Lifeless tt-5

by Mark Billingham

  There was no shortage of photo opportunities in London. The gasometers of King’s Cross were perfect for the seriously arty, as were the estates of Tower Hamlets and Tottenham for a certain sort of documentary maker. Snap-happy tourists, of course, were spoiled for choice. The Americans and the Japanese on their European tours, the Geordies and the Jocks down for the weekend; they could all point their cameras just about anywhere, and few landmarks were more popular than Eros. Visitors to Piccadilly Circus clicked away oblivious, thinking that the figure atop the memorial fountain was the God of Love, and equally misguided about many of those who gathered around the steps of the monument. The statue was actually meant to be the Angel of Christian Charity, and a number of those within range of his bow were among the city’s lost: runaways, junkies, and rent boys for whom a little Christian charity was long overdue.

  “No… further… keep moving…”

  The blonde spoke with a thick Scandinavian accent and kept waving from behind the camera, eager to keep the trio of scarred and scruffy-looking wasters out of her shot. Her boyfriend was growing increasingly impatient, unaware of the three figures on the steps directly behind him.

  Spike and Caroline were tucking hungrily into greasy pizza slices while Thorne sat engrossed in what was happening on the far side of the circus. He watched as a big man in an unfamiliar blue uniform leaned down to talk to a beggar outside Burger King. There was some head shaking before the man on the ground snatched up his blanket and stalked away.

  “Who’s that?” Thorne nodded toward the man in the uniform.

  Spike stood up and peered across the traffic. “PCP,” he said.

  “Piccadilly Circus Partnership.” Caroline shoved the last bit of pizza into her mouth and wiped her fingers on the back of her jeans. “A bunch of local businesses pay for a few little fucking Hitlers to keep the streets clean. Someone told me they’re in radio contact with the police and there’s a huge control room full of CCTV screens in the Trocadero.” She pointed toward the huge entertainment complex on Coventry Street. “They’re supposed to be on the lookout for all sorts of stuff. Cracked paving stones, blocked drains, or whatever…”

  “Yeah, right.” Spike was lighting a roll-up. “These fuckers think some things smell a damn sight worse than that, like.”

  Thorne watched the man in the blue uniform walking slowly across the zebra crossing toward Tower Records. There were plenty of these cut-price coppers to be seen around the West End, differentiated-to any but the trained eye-only by the colored fluorescent strips across their uniforms and peaked caps. Aside from the PCP goons, there were council-appointed city wardens patrolling the streets in pairs. Then there were the Met’s own community support officers. The CSOs had the power to detain rather than arrest, and despite the publicity that had surrounded their introduction a few years previously, they were seen-not least by real police officers-as something of a joke.

  “Look at that cocky sod,” Caroline said. “I bet he goes home and gets his wife to piss on him…”

  In general terms at least, Thorne shared Caroline’s suspicions. He thought that those who wanted to be full-time police officers were dodgy enough. Anyone who couldn’t manage that, but still had some overwhelming desire to pull on a uniform and strut around trying to keep the streets clean, almost certainly needed watching.

  Spike tried to blow smoke rings, but the breeze pulled them apart. “Or he makes her dress up as a beggar and handcuffs her to the bed.”

  Caroline laughed. “With a sign saying ‘Homeless and Horny’…”

  “Dirty bastard…”

  Thorne thought about the “policeman” that Mannion and others had mentioned. The one who was supposed to have been seen asking questions prior to the first killing. Was it possible that this man had been one of these ancillary officers? With a few drinks inside you, wouldn’t one uniform look much the same as another on a dark night? He thought it was unlikely. They didn’t know for sure that the officer described had even been uniformed, but if he had, Thorne guessed that most of those sleeping rough around the West End, many of them living on the fringes of one law or another, would know a genuine copper when they saw one.

  He turned, and watched a real enough police officer marshaling the queue that was moving slowly into a matinee at the Criterion. He decided that thinking out loud could do no harm.

  “Do you reckon this killer might be a copper?”

  Spike sat down again. The smoke from his cigarette moved quickly across Thorne’s face. “Fuck knows. It’s what a lot of people think.” He turned to Caroline. “Caz thinks he’s a copper, don’t you?”

  “Got every chance,” she said. “That’s why they’ve sent this undercover copper in to catch him. It’s like in films, when they talk to convicted killers to find out what the one they’re after is thinking. It-takesone-to-know-one kind of thing…”

  Thorne nodded, thinking that he didn’t understand what went on in his own head, let alone anybody else’s.

  “I wouldn’t fancy doing it,” Spike said. “Sleeping on the street if you didn’t have to, with a killer knocking around.”

  Caroline leaned across and touched Thorne’s face. The graze on his forehead had scabbed over and the bruises were yellowing nicely, their edges indistinct. “This undercover bloke’ll be all right,” she said. “If he’s as handy with his fists as the coppers that did this, I don’t think he’s got much to worry about.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Where’ve you been?” Holland asked. He stepped into a shop doorway to escape the noise of the traffic.

  “Sorry. I only just got your message. I fancied a lie-in…”

  “Where are you?”

  “Hang on… I can’t see a street sign. I’m somewhere round the back of the National Gallery.”

  “I was looking for you at the theater.”

  “That’s where I normally am.”

  “I know. I went in to the London Lift when you didn’t return the call and that’s where Brendan said you’d be.”

  “I moved,” Thorne said.

  Holland grunted, relieved that Thorne was okay but pissed off that he’d spent all morning running around like a blue-arsed fly, trying to find him. “We’ve had a bit of luck,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Where can we meet?”

  The three of them had walked the length of Oxford Street before Spike and Caroline had gone down into the subways beneath Marble Arch to catch up on some sleep. Thorne had crossed the road into Hyde Park and sat down on a bench near one of the cafes at Speakers’ Corner.

  This triangle at the northeast corner of the park should have been a pleasant enough place to sit at this time of year. Even if the verge adjoining the bridle path had been freshly churned into mud, elsewhere the autumn crocuses were in full bloom, bright and lively. The railed-in lawns were still lush, and despite the plastic bags that danced from many of the branches, the leaves provided plenty more color a little higher up-green, and bronze, and butter yellow on the ash trees.

  Thorne knew that twenty-four hours earlier, as on every Sunday morning, the political pundits, the zealots, and the nutcases would have been out in force. They’d have been up on their soapboxes, shouting about freedom and enlightenment, and aliens sending messages through their toasters, each one honoring the tradition of free speech that had been guaranteed on this spot by act of Parliament a hundred and twentyfive years before. Halfway through this bleak Monday, freezing his tits off and with a headache just starting to kick in, Thorne found it far easier to picture the gallows at Tyburn, which had stood on the same spot for centuries before that. It was less effort to imagine the creak of a body swinging-of twenty – four at one time from the Triple Tree-and the bloodthirsty cries of the crowd than to conjure the voices of debate and discussion.

  Holland dropped down onto the bench next to him and nodded toward the corner. A semicircle of pin oaks had been planted on its farthest boundary, fiery red against the off-white brickwork on the far
side of Park Lane. “What would you want to get off your chest, then?”

  “Eh?”

  “If you had a crowd, and you could talk about anything you liked. ..”

  It was one of the main reasons why Thorne enjoyed having Holland around; why Thorne had made himself unpopular with anyone who’d stepped, however briefly, into the former DC’s shoes. Holland had the pleasing knack of being able to punch through the hard shell of a black mood with one glib comment or seemingly innocent inquiry; with a stupid question in too cheery a voice. There were occasions, if Thorne was feeling particularly arsey, when he put this down to insensitivity on Holland’s part, but more frequently he saw it to be the exact opposite.

  “God knows,” Thorne said. “The way things are going, I think I’ll end up as one of the toasters-andaliens brigade.”

  “Sorry?”

  Thorne shook his head. It didn’t matter. “What about you?”

  “Where d’you want to start? I’d try to win the crowd over to the idea that all children should be taken into care between the ages of one and sixteen. I’d ask them to support my campaign for police paternity leave to be extended to, say, five years, and to include free alcohol and Caribbean holidays. I’d ask if any of them wanted to sleep with me…”

  “Things a bit sticky at home?”

  “How much room is there in your doorway?”

  Thorne did his best to smile, and leaned back on the bench. He watched a pair of squirrels chase each other around a litter bin; saw a fat magpie hop lazily away as one of them ran at it.

  Holland took off his gloves as he reached down to pull something from his briefcase. “I’m only joking,” he said.

  It was a magazine. Glossy, with a picture of a grimfaced soldier on the front: sand all around and in sandbags at his feet; sheets of dust rising black behind him. In bold red lettering across the top: glorious.

  “It’s the regimental magazine,” Holland said. “That’s their nickname: the ‘Glory Boys’ or the ‘Glorious Twelfth.’ A woman from their HQ sent it. She’s the assistant adjutant…”

  “She sent it to you?”

  “Just arrived out of the blue. It’s the Spring 1991 issue.”

  Thorne threw him a sideways look as he began to flick through the magazine.

  “I’m sure she was genuinely trying to help.” Holland tried to summon a cocky grin, but blushed despite himself. “But I think she did take a shine to me…”

  “It’s bloody typical,” Thorne said. “The finest detectives on the force applying themselves twenty-four hours a day, and we get a break because some woman, who’s clearly mad or desperate, thinks you’ve got a nice arse.”

  The magazine was a mixture of regimental news and notices. There were letters, quizzes, and book reviews; advertisements for modeling kits, financial services, and shooting weekends. There were obituaries for those who had long since left the regiment and for some who had died more recently, while on active service.

  About half the magazine was taken up by articles and photographs. All these were the work of serving soldiers, and the majority of them concerned what had, in spring 1991, been the very recent conflict in the Gulf: “Christmas in Kuwait”; “Desert Shield-A Trooper’s Perspective”; “Into the Storm.”

  “That’s the one,” Holland said. He leaned across and pointed to where a page had been marked by a piece of paper. “That’s the page she wanted us to see.”

  Thorne unfolded the bookmark. It was headed with the regimental crest and Latin motto. The message was handwritten in blue ink: Thought this would be a shot in the dark, but I think we struck lucky. The photograph is what you’ll probably be most interested in. Lt. Sarah Cheshire.

  “No kiss?” Thorne asked.

  “I’m not listening,” Holland said. He pointed to a black-and-white photo that took up half a page of the magazine. “Our four men are somewhere among that lot…”

  Two dozen or so soldiers had posed for the camera, arranged in front of, around, and in many cases on top of three battle tanks. They all wore desert camouflage and berets. Each carried a rifle and no more than a few of them were smiling. There was a caption to the right of the picture: D Troop, 2nd Sabre Squadron. Bremenhaven. October

  1990.

  “Just before they were posted to the Gulf,” Holland said. He reached over again and jabbed a finger toward one of the soldiers. The faces were small in shot, the features indistinct. “That’s Jago…”

  Thorne looked at the list of names beneath the photograph. Jago’s was certainly there, but the list was not structured in any way. It was impossible to tell how the names corresponded to the men in the picture, gathered as arbitrarily as they were.

  “How do you know?” Thorne asked.

  “We scanned the photo and e-mailed it to Susan Jago. She picked her brother out for us.”

  “She pick out anybody else?”

  “She told us before that she’d only seen one photo of the crew together… and that was years ago.”

  Thorne studied the photograph. He thought he could read fear-apprehension, at least-on one or two of the faces, but decided in the end that he was simply projecting. He couldn’t see what was in the heads and hearts of these soldiers any better than he’d been able to see what was in the eyes of the four he’d watched committing murder on a grainy videotape. Those men were in front of him at that moment; he was looking at their faces. And now, if any were still alive, there was a way to trace them.

  “How did they get away with it, Dave? How did no one find out what they’d done?”

  “Maybe someone did,” Holland said. “The army might have known and hushed it up…”

  Thorne wasn’t convinced. “Or maybe they just buried the bodies.” He ran that through his mind for a moment; thought about holes being dug in wet sand once the camera had been switched off. Thinking about the tape reminded him of something else. “Any word back from the lab yet? They were going to try and sort out the sound on the video…”

  Holland rolled his eyes. “Believe it or not, we’ve now sent it to a special unit at the University of California…”

  “They can’t do it here?”

  “Not if you want a result this side of Christmas.”

  “Jesus.” Thorne handed the magazine back to Holland. “I presume we’re going back to the army with these names.”

  “Yeah, and this should make things piss-easy for them. We know none of them are still serving with the Twelfth King’s Hussars, but we should be able to find out if any have moved anywhere else within the service. And now we’ve got the names, we can finally get on to the Army Personnel Centre.”

  “I think we should start trying to locate them ourselves at the same time, though.” Thorne got to his feet. “We might find them faster than the army can.”

  “That’s the plan,” Holland said. “We just need to get hold of someone with a decent memory. Someone who can remember the other three who were in Jago’s tank crew.”

  “Start with the rarest names, right? Leave the Smiths and Joneses till last…”

  “Really?” Holland looked across at Thorne like he was telling him how to tie his shoelaces.

  Thorne returned the look with knobs on. “Okay… Sorry, Sergeant.”

  “We’re shit out of luck as far as that goes, anyway.” Holland pulled on his gloves and stood up. “Nothing too outlandish, I’m afraid. Not a single Private Parts or Corporal Clutterbuck among them

  …”

  They walked south toward the Serpentine.

  It had started to drizzle, and Holland reached instinctively for the umbrella in his case, then stopped when he saw Thorne moving through the rain as if he were unaware of it.

  “So why did you move?” Holland asked. “Are you trying to lower the tone in as many places as possible?”

  “No choice. The bloke whose pitch I took is coming back. Today or maybe tomorrow. These things tend not to be very specific…”

  When Thorne had seen him the day before, Spike had
been insistent that Terry T was on his way back to London. He’d heard a definite rumor, at any rate, and seeing as how Terry would want his pitch back, it was a good idea for Thorne to look around for somewhere new to bed down. Terry T was a big bloke, after all, Spike had said, and with a seriously vicious temper. Thorne had taken the bait, pretending to fall for the same gag he hadn’t fallen for on the first night he and Spike had met…

  “How’s the face feel?” Holland asked. This was the first day he’d laid eyes on Thorne since his arrest, and the first time he’d mentioned Thorne’s souvenirs of the occasion.

  “What, have you only just noticed it?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want people banging on about it…”

  “Because I got my face smashed in?” Thorne’s tone was suddenly edgy, and snide. “Or because of why?” They walked on in silence for a few minutes.

  “Obviously, it looks pretty bad,” Holland said. “The face, I mean. I just wondered if it hurt much, that’s all. Thought maybe you could get Phil Hendricks to bung you a few painkillers or something.”

  Thorne felt bad that he’d been snappy before. “Don’t worry about the face, Holland. It looks like shit, but beneath the bruises, my looks remain undamaged.”

  “That’s a shame,” Holland said.

  They came out onto Carriage Drive opposite Hyde Park Corner. Thorne had decided to take the long way back and walk into the West End along Piccadilly. Holland was planning to catch the tube back up to Colindale.

  “Do you want to know the worst thing about you being promoted?” Thorne asked. “I can no longer enjoy the simple pleasure of calling you Constable as if it’s spelled with a U and an extra T…”

  Saturday had been a bit hectic, but he’d got what he needed, and the rest of the weekend had actually been very pleasant. He’d taken a boat trip down to Greenwich and wandered around the Maritime Museum. Sitting in a nice pub by the river, he’d had a couple of pints and a Sunday lunch with all the trimmings. Later, he’d poked around a few of the little antiquey places and secondhand shops. He’d bought a computer game and a black suede jacket from the market.