the more serious offenses committed against army personnel and their families. An elite force of fewer than two hundred plainclothes detectives selected from RMP ranks, they had teams in constant readiness to be deployed anywhere in the world. But they were also there to investigate serious crimes committed by soldiers; policing their own, in much the same way as the bunch who might well be hauling Tom Thorne across the coals when all this was over. In Brigstocke’s mind, this made them spooks; “rubber-heelers,” because you could never hear the buggers coming. If the ordinary squaddie felt the same way about them as the ordinary copper felt about the DPS, Brigstocke guessed they were as popular as turds in a sandpit.

  Brigstocke was rarely quick to judge—and was certainly not in Tom Thorne’s league—but the SIB man got up his nose from the off. He was a major, which, as far as Brigstocke knew, may well have equated in army terms with his own rank, but there was no reference to it. And certainly no bloody deference. He spoke to Brigstocke as if they were colleagues, which, considering he’d never so much as heard of the bloke before, was hugely irritating.

  As they were talking—or rather as Brigstocke was listening—he kept wondering if he was on the phone to a copper or a soldier; or some bizarre hybrid of the two. The man certainly had twice the arrogance of either…

  And to begin with, at least, he insisted on trying to be jokey. “It’s sod all like they make out on Red Cap,” he said. “The women aren’t nearly so attractive, for a start…”

  “I’ve never watched it,” Brigstocke said.

  The major then went round the houses for a while, chatting about this, that, and every other thing: asking Brigstocke how busy he was and comparing caseloads; no rest for the wicked, no thanks for a job well done, and you didn’t have to be mad to work here but…

  It took maybe ten minutes before he got to the point: “So, this business with the tank crew…”

  Brigstocke repeated what Kitson and Holland had said that first time to Rutherford and Spiby at Media Ops; what they’d said a few days after that when they’d been down to the regiment’s HQ in Somerset. He talked about a complex and consuming murder case: two vagrants who, it transpired, had been ex-servicemen, and two others whom they’d been trying to trace. They were trying to catch a killer; there was no more to it than that.

  “So, how’s it going?”

  “We’re getting there, slowly. You know how it is…”

  “You’ve traced the crew, though. You’ve got all four names now, yes?”

  He’d have got that from the AP Centre. Maybe from Stephen Brereton. It didn’t much matter.

  “Yes, they came through this afternoon.” Thinking: You fuckers don’t hang about, do you? “The army’s been very helpful…”

  “Well, of course, why wouldn’t we be?”

  Brigstocke manufactured a laugh. “No reason,” he said. “But if it’s anything like the Met, sometimes it’s got sod all to do with a desire to help and everything to do with red tape, you know…?”

  There was a pause then. Brigstocke thought he could hear, through the faint hiss on the line, the sound of pages being turned.

  “So, nothing you think we should know about?”

  If Brigstocke were the paranoid kind, he might have heard that as nothing you’re not telling us? If he were really going to town, it might even have been nothing you’re not telling us that we might know already?

  “If I think of anything, I’ll get back to you…”

  Of course, Brigstocke had said nothing at all about the video. He’d been delighted, if a little surprised, that Jesmond, who was normally circumspect about such things, had backed his judgment and authorized him to keep quiet about it.

  “I’m sure we’ll speak again,” the major said, before hanging up.

  They would be told about the videotape at some point. Once it ceased being active evidence, it would be handed quietly over, and then it would be up to the Redcaps what they did about it. Then, Brigstocke felt sure, the man he’d just spoken to would be back on the phone. Only this time, he wouldn’t be quite as matey…

  He was still thinking about these conversations, past and future, while Holland was speaking. He’d come into Brigstocke’s office and begun to talk about the locate/trace he’d set up on Ian Hadingham.

  Brigstocke pushed thoughts of the SIB major to the back of his mind and concentrated on what Dave Holland was telling him.

  “…so I went after his wife instead,” Holland said. “Shireen Hadingham was listed as his next of kin. Not much more bloody luck with her until I started using her maiden name. She’s gone back to calling herself ‘Shireen Collins’…”

  “Her and Hadingham split up?”

  “Not long after he came out of the army.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “Yeah. Five minutes. I spoke to her.”

  “She confirm the tattoo?” Brigstocke asked.

  Holland nodded. “He was very proud of it, by all accounts…”

  On the ceiling, a strip light that was on its way out buzzed and flickered. Brigstocke could feel the day grinding toward its arse end. He was aching to get out of the building; to get home and collapse onto a sofa. He wanted nothing more than to open a bottle and let a few children clamber over him for a while. “Does she know where her ex–old man is?” he asked.

  “Oh yes, and she’s pretty sure he isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Get on with it, Dave…”

  “He’s in Denstone Cemetery, just outside Salford.”

  Brigstocke stared at Holland. He guessed he wouldn’t be opening that bottle for a while yet.

  “That’s the thing,” Holland said. “Ian Hadingham killed himself just under a year ago.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Thorne had parted company from Spike, Caroline, and Terry T a few hours earlier. Caroline had insisted that they’d see him later—“back at our place”—before she and Spike had disappeared, and Terry had wandered off in search of strong drink. On the pretense of doing the same thing, Thorne had gone his own way, grateful for the chance to spend some time alone; to get on the phone to Dave Holland and catch up with developments.

  Things had been moving bloody quickly…

  He’d never been one to write a lot of stuff down; certainly no more than he’d had to, and that was quite enough. He’d grown accustomed to carrying around a lot of information in his head, both mundane and monstrous, and to the fact that some of the grislier details had a habit of lodging there, unwanted, like the melody to some anodyne pop song. Working as he was, though there were a few bits and pieces scribbled on scraps of paper in his rucksack, he was having to remember much more than he normally would.

  Now there were four more names he was not likely to forget in hurry. Hadingham, Eales, Bonser, and Jago. A quartet of soldiers, of killers. Perhaps of dead men…

  Thorne had been less than gobsmacked to learn that ex-corporal Ian Hadingham was already dead. There were no details as yet, but he’d have put money on the fact that this “suicide” was about as kosher as the “accidental” hit-and-run that had killed Trooper Chris Jago. And there was no doubt whatsoever as to how Alec Bonser, the driver of the tank, had died.

  That was three out of four…

  It was by no means clear-cut, of course, but it certainly added credence to the theory that the crew was being targeted by the man who had shot the video; that whoever had been behind the camera on that ugly day in 1991 was doing the killing.

  The warren of pedestrian subways that ran beneath Marble
Arch had probably looked like a good idea on paper; in much the same way that sixties tower blocks had seemed to make perfect sense until those unlucky enough had actually started to live in them. The tunnels honeycombed from Oxford Street to Edgware Road; from the tube station into Hyde Park, in a maze of long, intersecting corridors from which there were no fewer than fourteen different entrances and exits. By day, these subways were eerie enough. Once darkness had fallen, though the subways themselves were well lit for the most part, anyone with any sense would risk sprinting across four lanes of traffic rather than venturing underground.

  When Thorne had been here a few days before, the morning he’d met Holland at Speakers’ Corner, an old woman had been sitting on a bench outside Exit 6, feeding pigeons. It had taken Thorne a few moments to notice her, to make her out clearly behind the curtain of wings, the shifting mass of grays and browns and slick-wet blues that surrounded her. The birds had engulfed the tiny figure, walking across her lap and sitting on her head and shoulders. They swarmed in a grubby mass around her feet and perched on every spare inch of the bench and on the handle of the shopping cart by her side. It had been a disturbing image, as though she might be consumed, but as Thorne had walked past he could see that the woman looked perfectly content. She’d sat there smiling, a cigarette dangling from her lips, talking happily to the pigeons as they flocked to devour only the crumbs from her hand. Thorne had slowed to listen, but whatever the old woman had been saying was lost beneath the noise of the feeding frenzy.

  Now, as he walked toward the subway entrance, there was only a mottled carpet of pigeon shit around the bench as evidence of the woman’s presence. If she were ever to disappear, the council’s cleaning department would have to be considered prime suspects…

  Even halfway down the stairs, the sound changed. The noise of the traffic above had became a hum; a low drone broken only by the bleat of a car horn or the distorted wail of an emergency siren. By the time Thorne was in the subway itself, though the noises from the street had receded, those from closer around him had become amplified. The ordinary sound of a cough, of an empty can blown or kicked along, of his own footsteps, was suddenly spookier; a full second passing between the sound itself and its echo, carried back on the wind that didn’t so much whistle as growl along the concrete corridors.

  The tunnels were about eight feet wide and more or less the same high. Once they might have seemed futuristic, these straight tubes with lights mounted every few feet along the walls, but now they were simply unnerving. Stinking of urine, and danger, and something sickly sweet that Thorne couldn’t quite place.

  The tiles that ran along some walls, and the complex mosaics that were crumbling from others, contrasted with the graffiti-covered metal doors. Thorne guessed they concealed pipework. Small metal speakers were mounted along the ceiling. They were presumably there to carry underground announcements, but something about the place made it easy to imagine a robotic voice conveying information to the survivors of a nuclear blast.

  As Thorne walked deeper into the maze of tunnels, one or two people began to move past him. They all wore rucksacks or carried sleeping bags, and some had large sheets of cardboard folded under their arms. In each corridor there were already a number of people sleeping. At least, Thorne presumed there were; it was difficult to tell, as some of the boxes—the cardboard coffins, eight or ten feet long—could have been empty, but Thorne was fairly sure that most were inhabited. He wondered if the pigeon woman was down here somewhere. He briefly imagined her, boxed up beneath a blanket of dirty feathers, waiting for daylight; for the sound of claw skitter and wing beat.

  When she might feel what it was to be needed again…

  Thorne came to a T-junction and looked both ways. At the far end of the right-hand tunnel he saw two figures sitting against a wall. Spike and Caroline. He watched as Spike stood and whistled to him. He waved and began walking toward them.

  Halfway along the tunnel, Thorne walked past a complex arrangement of boxes: two fastened together, one on top of the other, with a third coming off them at a right angle. A middle-aged black man sat nearby, proprietorial outside his unique sleeping quarters. He wore a baggy gray hat that perfectly matched his beard, and the color of his skin. He looked up from a paperback as Thorne passed and gave him a hard stare. Thorne held the look just long enough to make it clear he knew what he was doing and kept on going.

  When he reached Spike and Caroline, Thorne sat down. He pointed back over his shoulder toward the man who, he guessed, was still staring at him. “Neighborhood watch?”

  “Ollie’s a cool bloke,” Spike said. “He keeps an eye out, you know?”

  Caroline moistened a Rizla and completed a skinny roll-up. “He’s also got the only two-story bedroom down here. It’s like one of those hamster houses.”

  Thorne looked at the two huge cardboard boxes end to end against the wall next to them. “Where do you get these things?”

  “Round the back of Dixon’s,” Spike said. “They’re for fridge freezers, you know? Those big, fuck-off American ones, right, Caz?”

  “We fold ’em up, stash ’em during the day, and then put ’em back together last thing.”

  “It’s flat pack, like.” Spike had taken the tobacco and papers, was busily rolling a fag of his own. “Same as you get from IKEA, only cheaper…”

  Caroline lit her cigarette, inhaled deeply, then pointed to the smaller of the two boxes, letting the smoke go as she spoke. “That one’s yours…”

  Thorne looked, and realized that Spike and Caroline would be sharing the bigger box. That they’d made the other one up for him.

  “We got you some scoff an’ all,” Spike said. “We’ve already had ours…sorry.” He produced a brown KFC bag and handed it to Thorne.

  Thorne felt oddly touched. As he reached across for the bag he was thinking that, in relative terms, there weren’t many people he could think of who’d have done as much for him. There were plenty, with far more to their names than these two, who’d have balked at equivalent acts of generosity.

  “Be stone cold by now, like,” Spike said.

  Thorne opened the beer he’d brought with him. While he tucked hungrily into the food, the three of them talked. And they laughed a lot. Spike was a natural storyteller and Caroline was the perfect foil; she happily fed him cues and helped him recount tales of life on the street, some of them horrific, despite the humor that Spike was able to wring from their telling. It was no different, Thorne thought, from a copper’s war stories; from the gags that flew thick and fast across a room where the walls were smeared with blood and in which one occupant would fail to laugh only because they were dead.

  There hadn’t been a single night since Thorne had come onto the street when he hadn’t sat or lain, desperate for sleep to take away the ache of cold or hunger, and thought that he would give nearly anything for the comfort of his own bed. That he’d have plumbed the depths of depravity for a curry from the Bengal Lancer and a Cash album on the stereo. But, sitting in a stinking subway with two junkies, watching water run down the wall behind them, and with cold KFC settling heavy in his gut, Thorne felt as good as he had in a long while.

  “I want to get the stuff for our flat from IKEA,” Caroline said suddenly. “And I want a big American fridge.”

  Such was the nature of their conversation: tangential; fragmented; comments that referred to conversations long since dead-ended…

  “Got to get the flat first, like,” Spike said. He pushed his legs out straight, then raised his knees, then repeated the action. “Yeah? See what I’m saying? Got to get the fucking flat.”

  “It’ll happen,” Thorne said.

  Caroline sniffed once, twice, and let her head drop back. She banged it against the wall, over and over again, though never quite hard enough to hurt. She spoke like a child, desperate to cling onto a fantasy; to be convinced that it isn’t really the lie she knows it to be. “When…when…when…?”

  “I’m not a fortune-tell
er,” Spike said.

  “Tell me.”

  “When we get enough money. You’ll have to start nicking stuff from a better class of shop…”

  “I know how to get the money.”

  “Fuck that!” Spike was clenching and unclenching his fists; quickly, like he was shaking away a cramp; like he was warming up for something. “Fuck that!”

  Thorne could see that, all in a rush, things were starting to unravel. Their words were not overtly aggressive, but an agitation, an impatience, a pain, was coloring everything they said.

  “You talked once about just needing a bit of luck,” Thorne said. “Remember? You never know when that’s going to happen.”

  “Right, he’s right,” Spike said.

  Caroline snapped her head up and stared at Thorne. “I know it’s going to happen, because it always happens, and it’s always bad.”

  Spike shook his head, kept on shaking it. “No…no way, no way…”

  “I don’t know anyone who has the good sort,” she said. “We only have the shit kind. We get luck that’s fatal…”

  They were starting to talk over each other. “When it comes, we’ll have enough money to get everything we want. Everything.” Spike was grinning from ear to ear, jabbering, high and fast. “We’ll get a place with room for loads of fucking fridges and the best sound system and all great stuff in the kitchen and whatever…”

  “You’re dreaming…”

  “We can have massive parties, and when we feel like it we can check into one of them posh places in the country and get straight, and then when we’re well and truly sorted we can get Robbie back…”

  Caroline flinched and dragged her eyelids down. When she opened them again, though she made no sound, her eyes were wide behind a film of tears. She cast them down to the floor, her fingers spinning the thin leather bracelets around her wrist.

  “He’s here,” Spike said suddenly.

  As fast as Thorne could turn to see the man walking toward them down the tunnel, Caroline was on her feet and on her way to meet him. It didn’t take very long. There were not much more than half a dozen grunted words of exchange before the more important commodities were handed over.