From the Dead tt-9

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne took a few seconds, gathered together some papers on his desk. He summoned the same calm expression he had been relying on in court all morning, but he could still remember the smell of that Jag, the taste of the smoke and the ash that was not just ash, and the pale globules of fat that were stuck to the seats.

  'She got off pretty lightly, if you ask me,' he said. 'She pleaded guilty, which always does you a favour, and it didn't hurt that her old man was a scumbag who was probably knocking her about when he wasn't busy having people's legs broken. Yeah, Alan Langford got what was coming to him, probably, but it was still a seriously nasty way to go.'

  'Look at the date,' Anna said, She pushed the photo back towards Thorne. 'Bottom right…'

  Thorne picked up the photo. The date had been stamped automatically by the camera: a little over three months earlier. 'They can do that sort of thing with Photoshop,' he said. 'Besides which, this could be a photo of anybody.'

  'Donna says it's her husband,' Anna said. She shook her head, searched for something else, but in the end she just shrugged and said it again. 'She swears it's Alan.'

  'Then she's lying.'

  'Why?'

  'Because… Look, maybe she went a bit funny inside. She wouldn't be the first. Maybe she wants money. Maybe she's trying to get some big "miscarriage of justice" thing off the ground.'

  'She doesn't even know I'm here,' Anna said. 'She came to me because she doesn't want the police involved.'

  Thorne was taken aback. 'OK, so how are you going to explain this conversation to your client?' He could not suppress a smile and felt more than a little guilty as he watched her start to fidget and redden again.

  'I'll just be honest and tell her that I was getting nowhere,' Anna said. 'That I couldn't think what else to do. I'll tell her I've spent a fortnight staring at that sodding photo and that I'm none the wiser.'

  'Why did you come to see me?' Thorne asked.

  'I thought you might be able to get a bit more information from the photograph.' She looked at Thorne, but got no response. 'Don't you have ways of… enhancing pictures, or whatever? I mean, there must be some way to tell where this picture was taken. I don't know, geographical profiling, a computer programme or something?'

  'This isn't CSI,' Thorne said. 'We haven't even got a photocopier that works properly.'

  'I also thought you might be interested.' Anna was leaning towards him suddenly. 'Stupid of me, I can see that, but it seemed like a decent idea at the time. It was your case, so I hoped that if you saw the photo you might at least think that maybe it wasn't… finished.' She stared at Thorne for a few seconds longer, then sat back and reached for a strand of hair to pull at.

  'It's a waste of time,' Thorne said. 'I'm sorry, but I've got more important things to worry about. Actually, I can't think of anything that isn't more important than this.' He pushed back his chair and, after a moment or two, Anna got the message and did the same.

  'I'll get out of your way, then,' she said.

  She took a step towards the door.

  Thorne thought she looked about fourteen. 'Look… I'll run it past my boss, all right?' He saw her expression change and raised a hand. 'He'll only say the same as me, though, so don't hold your breath.' He picked up the photograph again, nodded down at it. 'Could do with a bit of that myself,' he said. 'Sun and sand.'

  'Tom?'

  Thorne looked up to see DI Yvonne Kitson standing in the doorway. They shared the office and most of the time Thorne was happy enough with the arrangement. He certainly liked her a lot more than he had back when she was a high-flier, and suspected that she felt the same way about herself. Like Thorne, she could still put noses out of joint without much effort, but it was hard not to admire the way she had rebuilt a career that had plunged so calamitously off the tracks after an extra-marital affair with a senior officer.

  'Like a self-assembly wardrobe,' she had once said to Thorne. 'One loose screw and the whole thing fell to pieces.'

  Now, she had one eye on Thorne's visitor. He gestured towards Anna, the photograph flapping between his fingers, and introduced her.

  Kitson nodded a cursory greeting and turned back to Thorne. 'I just thought you'd like to know that the jury's gone out.'

  'Right.' Thorne stood and moved around the desk.

  Anna was doing up the buttons on her jacket. 'The case you were in court for?'

  Thorne nodded, thinking about the wink he'd given Adam Chambers. 'One that isn't quite so… piss-easy,' he said.

  DCI Russell Brigstocke's office was twenty feet along the corridor from the one Thorne shared with Yvonne Kitson. When Thorne walked in, Brigstocke was on the phone, so Thorne dropped into a chair and waited. He thought about an eighteen-year-old girl whose bones still lay waiting for an inquisitive dog and about a man who had died screaming, handcuffed to the wheel of a car in the middle of nowhere.

  He tried to separate the two murders, committed so many years apart. To tease out the tangle of pictures, real and imagined.

  He wanted to worry about the right thing…

  Brigstocke put the phone down and reached for a mug of coffee. He took a sip, grimaced.

  'You know the jury's out?' Thorne asked.

  Brigstocke nodded. 'No point thinking about it, mate,' he said. 'I heard it went really well this morning.'

  'Sam tell you it was in the bag, did he?'

  'I'm just saying we've done everything we could.'

  'Everything except find her,' Thorne said.

  He felt chilly suddenly, aware of how thin and flimsy his suit was, missing the heavy familiarity of his leather jacket. As it went, most coppers dressed the way he was at that moment. It was as if each one graduated to a plain-clothes unit and instantly acquired the fashion sense of a low-end estate agent, but Thorne had always resisted the pull of the off-the-peg M amp;S two-piece, the easy-iron shirt and shiny tie.

  'It's bloody cold in here,' he said.

  Brigstocke nodded. 'There's air in the radiator and nobody's got a key.'

  Thorne got up and walked across to the radiator, bent and put his hand to the metal, which was no better than lukewarm. He stood up, pressed his calves against it. Hearing a sound he had come to recognise and dread, he looked round and saw Brigstocke shuffling a pack of cards.

  'I've got a new one for you.'

  'Do you have to?' Thorne asked.

  For reasons nobody could quite fathom, Brigstocke had developed a keen interest in magic over the previous few months. He attended classes at a club in Watford and had started performing close-up magic for beer money at assorted Met parties and conferences. He also insisted on trying out new tricks on anyone who could not escape quickly enough.

  'Just think of a card,' Brigstocke said, slipping into the patter. 'Don't tell me, though. I mean, what kind of a trick would that be?'

  The trick was pretty good, and Thorne did his best to sound encouraging, but he had never really seen the point of magic. He had no real interest unless the magician explained how a trick was done. Russell Brigstocke was a decent copper, but he was certainly not a wizard.

  'Who was the girl in your office?' Brigstocke asked, putting away the cards.

  Thorne told him about Anna Carpenter and the Curious Case of the Suntanned Corpse. Brigstocke had not worked on the Langford inquiry, but he remembered the investigation well enough.

  'Coming back from the dead,' he said. 'Now that's a decent trick.'

  'It would be impressive.'

  'Anything in it?'

  Thorne took the photograph from his pocket and passed it over. 'God knows what Donna Langford's up to,' he said. 'I just hope that detective agency's screwing a decent wedge out of her.'

  'Does it even look like him?'

  Thorne stood at Brigstocke's shoulder and looked again. The dyed hair, the squint, the grin. That faint bell was ringing a little louder now, but surely that was just because Anna Carpenter had told him who it was supposed to be. 'Looks like a lot of people,' he said. 'Looks like a
bad actor playing a gangster on his holidays.'

  'What did you tell her?'

  'That she was wasting her time and we couldn't afford to waste any of ours.'

  'Absolutely right,' Brigstocke said. 'Not when we've got the latest Police Performance Assessment Framework to read and twelve-page reports on Standard Operating Procedure to complete by the end of the day.'

  Thorne laughed and felt it take the chill off.

  They talked about football for a few minutes, then families. Thorne asked after Brigstocke's three kids. The DCI asked Thorne how on earth his girlfriend was handling her job on the Kidnap Unit and managing to share a flat with someone who supported Spurs and listened to country music.

  'How does she cope with all that pain and stress, day after day?' Brigstocke asked.

  Thorne shook his head and let the punchline come.

  'And the kidnaps must be even worse…'

  They joked and chatted. Piss-takes and bullshit. Killing time and pretending not to think about the twelve strangers arguing in a room on the other side of the city.

  FOUR

  Anna bolted her dinner.

  It was always fairly awkward when it was just her, Megan and Megan's latest boyfriend – on this occasion the admittedly gorgeous, but palpably brain-dead, Daniel – and it didn't help that Megan had done the cooking. Anna's housemate could only really manage pasta, and usually just threw in whatever happened to be lying around in the fridge. Her latest creation involved carrots, tinned peas and hard-boiled eggs, and watching Daniel slather brown sauce all over it didn't do much for Anna's appetite. Half a plate was filling enough, in the end.

  It still tasted better than sushi, though…

  After ten minutes' idle chat, during which nobody asked how her day had been, and ten more growing increasingly annoyed as Daniel sprawled on the sofa, smoking and dodging the washing-up, Anna went upstairs to her room. She lay on the bed and watched TV. Channel-hopped through the local news, a quiz show that left her utterly baffled, and a pointless remake of a sitcom that had been pointless first time around.

  That had to be a sign of getting old, Anna thought: when they remake something you've grown up watching. It had to be a bad sign, surely. Looked at objectively by almost anybody – her parents, for example – it made her present circumstances seem that much sadder.

  Working for peanuts and living like a student.

  The house was only a couple of minutes' walk from the office which, along with the lower-than-average rent, justified for Anna the fact that she hated the area. It helped her forget, some of the time at least, that she had nothing in common with her nineteen-year-old housemate and had actually lived in a far nicer place when she was a student.

  Back then, of course, her parents had been happy to chip in a little and help her do the place up. They had arrived unannounced, beaming on the doorstep with the radio she was always borrowing when she was at home and a brand-new microwave. They sent funny letters and food-parcels. Later, though, all of that had changed.

  'What the hell did you think you were doing?'

  Her father did not often lose his temper, and seeing him looking so lost, so genuinely confused, when Anna had announced that she had thrown in her job at the bank had been hugely upsetting. She felt ashamed just thinking about it; prickling with sweat and as close to tears as he had been when she'd told him.

  'What are we supposed to think, your mum and me?'

  Her mother had risen slowly from her seat as soon as Anna had begun saying her piece, but had made no response. She had just stared, red-faced and breathing noisily, as though she were trying her very best not to march across the carpet and slap her daughter.

  'I'm really sorry you're upset,' Anna had said. Standing in her parents' overheated front room, she had heard her mother's voice in her own. The tone that had been reserved for those occasions when Anna or her sister had done something more than usually idiotic. 'But I think I'm old enough and ugly enough to make my own decisions, don't you?'

  Her father had opened and closed his mouth. Her mother had just sat down again.

  My own seriously stupid decisions…

  Detective Inspector Tom Thorne knew nothing about Anna's history or her questionable lifestyle decisions, but clearly he thought she had been stupid to take on Donna Langford as a client. Thinking through their conversation on her journey back south of the river, she had decided he'd been pleasant enough, if a little condescending. No, more than pleasant, but he had made his scepticism and his distaste perfectly obvious, so she had not been holding out much hope.

  A text message had been waiting for her when she came out of Victoria Tube Station: ' Like I thought. Not much we can do with this. Good luck with Donna. '

  She was halfway through a reply, trying to word a jokey comment about Thorne's broken photocopier, when she changed her mind and erased what she had typed.

  Luck was hardly likely to help her, Anna decided. She could not imagine where it might come from and how it would turn things around. It would not prevent her having to make the phone call she was dreading; giving back the money she'd been paid in advance and admitting to her client – her only client – that she had run out of ideas.

  Downstairs, housemate and housemate's stupid boyfriend had put on some music. Anna turned up the volume on the TV. She flopped back down on the bed, muttered a barrage of swear-words and slapped her palms repeatedly into the softness of the duvet.

  I've got more important things to worry about, Thorne had said. Well, she hadn't. She needed the money and she needed something to get her blood pumping a little faster. Whatever Tom Thorne thought about her, Donna Langford had nowhere to turn and she was even more desperate than Anna had guessed when she'd first laid eyes on her.

  There was something about Thorne, too; something that told her she could not quite write him off. She had seen it in his face when she'd challenged him, when she'd told him she thought he might be interested. When she had shamelessly done her very best to sound disappointed.

  She sat up and reached for the remote. Smiling now, thinking about her poor put-upon father. He was a man who could always be relied upon for a decent homily, whether one was needed or not.

  If you want something doing, gift horses and the price of politeness. Always wear clean underwear in case you're in an accident, that sort of thing.

  You make your own luck…

  'He's got a point,' Louise Porter said.

  'Yeah, right.' Thorne had told her about Russell Brigstocke's joke: the kidnaps and the country music.

  Louise held out her wine glass and Thorne topped it up. 'It's a wonder I don't throw you out.'

  'It's my flat.'

  'I'm fully expecting the Pope to make me a saint.'

  'I think that only happens once you're dead.'

  'See? Everything Russell said is true and you're a smartarse.'

  They had spent more evenings together recently, at Thorne's place or occasionally at Louise's in Pimlico, than was usually the case. Louise's team on the Kidnap Unit was less busy than it had been in a long time and Thorne had not caught a murder that necessitated too much overtime. Certainly nothing as all-consuming as the Andrea Keane inquiry.

  He had picked up a takeaway en route from Hendon, ignoring the Bengal Lancer – his usual port of call – and opting instead to try a new Greek place a little further south on the Kentish Town Road. The food had been fine, but looking down at what was left of his chicken souvlaki, Thorne wished he had not been so adventurous.

  It wasn't like him, after all.

  They drank their wine and a silence grew between them, while Louise flicked through the Evening Standard and Thorne watched the ten o'clock news. It was comfortable enough, as it should have been, more than two years into their relationship. But since Louise had lost a baby the year before, Thorne had found it hard to take anything for granted.

  An equilibrium had returned, but it felt precarious.

  Often, it seemed to Thorne, they moved
too cautiously around one another, circling their loss like wild animals. Curious, but wary. She got angry if she felt that he was treating her differently, and he would overcompensate, storming around the flat and taking out his bad day, his foul mood, his grief on her.

  It was difficult.

  The mildest of disagreements, a furious row, a fuck…

  Sometimes it felt wrong to Thorne how easily one could lead to the next, and that any of them was really about a hundred different things. He had tried to explain it to Phil Hendricks – his closest friend and a good one to Louise, too – one night in front of Sky Sports.

  'I bet the row lasts longer,' Hendricks had said.

  'I just can't bear the thought of her in pain,' Thorne had said, at which point Hendricks had stopped joking.

  'Tom?'

  Thorne looked over and saw that Louise was watching him over the top of her paper.

  'There's no point worrying about it,' she said. She laid down the paper and reached for the cat, curled up next to her on the sofa. 'There's nothing you can do, unless you fancy trying to nobble a couple of jurors.'

  Thorne sighed, nodded. He knew she was right, but it wasn't helping. 'A couple of them are no older than Andrea was,' he said.

  'So?'

  'So, you worry they can't make a… mature decision.'

  '"Mature" meaning "guilty".'

  'That they won't see what Chambers is really like.'

  'You want to raise the legal age for jury service? To what – twenty-one? Forty?'

  'I'm just saying.'

  'You don't think an eighteen-year-old knows exactly what the likes of Adam Chambers is capable of?' She jabbed a finger at her Standard. 'Kids half that age are doing worse things every day of the week. Knifing each other for an iPhone.'

  Thorne shook his head.

  'Come on, you've dealt with enough of them.'

  'Not the same,' Thorne said. 'You're right… but most of the time there's a reason at least. I'm not justifying it, course I'm not, but it's not the same as what Chambers did to Andrea Keane.'

  'You don't know what he did.'

  'They don't enjoy it.'