Lifeless tt-5

by Mark Billingham

  “What did Brigstocke say?” Holland asked. He had a pretty good idea, of course, and wondered if he was overstepping the mark by asking. But he guessed correctly that Thorne had long since forgotten, or stopped caring, where such marks were.

  “He was ‘officially’ telling me that the undercover operation was to be wound down. That I should go home and have a bath…”

  Thorne was obviously making light of it, but Holland wasn’t sure whether to smile or not. “When?”

  “I’ll stay out another night, I think.”

  “Okay…”

  “There’s a few people I need to say good-bye to.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then a decent curry, a good night’s sleep, probably a very pissed-off cat…”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Holland said.

  Thorne smiled. “I know it isn’t.”

  Brigstocke had called the evening before, when the dust kicked up by Mackillop’s murder had begun to settle. He’d made it clear that he was brooking no argument as far as pulling Thorne off the street was concerned, so Thorne didn’t waste any time by initiating one. Eales had gone. There would be no more killings. There was no longer any point. When it came to exactly what Thorne would be returning to, Brigstocke was a little less dogmatic. It may just have been that the decision had yet to be taken. But it was equally likely that Brigstocke had simply fought shy of delivering one blow on top of another.

  As things stood, if it was to be a continuance of his gardening leave, Thorne would give in to it without much of a fuss. The thought of going back to the team, back to how things had been before, unnerved him. He felt as though he’d lost his way during some long-distance endurance event; as if he were staggering, miles off the pace, in the wrong direction. He couldn’t do anything else until he’d completed the course, however laughable his finishing time was.

  He knew he couldn’t really compete, but he needed to cross the line…

  “ ‘I don’t know’ is the simple answer,” Thorne said. “I don’t know what they want. I don’t really know what I want.”

  Holland filled the pause that followed by reaching for his coat. “Do you think Eales spoke to whoever’s paying him before he left? Warned him?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think he had a great deal to warn him about.” Thorne gestured toward the papers on the desk. “There’s nothing there that incriminates anybody. I think Eales knows how to keep his mouth shut. How to keep secrets.”

  “Probably a good idea. Considering how many people died because one greedy fucker couldn’t.”

  Thorne eased his chair round slowly, one way and then the other. “We set so much store in trying to get hold of Eales, thinking that he’d tell us the name of the man behind the camera. I’m not actually sure it would have done us any good.”

  “You don’t think he’d have given him up?”

  “Eales is still a soldier,” Thorne said. “Name, rank, and serial number, right?”

  Holland picked up his case and crossed to the door. “Are you sticking around here for a bit? I need to get back…”

  Thorne grunted; he didn’t look like he was ready to go anywhere.

  Holland recalled walking through the cafe on his way up and seeing the addict Thorne had been spending so much time with. The boy had been sitting with his girlfriend, whose name Holland had never learned. Holland thought about what Thorne had said earlier; wondered how difficult he might find it to say some of those good-byes. “Your mate Spike’s downstairs…”

  Thorne nodded, like he already knew. “We’re supposed to be playing pool.”

  “We can have a game sometime if you want,” Holland said. He hovered at the doorway. “Later in the week, maybe. That pub round the corner from your place has got a table, hasn’t it?”

  “I’ll give you a call, Dave,” Thorne said. “When I’ve got myself sorted.”

  He sat for a few minutes after Holland had left and let his mind drift. Sadly, however hard he tried, it wouldn’t drift quite far enough.

  For want of anything else to do, he reached for the documents scattered across the desk and began to thumb through them. It always came down to paper in the end. Filed and boxed up in the General Registry. And it felt as though this case was heading that way pretty bloody quickly; not cold exactly, but as good as. The case, such as it was, would be handed over to the Homicide Task Force, or perhaps the brand-new, FBI-style Serious and Organised Crime Association. These were the proactive units responsible for tracking down and charging prime suspects who had gone missing. Thorne felt fairly sure that Eales was already abroad; that he would not make himself easy to find. The world was becoming smaller all the time, but it was still plenty big enough…

  He stared down at the bank statements; at the payments into each one, representing a man Ryan Eales had killed. He looked at the amounts and was unable to stop a part of his brain making the perverse calculations: fifteen hundred pounds per kick delivered; something like that…

  He thought back to the case he’d been working on the previous spring: to the hunt for another man who’d chosen murder as his profession; bookended by two fires, twenty years apart. A young girl dead, and an old man. Now here was Thorne, sitting in the old man’s coat and gnawing at the decisions he’d taken. At the series of judgments, considered and otherwise; from one burning to another.

  He pulled the Gulf War transcript to the front and glanced down at it. The printed dialogue and descriptions were horribly effective prompts. His mind called up the associated images from the videotape in an instant as he read: the groupings of the men, and the rain striking the sand like black candle wax, and luminous horror like a cat’s eye in the darkness.

  A soldier waving papers taken from the Iraqi prisoners. No sign of what was to come. “We are keeping these.” (LOUDER) “Do you understand?”

  While decisions-including that which would determine his own future-were being made, Thorne wondered if the Met had taken one to hand the tape over to the army. He wondered, too, in spite of all the bickering between the Met and the RMP that would surely follow, if the army themselves would be very surprised. Had Eales and his fellow crewmen effectively covered their tracks in 1991?

  “Where D’you Get It?”

  “Say Again?”

  (Louder) “Where D’you Get It?”

  “This?” (Soldier Holds Up Bacon Strips) “I Brought It With Me.”

  Or was that commendation in the war diary little more than an exercise in sweeping shit under the carpet?

  “That Reminds Me, I Could Kill A Fry-up…”

  “That Stuff Fucking Stinks, Ian…”

  Thorne read the next line…

  And stared, breathless, at the page. At five words, spoken out of vision. A phrase that told him everything.

  He knew who the man behind the camera was.

  Thorne shut his eyes and pressed himself back in the chair, thrown by the excitement and the terror of being suddenly and completely without doubt. It was a sensation he’d almost forgotten: the sickness and the surge of knowing.

  Then, quick and painful as a low punch, Thorne knew something else: that the man who had paid Ryan Eales to commit murder would walk away from it as surely as Eales himself had so far managed to do. Certain as he was of the man’s identity, and of what he had done, Thorne knew that there was no way on God’s earth that he could prove it.

  Five minutes, perhaps ten, passed as Thorne weighed it up.

  He stared into the thought, into the white-hot heart of it, until at last he began to make a few decisions. Each would be dependent on the decisions of others, but as Thorne stood and gathered his things together he felt as energized as he had in a long while. He might yet fail to cross it, but now at least he had a bloody good idea where the finishing line was.

  He came out of the office and descended quickly toward the lower-ground floor. If Spike was still there, the two of them could chat while they played pool. They would have plenty to talk about.

/>   Thorne had decided that if he was going to get off the streets, he needed to come clean… in every possible sense. He was going to tell Spike everything.

  THIRTY-SIX

  He heard the man coming long before he saw him. The footsteps sounded hesitant; he could recog nize the tread of someone unfamiliar within the network of tunnels from a mile away. He’d heard such echoes many times before: the click – clack of heels slowing, then speeding up again as confidence comes and goes; the scrape of a leather sole against the concrete as the wearer turns to get their bearings, or decides in which direction to proceed. Or whether to proceed at all…

  When he finally saw the man rounding the corner,

  Spike stood. He leaned back against the wall and waited; tried to look unconcerned as the distance between the two of them shortened, as the man moved toward him through puddles of water and deeper pools of shadow.

  “Am I in the right place?” the man said. Still twenty feet or more away.

  The fear would have killed any strength in his voice anyway, but with the sound moving effortlessly, as it did through the air underground, Spike had no need to speak much above a whisper. “Depends,” he said, “on if you’ve got shitloads of cash in one of those pockets…”

  When the man stopped, it was three or four arms’ lengths away from Spike. He looked around quickly. Took in his immediate surroundings. “This is nice,” he said.

  Spike said nothing.

  The man nodded toward the large cardboard box behind, and to Spike’s right, against the wall. “That where you sleep?”

  “It’s a lot better than some places,” Spike said. The corners of the man’s mouth turned up, but it could hardly have been called a smile. “Tell me how you got the tape.” It seemed that the small talk was at an end.

  “I told you when I called…”

  “You told me fuck-all,” the man said. “You talked a lot of crap and I’ve had a few days to think about it since then.”

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you want it? That’s fine with me, like. Only you seemed keen enough on the phone…”

  “Tell me.”

  It was never really silent down in the subways.

  There was always the muffled roar of the traffic overhead, the buzz of the strip lights, the eerie beat of dripping water. These were the only sounds for several seconds.

  Spike rubbed his hands across his face. Through his hair. “What d’you want me to say?” His voice was hoarse; cracked with nerves and desire. “You want me to tell you I’m a fucked-up junkie? Do anything to score? Desperate enough for money to shit on a mate?”

  “Now you’re starting to persuade me,” the man said.

  “Thorne told me he was a copper, like. That he’d been working undercover because of these murders.

  He told me about the case, about why everyone had been killed.”

  The man didn’t blink.

  “He talked about everything,” Spike said. “What happened all them years ago in the fucking desert.

  He told me who you were and he told me about the tape.”

  “Why?”

  Spike shrugged. “Fuck knows. Because it was his last night, I suppose, and the stupid bastard thought it didn’t matter. He said that the bloke who did the actual killing had legged it and there wasn’t anything else anyone could do…”

  The man thrust his hands into the pocket of a long leather coat and pressed his arms close to his body. It was getting very cold in the early hours. “So, you just sat there, took all that in, and saw an easy way to make a few quid?”

  “More than a few, mate…”

  “Don’t try to be clever.” It was a simple directive.

  Spoken quietly, with the cold confidence that comes from being used to having such instructions followed.

  “Look… I was fucked off with him,” Spike said.

  “For bullshitting me all that time. For making me and my girlfriend and all the rest of us look like idiots. It was a good way to get my own back.” The man looked unconvinced. “It was a good way to make some money.”

  “Yeah, all right. ’Course it was. Obviously, after what he told me, I knew that the tape was valuable.

  That you’d probably pay a fair bit to get it back.

  When he said he had the tape on him, I started to think about it, you know? I was thinking about a shedload of smack and that. And a flat for me and my girlfriend.” Spike grinned, bounced a fist against his leg, as he thought about those things again. “She wants us to get a place together, you know?” “You just took it?”

  “When he was asleep, I grabbed his stuff and fucked off. I know he’s looking for me, but I’m pretty good at keeping out of people’s way, you know?” “He said this was the only copy?”

  Spike widened his eyes. “Thorne’s fucking mental.

  I told you. I reckon being on the street has made him go funny, made him see things a bit twisted, like. He more or less nicked it, from what he was saying. Got some other copper he knew to hand it over to him on the quiet.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Don’t ask me. He was ranting about showing it to somebody. About using it for something.” The man seemed to think about this.

  “Listen,” Spike said. “I don’t really want to know about any of it, all right? Like you said, I’m just doing this for the money.”

  “Now, that I do understand,” the man said. “It’s what started all this in the first place.”

  Spike lifted a sleeve and rubbed the sweat away.

  “Starts everything, mate. Only some of us need it a bit more than others…”

  The man peered at Spike with curiosity and disgust, as though the wreckage of an accident had been taken away and he was staring at a bloodstain on the road. “My good fortune in this case,” he said.

  Spike reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out a plastic carrier bag, and wrapped it around whatever was inside. “Tape’s in here,” he said.

  The man made no move to take it. “You know that if you’re fucking me about, I’ll find you,” he said. “However good you think you are at keeping out of people’s way. I’ll pay someone to find you.” “Thorne told me what’s on here.” Spike shook the package. The tape rattled inside. “I haven’t watched it, but I know what you did. I know what happened back then, and what happened later on with cars and tablets and with army boots, so I know what you’re capable of.” He looked across at the man and held his stare. “I’m a junkie, and a liar, and a fuck ing thief. But I’m not stupid…”

  The man seemed impressed by this. When his hand came out of his pocket it was holding a bulging, brown A3 envelope.

  “How do we do this, then?” Spike held out the plastic bag at arm’s length. It shook in his hand. He dropped the arm and took a breath; tried to sound casual. “You want me to chuck it over or what?” The man stepped forward suddenly, and kept coming as Spike moved backward away from him. When

  Spike was against the wall, the man gently lifted the package from his hand. Six inches taller than Spike, he looked down and pressed the envelope against the boy’s chest. “Quite a bit in here,” he said. “Quite a lot of shit to put in your arm…”

  The man’s eyes swiveled in an instant to the cardboard box and at the same moment he took a step back. At the sudden noise; at the movement… A week before, back at the Lift, when they’d been playing pool and talking about how it might work, this had been the moment that had caused Spike to laugh out loud. Back before Thorne had gone to

  Brigstocke or Brigstocke to Jesmond. Before Jesmond had gone higher to wherever the buck stopped. This had been what they’d called the “rat” moment.

  “He’ll probably think it’s a rat,” Spike had said.

  “A fucking big one, like. He’ll probably shit himself…”

  The man’s reaction when Thorne appeared from inside the box-sitting and then standing up in one smooth movement-was less dramatic than Spike had predicted, but Thorne could certainly see that he�
�d sprung a powerful surprise. “I’m guessing those football tickets are out of the question now,” he said.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Alan Ward nudged his glasses, then reached to grab a handful of hair at the back of his head, as if that might be the only way to stop himself shaking it. He’d carried on moving backward as the sides and lid of the box had burst outward and upward, and now he stared at Thorne and Spike across the eight or so feet that separated one wall of the tunnel from the other.

  Thorne glanced to his left. “All right?”

  Spike nodded, without taking his eyes off Ward. “This is… interesting,” Ward said, finally. He looked both ways along the length of the tunnel. “No point in going anywhere,” Thorne said. “Because…?”

  “Because there are police officers at every exit. Why did you think it was so quiet down here tonight?” “Stupid bastard,” Spike said.

  The slow shake of Ward’s head became a nod of acceptance, and as Thorne watched, an excitement of sorts came into the journalist’s eyes. Though he was clearly anxious-the muscles in his face and neck singing with it-there was also a calmness in his voice and in his manner, as though he were somehow relaxed by the tension.

  He glared at Spike. “That little fucker wired up, is he?”

  Spike just smiled.

  “Or have you got something set up in the box?” Thorne nodded up at the roof of the tunnel, toward one of the small, metal PA speakers that was now more or less directly above Ward’s head. “The mike’s in there,” he said. “And the camera. Seemed appropriate to get it all on film as well.”

  “You haven’t got anything.”

  “You know we’ve got plenty…”

  Ward cocked his head as if he were weighing it up.

  Then he casually dropped the package he was carrying to the ground and began to stamp on it. The noise, as the tape’s plastic housing first cracked and then shattered, echoed back along the tunnel from left and right.