Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  More officers had gathered, serious and uneasy, as the Saturday began to dim. An armed unit was called into position. Residents were evacuated and the road was sealed off, before finally—five hours after he’d driven into Rosedene Way—the door to the top flat at number forty-eight was smashed open, and Jason Mackillop was found…

  Thorne had never met the murdered trainee. He wasn’t sure whether that made it easier or not to deal with his death, but it certainly made it easier to idealize him as a victim. Thorne didn’t know if Mackillop had bad breath or a foul temper; if he fancied himself or was close to his family. He’d never seen him at work, or fallen out with him, or heard him talk about anything important. Thorne knew only that he was naive, and keen, and almost ridiculously young. This not knowing made Jason Mackillop less real than many victims. But it didn’t mean that the dirty great slab of guilt that had been laid down on top of the others had any less weight.

  “He shouldn’t have gone in there on his own,” Holland said.

  Thorne looked wrung out by exhaustion and anger. “That doesn’t help.”

  “It’s all Andy Stone’s got to hold on to…”

  It was Monday afternoon; two days since Ryan Eales had murdered Jason Mackillop and fled. Police, continuing to investigate the killings of homeless men in and around the West End, had taken a room at the London Lift to conduct interviews, including one with a rough sleeper known only as Tom.

  Thorne and Holland were catching up…

  “He must have got out of there in one hell of a hurry,” Holland said. “No money in the place, but he seems to have left more or less everything else behind.”

  They were in a poky, self-contained office in one corner of the bigger, open-plan admin area: a small sofa and a chair; a desk with a grimy computer and several heaps of cardboard files. The day was gray outside the frosted glass of a thin window. Thorne took the sheets as they were handed to him. “He knew that after what he’d done it wouldn’t much matter if we got hold of this stuff. And it’s not like any of it gives us a name, is it?”

  Holland passed yet more paper across: photocopies of documentation found during the search of Eales’s flat. All indicated that although Eales had killed the other three men in his tank crew, as well as Radio Bob, Terry T, and the others, he’d actually been working with somebody else. Or rather, for somebody else…

  The man behind the camera.

  Thorne had been made aware of all this within hours of the entry into Eales’s flat, but this was his first look at the material evidence. He flicked through the bank statements and credit-card slips as Holland talked.

  “Half a dozen different accounts, in four different names, and he managed to empty all but one of them before he did his vanishing act. Major payments into one or other of his accounts within a few days of Jago’s death, and Hadingham’s ‘suicide.’ Money paid in after each killing.”

  “All in cash?”

  “All in cash, and completely untraceable to anybody. He was well paid for what he did.”

  “He was very good at it,” Thorne said.

  Holland dug out another piece of paper from his case and held it out. “And very good at not being caught…”

  Thorne took the sheet and began to read.

  “I meant to tell you about this,” Holland said. “Then, when everything kicked off on Saturday afternoon, you know, I thought it could wait.” He pointed. “That’s how they got away with it. Remember, we were talking about what they did with the bodies of the Iraqi soldiers? When we went to Taunton they told us about these war diaries, and at the time I didn’t think it was worth chasing up, because our boys would only have been mentioned if they’d been wounded or commended…”

  Thorne saw where it was going. “You’re shitting me…”

  “I just double-checked.”

  Thorne read the words aloud. “‘Callsign 40 from B-Troop, under the command of Corporal Ian Hadingham, engaged with and destroyed an enemy tank, killing all four on board…’”

  “The Iraqi tank surrendered,” Holland said, “or was captured or whatever. Then, after they’d shot them, Eales and the others just put the bodies back in the tank and blew the thing to shit. Whether anybody ever found out or not…”

  “They got commended?” Thorne looked as though he might be close to tears of one sort or another. “Christ on a bike…”

  Holland was rummaging in his briefcase again. “Something else that just came through. We finally got the transcript back from that lab in California: the techies who enhanced the sound on the video.” He passed across the sheaf of papers and closed his case.

  Thorne took what was handed to him without really looking at it and placed it on the desk with the rest of the paperwork. He groped for the swivel chair behind him and slid clumsily onto it. “Another couple of loose ends tied up. It’s all good, I suppose…”

  “None of it gets us anywhere, though. Right?”

  The silence that hung between them for the next few seconds was answer enough.

  “So what’s happening indoors?”

  “Everyone’s busy,” Holland said. “Fired up, like you’d expect, you know, but…”

  “Aimless,” Thorne said.

  “The Intel Unit’s digging around. Hoping that the paper trail might throw up an address or something. Somewhere Eales might hole up.”

  Thorne was dismissive. “He’s long gone.”

  And Holland didn’t argue. He suspected that the brass had already taken the decision to scale down surveillance at all ports and airports.

  The fact was that Mackillop’s death and Eales’s flight had torn the guts out of the investigation, and everyone knew it. It might, in other circumstances, have been what united the team and drove it on with renewed vigor, but this was more coffin nail than spur. Though they wanted Eales more badly than ever, they had to accept that, for the time being at least, they weren’t likely to find him. And, despite what they now knew, there was little chance, without Eales, of ever catching the man who’d bankrolled at least half a dozen killings over a year or more. Overstretched budgets were always important factors, as were limited resources and time constraints, but once a team lost the appetite for it, everything else became secondary.

  “What did Brigstocke say?” Holland asked. He had a pretty good idea, of course, and wondered if he was overstepping the mark by asking. But he guessed correctly that Thorne had long since forgotten, or stopped caring, where such marks were.

  “He was ‘officially’ telling me that the undercover operation was to be wound down. That I should go home and have a bath…”

  Thorne was obviously making light of it, but Holland wasn’t sure whether to smile or not. “When?”

  “I’ll stay out another night, I think.”

  “Okay…”

  “There’s a few people I need to say good-bye to.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then a decent curry, a good night’s sleep, probably a very pissed-off cat…”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Holland said.

  Thorne smiled. “I know it isn’t.”

  Brigstocke had called the evening before, when the dust kicked up by Mackillop’s murder had begun to settle. He’d made it clear that he was brooking no argument as far as pulling Thorne off the street was concerned, so Thorne didn’t waste any time by initiating one. Eales had gone. There would be no more killings. There was no longer any point. When it came to exactly what Thorne would be returning to, Brigstocke was a little less dogmatic. It may just have been that the decision had yet to be taken. But it was equally likely that Brigstocke had simply fought shy of delivering one blow on top of another.

  As things stood, if it was to be a continuance of his gardening leave, Thorne would give in to it without much of a fuss. The thought of going back to the team, back to how things had been before, unnerved him. He felt as though he’d lost his way during some long-distance endurance event; as if he were staggering, miles off the pace, in the wrong dire
ction. He couldn’t do anything else until he’d completed the course, however laughable his finishing time was.

  He knew he couldn’t really compete, but he needed to cross the line…

  “‘I don’t know’ is the simple answer,” Thorne said. “I don’t know what they want. I don’t really know what I want.”

  Holland filled the pause that followed by reaching for his coat. “Do you think Eales spoke to whoever’s paying him before he left? Warned him?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think he had a great deal to warn him about.” Thorne gestured toward the papers on the desk. “There’s nothing there that incriminates anybody. I think Eales knows how to keep his mouth shut. How to keep secrets.”

  “Probably a good idea. Considering how many people died because one greedy fucker couldn’t.”

  Thorne eased his chair round slowly, one way and then the other. “We set so much store in trying to get hold of Eales, thinking that he’d tell us the name of the man behind the camera. I’m not actually sure it would have done us any good.”

  “You don’t think he’d have given him up?”

  “Eales is still a soldier,” Thorne said. “Name, rank, and serial number, right?”

  Holland picked up his case and crossed to the door. “Are you sticking around here for a bit? I need to get back…”

  Thorne grunted; he didn’t look like he was ready to go anywhere.

  Holland recalled walking through the café on his way up and seeing the addict Thorne had been spending so much time with. The boy had been sitting with his girlfriend, whose name Holland had never learned. Holland thought about what Thorne had said earlier; wondered how difficult he might find it to say some of those good-byes. “Your mate Spike’s downstairs…”

  Thorne nodded, like he already knew. “We’re supposed to be playing pool.”

  “We can have a game sometime if you want,” Holland said. He hovered at the doorway. “Later in the week, maybe. That pub round the corner from your place has got a table, hasn’t it?”

  “I’ll give you a call, Dave,” Thorne said. “When I’ve got myself sorted.”

  He sat for a few minutes after Holland had left and let his mind drift. Sadly, however hard he tried, it wouldn’t drift quite far enough.

  For want of anything else to do, he reached for the documents scattered across the desk and began to thumb through them. It always came down to paper in the end. Filed and boxed up in the General Registry. And it felt as though this case was heading that way pretty bloody quickly; not cold exactly, but as good as. The case, such as it was, would be handed over to the Homicide Task Force, or perhaps the brand-new, FBI-style Serious and Organised Crime Association. These were the proactive units responsible for tracking down and charging prime suspects who had gone missing. Thorne felt fairly sure that Eales was already abroad; that he would not make himself easy to find. The world was becoming smaller all the time, but it was still plenty big enough…

  He stared down at the bank statements; at the payments into each one, representing a man Ryan Eales had killed. He looked at the amounts and was unable to stop a part of his brain making the perverse calculations: fifteen hundred pounds per kick delivered; something like that…

  He thought back to the case he’d been working on the previous spring: to the hunt for another man who’d chosen murder as his profession; book-ended by two fires, twenty years apart. A young girl dead, and an old man. Now here was Thorne, sitting in the old man’s coat and gnawing at the decisions he’d taken. At the series of judgments, considered and otherwise; from one burning to another.

  He pulled the Gulf War transcript to the front and glanced down at it. The printed dialogue and descriptions were horribly effective prompts. His mind called up the associated images from the videotape in an instant as he read: the groupings of the men, and the rain striking the sand like black candle wax, and luminous horror like a cat’s eye in the darkness.

  A soldier waving papers taken from the Iraqi prisoners. No sign of what was to come. “We are keeping these.” (LOUDER) “Do you understand?”

  While decisions—including that which would determine his own future—were being made, Thorne wondered if the Met had taken one to hand the tape over to the army. He wondered, too, in spite of all the bickering between the Met and the RMP that would surely follow, if the army themselves would be very surprised. Had Eales and his fellow crewmen effectively covered their tracks in 1991?

  “Where D’you Get It?”

  “Say Again?”

  (Louder) “Where D’you Get It?”

  “This?” (Soldier Holds Up Bacon Strips)

  “I Brought It With Me.”

  Or was that commendation in the war diary little more than an exercise in sweeping shit under the carpet?

  “That Reminds Me, I Could Kill

  A Fry-up…”

  “That Stuff Fucking Stinks, Ian…”

  Thorne read the next line…

  And stared, breathless, at the page. At five words, spoken out of vision. A phrase that told him everything.

  He knew who the man behind the camera was.

  Thorne shut his eyes and pressed himself back in the chair, thrown by the excitement and the terror of being suddenly and completely without doubt. It was a sensation he’d almost forgotten: the sickness and the surge of knowing.

  Then, quick and painful as a low punch, Thorne knew something else: that the man who had paid Ryan Eales to commit murder would walk away from it as surely as Eales himself had so far managed to do. Certain as he was of the man’s identity, and of what he had done, Thorne knew that there was no way on God’s earth that he could prove it.

  Five minutes, perhaps ten, passed as Thorne weighed it up.

  He stared into the thought, into the white-hot heart of it, until at last he began to make a few decisions. Each would be dependent on the decisions of others, but as Thorne stood and gathered his things together he felt as energized as he had in a long while. He might yet fail to cross it, but now at least he had a bloody good idea where the finishing line was.

  He came out of the office and descended quickly toward the lower-ground floor. If Spike was still there, the two of them could chat while they played pool. They would have plenty to talk about.

  Thorne had decided that if he was going to get off the streets, he needed to come clean…in every possible sense. He was going to tell Spike everything.

  THIRTY-SIX

  He heard the man coming long before he saw him.

  The footsteps sounded hesitant; he could recognize the tread of someone unfamiliar within the network of tunnels from a mile away. He’d heard such echoes many times before: the click-clack of heels slowing, then speeding up again as confidence comes and goes; the scrape of a leather sole against the concrete as the wearer turns to get their bearings, or decides in which direction to proceed. Or whether to proceed at all…

  When he finally saw the man rounding the corner, Spike stood. He leaned back against the wall and waited; tried to look unconcerned as the distance between the two of them shortened, as the man moved toward him through puddles of water and deeper pools of shadow.

  “Am I in the right place?” the man said. Still twenty feet or more away.

  The fear would have killed any strength in his voice anyway, but with the sound moving effortlessly, as it did through the air underground, Spike had no need to speak much above a whisper. “Depends,” he said, “on if you’ve got shitloads of cash in one of those pockets…”

  When the man stopped, it was three or four arms’ lengths away from Spike. He looked around quickly. Took in his immediate surroundings. “This is nice,” he said.

  Spike said nothing.

  The man nodded toward the large cardboard box behind, and to Spike’s right, against the wall. “That where you sleep?”

  “It’s a lot better than some places,” Spike said.

  The corners of the man’s mouth turned up, but it could hardly have been called a smile. “Te
ll me how you got the tape.” It seemed that the small talk was at an end.

  “I told you when I called…”

  “You told me fuck-all,” the man said. “You talked a lot of crap and I’ve had a few days to think about it since then.”

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you want it? That’s fine with me, like. Only you seemed keen enough on the phone…”

  “Tell me.”

  It was never really silent down in the subways. There was always the muffled roar of the traffic overhead, the buzz of the strip lights, the eerie beat of dripping water. These were the only sounds for several seconds.

  Spike rubbed his hands across his face. Through his hair. “What d’you want me to say?” His voice was hoarse; cracked with nerves and desire. “You want me to tell you I’m a fucked-up junkie? Do anything to score? Desperate enough for money to shit on a mate?”

  “Now you’re starting to persuade me,” the man said.

  “Thorne told me he was a copper, like. That he’d been working undercover because of these murders. He told me about the case, about why everyone had been killed.”

  The man didn’t blink.

  “He talked about everything,” Spike said. “What happened all them years ago in the fucking desert. He told me who you were and he told me about the tape.”

  “Why?”

  Spike shrugged. “Fuck knows. Because it was his last night, I suppose, and the stupid bastard thought it didn’t matter. He said that the bloke who did the actual killing had legged it and there wasn’t anything else anyone could do…”

  The man thrust his hands into the pocket of a long leather coat and pressed his arms close to his body. It was getting very cold in the early hours. “So, you just sat there, took all that in, and saw an easy way to make a few quid?”