If you could be bothered to look, there were plenty of places like that in London, north and south of the river; places with some charm and individuality; with a little bit of character. You couldn’t help but wonder why those who ended up on the street chose to congregate like rats around the West End. Were they drawn to the bright lights or something? Did they think it was glamorous? He didn’t understand it. Surely they could have gone wherever they fancied, slept wherever they liked. Wasn’t that one of the few good things about being homeless?
For all that he’d learned about the lives of these people-and he’d made it his business to learn a great deal-he couldn’t help but think that, for some of them, it was a lifestyle choice. There were a few, of course-the ones who were soft in the head or whatever-who would never be able to cope and were always going to end up on the margins of society, but for others it seemed to be about preference. From what he could see, those people didn’t want to help themselves and scorned any offer of assistance from others. It was hard to have any real sympathy with that sort…
Bearing in mind what he’d been doing, he knew full well that he could hardly have been expected to think any other way, but that was genuinely his opinion on the subject. He firmly believed that he could do what he’d done and still be, you know, objective about what went on in the world. The people who had died had done so for no other reason than simple necessity. What had been done-what he’d had to do-was about no more than self-preservation. Well, that and the money, of course.
But nothing else.
He could honestly say that he hadn’t borne any illwill toward anyone he’d ever killed.
Today, with more work to do, he wasn’t quite as relaxed as he had been when ambling about in Greenwich. It should all have been done and dusted by now, but when it came to protecting yourself, being safe rather than sorry was the only sensible approach.
He was spending a dreary Monday mastering his new computer game; sharpening up his reflexes and concentrating his mind. He’d get back to the matter in hand tomorrow.
TWENTY-THREE
As a trainee detective constable, Jason Mackillop was desperate for any chance to make an impression. It was easy to get lost on a major investigation such as this one. But it was also possible, if you were in the right place at the right time, with the right people at the end of the phone, to go from donkey to hero in a few minutes. They hadn’t talked much about luck on the five-week Detective Training Course at Hendon, but all the trainees knew it was every bit as important as the stuff they had been taught: forensics; crime-scene management; handling exhibits; disclosure of evidence; performance in the witness box.
At twenty-three, he was relatively young for a TDC. He was perhaps no more than six months away from being assigned as a full DC, but after the probation, the year on relief, and the two more as a dogsbody on the Crime Squad, he was more than ready to step up. He’d already proved he could handle himself in most formal areas of the job, and catching a break like this one certainly couldn’t hurt…
Mackillop put down the phone, took a deep breath, and snatched up the piece of paper on which he’d been scribbling. He needed to pass on the information quickly, but for a second or two he wasn’t completely certain as to whom. Should he observe the chain of command or just go straight to the most senior officer he could find? If he did, would he risk putting noses out of joint? It was fantastic to impress, but it might be a very bad move to alienate those just a step or two farther up the ladder than he was.
He glanced around the incident room, feeling the paper warm against his sweaty fingers. They were a good bunch, by and large, with no more tossers than you’d expect on any team of this size: Andy Stone was the sort of bloke you’d like as a mate, but Mackillop was unsure how good a copper he was; Kitson seemed well liked, but she sometimes had that look, like you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of her; Holland could be a bit distant, though he’d only just been promoted, and was bound to have a lot on his plate. Mackillop had never met Tom Thorne, the team’s absent DI, but he’d certainly heard enough about him…
Looking around, trying to make his mind up, he saw that Kitson was watching him from a spot by the coffee machine. Her eye flicked from his face to the piece of paper he was now wafting nervously from the end of his outstretched arm.
“All right, Jason?”
“Guv…”
Mackillop walked across, decision made, and within a minute he knew it had been the right one. Once he’d finished telling her about the phone call and shown her what he’d written down, Kitson had done exactly as he’d hoped she’d do: she’d congratulated him on a job well done, then pointed him straight toward the DCI’s office.
He couldn’t see Spike or One-Day Caroline, and guessed they’d be in later, but there were plenty of faces Thorne did recognize as he looked around. He saw Holy Joe, and the drunk who’d shouted at him outside St. Clement Danes, and others he’d exchanged a story or two with at the soup runs around the Strand.
He asked if any of the unfamiliar faces belonged to Terry T.
Brendan Maxwell craned his head, panned quickly around the cafe, then went back to his breakfast. “No, I can’t see him. Why?”
“That’s his spot I’ve been bedding down in most nights and Spike reckons he’s coming back. So I’ve got to find somewhere else.”
“Doesn’t hurt to move around a bit,” Maxwell said.
Thorne rammed the last of an egg-and-bacon roll into his mouth and answered with his mouth full. “S’pose not…”
“A lot of my clients have been moving around a bit more lately.” They had been talking quietly anyway, but now Maxwell lowered his voice until it was barely above a whisper. “Some of them have taken to sleeping in a different place every night, or getting themselves indoors. For obvious reasons.”
“I don’t want to go into a hostel,” Thorne said.
He had purposely gone into the Lift early. The battery on his mobile was very low and he was borrowing a charger in Maxwell’s office. They’d gone down to the cafe for breakfast while they waited.
Maxwell took a slurp of tea, then grunted and swallowed quickly as he remembered something. “Did that copper find you, by the way? He was going to look for you at the theater, I think…”
Thorne nodded. “He tracked me down eventually.” He remembered Holland telling him on the phone that he’d come here; that Maxwell had pointed him toward the theater doorway.
Since they’d met the day before in the park and Holland had shown him the magazine, Thorne had been anxiously waiting for news. It could only be a matter of time until they had names. It felt like they were turning a corner and picking up speed. Of course, he’d had the same feeling plenty of times before. Often, it just meant that you hit the brick wall that much faster.
“What’s Phil up to?” Thorne hadn’t seen Hendricks for nearly a fortnight.
The Irishman pointed a fork toward Thorne’s face. “He told me to make sure you took some painkillers if that was hurting…”
“They’re fucking ganging up on me,” Thorne said.
Maxwell looked confused for a moment, shrugged when Thorne shook his head. On the far side of the cafe, a plate crashed to the floor. Maxwell joined in with the cheer as loudly as anyone else. “You seeing a fair bit of the city, then?” he asked.
“I’m seeing a lot of it, yeah. But I don’t know that fair is the right word.”
“Not the stuff you see in the guidebooks, is it?”
“It’s like being on Panorama, ” Thorne said. “Only with more killing.”
In the queue at the counter behind them, voices were suddenly raised. Maxwell pushed back his chair and stood, ready to step in, but the man doing most of the shouting was already striding toward the door, telling anyone who’d listen that they could go fuck themselves.
Maxwell sat back down. “You like all that nasty stuff, though, right? Phil was telling me. All that blood and guts and Black Museum shit.”
Thorne f
elt slightly irritated. He didn’t know if Maxwell was being deliberately obtuse or if Hendricks had just put it across to him badly. Knowing how Hendricks had once tried to explain Thorne’s love of country music by telling Maxwell that he liked songs about death and lost dogs, this was certainly possible. “I like history,” he said. “In London, a lot of it’s just… dark.”
Maxwell pushed what was left of his breakfast around the plate. “Getting darker all the time,” he said.
Thorne sensed a figure looming behind him and twisted his neck round to see Lawrence Healey standing there, clutching a tray.
“May I join you?” Healey asked.
Maxwell put his fork down and threw back what was left of his tea. “I’m just on my way to a meeting. Tom?”
“Free country…” Thorne said.
Maxwell looked across the table before he turned to leave, something Thorne couldn’t read in his eyes. “Let me know if there’s anything else you need…”
Healey tucked into a bowl of what looked suspiciously like bran. There was a carton of yogurt on his tray and a cup of foul-smelling herbal tea. After a minute or two of silence and an exchange of awkward smiles, Healey cleared his throat. “I was going to ask how you were getting on, but looking at you, I’m not sure there’s any real need.”
“You should have seen the other bloke,” Thorne said.
“I saw him yesterday, as a matter of fact…”
Thorne didn’t know what to say.
Healey’s voice, even posher than Thorne remembered, suited a tone of wry amusement very well. “We have a weekly meeting with some of the officers from the Homeless Unit. Just a chat about anything that’s come up.” He stared across at Thorne for a few moments, nudged his glasses a little higher, then went back to his cereal.
Thorne watched Healey eat. He looked fit and tanned under a brushed-denim button-down shirt. That said, most people would have looked well compared to Thorne himself. Or to any of the blotchy or the blasted, the washed-out or pastyfaced characters that moved around them. “Thanks for the concern,” Thorne said. “But I really wouldn’t bother.”
“You might need some legal advice…”
“I’ll be fine.”
“We can help you with that.”
Thorne said nothing. He turned and looked at the noticeboard for a while, decided he’d probably give the poetry workshop a miss.
“Things going okay, though?” Healey asked. “Generally, I mean?”
“I’ve been better…”
“I know.”
“Really?”
“I do understand how hard it is.” Healey’s voice was lower suddenly. He reminded Thorne of an overearnest vicar. Or of Tony Blair. “It’s the adjustment that’s particularly difficult…”
Thorne had actually found adjusting to other people the trickiest thing of all; to the way other people saw him. It was usually one of two reactions: he was avoided or ignored. In the first instance, pedestrians would steer clear, the more sensitive doing their best to make that feint to one side as unobtrusive as possible. In the second, he seemed to become completely invisible, as passersby simply pretended that they hadn’t seen him at all. Both reactions were gloriously British in their sly dishonesty, but no more so, Thorne decided, than some people’s when confronted by people whom they actually knew. When greeting those they perhaps hadn’t seen for a while. There was one phrase that Thorne particularly hated; it could cover a multitude of sins and was trotted out no matter how sick or sad the person on the receiving end appeared. No matter how frightful their clothes or hair, or how much weight they’d put on since the last time you’d seen them: “You look well…”
Suddenly a hand fell onto Thorne’s shoulder and a rheumy-eyed whippet of a man he’d talked to once or twice leaned down close to him. “Great days, eh?” The man breathed sweet sherry into Thorne’s face. “Great days…”
Thorne had no idea what the man was talking about. He watched him walk away and accost someone at the next table, then turned back to Healey. “I’ve met some fascinating people, though,” he said.
“What’s it been now? A month or so?”
“Something like that. You lose track.” Thorne wasn’t sure exactly how many rough sleepers came within the Lift’s remit, but he couldn’t help wondering if Healey knew as much about all his clients. “What about you?”
“Sorry?”
Thorne was thinking about what Healey had said when they’d met in the corridor a couple of weeks before. “We’re both ‘new boys,’ remember? How are you settling in?”
“Oh… settled now, most definitely. Thank you for asking.”
“Just talking,” Thorne said.
“People can be suspicious of a new broom, you know? You just need to get your head down and get on with it, whatever anyone else thinks. A certain amount of tunnel vision definitely helps.”
The concern in Healey’s voice had gone and been replaced by something a little more abrasive. Thorne saw that there was a resolve behind the nice-butdim accent and the do-gooder appearance. He also understood exactly what Healey was saying. Tunnel vision was something he’d been accused of himself, though it was usually described somewhat less politely.
“It could help get you off the street,” Healey said.
“Maybe it’s what put me on it.”
“You want to talk about that?”
“Not hugely…”
When Healey began removing the foil from his yogurt carton, Thorne stood up and took his coat from the back of the chair.
“I enjoyed the chat,” Healey said.
Thorne bent to pile his empty plate and cup onto the tray. “You need to get out more,” he said.
He slid his tray onto a trolley near the food counter, then looked back to make sure that Healey hadn’t gone anywhere. He wanted to check to see if there’d been any messages, and as long as Healey was still eating, it was the perfect time to nip up to the office and get his phone back.
Looks played a major part in it; that’s how Russell Brigstocke felt anyway. It was like being a hardman, like being feared. Yes, it was about what was inside your head, about having the will to dish out pain, and to take it, but once you had it going on up there, then what you looked like was the next most important thing. The set of your mouth, and the way your eyes absorbed the light-the way they sucked it in and smothered it-counted far more than your size, or how much weight your punch packed.
It seemed to Brigstocke that Jason Mackillop looked like a copper. He had short hair and skin that was pitted with acne scars. He was heavyset beneath a blue M amp;S suit, and he stood awkwardly, as though he were designed to be permanently leaning on something: the roof of an unmarked vehicle; the windowsill in an airless interview room; a bar. What Mackillop looked like of course was a casting director’s idea of a copper, but as most of those who did the job for real looked like financial advisers-Brogstocke himself included, if he were being honest-that was probably no bad thing. At that moment, with the TDC standing in front of his desk and brightening the day right up, he decided that Jason Mackillop was the sort of copper he could do with a damn sight more of.
“Right, let’s have those names…” Brigstocke said.
The list of soldiers in the Glorious photograph had been divided up and Mackillop had been the one who had struck lucky. Among those in his allocation had been the writer of the original article, and not only had First Lieutenant Stephen Brereton been fairly easy to trace, but he’d had no great trouble providing the relevant information. Mackillop had already explained to Brigstocke how Brereton-now a major in the Corporate Communications Department of the MOD-had remembered Chris Jago pretty well. He’d talked about their time in Bremenhaven; about Jago’s fondness for German beer and German girls. He’d told Mackillop how each crew in the troop had been tight with one another; how a friendly rivalry between the different crews had been actively encouraged. Brereton hadn’t seemed to mind too much that he could not be told why the police were so interested
, and had said he’d be happy to have a look through some of his old Gulf War journals and diaries. After no more than ten minutes, he’d called back with the names of the other three men who’d manned a Challenger tank alongside Chris Jago in the early part of 1991.
“That major down in Somerset… Poulter? He said that these crews got moved about all the time, that they were sometimes shifted around in battle situations. How can Brereton be certain these are the men who were in that tank on February 26, 1991?”
“He isn’t,” Mackillop said. “Not absolutely, one hundred percent I mean. I gave him the exact date and he told me that his memory wasn’t that good, but that he thought he’d remember if there’d been any injuries or last-minute transfers, you know? He wouldn’t stake his life on it, but he couldn’t recall any particular reason why that crew should have been split up.”
“Right…” Brigstocke was holding out a hand, waiting to take the piece of paper.
Instead, Mackillop looked at his list, read the names to the DCI: “Trooper Christopher Jago, he was the gunner; Lance Corporal Ryan Eales, the loader/operator; Trooper Alec Bonser was the driver, and the tank commander was Corporal Ian Hadingham. I reckon this was our crew, guv.” Then he stepped forward and passed the paper across the desk.
Jago. Eales. Bonser. Hadingham.
Brigstocke stared down at the names of four men who surely held the key to solving a series of murders. Four men who themselves had committed murder and who now appeared to be paying for it with their own lives.
“Obviously, we’re still in the dark about which one of them is our first victim,” Mackillop said. “It could be Eales, Bonser, or Hadingham.”
Brigstocke nodded. “Now we’ve ID’d the crew, we can put a bit more pressure on the Army Personnel Centre-”
“I’m already on it, guv.”
“I can’t actually promote you until you’ve made DC, you know, Jason.”
Mackillop reddened. “Well, I’m not on it exactly, but Major Brereton said he’d talk to them and try to get at least the basic stuff to us A.S.A.P.”
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