Good as Dead

by Mark Billingham

  Holland nodded. ‘Easy enough to give someone an overdose if they’ve got no tolerance.’

  ‘Right.’ Thorne stood up and they began walking towards the flat. On the other side of the road a few more mobile phones were raised to begin shooting stills and video. ‘Having said all that, I mean … Slayer?’

  ‘That’s a decent motive in itself,’ Holland said.

  ‘Could easily have been a mercy killing.’

  There were more pictures being taken in the now crowded room where Allen’s body had been discovered, though the cameras were a little more sophisticated and, with the exception of the jury at any resulting court case, the films and photos were not intended for public consumption. The police cameramen moved easily around the crime scene examiners, weaving between assorted groupings of forensic scientists and fingerprint officers, each team intimately acquainted with the working practices of the others as they calmly went about their tasks.

  Bagging, tagging, scraping.

  Thorne could never watch any of them work without being reminded of how clumsy his own efforts seemed by comparison. These were the men and women who did the real detection, while he blundered around hoping to get lucky and banging his head into a succession of brick walls. At its best, there was a kind of … grace to what they did, though this was not to say that their manner was always delicate, or necessarily deferential to the corpse around which they crouched and crept.

  ‘Think anyone would notice if that hi-fi went walkabout?’

  ‘Well, I’ll keep schtum if I can have the wide-screen.’

  ‘Seriously though, you seen some of the DVDs he had?’

  ‘Yeah, he was a bit of a torture buff, clearly.’

  ‘Gang rape and chainsaws and all that.’

  ‘Did you know that nine out of ten people enjoy gang rape?’

  Allen was lying on his side in front of the sofa. His eyes were half closed and protruding. His lips were blue. The side of his face that lay against the floor was swollen and purplish and there was a light coating of froth around his mouth.

  ‘The other morning,’ Holland said, ‘when I said this case sounded like something different.’ He nodded down towards the body. ‘I suppose I meant that there wouldn’t be any of this.’

  Thorne looked at Peter Allen’s pale fingers, clawed against the tatty carpet, and remembered what had been said on the phone the night before.

  Another box ticked.

  It was not the first time he had thought about Louise that morning.

  It had seemed somewhat incongruous, barrelling through the rush-hour traffic towards Hackney and listening to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Roaring along bus lanes with the blue light flashing on the roof and jumping lights with his hand pressed to the horn, while those voices – one frail, one pure – snaked so perfectly around one another. Emmylou had always maintained that she and Parsons had never been lovers, but Thorne still found it hard to believe. You could hear it in the way they sang to each other, for each other.

  He listened, and asked himself why he had really called Louise.

  Had some part of him hoped that she would tell him how unhappy and lonely she was, what a mistake they had made? How would he have felt if she had actually said any of those things?

  He had wanted to talk to someone who knew him, he could admit that much, however uncomfortable it might turn out to be. He had wanted to hear her voice. Yes, and perhaps he had needed to pick at the scab just a little. To open it up. All those changes that had been decided upon in the wake of the split were exciting in theory … fresh challenges, change of outlook, all that, but wasn’t it possible that you could change too much and move on too quickly?

  He would be stupid if he wasn’t scared.

  No time to dwell on it now, thank God.

  Another box …

  Thorne had put his foot down and pushed on across the roundabout at Old Street, losing himself in the gorgeous noise of Gram and Emmylou, and the tightness in his chest was gone by the time he saw Holland raising a hand to him outside the crime scene.

  Hemmings, the on-call pathologist, was a humourless piece of work Thorne had run into a time or two before. As he walked across to join Thorne and Holland, the look on his doughy face made it clear that having already conducted his initial examination of the body, he was not best pleased at being asked to wait until Thorne arrived.

  ‘He’s been dead at least eight hours. No more than twelve.’

  ‘No time for hello?’

  ‘I was told you were in a hurry.’

  Thorne thought he could probably spare the few seconds it would take to tell Hemmings where to go and what to do to himself when he got there. He decided against it. ‘Definitely an overdose?’

  ‘Well, clearly I can’t say if there was any underlying condition that precipitated it, but on the face of it … probably. There are no track marks to suggest he’d done it before.’

  ‘So, not self-inflicted?’

  ‘Not for me to say, but presuming he was right-handed, it’s a little odd that he injected himself in his right arm. Then again, you’re the detective.’ The way he said the word, and the smile before he turned away, made it clear the pathologist thought much the same about what the likes of Thorne did as Thorne himself.

  Blundering, clumsy …

  ‘Arsehole,’ Holland muttered.

  ‘That’s Dr Arsehole to you,’ Thorne said. ‘They like you to remember that.’ They walked across to where a fingerprint officer was working at the hi-fi, passing a magnetic wand across the surface, then applying powder with a fibreglass brush as delicately as if he were restoring an Old Master. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Plenty,’ the officer said. ‘But I’m guessing they all belong to the victim.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there are whole areas that have no prints at all, lots of things that have obviously been wiped clean. Even the empty beer cans in the bin.’ He nodded across towards the body. ‘And the syringe, and as far as I know not many people can jack up without touching that.’ He smiled. ‘I mean, I don’t want to tell you your job … ’

  ‘I wish more people would,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Whoever did it wasn’t as clever as he thought though.’ The officer laid down his brush and took a step across to a plastic box containing evidence that had already been earmarked for further examination. He reached inside and held up a plastic bag containing a bottle of cleaning spray. ‘He didn’t think to wipe this down after he’d used it.’

  ‘D’oh!’ Holland said.

  ‘It gets even better.’ The crime scene forensic manager, who had clearly been listening in, walked across and removed a second bag with one of the beer cans inside. ‘No prints,’ she said, ‘but I’ll bet we can still get DNA from it.’

  Thorne looked at the two technicians, each proudly holding up their evidence bags like children waiting to be praised. ‘Which is going to be quicker?’ he asked.

  They looked at one another.

  Thorne knew that under normal circumstances the prints would probably come back faster than the DNA, but he also knew that there were a good many variables and that turnaround times for both could be significantly improved if the job was deemed urgent enough. If the samples were hand-delivered to the Forensic Science Service labs at Lambeth and prioritised. A matter of hours as opposed to days.

  The forensic manager shrugged. ‘Probably not a lot in it.’

  ‘What about ADAPT?’ Holland asked. He reddened slightly as everyone turned their attention to him. ‘Accelerated DNA Profiling Technology. They reckon they can get a profile in under an hour now.’

  ‘Where did you get that from?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘You know those memos and Job newsletters that you throw away every day? Some of us actually read them.’ Holland looked to the forensic manager. ‘DNA in a box, right?’

  She nodded, then turned to Thorne, a hand raised. ‘Under an hour is a bit of an exaggeration and anyway it’s not cut and dried. It’s eno
ugh to make an arrest on, but the level of identification is not strictly evidential. So, even if I got permission to run it, nothing I come up with would be admissible in court.’

  ‘I’ll worry about that later,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘See what you can do.’

  The fingerprint officer took half a step forward. ‘I reckon I can get the prints turned around in a few hours,’ he said. ‘If it’s really important.’

  Thorne knew that normally the forensic manager would be responsible for looking after both print and DNA evidence. For getting the samples to the lab then transferring the information to the relevant offender databases at Scotland Yard to see if there was a match. On this occasion though, he guessed that keeping them separate and encouraging a degree of competition would get him a result the quickest.

  ‘There’s a bottle of decent Scotch in it, OK?’ Thorne looked to the fingerprint officer, who nodded. He turned to the forensic manager.

  ‘Make it a case of Merlot and you’re on,’ she said.

  ‘You get back to me before he does, I’ll cook you dinner and drink it with you.’ Thorne looked back to the fingerprint officer. ‘That offer doesn’t apply to you, obviously.’

  As he walked towards the front door, Thorne barked instructions at Holland who was a step or two behind. ‘I want everything done on the hurry-up,’ he said. ‘House-to-house, the lot.’

  ‘I’ll sort it.’

  ‘And talk to the coroner. I want this PM done straight away, so put the wind up him a bit. Tell him there’s a police officer’s life at stake.’ He began to strip off the paper suit. ‘And I want Hendricks to do it.’

  Holland watched him. ‘So what do you think? If Allen was responsible for putting Amin on to the hospital wing … ’

  ‘He was,’ Thorne said. ‘Someone paid Allen to do it, and now they’ve paid someone else to make sure he never tells us who.’ He leaned against the front door and bent to remove the bootees. ‘Whoever killed Amin wanted him in that hospital, because that was the only place they could really make it look like suicide. Whoever did it knows the prison. Knows it’s not very easy to walk into someone’s cell in the middle of the night and string them up. They organised the whole thing, and now we’ve started sniffing around they’re ordering a clean-up operation.’

  ‘If we can find him, it sounds like whoever killed Allen is our best bet.’

  ‘One of them,’ Thorne said.

  He kicked off the suit, took out his mobile and walked towards the BMW, dialling as he went.

  The call went straight to an answering machine.

  ‘Rahim, it’s Tom Thorne. Listen, I know you’re already frightened, but I thought you should know that whoever was responsible for Amin’s death has just had somebody else killed. If that scares you even more, then good. I’m sorry, but I don’t really have time to care. Now, is there something you want to tell me?’

  FORTY-TWO

  Paul had always tanned more easily than she did on holiday. Not that they’d taken too many holidays together, a couple of weeks in Greece and two more at a falling-down villa in Majorca. But when they had, he was always the jammy so-and-so who ended up nut-brown, while more often than not she would look as though they’d been away to Iceland or somewhere, with shoulders and thighs the colour of a smacked arse unless she lathered on a fresh layer of Factor 30 every half an hour.

  Paul would wind her up and she would get increasingly annoyed.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ she would say on the last day. ‘You look like you live here and I look like I’ve just got off the sodding plane.’

  He would say something about wrinkles or not getting skin cancer, but it didn’t help. Then she would look at him lying on the bed and grinning at her, unshaven and shirtless and more tanned than a hard-arsed London copper had any right to be, and it was impossible to stay angry for very long.

  ‘I feel like one of those desperate women who’s come on holiday on her own and found some local fisherman to shag her … ’

  Alfie had thankfully inherited the tanning gene, and now, as the three of them walked along the beach, Helen cast a sideways glance at father and son, the same long legs and skinny chests, bronzed and beautiful in multi-coloured shorts, and for once the sun felt good on her face.

  The sea was that colour you only ever see in the brochures.

  Someone was cooking on the beach just up ahead, fresh fish for her and steak for Alfie and Paul.

  They were all laughing …

  Helen opened her eyes.

  Akhtar turned from the sink where he was rinsing out the mugs they had drunk tea from half an hour before. ‘I did not mean to wake you.’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep,’ Helen said.

  Akhtar nodded and wiped his hands on a grubby-looking tea towel. ‘Yes, of course.’ He turned and picked up the box of tissues from the desk, stepped across and held it out towards her.

  Helen had not realised she was crying. She reached out to take a couple of the tissues and nodded her thanks. Her fingers brushed his wrist and his face was no more than two feet from her own.

  It had been a while since he had picked up the gun.

  Backing away from her, he nodded around the storeroom. ‘It is definitely a lot more pleasant to spend time in your mind than it is in here,’ he said. ‘I have been doing the same thing myself.’

  ‘What do you think about?’ She needed to ask before he did.

  ‘Just remembering things, that’s all. Growing up, you know?’

  ‘What part of India are you from?’

  He sat down at the desk. ‘Actually, I grew up in Aden. South Yemen.’

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘My family moved there from Bombay in the twenties and we did not go back to India until after the British left Yemen in 1967. Things became difficult. There was some trouble over independence, you understand?’

  Helen knew nothing whatsoever about it, but nodded anyway.

  ‘My father died at around the same time, so the whole family moved back to Bombay. He had his own business, you know? Importing rice and sugar from Australia.’ He nodded to himself, remembering. ‘Dropped dead at forty-two.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Just got up from the chair and fell on his face. So, we went home … everyone in the family still thought of Bombay as home … and two years later I came to the UK. When I was nineteen.’

  ‘Why did you come?’

  ‘To make money,’ he said, as though it were obvious. ‘With my father gone, the family was relying on me and I could not make enough in Bombay, simple as that. We sold some of the furniture in my mother’s house to pay for the ticket and that was it.’ He smiled again. ‘I went to Finchley! Straight from Heathrow on the train, because that was what everybody told me. Go to Finchley, because there are plenty of Indians there and somebody will help you. It sounds funny, I know, but they were right. I found a guesthouse on the first day and I managed to get myself some small jobs, washing cars and cleaning in a restaurant and what have you. And I remember being shocked … really shocked to see British people working, doing the same things I was. Because back at home, we were the ones that did all the work.

  ‘It was not easy to find anything better, because back then, in the early seventies, it was not always easy for an Indian to be accepted. There was still a lot of … tension. Rivers of blood and all that carry-on. But eventually I was lucky and I got a good job in a bank on the Euston Road. Eight pounds a week, that was. Eight pounds a week and I was still sending money home, because there were fifteen or sixteen people relying on me back in Bombay. My mother and everyone else over there waiting for the money to arrive every month.’ He waved a hand. ‘But it was fine, you know? That was the reason I had come, after all.’ He paused for a few seconds. Shook his head. ‘I was at that bank for eighteen years altogether, though I should say the wages did go up a little, and after a while the family started coming across in dribs and drabs. My mother, my sisters, my uncles. I got them s
ettled over here and got a small loan for a flat. A very small loan for a very small flat!

  ‘Then, I met Nadira.’

  Helen saw his face change, a wash of pleasure. ‘How did you meet?’

  ‘It was through someone at the bank. Someone senior to me. She was from a very well-off family, very respectable, so of course her father wanted to make absolutely sure I was suitable. He came to see my flat and spoke to people at the bank. It was not arranged, but it was approved.

  ‘Thank heavens …

  ‘I stayed on at the bank for another year or so, but a cousin of mine had a shop in Bristol and after I had been to stay with him, Nadira and I decided that we would try to do the same. It was eighty thousand pounds plus the stock to get the shop and we could not get a loan, so we remortgaged our house. It was a big risk, but we had to take it.’ He pressed a hand to his chest. ‘I had to take it, if you want the truth. I wanted my own business, the same as my father. We already had my eldest son and daughter by then and Nadira was pregnant with Amin.’ He swallowed, tried again. ‘With Amin … ’

  ‘It can’t have been easy,’ Helen said.

  ‘Not easy, no.’

  ‘With a young family.’

  ‘Nadira would have to bring the children in of course and I remember very clearly that she was working in the shop until the very last day of her pregnancy. Sitting behind that counter, the size of a house! Nowadays, she helps out if I need to go to the cash-and-carry, but most of the time it’s just me and to be honest, that suits me fine. I have plenty of time to read and listen to the radio, or just to think about things, you know? Perhaps too much time, lately.’

  ‘Don’t you ever take a holiday or anything? I mean, you never seem to be closed.’

  Akhtar shook his head. ‘I get up at a quarter to four and get here an hour after that. I sort out the newspapers, do the paper round then get back to open the shop ready for the morning rush. I stay open until half-past six Monday to Friday, five o’clock on Saturdays, two o’clock on Sundays. No holidays.’