Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  Eales’s flat was small, but smart and extremely tidy. Once inside, he saw a tightly winding flight of stairs covered in coir matting rose straight into a bed-sitting room, with an arch at one end leading through to a tiny kitchen, and a door at the other, which Mackillop presumed opened into the bathroom.

  Eales was putting his shopping into cupboards while Mackillop sat on a stiff-backed chair in the bedroom, still unable to believe how jammy he’d been.

  “I know it’s not huge,” Eales shouted through from the kitchen. “But I don’t have a lot of stuff…”

  Mackillop was buzzing. He felt like he’d been in the Job for years. He couldn’t wait to clock the look on Stone’s face when he finally turned up; when the DC saw which of them had really got lucky that lunchtime.

  “You still wouldn’t believe what the rent is, mind you…”

  “It’s nice,” Mackillop said, meaning it. His own flat in a modern block was bigger, but strictly functional. He liked the polished floor in this place, the stripped beams in the ceiling, and the stained-glass panels in the bathroom door.

  “It’ll do,” Eales said.

  “It’d do for me…”

  “Good job I’ve just done a shop.” Eales was walking in from the kitchen brandishing an unopened packet of biscuits. “Coffee won’t be a sec.” He handed the packet across and turned back toward the kitchen. “If your partner’s going to be a while, you might as well put your feet up…”

  While he waited for his coffee Mackillop continued to look around. Eales had said that he didn’t have much, but Mackillop thought he could be fairly positive about at least one of the ex-trooper’s possessions; the one which, without any doubt, would be the most valuable. There was a VCR beneath the small TV at the end of the bed, and a number of unmarked videotapes piled on top of it. Mackillop couldn’t help but wonder…

  “Why have you not contacted us, Mr. Eales?” he asked.

  Eales walked back through, handed a mug to Mackillop, and sat down on the edge of his bed. “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he said.

  “You did know we were trying to trace you, though? You didn’t seem very surprised to find a policeman on your doorstep.”

  “A little, maybe.”

  “It was obvious you knew who I was looking for.”

  “I didn’t know anything until I saw it on the TV the other night. I’ve not seen a newspaper in a while. I’ve barely been out of the house.”

  Mackillop took out a biscuit from the packet on the floor, held it up. “Except to go shopping.”

  “Once every couple of days,” Eales said. “You’ve got to get supplies in. And when I go, I don’t hang about.”

  “You’ve been keeping your head down?”

  “Something like that.”

  Mackillop knew why, of course. Even with his life under threat, Eales would hardly have been mustard-keen to go to the police; to explain the reason why he was next on a killer’s list. Mackillop also knew that, by questioning him, he was almost certainly moving well beyond his remit. So far, he hadn’t been short of luck, but the sensible part of him was wondering just how far he could push it. “I’m guessing it’s not your name on the rent book…”

  “It’s a name I use sometimes.” Eales slurped his coffee. “I pay the rent, and that’s all anyone seems bothered about.”

  “You’ve not used your real name for a while, have you?”

  Eales walked over, leaned down to grab a few biscuits, then sat again. “Have I not?”

  “I know that because we’ve looked. Everywhere…”

  “I didn’t think you were here to nick me for not filling in forms correctly.”

  “I’m not,” Mackillop said. “But it’s natural to wonder why you might be so keen to stay anonymous.” He watched as Eales downed the rest of his coffee in three or four swift gulps; amazed, as his own mug was still hot to the touch.

  Eales stood, gestured with his empty mug. “I’m going to get some more.”

  Mackillop followed him toward the kitchen. “Mr. Eales…”

  “I’ve moved around a lot in the last few years.” Eales spoke with his back to Mackillop, taking coffee and sugar from the cupboard, moving across to the fridge for milk. “I’ve done a few strange jobs, you know? Worked for one or two dodgy characters…”

  “Dodgy how?”

  “Dodgy, as in secret. I do what they pay me for, I fuck off and I keep my mouth shut. This isn’t the sort of work you pick up at the Job Centre, you know?”

  Mackillop thought about it, guessed that Eales was talking about working as a mercenary. He watched the man’s shoulders moving beneath his sweatshirt. Eales certainly looked as though he kept himself useful. “We’re not really interested in what you’ve been doing,” he said. “We’re actually here for your own good. But I think you know that, don’t you?”

  Eales turned, looked at him.

  Mackillop was starting to grow impatient with the caginess; tired of going round the houses. Here was someone who’d taken part in a brutal war crime; their only hope of catching a man who’d perpetrated an atrocity of his own fifteen years down the line.

  “Do you know why we’ve been trying to find you, Mr. Eales?”

  Eales began to look a little nervous. He reached for his mug and dropped his head to sip from it. Mackillop waited a few seconds, then pulled out his phone, deciding that maybe it was a good time to see how far away Stone was…

  Eales moved forward, suddenly enough to slop hot coffee across the floor. To make Mackillop step back. “Show me your warrant card again. Straightaway, please.”

  Mackillop did as Eales asked. Watched as he took a few moments to regain control and recover his composure.

  “I’m sorry for…sorry about that,” Eales said. “You know damn well that I’ve got every right to be a bit jumpy, so let’s not kid each other.” He snatched a tea towel from the worktop, tossed it onto the spill, and pushed it around with his foot as he spoke. “I knew Ian Hadingham had topped himself last year, all right? Supposedly topped himself. And I knew Chris Jago was missing because I’d tried to get in touch with him. So that, on top of Hadingham, was enough to make me nervous. Then I open a paper three weeks ago and see a picture of a dead man who looks very much like Alec Bonser. I see his picture, and I see a picture like this…” He rolled up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. There were several tattoos: a row of Chinese symbols, two Celtic bands, a lion’s head—but the important one was high up, just below the shoulder.

  Letters faded to the blue of his eyes:

  O+

  S.O.F.A.

  “I’ve no idea if he killed Chris Jago or not, but I’m the fourth member of that crew, and I want to stay alive as long as possible, thank you very much. I’m not claiming to be Brain of Britain. I was just a pig-thick squaddie, but it seemed like a good idea to keep a fairly low profile. Like you said, I kept my head down, and I’ve got away with it. Until now, at any rate.” Eales shrugged, blew on his coffee. “You lot might want to talk to me, but last time I checked, that wasn’t fatal.”

  Mackillop felt like straps were being fastened tight across his chest. Dry-mouthed in a second, he sucked in the words and tried to arrange them into the question that was begging to be asked: You’ve no idea of who killed Chris Jago?

  But he said nothing. The suspicion that he was out of his depth had suddenly become a horrible certainty. He felt like he was back on the course, that this was part of some elaborate training exercise. It was as if Eales were one of his tutors playing a role and this was the crucial point in the assessment process. The part where he could fuck up everything if he wasn’t very careful. Mackillop knew that he was being given the chance to put the big question, but he also knew that the moment belonged by right, and by seniority, to others.

  Eales nodded toward the mug in Mackillop’s hand. “Do you want another one of those?”

  The clever thing to do, the correct thing, was to back off a little. To sit tight, and wait for Andy Stone to arrive. Mac
killop handed the mug across and turned back toward the bed-sitting room.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The Latest Victim. The First Picture…

  The newspaper felt a little spongy. It was stained in places by whatever liquid had pooled, brown and viscous, in the bottom of the bin. But the headline remained stark enough; the expression on the face of the young Terry Turner still hopeful, and heartbreaking.

  “Weird to see him looking so young,” Maxwell said. “Without the bloody padlock…”

  Thorne tore through the pages until he found the one he was after: the photo of another young man, this one in uniform, staring into the camera; wide-eyed and half smiling, like it didn’t much matter what was coming.

  Thorne got up off his knees. “Look at this.” He folded the newspaper over and handed it across.

  Maxwell stared at the picture for a few seconds, at the appeal for information beneath it, then turned back to Thorne. The expression on his face made it clear that he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at; what he was meant to be seeing.

  “Could that be him?” Thorne asked.

  Maxwell went back to the photo. “This bloke?”

  “Could he be our Detective Sergeant Trevor Morley?”

  “How old’s this picture?”

  “Just look, Bren…”

  Maxwell did as he was told. Let out a long, slow breath…

  Thorne moved quickly across to stand alongside him, nodded down at the photograph. “That was taken when he joined up in the late eighties.” He suddenly remembered the digitally aged version that had been broadcast the night before; that Hendricks had talked about watching. “Did you not see this on Crimewatch last night?”

  “I was out,” Maxwell said.

  “Shit…”

  “I was out on the streets, doing my fucking job. Fair enough?”

  “Just stick twenty years on his face, all right? He’d be late thirties now, somewhere round there. Hair longer, obviously. A beard. From what you said, the coloring’s the same, right?”

  “Sandy, but with some gray. And the freckles are darker, but I suppose that would have happened…”

  “Look at the mouth,” Thorne said. “The smile would almost certainly be the same.”

  “Maybe. Yeah…this could be him.”

  “’Could be,’ or is?”

  “Jesus. I should have looked at this properly when I saw it the first time. I read about what had happened to Terry; that’s all. I never really took this in.”

  “Well, now’s your chance. Come on, Brendan.”

  Maxwell stabbed at the page. “The face has filled out a bit and it’s lined. Not wrinkles exactly; hard lines, like creases, you know? Like it’s weathered.”

  It was good enough…

  Thorne knew that they’d made a huge mistake; that they should at least have considered the possibility of this for longer and not dismissed it as quickly as they had. Though the evidence had certainly pointed toward the man behind the camera, they’d got it the wrong way round.

  “It’s me…”

  “What?” Maxwell turned, thinking that Thorne was talking to him, but he saw that Thorne had his phone pressed hard to his ear.

  “We’ve been idiots, Russell,” Thorne said. “Ryan Eales isn’t the next one on the list. He’s the one who’s been working his way through it…”

  Ryan Eales turned side on, leaned against the wall in the archway between kitchen and bed-sitting room. “Bit of luck that I came back when I did. That you were sitting outside in your car like that.”

  “We’d have knocked on your door eventually,” Mackillop said.

  “I might not have answered it.”

  Which would, Mackillop thought, have been understandable. All in all, things had turned out pretty well. It was equally likely that, if there had been no reply, and the man in the ground-floor flat turned out to have been the pothead Eales said he was, nobody would have bothered coming back. Mackillop laughed. “I suppose we should be grateful that you’d run out of biscuits,” he said.

  “Right…”

  The weather had changed suddenly yet again. Sunshine was screaming in through the big bay window and a smaller skylight toward the bathroom, flashing where it kissed the white walls and the varnish on the honey-colored floorboards. From where he was standing, near the top of the stairs, Mackillop saw the gleam from two pairs of boots, highly polished and placed side by side between bed and wardrobe. He saw magazines neatly piled beneath the bedside table and freshly ironed shirts folded symmetrically on a chair next to the bathroom door. “You can tell the person who lives here’s ex-army,” he said.

  Eales seemed to find this funny. “How come?”

  “The boots.” Mackillop pointed across to them. “The way they’re arranged; the way everything’s laid out. Neat, you know, and well organized.”

  “It’s just the way we’re taught to do things.”

  “It must take a lot of effort, though.”

  “Not really,” Eales said. “You do things a particular way because it makes sense. Being organized and tidy makes things simpler.”

  Mackillop considered this. “I thought about the army myself before I joined the Met. For a short while, anyway.”

  “You’d’ve been good.”

  “You reckon?”

  “Chances are, if you’re a good copper.”

  “Getting there,” Mackillop said. He felt himself redden slightly. Looked around the room once again. “Yeah, definitely a soldier’s place…”

  Eales smiled. “Look underneath the bed.”

  Mackillop glanced across, then started to move when Eales nodded his encouragement. As he bent down he could see that the base of the bed was actually a drawer. He pulled it out and found himself staring at a collection of military memorabilia: a dress uniform, pressed and folded; a gas mask; badges and medals displayed in open cases; bundles of photographs. And weapons: grenades, guns, a highly polished bayonet…

  “Bloody hell!”

  “Don’t worry, the guns have been decommissioned,” Eales said. “Firing pins removed and barrels drilled.”

  Mackillop reached toward one of the pistols. “May I?”

  “Help yourself. That smaller one’s a Browning nine-millimeter. It’s Iraqi.”

  Mackillop’s hand hovered above the gun. He wondered if it had once belonged to one of those soldiers he’d seen kneeling in the desert. Taken from him before another was put to the back of his head. He picked up the bayonet instead.

  “That’s seriously sharp, by the way.”

  “I bet.” Mackillop stood and held the bayonet up in front of himself. In the skinny mirror of its blade he could see the refelction of bathroom door, the TV and VCR, the black wire that snaked across the floor from the PlayStation to the controller.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” Eales said.

  “This might sound morbid, and a bit…geeky or whatever.” Mackillop turned the hilt, throwing a sliver of reflected sunlight across Eales’s face. “Has this thing ever…killed anyone?”

  Eales walked across and took the bayonet from Mackillop’s hand. “This?” he said. He examined the blade as if he were seeing it for the first time, leaned forward, and slid it into Mackillop’s belly. “Not until now…”

  The policeman’s hands flew to the hilt, wrapped themselves tight around the soldier’s; hands that were bigger and stronger and drier. He tried to push, and when he opened his mouth he produced only the gentle pop of a bubble bursting.

  “You ready?” Eales asked. “Here we go.” He nodded, counting quietly to three, before twisting the bayonet and dragging it up hard, through muscle, toward the sternum.

  Mackillop sighed, then sucked the air quickly back in, as if he’d just dipped a foot into a hot bath or touched a sensitive filling.

  There was only the sound of breathing for a while after that, labored and bubbly, and the low moan of boards beneath shifting feet, as both sets of fingers grew slippery against the hilt.

 
“Luck always runs out in the end,” Eales said.

  And he never broke eye contact, not for a moment. Holding fast to what was bright in Jason Mackillop’s eyes, which seemed to blaze, just for that final second or two, before it went out. Like the last dot of life as a TV screen fades to black, shrinking quickly from a world to a pinprick.

  And then nothing.

  Part Four

  Finished Falling

  THIRTY-FIVE

  At first, so he told everyone later, he thought that Mackillop had simply got tired of waiting for him and buggered off…

  By the time Andy Stone’s taxi had finally worked its way through the Saturday-afternoon traffic and reached the house where Asif Mahmoud lived, the Volvo was nowhere to be seen and Jason Mackillop wasn’t answering his phone. Stone had visited the ground-floor flat. He’d been told by Mr. Mahmoud that though he hadn’t seen any police officers, he had heard comings and goings. Someone had come into the house a short time earlier, then left again fairly soon afterward. Stone had immediately knocked at the other three flats in the building—including, of course, the one on the top floor—but had received no reply.

  Confused and pissed off, he had decided to head back to Becke House, so had made his way to the tube station. It wasn’t until thirty minutes later, when he got above ground at Colindale, that the message had come through about Ryan Eales…

  “How long d’you think Stone missed him by?” Thorne asked.

  Holland was pulling sheets of paper from his case. He looked up. “Impossible to say for sure. It must have been pretty close, though. Hendricks has the time of death at somewhere between one-thirty and two-thirty…”

  “I was calling Brigstocke just after two,” Thorne said. “We should have moved faster. I should have moved faster.”

  When, after an hour, TDC Mackillop could still not be contacted, a team had been dispatched back to West Finchley. While the car—which was found in a side street behind Finchley Central Station—was being towed away, witnesses described seeing it parked outside the house on Rosedene Way. A woman who’d been walking her dog gave an accurate description of Mackillop, and a man who lived opposite gave a statement saying that he’d seen the driver of the car talking to someone on the street.