Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne said that he did, and that he certainly wouldn’t be.

  As he moved toward the exit he could still make out the hiss and blather of Radio Bob’s broadcasts, coming from the café, on the other side of the door behind him.

  “Are you receiving me? Are you receiving me…?”

  EIGHT

  London stank of desperation.

  This time of night, of course, it smelled of all sorts of things: fags and fast food; piss and petrol. Still, in spite of all the money that was clearly being spent—the wealth on display in the rows of Mercs, Jags, and Beamers, and in the ranks of overpriced restaurants—you could catch the whiff of desperation almost everywhere. Pungent and unmistakable. Classless and clinging, and far stronger than anything being rubbed onto wrists, or rolled across armpits, or sprayed over shoppers by those grotesquely made-up hags in Harrods and Selfridges.

  Where he was walking, the desperation was of the common or garden variety. A need for warmth, food, or a fix. A need for comfort. But some of the rarer blends of that distinctive scent were around as well, drifting through the West End, there if you could nose them out beneath the everyday stink of chicken and vomit and beer.

  From Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, it floated south—the stale desperation for a smarter phone and a younger partner mingling with those more basic, bodily needs, reeking in Soho and the Circus—before moving along Piccadilly, where the drive to be better dressed, better off, and better than gave off the sharpest stench of all. It was a world away from the gutters and the shitty cut-throughs, of course—from the alleyways that were presently his own area of operation—but he knew that the desperation was of an even headier kind in Old Bond Street and the Burlington Arcade…

  It was already clear to him that things had changed since he’d killed the driver. Walking around within that rough square bordered by Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road, he’d noticed that more of them were settling down in pairs. Looking out for each other; one asleep and the other keeping at least one eye open.

  It was understandable. More than that, it was commendable.

  Word would probably have spread faster than head lice anyway after the driver had been killed. After the second one, for certain. But now the television and the newspapers were all banging on about the danger to what they’d all taken to calling the city’s “most vulnerable citizens.” It was tricky to see it clearly in a community as shifting—as tidal, they said—as this one was, but panic was starting to set in.

  Now, that was another smell he knew far better than most people.

  He also knew very well that panic wouldn’t save anyone. Panic was what you saw in the eyes of dead men and what stained the floor beneath them.

  Moving past Charing Cross Station for the second time that evening and on toward Waterloo Bridge, he peered up every likely-looking side street and into every pool of shadow, humming a song from the mideighties. Something about panic on the streets of London. He couldn’t remember who the song was by…

  It wasn’t as if he was going to have any problem finding someone alone and fucked up and begging for a good kicking. The very nature of these people would work against them in the end. If they were cut out to stick together, to bond with others, you’d hardly see them curling up in puddles and sleeping in their own shit, would you?

  Singling one of them out would be easy enough.

  They were the leavings; the ones who had failed at everything and would ultimately fuck up at the most basic task of staying alive. Failure was their strong suit, and, at the end of the day, helping one more of them do what they were obviously good at wasn’t going to cost him a great deal of sleep.

  How could you take someone’s life when they didn’t really have one in the first place?

  Moony was two bottles dead to the world, but he still woke up the second the boot was placed across his neck.

  “Jesus!”

  The sole was wiped slowly across a cheek, then lifted. “I thought it was your mate Paddy who was the religious one.”

  As Moony turned to look up, Thorne bent and grabbed hold of the conveniently wide lapels. He dragged him fast across the narrow street, leaving sheets of cardboard and blankets trailing in his wake, Moony yelped like a throttled dog.

  “Hey!” A figure took two tentative steps toward them from the end of the street.

  “Fuck off,” Thorne said, and the figure did as he’d been told.

  Thorne slammed Moony into a wall plastered with posters for boy bands and nightclubs, pushed him hard onto his arse, and squatted down close to him.

  “Oh my Christ,” Moony said, breathless.

  “There you go again,” Thorne said. “Strange how people turn to Him when they think their number’s up.” He pressed a palm against Moony’s heart. “That’s going ten to the dozen, that is.”

  “What do you”—three gulps of air—“fucking expect?”

  “You thought I was the man who killed Ray, didn’t you? The man who kicked Paddy’s brains into the middle of next week.” Thorne took a handful of the loose flesh around Moony’s chest and dug in his fingers. “You thought you were about to get some dosh pinned onto you, right?”

  Moony squealed and grabbed at Thorne’s fist, but Thorne calmly raised his other hand and slapped him twice, a little harder than he might have slapped someone who was unconscious. Moony’s hands flew to his face and he stopped struggling.

  “Only it’s the money that’s bothering me,” Thorne said. “Well, not the money itself so much as the fact that you knew about it. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Moony shook his head.

  “There’s been nothing on the news about any money being pinned to the victims’ chests. Nothing in the papers either, as far as I can remember.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “My guess is it’s one of those things they’re keeping back, you know? They do that sometimes, the police. They keep certain facts out of the press so they can weed out the cranks and the copycats.”

  “I must have read about it somewhere.”

  “No. You didn’t. Not unless it was written on the side of a beer can. There are only two reasons why you’d know about money being pinned to the chests of the victims, and as I don’t think you’re the murderer…You’re not, are you?”

  Moony was starting to snivel.

  “I thought not. Which means that you must be the kind of snot-gobbling tosspot that steals money from the body of a dying man.”

  “No…”

  Thorne grabbed an ear and twisted. “Tell me.”

  “I thought Paddy was just pissed, that’s all.” Moony spluttered out his confession between sniffs and yelps. “I didn’t know he was hurt.”

  “You lying little turd. There was blood everywhere.” Thorne knew that now he was revealing a knowledge of the facts few would be privy to, but he also knew that Moony was too far gone, and too terrified, to take it in or realize its significance.

  “I didn’t know he was that bad…”

  “You didn’t care how bad he was. You just wanted the money.”

  “I needed it…”

  “Did you take anything else?”

  Moony tried to turn away, but Thorne yanked on his ear again, turned his face back around. “There was a watch.”

  Long since sold, Thorne knew, and the money—a fraction of whatever the watch might have been worth—spent on cider or sweet sherry.

  “Taking the money and the watch is bad enough,” Thorne said. “The fact that you robbed a man who was supposed to be your friend, whose life was bleeding away into the gutter, makes me sick, but it doesn’t surprise me. What I really can’t understand is why you didn’t call the police. Why you didn’t tell anybody…”

  “I told you, I didn’t think he was—”

  Thorne could feel the cartilage buckle beneath his fingers as he closed his fist hard around Moony’s ear. “If you tell me that again, I’ll rip this off.”

/>   Moony gurgled his understanding.

  “See, I’m guessing that if you’d called an ambulance, if they could have got to Paddy a little earlier than they did, he might not be hooked up to a machine right now. I’m not a doctor or anything, but there’s got to be a chance.”

  “No…”

  “No, you’re probably right. Chances are he was already brain-dead by the time you started going through his pockets. But you couldn’t possibly have known that, could you? You just thought he was…what, exactly? Moderately badly injured? Serious but hopefully not critical? So you took what you wanted and left him there to die, because, basically, at the end of the day, you didn’t give a fuck. Simple as that…”

  The recognizable rumble of a diesel engine grew louder as a black cab drove slowly past the end of the street and stopped. Thorne heard a door slam, the exchange of voices, before the cab moved off again.

  “Leave me alone,” Moony said.

  “I will, but what if I was to hurt you first?”

  “Please…”

  “What if I was to injure you in some way? I don’t know what exactly, something serious but hopefully not critical.” Thorne watched Moony’s eyelids flutter and close. He caught the sudden, sharp smell of urine that drifted up from his crotch. “If I was to do that and then leave you alone, do you think anyone would help you? What d’you reckon?” Thorne leaned in close to Moony’s face. “Would anyone give a fuck?”

  Because the average rough sleeper wasn’t usually to be seen blathering into a state-of-the-art mobile phone, Thorne had been finding discreet locations from which to check in with Holland. Tonight, he couldn’t be bothered, and besides, the phone was small enough to fit easily into his palm. So, sitting in his theater doorway with it pressed close to his ear, he figured he looked no stranger than Radio Bob, muttering happily into an invisible handset…

  “So Hayes was definitely a victim of the same killer,” Holland said. “If he had the money on him.”

  Thorne swallowed a mouthful of lager. “Looks that way,” he said.

  “More than ‘looks,’ I would have thought.”

  “Whatever…”

  “We’ve got two murders—three, if you count Paddy Hayes, and I think we can.”

  “I’m not arguing.”

  “You’ve still got a problem with the whole serial-killer angle, though?”

  “Look, Raymond Mannion was terrified. I’ve got a witness.”

  “Of course he was scared—”

  “Not in the general way you mean, because there was a killer around. He was scared of someone. I think he was killed because of what he knew or what he’d seen.”

  “It’s a leap.”

  “Which means that the killing of the first victim takes on a greater significance. Don’t you think?”

  “Maybe…”

  “Come on, Dave. While everyone’s looking for all the usual perverse, serial-killer motives, it’s worth considering that there might just be something a bit more basic going on here.”

  “That’s just it, though. Everyone here is looking for the perverse serial-killer motives. That’s our major line of inquiry at the moment…”

  “Right.”

  “Well, it has to be until we’ve got something better to go on, doesn’t it?”

  “So what’s Brigstocke’s profiler come up with?”

  “Not a lot at the moment.”

  “What? Not even the ‘white, male, started fires as a child, and tortured small furry animals’ cobblers?”

  “What do you want us to do about Moony?”

  “Nick him.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t care. Being a reprehensible shitbag. Think of something…”

  “It’ll be hard to make a theft charge stick when all we’ve got is what he told you. There’s no material evidence. How did you get him to tell you, by the way, or don’t I want to know that?”

  “Look, there’s always a chance Moony might sober up and start asking awkward questions, so let’s just get him off the street. Give him a nice, warm cell and a bottle of Strongbow and he won’t complain.”

  “Fair enough…”

  They chatted for another few minutes, but Thorne spent most of the conversation thinking about what Holland had just said. About the question he’d asked, only half-jokingly.

  Don’t I want to know that…?

  As the last major case Thorne had been working on before his leave had moved toward its resolution, he’d been involved in things, he’d done things, far worse than slapping a few answers out of someone.

  Holland talked and Thorne talked back, but he was thinking about the smell of flesh beneath the weight of a hot steam iron. Thinking about what Jesmond had said about wearing a hairshirt. Thinking about how good the beer tasted…

  He woke violently, knowing for certain that he was being watched.

  The room he’d been standing in began to go fuzzy around the edges and then to disappear. Of the men in there, one had been his father; near enough, but not quite as he’d been before the Alzheimer’s. There’d been no violent mood swings, no inappropriate language. Instead, there’d been only a priceless look on his old man’s face: a bemused half smile at knowing that he’d said something funny without having the first idea why. So the three of them—his father, his father’s friend Victor, and Thorne himself—had begun to laugh, until the laughter had become all that mattered. So that even the first, delicate wisps of smoke creeping underneath the door had seemed completely hysterical.

  Thorne sat bolt upright, breathing heavily.

  His tongue was thick and vile against the roof of his mouth. He couldn’t tell New York from New Year, let alone the difference between concern and contempt on the faces of the young couple staring at him. So he shouted at them, calling them cunts and telling them to fuck off, before dropping back hard against the door behind him and then down.

  For a while he stared out at the street through a curtain of drizzle. Then he closed his eyes. Hoping there might be some way back into that room filled with laughter and smoke.

  NINE

  For Robert Asker it had begun with the simple, overpowering conviction that there were people living beneath the shower tray…

  He’d heard them, their voices muffled at first by the rush of the water and then a little clearer, but still indistinct, once he’d turned off the shower. He’d stood stock-still and dripping wet above the plug hole and stared down. He’d seen the faintest orange glow, a light of some sort, way down in the pipes. He knew what it meant: they had to be living in the pipework, which meant that they could travel quickly and talk to him from almost anywhere in the house.

  It wasn’t long before they were using the network of major drains and sewer pipes to follow him when he was outside, when he was away from home. Then he began to hear the voices at work and in his car. It was like several voices at once, each canceling out the others, so that he could only make out one word in ten and could never really get the gist of what they were saying. What they were trying to tell him.

  Of course, it really began when he told his wife about the voices. That’s when he lost control of everything. It all began to fall apart from that moment onward…

  It wasn’t long after he told her that he got laid off. From then on it was hard to know whether her attitude stemmed from anger at his getting himself sacked or frustration at his ramblings, at his insistence on what he was hearing. Either way, he was damn sure that she was withdrawing from him and that she was taking his daughter with her. He noticed that she was keeping the girl with her more and more, that she would always take her along, even if she was popping out for just a few minutes.

  She was afraid for their daughter to be left alone in the house with a madman.

  He wasn’t sleeping. They spoke loudest of all at night, and he paced the house with his hands over his ears and with the music turned up so loud that people several houses away would phone the police at regular intervals.

  Sh
e made him talk to people, to half a dozen different doctors, but nothing they gave him made any difference, except for making him moody, which meant that he started to shout. He shouted because he was sick of not being listened to and he shouted to make himself heard above the constant chatter of the voices. Once he’d started shouting, it was only a matter of time before she left.

  It all happened quickly enough. Job, wife, child, house…

  There was hospital for a while after that, several of them, but the drugs only made him unresponsive, almost catatonic, and the voices were still there, growing in number and urgency. Barracking as he plummeted toward the tender mercies of the community. Toward the net he was destined to slip through.

  It wasn’t until he was on the street that he discovered the radio. Left to himself, he found out how to tune in the voices to make their messages clearer. He also learned how to turn down the volume of the voices when he needed a break, and most importantly of all, he found out how he could talk to them. He never actually turned the radio off; he couldn’t do it, even if he’d wanted to. The best he could manage was to tune it out for a few minutes at a time, but he was loath to do that in case he missed those transmissions he was always hoping to hear: the message offering him his job back; the message from his wife saying that she understood now, and that she was coming back; a message from his daughter…

  Robert moved slowly past the design stores and clothes shops on Long Acre. Listening, then talking. Laughing every now and then.

  He felt all right now, despite everything. It was shitty and he got ill with his guts, and with leg ulcers sometimes, but he was on the air. Radio Bob was as happy as he’d been at any time since he’d first seen that small circle of light, liquid and winking in the belly of a waste pipe.

  “There are three basic types of begging,” Spike said. “There’s a couple of other odd ones, there’s the specialized varieties, like, but at the end of the day you’ve got your three main types. I’m not talking about getting cash—there’s loads of ways to do that. I’m talking about just asking people for it, right?