Love Like Blood

by Mark Billingham

  ‘You’ve got no doubts?’

  ‘None,’ Tanner said. She shook her head. ‘Skype. Did you hear him?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The people that do this stuff use it to get round the law against forced marriage. Young girls being married off on Skype to men in Bangladesh or Turkey or wherever. Then they stick them straight on a plane to… consummate the marriage.’

  Thorne saw the look on Tanner’s face, but distaste was not certainty. It did not mean that anyone had committed murder. ‘You don’t for a minute think that maybe they seemed upset because they were? The Shahs and the Azims? I’ve seen some very good liars in my time, but I’ve also come across plenty of people I thought were dodgy as hell, when they hadn’t done anything wrong. I know you must have, too. Something like losing a child can do strange things to people. How they act.’ He looked at her. ‘Talking of which, why didn’t you tell me about Kamal being arrested?’

  ‘I didn’t think it was very important,’ Tanner said. ‘Just fancied throwing it at his father, see what the reaction was. It was only a caution. Drunk and shouting his mouth off, a couple of poppers in his pocket.’

  ‘Still. I’m not very happy about you knowing things that I don’t.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Tanner did not look thrilled about being reprimanded, however gently. It was clearly not something she was used to. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘If we’re going to do this together…’

  After a few seconds of silence, Tanner sat back and shook her head. ‘My only problem is not letting them know I’m on to them. Not letting them see how angry I am. That they can sit there, bleating on about their missing children, asking us what we’re doing to find them, when they’ve handed money over so that two men can… do whatever.’ She looked at him. ‘If I wasn’t a hundred per cent sure before, I am now.’

  Tanner’s certainty was pretty persuasive and Thorne could not deny that the conversations with the two sets of parents – well, those that did the talking, anyway – had not given him any reason to walk away from this.

  That prickle at the nape of his neck he had learned not to ignore.

  ‘What?’ Tanner had clocked the look on Thorne’s face.

  ‘Just something Helen said to me once. If everyone loves their kids, some of them have got a strange way of showing it.’

  ‘I like her already,’ Tanner said.

  There was one thing, though, that continued to nag at him. Something that Tanner had not considered, or more likely was choosing to ignore.

  These two men…

  If they had tried and failed to kill her once, wasn’t there every possibility that they would try again?

  NINE

  Obviously it paid to be nice to your regulars, but Angie made a point of always being extra nice to customers she hadn’t seen before, in the hope they might become regulars. So she’d turned on the chat and the big smile for the pair that had wandered in just before the lunchtime rush, told them to let her know if there was anything else they needed. Refills, extra toast, whatever. The younger man, Irish by the sound of it, had been keen to tackle one of Angie’s all-day full English breakfasts, while his friend – a Pakistani, she reckoned, though he didn’t really have any kind of accent – had just asked for orange juice and a muffin.

  ‘Never mind him,’ the Irishman had said. ‘I’ll eat enough for both of us.’

  Angie had grinned. ‘Well, you’re a big lad.’

  The big lad had sat back and stretched. ‘Right enough.’

  Once she’d taken the food over, brought a bottle of ketchup across from another table, she sat with a magazine and watched them from the corner of the counter. Turned that smile on again whenever one of them looked up and caught her eye. It was easy enough to listen in to their conversation too, despite the growl of traffic moving past on the Holloway Road just six feet from the door. It made sense to know who your punters were, that’s what she always told herself. It was fun to have a nosy now and again and it was how she got through the times when the place wasn’t busy. No harm in it, was there? It was just a question of looking like you weren’t actually listening at all, and trying not to mind too much that your customers’ lives always sounded so much more interesting than your own.

  While the Irishman ate, his mate looked swiftly through the pile of newspapers he’d brought in with him. When he’d finished, he laid the papers to one side and started scrolling through his phone. After a few minutes he put that down, too and picked a small piece from his muffin.

  ‘Still nothing,’ he said.

  The Irishman shrugged, his mouth full. ‘Should be any time now.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘No worries.’

  ‘I always worry until we get the rest of the money. One of us has to.’

  Angie turned the page of her magazine. She waved as one of her regulars wandered out.

  ‘It’ll be grand.’ The big Irishman swallowed and took a slurp of tea. ‘There’s always some old bloke comes along with a dog.’

  Glancing over, Angie could see that the Pakistani was watching the Irishman eat. It was not a spectacle he seemed entirely comfortable with. After a minute or so, the Irishman looked up and grinned. He speared a slice of bacon and held it out, a fat drop of grease plopping on to the red vinyl tablecloth between them.

  ‘Want some?’

  The Pakistani shook his head, looking bored as much as anything else, but the reaction certainly seemed to amuse his mate.

  ‘No, course you don’t. Sorry.’

  The older man let out a long, slow breath. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of that stupid joke?’

  The Irishman was still grinning. Apparently not.

  ‘You know I’m a vegetarian.’

  ‘Why it’s still funny,’ the Irishman said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s a religious thing as well though, yeah?’

  The Pakistani sighed. ‘I’m a vegetarian.’

  That explained the muffin, Angie thought. Mind you, there was a vegetarian breakfast on the menu, and she could easily have done him an egg sandwich or something. Maybe the bloke just wasn’t very hungry.

  She turned another page, wondering what dogs had to do with money.

  ‘Anyway, you know I don’t give a toss what you are. Never have, mate. Couldn’t care less what you or anyone else believes in, because it’s all nonsense.’ He sliced a piece of fried bread in half. ‘But you know, I’m just a pig-thick bogtrotter and religion’s always been nothing but trouble where I come from, so…’

  ‘So.’

  ‘My choice, right?’

  ‘Well, I don’t believe that faith is something you choose.’ The Pakistani sat back. ‘It’s something you have or you don’t have. Like the colour of your eyes. A part of you.’

  ‘You can choose to change the colour of your eyes.’ The Irishman pushed half a tomato on to his fried bread and bit into it. ‘They have these special contact lenses.’

  They sat in silence for a few minutes. The Pakistani quietly finished his muffin while the Irishman began to slow down a little, the all-day breakfast beginning to look like something it would take him all day to eat.

  ‘I reckon it’s a good thing,’ he said. ‘That we don’t really get on, like.’

  ‘A good thing.’

  ‘Well, yeah… when you work with someone who’s a friend, or someone who becomes a friend because you work with them, it can cause problems, can’t it? You get touchy about things. Upset.’

  The other man nodded, considering it.

  ‘I think it’s what makes us a perfect team. You know, the fact that we don’t actually have a lot of time for each other. Keeps us sharp, I reckon.’

  ‘I can’t deny that we’re a good team,’ the Pakistani said.

  ‘Better than good, I’d say.’

  ‘We do an excellent job, I wouldn’t argue with that.’

  ‘We’re efficient, right? That’s why people pay us to do a job, and I think we�
�re efficient because we’re so different. Because, if we weren’t doing this, we wouldn’t be giving each other the time of day, would we? Come on, be honest, would we?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  When a sausage sandwich was pushed through from the kitchen, Angie picked it up and carried it across to a table by the window. She slowed and smiled as she passed the two men whose conversation she had become so interested in, but neither of them looked up at her.

  ‘Course we bloody wouldn’t. We’d be avoiding each other like the plague.’ The Irishman was brandishing a fork as he spoke, a gobbet of baked beans stubbornly clinging to the tines. ‘The truth is, you don’t like me a whole lot because I couldn’t care less about religion or any of that.’ He muttered something that Angie couldn’t quite catch above the noise of plates clattering in the kitchen. Something about hats and beards. ‘If a woman’s showing her ankles when she should be wearing one of those stupid things that makes her look like a sodding postbox. All that carry-on. You dislike me, because I do this for the money, pure and simple.’

  ‘I’ve always been well aware of why you do it,’ the Pakistani said.

  ‘Not like you don’t take the money. But that’s not why you do it, right? It’s a whatever… a higher calling.’

  ‘I do it because it has to be done.’

  The big man nodded, as if he were impressed. ‘Yeah, I’ve known a few people in my time who did things that’d give anyone bad dreams… you know, back at home… but you’re cold as you like, no question about that. Coldest I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘We are doing these things for very different reasons, that is certainly true.’ The Pakistani brushed crumbs from his shirt. ‘But we also go about them in very different ways.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that.’

  ‘You are more… emotional.’

  ‘Oh, I can get a bit worked up, definitely.’

  ‘For me, it’s not like that. I know what I’m doing is right and virtuous, but in the act itself there is no more feeling than if it were a goat, or a pig.’

  Angie looked up from her magazine. What the hell were they on about now? The Irishman was smiling as he laid down his knife and fork and sat back, having finally given up. He raised a hand, and when she looked at him he pointed to his plate and shook his head.

  ‘You beaten?’

  ‘I’m as full as a fat girl’s knickers.’

  As she came around the counter, laughing, the Pakistani took out his wallet and removed a twenty-pound note. He leaned across the table and said, ‘I don’t dislike you.’

  ‘Doesn’t bother me if you do,’ the Irishman said.

  Angie walked across and began gathering up their plates. The Irishman helpfully passed over his used cutlery and dirty mug.

  ‘I have no strong feelings about you one way or another.’ The Pakistani slid the note beneath his empty glass, seemingly oblivious to Angie’s presence. He took out his phone to check it again. ‘I admire any man who works for a living, who does his job well.’

  The Irishman grabbed a napkin and pretended to dab his eyes. ‘Oh, I’m filling up over here.’

  Turning from the table, Angie heard the scrape as the Pakistani pushed back his chair.

  ‘What I dislike,’ he said, quietly, ‘is the fact that you seem to enjoy it so much.’

  TEN

  When Thorne called from his office in Colindale, Tanner answered almost immediately, and it was apparent that she had already programmed Thorne’s number into her phone.

  ‘I was just about to call you,’ she said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘No, you first.’

  Thorne looked around. A few desks away, DI Yvonne Kitson was in the middle of her own phone conversation, while other officers appeared mesmerised by whatever was on their computer screens. Their boss, DCI Russell Brigstocke, was attending a ‘strategic diversity’ meeting at some country-house hotel and was almost certainly chewing his face off with boredom by now.

  Nobody seemed to be paying Thorne any attention.

  ‘These two men,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I was thinking about how it works.’ Thorne checked again to make sure he was not being overheard. ‘So, let’s accept for the time being that the parents of Meena Athwal, the families of Amaya and Kamal… decide their son or daughter needs to be killed. They don’t just pick up the phone. It’s not like the killers advertise, is it? Someone else arranges it.’

  ‘Obviously. The deal is brokered.’

  ‘So, where do we start looking for our broker?’

  ‘I’ve already got an idea about that,’ Tanner said. ‘But there’s some other stuff I need to talk to you about first. Things I need to show you. When’s a good time?’

  ‘The rest of the day’s buggered,’ Thorne said. He had a mountain of paperwork that couldn’t wait any longer and several other cases demanding his attention.

  Murders he knew had happened, victims he had seen with his own eyes.

  ‘What about tonight, then?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I can come to you, if that’s easier.’

  Thorne wasn’t too sure that it would be. Driving home via Hammersmith was not ideal, but wouldn’t going to Tanner’s place again and getting back late be better than bringing all this home with him? He had still not said anything to Helen about what he was doing, and even if he did, he wondered how he and Tanner would be able to talk openly about the case with Alfie tearing about.

  He explained the situation.

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘As good as,’ Thorne said. ‘He doesn’t go to bed until seven and only then if we’re lucky.’

  ‘I’ll come just after seven then,’ Tanner said. ‘It’s my turn anyway. I’ll bring a bottle.’

  It looked as though the arrangement had been made.

  When Thorne got home, he told Helen that a work colleague from a different team was coming over; that cases they had been working on separately might be connected. He told her he would explain later. Helen did not seem overly concerned one way or another, though that might have been due to the fact that she was already preoccupied with getting Alfie ready for bed.

  Or perhaps it was because she was not used to seeing Thorne so keen to tidy up.

  Tanner arrived at seven fifteen with a clanking carrier bag from which she produced two bottles of wine. ‘I wasn’t sure what you’d both like,’ she said. ‘I had plenty knocking around. Found it stashed all over the house, you know, after Susan.’

  Thorne carried the wine over to the fridge. He offered to open a bottle for Tanner. She reminded him that she was driving and asked for water.

  As Thorne walked back across to the small table in the kitchen, Tanner nodded towards the hallway that led to the bedrooms. They could just make out Helen’s voice. ‘Bedtime story?’

  ‘He wants the same one every night,’ Thorne said, sitting down.

  ‘My brothers’ kids were all the same. How bloody hungry can a caterpillar be?’ A smile made no more than a fleeting appearance, and Tanner was quickly into work mode and turning away; removing a laptop from her bag and opening it on the table. The moment the system was awake, she began working at the keyboard. A few seconds later, she double-clicked the track pad, then turned it so that he could see.

  ‘Dipak sent me this.’ She pointed at the still CCTV image that filled the screen. Blurry, black and white. ‘Woodside Park, so we were right. They were going home.’

  ‘Got off two stops early.’ Thorne leaned in. Two Asian teenagers he guessed were Amaya Shah and Kamal Azim, moving towards the ticket barriers. Another man, older, his hand on Amaya’s arm as though pushing her through.

  ‘I’ve seen all the footage and it’s obvious they’re in a hurry,’ Tanner said. ‘Looking behind them several times, like they’re trying to get away from someone.’

  ‘What about him?’ Thorne pointed at the older man. He too was Asian; well dressed, fortyish. Only the side of his face was visible in the sti
ll, but Tanner had just said she’d seen much more. ‘You think he’s one of them? Didn’t you say you had a decent e-fit?’

  ‘I’ve got something better,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Right…’ Thorne waited.

  ‘We’ll get to that.’ She smiled again and this time not simply because it was the appropriate response. Thorne could sense she had something important up her sleeve, and he was surprised that someone who was anything but a drama queen would milk the suspense.

  He was amazed to see her enjoying it.

  They looked up together as Helen appeared at the end of the hallway.

  ‘Got him off,’ she said.

  ‘Brown bear does the business again,’ Thorne said.

  Tanner was still smiling. ‘I’m Nicola. Sorry for being a nuisance.’

  ‘Don’t be daft.’ Helen moved across to shake Tanner’s hand, then told Thorne she was going for a shower. He said he’d keep an ear open for Alfie and that he’d try to be as quick as he could.

  ‘I brought some wine,’ Tanner said, pointing to the fridge.

  When Helen had left the room, Thorne asked again about the broker they had talked about on the phone; how those that required the services of the two killers Tanner was after might go about securing them.

  ‘It’s the multi-faith thing I’m struggling with,’ he said. ‘If it was just about Muslims or Sikhs, or just about Hindus, there are all manner of groups and organisations that might be able to front for these people.’

  ‘I struggled with that too,’ Tanner said. ‘For a while.’

  ‘Where would all three of them come together, though?’ Thorne was thinking out loud. ‘Some social thing? People who all support the same football team?’

  Tanner was already typing again. She said, ‘I’ll show you where I’d got to.’

  She turned the laptop around again and Thorne found himself staring at the home page of a website called The London Sikh and Hindu Forum.

  ‘I started with this and a few others like it,’ Tanner said. ‘Places where the Hindu and Sikh communities would come together.’