Bloodline

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Is it autism?’ Kitson asked.

  Mitchell shrugged. ‘They don’t think so. I don’t think they know what it is, tell you the truth, and we’ve given up worrying about it. Whatever it is, nobody can do anything about it, so we just get on with things.’

  Thorne watched as the boy pushed his train back and forth, his chin quivering as he made barely audible ‘chuffing’ noises. He had the same wide blue eyes as his mother, though his lips were fuller, redder. When he smiled, which for no reason that was obvious he did every minute or so, his front teeth slid down over his bottom lip and he moved them quickly from side to side. There was no way of knowing if Debbie Mitchell did the same thing, as Thorne had yet to see her smile.

  ‘How much does he understand?’ Thorne asked.

  Nina Collins was lighting up again. ‘Bloody hell, are you pair coppers or social workers?’

  ‘I just don’t want to upset him,’ Thorne said. ‘When we get started.’

  Mitchell shook her head, like it was OK, but her hand drifted across to her son’s head, moved through his hair.

  ‘You going to tell us about this man again?’ Collins said.

  Thorne nodded. ‘What have they told you so far, the sensitive coppers and the shouty ones?’

  Mitchell took a deep breath. ‘They talked about this weirdo who might want to hurt me because of what happened to my mum.’

  Thorne nodded again. ‘Right, and they probably said stuff like, “We have reason to believe that you might be in danger.”’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Well, here’s the thing. There’s no might about it, OK? Not if you stay where you are.’

  Kitson moved her chair forward. ‘You mustn’t underestimate the man we’re talking about here, Debbie.’

  ‘She’s had weirdos like this floating around all her life,’ Collins said. ‘Wanting to know about what happened to her mum, getting some cheap thrill out of it or something.’

  ‘This particular weirdo has already killed four people, Debbie,’ Thorne said. ‘Four people whose mothers died the same way yours did.’

  Collins’ hand was in her hair, pulling at the spikes. ‘They never said four . . .’

  ‘A couple, I thought,’ Mitchell said. ‘You know, that might have been by this same man.’

  Thorne looked at Kitson. He wondered who had taken the decision about what this woman should be told. Had they deliberated over how many previous murders they could mention? Was two deemed to be OK and three unacceptable? It seemed ridiculous, not least because one should have been enough to send anyone scurrying for cover without looking back. But whatever was preventing Debbie Mitchell from doing the sensible thing, and however much trouble he might be in for taking a unilateral decision, Thorne could see no point in pussyfooting around.

  ‘Would you like to know how he did it?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘No.’ Collins had gone noticeably pale.

  ‘Exactly how he stalked and murdered four people, what he used to kill them. Would that make you take this seriously? Get you off your arse and make you start packing?’

  ‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchell said, raising her voice. ‘We need to stay here.’

  The women had moved even closer together. Thorne could see that Jason had stopped playing with his train and was on his knees by the side of the sofa, pulling at his mother’s hand, trying to rub it against his cheek.

  ‘Are you worried about Jason?’ Kitson said. ‘Is that the problem? Because you wouldn’t be separated.’

  Mitchell started shaking her head, but it wasn’t clear if she was answering the question or just didn’t believe what Kitson was telling her.

  ‘We have special accommodation designed for families.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You need to get out—’

  ‘He got into their houses,’ Thorne said. ‘Don’t you understand? They all thought they were safe and he got inside and murdered them.’

  ‘I’ll look after them,’ Collins said.

  Thorne flicked his eyes to her. ‘What, even at night, Nina? You’ll be working, won’t you?’ Thorne had checked Collins’ record and seen that she’d had more arrests for soliciting than Debbie Mitchell. He watched her blink, glanced across in time to see something pass across Kitson’s face, and felt a stab of guilt; felt the wind leak out of him. However stupid and stubborn these women were being, it was clear that Nina Collins was hugely attached to Debbie Mitchell and her son; that her affection for them was fierce and unconditional. ‘Look, I’m just saying . . .’

  When Collins came back at him, her voice had dropped a little. The nerves were evident in the staccato drags on her cigarette and the stutter as she blew out the smoke. ‘Can’t you look after us?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to do,’ Thorne said.

  ‘We can’t go,’ Mitchell said. She was staring at Jason, watching the teeth move across his bottom lip as he squeezed her hand. ‘You don’t understand. He needs routine. We both do. It’s the only way we can manage to keep everything on an even keel, you know? The only thing that stops it all going to pieces.’

  In the desperation that had masked her face, Thorne caught a glimpse of what was driving her. He could see that her terror in acknowledging the threat - the crippling fear of change that could see a spiral back into drugs and might conceivably cost her custody of her child again - was even greater than her fear of the man who wanted to kill her.

  ‘He would be so unhappy,’ she said.

  Thorne understood, just, but it didn’t matter. ‘How happy would he be if you were dead?’

  Mitchell suddenly cried out in pain and yanked her hand away from Jason’s mouth, her knuckles having caught on the boy’s teeth as he squeezed and kissed it. His face was frozen for a few seconds in shock and she quickly got off the sofa to comfort him, but he was already starting to whimper and turn back to his plastic train.

  Collins stood up too. ‘That’s enough, I reckon,’ she said. She waited for Thorne and Kitson to get up, then ushered them towards the front door.

  Kitson stopped and turned at the end of the hallway. ‘Please try and talk some sense into her, Nina.’

  Collins reached past her and opened the door. ‘What would make sense is for you lot to stop pissing about and catch this nutter. All right, love? Then we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation, would we?’

  ‘For Jason’s sake,’ Thorne said.

  Collins all but pushed them both out on to the front step and stared Thorne down, her swagger returned. She said, ‘I liked you better when you were telling your shit jokes.’

  Then she slammed the door in their faces.

  ‘Looks like it’s got to be an arrest then,’ Kitson said, as they walked towards the car.

  Thorne shook his head and moved quickly ahead of her. ‘Last chance,’ he said. He opened the door of the BMW, reached inside for a large brown envelope and walked back past Kitson, towards Debbie Mitchell’s front door.

  ‘Tom . . . ?’

  He said nothing when Nina Collins opened the door. Just pushed the envelope into her hand and wheeled away. He was halfway back to the car when he heard the door close behind him.

  Kitson stared at him as he turned the ignition over. ‘Was that what I think it was?’

  ‘Impossible to answer that,’ Thorne said. He held up his hand to stop her speaking again, as if it might help the engine catch. ‘I have no idea what you think it was.’

  SEVENTEEN

  Back at the office there were still a few Anthony Garveys to trace and eliminate. There was paperwork for the DVLA and assorted credit-reference agencies to be completed as part of the hunt for Graham Fowler and Simon Walsh; liaison with forces in the north in an effort to track down Andrew Dowd. So, in terms of excitement, there was nothing to match the small wager that Thorne and Kitson had made with each other on the way back from Whetstone.

  ‘By the end of the day, I reckon,’ Kitson had said.

  ‘No chan
ce.’

  ‘I’m telling you. Collins is the type who likes to have her say.’

  There was every chance Kitson was right, but Thorne was in the mood to argue that white was black. ‘Tomorrow,’ he’d said. ‘Earliest, if at all.’

  ‘Tenner?’

  Being of a mind to argue - ‘chopsy’, his father used to call it - was one thing, but this was cold, hard cash. Thorne had read somewhere that the buzz of gambling lay in the fear of losing far more than in the possibility of winning, and having recently kicked an online poker habit, he’d been looking for something to make his heart beat a little bit faster. ‘You’re on,’ he’d said.

  With fifteen minutes until going-home time, Sam Karim put his head round the door to say that Brigstocke wanted a word, and Thorne’s heart-rate increased for all the wrong reasons. ‘How are you going to spend the money?’ he asked on his way to the door.

  ‘I’m saving up for shoes,’ Kitson said. ‘Do you want to go double or quits?’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Another tenner says Spurs lose tomorrow.’

  At home against Aston Villa. Should be guaranteed at least a point. It was Spurs, though . . .

  ‘I think somebody’s bottle’s gone,’ Kitson said.

  Karim was still standing in the doorway. ‘The guv’nor did say now.’

  ‘Stick it up your arse,’ Thorne said. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘I think maybe you should make another appointment to see that brain doctor,’ Brigstocke said. He leaned back against the edge of his desk, arms folded.

  Thorne said nothing. It was usually best just to sit there and take it.

  ‘Tell him to have a look, see if he can find one.’

  Brigstocke had moved on from the straightforward, high-volume bollocking - he had done that while recounting his fifteen-minute phone conversation with Nina Collins - and was now on to the sarcasm. Before long he would be into the last phase, which Thorne enjoyed the least: the one where the pitch dropped and the tone became one of sadness and disappointment, as though the offence for which he was dishing out the dressing down had actually wounded him. Thorne knew that Brigstocke had learned this ‘you’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let the whole school down’ approach from Trevor Jesmond, who considered himself a master of it. Thorne had been on the receiving end many times, had looked suitably chastened at the slowly shaking head and the puppy-in-need-of-a-home expression, but in Jesmond’s case he always relished it, working on the principle that if he was upsetting the superintendent, he was clearly doing something right.

  ‘Mitchell was terrified,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Poor woman’s shitting herself, according to her friend.’

  ‘That was the idea.’

  ‘Oh, thank Christ for that. There I was thinking you were showing her confidential photographs of all the murder victims because you were an insensitive idiot who was gagging to get back into uniform. Have you still got a pointed hat?’

  ‘Not all the victims,’ Thorne said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It wasn’t all the victims. Just the Mackens.’

  ‘Well, that’s OK then.’

  Thorne couldn’t prevent the faintest of smirks washing across his face. ‘Just a sample.’

  ‘Jesus, Tom . . .’

  ‘Did it work?’

  Brigstocke stared at him for a few seconds, as though toying with one last cathartic bout of shouting, before walking behind his desk and sitting down. ‘Debbie Mitchell’s moving in with Nina Collins,’ he said. ‘It’s only a couple of streets away—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter, as long as she moves.’

  ‘She wants to stay close to the park, she says. It’s the kid’s favourite place, apparently.’

  ‘Well, she can forget about that for a while.’

  ‘Plus, the kid knows Nina, so there shouldn’t be too much disruption. I understand he doesn’t respond well to . . . upheaval.’

  Thorne told Brigstocke he was right. He remembered the boy’s smile, how easily it appeared and how astounding it was, considering that upheaval was something he had lived with for a long time. ‘So, I’m not in the shit then?’

  It was Brigstocke’s turn to smirk. ‘Oh, don’t worry, if Collins or Mitchell decides to make any sort of official complaint, I’ll give you up like a shot.’

  ‘You’re a pal,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Yes, I am.’ Brigstocke looked down to the papers on his desk, as though he were good and ready for Thorne to leave. ‘Or I would have given you up already.’

  Thorne recognised a cue and turned for the door, but Brigstocke called him back.

  ‘You were wrong about Anthony Garvey,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Don’t know about the name, but we can be pretty sure he’s Raymond Garvey’s son.’

  Thorne nodded. ‘The DNA . . .’

  ‘We had Garvey senior’s on file, obviously, so we ran a match with the sample we got from under Catherine Burke’s fingernails. We can be ninety-nine per cent sure they’re father and son.’

  ‘Ninety-nine per cent?’

  Brigstocke knew that Thorne understood why they could not declare it a 100 per cent match, but he said it anyway, enjoying the moment. ‘To be certain, we need to know who the mother was.’ The look, before Brigstocke dropped his eyes back to his paperwork, said, ‘Now we’re done.’

  Walking out into the car-park, Kitson - ten pounds richer - said, ‘You remember the argument with Brigstocke in the pub? That stuff about the “tension” between the need to catch the killer and the need to protect the potential victims.’

  ‘I think that’s when his bad mood started,’ Thorne said. ‘That, or the fact that I got the last lamb casserole.’

  ‘Seriously.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was thinking. Didn’t it seem like nobody was trying very hard to get Debbie Mitchell out of that house?’

  ‘Well, she certainly took some shifting.’

  ‘You managed it, though. How come nobody else did?’

  It was cold and starting to rain. They waited under the concrete overhang outside the rear entrance to Becke House, Thorne’s car fifty yards to his left and Kitson’s further away in the other direction.

  ‘You saying they were happy to let her stay there as some kind of bait?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t like they had to plan it or anything. I mean, she didn’t want to leave, so maybe someone thought, Let’s use this to our advantage.’

  ‘Then we can’t be blamed if it all goes tits up.’

  ‘Right,’ Kitson said. ‘They stick a few unmarked cars around the place, set up an observation point, cameras, whatever.’

  Thorne was nodding, going with it. ‘And the brass are pissed off with me, not because of this business with the crime-scene photos, but because they had their next victim sitting there waiting for the killer on a plate, and I went and ballsed it up.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Kitson was wearing a grey hooded top under a leather jacket. She raised the hood, stared out into the drizzle. ‘I’m just thinking out loud. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘You’ve had sillier ideas,’ Thorne said.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘For sure.’ Thorne turned to her and held the look to let her know that he meant it, before allowing the smile to come. ‘We’re definitely worth a point against Villa tomorrow.’

  ‘You should have taken the bet then,’ Kitson said.

  The alert tone on Thorne’s mobile sounded. He fished the handset from his pocket. The text was from Louise: celebration drink with team after work. won’t be 2 late. X.

  ‘Fancy grabbing a drink?’ Thorne asked. Kitson looked at her watch, but he could see it was a gesture as much as anything. ‘Quick one in the Oak?’

  ‘I’d better not. The kids, you know.’

  ‘Why are you still talking to me?’

  ‘See you tomorrow.’

  ‘Not sure I’ll be in,’ Thorne said. He was pressing buttons on
his phone, deleting the message from Louise. ‘Got a meeting in the centre of town mid-morning, so we’ll see how it goes.’

  ‘Monday, then . . .’

  Thorne grunted a ‘yes’ and watched Kitson jog away towards her car. After a few moments, he stepped out into the rain and began to walk towards his.

  Later, sinking into the sofa, his eyes scanned the living room, taking in the patch of damp by the side of the window and the bits on the carpet that were not the fleck in its weave. Not for the first time, he contemplated getting a cleaner. He listened to Charlie Rich singing ‘A Sunday Kind of Woman’ and ‘Nothing in the World’, letting his eyes close and his mind wander, the music fading into a mix that included the less tuneful voices of Russell Brigstocke and Yvonne Kitson, the hectoring rasp of Nina Collins and the scream of Martin Macken, howling like feedback against the sugary strings and soft waves of pedal-steel.

  Thorne thought about Jason Mitchell, the concentration and the quiet ‘chuff-chuff ’ as he pushed his train back and forth. The smile, sudden as a slap. He couldn’t tell if the boy even knew he was smiling and wondered where in his brain the problem lay.

  White, pink or blue?

  Would somebody like Pavesh Kambar be able to point to his handy multi-coloured plastic model and say, There, that’s where the trouble is, that’s where the wiring is faulty? Or perhaps he would say that it wasn’t faulty at all, that it was a different kind of wiring he hadn’t been trained to deal with, one that he simply couldn’t fathom. A feeling-useless moment, maybe. Time to pull out that rarely used F-word.

  White, pink or blue.

  Pillar-box red against black-and-white squares. Brown specks on the carpet and wallpaper by the window yellowing and greasy, like the business side of a sticking plaster when you’ve torn it off.

  The CD finished, so Thorne got up, removed the disc from the player and put it away. The phone was on its cradle near the front door. He picked up his wallet from the table, took out a card and dialled the number scribbled on it.

  ‘Hello?’ The voice was wary, cracked.