Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  The three of them were walking quickly, from the Trafalgar Square end of the Strand, heading for the nine o’clock soup run behind Temple underground station. The street was gaudy with lights: the multicolored neon from the Vaudeville and Adelphi theaters; the huge yellow lamps across the front of the Strand Palace Hotel; the pulsing red or bright white of the cars, crawling in both directions.

  The night was cold again, but as yet mercifully dry.

  “You get whatever you can, whenever you can, ’cause there’s not a lot to go round,” Spike said. “Yeah?”

  Caroline had slowed to light a cigarette, and was just catching up with Spike and Thorne again. “Except at fucking Christmas,” she said.

  Thorne told them about something he’d read once: a quote from one of those pointless “It” girls with too many names and too little to do. She’d said something about how dreadful it was to be without shelter at Christmas, and suggested that all homeless people should move to the Caribbean during the winter, and live on fresh fish.

  Caroline’s laughter quickly turned into a coughing fit.

  “Dozy posh cunt,” Spike said.

  December was still a few months away, but plenty of shops had already put out the decorations. Thorne had no idea where he’d be when it came. His father’s sister Eileen had offered, as had Hendricks. Everyone said that the first one was the most difficult…

  “It’s supposed to be the worst time to be on the street, right?” he said. “There’s always documentaries on the telly. Women in green wellies taking a tramp home for Christmas.”

  Spike shrugged. “It’s the same as the rest of the year, just a bit colder. It’s every other punter that changes.” He put on his best Islington trendy accent: “It’s when people really start to care…”

  They told Thorne about the cold-weather shelters that Crisis and other organizations would open. About the donations that poured in from members of the public, and from some of the more forward-thinking companies. Big-name stores playing Santa and clearing out old stock.

  “You can pop along Christmas Day, get yourself turkey and all the trimmings, and as many Gap sweatshirts as you can carry.”

  “It’s hysterical,” Caroline said. “You get these poor bastards walking into day centers and hostels all through January with nothing except major drug habits and enormous bags of brand-new toiletries.”

  Spike took Caroline’s cigarette from her mouth, used it to light one of his own. “The new clothes thing is ace, though. People who give stuff to Oxfam or whatever seem to think we’re all desperate to dress like some old granddad. Fucking cardigans and pajamas that somebody died in.”

  “Nothing wrong with a decent cardy,” Thorne said.

  Caroline took hold of his arm. “Yeah, but you are an old granddad, aren’t you?”

  They drifted across the pavement toward a gift shop and stationer’s, whose window was already well stocked with tinsel and tat. They stared for a few seconds.

  “Too bloody soon,” Thorne said. There was a Dixon’s next door and he turned his attention to the television screens, still flickering in the window. A soap opera, The Bill, Sky News. He watched a journalist talking to camera and tried, without the benefit of sound, to work out what he might be talking about. He remembered Alan Ward, the reporter he’d met outside Colindale Station when he’d run into Steve Norman. Thorne decided that if Spurs were at home over the Christmas period—if he were at home—he’d take the man up on his offer of football tickets. He thought about the pies and the hot dogs and the scalding tea at halftime; more attractive, at that moment, than the prospect of watching the game itself…

  Spike leaned his face against the glass, steaming it up as he spoke. “I think I might go to my sister’s this year. She’s got a fantastic flat in Docklands…”

  Thorne nodded. Spike was constantly telling him things that he’d told him once or twice already.

  “I don’t care, as long as I’m indoors,” Caroline said. “This year more than any.”

  Thorne knew that she was talking about the murders. For the families, wherever they were, and for those still sleeping on the same streets as their dead friends, this would be that first, difficult Christmas.

  “Killing people, or scaring them into leaving,” Caroline said. “One way and another, he’s clearing a lot of us off the street.”

  Spike leaned back, drew a face on the window with his finger. “Maybe he’s working for the council…”

  As with those places that dispensed more substantial meals, there were soup runs happening across the West End at different times during the evening. There was one at ten o’clock, just around the corner on the Strand, where, with irony far thicker than the soup itself, the homeless were fed within spitting distance—within sniffing distance—of the Savoy. Again, it was all about knowing when and where. There were some, with appetites all but destroyed by drugs, who would go all day without eating and get by on two or three bowls of soup; trudging between the various locations with the weary resignation of those for whom eating has long ceased being a pleasure.

  There were a dozen or more people already waiting by the time they got arrived, including a good few that Thorne had come across before. He recognized faces he’d seen at the Lift, from the streets around the theater where he bedded down for the night. He met—but only briefly—the disturbing gaze of the man who’d come close to attacking him and Spike a couple of days earlier.

  Thorne, Spike, and Caroline joined those who were milling around outside a building that was—according to a discreet but highly polished nameplate—the headquarters of British and American Tobacco. Some lurked as close as possible to where they were expecting the van to stop, while others hung back, preferring to wait across the road. They gathered in small groups, talking or staring into space: the pale-faced kids in dirty anoraks, and the entrenched, long-haired and bearded, in dark clothes that seemed smeared across their bulky frames in grease. One group looked like backpackers who’d run out of money. Thorne caught a word or two in an Australian accent and decided that’s exactly what they were.

  Standing alone on the other side of the road near the tube station was one of the few black men Thorne had seen in his time on the streets. Maxwell had told him early on that there were so few black and Asian rough sleepers because those communities were closer-knit; that they believed in the extended family. Basically, he’d said, it came down to how much people gave a shit. It made sense to Thorne, who knew that were he even able to find any of his cousins—first, second, or whatever—none of them would be inclined to take him in if he found himself in real trouble. He also knew, of course, that he’d be equally reluctant were he the one being asked to help. He’d seen enough blood to know that it was certainly thicker than water. But he’d also seen enough of it spilled within families to know that the phrase meant less than bugger-all.

  Spike saw Thorne looking around. “Told you. There’s all sorts…”

  “Must be great soup,” Thorne said.

  It arrived, and it wasn’t. Ladled into Styrofoam bowls from a huge metal saucepan in the back of a Volvo estate. But it was hot, dished out with a smile, and, crucially, with no questions asked. This was another reason why the soup run remained popular, and why teenage backpackers could stand in line with those who’d been sleeping rough for decades.

  Caroline crossed the road to a bench and lit up as a very tall man, six feet five or more and cradling his bowl of soup, sauntered up to where Spike and Thorne were finishing theirs. Thorne put his empty bowl on to the windowsill behind him, watched as Spike tossed his into the gutter. Thorne had to fight the urge to march over and pick it up.

  The tall man and Spike greeted each other warmly and Spike made the introductions: “This is Holy Joe.”

  The man looked down at Thorne and gave a small nod. He was wearing a Queen’s Park Rangers bobble hat and trainers, and what looked like a long brown robe beneath a tightly buttoned donkey jacket.

  “Who was it this time?
” Spike asked.

  “Nuns,” the man said. “They’re the fucking worst.”

  Spike explained that Joe spent most of his time falling upon the tender mercies of a variety of different church organizations: the Jesus Army; the Salvation Army; the Quakers; the Young Jewish Volunteer Corps; the Sisters and Brothers of Just About Anybody. A few weeks at a time of free food and accommodations for the price of a daily Bible class or prayer meeting.

  “I’ve got a hundred and seven crosses in a plastic bag,” Joe said. He took a slurp of soup. “Wooden ones, plastic ones. There’s dozens of Bibles…”

  “I bet you knew Paddy Hayes,” Thorne said. “Spike’s mate. The one who was killed. He was a God-botherer, wasn’t he?”

  Joe took a step back into the road, scraped the sole of his training shoe against the curb as though he were trying to remove dogshit. “Yeah, but Paddy was a bit of a lightweight.”

  Thorne was still convinced that Jago and the first victim would provide the answer as to why these murders had happened. Why they were still happening. But how the killer selected the subsequent victims, if it was anything other than random, might give the police their best chance of catching him quickly. The idea that he was choosing victims from among distinct groups was definitely a strong possibility, but Thorne suddenly wondered if there might be a church connection.

  “You can ask this man anything,” Spike said. “He could do religion and all that shit on Mastermind. Your specialist subject, innit, Joe?”

  Hadn’t Robert Asker thought that he could talk to God on his radio? Maybe he’d been to a meeting or two. Thorne made a mental note to ask Caroline when he got the chance.

  Spike was getting excited, shifting from foot to foot. “Go on, ask him something. He knows the Bible fucking backward.”

  Joe nodded solemnly. “And the Talmud. And the Koran. I’m not fussy.”

  “I can’t think of anything,” Thorne said.

  “Ask him all the books in the Bible. Ask him to do them in order…”

  “Too easy,” Joe said.

  Thorne thought about his father, who would have loved a game like this. The old man wouldn’t have slept until he’d found out the right answer and written it down somewhere. In his last few years he’d taken to ringing Thorne up in the early hours of the morning, demanding lists of answers to all manner of bizarre trivia questions.

  “Ask him,” Spike said.

  Give me a dozen big cats…The three fastest ball games in the world…All the kings and queens of England. Go on, I’ll give you the first couple to start…

  “Go on, anything you like.”

  “Okay,” Thorne said. He pointed to the bowl in Joe’s hands. “Could Jesus have turned that into soup?”

  There was the swish of a revolving door behind them and a man walked quickly from the B&A Tobacco building and hurried across the road. He wore a tailored overcoat and carried a metal briefcase, and his free hand struggled to tuck in one end of a bright red scarf that had caught in the wind.

  Holy Joe turned and shouted cheerily after him. “Oi, mate, got any ciggies for me?”

  The man didn’t even bother to look up. “Piss off,” he said.

  Back on the Strand, they walked east toward Fleet Street. They passed the “ghost” Aldwych underground station, half of its boarded-up entrance now home to a Photo-Me booth, and Thorne gave Spike and Caroline a potted history. He told them how the station, originally called Strand, had fallen into disuse a number of times in the century since it had been opened; how a man had been eaten on one of the escalators in An American Werewolf in London, and how, during the Second World War, it had been home to the British Museum’s collection of mummies.

  As they crossed toward St. Clement Danes, serene on its traffic island, Thorne pointed toward the spikes and spires of the Royal Courts of Justice, brutal against the night sky beyond the church. As a civil court, it was not a place Thorne knew well, but he did know that the man who built its clock was strangled to death when his tie got caught in the mechanism.

  “Bloody hell,” Spike said. “You know some seriously weird shit.”

  Thorne thought about everything he’d learned, from Spike more than anyone, in the past few weeks. He thought about the things he’d been shown and the people he’d met. He thought about the knowledge that had been passed on to him.

  “I know some weird shit…?”

  Around the back of the church, a number of those who had been at the soup run had gathered to stand around and drink. To kill time until the next one. Caroline and Spike drifted away to talk to a couple of junkies whose conversation, by the look of them, would not be sparkling.

  “Got-a-beer?”

  Thorne turned to see an older man with a shock of white hair and a nose like an overripe strawberry standing far too close to him.

  “Got-a-beer, mate?”

  The words weren’t slurred exactly, but ran easily into one as though they belonged together. It sounded both casual and aggressive, the last word fading into a breath like hot fat spitting. Thorne wasn’t sure if the man had simply not got him down as a fellow rough sleeper, or was just so far gone that he didn’t care whom he asked. Either way, the answer was going to be the same.

  “Sorry.” Thorne patted the can in his pocket. “Just got the one and that’s mine.”

  “You’re not drinking it.”

  Thorne took the can of Special Brew from his pocket. He was going to fill it with weak stuff later, but what the hell. He yanked back the ring pull. “Yes, I am.”

  As Thorne brought the can to his mouth, the man stepped even closer. “Give us a fucking swig then.”

  The man was leaning into him from the side. Thorne could feel the material of the man’s filthy body warmer against his father’s coat.

  “Just the one swig…”

  “Fuck off,” Thorne said.

  The man moved back sharply as though he’d been pushed. He squinted at Thorne for ten or fifteen seconds, his feet planted firmly enough, but the top half of his body swaying gently. Then he cocked his head. “You’re a copper,” he said.

  Thorne grunted and laughed. Took a mouthful of beer. It tasted vile.

  “You’re Old Bill. ’Course you are.” He was starting to raise his voice. “I know you are.”

  “Listen, mate…”

  “I know a piggy…”

  Thorne thrust the can toward him. “Here, you can take it…”

  “Oink! Oink!” He smacked a fat hand against the side of his leg over and over as he shouted: “You’re a copper, you’re a rozzer, you’re a rotten, filthy fucker…”

  Thorne was on the verge of driving the base of the can against the old man’s head when Spike appeared next to him.

  “All right?”

  As Thorne turned his head the man reached out and grabbed the beer.

  Spike took hold of his arm. “Give us that back, you twat…”

  “Let him have it,” Thorne said.

  When Spike let go, the man took a couple of steps back, pulling the can of beer close to his chest. “He’s a copper. I swear he’s a fucking copper.”

  Spike spoke like he was humoring a mental patient. “’Course he is.” He cupped his hands around his mouth, shouted after the old man, although he was no more than a few feet away. “You don’t know how fucking wrong you are, pal.”

  They watched as the man walked to the railings at the edge of the curb and started to drink.

  Spike looked at Thorne. “You didn’t used to be a copper, did you?”

  Thorne turned and walked away, heading around the narrow strip of pavement that circled the church.

  The old man was clearly a head case, yet Thorne was still unnerved by the confrontation. Was there a chance he had been recognized? Could the old man have been someone Thorne had put away years before? It didn’t really matter; from what Spike had shouted, it was clear that he still believed Thorne had spent time in prison.

  He thought back to the case he’d been working
on just before his father had died. The case that might have been the reason his father had died. He thought about a line he’d drawn, and then stepped across as casually as if he were entering another room.

  Ex-offender was exactly right.

  He stopped at the front of the church, looked up at the blackened statue of Gladstone, at the defiant bronze figure of Bomber Harris…

  Something began to suggest itself.

  There were other statues around the front of the church. He didn’t need to know whom they honored. Even from behind, the bearing of these men told Thorne what they were. He turned and walked back toward the entrance of the church, remembering it even as he saw the three letters, spelled out horizontally on a pale blue cross, beneath the figure of a golden eagle. St. Clement Danes was the RAF church…

  Something blurred started to come sharply into focus.

  He thought about the museum he’d walked past earlier with Russell Brigstocke. He remembered something Spike had said when he was talking about the differing backgrounds of people who were sleeping rough:

  It’s a right old mix, though. I fucking love it, like. You’ve got your immigrants, you’ve got…

  And then Thorne knew exactly who might have their blood group as a tattoo.

  It was funny, he thought, about old friends.

  Sitting in the flat, he thought about the strange ways things could pan out if you came across them again. Funny how it happened as well. It might be that you just ran into someone from your past on a street somewhere, or on a train, or found yourself leaning against the same bar one night. It might be a phone call out of the blue.

  Or it might all come about same as this had: it might all start with a letter…

  It was weird, that was the other thing, how some that you’d never really been close to might turn out, a few years down the line, to be all right. To be the ones you got on okay with. While others—the blokes who you thought at the time would be your mates forever; who you said stupid, soppy shit to after a few beers; who you felt really connected to—ended up being the ones who caused all the fucking headaches later on. And, of course, sod’s law, you could never tell first time round which were which.