Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

Inside half an hour they’d put away a couple each and begun to loosen up a little.

  “Where are the kids tonight…?” As Holland was asking the question he realized he was unsure what he should call Kitson. He couldn’t remember having a drink with her on her own before, and something about it—and perhaps about the fact that they were drinking so fast—seemed to alter the dynamic between them.

  “Tony’s got them. He picks them up from the child minder if I’m on a late one.”

  “Right.” Holland hadn’t heard Kitson mention her new bloke’s name before.

  “And ‘Yvonne’s’ fine, by the way,” she said. “I think we’re off the clock in here.”

  They took sips of white wine and lager top and looked around at the pub’s brightly lit and unwelcoming interior. The place had no frills, but was still very busy. As it happened, being very much the local for the Peel Centre, there were usually just as many coppers in the place as were to be found up the road in Becke House.

  “What about you, Dave? You were somewhere near Leicester Square, weren’t you?”

  “That’s right.” Kitson still had no idea that Thorne had gone undercover, and so obviously had not been informed that Holland and Brigstocke had gone into the West End to meet up with him and show him the tape. “Some old boy told one of the local lads he’d seen something on the night of the last murder. Waste of bloody time…”

  “That’s only a few stops from Elephant and Castle, isn’t it? You could have been home in quarter of an hour.”

  A copper, whose face he’d seen before in the pub and at various times around Becke House, came to the table and asked Holland if the empty chair opposite him was taken. Holland shook his head, watched the man take the chair across and join a group who looked like they were settling down to make a night of it. He turned back to Kitson. “It’s not fair on Sophie. I’m bringing such a lot of shit home with me at the moment, you know? Like I’m walking it through the flat and getting it everywhere. Dirtying everything…”

  “Is this about the tape?”

  “It’s mad, I know. We see loads of horrible stuff, right? It’s just seeing it happen like that. Watching them do it.”

  “It’s how you’re meant to feel, Dave. You should be worried if you didn’t.”

  “This is going to sound stupid, but I don’t want to pass any of it on to Chloe. I have to deal with it, but there’s no reason why she should, is there? It’s like passive smoking or something. I don’t want her anywhere near anything that might affect her, and right now it’s like I’m choking on it. I feel like I’m carrying it around on my clothes and in my hair. Passive evil…”

  Kitson smiled as she raised her glass to her lips.

  “Told you it was stupid,” Holland said.

  Kitson shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. “I curse my three sometimes, but perhaps I should be grateful I’ve got so much chasing round to do. I’m too busy sorting out football kit, and nagging them about homework, and running a taxi service, to worry about bringing work home with me.”

  “Maybe me and Sophie should have a few more kids,” Holland said.

  Kitson drained her wineglass. “My shout…”

  While Kitson was at the bar, Holland thought about the way Susan Jago had fought to protect her brother; to defend him, even in the face of the sickening evidence. He wondered what Jago’s mother would think about what her son had done. He’d confronted the parents of those who had committed the most shocking acts and knew that in most cases they never stopped loving their children. They couldn’t, any more than he could conceive of not feeling as he did now about his daughter, no matter what she did. For the families—especially the parents—of those who killed or abused, faith could be destroyed. But love, he knew now, was unconditional. When your children did such things, you did not stop loving them. You simply began hating yourself.

  Kitson was coming back to the table with the drinks and she smiled as he caught her eye. Holland thought suddenly that she looked quite sexy. Asked himself what the hell he was thinking about…

  “What were you doing,” Kitson asked sometime later, “in 1991?”

  Holland did the math. “I was sixteen, so I suppose I was going out a lot. I can remember coming back late from parties or clubs a couple of times and sitting up watching the bombing on TV. What about you?”

  “I was just finishing college,” Kitson said. “We were all dead against it, obviously. Not as much as with the last one, but there were still plenty of protests. We thought it was all about oil.”

  A cheer went up as someone hit the jackpot on the fruit machine in the corner. Holland leaned forward, spoke up to make himself heard above the rhythmic chink and clatter of the payout. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re a copper or a killer, does it?” He swallowed a mouthful of beer. “How well do we really know anybody?”

  Kitson raised her eyebrows. “Bloody hell…”

  Holland reddened slightly. He hadn’t meant it to sound so stupidly portentous. “I never had you down as a lefty, that’s all,” he said.

  “Watford Polytechnic was hardly Kent State.”

  Holland laughed, though he didn’t understand the reference. “Even so…”

  “And I never had you down as someone who takes such a lot of the job home with him.” She smiled, nodding toward Holland’s glass. “Speaking of which…”

  “What?”

  “If you do want to have any more kids, you’d best finish that, go home, and get down to it…”

  “You look wankered, mate,” Spike said.

  Thorne grinned and swayed to one side, waving a young woman past as if he were a bullfighter. “I feel wankered,” he said. “Bladdered, fucked, off my tits…”

  “How many of those have you had?”

  Thorne had just about got used to the taste of Carlsberg Special Brew, but he hadn’t been prepared for the kick. It was somewhere past chucking-out time and he’d been drinking steadily since he’d left the London Lift. Since he’d said good-bye to Holland and Brigstocke and begun trying to walk off the memory of what he’d seen on that videotape.

  “Not enough.” Thorne could feel the weight of the cans in his rucksack. “Plenty more, though…”

  Walking hadn’t done the trick, so he’d gone straight into the nearest Tesco Metro and handed over a quarter of his weekly money in exchange for eight cans.

  “You should save a couple,” Caroline said.

  He’d met up with Spike and Caroline on Bedford Street and they’d walked aimlessly around Covent Garden ever since. Thorne had announced that he wanted to go to sleep an hour before, that he had to get back to his theater, but somehow he never quite kept going in any one direction and it seemed stupid to doss down anywhere while there was still a can open.

  “Have one!” Thorne tried to reach behind into the rucksack, his arm flailing.

  “I keep telling you, I don’t want one,” Spike said. “I’ll take one off you to sell, mind you…”

  “You can piss off,” Thorne said.

  Caroline pulled a face. “That stuff tastes fucking horrible…”

  “I don’t understand why you two don’t drink.” Thorne held up the gold-and-red can and read the writing; the By Royal Appointment. “If it’s good enough for the Danish court…”

  “Prefer to save our money, like,” Spike said. “Spend it on the good stuff.”

  Caroline took Thorne’s arm and hooked her own around it as they walked. “I’ll have a vodka, mind you, if there’s one on offer.”

  “I bet fuck-all gets done in Denmark,” Thorne said.

  Spike cackled.

  “Be nice to get dressed up one night, wouldn’t it?” Caroline reached out her other arm and drew Spike toward her. “Go out somewhere and dance, and drink vodka and tonic or a few cocktails…”

  Spike leaned over to kiss her and Thorne pulled away from them.

  He whistled. “Give her a snog, for Christ’s sake, and tell her you love her.” He was aware of how h
e sounded: the words not slurred exactly, but slow and singsong; emphasized oddly, like he was speaking through a machine. “Go on, put your arms round her…”

  Put your arms round them…Give the fuckers a cuddle.

  Thorne stopped dead and shut his eyes. The can slipped out of his hand on to the pavement. “Fuck…”

  Caroline and Spike walked over.

  “We need to get you bedded down,” Caroline said.

  Thorne looked down at the thick, golden liquid running away across the curb. He pushed the toe of his boot into it. His stomach lurched as he watched it spread and darken, leaking from the wound and staining the sand.

  “I want to go to sleep,” he said.

  Spike pushed him forward. “I thought you boozers were supposed to have some kind of tolerance…”

  Sleep hung around, but refused to settle. Instead, thoughts collided inside his thick head like oversize bumper cars moving at half speed…

  Atrocious was a meaningless, fucked-up word. A crappy meal could be atrocious, yes, or a shit football team or a bad movie. Atrocious didn’t come close to describing the thing itself: the atrocity. That’s what they were calling it. Brigstocke and the rest of them. Not murder. An atrocity. All about the context, apparently…

  There were rats in the skip around the corner. He could hear them digging into the bin bags. Chewing through Styrofoam for crusts, and wrappers slick with kebab fat.

  He’d probably seen things as bad in Surbiton semis and Hackney tower blocks, or at least the aftermath of such things. He’d certainly known of worse—of acts that had left a greater number dead—happening in that war and in others. He’d watched them on the news. Weren’t those things atrocities, too?

  He belched up Special Brew, tasting it a second time. Moaning. Biting down into each sour-sweet bubble.

  Why was what he’d seen on that piece-of-shit tape any worse than when a bomb fell through the red cross daubed on a hospital roof? These were not civilians, were they? This was soldiers killing soldiers. Yet somehow it was worse. You knew perfectly well that things went wrong, that machines went wrong, and that people fucked up. But this wasn’t fucking up; this was basic bloody horror. This was inhuman behavior from those who’d been there—who were supposed to have been there—in defense of humanity.

  He shifted, driving an elbow into the rucksack behind him and pulling at the frayed edge of the sleeping bag. He could smell himself on the warm air that rose up from inside.

  If anything, what he’d seen on that tape, what had happened at the end, was more terrible than the executions themselves. But whoever was behind the camera hadn’t filmed the actual shootings. There was no way, from seeing the tape, of knowing if each of the four soldiers had done his bit.

  If each one of ours had killed one of theirs…

  He hoped it hadn’t been the case. Hoped that one soldier, or at worst two, had done all the killing. He pictured one of the soldiers lining up the prisoners and trying to kill as many as he could with one shot. If those heavy heads were close enough together, if all those ducks were in a row, would the bullet pass straight through one and into the next? Through two or three maybe…?

  Now the soldiers themselves were being hunted down and killed. It was hard to feel too sorry for them, though, kicked to death or not. They weren’t shitting themselves, were they? Sitting there, watching it happen, and waiting their turn.

  He lay down flat and turned his head. The stone felt wonderfully cool against his face.

  It had to be the man who’d shot the video, didn’t it? Surely. That’s what he felt in his guts, swilling around with the beer and the tea and the sandwiches. They’d know soon enough; they’d know what was happening when they found the other two soldiers. If they were alive, they could identify whoever had been pointing that camera.

  Somebody shot soldiers shooting.

  Fucking tongue twister…

  Thorne smelled something familiar and opened his eyes.

  He had no idea how many hours it had been since Spike and Caroline had dropped him at his doorway and left. He was equally clueless as to how long Spike had been back, sitting there on the steps with a skinny joint in his hand. Without a watch, Thorne relied on his mobile phone to tell him the time. Even if he could have dug it out now in front of Spike, he wouldn’t have bothered…

  “When d’you come back?”

  “Just.” Without turning, he offered Thorne the joint. “Want some?”

  Thorne groaned a negative. “Where’s Caroline?”

  From the back, Thorne could see the shrug, and shake of the head, but not Spike’s expression. “Busy…”

  Thorne’s eyes had closed for what seemed like no more than a second when he heard something smack against the wall above him and felt something hit his face.

  “Fuck’s that?”

  He sat up, wiping his mouth, and saw the messy remains of a burger scattered on the floor and across his sleeping bag. He saw Spike standing and moving toward two men in the middle of the street.

  “What d’you think you’re fucking doing?” Spike asked.

  The man who answered was wearing a green parka and a blank expression. He slurred, mock apologetic. “Sorry, mate, I thought this was a rubbish tip…”

  The second man was bald and thin-faced. He laughed and casually lobbed something else, whistling as if he’d launched a grenade. Spike stepped aside and watched the cup explode, sending ice cubes and whatever drink was inside spilling across the pavement.

  “You arsehole.” Spike came forward, and the first man—taller and heavier than he was—moved to meet him.

  Thorne was on his feet now, sobering up very quickly and struggling to free his feet from the sleeping bag. He watched as the man in the parka spread his legs and lowered his face into Spike’s.

  “You fancy it, you junkie cunt?”

  Then things got very out of hand very quickly…

  As the pushes are exchanged, and quickly become blows, Thorne begins moving down the steps. At the same time, the bald man charges toward him. Still tangled in his sleeping bag, Thorne all but falls into him, raising his forearms to meet the man’s face as they collide.

  As they struggle Thorne is aware of Spike and the other man going at it a few feet away. He hears leather soles scraping against the road to gain purchase, then bodies hitting it as they both go down. Spike’s attacker is taunting him as they struggle: calling Spike filthy; a disease; a dirty, AIDS-ridden fucker. Between these words he grunts with the effort of every punch.

  Thorne knows that he’s being hit and kicked, but he hears rather than feels the impact. The man is lashing out wildly, screaming at Thorne that he’s dead as he swings fists and feet. Thorne grabs an arm, fastens one of his own around the man’s neck, and moves his hands quickly. He can feel the stubble on the man’s head as he takes a firm grip on it and brings a knee up hard into his face.

  The man slumps…

  His hands claw at Thorne’s coat, pulling off a button as he goes to his knees.

  Thorne spins away and in a couple of staggered steps he is on top of the man with the parka. Spike is flat on his back beneath them, his hands raised to protect his head.

  Thorne tries to grab hold of the arms that are pummeling Spike, to pin them back, but it’s hard to get a grip on the shiny material.

  A voice shouts something close to him and Thorne feels a hand taking hold of his shoulder. He wheels round fast, pulling back a fist.

  “I said that’s enough…”

  Thorne paused for half a second, panting and scarlet-faced, the fist still poised to accelerate forward. He was pissed, very pissed no question, but still he recognized Sergeant Dan Britton. The officer was wearing the same hooded top and combats he’d been wearing in the tube station. Thorne, fizzing with adrenaline and strong lager, was nevertheless 100 percent certain that the man who’d taken hold of him was a copper.

  He took a breath…

  Then punched him anyway.

  EIGHTEEN
>
  “I was pissed,” Thorne said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “You broke my sergeant’s nose is what you did…”

  The man opposite Thorne wore a blue suit over a white shirt and a tie with golf balls on it. He’d walked into the interview room, told Thorne in very blunt language that he was an idiot, and put two coffees down on the table. He’d identified himself as Inspector John McCabe and then sat back, waiting for Thorne to explain himself.

  “How’s he doing?” Thorne asked.

  “Britton? His face is about the same as yours.” McCabe slid the coffee across the table. “You look like shit warmed up.”

  Thorne felt much worse.

  He was starting to realize exactly what had happened. The lack of formality, McCabe’s attitude, the mugs of coffee. It was becoming obvious what he’d done; and even as McCabe spelled it out, moments from the night before zipped through Thorne’s semi-functioning consciousness like a dream sequence in an arty movie. Being pinned against the wall while others scattered; shouting the odds in the van; bleeding onto the smooth counter in the custody suite; making it clear that he could find his own way to the cells, thank you very fucking much. Telling anyone who’d listen that they had to ring this phone number…

  Christ, he really hadn’t known what he was doing.

  “This is the stuff of legend,” McCabe said. He was somewhere in his late forties, but there was very little gray in the helmet of straight black hair. He was clean-shaven and ruddy, with a smile—much in evidence as he spoke—that was slightly lopsided. “In years to come, the boys at SO10 might well be using this on courses.”

  “All right…”

  “It’s the perfect example of how not to do things…”

  Thorne picked up his coffee and leaned back in his chair. It was probably best to let McCabe get on with it.

  “What you do is, you get yourself arrested for something. Something nice and trivial, you know, like assaulting a police officer. Then, when things get a bit tasty, because you’re a total fuckup or maybe because you’re a bit frightened of spending a night in the cells all on your own, you start announcing that you’re actually working undercover and giving out the number of your squad to all and bloody sundry.” A slurp of coffee and the lopsided smile. “Done much undercover work, have you?”