From the Dead (2010)

by Mark Billingham

  'Did you get off?'

  Thorne just stared as the woman reddened still further.

  She mumbled, 'Sorry, stupid joke,' and proffered a business card. 'My name's Anna Carpenter, and--'

  Thorne took the card without looking at it and gestured towards the security door. 'Let's go up to my office.' He swiped his ID and gave the finger to the desk sergeant, who was still chuckling as Thorne ushered Anna through the door.

  THREE

  Thorne stared down at the card and the photograph on the desk in front of him. He tapped a finger against the dog-eared business card. 'F.A. Investigations'. The name 'Frank Anderson' beneath and an address in Victoria. It looked like one of those you could get printed up in batches of fifty from DIY machines at railway stations. Thin card and a font that made the lettering look like broken-down typing. A cheesy picture of a bloodhound with a magnifying glass.

  'Don't you get your own card?' Thorne asked.

  The woman sitting opposite picked at her thumbnail. 'Mr Anderson keeps saying he'll get around to it,' she said. 'And he makes the administrative decisions. Right now, I think he's got more important things to spend his money on.'

  Thorne nodded his understanding. Like keeping his Cavalier on the road, he thought.

  'This is my case, though.' She waited until Thorne looked up and across at her. 'I mean, Donna's my client.'

  Thorne could see the determination clearly in Anna Carpenter's face, could hear it in her voice. A desire to impress, to impose herself, even if she didn't quite look the part in jeans and a black corduroy jacket. Like a superannuated student, Thorne's father would have said. She was late twenties, Thorne guessed; round-faced and pretty. When she wasn't picking at her fingernails, she tugged at a strand of long, dirty-blonde hair and shifted around in her chair like someone who found it difficult to keep still for more than a few seconds at a time.

  'I never said she wasn't,' Thorne said. He looked down again, turned his attention to the photograph. A man was squinting into the sunshine, grinning at the camera and holding up a glass of beer. He was probably mid-fifties, with the hair on his head a little darker than it would have been naturally, judging by the grey tangle on his flabby, nut-brown chest. The sky behind him was cloudless, with the jagged line of a mountain sloping down to a dark blue streak of sea in the background, a small sail-boat in the far distance. He might have been sitting on a boat himself, or at the end of a pier. In a restaurant near the water's edge, perhaps.

  'Greece? Spain? South of France?' Thorne shook his head. 'Florida, maybe? Your guess is as good as mine.'

  'It's not Birmingham,' Anna said. 'That's about as far as I've got.'

  The man's eyes were all but closed against the glare, but the grin seemed unforced, effortless. 'He looks happy enough.'

  'Got every reason to be,' Anna said. 'Actually, I thought you might recognise him.'

  Thorne looked closer. A bell was ringing, but faintly. 'What's your client's name?'

  There was a pause, the hint of a satisfied smile. 'She was sent that picture last December.' Anna moved her chair forward until she was tight against the desk. 'That was two months before she was released from prison.'

  'What did she do?'

  'Conspiracy to murder her husband.'

  'How long?'

  'Twelve years. She served ten.'

  'Langford?' Thorne stared at her. The penny had dropped, hard, but it made no sense. 'Your client is Donna Langford?'

  Anna nodded. 'She's using her maiden name now, but, yes, she was.'

  'Somebody's winding you up, love.'

  'I don't think so.'

  'You know what she did?' Thorne stabbed a finger at the photograph. 'Why this can't possibly be who she thinks it is?'

  'She told me some of it.'

  'Let me tell you all of it,' Thorne said. 'Then we can both stop wasting our time.'

  Thorne had worked on cases within the last six months that he could not remember as clearly as this one, even though it had been more than a decade since Alan Langford was murdered.

  They'd called it the 'Epping Forest Barbecue' in the office.

  Langford had always been a man who made news. He had kept a good few journalists busy over the years, crime and business correspondents both; his property empire growing as fast as his competitors retired suddenly, vanished or met with unfortunate accidents. He finally became front-page fodder when his charred remains were discovered in his burned-out Jag in Epping Forest. Then the column inches became feet and yards when it emerged that his wife had arranged his murder.

  Donna Langford, an immaculately turned-out businessman's wife, patron of several local charities and lady who lunched, had paid someone to kill her husband.

  'She used her old man's own contacts,' Thorne said. 'Maybe the bloke she hired was in Langford's address-book . . . under "H" for "Hit-men".'

  'Look at the picture again,' Anna said. 'It's him. You must remember what he looked like back then. You can see that he's aged, surely?'

  Thorne glanced down. 'Yes, well, he's certainly looking a lot better than the last time I saw him.'

  'If you're talking about the body in the car, that wasn't him.'

  'Donna identified him.' Thorne was doing his best not to sound patronising, but it was a struggle. 'It was his car and his jewellery. That was pretty much all that was left, mind you . . .'

  'She never knew that was how he was going to do it,' Anna said. 'The man she hired.'

  'She never asked.' Thorne leaned back in his chair. 'She calmly paid an Irishman called Paul Monahan twenty-five thousand pounds. He used a few quid of it to buy some petrol and a pair of handcuffs.'

  'When did you know she had been involved?'

  'About thirty seconds after I met her,' Thorne said. 'When she came in to identify the body. I've seen people react in all sorts of ways, but she just stood and . . . shook. I asked her if she was all right, and she more or less made a confession on the spot, with her old man still stinking like overcooked meat in the corner.'

  'How did you catch Monahan?'

  'Donna gave us his name and then we matched his DNA to a cigarette butt we found at the crime scene. It couldn't have been more straightforward in the end.' Thorne slid the picture across the desk towards Anna. 'Trust me, cases as piss-easy as that one don't come along every day.'

  Anna nodded and cleared her throat. 'Donna's served ten years in prison, Inspector.'

  Thorne took a few seconds, gathered together some papers on his desk. He summoned the same calm expression he had been relying on in court all morning, but he could still remember the smell of that Jag, the taste of the smoke and the ash that was not just ash, and the pale globules of fat that were stuck to the seats.

  'She got off pretty lightly, if you ask me,' he said. 'She pleaded guilty, which always does you a favour, and it didn't hurt that her old man was a scumbag who was probably knocking her about when he wasn't busy having people's legs broken. Yeah, Alan Langford got what was coming to him, probably, but it was still a seriously nasty way to go.'

  'Look at the date,' Anna said, She pushed the photo back towards Thorne. 'Bottom right . . .'

  Thorne picked up the photo. The date had been stamped automatically by the camera: a little over three months earlier. 'They can do that sort of thing with Photoshop,' he said. 'Besides which, this could be a photo of anybody.'

  'Donna says it's her husband,' Anna said. She shook her head, searched for something else, but in the end she just shrugged and said it again. 'She swears it's Alan.'

  'Then she's lying.'

  'Why?'

  'Because . . . Look, maybe she went a bit funny inside. She wouldn't be the first. Maybe she wants money. Maybe she's trying to get some big "miscarriage of justice" thing off the ground.'

  'She doesn't even know I'm here,' Anna said. 'She came to me because she doesn't want the police involved.'

  Thorne was taken aback. 'OK, so how are you going to explain this conversation to your client?' He could no
t suppress a smile and felt more than a little guilty as he watched her start to fidget and redden again.

  'I'll just be honest and tell her that I was getting nowhere,' Anna said. 'That I couldn't think what else to do. I'll tell her I've spent a fortnight staring at that sodding photo and that I'm none the wiser.'

  'Why did you come to see me?' Thorne asked.

  'I thought you might be able to get a bit more information from the photograph.' She looked at Thorne, but got no response. 'Don't you have ways of . . . enhancing pictures, or whatever? I mean, there must be some way to tell where this picture was taken. I don't know, geographical profiling, a computer programme or something?'

  'This isn't CSI,' Thorne said. 'We haven't even got a photocopier that works properly.'

  'I also thought you might be interested.' Anna was leaning towards him suddenly. 'Stupid of me, I can see that, but it seemed like a decent idea at the time. It was your case, so I hoped that if you saw the photo you might at least think that maybe it wasn't . . . finished.' She stared at Thorne for a few seconds longer, then sat back and reached for a strand of hair to pull at.

  'It's a waste of time,' Thorne said. 'I'm sorry, but I've got more important things to worry about. Actually, I can't think of anything that isn't more important than this.' He pushed back his chair and, after a moment or two, Anna got the message and did the same.

  'I'll get out of your way, then,' she said.

  She took a step towards the door.

  Thorne thought she looked about fourteen. 'Look . . . I'll run it past my boss, all right?' He saw her expression change and raised a hand. 'He'll only say the same as me, though, so don't hold your breath.' He picked up the photograph again, nodded down at it. 'Could do with a bit of that myself,' he said. 'Sun and sand.'

  'Tom?'

  Thorne looked up to see DI Yvonne Kitson standing in the doorway. They shared the office and most of the time Thorne was happy enough with the arrangement. He certainly liked her a lot more than he had back when she was a high-flier, and suspected that she felt the same way about herself. Like Thorne, she could still put noses out of joint without much effort, but it was hard not to admire the way she had rebuilt a career that had plunged so calamitously off the tracks after an extra-marital affair with a senior officer.

  'Like a self-assembly wardrobe,' she had once said to Thorne. 'One loose screw and the whole thing fell to pieces.'

  Now, she had one eye on Thorne's visitor. He gestured towards Anna, the photograph flapping between his fingers, and introduced her.

  Kitson nodded a cursory greeting and turned back to Thorne. 'I just thought you'd like to know that the jury's gone out.'

  'Right.' Thorne stood and moved around the desk.

  Anna was doing up the buttons on her jacket. 'The case you were in court for?'

  Thorne nodded, thinking about the wink he'd given Adam Chambers. 'One that isn't quite so . . . piss-easy,' he said.

  DCI Russell Brigstocke's office was twenty feet along the corridor from the one Thorne shared with Yvonne Kitson. When Thorne walked in, Brigstocke was on the phone, so Thorne dropped into a chair and waited. He thought about an eighteen-year-old girl whose bones still lay waiting for an inquisitive dog and about a man who had died screaming, handcuffed to the wheel of a car in the middle of nowhere.

  He tried to separate the two murders, committed so many years apart. To tease out the tangle of pictures, real and imagined.

  He wanted to worry about the right thing . . .

  Brigstocke put the phone down and reached for a mug of coffee. He took a sip, grimaced.

  'You know the jury's out?' Thorne asked.

  Brigstocke nodded. 'No point thinking about it, mate,' he said. 'I heard it went really well this morning.'

  'Sam tell you it was in the bag, did he?'

  'I'm just saying we've done everything we could.'

  'Everything except find her,' Thorne said.

  He felt chilly suddenly, aware of how thin and flimsy his suit was, missing the heavy familiarity of his leather jacket. As it went, most coppers dressed the way he was at that moment. It was as if each one graduated to a plain-clothes unit and instantly acquired the fashion sense of a low-end estate agent, but Thorne had always resisted the pull of the off-the-peg M&S two-piece, the easy-iron shirt and shiny tie.

  'It's bloody cold in here,' he said.

  Brigstocke nodded. 'There's air in the radiator and nobody's got a key.'

  Thorne got up and walked across to the radiator, bent and put his hand to the metal, which was no better than lukewarm. He stood up, pressed his calves against it. Hearing a sound he had come to recognise and dread, he looked round and saw Brigstocke shuffling a pack of cards.

  'I've got a new one for you.'

  'Do you have to?' Thorne asked.

  For reasons nobody could quite fathom, Brigstocke had developed a keen interest in magic over the previous few months. He attended classes at a club in Watford and had started performing close-up magic for beer money at assorted Met parties and conferences. He also insisted on trying out new tricks on anyone who could not escape quickly enough.

  'Just think of a card,' Brigstocke said, slipping into the patter. 'Don't tell me, though. I mean, what kind of a trick would that be?'

  The trick was pretty good, and Thorne did his best to sound encouraging, but he had never really seen the point of magic. He had no real interest unless the magician explained how a trick was done. Russell Brigstocke was a decent copper, but he was certainly not a wizard.

  'Who was the girl in your office?' Brigstocke asked, putting away the cards.

  Thorne told him about Anna Carpenter and the Curious Case of the Suntanned Corpse. Brigstocke had not worked on the Langford inquiry, but he remembered the investigation well enough.

  'Coming back from the dead,' he said. 'Now that's a decent trick.'

  'It would be impressive.'

  'Anything in it?'

  Thorne took the photograph from his pocket and passed it over. 'God knows what Donna Langford's up to,' he said. 'I just hope that detective agency's screwing a decent wedge out of her.'

  'Does it even look like him?'

  Thorne stood at Brigstocke's shoulder and looked again. The dyed hair, the squint, the grin. That faint bell was ringing a little louder now, but surely that was just because Anna Carpenter had told him who it was supposed to be. 'Looks like a lot of people,' he said. 'Looks like a bad actor playing a gangster on his holidays.'

  'What did you tell her?'

  'That she was wasting her time and we couldn't afford to waste any of ours.'

  'Absolutely right,' Brigstocke said. 'Not when we've got the latest Police Performance Assessment Framework to read and twelve-page reports on Standard Operating Procedure to complete by the end of the day.'

  Thorne laughed and felt it take the chill off.

  They talked about football for a few minutes, then families. Thorne asked after Brigstocke's three kids. The DCI asked Thorne how on earth his girlfriend was handling her job on the Kidnap Unit and managing to share a flat with someone who supported Spurs and listened to country music.

  'How does she cope with all that pain and stress, day after day?' Brigstocke asked.

  Thorne shook his head and let the punchline come.

  'And the kidnaps must be even worse . . .'

  They joked and chatted. Piss-takes and bullshit. Killing time and pretending not to think about the twelve strangers arguing in a room on the other side of the city.

  FOUR

  Anna bolted her dinner.

  It was always fairly awkward when it was just her, Megan and Megan's latest boyfriend - on this occasion the admittedly gorgeous, but palpably brain-dead, Daniel - and it didn't help that Megan had done the cooking. Anna's housemate could only really manage pasta, and usually just threw in whatever happened to be lying around in the fridge. Her latest creation involved carrots, tinned peas and hard-boiled eggs, and watching Daniel slather brown sauce all over it di
dn't do much for Anna's appetite. Half a plate was filling enough, in the end.

  It still tasted better than sushi, though . . .

  After ten minutes' idle chat, during which nobody asked how her day had been, and ten more growing increasingly annoyed as Daniel sprawled on the sofa, smoking and dodging the washing-up, Anna went upstairs to her room. She lay on the bed and watched TV. Channel-hopped through the local news, a quiz show that left her utterly baffled, and a pointless remake of a sitcom that had been pointless first time around.