Good as Dead tt-10

by Mark Billingham

  Rotten meat and lemons.

  SIXTY-THREE

  McCarthy had punched in the code needed to access the private lift. It had been sent by text message the previous day. He and Thorne said nothing as the lift rose up towards the penthouse level, then just before they reached the top floor, McCarthy said, ‘They’re not always about the sex, you know?’ He looked at Thorne. ‘These parties. Sometimes it’s just a question of meeting people and talking, without having to worry about what they’re thinking. It’s about having fun and not having to lie. You said it yourself this afternoon in my office. It’s about being yourself.’

  The doors opened.

  ‘All very touching,’ Thorne said. ‘Except when “yourself” is nuts deep in an underage boy.’

  The man who answered the door had the build of a nightclub bouncer, but his suit was somewhat better cut and Thorne doubted he ever had cause to turn people away for wearing trainers. He nodded his recognition at McCarthy then looked Thorne up and down.

  ‘A guest,’ McCarthy said.

  The man at the door sniffed. ‘Nobody said anything.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Thorne smiled. ‘Should I have brought a bottle or something?’

  ‘Oh come on, Graham, stop pissing around,’ McCarthy said. ‘He’s with me, all right? And I’m gagging for a drink.’

  In the hour and a half since McCarthy had told him about the party, Thorne had been thinking very carefully about the best way to get inside. To make his entrance. At this point of course, it would have been easy enough simply to produce a warrant card, to put a shoulder against the door and march inside shouting the odds. Thorne doubted very much that he would encounter a lot of resistance if he did, certainly none of an aggressive nature, but all the same he had decided on a rather more low-key approach. He wanted to walk in there with the not-so-good doctor and for it to be seen. He needed the man whose evening he was intent on spoiling to see clearly that the chain was broken and that McCarthy was his. To understand, as quickly as Thorne could engineer it, that no amount of wriggling was going to get anyone off the hook.

  ‘Actually, Graham, we’re both gagging for a drink,’ Thorne said.

  Graham rolled his eyes and stood aside. ‘Enjoy… ’

  They laid their jackets down on a cowhide-covered chaise longue just inside the door. McCarthy took a glass of wine and Thorne helped himself to water from the tray proffered by a teenage boy with spiky black hair and pupils like piss-holes in the snow. Then they took three steps down into a large, open-plan living area.

  Thorne smelled marijuana, amyl nitrate and aftershave.

  Money…

  The decor and furnishings reminded Thorne of Rahim Jaffer’s flat and he wondered if it was all those evenings the young man had spent in places such as this that had given him a taste for the ultra-modern and expensive. Ironic, as they had certainly helped pay for it. Looking around – as though he were doing no more than admiring the art on the walls or the stylish light fittings – Thorne counted fourteen men in the room. Forty-ish and upwards and all dressed as though they had just come from one office or another, and while most had a drink in their hands, some had not yet been there long enough to loosen their ties.

  There were at least the same number of boys.

  While their prospective clients were just starting to relax and remained content to talk among themselves for a while, most of those who had been invited to provide a paid service did the same thing. They were gathered in twos and threes at the edges of the room. Whispering and giggling, moving in time to the low-level soft rock, or hovering near the long glass table where a cold buffet had been laid out.

  Two distinct groups, for the time being.

  There was plenty of eye contact though. Sizing-up being done on both sides. Sly looks and not so shy smiles.

  The boys were white, black, Asian. A selection made deliberately, Thorne guessed, so as to appeal to all tastes. He wondered if the same consideration had gone into picking out the invitees according to their age. Thorne guessed that the majority were fifteen and up, but several were younger – or were at least trying to look younger – while two boys who stood close together near the food could not have been more than twelve.

  Someone had probably agreed to pay a little more for them.

  With McCarthy staying close to him as per instructions, Thorne wandered across the bleached-wood floor to stand near the vast windows that ran around half the room. A man with swept-back silver hair tapped a finger against the rain-streaked glass and nodded out.

  ‘Shame about the bloody weather,’ he said. ‘Out on that balcony you get the most astonishing view.’

  Thorne turned and leaned back against the glass, scanning the room.

  The man nodded towards a skinny boy in a tight black vest who looked to Thorne as though he was not that long out of Spiderman pyjamas. ‘Mind you, the view’s pretty spectacular in here… ’

  At that moment, Thorne got his first look at the man he was there for. He walked into the room from one of the two softly lit corridors running off on either side. Coming from the toilet, Thorne guessed, or perhaps a bedroom, though it did seem a little early for that. Thorne watched the man help himself to a drink from another of the boys with the trays, then lean across, smiling at whatever the boy had said, to take something from the buffet. He popped the food into his mouth as he turned, and saw McCarthy.

  He raised his glass and started walking towards them.

  It took a few steps before the man got his first good look at Thorne, before the easy stride faltered, just a little. Thorne was impressed that he had been recognised so quickly. It had been eight months after all, and even then they had only been face to face for half an hour or so.

  As long as it had taken for Thorne to give his evidence.

  ‘Smashing party, your honour,’ Thorne said.

  The man stood close and stared hard at McCarthy, but McCarthy refused to meet the look, staring down instead into his wine glass. The man shifted his attention. Said, ‘Thorne.’

  Thorne was even more impressed that his name had been remembered. Then he realised that McCarthy would have been in regular contact with his colleague from the moment Thorne had turned up at Barndale two days earlier and begun asking questions. That the man in front of him was simply putting two and two together.

  The quicker he made four, Thorne decided, the better.

  ‘Your friend Dr McCarthy here has been great company,’ Thorne said. ‘And a fascinating storyteller.’ He looked at McCarthy. ‘You can toddle off now, Ian. My sergeant’s waiting for you downstairs.’

  McCarthy hesitated, but only for a second, and neither Thorne nor the other man bothered to watch him leave.

  ‘So, who’s waiting for me?’ the man asked. ‘Not a lowly sergeant, surely.’

  The music got louder suddenly, and someone let out a whoop of excitement from the other side of the room.

  Thorne did not blink.

  ‘You’re all mine,’ he said.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  Helen Weeks’ phone rang out. Ten seconds, fifteen. Twenty…

  ‘They’re not going to answer,’ Chivers said.

  ‘ They? ’ Pascoe stared at him. ‘What exactly do you think is going on in there?’ Chivers started to answer, but Pascoe talked over him. ‘Because two and something days is a bit quick for Stockholm Syndrome to have kicked in, you know what I mean?’

  Twenty-five seconds.

  ‘Neither the hostage nor the hostage taker is answering the phone,’ Chivers said. ‘I was stating a fact, that’s all. There was no-’

  The call was answered and, almost simultaneously, all five people inside the truck held their breath. Pressed hands to headsets. There were a few, crackly seconds of near-silence, then Helen Weeks said, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Helen, it’s Sue Pascoe. I need to speak to Mr Mitchell.’ Calm, but authoritative. The tone she reserved for particular types of crisis intervention.

  ‘He’s asleep.’

 
‘I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to wake him up.’

  ‘Is there some sort of problem?’

  ‘I need to speak to him now, Helen. I need to know that he’s all right.’

  There was a pause.

  Chivers looked at Donnelly, turned his palms up.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘Hang up now.’ Akhtar’s voice. Calm, but authoritative.

  ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘ Hang up! ’

  The line went dead.

  Pascoe removed her headset and dabbed fingers against the film of sweat on her ear. Donnelly and Chivers were already moving together towards the back doors, and their body language – their shoulders together, their heads low and close – made the manner of the conversation they were gearing up to have abundantly clear. Made it equally obvious that any further contribution from Pascoe would be entirely superfluous.

  ‘Going in through the front isn’t an option,’ Chivers said.

  ‘Right.’ Donnelly began nodding.

  ‘The shutters wouldn’t be a problem, but we’d be too far away. He’d have too much time to react. The back door’s the obvious entry point.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Best part of an hour to get set up. Forty minutes at a push.’

  ‘So let’s push it.’

  Chivers jumped down from the back of the truck and immediately began shouting. Donnelly started talking to Pascoe. Something about how vital her role was going to be in this last hour or so, something about redeeming herself, but it took her a few seconds to focus. She was remembering something she had said to Tom Thorne.

  The hostage is mine to lose.

  And the nothing she’d had to say to Stephen Mitchell’s wife.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Looking at him, Thorne suddenly had a very clear image of His Honour Judge Jeffrey Prosser QC dressing before a trial. Transforming himself, enjoying the ritual. He pictured the man standing in front of a large mirror in his chambers, the smile widening and the blood rushing to his cock as he slipped on his purple robe and red sash. As he became empowered. The wig would be last of all, best of all. Stern and imposing suddenly, that blissful scratch of horsehair against the tender pink skin.

  The smallest suggestion of punishment.

  Bare-headed now and wearing a blue pinstripe, Prosser reminded Thorne of an old deputy headmaster he had not thought about in more than twenty years. A scrawny neck and sagging gut. Almost entirely bald, his face flushed with the effort those few stray tufts of grey were making in fighting their desperate rearguard action. Fierce, but ultimately ineffectual. The man Thorne remembered from school had made up for countless failings as a teacher with a manic adherence to a disciplinary regime that involved caning boys from eleven and upwards on a regular basis. Across the palm much of the time, but always the buttocks for the younger boys. Breathless by the end of it, and sweating.

  Right, Thorne, now get out of my sight.

  Thorne looked at Prosser. Perhaps the similarity was even closer than he had thought.

  They had not moved from their positions near the window, except for Prosser stepping briefly across to a low glass table to set his tumbler down, after finishing his drink in two large gulps. Another half a dozen guests had arrived in the last few minutes and one or two of the boys had begun dancing together, showing themselves off to potential customers. The judge made no attempt whatsoever to disguise the fact that he was enjoying the show.

  ‘I’m still not a hundred per cent sure why you’ve blundered into a private party without an invitation,’ he said. ‘One photograph is hardly going to give any of our friends at the CPS a hard-on, is it?’

  ‘One photograph of you, Ian McCarthy and Simon Powell.’

  ‘Whom I am not for one second denying that I know.’

  ‘That’s a good start.’

  ‘I’ve dealt with Simon several times professionally and I met Ian socially a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Somewhere like this.’

  ‘I’m not disputing the fact that Ian, Simon and I were once at the same party.’ He smiled. ‘You have that photograph, so to do so would be ridiculous.’

  ‘The person who took that photograph is willing to testify that Amin Akhtar was also at that party.’

  ‘I go to a lot of parties,’ Prosser said. ‘I meet a lot of people.’

  ‘I have a witness who puts you and Amin Akhtar at the same party just a few months before he was convicted. That’s just a few months before you sentenced him to eight years in a Young Offenders Institution.’

  ‘It’s a small world.’

  Thorne turned his head, nodded towards a man sharing a joint with a boy young enough to be his grandson. ‘I bet this is. Same faces showing up all the time, I’d imagine. Same arses… ’

  ‘For God’s sake-’

  ‘Amin Akhtar.’

  ‘It really means nothing.’

  ‘Means everything if you had sex with him.’

  ‘Now, I really don’t see how you’re going to prove that. ’

  A man in a cream shirt and brown velvet waistcoat approached and the smile indicated that he and Prosser clearly knew one another. He opened his mouth to speak, but Prosser shook his head, made it clear he was rather busy. The man raised his eyebrows and turned on his heel.

  ‘McCarthy’s not exactly playing hard to get any more,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s made it very clear that he’ll happily spill his guts in return for a nice bit of carpet in his cell, and there’s no reason to believe that Powell is going to be any less of a pushover.

  ‘Thing is though, I’d like to hear it from you. Because you’re the one it started with, that day eight months ago, when you looked up and saw Amin Akhtar in the dock in front of you. You’re the one who made everything happen, the one who put the fear of God into your friends and called in a few favours… so you’re the one who’s going to confess.’ He leaned in close to Prosser. ‘So that I can tell the father of the boy you had killed.’

  ‘You’re welcome to lie to him,’ Prosser said. ‘If you really think that will help.’

  Thorne’s mobile rang in his pocket. He dug it out and saw who was calling. It must have been obvious from his expression that it was a call he needed to take.

  Prosser took two steps away, then turned. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not making a run for it,’ he said. He picked up his empty glass from the table and waggled it at Thorne. ‘Just getting a top-up… ’

  ‘Just thought you ought to know,’ Pascoe said, ‘Donnelly’s authorised a dynamic entry.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  There was the smallest of pauses, an intake of breath. ‘We’ve got every reason to believe that Stephen Mitchell is dead.’

  Every reason. So now Thorne knew for sure that they had not been sent the picture, that the RVP team had found out about the hostage’s death in some other way. All the same, he could hardly admit that he had known and said nothing. ‘That gunshot on the first night.’

  ‘We don’t know what happened,’ Pascoe said. ‘We can only assume that Weeks had no choice but to pretend everything was normal. I should have sussed there was something wrong, but I didn’t.’

  ‘You blaming yourself for this?’

  ‘I fucked up.’

  ‘How long until they go in?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Under an hour.’

  Thorne watched Prosser filling his glass. Still smiling.

  ‘Where are you?’

  Thorne told her, his eyes on Prosser as the judge walked back across the living room, moving calmly through a gaggle of partygoers. A nod and a wink to someone he recognised, something whispered, a hand laid on an arm. Watching, Thorne recalled how Ian McCarthy had reacted to those initial accusations. The doctor had tried to appear confident and fearless, but the anxiety had been all too obvious and Thorne had been able to smell the man’s weakness, sharp as disinfectant.

  Prosser, though, seemed genuinely unafraid of anything.

  ‘Tom?’


  ‘I’m still here,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Well anyway, I just thought you should know. If there’s anything you might have that could persuade Akhtar to give up and walk out of there before Chivers and his mates go crashing in, you need to get back here with it on the hurry-up… ’

  When Thorne had hung up, he walked across and took hold of Prosser by the arm.

  Making it up as you go along again?

  Prosser tried to pull away, but Thorne dug his fingers into the flab of the judge’s forearm.

  Thinking about the promise he’d made to Javed Akhtar.

  The assurances he’d given Helen Weeks.

  He prised the heavy tumbler from Prosser’s hand, wondering – just for a second – how it would feel to smash it against the table and grind the jagged edge into the mottled flesh of the man’s neck. He set it down and guided Prosser none too gently towards the door.

  ‘Hell are we going?’ Prosser demanded, still trying to wrench his arm from Thorne’s grip.

  Thorne dug his fingers in harder.

  He called Holland as soon as they were in the lift and told him that they were going to be swapping vehicles. Unlike his own car, the Passat was fitted with Blues and Twos and Thorne guessed that the siren might save him a few precious minutes. He told Holland and Kitson to call up a van, to make it two. He told them to get straight up to the penthouse party and start nicking people for fun.

  Then he turned to Prosser.

  ‘How do you feel about restorative justice?’

  SIXTY-SIX

  ‘I haven’t been telling you the truth,’ Helen said. ‘Not that I’ve been lying, exactly, just not telling the truth, and I want to be honest. Here… like this. I need to be honest.’

  Since they had called and demanded to speak to Mitchell, Akhtar had been prowling back and forth like one of those creatures in a zoo that have gone slightly mad. From storeroom to shop and back again. As though it were only a question of which way they were going to come for him.