Bloodline

by Mark Billingham

  There was still a little water trapped inside the plastic bag, which now lay plastered to the man’s face, distorting what was left of it even further. Thorne thought it looked like an old cushion. The sodden stuffing leaking out, the material ragged and rotten.

  ‘Somewhere around thirty-six hours in the water,’ Hendricks said now. ‘Not that it would have been very pretty beforehand.’

  ‘Definitely dead before he went in, then?’

  ‘You saw his face, mate. That wasn’t the fish.’ Hendricks sat back in his chair. ‘And dead for a few hours before that, I reckon. Four or five at least.’

  ‘So he was killed somewhere else?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think the killer battered him, stuck a bag over his head and then stood around on the canal bank waving at passers-by.’

  Thorne acknowledged the inanity of his question with a nod, already thinking that their best chance of working out where he was killed would normally have been provided by forensics. But that was virtually a dead end, those thirty-six hours in the water having ruined more than just the victim’s good looks. He blinked away an image of the tattered flesh inside the plastic bag. ‘Doesn’t seem much point in a personal ID,’ he said. ‘No birthmarks or anything, and I can’t see anyone recognising him.’

  Hendricks shook his head. ‘Good job we don’t need one.’

  ‘First piece of luck we’ve had,’ Thorne said. ‘Mind you, he was only ever going to be one of three people.’

  The treatment meted out to the dead man’s face made even a check of dental records tricky to say the least and the chances of getting any fingerprint or DNA samples from a reliable source to match with his corpse were almost non-existent. So, the items found on the body itself were liable to be as close as they would come to identify Anthony Garvey’s latest victim as Simon Walsh: an old driving licence in the back pocket of his jeans; a barely decipherable letter from his aunt tucked inside the protective wallet.

  ‘The aunt’s the next of kin, right?’

  Thorne nodded.

  ‘How did she take it?’

  ‘Brigstocke got the shitty end of the stick on that one.’

  ‘I still don’t know how you lot do that,’ Hendricks said. ‘Cutting ’em up’s a doddle by comparison.’

  ‘I’d take a room full of widows and grieving parents any day.’

  Hendricks shook his head, adamant. ‘I always know how the dead ones are going to react.’

  Thorne was about to say, ‘You get used to it,’ but Hendricks knew him too well. Knew otherwise. ‘I think his aunt was pleased that Walsh still had her letter. That he thought about her, you know?’

  There was a sudden clatter, and the squeak of rubber wheels outside the door as a trolley was pushed past. It faded quickly, lost beneath the echoing conversation of the mortuary attendants; an everyday cadence.

  Hendricks turned to his computer, opened his email browser and scanned his inbox. Thorne watched him, the elaborate Celtic band tattooed around his biceps moving as he pushed the mouse around. ‘Fancy a couple of days in Gothenburg?’ Hendricks asked, peering at the screen. ‘A seminar on “image analysis in toxicological pathology” and all the pickled herring you can eat?’

  ‘Why change his method?’ Thorne asked. ‘Why did Walsh get it from the front? And why was he so violent this time?’

  Hendricks spun around on his chair. ‘That’s a “no” to the pickled herring, then, is it?’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Maybe he’s getting cocky, thinks he’s good at it.’

  ‘Nobody’s arguing.’

  ‘So, he doesn’t feel like he’s got to sneak up. I don’t know. Maybe he was in a hurry, or didn’t have time to get to know this one, like he did with Macken.’ Hendricks thought for a few seconds. ‘Maybe he’s just getting angrier.’

  ‘Why kill him somewhere else, then dump him, though?’ Thorne said. ‘He’s never worried about the body being found before.’

  ‘Nobody said he didn’t want the body found. If he killed him outdoors, he’s pretty much got to dump him outdoors, I would have thought. Where else is he going to stick him?’

  ‘Yeah . . .’

  ‘Even if he’d wanted to use the same MO as before and kill him indoors, it sounds like Walsh might not have been living anywhere Garvey could have done it.’

  ‘Yeah . . . you’re probably right,’ Thorne said. He puffed out his cheeks and let the air go slowly, forcing himself to his feet, though he would have been happy to stay in his chair for a few more hours. Walking towards the door, saying he’d phone later and asking for the report to be faxed across as soon as it was ready, he was aware that Hendricks was still looking at him. Thorne knew that expression well enough - the eyes narrowed behind the glasses - and that Hendricks was concerned about him. Him and the case, him and Louise, he couldn’t be sure which, but he was certainly not going to ask.

  In the end, Hendricks just said, ‘You’re positive about the Gothenburg trip? They do seriously good vodka in Sweden, you know. And they haven’t banned Red Bull.’

  Back at Becke House, the atmosphere in the Incident Room was strange, as though the workforce at a call centre - which today it resembled even more than usual - had been incentivised with a mystery prize that everyone suspected would not be worth winning. The discovery of a body would always light a fire under a team, even one that was becoming used to it, but the urgency seemed somehow perfunctory. The sense of futility was there if you looked hard enough - in each glance from colleague to colleague, in every stab at a keyboard and snatch of a phone from its cradle.

  As office manager, DS Samir Karim had been rallying the troops since the call out to Camden the previous afternoon. He found Thorne by the coffee machine, hunting fruitlessly for biscuits.

  ‘Headless chickens,’ Karim said.

  Thorne slammed the door of the cupboard above the fridge. ‘Not a lot else we can do.’

  As expected, the wizards at the FSS were twiddling their thumbs, any forensic evidence having been destroyed in the water. There was always the chance that a call might come in from a member of the public who had seen something, either at Camden Lock or at the murder scene - wherever that was - and there were plenty of officers out conducting a house-to-house, but save for the handful of trendy apartments a few hundred yards from where the body was found, it was not a residential area.

  ‘There was a chicken in America who lived for eighteen months without a head,’ Karim said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Straight up. Fifty-odd years ago. One of my kids showed me on the internet. “Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken”. They used to feed it with an eyedropper straight down its neck and it went round fairs and circuses and stuff. A year and a half, running around with no head.’

  ‘We haven’t got that long,’ Thorne said.

  Brigstocke appeared on the far side of the Incident Room and beckoned him over. Thorne left Karim to continue the search for biscuits and followed the DCI into his office.

  ‘Just had a lovely chat on the phone with Simon Walsh’s aunt,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Usual bullshit and diplomacy. Telling her that her nephew was the victim of a random attack and trying to convince her that she really doesn’t want to come and have a look at him just yet.’

  ‘I’ve been talking about miraculous chickens,’ Thorne said.

  Brigstocke blinked and Thorne gave a small shake of the head to let him know that it wasn’t important. Brigstocke walked round and sat behind his desk. ‘So, as soon as we can find a piece of this poor sod’s jaw with any teeth left in it, we’ll be looking at dental records to confirm the ID. Got to find his dentist first, of course, so I’m not holding my breath.’ He suddenly seemed to notice Thorne’s appearance for the first time. ‘Bloody hell, I’m the one with three kids. How come you look so knackered?’

  ‘Mental exhaustion,’ Thorne said. ‘Exercising a brain the size of mine takes it out of you, not that you would know. It’s a bit harder than helping with the geography h
omework and making sure your kids have got the right packed lunches.’

  Brigstocke laughed. ‘You wait until you’ve got one, mate.’

  Thorne studied the dents along the metal edge of the desk, the dust on the shelves of the plastic in-tray. When he looked up again, Brigstocke was pushing a pile of newspapers towards him. ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve finally got pictures,’ Brigstocke said. He pointed as Thorne flicked through the early edition of the Evening Standard. ‘Page five . . . and they’ve gone into all the nationals as well. Working on London Tonight as we speak.’

  Thorne looked at the black-and-white pictures of Graham Fowler and Andrew Dowd. Above, a headline read ‘POLICE HUNT FOR MISSING MEN’, while below were a few deliberately vague words about an ‘ongoing inquiry’ and a contact telephone number. The first picture was blurry and long out of date and the second, though it had been provided that day by Dowd’s wife, was hardly a definitive portrait. Thorne wondered if they would be of any use at all. Then again, he knew that, barring weddings, few people ever had professional photographs taken and that, if Louise were ever asked to provide a picture of him, there would be not much more than passport shots and a few holiday snaps.

  He tossed the newspaper back on to the desk. ‘Nice that the superintendent finally saw sense. Bit late for Simon Walsh, mind.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Jesmond was still against it.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘And a couple of the others who are always up his arse. Way he saw it, to run the pictures now, after Walsh has been killed, is almost an admission that we screwed up. Something people might focus on once everything’s done and dusted.’

  ‘We screwed up?’

  Brigstocke raised a hand. ‘Luckily, Johns overruled him, so now we can all relax and keep our fingers crossed.’

  ‘Is that the best we can do?’

  ‘It’s not like we’ve got leads coming out of our ears, is it? We’re no further on after the Walsh murder, and I can’t see it panning out with your mate Carol.’

  Chamberlain had called an hour earlier. Once Thorne had told her about the discovery of the latest body, she’d described her meeting with Ray Garvey’s ex-wife and told him about Malcolm Reece, the old friend she was already trying to track down. Thorne had said he would come to the hotel and catch up in person if he could find the time. He had encouraged her, as gently as he could, to work a little quicker.

  ‘Maybe you should pay me a bit more.’ Chamberlain had sounded miffed. ‘Or get me an assistant.’

  ‘We’re stretched for cash as it is,’ Thorne had said. ‘It was you or the hypnotherapist . . .’

  Brigstocke stood and walked around his desk. He gestured towards the pile of newspapers. ‘I reckon those phones are going to go mad this afternoon.’

  ‘Let’s just hope we don’t have too many nutters ringing.’

  ‘We should get a decent lunch inside us,’ Brigstocke said. ‘It might be a long day.’

  Thorne nodded. He had not eaten breakfast and needed something to soak up all the coffee he had been pouring down his throat.

  ‘With any luck, the Oak might have that lamb casserole on again.’ Brigstocke opened the door. ‘The one you snaffled the other day.’

  Thorne said that sounded good, but thought they should probably be eating something a little less solid. Something that could be taken through an eyedropper, straight down the neck.

  There had been plenty of calls that afternoon; and, despite Thorne’s worst fears, a few had sounded promising. There had been more than one sighting of Graham Fowler, two within half a mile of each other in the area between Piccadilly and Covent Garden. A woman who ran a bed and breakfast in Ambleside, a market town ten miles south of Keswick in the Lake District, claimed that a man who might have been Andrew Dowd had been staying with her for a few days earlier that week, before moving on suddenly. She seemed more interested in the as-yet-unsettled bill than anything else.

  There had been no shortage of work, the mood in the office a little more positive, but Thorne still managed to get back to Kentish Town before seven and was pleased that Louise had managed to do the same. She was brighter and more talkative than she had been all week. She told him about the latest developments in the case she was working, while he made them both poached eggs and opened the bottle of wine he’d picked up on the way home.

  They watched half an old episode of The Professionals on G.O.L.D. while they ate, then listened to The Essential George Jones - her choice - while Thorne cleared up and Louise leafed through a couple of reports for the following day. If she was still feeling fragile, she was showing no sign of it. She hummed along to ‘Why Baby Why’ and ‘White Lightning’ and seemed happy enough during ‘The Door’ - one of several George Jones numbers that Thorne himself could rarely listen to without swallowing down the lump in his throat.

  When they were getting ready for bed, she said, ‘I had a long chat with Lucy Freeman today.’

  The pregnant woman in Louise’s office. Thorne threw his dirty shirt into the laundry basket, sat on the edge of the bed to remove his trousers.

  ‘I told her I’d got a friend who’s just lost a baby.’

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  Louise shrugged; she didn’t know or it didn’t matter. She sat in front of the small mirror on the dressing-table in just knickers and a T-shirt. ‘Lucy was really . . . nice, actually.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Good that the other woman was nice. Good that Louise had the conversation and that it went well.

  ‘Your hormones get all mixed up afterwards, which is why I’ve been getting upset, moody, whatever.’

  ‘You’ve every reason to be upset.’

  ‘I’m just saying. That’s what Lucy was talking about. She’s also got a friend who lost a baby—’

  ‘One in four pregnancies, that’s what it said in your leaflet.’

  ‘And she didn’t feel right again until her due date.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Not properly, anyway. Lucy said that it only really changes once the date you were due to have the baby comes and goes. Said it was just like a switch being thrown. That’s when you can . . . move on.’

  Thorne nodded, doing the maths as he removed his underpants.

  ‘Thirty-one weeks and I’ll be right as rain.’

  Thorne heard something in her laugh; enough to know that he should go to her. ‘Come here . . .’

  She got up and turned into his arms, pressed her face into him. He could feel the tension in her, the effort to keep it together.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ she said. Her mouth moved against his chest. ‘She was only trying to help.’

  ‘She didn’t though, did she?’

  ‘Not a lot, no.’ The half laugh again, and then her face was open and moving towards Thorne’s, and by the time they were on the bed she was already pulling the T-shirt up over her head.

  ‘Things are still a bit . . . delicate downstairs,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to find other things to do.’

  Thorne grinned.

  ‘Not that,’ Louise said.

  There was nothing too soft or subtle about the things they did to please each other, and despite the emotion that had been crackling between them, it still felt closer to sex than making love.

  Like something they both needed.

  The ringing of Thorne’s mobile pulled him from a dream in which he was moving fast across the surface of very blue water. He looked at his watch in the light from the small screen: 6.12 a.m. It was Russell Brigstocke’s name on the display.

  ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘Some things are worth getting out of bed for,’ Brigstocke said. ‘I’m in such a good mood I might pop back between the sheets, start Mrs Brigstocke’s day off with a bang.’

  Thorne thought about the night before and felt himself start to stiffen. He had hoped that the guilt might have gone, but it was still there, solid and stubborn in his chest.

  ‘Let’s have
it then.’

  ‘Graham Fowler walked into Charing Cross station at eleven o’clock last night with a copy of the Standard he’d been planning to sleep on.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘It gets better,’ Brigstocke said. ‘About half an hour ago, they took a call from Andrew Dowd in the Incident Room. Looks like he finally turned on his phone and picked up our message.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Kendal,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Where the mint cake comes from. Someone’s on the way up there to get him.’

  Careful not to wake Louise, Thorne pushed back the duvet and stood naked by the side of the bed in the dark. ‘So, Jesmond and his cronies might get away with it after all.’

  ‘We all might.’

  ‘Jammy bastards.’

  Brigstocke laughed. ‘Us or them?’

  ‘I was talking about Fowler and Dowd,’ Thorne said.

  PART THREE

  A GAME OF SKILL AND STRATEGY

  AFTERWARDS

  Nina

  At the worst moments, when she feels like lashing out, she knows that there’s only one man really responsible for what happened, but it’s hard not to blame those two extras from The Bill who had been sitting in the car outside. Or that tosser Thorne and his cronies, the ones who’d stuck it there twenty-four hours a day, since the day Debbie and Jason had moved in.

  Working from home the way she does, the way she did, a police car on your doorstep is hardly good for business, after all.

  She’d always preferred to do business from her own place, and most of the girls she knew felt the same. She felt safer inside her own four walls and in control. But she could hardly expect any of her regulars to come strolling in past a pair of boys in blue, could she, and the money wasn’t going to earn itself. So she’d had to make a few more visits to crappy hotels and dodgy flats. A few more hand-jobs in cars, parked up behind the football ground. She’d had to take a few more risks.