Lifeless

by Mark Billingham

  The jokey tone hadn’t lasted long…

  “You said that going undercover would just be about gathering information,” Brigstocke said. “We’ve got that information now. We know who the victims are, and we know why it’s happening, so give me one good reason for you to carry on.”

  “Because the killer hasn’t gone anywhere.”

  “We talked about this when you came to me with your stupid idea in the first place…”

  “Things are much different now,” Thorne said.

  “Fucking right they’re different.” Brigstocke glanced toward the couple, then across at the woman who stood smoking behind the bar. He lowered his voice. “The night before last, it was you he tried to kill…”

  Thorne put the half-eaten cheese roll back onto his plate. He wasn’t hugely hungry. He’d gone to the Lift early and put away a full breakfast while he waited in vain for Spike or Caroline to turn up. Thorne hadn’t seen either of them since the previous morning. He’d left the subway when Holland had called with news of the murder, then returned a few hours later to wake them; to tell them that he’d been into the West End and seen the police gathered outside the theater.

  To tell them that Terry was dead…

  “You’re not willing to consider the possibility that Terry Turner being kicked to death in that doorway was a bizarre coincidence, are you?” Thorne looked at Brigstocke. “I thought not…”

  “The killer knows who you are,” Brigstocke said.

  “Thanks to one too many cans of Special Brew, the world and his fucking wife knows there’s an undercover copper on the streets.”

  “Right, but this bloke knows it’s you.”

  “I’m well aware of that…”

  “Do you think he knows you personally? Is it someone you’ve met?”

  Thorne stared into his beer. “He mistook Terry Turner for me, so I doubt it.”

  “It was dark. It was pissing with rain. Turner might well have been out of it, asleep, with his back to the killer…”

  “Terry was a foot taller than I am,” Thorne said. “I can’t see it.”

  The door opened and a man walked in leading a greyhound. He climbed onto a stool at the bar and the dog dropped flat at his feet. The man exchanged a word or two with the barmaid, ordered a pint, and turned to stare at the TV.

  “We can skirt around the obvious question all bloody day…” Brigstocke said.

  Over by the bar, the greyhound raised his head for a moment, yawned, and let it drop again. The dog looked like he couldn’t give a fuck, and so did his owner. The man seemed far more at ease than Thorne imagined him to be behind his own four walls: he looked at home; he looked like himself.

  “Tom?”

  “I’m listening…”

  “Why? That’s what we need to address. Why on earth does he come after you?”

  Thorne took a second to collect his thoughts. “Okay, this is the best I can come up with, and you’re not going to like it. I reckon he’s shitting himself.”

  “He’s shitting himself?”

  “I think he’s panicking. I think he knows we’re getting close. Maybe not to him, not as yet, but he doesn’t feel safe because he knows we’ve put the nuts and bolts of it together. Like you said, we’ve got the names and we’ve got a motive. If Eales is still alive, and we can find him, the killer knows he can be identified.”

  “So why not just kill Eales?”

  “Maybe he already has,” Thorne said. “Look, all I’m really saying is that I don’t think this bloke’s that bloody clever. He’s felt cornered, he’s started to panic, and he’s reacted, and I don’t think there’s a lot more to it than that. Who knows? Maybe he thinks I’m such a brilliant detective that he needs to get me out of the way.”

  “Now it’s getting really far-fetched.”

  “Whichever way you look at it, it wasn’t a very clever thing to do, but I think we’re talking about someone who works on instinct, you know? If we’re right about the blackmail angle, this whole thing is about him feeling threatened and trying to protect himself…”

  The pub’s business rocketed as a pair of lads came through the door. The dog barked halfheartedly and was silenced by a nudge from his master’s boot. The barmaid lit another fag from the butt of the last one, and on TV, a blonde with a smile as overcooked as her tan was promising to find an elderly couple their dream home in the sun.

  Brigstocke tore open a bag of crisps and leaned across the table. “All this stuff he knows. How exactly does he know it?”

  “That’s the bit you’re not going to like,” Thorne said.

  “We’re back to him being on the Job, are we?”

  “I’m starting to think it’s likely. If I’m right about why I was targeted, I can’t see how else he’d know what was going on, unless he was a copper.”

  “If you’re right…”

  “He knew more than who I was, Russell. He knew where I’d be.” Thorne pictured Terry T, fingering the padlock at his throat, offering to share the doorway that even now they were still trying to scrub the blood out of. “Where I was supposed to be.”

  Brigstocke said nothing for several moments. His face, distorted as it was through his glass of water, made it clear he was finding Thorne’s point a hard one to argue against. “So who are we talking about? How many people knew where you were sleeping?”

  “You, Holland, Hendricks. Brendan Maxwell at the Lift. McCabe and maybe one or two others at Charing Cross.”

  “Was McCabe’s name last for any particular reason?”

  “I just think he’s worth looking at. Him and a few of his team.”

  “Looking at?”

  “Maybe we could get a couple of Intel lads on it. Keep an eye on him…?”

  Brigstocke looked drawn suddenly, like another weight had been added to a load that was already unbearable. “This kind of thing’s easy to suggest. It’s a piece of piss in a pub, but actually getting it done is a fucking nightmare. You don’t really grasp any of that, do you, Tom? Christ, putting a DI under surveillance on the strength of something like this, on the strength of very little, is asking for trouble.”

  Thorne remembered something he’d said to McCabe that still held true. “I can’t speak for you,” he said, “but some of us are in plenty of trouble already. I don’t think a bit more’s going to make a lot of difference.”

  Thorne stared and Brigstocke stared back at him; a grim expression that stayed frozen on the DCI’s face for several seconds, until he stuffed a handful of crisps into his mouth.

  Shireen Collins—Ian Hadingham’s ex-wife—was a petite, attractive black woman whom Holland guessed, once he’d seen her up close, to be somewhere just the right side of forty. She presented a fair bit younger—her hair cut in cornrows and her clothes suitably sporty—though with half a dozen kids under five running about, a tracksuit and trainers were probably the most practical choices.

  She worked as a child minder, and Holland and Stone had arrived to find that she was looking after four children that day. “Plus two of my own,” she told them, pointing out a boy and a girl. “Those are mine, the really evil ones…”

  “They’re nice-looking kids,” Stone said.

  “The older two, Ian’s two, are both at school.”

  The flat, on the southern side of Salford, was on the ground floor; one of three in a Victorian conversion. “The people upstairs work all day,” Collins said as she showed them in. “So we can make as much noise as we like, which is great. Four- and five-year-olds make a lot of noise.”

  From what Holland and Stone could make out, there were a couple of bedrooms and a large living room that ran off a kitchen-diner. They sat at a long kitchen table, from which Collins had been clearing the remains of lunch when they’d arrived. “There’s a bit left if you fancy chicken nuggets and potato faces,” she said. Having missed breakfast, Holland was seriously tempted, but the offer was declined. In the next room, visible through a serving hatch, the kids were gathered in front of
a widescreen TV. Collins leaned through the hatch and issued gentle but firm instructions until there was something approaching quiet.

  “They get half an hour with a video after lunch,” she said. “So that’s about as long as we’ve got.”

  Holland threw his overcoat across a kitchen chair. “That’ll be plenty, Shireen.”

  The conversation was not without interruption—punctuated by high-pitched chatter, cartoonish music, and the occasional bout of tears from the next room—but Shireen Collins spoke openly enough. It was obvious that at some point she’d felt a great deal for Ian Hadingham. But it was equally clear that she’d moved on. From their marriage, and from his death…

  “Ian was always a waste of space unless he was in a uniform,” she said. “When he’d come home on leave or whatever, he’d just sit about feeling sorry for himself. He’d ignore me and he’d ignore the kids most of the time, and to be honest, after a couple of weeks, I couldn’t wait for him to get back to his bloody regiment. God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it?”

  “Have you been talking to my girlfriend?” Holland said.

  Collins laughed. She tried to explain how it had felt; how she’d once felt jealous of the bond he’d so clearly shared with his pals in the regiment. How she’d resented it, and fought for her husband’s attention, and then, in the end, how she’d simply given up competing.

  “What happened after Ian came back from the Gulf?” Holland asked.

  Collins laughed again, but rather more sadly this time. “I’m not sure how much of him did come back,” she said. “It was like he was somewhere else in his head and it wasn’t a place where I was welcome. Actually, I’m not sure it was a place I’d’ve liked very much. I know they all went through a lot out there.”

  Holland stared straight at Collins. He did not want to catch Stone’s eye; he knew Stone would be thinking the same thing he was: You have no bloody idea…

  “He left the army pretty soon after he came home,” Collins said. “It was all right for a while, for a year or so, and we even talked about having more kids, but something told me not to. That we’d’ve been doing it for the wrong reasons.”

  “What did Ian do,” Holland asked, “after he left the army?”

  “All sorts of things, but none of them for very long, you know? He worked in warehouses, did some security work, tried to retrain as an electrical engineer, but he couldn’t hold down a job. Had a bit of a problem with authority. It’d be fine for a few months, then he’d blow it. He was fired more than once for threatening people.” She opened her mouth to say something else, then changed her mind. “His head was basically messed up afterward.”

  Stone nodded his understanding. “So he moved out, right?”

  “Right. We decided to separate a few years on from that. He moved out and eventually I got this place. He never went far away, like—he wanted to stay close to the kids and that—but he moved around.”

  “He got a flat?”

  “Lots of different flats. He didn’t seem to like staying put too long; plus, he kept falling behind with his rent and getting chucked out of places.”

  “How did he react when you met somebody else?” Holland asked. “It can’t have been very easy…”

  There was a yell from next door. Collins stood to look in on the children, but sat down again quickly enough. “Ian wasn’t exactly thrilled and he had a bit of a problem with Owen.” She pointed toward her young children. “Owen’s their dad. Things got a bit ugly and Ian was a big bloke. He was handy, you know? So we got the police involved and we decided against actually getting married, and it was fine after that. It was fine for me and Owen, I mean, but things went downhill for Ian pretty quickly.”

  “Downhill?” Stone said.

  “He started dossing down all over the place. Sleeping on people’s floors and in shitty bedsits or whatever. Like he’d stopped caring, basically. He was drinking a lot and pissing off all his mates. Not that he had many left by then…”

  “Did he see any of his old mates from the army?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Any of the lads on his tank crew, maybe?”

  “He never talked about it,” she said. “I wouldn’t know if he had, but to be honest I’d stopped really listening to him, you know? He went funny the last few years. He talked a lot of rubbish. Before he died he came round to tell me that he was going to turn it all round. Banging on about how he was going to look after me and the kids, how he was going to see us all right. I never told Owen any of that, by the way. He’d’ve gone mental.”

  Holland couldn’t resist a glance at Stone this time. “Did he say how he was going to turn it round? Was he talking about money?”

  “Yeah, I think so, but he always had some stupid scheme or other on the go. He was always on about getting himself sorted again. Silly bastard…”

  “Tell us about when Ian died, Shireen?”

  A boy came to the hatch and asked for a drink.

  Shireen smiled; told Holland and Stone about her ex-husband’s death as she mixed orange squash. “It was booze and pills,” she said. “He emptied a couple of bottles of both in some pissy little room just round the corner from here. They didn’t find him for a week because the poor sod had nobody to miss him by then.”

  “They never found a note, did they?”

  “No…”

  “You never thought it was odd that Ian killed himself?” Stone said. “Bearing in mind what he’d said about turning his life around and all that.”

  She looked at them, unblinking, and Holland thought he could see the unasked question in her confused expression. He thought it said a lot about how Shireen Collins was getting on with her life that she hadn’t really asked them why, a year after her ex-husband had died, they wanted to talk to her about him. He also thought that if Hadingham was as big, as handy, as she’d said he was, then it couldn’t have been easy for whoever had killed him to have forced those tablets down his throat. Mind you, if Hadingham had been pissed before it happened…

  Suddenly there were other children demanding drinks and attention and it was clear that half an hour had been a generous estimate.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could come back…”

  They’d taken a cab from the station. Stone asked if there was a number they could call or somewhere they could pick up a taxi. She gave them directions to a minicab office five minutes’ walk away.

  Holland started pulling on his coat. “Do you mind me asking what you did with all Ian’s things?”

  “All the stuff he’d left here had gone long before he died,” she said. “I gave the clothes and a few of his old CDs to a charity shop. A lot of it just went in the rubbish, to be honest.”

  “Were there any videotapes?” Stone asked.

  She seemed slightly thrown by the question. “We had…blank tapes for recording stuff on. We still use them, I think, for taping the football or Corrie or whatever…”

  “What about the things Ian took with him when he left?”

  “No, they gave me everything that was in the room where they found him; all his personal belongings.”

  “You don’t remember a videotape?”

  She suddenly looked embarrassed. She lowered her voice, and tried to look Stone in the eye, but couldn’t quite manage it. “D’you mean like porno?”

  Handing Stone his jacket, Holland turned to her. “It doesn’t matter, really. It’s nothing…”

  It was dry outside, but from the look of the sky it was no more than a lull, so they did their best to make the five-minute walk in much faster time.

  “She’s going to find out what he did eventually,” Stone said.

  Holland shook his head. “It’s not up to us.”

  “I don’t think she’ll be that devastated somehow…”

  “Maybe she will. On her kids’ behalf.”

  “Right. I suppose it’s going to piss on their old man’s memory somewhat. Blow the whole war-hero thing.”

&
nbsp; “Just a bit…”

  “We’re bang on about the fucking blackmail, though. That’s for definite. Hadingham as good as told her he was coming into money.”

  “Yeah. I just wish we had something more than what she says he told her.”

  “You’ve become a damn sight harder to please since you became a sergeant, do you know that?”

  “You’re always hoping there’ll be like…I don’t know, a photocopy of the blackmail demand he made to whoever topped him or something. You know, by some miracle…”

  “Her testimony’s a confirmation, though, isn’t it?”

  “It’s just circumstantial, at the end of the day. I mean, it all helps, I’m not saying it doesn’t. It’s another piece of it. It’s a big piece. But it’s way too late to get any physical evidence, any forensics or whatever, so I can’t see us actually pinning it on the bloke when we get him.”

  “What about the tape?”

  “Maybe he had it with him, which makes sense if he thinks he’s going to make some major money out of it, and the killer took it. Or he never had one, which doesn’t really pan out if we’re sticking with the blackmail idea. Or it’s lost…”

  “Or he left it at home when he moved out and the bloke his wife was shagging taped Match of the Day over it.”

  “You know, this is one of the many reasons why I’m a sergeant and you’re not.”

  “Bollocks!”

  The rain came then, suddenly; blowing into them from behind and quickly soaking the backs of their legs. Stone carried on swearing, and though they couldn’t have been too far from the minicab office, he started to run.

  Holland just kept walking and watching Stone disappear into the distance. He couldn’t be arsed to try to catch up.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Thorne tried and failed to make himself comfortable in the doorway of a tatty souvenir shop on Carnaby Street. There were half a dozen of these places knocking out multicolored Doc Martens and overpriced T-shirts on a street that hadn’t been fashionable in donkey’s years.