Good as Dead tt-10

by Mark Billingham

  Chivers said, ‘Good,’ and Pascoe said nothing.

  She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of what Thorne was planning at all.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Hendricks called as Thorne was on his way into the hall.

  ‘Queue-jumping again?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Peter Allen.’

  ‘It’s important, Phil, and I don’t think too many of your customers are likely to complain.’

  ‘ I can complain though.’

  ‘And just so you know, I still need help with the drug thing. Amin Akhtar’s overdose, I mean. Soon as you can, mate.’

  ‘I’m starting to see why Louise dumped you.’

  ‘It was mutual,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks laughed. ‘What, as in the two of you talking things over and mutually deciding you were a complete and utter cock?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Thorne nodded across to Donnelly, who was waiting with the others at the monitors. ‘Call me when you’re done, will you?’ He hung up before the abuse became rather less good-natured, and walked across to join them.

  He took Pascoe’s seat and put on the headset while she gave him the usual instructions. Again she urged him to keep his tone nice and even when talking to Akhtar, to listen and to reassure, but Thorne could sense her uncertainty.

  He told her that he was ready.

  ‘Do we really think this is a good idea?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s the only one I’ve got,’ Thorne said.

  ‘There’s no way of knowing how he’s going to react to this and that worries me.’ Pascoe looked to Donnelly. ‘Excitement, rage, guilt. None of them are exactly ideal.’

  ‘He wants answers,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s why he’s doing this. That’s why we’re all here and why Helen’s in there. We’re only going to get the right outcome if I start giving him some.’

  ‘Some,’ Chivers said, quietly.

  ‘Look, I can’t give him the one answer he really wants, not yet, but surely it’s important that he knows I’m close.’

  ‘Are you?’ Donnelly asked.

  Thorne said that he was, and he meant it, but he had also lost count of those times when touching distance was as close as he got. When a killer had remained that all-important step ahead and a case had finished up as nothing more than a folder full of paper and an uncomfortable memory. Donnelly nodded, but Thorne knew he understood the way it worked as well as he did. ‘I want him to know I’ve shaken things up,’ he said.

  Donnelly told him to make the call.

  As soon as Helen answered, the sound quality told those listening that her mobile had been put on speaker. Thorne asked her how she was and, though her voice was a little smaller, a little flatter than it had been the last time he’d heard it, she told him she was fine. Ticking along. She told him she was being well looked after, but that she didn’t want to see another bar of chocolate for as long as she lived, that she was desperate for a hot bath and something a bit stronger than 7-Up to drink. Donnelly signalled to him and Thorne asked her how Stephen Mitchell was, but Akhtar cut in before Helen could answer.

  ‘Do you have any news, Mr Thorne?’ He sounded almost as tired as Helen Weeks. ‘Or are you just calling to tell me how busy you are? To remind me once again that these things take time.’

  Thorne remembered everything Pascoe had told him a few minutes earlier, her worries about Akhtar’s reaction. But there seemed little point in going round the houses, and besides Thorne wanted the news to sound every bit as important, as shocking, as it was.

  ‘He’s killed somebody else.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘The man who murdered your son.’

  There was almost half a minute of silence. Thorne glanced at Pascoe, but she was looking at the floor. Behind them, the doors to the hall banged as someone came in. They started to apologise and were quickly shushed.

  ‘Who is he?’ Akhtar asked.

  There was no easy way to say it. ‘I don’t know,’ Thorne said. ‘But he is scared because we’re getting close to him. He’s scared, Javed.’

  Though Pascoe had been unsure as to how Akhtar would react, Thorne had expected something approaching pleasure at the news. But when Akhtar spoke again, there was little sign of it.

  ‘Who was killed?’

  ‘Another boy from Barndale,’ Thorne said.

  ‘A friend of Amin’s?’

  ‘No, not a friend. I think he was the boy that attacked Amin.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Someone paid this boy to attack Amin, because they wanted to make sure he ended up in the hospital wing. That was where they planned to kill him, so they could make it look like suicide.’

  ‘That’s what I said, didn’t I?’ There was anger creeping into Akhtar’s voice. ‘I said that to the police over and over again and I told everybody at the bloody inquest. I kept saying that my son would never have taken his own life.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what you said.’

  ‘And you see what happens? You see?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now another boy is dead because nobody would listen.’

  ‘That boy is dead because the man responsible was worried he could identify him.’

  There was another long pause.

  ‘So, if this boy is dead, how are you going to identify him?’

  ‘I’m waiting for more information,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Waiting.’ There was a snort of derision. ‘There’s been far too much waiting.’

  ‘I know that sounds a bit vague, but I’m hopeful.’ Even as he said it, Thorne realised that he was often guilty of confusing ‘hopeful’ with ‘desperate’. ‘OK, Javed? We’re nearly there.’

  Akhtar did not reply. Thorne exchanged a long look with Donnelly while they listened to the hiss and crackle from the speakers, something muttered which was impossible to make out clearly, Helen coughing.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘You heard all that?’

  ‘Yes, I heard. I hope you get the information you need.’

  ‘It’s going to be over soon, OK?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘So, what are you drinking?’ Thorne asked. ‘I’ll have a bottle waiting.’

  ‘Right now, I’d settle for paint-stripper,’ Helen said.

  Then Akhtar’s voice. Louder, as though he’d suddenly moved closer to the phone. ‘Don’t start planning your celebrations just yet, Mr Thorne. You have to find this man first. Then you have to catch him.’

  The line went dead.

  Thorne removed the headset and looked at Pascoe. ‘All right?’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ she said.

  Chivers nodded towards the monitors. ‘She’s every bit as good as you said she was. Weeks.’ He looked back to Thorne. ‘I reckon she could really help us.’

  ‘Help us how?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘With information,’ Chivers said. ‘Once the tech boys have done their stuff, if we can somehow let her know that we’re listening in, she might be able to send us messages.’ He looked to Donnelly. ‘We can slip it into a call or whatever. “TSU’s set up” or something. She’ll know what that means and maybe she can find a way to let us know where Akhtar is when the time comes. What might be waiting for us on the other side of that door if we need to go in.’

  Donnelly nodded. Said, ‘Makes sense.’

  Thorne turned to Pascoe.

  She was looking at the floor again.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Though she could not know it, Helen had been every bit as surprised as Thorne that Javed had not reacted more positively to what he had been told. To hearing about Thorne’s progress. He had quickly grown irritable on discovering that he had been proved right and that he might soon know the name of the man who had murdered his son. When the call was over, he had spent a few minutes stalking back and forth between the shop and the storeroom, muttering to himself angrily. He had waved his arms around and slapped himse
lf on the side of the head. Then, he had suddenly fallen silent and become morose.

  Inconsolable.

  As though he had just remembered something terrible.

  Helen had said, ‘Good news,’ and ‘Sounds like you got what you wanted,’ but he had ignored her. She had asked for water and he had snapped at her, saying that he was not her bloody servant. Then he had brought it to her without a word.

  Over the last twenty-four hours, she had begun to feel as though she understood this man who was holding her. That she could adjust to his reactions, handle things. She had not felt the need to keep pushing for sympathy or pity, to remind him that she was the mother of a small child, and when they had talked, really talked to one another, as they had only an hour before, there were moments when Helen might almost have been able to forget where they were. Now, watching him slumped in the chair with his eyes closed and the blood pulsing at his temple, she realised that she needed to sharpen up and remember exactly who and what she was.

  What they both were.

  Hostage and hostage taker.

  She was well aware that her own emotions had been all over the place too, but reminded herself that she was not threatening to kill anyone. Yes, Akhtar had been genuinely horrified at Mitchell’s death, but Helen also remembered the sound of him smashing things up next door and she could not forget the hatred on his face when he had turned round in the shop two days before and pointed that gun at them. She recalled those moments of dark rage and the keening sobs from the next room, the tenderness then the paranoia.

  Like lights going on and off.

  And the fear that had begun to fold away its wings fluttered back to life in her gut, as Helen asked herself if those running the operation outside were getting as nervous as she was.

  FORTY-SIX

  I’m waiting for more information.

  Thorne waited, and as the time passed and no other useful option presented itself, the waiting sucked the energy from him as efficiently as any physical exertion. Sapped him. He sat at the trestle table in the school hall and stared, unmoving, at the monitors, feeling heavier and more useless by the minute.

  More desperate than hopeful.

  Donnelly was sitting outside in the newly arrived Technical Support vehicle, poring over plans of the building; discussing the thicknesses of walls, the locations of gas and water pipes and electrical cabling. Chivers was in the playground, talking through a variety of scenarios with key members of his firearms team. Thorne did not know where Sue Pascoe had gone.

  Once the Technical Support officers had been busy for a few hours there might be other pictures to look at, but for now Thorne could do little but stare at that single, fixed image of the front of Akhtar’s shop.

  He stared, and began to drift.

  For a few dizzying moments, despite the urgency, the tension that was clearly still ticking in all those around him, Thorne found his mind starting to wander. Staring at the monitor, there was something soporific about the picture: the occasional flicker across the image; the blurred swirls of dark graffiti against the grey shutters.

  PAKI still the only word he could make out.

  Akhtar’s words: Amin could come to us with anything.

  In that vague and comforting way that the past got wrapped up and presented to oneself, Thorne had always considered his own relationship with his parents to be reasonably open and honest, but just a few seconds of serious reflection was all it took to tear that wrapping away and reveal the truth.

  Unvarnished and ugly.

  Thorne had not told his mother and father he wanted to join the police force, not until it was too late anyway, when he was no more than a few days away from traipsing off to Hendon. He had not told them that he did not want to go to university. That he had no wish to take whatever exams he would need to become a lawyer or an accountant, or any of those other professions he knew would make Jim and Maureen Thorne so proud.

  He had not told them that he was too afraid to fail.

  He might not have dreaded their disappointment quite as much had he been telling them he was away to join the army. His father’s older brother had been a soldier, he seemed to remember, or in the air force maybe. Yes, that would definitely have gone down better. There would have been tears from his mother almost certainly, but perhaps a grudging wink from the old man later on.

  Or would it have been the other way round?

  The police, though?

  There was no Dixon of Dock Green dignity about the job back then, as there might have been in the fifties or sixties. None of the Sweeney swagger. Thorne chose to join up just as the chickens started coming home to roost. Too many coppers on the take and rape victims treated like sluts.

  Not a good time for that particular career move.

  Thorne had stuck to his guns though, safe in the knowledge there was nothing they could do to stop him. He’d shouted back, his eighteen-year-old sulking skills more than a match for theirs, and bitten back the terror that first night as a cadet. Lying awake in the jockstrap-stinking dormitories that by some bizarre quirk of fate now housed his own office.

  He had never really talked to them about the job either, had taken good care to avoid it. The gossip and the funny stuff, but nothing that had actually mattered.

  Not Calvert.

  Three dead girls, smothered in their beds by their own father. Matching ivory nightdresses splayed like angels’ wings and six tiny white feet.

  Was that really the reason he and Jan had never had kids? Why he had felt so ambivalent about having a child with Louise? Some counsellor or other had said as much a few years before and Thorne had told her where to stick her Christmas-cracker theories. He had not quite been able to forget that knowing smile though, just before she’d looked back down at her notes.

  His notes.

  He was vaguely aware of footsteps approaching behind him. Heels…

  Jan had a kid with somebody else now and Louise would probably end up doing the same, as soon as she found someone a little quicker than Thorne had been to admit he quite fancied the idea.

  Lives moved on.

  ‘Tom… ’

  Thorne turned, just as Sue Pascoe arrived with two cups of coffee. He could smell the cigarettes as he leaned forward and gratefully took the plastic cup she was proffering.

  ‘I need to wake up,’ he said.

  They sat and drank their coffees in silence for a minute, then turned at the sound of Chivers’ voice from the other end of the hall. He was talking to a pair of uniformed officers. There was laughter, some back-slapping.

  ‘He wants the same thing as we do, you know,’ Thorne said.

  Pascoe looked at him. ‘Let’s hope so.’

  ‘Just a different way of going about things.’

  She blew on her coffee, her eyes still on Chivers.

  ‘I’m sure he’s good at what he does.’

  ‘He is,’ she said. ‘I asked around.’

  ‘There you go then.’

  She shook her head. ‘You’re good at what you do, too.’

  ‘Did you ask around?’

  ‘I didn’t have to.’

  Thorne nodded, tried not to smile too much.

  ‘But you still fuck up,’ she said, looking at him.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Same as everyone else does. Right?’

  Calvert had been the big one, no question. There’s always one that shapes you, that’s what his boss had said at the time. You don’t get a lot of say in the matter. Lucky or unlucky, result or disaster, all that. Why couldn’t it have been talking someone down off a bridge though? Or saving a playground full of kids from some headcase with a samurai sword?

  Someone to catch and someone to save. Right up your street.

  Louise knew him well enough. Knew which of them he would pick if he could only choose one.

  ‘Right?’ Pascoe asked again.

  Thorne looked at her. Unable, unwilling, to speak.

  ‘Only problem is,’ she said, nodding
towards the other end of the hall, ‘if he fucks up, so do I. So have I.’ She turned back to Thorne. ‘Chivers could shoot a hostage in the face, but in the end it would still be down to me. The hostage is mine to lose, do you see?’

  Thorne sipped his coffee.

  He could certainly see the intensity in Pascoe’s eyes, but he was not sure if her concern was based on anything other than professional pride. Was she thinking only about doing her job properly, about her record as a negotiator? Or had she genuinely come to care about the well-being of Stephen Mitchell and Helen Weeks? Of Javed Akhtar? Thorne supposed that it didn’t much matter, that it might be all those things, but still he did not know what to say to her.

  When his mobile rang on the table, he grabbed at it.

  ‘DI Thorne?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘It’s Wendy Markham.’

  Thorne waited, unable to place the name.

  ‘I was running the DNA sample. The beer can in Hackney?’

  ‘God, sorry. Thanks for getting back to me.’ Thorne could feel a tingle of excitement. He sat up straight in his chair. He glanced across at Pascoe who raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Am I first?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thorne said. ‘You’re first.’

  ‘Good, because we’ve got you a nice cold hit. Jonathan Bridges, aged eighteen, record a mile long. He just served six months for robbing a junkie at knifepoint.’

  ‘Bridges?’ Thorne had seen the name written down somewhere. He struggled to remember. ‘Served six months where?’

  There was a pause as Markham consulted her notes. ‘Barndale YOI.’

  Even as Thorne had asked the question, it had come to him. The boy’s name on a list along with ten others. The patients on the hospital wing the night Amin Akhtar had died, the boys that Dawes had questioned eight weeks ago. He swallowed hard, remembering what Hendricks had said a couple of nights before, his suggestion that one of the other patients had been responsible for Amin’s death.

  He was half right…

  Thorne signalled to Pascoe, who quickly passed him a pen and a scrap of paper. He scribbled down the name.