Lifeless tt-5

by Mark Billingham

  It sounded like Spike had got himself into trouble before he’d come to London. It was the same story to one degree or another in most provincial towns. Kids reached a certain age, ran out of things to do, and looked around for something to combat the boredom. It was usually drink, drugs, crime, or a combination of all three. Some got out and got lucky. Others were drawn to those places where their blighted lives might flourish among like-minded souls. Many were destined to fare no better in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh than they had at home, but they would not be short of company; equally doomed perhaps, but not quite as freakish.

  “They let you out on police bail, right?” Spike asked.

  “Right…”

  “But what if you needed to be bailed out? If you needed someone to come and get you, to pay to get you out. Would you have anybody?”

  Thorne said nothing. Thinking it would probably be Hendricks; Holland at a push. But beyond them…

  “It’d be my sister, I think,” Spike said. “It’d have to be. She bailed me out a year or so back, when I got caught with my stuff as well as Caroline’s and this other bloke’s, and they done me for dealing. So my sister stumped up the bail and gave me some extra cash on top of that.” His head dropped, and when he raised it again a smile was smeared across his face. His eyeballs were starting to roll upward, creamy under the streetlight and cracked with red. “She wanted to set me up for a bit, you know? To tide me over. I told her I was going to try and get myself clean, but I went straight out and used the money she gave me to score. Surprise, surprise, right? I think deep down she knew I would, ’cause she knows well enough what I’m like. She knows me better than anyone.” He stared at Thorne for half a minute, blinking slowly. “She knows, right?”

  Thorne nodded. From a club somewhere nearby came the deep thump of a bass line. It was not 2 a.m. yet.

  “I’d really have to be in the shit before I’d ask her for help again. Really deep in it. D’you know what I mean? Because I know bloody well I’d only let her down, and life’s hard enough without feeling guilty all the time, right? It’s not like she can’t afford it, mind you. She’s done brilliantly. She’s got a really posh job, got herself a flash car and a swanky flat in Docklands and all that. It’s just like it’s become dead important for me not to ask my sister for anything. I’m fucked, right? I know I am. We’re all completely fucked. But whatever happens, I’m not going to disappoint her again…”

  Spike unfolded the paper and turned it over. He stared down at the front page, mouthing the first few words of the headline. Thorne was looking down at him from six feet away, but even if he’d been eyeball to eyeball, there would have been no way to tell if Spike was really taking in what was in front of his face.

  If he was, something in the story made him suddenly laugh out loud. He cackled and hissed, chortled to himself for the next minute or more.

  Thorne could only wish he found it that funny.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Dan Britton’s not here,” McCabe said. “In case you’ve come to apologize.”

  Nothing could have been further from Tom Thorne’s mind. “Still pissed off, is he? Maybe he decided to get his own back by opening his mouth…”

  They were standing on the corner of Agar Street, on the north side of the Strand, a hundred yards or so from Charing Cross Station. Thorne had asked the desk sergeant to pass on a message; he needed to meet Inspector McCabe outside, urgently.

  “I’ll tell him,” the desk sergeant had said. “He’s most likely up to his neck.”

  Thorne had leaned onto the counter. “Tell him I’ve got information that could help prevent a serious assault…”

  Outside, the wind whipped the litter in front of passing cars. “I saw the paper.” The lopsided smile appeared. “It’s unfortunate.”

  “It’ll be a lot more unfortunate when I break his nose all over again.”

  “Don’t even think about accusing anyone on my team.”

  “Well, someone’s got a big mouth.” Thorne realized what he’d said straightaway, and the mileage that the man would enjoy getting from it.

  “Talk about pots and fucking kettles,” McCabe said. “I don’t know how long you’ve been mixing with smackheads and winos, mate, but you’re starting to make about as much sense…”

  McCabe began to walk. He turned right along Chandos Place toward Covent Garden. Thorne watched him, then followed, a hundred yards or so behind. At a corner of the piazza, McCabe stopped and Thorne caught him up. They stood on the edge of the Saturday-morning crowd that had gathered in front of a heavily tattooed juggler.

  “This bloke’s good,” McCabe said.

  Thorne grunted. There were a lot of people watching, and if one in five of them chucked a bit of money his way, the juggler would do all right for himself. Maybe he’d tell Spike to start practicing…

  “Better than those arseholes who paint themselves silver and stand around pretending to be statues. I think I’d rather have junkies and dossers on the streets than out-of-work actors.”

  “Shame our killer doesn’t agree with you,” Thorne said.

  McCabe turned slightly to look at him, as if he wasn’t sure whether Thorne was joking. As if he wasn’t sure about Thorne, full stop. “Seriously,” he said, “I tried to make certain everyone got the message. I did as much as I could to keep the lid on.”

  “Fair enough…”

  Thorne was starting to calm down a little. It didn’t matter whether McCabe was telling the truth or not. There was nothing anyone could do about the leak now. But still, Thorne couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would bother going to the paper with the story. “It’s not like it’s a royal sex scandal, is it?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not giving Princess Anne one, are you?”

  “Come on, they don’t pay big money for this kind of tip, do they? So what’s the bloody point?”

  “Not big money, no,” McCabe said. “But if it was one of your rough-sleeper mates, they’d settle for a few quid, or a bottle of scotch. They’d take anything they could get.”

  “Nobody I’ve met on the street has a clue…” Then Thorne remembered the drunk outside St. Clement Danes: the one who’d known he was a copper, who’d shouted about it until Spike had come along and shut him up. Could he have told the Standard? Could Moony have said something to somebody? Either was a possibility, of course, but Thorne was far from convinced.

  “You wouldn’t know if they did,” McCabe said. “The Drugs Squad sent a UCO in a year or two back; before my time. He was sussed within five minutes. Silly beggar was buying everyone beer and sneaking off to hotels every night.”

  “I’ve not been that stupid,” Thorne said. He continued quickly before McCabe could say anything. “Not quite that stupid.”

  McCabe turned back to the show, his interest waning suddenly. “If it isn’t about money, I haven’t got a clue.”

  “That’s why I was only half joking when I suggested Britton. He’s got a motive. I could understand him wanting to make me look like a mug.”

  “It wasn’t Britton.”

  The juggler was tossing meat cleavers into the air. He deliberately let one clatter to the cobbles, making the stunt look that bit more dangerous. The crowd didn’t seem overly impressed.

  “Whoever opened their mouth did so for a reason,” Thorne said. “They must be getting something out of it.”

  There was one major change to the layout on the whiteboard at the far end of the incident room: the list of victims had been divided into two. The names of Mannion, Hayes, and Asker now constituted a column of their own. Next to it, in black felt-tip, was written: Unknown Vic 1 and Jago, with a line in red leading from those names to 12th King’s Hussars and another to Tank Crew.

  Beneath that were two question marks.

  Of the large number of calls and e-mails that Brigstocke had fielded so far that day, he’d hoped that one or two might have gone some way toward replacing those question marks. He’d hoped that,
despite everything Kitson and Holland had been told in Somerset, the army would have found some way to dig up the names of the other soldiers who had served on the tank crew with Christopher Jago in

  1991.

  One already dead. Two who might be, or might soon be…

  As it was, far too many of those calls and e-mails had been about Tom Thorne.

  “It’s a pain in the arse,” Brigstocke said. He and Holland were sitting in his office, having polished off a lunch of ham rolls and cheese-and-onion crisps brought across from the Oak. “I’ve had that tosser from the Press Office on half a dozen times at least. Norman? He reckons he’s got papers and TV all over him…”

  Holland grimaced. He remembered Steve Norman from a case a couple of years before, when the MIT had been forced to work more closely than they’d have liked with the media. “Slimy sod deserves something a lot worse all over him.”

  Brigstocke didn’t think it was funny or he wasn’t listening. “I said as little as I could get away with, but I think they’re happy enough to let the story run for a while. Nobody seems desperate to squash it, anyway.”

  “It’s a bit late, I’d’ve thought…”

  “Norman’s not an easy bloke to read, but he’s sharp enough. We were going round the houses a bit, you know, discussing the story, talking about the UCO.” He raised his fingers, used them to put the initials in inverted commas. “But I got the distinct impression that he knew we were talking about Thorne.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Holland lowered his voice. “Should he know?”

  “He shouldn’t, but if it was a copper who leaked the story, then it’s hardly a major surprise.”

  Holland remembered a little more about the case during which he’d first come across the senior press officer; about the way Norman had clashed with one officer in particular. “Him and Thorne have got a bit of history…”

  Brigstocke barked out a humorless laugh. “Is there anyone Tom Thorne hasn’t got history with?”

  Another knock, and on being invited in, Yvonne Kitson put her head round the door. Holland saw something pass across her face on seeing that he and Brigstocke were ensconced, on guessing that they’d just stopped talking. But whatever she was feeling- curiosity, envy, suspicion-its expression was only momentary. He hoped that when the investigation was over, Kitson wouldn’t be pissed off that he’d been privy to the workings of the undercover operation while she had not. Holland thought he knew her well enough. He was pretty confident that she wouldn’t feel slighted; that she’d put it down to the close working relationship he had with Tom Thorne.

  “Am I interrupting, sir?”

  “No, you’re fine, Yvonne. Everyone okay after the briefing this morning?”

  “I think so…”

  Once the story had appeared in the previous day’s Standard, Brigstocke had been forced to say something to his team. He’d been forced to lie, told them that, yes, there was a UCO working as part of the investigation, but that the officer had been recruited, as might have been expected, from SO10. There was nothing else they needed to know.

  There was no reason for anyone to doubt that this was the unvarnished truth. Even if they did, they certainly wouldn’t have imagined that the officer at the center of it all was Tom Thorne.

  “You okay, Dave?” Kitson asked.

  “Yeah, I’m good…”

  Thinking about it, Holland might have preferred it if Kitson had been the dealing with Thorne. To be honest, he could have done without the stress.

  Kitson and Brigstocke spent a few minutes talking about another case. While the rough-sleeper killings was far and away the most high profile and demanding of the team’s cases, there were, at least theoretically, another forty-seven unsolved murders on their books: dozens of men and women stabbed, shot, and battered. Murders that were horrific and humdrum. Predictable and perverse. Gangland executions, domestic batteries, hate crimes. From sexual predation to pub punch-ups. Killings of every known variety, as well as a few that seemed to have been created just for the occasion. Some had come in since the roughsleeper murders had started, but some dated back to long before. Thankfully, a healthy number were in the pretrial stage, but there were still many that showed no sign of progress, and these were the ones that had been shoved onto the back burner. It always struck Holland as a ridiculous mixture of metaphors: some cases had gone so cold that no amount of time on any sort of burner would do them any good. The top brass had their own way of describing such things: they were fond of words like de – prioritizing. He could almost hear Thorne’s voice:

  De – prioritized in terms of fucking manpower, maybe. In terms of money. Try telling the victim’s family that they’ve been de – prioritized…

  Holland knew that catching the man who was killing the ex-servicemen was the only acceptable outcome; that was their priority. He understood the decision not to reveal the videotape at this time. Still, he hoped when the time came, though some or all of those responsible would already be dead, that as much effort would go into investigating the murders of four Iraqi soldiers.

  Kitson stopped on her way out. “I’ll let you get back to it.”

  “Boy’s stuff,” Holland said.

  Brigstocke pursed his lips and nodded, mock serious; masking the bullshit with silliness. “Right. You wouldn’t be interested…”

  As she walked back toward the incident room, Yvonne Kitson tried to keep the irritation in check. She’d had enough of this crap the year before. When her private life had become the stuff of pub chat and watercooler gossip.

  She’d been as rattled as anybody else by Brigstocke’s briefing that morning. Everyone had been talking since they’d seen it in the paper, of course, but hearing it from the DCI was something else. She knew very well that undercover operations could succeed only through secrecy, but still she’d felt as a DI that she could have been taken into confidence. Brought within the inner circle.

  She hadn’t let Brigstocke or anyone else see how she was feeling, though. That was something else she’d learned the previous year. When Brigstocke had asked how everyone had taken it, she’d lied.

  But hopefully she’d done so just a little better than he and Holland just had.

  She walked back into a crowded and bustling incident room, wondering why it was that people whose job it was to find the truth lied like such rank amateurs.

  He only came into the West End for work. At other times he couldn’t see any point in it. In terms of shopping or entertainment, you could get everything you needed locally, and he preferred not to venture too far from where he was staying. It wasn’t that he was a long way away; it wasn’t too much of a slog to get into town or anything like that. Central London just wore him out. Once he’d returned home, and the buzz of the job he’d been doing had worn off, he was left ragged and wrung out, with a dull ache, as if a muscle he’d been working on was complaining at the effort.

  The West End was greedy.

  Everywhere your eyes fell, the place had its scabby hand out in one way or another, from sandwich boards to neon signs and a hundred foreign students with a thousand pointless leaflets. Everyone wanted something, and not just those poor, useless buggers with nowhere else to go. All of them: the people working in shops and behind fast-food counters and the ones in cars and those walking fast along the pavement, tutting and growling, looking like they were ready to kill someone if their progress was halted for even one second. They all wanted something-your money, or your time, or your fucking attention-and if you wanted to make absolutely sure they got nothing, that no part of you was touched, it was crucial to stay on top of your game.

  He wandered through the streets around Soho and Covent Garden, moving quickly between those places he needed to visit. There was a list of them in his pocket, and he’d worked through most of it already. He turned from Dean Street on to Old Compton Street, heading toward Piccadilly. Past the cruisers and the coked-up media wankers. Past a wild-haired wino, breathing hea
vily and scowling at the world from the doorway of a fetish-wear boutique.

  As he walked he realized where that dull ache came from. It was the effort of staying self-contained that drained you; of keeping yourself impervious to the offers and the pleas; to the promises of pleasure of one sort or another. It was as though he’d been forced to spend the day permanently clenched, and he knew that when he got home he’d need to spend long hours flicking through the channels or working at the controls of the PlayStation. Sleep wouldn’t come until the knots had fallen out.

  He wasn’t complaining. You went where the job demanded, but still, he was pleased that he’d been able to define what it was that was niggling him. He’d write it down somewhere when he got back. All that stuff about greed…

  At least it was an appropriate place to be, he thought. Considering why he was there in the first place. After all, if one idiot hadn’t got greedy, none of it would ever have been necessary. They would all still be alive. The driver and the gunner and…

  He waited until the man who was walking straight toward him had stepped aside before pulling the list from his pocket and checking the next address.

  By the time it was dark he’d be well away, and he’d made an early start so as to be sure of it. He’d been around the West End late on a Saturday night before and it wasn’t something he was desperate to repeat unless he had to. That was when the fights broke out and the gutter seemed as good a place to lie down as any; when all the alleyways ran with piss and every hidey-hole contained some moron throwing up or sleeping off the excesses.

  On Saturday night you couldn’t tell who was homeless and who wasn’t.

  The young blond-haired woman was still unhappy with the background. She waved her hand, urging her subject to move just a little farther to the right…