Good as Dead tt-10

by Mark Billingham

‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘A… situation has developed very suddenly, which means that we’re looking at Amin’s death again.’ Thorne let that hang for a second or two. ‘That I am. Starting pretty much from scratch, I’m afraid.’

  McCarthy sat back, thinking, then raised his arms. ‘Right, well I’m still none the wiser, but if there’s anything I can do… ’

  Thorne stood up. ‘A guided tour would be very helpful,’ he said.

  McCarthy said that would not be a problem, so Thorne walked out on to the ward, waiting by the door for a few moments while the doctor grabbed his jacket.

  Waiting, and thinking that for once he knew what might be causing that tickle in the soft hairs at the back of his neck; that something McCarthy had told him would need looking at more closely.

  ‘All set?’ McCarthy said, closing the door to his office behind him.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  Thinking that six o’clock in the morning was a very strange time to kill yourself.

  Gavin Slater did not seem inclined to let Holland and Kitson into his house. He had glowered at their warrant cards and drawn the front door a little closer towards him. From inside came the sounds of a television at high volume and somewhere upstairs a woman was shouting, raising her voice above the barking of a dog.

  Holland and Kitson were not overly keen on going inside themselves.

  ‘You may or may not know that Amin Akhtar died two months ago,’ Holland said.

  Slater blinked, then smiled. ‘I didn’t, but thanks. Not too often you lot knock on my door with good news.’

  ‘We just need to ask you a few questions.’

  Slater laughed. ‘Right, like where I was when it happened? Was I breaking into whatever prison the little shitbag ended up in, something like that?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Kitson said.

  ‘So what happened?’ Slater sniffed. ‘Somebody take a knife to him or what?’

  ‘We’re not at liberty to reveal the circumstances-’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’ Slater began to pick away at a patch of paint that was peeling from his front door. ‘Just let me know when you’ve got a name, so I can send him a box of chocolates or something.’

  ‘Maybe you can help us with that,’ Holland said.

  Slater laughed again. Inside, the woman was screaming at the dog to shut up.

  Kitson brushed away a sliver of white paint that had blown on to her jacket. ‘So you’re not exactly heartbroken that Amin is dead then?’

  Slater turned and studied her for a few moments. ‘The Met really is taking on the brightest and the best, isn’t it?’ He looked away and up towards the main road where heavy traffic was pouring east towards the Angel and west towards King’s Cross. A few streets from where, just over a year before, his eldest son had been fatally stabbed with his own knife by Amin Akhtar.

  ‘You still in touch with either of the boys who were involved in the incident with Lee?’ Kitson asked.

  ‘The “incident”?’

  ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Not seen them since Lee’s funeral.’

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘They helped to carry his coffin, them and a few of Lee’s other mates.’ Slater narrowed his eyes at Kitson. ‘You might have known that, if any of your lot had actually bothered to come. Don’t you normally do that, show up to pay your respects when a victim of violent crime is buried? Or does it depend on what colour they are?’

  ‘It depends on how you define “victim”,’ Kitson said.

  Slater breathed in deep, then smacked his palms together hard to get rid of the dried paint. ‘Well, thanks again for dropping by to cheer me up. If I think of anything that might help, I’ll be sure and keep it to myself.’ He turned away and walked back inside. Said, ‘Now piss off,’ before slamming the door shut.

  Holland and Kitson walked back towards their car.

  ‘He was lying,’ Kitson said. ‘About not seeing those other two.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean anything.’ Holland said. ‘Careful,’ and stepped around a smear of dog shit. ‘It’s the default position with rubbish like him, lying to coppers.’

  Kitson reached into her bag for the keys. Pressed the remote to unlock the car.

  ‘I still don’t know what he wants us to do,’ Holland said. ‘What he thinks we can do.’ He saw the questioning look from Kitson. ‘Thorne.’ They climbed into the car and Kitson started the engine. ‘I mean, we’ve got no good reason to think anyone killed Amin.’

  They sat there for a few moments. They could still hear Slater’s dog barking from the other end of the street. Holland could see that Kitson clearly found something funny.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t seem like five minutes since you were all fresh-faced and floppy-haired and thought the sun shone out of Tom Thorne’s arse. You’d have jumped off a cliff if he’d told you to.’

  Holland said, ‘Yeah, well,’ and ran a hand through blond hair that was somewhat shorter these days. Nobody’s fresh-faced anything.

  ‘Then you found out he was fallible,’ Kitson said. ‘Like everyone else.’

  Holland looked at her, thinking that he was not the only one who had changed. That she had… softened, while, for whatever reason, he had moved the other way. Thinking: yes, if fallible means being everyone’s sure thing for youngest female commander in the Met, until you sleep with a senior officer and screw up your marriage and have to start all over again. ‘Like everyone else,’ he said.

  Kitson angled the rear-view mirror down to check her reflection. She pursed her lips and opened her eyes wide. ‘We have addresses for the other two?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, for all the good it’s going to do us.’

  ‘You got anything else on?’

  ‘I’m just saying… ’

  Kitson readjusted the mirror then looked back towards Gavin Slater’s house. ‘His youngest’s inside, isn’t he?’

  Holland nodded. Following in the criminal footsteps of both his father and elder brother, Wayne Slater was serving four months in a YOI near Manchester for breaking and entering.

  ‘So there might be something useful there, right? Someone in that YOI knows someone in Barndale, you know how it works.’ Kitson moved out into the traffic and turned towards the main road. ‘It’s not beyond the realms of possibility, is it?’

  Holland shrugged, said, ‘I suppose not.’

  Thinking that the only thing they could usefully do would be to turn the car round, pick up that piece of dog shit he had almost stepped in and pop it through Gavin Slater’s letterbox.

  ELEVEN

  Prisons smelled bad enough, but hospitals were a lot worse. Blood and bandages or maybe just the stink of the stuff they used to sterilise everything, but whatever the source, it always triggered bad memories and made Thorne uncomfortable. Oddly, he was far more at home in a mortuary, less affected by the stench of the bone-saw at work and the freshly harvested organs than he was by bedpans and rotting fruit.

  Perhaps it was because the only people suffering in a mortuary were the ones throwing up over their shoes.

  From McCarthy’s office near the main doors, they walked past the prison hospital officers and nurses’ station, an examination room, a surgery and a large storage cupboard that had been converted into a small tea room. The dispensary was at the far end, opposite another set of doors.

  Thorne stopped and searched for the CCTV camera Dawes had mentioned. Unable to see one, he asked McCarthy where it was.

  ‘There was one, yes. We’d had a few thefts from the DDA cupboard.’

  ‘DDA?’

  ‘Dangerous Drugs Act. Morphine, methadone, what have you.’

  ‘And that camera was moved there from somewhere else just before Amin died, yes?’

  McCarthy thought about it. ‘That’s right… a couple of months ago, somewhere around there.’ He sighed, exasperated. ‘And now it’s been moved again.’

  ‘Because?’
>
  ‘Because some bright spark suggested we might be better off putting the camera inside the dispensary. That way we might see the culprit coming in. From the front.’ He smacked the side of his head. ‘Clever, eh?’

  ‘Caught anybody?’

  ‘Not as yet,’ McCarthy said.

  ‘So where are the monitors?’

  ‘In the nurses’ station.’

  Thorne nodded and looked around. ‘There’s another camera at the main doors.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And inside one of the rooms?’

  McCarthy nodded, grim. ‘The room next door to the one Amin was in.’

  ‘Why just that one?’

  ‘That’s what’s so bloody ironic,’ McCarthy said. ‘It’s the room we put any patient in who’s on suicide watch.’

  The medical officer used his pass-key to take them through the set of white metal doors on to the first of two interconnecting wards. Each ward contained half a dozen beds, three on each side. All were occupied.

  ‘You always this busy?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘God, yes,’ McCarthy said. ‘And seriously understaffed. Even if I’m here I’m usually up to my neck in medical reports for parole hearings, organising rehab programmes, all that stuff. So I need locum GPs to come in for the daily sick parades or to dole out the Ritalin and we still have a contract with the local primary healthcare trust to provide extra nursing staff. The PHOs do a good job, don’t get me wrong, and even with them we’re run off our feet, but most of them have only had very basic medical training.’

  ‘Like the one who thought Amin was asleep, right?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  They walked slowly up and down the two wards. Each had its own small toilet and shower block at the far end. There were glass walls and no locks. Passing each bed, the looks Thorne received from those patients who were not asleep or reading magazines were considerably less aggressive than he might expect from the boys in the main body of the prison. Out there, if you weren’t wearing a uniform of some sort you were almost certainly a solicitor or a copper.

  And Thorne did not look like a solicitor.

  Perhaps the kids in here were just too drugged up to care, he thought. Or maybe he made a more convincing doctor than he did a brief.

  He was sure that Phil Hendricks would have something to say about that.

  Somebody turned a radio up and was quickly told to turn it down as Thorne nodded towards the bunch of keys in McCarthy’s hand. ‘Who has keys in and out of here?’

  McCarthy looked at him as though it were a very inappropriate question.

  ‘I need to ask.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Thorne looked at him. ‘Didn’t DI Dawes?’

  McCarthy nodded slowly, which made Thorne think that the man who had led the original inquiry might not have been quite as much of an idiot as he’d taken him for.

  ‘Well, myself, obviously. The PHOs. All the officers… ’

  They walked through an open doorway at the far end of the second ward, on to the corridor that contained the wing’s three private rooms.

  ‘And the pass-key opens these as well, does it?’

  McCarthy shook his head and lifted his keys up, selecting two different ones for Thorne to look at. ‘The pass-key is for all the main doors, but you need this one to open any of these cells.’

  ‘Cells?’

  ‘ Rooms, I mean.’ He reddened slightly and waved his embarrassment away. ‘Room, cell. Patient, prisoner.’

  Thorne understood. Boy, little bastard. It all depended who you were talking to and what kind of mood they were in.

  ‘Which one was Amin’s?’

  McCarthy pointed and moved to open the door furthest to their left. While he was doing that, Thorne took a few paces towards the room next door to the one being unlocked. The room reserved for potential suicides in which the remaining CCTV camera was installed. Once past it, he turned and walked slowly back towards the door McCarthy had opened for him, taking care to stay as close as possible to the wall.

  McCarthy watched him, but Thorne saw no need to explain what he was doing if the doctor was not bright enough to work it out. He would stop off at the nurses’ station to review the footage on his way out.

  ‘Here we are,’ McCarthy said.

  The doctor’s indecision as to what to call it was understandable, as the space with which Thorne was confronted was somewhere between a room and a cell, albeit one of those on the Gold wing. Ten feet by eight, with plain white walls, an alcove cordoned off containing toilet and sink. The room was dominated by a traditional hospital bed with sides that could be raised if necessary, an IV stand on one side and a small melamine-topped table on the other. There was no window, save for the one in the metal door through which a PHO had looked, though for not quite long enough to establish that the room’s occupant was not breathing.

  ‘Not exactly BUPA, I know,’ McCarthy said.

  Thorne walked across to the bed. It smelled clean but there was a yellow-brown stain on the pillow. He wondered if anyone had slept in it since Amin Akhtar. ‘Well, if it was any nicer you’d only get stick from the “prisons are holiday camps” brigade,’ he said. ‘You’d have the Daily Mail complaining that your patients were too comfortable.’

  McCarthy nodded, gave a small laugh. ‘A few months back, our head of PE ordered a pitch-and-putt set for the boys and a week later one of the papers claimed that we were building an eighteen-hole golf course.’

  ‘So what kind of dosage was Amin on?’ Thorne asked. He walked across to the far wall. Just a few steps. ‘The Tramadol.’

  ‘Two fifty-milligram tablets, four times a day. It’s a medium-strength painkiller.’

  ‘And nothing else?’

  ‘Only a low-dose antibiotic. A drip, you know?’

  ‘And how many tablets would he have needed to OD? Just roughly.’

  ‘I don’t know, thirty or more at least.’

  Thorne thought for a few seconds. ‘Plus the few you said got spilled on the floor, right? So that’s thirty-something tablets he somehow managed to avoid taking during his routine medication and stashed away. Does that sound about right?’

  McCarthy nodded, said, ‘More or less.’

  ‘Right, and he’d been in here four days, so in order to get enough to do the job properly, he would have had to be palming virtually all his pills almost every time he was given them. Sorry, I’m just thinking out loud here… but the staff are supposed to watch and make sure medication gets taken, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they’re supposed to.’

  ‘Well, someone screwed up rather badly by the sound of it.’

  ‘I gave him several doses of the tablets myself,’ McCarthy said, ‘and I certainly didn’t screw up.’

  ‘I wasn’t trying to say you had, but can you think of any other explanation?’ Thorne walked slowly back across the room, turned and leaned against the door.

  ‘Perhaps someone brought them in for him,’ McCarthy suggested.

  ‘From the outside?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that would mean Amin had suicidal feelings even before he got attacked.’ Thorne shook his head. ‘It would have to have been after he was admitted to the hospital wing. Was he allowed visits from other boys while he was in here?’

  ‘Yes, at least one lad came in, I think. I can get you the name.’

  ‘That would be helpful,’ Thorne said. ‘But we’ve still got the same question to answer. Where did whoever gave Amin enough tablets to kill himself get them from?’ Thorne had already figured out the most likely answer, but waited for McCarthy to catch him up. It only took a few seconds.

  ‘What about the thefts from the dispensary?’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Thorne said.

  The doctor nodded, looking highly delighted with himself and his powers of deduction. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem to find out if and when any Tramadol tablets were taken. Everything is noted down in the DDA book, s
o-’ He stopped at the noise from Thorne’s pocket. ‘Is that yours?’

  Thorne was unsurprised at McCarthy’s shocked expression when his mobile rang. They were strictly forbidden inside the prison and that applied to members of staff every bit as much as to prisoners themselves. It was another protocol Thorne had been obliged to ignore, and dispensation had been granted after a senior officer at the Yard had spoken to the governor by phone and made it clear that they were dealing with a serious live-time incident.

  Thorne took the phone from his jacket and saw who was calling. ‘I need to take this,’ he said.

  McCarthy stayed where he was, then seeing that Thorne was not about to answer while anyone was around to listen, indicated that he would wait outside and stepped into the hall.

  Thorne pushed the door shut after him and answered the phone.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘He wants to know what’s happening.’

  Thorne pressed the handset to his chest and swore quietly. He could still hear the radio that was playing on the ward across the corridor. ‘Tell him I’m doing what he asked me to do,’ he said. ‘I’m working as quickly as I can, all right?’

  ‘I’ll tell him.’

  ‘That this might take some time.’

  There was a pause. ‘I’ll tell him… ’

  ‘I’m talking to all the people I need to talk to.’ He looked down at the bed in which Amin Akhtar had died. He reached out and touched the metal bedstead. ‘I’m in the right place. Tell him we’re taking everything he said very seriously, OK?’

  ‘The truth, that’s what he wants.’

  ‘I know… I know it is, and I’m going to find out what happened, one way or the other.’ He sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘You make sure he knows that.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Helen…?’

  ‘That’s good.’

  She was breathless and he could hear the tightness in her voice, the effort to sound upbeat. He guessed that Akhtar was listening. ‘How are you and Mitchell doing, Helen? How’s Akhtar doing?’

  There was another pause, longer this time. Thorne could hear Helen Weeks breathing, imagined he could also hear the breathing of the man who was probably pointing a gun at her.