Good as Dead tt-10

by Mark Billingham

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 enough 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 inherite
d 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 settled 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.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Helen said.

  ‘I think I have worked hard.’ Akhtar’s face had changed again. He leaned forward in his chair, angry suddenly. ‘I thought that would make me the sort of person that deserved to be taken seriously. That would be respected. I thought I was the kind of person, that we were the kind of family, the law should be protecting.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Helen said.

  ‘ Now they are taking me seriously though.’ He picked up the gun and pointed it. ‘This thing gets you plenty of bloody respect.’ He stared at her for a few moments, then looked at his watch. Said, ‘They should be calling again soon.’

  Helen closed her eyes.

  She leaned her head back against the radiator and tried to forget about the metal cuff eating the flesh from her wrist, the stiffness in her back and neck and the terrible cramp in her legs.

  She tried to empty her mind.

  To get back to that beach, and her two beautiful boys.

  FORTY-THREE

  Thorne had called on his way back from Hackney, and while they were waiting for him to arrive, Donnelly, Chivers and Pascoe gathered for a pre-contact briefing in the small room behind the school stage. Pascoe listened while Chivers continued to press for technical support, arguing that the operation was not moving forward, that the information they were getting back from the phone calls was limited. Donnelly nodded and grunted, casting the occasional glance in Pascoe’s direction. He had not been in the best of moods since they had relieved the overnight team a couple of hours before.

  ‘Everything OK?’ Pascoe asked.

  Chivers looked at her, annoyed, as though he had almost forgotten she was there at all. Pascoe ignored it. She had been trying to do the same with him.

  ‘Just the usual carry-on,’ Donnelly said.

  Pascoe waited.

  ‘My boss is getting it in the neck from the Commissioner, who’s getting it in the neck from the Mayor’s office because Transport for London are kicking off.’

  ‘So now your boss is giving you grief.’
/>   ‘People need to get around.’ Chivers slurped at his coffee. ‘They want their lives back.’

  ‘So does Helen Weeks.’

  ‘It’s not your problem,’ Donnelly said. He turned back to Chivers and asked him to carry on.

  ‘We get a Technical Support Unit in, let them do their stuff and see how it pans out,’ Chivers said. ‘I don’t see what we’ve got to lose. At least with all that in place, we’ll be in a far better situation if anything does happen and we need to go in quickly.’

  ‘We’re all hoping that doesn’t happen though, obviously.’

  ‘I said “if”.’

  ‘What exactly are we talking about?’ Pascoe asked.

  ‘Microphones in the walls. Maybe some cameras in there if we’re lucky and depending on the set-up.’ Seeing that Pascoe was about to raise her usual objections, Chivers steamed on. ‘Listen, Akhtar won’t have a clue what we’re doing, all right? No need to worry on that score. Some of the gear these guys have got is so sophisticated they could slip a microphone in your knickers and you wouldn’t know it.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  Chivers smiled. ‘They’re like ninjas.’

  Nobody spoke for a long few seconds. The only sounds were the squawk of a radio from the hall and the rustle as Chivers adjusted the weapons belt around his waist. Pascoe saw that he had now added an M26 Taser to his personal armoury.

  ‘OK, we’ll see how this next call goes,’ Donnelly said. ‘If there’s no significant change we’ll bring in a TSU.’

  Chivers nodded, happy.

  ‘Is this just because they want the bloody station reopened?’ Pascoe asked.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Donnelly said.

  Pascoe knew she had overstepped the mark and looked away. A tiny, suspicious part of her thinking: is this because I knocked you back yesterday?

  Donnelly stood up. ‘Like I said, we’ll see what happens when Thorne gets here and we put the one o’clock call in. That might change things.’ He gathered his notes together. ‘From what Thorne told me on the phone, it sounds like he’s planning to rattle Akhtar’s cage a bit.’