Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  “I can see that, but even so…”

  “It’s definitely not him, ’cause there was no scar.” She rubbed her right arm, just above the elbow. “Chris caught his arm on some barbed wire, there, when he was a kid. Trying to get a ball back.”

  “Right…”

  “And the tattoo was wrong. I was so sure it was the same, you know? Then, when I saw it, I could tell it was different. Maybe it was the position of it. It might have been a bit lower down Chris’s arm than it was on…that bloke.”

  “How exactly was it different?”

  Jago started crying again, snatching breaths between the sobs. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and chewed her bottom lip.

  Holland looked down at her. He’d thought she was somewhere in her early thirties, but seeing her now, he wondered if she might be younger. The mascara that was smeared all over her face made it difficult to tell one way or the other. She had very dark hair and extremely pale skin. Similar coloring to the dead man lying in a drawer along the corridor.

  “How was the tattoo different?” Kitson asked again. “Different letters? Color? Was it laid out differently?”

  Hendricks drew Jago a little closer, nodded his encouragement.

  Between sobs: “I don’t…know.”

  “You’re certain it is different, though?”

  “Yes…I think so.”

  Kitson glanced up at Holland, raised an eyebrow. When she spoke again, her voice was still low and soothing, but Holland could hear the determination.

  “Look, we know the man in the mortuary isn’t Chris, which is great.” Holland caught Hendricks’s eye and had to look away for a second, embarrassed by the lie. “But I have to ask you if you recognized him at all. Had you ever seen him before?”

  The shake of the head was as definite as it could be.

  “I’m only asking you because of the tattoo. It’s such a unique design. Do you understand, Susan? Why would someone have a tattoo so similar?”

  Again she brought the crying under control, pressing a sodden tissue hard into both eyes.

  “There was a time, years ago, when Chris and his mates all went out one night and got one. They got pissed up and got their tattoos at the same time. They got the same sort of thing done. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it means.”

  Excitement flashed across Kitson’s face. “Chris and his mates? Is the man in the mortuary one of your brother’s mates, do you think? Is that possible?”

  Jago shook her head. “I told you, no. I’ve never seen him before…”

  The excitement had gone by the time Kitson had stood up. She nodded to Holland. “We’d better be getting back.” To Jago: “Do you want us to arrange a cab for you?”

  Hendricks moved his arm from her shoulder and took hold of her hand. “Why don’t I give you a lift?”

  “Could you?”

  “Yeah, no problem. I’ll run you to Euston…”

  She looked up at Holland and Kitson. “I’ll have to sort out my ticket when I get there. I’m not sure what train I’m allowed to get, because I got an open return.” Her eyes were red beneath a film of tears, but Holland thought he could see real happiness in them for the first time. “I thought it was Christopher, you see? I didn’t think I’d be going straight back.”

  Thorne raised his hands, backing away. Though he could make out precious little of what the man was saying, the words fuck, off, and bastard were clear enough, so he picked up the gist of it.

  “Calm down, pal,” Spike said.

  The man hurled another torrent of incoherent abuse at them and wheeled away, just managing to avoid walking straight into the wall behind him.

  Spike hawked into the gutter and picked up his pace. “Fucking old tosser has a right go at me every time I walk past.”

  Thorne caught him up. They were walking north up Greek Street, toward Soho Square. The two of them had hooked up in a greasy spoon for breakfast and been mooching around fairly aimlessly ever since. Now it was raining and they were keen to get indoors; Spike had said he knew somewhere warm where they could get a cup of tea.

  “Why?” Thorne said. “What’s he got against you, then?”

  “He’s a boozer, so he doesn’t want anything to do with the likes of me, does he? With a junkie.”

  It was a word Thorne was used to hearing spoken with distaste. Spike said it casually, as if it were just another word to describe himself, like blond.

  In a little under three weeks, Thorne had seen enough to know exactly what Spike was talking about. The homeless community had its divisions like any other; its imagined hierarchies. There were, by and large, three main groups: drug addicts, drinkers, and those with mental-health problems. As might be expected, there were one or two who could claim membership in all three groups, but on the whole they stayed separate. And, those with mental-health problems tended to keep themselves to themselves, so any antagonism festered mainly between the drinkers and the addicts.

  “It’s mad,” Thorne said. “The boozers can’t stand the junkies; the junkies hate the boozers; nobody much likes the nutters…”

  “And we all hate the asylum seekers!” Spike cackled, loving his own joke, flicking his fingers together like a young black man. “It’s a right old mix, though. I fucking love it, like. You’ve got your immigrants, you’ve got blokes who used to be in the army, you’ve got blokes who’ve been inside. There’s all sorts on the street, mate. All sorts…”

  Thorne wasn’t going to argue.

  They’d reached Oxford Street, where they waited for a gap in the traffic and started to cross. “You’re right, though, it is a bit mental that we don’t all get on.” Spike spun round, pointed back toward where they’d had their altercation. “Mind you, you saw what that boozer was like. They’re a mad, smelly bunch of fuckers. No offense, like…”

  “Eh?”

  “See, that’s another reason why the two of us wouldn’t normally get on, apart from the age-difference thing. A junkie and a boozer. You are a boozer, right?”

  For as long as he could remember, people had liked to imagine that Thorne drank a lot more than was actually the case. It was something expected of people who did what he did, saw the things he’d seen. The truth was that he liked expensive wine and cheap beer, and though he and Phil Hendricks could put a few away in front of the football, he didn’t have anything like a drink problem…not really.

  Yes, he’d drunk a little more than normal of late for obvious reasons, and he was drinking on the street, but only because the undercover role demanded it. As it was, he’d taken to buying piss-weak lager and pouring it into empty cans of Tennent’s Extra and Special Brew. No self-respecting alcoholic would be seen dead with a can of Carling or Sainsbury’s own brand first thing in the morning.

  “I mean it’s not like you’re always drinking,” Spike said. “But I’ve smelled it on you.”

  Thorne ran a hand through his hair and shook away the water. He winked at Spike. “I like a drink…”

  They walked on past the Wheatsheaf and the Black Horse. Past the Marquess of Granby on Rath-bone Street. This pub was a favorite of Thorne’s, as it had once been of Dylan Thomas’s. The Welsh poet had been a regular visitor and enjoyed trying to provoke guardsmen, who had popped in to pick on, or pick up, homosexuals.

  Spike suddenly cut left, and within a minute or two they were in one of the quiet side streets behind the Middlesex Hospital, where Paddy Hayes had finally died almost a week earlier.

  “It’s like it is in prison,” Thorne said. “The way the groups don’t get on. Everyone thinking they’re better than everyone else. The white-collar brigade, the dodgy businessmen, and the con men think they should be kept separate from the real criminals. The honest-to-goodness armed robbers think they’re better than the murderers. Everyone hates the sex offenders…”

  Spike stepped ahead and turned round, talked to Thorne as he was half skipping backward, away from him. He looked like an excited, adolescent boy. “So, were you inside, t
hen?”

  In retrospect, it hadn’t been the cleverest thing in the world he could have said, but Spike’s presumption wouldn’t do him any harm. He decided to just say nothing.

  “Listen, I’m sorry,” Spike said. “I didn’t mean to pry, like, and you don’t have to say nothing if you don’t want to.”

  He stopped suddenly, stood still for a second or two before heading up a narrow alleyway. Thorne followed.

  It was the sort of crooked cut-through that London was riddled with; that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years. The windowless buildings seemed to press in on either side, closer to one another at the top than they were at street level. The black bricks were greasy, and the floor was rutted and puddled.

  A figure stepped into view at the other end of the alleyway and Thorne froze.

  “S’all right,” Spike said. He walked toward the man, who had clearly been waiting for him, while Thorne stayed where he was, and watched.

  It happened quickly enough: hands emerging from pockets, taking, handing over and put swiftly back again.

  While Thorne waited for Spike to finish his shopping, he thought about those different groups within the community of rough sleepers. The junkies, the drinkers, the nutcases. He realized that as far as the dead men who had been identified went, there was one from each group: Mannion was a drug user, Hayes was never seen without a bottle, and Radio Bob had certainly had mental problems. Was this a coincidence? Or could it be part of the way the killer selected his victims?

  Thanks to that woman who’d called to say the dead man might be her brother, they could well have a name for the first victim by now. Did he fit into this pattern at all? The postmortem had not told them much. There’d certainly been no evidence of drug use or excessive drinking…

  Thorne turned and walked slowly back toward the street. He wondered what his own internal organs, furred and fucked up as they probably were, might one day tell an eager pathologist. What they might have to say for themselves.

  He remembered a slight judder; the squeak of the belt as his father’s coffin had slid forward, a second before the organist had picked up her cue.

  Stopping and leaning against a wall, he hoped that when the time came, his innards would be there undisturbed and intact. Melting nicely. Burning along with the rest of him, having said fuck-all of any consequence to anyone.

  “Why did you never report your brother missing?” Hendricks asked.

  “I just kept expecting him to pop up again. He always has done before.” Susan Jago had a red vinyl overnight bag on her knees. She twisted the handles around each other as she spoke. “Chris has been doing this on and off for years. He’ll go a bit funny and vanish off the face of the earth for a while, then come waltzing back like there’s no problem.”

  There were a variety of routes from Westminster Hospital to Euston Station, and Hendricks had mentally tossed a coin. He was driving along Victoria Street toward Parliament Square and from there he’d head north up Whitehall and keep going.

  “Was he on any medication?”

  “Blimey, he’s been on everything at one time or another. You name it…”

  “Got a loyalty card at the chemist’s, has he?”

  She laughed and let her head drop back. “He’s a complete mess, Christopher is. Has been for ages.”

  Hendricks steered the Ford Focus skillfully through the traffic, though the wet streets weren’t making him slow down overmuch. He’d already apologized once when he’d jumped a light and the woman in the passenger seat had sucked in a noisy, nervous breath. Now he raced to overtake a bus that was pulling out, and she did it again.

  “Sorry…”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Just trying to get you there a bit quicker. If you miss the next one, you’ll have a bit of a wait.”

  “Like I said, no one’s expecting me back. The kids are at a friend’s.”

  Despite the weather, Parliament Square was thick with people, and cars were taking an age to get around it. Hendricks had definitely chosen the tourist route.

  “Did he never have a job?”

  “He had all sorts of jobs, but they were all shit. Couldn’t even hold on to them. He’d get into a fight at work or just stop turning up. Then he’d be off on one of his walkabouts.” She shrugged, stared out of the window at the crowds under umbrellas outside Westminster Abbey.

  “Was there any kind of trigger for Chris’s illness? You said he’d been like it for ages…”

  “I wouldn’t call it an illness, exactly. He just gets depressed, you know?”

  “It’s an illness.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I just wondered if there’d been a single event that might have sparked him off? A breakup with someone. A death in the family…”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Nothing you can think of?”

  “All of them things happen to everybody, don’t they?”

  “Yes, but we all have a different brain chemistry.”

  “He’s always had mates and girlfriends and all that, and a lot of the time he’s as happy as anyone is, but for ages now he’s just been liable to go off on one. I don’t know why. I don’t know what causes it. I just want to find him and keep a better eye on him this time. I want to get him some help.”

  She was starting to get worked up again, and Hendricks could hear in her voice that tears weren’t far away. He thought it was odd, considering how much she clearly cared for her brother, that she seemed to know so little about what was wrong with him. She was vague about the whats and the whens, but then denial tended to do that. He sensed that she blamed herself, that she somehow felt guilty for what had happened, for what might have happened, to her brother. He wished that there was something he could do to help her. He thought about the tattoo, about what Kitson had said back at the hospital. If Chris Jago was dead—and his sister had obviously thought that was possible—Hendricks thought there might be something he could do to help find him. But first he needed to go home, or back to his office at the hospital…

  She was staring at him. “Can I ask you, are you gay?” she said.

  Hendricks was stunned at her directness. He took a second, then barked out a laugh. “Yes, I am.” He was struck by a possibility. “Was Chris?”

  “God, no,” she said. “I’ve got a mate at work who is, and you’re a lot like him. It doesn’t bother me, though.”

  They drove on, making small talk until the traffic began to thin out at the top end of the Tottenham Court Road. Hendricks checked the clock on the dash. “It’ll be close, but I think we’ll make it,” he said.

  Next to him, Susan Jago clutched the handles of her bag a little bit tighter.

  Chloe Holland took half a dozen unsteady steps toward her father, and banged her head against the top of his leg. “Dada…”

  Holland picked up his daughter and carried her over to the sofa in the corner of the living room.

  “Come on then, chicken. A quick cuddle before bed…”

  His girlfriend, Sophie Wagstaffe, stood in the doorway. “Don’t get her too excited, Dave.”

  He thought about saying something about how any excitement round the place would be welcome, but he bit his tongue. Its absence was almost certainly down to him. Yes, they were both tired at the end of the day, and fractious, but he was also bringing the frustration of the case home with him. His mood flung a coarse, heavy blanket across everything. He couldn’t blame Sophie for being thoroughly fed up.

  The little girl pointed to her favorite video, lying on the carpet in front of the VCR. “Arnee,” she said.

  “Barney, yes. Good girl…”

  His daughter would be a year old in a couple of days.

  Chloe had been conceived just in time to stop his relationship with Sophie from falling apart completely. Pregnancy changed the emphasis of everything. The stupid affair he’d had became a weapon that was wielded only rarely, and most of the conversations that took place in raised voices became about
the Job. Did he not think that perhaps now he should find something a bit safer? Something that paid a bit more, maybe, before he became completely institutionalized?

  Once Chloe had been around for a while, once they’d got over the heart-stopping, joyous shell shock of it, they discussed their future again, though now nobody had the energy to do a lot of shouting. Or to do a lot of anything else. The flat they’d shared for years in Elephant and Castle was far too small, no question, so they talked about moving; about getting out of London altogether. They’d decided that Holland should sit the sergeant’s exam, but the increase in pay had been more than canceled out by a greater caseload. With Sophie back teaching again, and child care to be paid for, they were no better off. Any move in the short term was out of the question.

  “Come on, Dave.”

  “All right…”

  “I need to change her and get her down.”

  “Just give me a minute…”

  The tiredness never seemed to ease up. Just as Chloe had started to sleep that bit longer, he’d been required to do longer tours of duty. His new seniority, together with the seriousness of this particular case, meant that sixteen- and eighteen-hour shifts were becoming increasingly common. He wanted nothing more at that moment than to hug his baby girl tight to his chest, close his eyes, and stay where he was until the morning.

  “Dave, please.”

  That was what was really going on, he thought, when couples stayed together because of the children. The truth was that they were just too exhausted to leave.

  It wasn’t that bad, of course. He knew that actually he could count himself lucky that Sophie hadn’t walked out on him. It was amazing that she hadn’t packed a bag and done a bunk with someone. Some teacher maybe, same as Tom Thorne’s missus. Creative-writing lecturer that had been, years back. Jesus…

  Holland opened his eyes as he felt Chloe being lifted from him.

  “Right, okay then. I need to make a call anyway…”

  He watched as Sophie gathered stuff up: the necessary books and an armful of soft toys. He waved his daughter good night as Sophie carried her through into the bedroom. If only they could get away, he thought. Just the two of them. Leave the baby with grandparents, then head off somewhere to laze around and fuck each other’s brains out in the sunshine. He’d see what he could manage when the case had cooled down a little.