Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  “What’s it been now? A month or so?”

  “Something like that. You lose track.” Thorne wasn’t sure exactly how many rough sleepers came within the Lift’s remit, but he couldn’t help wondering if Healey knew as much about all his clients. “What about you?”

  “Sorry?”

  Thorne was thinking about what Healey had said when they’d met in the corridor a couple of weeks before. “We’re both ‘new boys,’ remember? How are you settling in?”

  “Oh…settled now, most definitely. Thank you for asking.”

  “Just talking,” Thorne said.

  “People can be suspicious of a new broom, you know? You just need to get your head down and get on with it, whatever anyone else thinks. A certain amount of tunnel vision definitely helps.”

  The concern in Healey’s voice had gone and been replaced by something a little more abrasive. Thorne saw that there was a resolve behind the nice-but-dim accent and the do-gooder appearance. He also understood exactly what Healey was saying. Tunnel vision was something he’d been accused of himself, though it was usually described somewhat less politely.

  “It could help get you off the street,” Healey said.

  “Maybe it’s what put me on it.”

  “You want to talk about that?”

  “Not hugely…”

  When Healey began removing the foil from his yogurt carton, Thorne stood up and took his coat from the back of the chair.

  “I enjoyed the chat,” Healey said.

  Thorne bent to pile his empty plate and cup onto the tray. “You need to get out more,” he said.

  He slid his tray onto a trolley near the food counter, then looked back to make sure that Healey hadn’t gone anywhere. He wanted to check to see if there’d been any messages, and as long as Healey was still eating, it was the perfect time to nip up to the office and get his phone back.

  Looks played a major part in it; that’s how Russell Brigstocke felt anyway. It was like being a hardman, like being feared. Yes, it was about what was inside your head, about having the will to dish out pain, and to take it, but once you had it going on up there, then what you looked like was the next most important thing. The set of your mouth, and the way your eyes absorbed the light—the way they sucked it in and smothered it—counted far more than your size, or how much weight your punch packed.

  It seemed to Brigstocke that Jason Mackillop looked like a copper. He had short hair and skin that was pitted with acne scars. He was heavyset beneath a blue M&S suit, and he stood awkwardly, as though he were designed to be permanently leaning on something: the roof of an unmarked vehicle; the windowsill in an airless interview room; a bar. What Mackillop looked like of course was a casting director’s idea of a copper, but as most of those who did the job for real looked like financial advisers—Brogstocke himself included, if he were being honest—that was probably no bad thing. At that moment, with the TDC standing in front of his desk and brightening the day right up, he decided that Jason Mackillop was the sort of copper he could do with a damn sight more of.

  “Right, let’s have those names…” Brigstocke said.

  The list of soldiers in the Glorious photograph had been divided up and Mackillop had been the one who had struck lucky. Among those in his allocation had been the writer of the original article, and not only had First Lieutenant Stephen Brereton been fairly easy to trace, but he’d had no great trouble providing the relevant information. Mackillop had already explained to Brigstocke how Brereton—now a major in the Corporate Communications Department of the MOD—had remembered Chris Jago pretty well. He’d talked about their time in Bremenhaven; about Jago’s fondness for German beer and German girls. He’d told Mackillop how each crew in the troop had been tight with one another; how a friendly rivalry between the different crews had been actively encouraged. Brereton hadn’t seemed to mind too much that he could not be told why the police were so interested, and had said he’d be happy to have a look through some of his old Gulf War journals and diaries. After no more than ten minutes, he’d called back with the names of the other three men who’d manned a Challenger tank alongside Chris Jago in the early part of 1991.

  “That major down in Somerset…Poulter? He said that these crews got moved about all the time, that they were sometimes shifted around in battle situations. How can Brereton be certain these are the men who were in that tank on February 26, 1991?”

  “He isn’t,” Mackillop said. “Not absolutely, one hundred percent I mean. I gave him the exact date and he told me that his memory wasn’t that good, but that he thought he’d remember if there’d been any injuries or last-minute transfers, you know? He wouldn’t stake his life on it, but he couldn’t recall any particular reason why that crew should have been split up.”

  “Right…” Brigstocke was holding out a hand, waiting to take the piece of paper.

  Instead, Mackillop looked at his list, read the names to the DCI: “Trooper Christopher Jago, he was the gunner; Lance Corporal Ryan Eales, the loader/operator; Trooper Alec Bonser was the driver, and the tank commander was Corporal Ian Hadingham. I reckon this was our crew, guv.” Then he stepped forward and passed the paper across the desk.

  Jago. Eales. Bonser. Hadingham.

  Brigstocke stared down at the names of four men who surely held the key to solving a series of murders. Four men who themselves had committed murder and who now appeared to be paying for it with their own lives.

  “Obviously, we’re still in the dark about which one of them is our first victim,” Mackillop said. “It could be Eales, Bonser, or Hadingham.”

  Brigstocke nodded. “Now we’ve ID’d the crew, we can put a bit more pressure on the Army Personnel Centre—”

  “I’m already on it, guv.”

  “I can’t actually promote you until you’ve made DC, you know, Jason.”

  Mackillop reddened. “Well, I’m not on it exactly, but Major Brereton said he’d talk to them and try to get at least the basic stuff to us A.S.A.P.”

  “Basic stuff?”

  “Individual pictures of the soldiers, and maybe some of the details that are in their records: height, weight, color of hair, blood group with a bit of luck. Hopefully, we should be able to figure out which one our mystery corpse is.”

  “Hopefully.” Brigstocke was thinking that they’d need more than a photo. The killer hadn’t left any of the victims in a state that was particularly recognizable. “He reckons he can do that, does he, this Major Brereton?”

  “He sounded like there was every chance, yeah. I think they respond better when requests for information come from other soldiers.”

  Brigstocke picked up the phone. “Not like the way most people on the Job respond to each other, then?”

  “Guv…?”

  “You’ll know what I’m on about soon enough.” Brigstocke dialed a number, pointed toward the piece of paper. “Well done on this, Jason. Your luck was in, no question…”

  “Oh, it was pure bloody jam, guv, I know that.”

  “Luck’s no use to anybody unless they use it. It sounds like you dealt with this Brereton bloke very well.”

  Mackillop handled the praise like someone with far greater experience. Just a small nod. But Brigstocke caught the spasm of delight on his face, like a stifled sneeze, in the second or two before the TDC turned to walk toward the door.

  Brigstocke leaned back in his chair and listened to the phone ringing on the other end of the line. He was as absurdly excited as Mackillop had been by the prospect of giving Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond the first piece of genuinely good news in a while.

  The four of them—Thorne, Spike, Caroline, and Terry T—sat around a table in a grotty café behind the Charing Cross Road. Terry had returned from his travels with a few extra quid in his pocket and had insisted on shelling out on tea and doughnuts for everyone. This, and the fact that he was able to make the word cunt sound like a term of endearment, made Thorne take to him straightaway.

  “Y
ou the cunt who’s been sleeping in my pitch?” Terry had said on being introduced. The voice was high and hoarse, ripening a thick London accent.

  Thorne had thought about it for a few seconds. “Yeah, I think that’ll be me. Just keeping it warm for you, obviously.”

  “Fair play, mate…”

  Terry T was every bit as tall as Spike had described, but he was also spookily thin. He was, Thorne guessed, somewhere in his late thirties, but he looked a damn sight older, with sunken cheeks, very few teeth, and what appeared to be no hair at all beneath a floppy green hat. Like a cross between Nosferatu and the King of the Gypsies. A feather dangled from one ear and he’d taken off his scarf to reveal a heavy-looking, tarnished padlock on a chain around his neck, which had turned the skin beneath it distinctly green.

  Terry had seen Thorne staring and reached up to finger the chain. “Lost the fuckin’ key, didn’t I?”

  “So where you been then, Tel? What you been doing…?”

  Spike was buzzing, and for more than just the usual reason. He was excited to have his friend back. Thorne felt a peculiar twinge of something that might have been jealousy, though it was probably no more than a sugar rush from the doughnuts.

  “Been all over,” Terry T said. “Up north to Birmingham and Liverpool, then even further, mate. Up with the chilly Jockos.”

  Spike dipped a doughnut into a glass of Coke, let the drips fall off. “I thought most of them were here in London.”

  “Plenty more where they came from,” Terry said.

  Spike rolled his eyes, put on a cod-Scottish accent, and mumbled something incomprehensible. “It’s fucking disgusting,” he said. “They come down here, they beg on our street corners, they drink our Special Brew…”

  Terry and Caroline laughed.

  “How d’you get around?” Thorne asked.

  “Hitching, mostly. Got a couple of free trains by keeping an eye out for the ticket collector and spending a lot of time in the bog.”

  “I bet it’s a bit colder on the streets up there.”

  “I was indoors, mate. Sofa-surfing…”

  Instinctively, Thorne looked to Spike for an explanation.

  Spike held out his arms as if riding a surfboard, repeated the phrase in a silly American accent. “Sofa-surfing. Moving around, like. Dossing down on people’s floors, sofas, what-ever…”

  “Loads of people do it,” Caroline said. She’d poured a small mound of sugar onto the tabletop and had been absently toying with it: drawing patterns in the grains with her finger. All at once she chopped the edge of her hand onto the table and swept the sugar onto the floor. “You think there’s a lot of people sleeping on the street and in the hostels, you can multiply that by tens of thousands…”

  More of those who, conveniently, could never be counted when the official figures were being produced; more of the so-called hidden homeless. Thorne suddenly wondered if Terry T knew what had been going on while he was traveling. What had happened to some of those who had been unable to hide.

  “So how long have you been away, Terry?”

  Caroline flashed Thorne a look. He could see that she knew what was going through his mind, but he couldn’t be sure what she was trying to tell him.

  “Christ…it was a few days after that poor bastard got his head kicked in round Golden Square. When was that?”

  “A couple of months ago,” Spike said.

  “Did they ever catch the bloke who did it?”

  Terry couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a paper or watched the news; he knew nothing of those who had died after that first victim. Caroline brought him up to date: she told him about the murders of Ray Mannion and Paddy Hayes; she leaned across to grab one of Terry T’s long, bony hands and told him what had happened to Radio Bob.

  Spike edged toward Thorne. “Terry and Bob were mates,” he said. Like it wasn’t obvious enough…

  “Do they know why?” Terry asked eventually.

  Spike snorted. “Not got a clue, if you ask me, like.”

  “There’s supposedly an undercover copper sleeping rough,” Caroline said. “To try and catch him.”

  “They reckon the killer might be a copper,” Thorne said.

  There was a small bowl on the table filled with sachets and sealed tubes: sugar, vinegar, mustard, mayonnaise. Caroline grabbed a handful and dropped them into her bag. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against Spike. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop, whistling something between his teeth.

  Terry took out a plastic wallet and shook some money onto the table to settle the bill. “He’ll be a dead copper if I get hold of him…”

  They walked up to Centre Point, then stopped and stood about for a quarter of an hour. For a few, strange minutes Thorne felt like a teenager again; content to hang around with friends, not doing anything in particular. Just talking bollocks and winding one another up. Happy enough to say nothing at all if the mood wasn’t right.

  The feeling passed quickly enough. This was not about relishing space and free time and the absence of responsibility. It was about being lost.

  They moved off again, crossing Oxford Street and heading north. “I can’t fucking believe I wasn’t here,” Terry said. “I can’t believe I missed Bob’s funeral.”

  Caroline caught up with him. “Listen, I’m sure you and some of the other lads can get together later and have a few drinks for him, eh?”

  “More than a few,” Terry said.

  Caroline looked at Thorne. “You up for that?”

  “Better watch him, though, Tel.” Spike pointed at Thorne and began to shadowbox. “After a couple of cans he thinks he’s Lennox Lewis…”

  “I don’t really know what I’m doing later,” Thorne said. “I’ve got to find a decent place to get some kip.”

  Terry turned to him. “I was only joking about my pitch, mate. Plenty of room in there for two if you want to stick around for a bit.”

  Spike whistled. “You on the turn, Tel?”

  “I’ll see…” Thorne said.

  Caroline punched him on the shoulder. “Tonight’s sorted, so don’t bother arguing. It’s going to piss down later, so you’re coming underground with us…”

  Major Stephen Brereton had been as good as his word. By mid-afternoon, photos and descriptions of the four men in the tank crew were being faxed through to the incident room. Holland and Kitson had stood over the machine as the information came through, inch by inch. They cleared a desk, laid it all out, and looked for the answer that they hoped would be somewhere in front of them. Brigstocke had been right in guessing that the photos would not do the job on their own. They were simple head-and-shoulder shots of the four men in uniform, taken shortly after each had enlisted, but enough was likely to have happened since then to change the way each of the men looked.

  They studied the information sheets on Hadingham, Bonser, and Eales: dates of birth and of enlistment; potted service histories; basic physical details.

  “Blood group doesn’t help us,” Kitson said, reading. “Eales and Hadingham are both O-positive…”

  Holland was the one who spotted it. “Found him…”

  “Show me.”

  Kitson looked over Holland’s shoulder and Holland pointed to the description of Trooper Alec Bonser. The driver.

  “He was five feet nine, look, same as our John Doe. Eales and Hadingham were both six-footers. The body in Westminster Morgue has got to be Alec Bonser.”

  Kitson carried on staring at the sheet of paper.

  “It’s got to be,” Holland said. “I don’t see any other—”

  “You’re right, I know.” Kitson pointed to another line of type. “I was looking for something else. This is good news for us, maybe…”

  Holland saw that Kitson was pointing to the entry under Next of Kin: Barbara Bonser (Mother).

  Holland let out a long, slow breath and looked around. He could see that Andy Stone, Jason Mackillop, and others had been earwigging; that they were hanging on eve
ry word. “What about the death message?” Holland asked.

  “I’ll sort it.” Kitson gathered up the sheets of paper. “I’ll go and fill the DCI in and get the say-so…”

  “So we should start looking for Eales and Hadingham, then?”

  “Looks like it.” She pulled out one of the sheets, glanced at it, and thrust it back at Holland. “You can make a start on our tank commander while I’m gone.”

  As he watched Kitson walk toward Brigstocke’s office, Holland wondered what he would say to Barbara Bonser if he were in the same position. What his own mother would say if it were his death message that was being delivered. He started to sweat, and to feel like he needed to sit down, when he began to wonder how he would react—how he would really react—were he ever to be told that anything had happened to Chloe…

  An hour later the whiteboard had been updated. Blown-up pictures of Jago, Hadingham, Bonser, and Eales had been added. The question marks had been removed. They had the names of the two soldiers who might still be alive and, finally, they had the names of both of those who were dead. Now, well into the locate/trace on Ian Hadingham, Holland had come up with nothing. The usual calls and searches to DSS and the National Voters’ Register had failed to turn his man up, and though he hadn’t expected it to be simple, he was wondering where to go next.

  This is good news for us, maybe…

  It suddenly struck him that he hadn’t once put Sophie into any of those painful next-of-kin scenarios that had occupied his thoughts earlier. The realization came like a fist in the gut; it winded him, and he knew he would be feeling its effects for a while. But at the same time it gave him an idea. A change of direction.

  He looked again at Ian Hadingham’s information sheet and turned back to his computer.

  Brigstocke should have known better. All his years of experience should have told him there were only two chances the day would finish up as well as it had started.

  Slim and none.