Bloodline

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne was struggling to answer the question. There was some reason for his reluctance to go home that he could not quite articulate, but which nevertheless made him feel horribly guilty. He would not have felt comfortable sharing it with Holland, or anyone else, even if he had been able to find the right words. ‘I told you,’ he said, happy to exaggerate the perfectly timed yawn. ‘I’m just knackered.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Holland stood up and said that he was ready to turn in.

  They arranged to meet for breakfast at seven. Holland said he would set the alarm on his phone. Then, instead of walking with Holland towards the lifts, Thorne contradicted himself by announcing that he was staying up for one more: ‘It’ll help me sleep.’

  ‘Have a couple,’ Holland said. ‘You’ll sleep like a baby.’

  Thorne could guess where it was going, but just smiled, letting Holland get to the punchline.

  ‘You’ll wake up crying because you’ve pissed yourself.’

  Thorne walked to the bar and ordered another glass of wine. The woman sitting a few stools along put down her magazine. ‘Your mate abandoned you, has he?’

  ‘I’ve got a dirty, suspicious mind, apparently,’ Thorne said. He nodded towards the optics. ‘You want one?’

  The woman thanked him and moved across. She asked for a rum and Coke and when she spoke it was obvious that it was not going to be her first. She was pale, with shoulder-length dark hair, and wore a cream denim jacket over a shortish brown skirt. The barman in the plum-coloured waistcoat, whose name tag said TREVOR, set about pouring the drinks and raised his eyebrows at Thorne when the woman wasn’t looking.

  ‘I’m Angie,’ she said.

  Thorne shook the woman’s outstretched hand and felt himself redden a little as he told her his name.

  ‘What business you in then, Tom?’

  ‘I sell nuts,’ Thorne said. ‘Crisps, nuts . . . I’m basically a snack salesman.’

  She nodded, smiling slightly, as though she wasn’t sure whether to believe him. When the barman had put down the drinks she picked up her glass and waited until he’d moved away. ‘Listen, Tom, it’s almost midnight, and we can sit here getting hammered if you want. Or we could just take these up to your room.’

  She did not take her eyes from his as she sipped her drink. Now Thorne felt himself really redden. He could also feel the blood moving to other parts of his body and was grateful that he was sitting down.

  He had called Louise earlier from the car-park, at the same time as Holland was speaking to Sophie. She’d said she had no problem with him staying over; had even sounded slightly annoyed that he would think she might have. She’d said that she’d be happy to get an early night and when he’d asked how her first day back had been, she’d told him it was fine; that he had been worrying for nothing.

  ‘I’ve . . . got a girlfriend,’ Thorne said. He nodded, like it was self-explanatory, but the woman just stared, as though waiting for him to elaborate. He was trying to swallow, dry-mouthed, thinking that he didn’t really fancy her very much and wondering how he would be reacting if he did. ‘You know, otherwise . . .’

  The woman raised her hands and spun slowly away on her stool. ‘Not a problem.’

  Thorne was still nodding like an idiot. She’d said it the same way that Louise had: casual and frosty. He opened his wallet and took out a ten-pound note to pay for the drinks; turned when he heard the woman cursing.

  She pointed to the warrant card, shaking her head. ‘I can normally spot you bastards a mile away.’

  From the corner of his eye, Thorne could see Trevor smirking as he dried glasses at the end of the bar. Realising now that the woman’s proposition had been a purely commercial one, Thorne did his best not to look overly shocked.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, love,’ he said. ‘I’m not local, and if it makes you feel any better, I think my professional radar’s working about as well as yours.’ He listened to the music for a few seconds, drumming his fingers on the bar, then he raised his glass. ‘Cheers, Angie.’

  ‘It’s Mary, actually.’

  ‘Slow night, Mary?’

  ‘Cata-fucking-tonic,’ she said.

  TEN

  They hit the rush hour coming out of Leicester, ran into the tail end of another as soon as they got within commuting distance of London, and the drizzle didn’t help. When Brigstocke called just before ten, they were still twenty miles from the city, and still regretting the hideously greasy breakfast they’d eaten two hours earlier.

  ‘Should have just had the muesli,’ Holland said.

  Thorne turned down the radio. ‘And you take the piss out of rosé?’ He pressed the button on his phone that activated the loudspeaker, and passed it to Holland. It was the closest he came to hands-free.

  ‘How did it go with Paice?’ Brigstocke asked.

  ‘Nothing to get excited about,’ Thorne said. ‘Catherine Burke never told him about her mum, that’s all.’

  ‘Worth checking though,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Providing your expenses claims aren’t too stupid.’

  ‘There might be a claim later on for food poisoning,’ Holland said.

  Brigstocke told them that Hendricks was due to perform the first of the Macken post-mortems later that morning, and that, as they had already confirmed a DNA match, he’d asked FSS to prioritise the examination of the two newest X-ray fragments, to see if they could get any more information.

  ‘Every chance, I reckon,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s leaving them for us to find, so he must want us to know what they are.’

  ‘Or waste our time trying to find out,’ Holland added.

  Another phone had started ringing in the background and there was a hiatus while Brigstocke answered it; then a minute or two of muffled conversation over the loudspeaker.

  ‘Is that what you think?’ Holland turned to Thorne. ‘He’s leaving them for us. It’s not . . . ritualistic?’

  Before Thorne could say that he had no idea, he was distracted by the car behind. ‘Look at this idiot up my arse,’ he said. He stared hard into his rear-view, stepping on the brake a few times until he thought the driver behind had got the message.

  Brigstocke was back on the line, asking them how far away they were, then telling them not to bother coming into the office. ‘Get yourselves straight down to the Holloway Road,’ he said. He explained that they had done a door-to-door across some of the university accommodation first thing and managed to track down a few of the students who had been at the Rocket Club on Saturday night. ‘We may as well save ourselves some time and interview them all together.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Thorne said. It would also be a chance to see the last place where anyone, save for their killer, had seen Greg or Alex Macken alive.

  Brigstocke had an even stronger reason. ‘Several of them say they saw the brother talking to a man in the bar who he may have left with later on.’

  ‘Sounds promising,’ Holland said.

  ‘Well, I don’t know how sober any of them were, but between them, there’s a chance of getting a proper description. With luck . . . we might do even better than that.’

  Thorne looked at Holland. ‘Cameras.’

  ‘Smart-arse,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Yeah, Yvonne’s going down to see if there’s any deccent CCTV.’

  ‘Probably have to wade through hours of students throwing up on the stairs and shagging in dark corners,’ Holland said.

  Thorne laughed. ‘I’m sure there’ll be plenty of volunteers.’

  ‘I think I’ll save that footage for myself,’ Brigstocke said, before he hung up. ‘Keep it to show the wife when my eldest starts banging on about going to university.’

  A few miles further on, the traffic thickened approaching the turn-off for the M25 and Thorne had to take the BMW down into first gear. He smacked the wheel harder than he might in time to the song on the radio.

  ‘Why don’t we shoot up the hard shoulder?’ Holland asked.

  Thorne explained that they would be through
the jam quickly enough once they got past the junction. That the students weren’t going anywhere, and that he didn’t really fancy getting done by one of the cameras and spending weeks writing letters to prove that he was on legitimate police business.

  ‘Just an idea,’ Holland said.

  Thorne checked his mirror and eased the car into the inside lane, thinking about it, knocking the wipers up a notch as the rain grew heavier. Coming down in needles suddenly, from a sky the colour of wet cement.

  Bearing in mind what they looked like now, pale and half dressed with hair like shit, Thorne could barely imagine how the students sitting in front of him had looked when uniformed coppers had banged on their doors at seven-thirty that morning. Even as he thought it, watching while Holland took down their names, Thorne could hear Louise making some crack about him turning into his father. Back before his dad had died, of course, and before the Alzheimer’s had really kicked in. Back when the old man could still string a sentence together without upsetting too many people.

  Louise had never met Thorne’s father, but she knew enough about the man to enjoy teasing Thorne about how much his habits and attitudes were now becoming like those of his dad. Thorne tried fighting his corner, but could never muster a great deal of conviction.

  A few weeks before, she’d said, ‘It’ll probably get even worse, now that you’re actually going to be a sodding dad!’

  ‘Greg doesn’t come in here much, not normally.’ The speaker was a young woman with blonde hair cut very short and a ring through her bottom lip that Phil Hendricks would have been proud of. ‘Don’t think I saw him in here at all last term.’

  ‘I saw him once.’ A tall, skinny boy with a scrubby beard. ‘Didn’t look like he was enjoying himself much.’

  There were nods and murmurs of agreement from the rest of the group. Seven of them were gathered in a corner of the main bar at the Rocket Club: four girls and three boys. A few stared into takeaway coffees and three of them passed a large bottle of water between them. The place stank of beer and the uncarpeted area of the floor around the bar itself was sticky with it.

  ‘Greg preferred to stay at home and study,’ Holland said. ‘That it?’

  The skinny boy shrugged. ‘Yeah, he worked pretty hard, but he wasn’t mental about it or anything. I think he just hated the music in here.’

  ‘He liked jazz,’ the blonde girl said. ‘Weird Scandinavian stuff. We used to take the piss ’cause it sounded so shit.’

  Thorne tried to hide a smile. A taste in music that others thought dubious was something he and Greg Macken had obviously shared. ‘So, why was he here on Saturday?’

  ‘And the Saturday before that,’ the boy said. ‘Been in here a few times, since the start of term.’

  ‘Right. So what was different?’

  There were a few seconds of silence, save for some slightly awkward shifting of feet and slurpings of coffee. An overweight Asian girl with a purple streak through her hair smiled sadly as she reached forward for the bottle of water. ‘He had the hots for this bloke,’ she said.

  ‘The man some of you saw him talking to?’

  A few of them nodded.

  Thorne well understood the hesitation. It was strange how the stuff of everyday gossip became something far harder to discuss when the person it concerned had been murdered. ‘You saw him in here with the same bloke before last Saturday?’ he asked.

  The Asian girl said that she had. ‘I think he came in the first couple of times to keep an eye on his sister, you know? Then he saw this guy he fancied, so he kept coming back.’

  ‘You saw them talking before?’

  ‘No, not talking. Not until Saturday.’

  ‘What happened on Saturday?’

  ‘I think it just took Greg that long to pluck up the courage.’

  ‘He wasn’t exactly . . . confident.’ The girl with the lip-ring started to cry. The boy with the beard moved his chair closer and draped an arm around her shoulders. ‘Probably needed to get a few drinks inside him first.’

  Thorne nodded. Gay or straight, eighteen or eighty, he knew how that worked. But whatever shyness had held Greg Macken back until Saturday evening, Thorne was struck by just how confident his killer had been. Happy enough to stalk his victim, then wait for him to make the first move.

  ‘Was Greg drunk, do you think?’ Holland asked. ‘By the time he left?’

  The Asian girl shook her head. ‘A bit of Dutch courage, but that’s about it. I spoke to him half an hour before I noticed he’d gone and he sounded fine.’ Her head dropped. ‘He was . . . excited.’

  The post-mortem would tell them how much Greg Macken had drunk on the night he died. Thorne was also interested to see what the toxicology report had to say. It had been suggested that the killer might have slipped something into Macken’s drink - Rohypnol or liquid ecstasy maybe - though Thorne wondered, if that were the case, why the killer had felt the need to smash Macken’s head in before bringing out the plastic bag.

  ‘So, did anyone see them leave together?’

  The blonde girl said that she couldn’t swear to it. ‘But, you know, Greg wasn’t here and neither was the bloke he’d been talking to.’

  ‘I saw them by the door,’ the skinny boy said. ‘Next time I looked, they’d gone, so I just assumed . . .’

  Thorne held up a hand to let them know that it didn’t matter too much. If the CCTV panned out, it wouldn’t matter at all. ‘Tell me about this bloke,’ he said.

  ‘He was older than most of the people in here,’ the Asian girl said. ‘Thirty-ish, I reckon.’

  Thorne asked if that was unusual, and the students explained that anyone could pay to come in on nights when there were bands playing. Besides, there were always a few mature students around.

  ‘He looked . . . sure of himself,’ the blonde girl said.

  The skinny boy agreed. ‘I thought he looked like a right cocky sod, to be honest.’

  The Asian girl said he’d seemed relaxed, happy even, and eventually admitted - though she couldn’t look anywhere but at the floor as she did - that if Greg hadn’t been so obviously interested, she might have made a move herself.

  The students began to give a more detailed physical description; the three who had got the best look at the man edged closer to the table as Holland took notes. While they argued about the colour of the man’s shirt and how far off the collar his hair had been, Thorne took a seat next to a girl who had not spoken at all.

  She had long dark hair and wore a sensible coat. She looked about fourteen.

  ‘I take it you didn’t see much,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I wasn’t here,’ the girl said. Her voice was quiet, Home Counties. ‘I’m a friend of Alex. We were next door watching the band.’ As soon as she’d said the name, her lip had begun to tremble and Thorne was reaching into the pocket of his leather jacket for tissues. The girl beat him to it, pressing a crumpled wad into the corner of each eye and speaking through delicate, childlike sobs. ‘We were supposed to be having lunch on Sunday,’ she said. ‘A bit optimistic, considering how hammered we both were by the time we’d left, but that was the plan. A big Sunday roast in some pub somewhere. Alex could have eaten for England, you know?’ She dropped her hands into her lap, squeezed the tissue between them. ‘I felt so rough the next day that I never even got round to calling her.’

  ‘Come on,’ Thorne said. He didn’t bother telling her that any such call would have gone unanswered.

  ‘Then, you know, she didn’t come in on Monday morning. I never spoke to her again.’ Her hands moved back to her face, and when she finally took away the sodden lump of tissue there was a shiny string of snot between her nose and her fingers. She kept very still as Thorne leaned across and wiped it away.

  Once a consensus of sorts had been reached on the description, the students were allowed to go, with a reminder for them to get in touch should they remember anything else. As they trooped slowly out, they passed Yvonne Kitson on her way in, and Thorne saw her
entrance earn more than a casual backward glance from the skinny boy with the scraggy beard. Kitson saw it too, and did not seem displeased.

  ‘Careful,’ Holland said. ‘That’s only a notch above kiddie-fiddling.’

  ‘Is it?’ Kitson’s face was the picture of innocence. ‘So neither of you fancied the blonde?’

  Neither of them said anything.

  Kitson smiled and sat down. ‘Right, we’ve got no cameras in the bar, unfortunately, but they’re on all the staircases, in the main lobby and at the front door. So, we should have something to go through by late afternoon.’ She reached into her handbag and began reapplying lipstick. ‘Did we get a decent description?’

  ‘We got one,’ Thorne said. ‘Different from the one the Leicester boys were given, and different from the one we got from Emily Walker’s neighbour.’

  ‘So, they’re all unreliable.’

  ‘That’s always a possibility.’

  ‘Or we’ve got someone who makes an effort to change his appearance. ’

  Holland looked from one DI to the other. ‘What’s that all about, then? Part of the kick he’s getting, do you reckon?’ He shook his head as though he were answering his own question. ‘Maybe it’s one of those multiple-personalities things.’

  ‘No chance.’ Kitson shook her head and dropped the lipstick back in her bag. ‘Let his defence team try that kind of cobblers on when the time comes. He probably just enjoys pissing us about.’

  ‘Fine with me.’ Thorne picked up the empty cups from the floor and placed them on the table. ‘They’re usually the ones who get careless. ’

  ‘Like Garvey,’ Holland said. ‘He slipped up eventually.’

  ‘Yeah, but there were seven bodies by then,’ Kitson said.

  Thorne stood, dug into his pocket for the car keys. Said, ‘This one’s more than halfway to that already.’