The Killing Habit

by Mark Billingham

I enjoy playing rugby and watching drag racing.

  Likes: Politics/current affairs. Real ale.

  He logged into the site, began to poke around. A few new names and photographs; a few more piss-poor little lives to marvel at or be disgusted by for half an hour before he turned in.

  Ava. 36. Designer.

  Christine. 55. Company Director.

  Julie. 29. Retail Executive.

  Oddest thing of all, and this always amazed him, some of them weren’t even particularly awful to look at. He guessed that several of the pictures were every bit as fake as the women themselves, but even so, one or two of them were actually… all right. The way they presented themselves was borderline acceptable, but the very fact that they had to, that there was this need to exhibit themselves in a shop window…

  Above all, what saddened him the most, was the fatal lack of dignity.

  And he was the one that was supposed to have some sort of twisted hunger.

  He scrolled and selected, he downloaded and printed out. It was as much about killing time as anything, because he wasn’t actually on the lookout, not just yet. Of course, there was always the possibility that he would see something that was simply too perfect to pass by, like an immaculately tailored jacket or a beautiful watch or whatever, that he’d spot somewhere and be unable to resist.

  But that wasn’t the reason he was there.

  He opened up Ava’s profile and began to read.

  Just browsing.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The minute the man was on the ground, his legs kicking slowly like some kind of dying bluebottle, Kieran Sykes took out his phone and began filming. It was hilarious. It was better than the telly. He was pretty sure that if some of those daft home-video shows on the box were a bit edgier, he might have made himself a few quid.

  The man had stumbled for a few yards before hitting the deck, leaned against a wall like he might be having a piss, and gone down like a sack of spuds.

  Smacked his head good and hard as well, which hadn’t done him any favours.

  Kieran stepped into the road, dodged a van and kept on filming; zoomed in, even though the bloke wasn’t thrashing around any more, providing his own over-the-top commentary to amuse his mates later on.

  ‘This is what drugs can do. Drugs are evil! Behold… this man is a respectable politician, but one spliff laced with just a drop or two of the deadly “zombie juice” has reduced him to this. How can we protect our children? How can we stop this terrible drug from creating a plague of mashed-up undead who will surely destroy our inner cities…’

  Kieran was still laughing as he turned the phone off and ambled away towards his flat. Now there was no question that it was good gear he was selling. One spliff, that was all. Ready-rolled as well, for the buyer’s convenience. To be fair, he preferred doing it, because aside from the fact that most of his customers were in too much of a hurry to be arsed doing it for themselves, it meant he could control the amount of the stuff he was shifting. He’d actually thought he was skimping, because that’s what he’d always done, but this batch must have been considerably pokier than he’d been told. It was good news, because it meant he could put even less of it in next time.

  Ker-ching!

  Not such good news for that soppy sod he’d left spark out on the pavement, mind you. Politician, he thought, laughing out loud again. That was a nice touch…

  He crossed the Seven Sisters Road, thinking he might pick up something to eat, then deciding he couldn’t be bothered when he saw the queue in the kebab shop. Ten minutes later, he turned into his street and was just thinking that cheese on toast would hit the spot when he saw the bike parked outside the house and the man sitting on his garden wall.

  Kieran walked past him, and the man stood up. He was dressed from head to foot in black leather, like something out of a gay porn film, his crash helmet dangling from one hand.

  ‘Sir…’

  Kieran turned round. Said, ‘Unless you’ve got a pizza on the back of that bike, you can piss off.’

  ‘I have a message for you, that’s all.’

  Kieran stepped towards him. What kind of accent was that, anyway? Eastern European, some shit. Like a vampire or a hooker.

  ‘You cannot work here any more,’ the biker said. ‘OK? Not in Tottenham, not in Hackney. Not in… north.’

  ‘Say again, boss?’

  ‘That’s it. You don’t sell any more because there isn’t room. You understand?’

  ‘Oh, come on, mate. You saying there isn’t room in north London for an independent trader to make a living for himself?’ Kieran smiled, waited, but the man looked straight through him. Kieran held out his arms. ‘I’m only punting a few joints, for Christ’s sake. It’s beer money, basically.’ When this got no reaction, Kieran dropped his arms and moved a step closer. ‘Is it you saying this or some pussy who sent you because he can’t be bothered to tell me himself? Making out like he’s Pablo Escobar or whoever?’

  The biker shook his head.

  ‘Well, whoever it is, tell them that a bit of healthy competition is good for everyone, all right? It’s the free market or whatever. It’s what made this country great. No offence.’

  The biker nodded. ‘I was just told to give you the message. I gave you the message.’

  Kieran turned away and walked towards the house, shouting as he stepped over the wall and trudged across the front garden. ‘Well, message received, thanks very much.’ Now he was laughing again. ‘Received and filed under “couldn’t give a flying fuck”.’ He used his left hand to dig for keys and his right to raise a finger.

  The biker shrugged and put his helmet and gloves back on, then took the gun from his jacket pocket. He marched smartly up the path as Kieran pushed his key into the front door and shot him in the back of the head.

  FORTY-NINE

  Kenneth Ablett was one of those unfortunate people whose face made it seem as if he was constantly amused about something; whose expression fell naturally into what could best be described as a smirk. Kitson had noticed it when she’d met him at the Made In Heaven offices. It was fine, she thought, if you were one half of a comedy double act, but it played rather less well in an interview room. He had at least dispensed with the man-bun this morning, having decided quite sensibly that it was best not to antagonise the officers interviewing him any more than was absolutely necessary.

  He had a fair amount of ground to make up.

  He had been pleasant enough since arriving. He had declined the offer of legal representation and smirked his way through the caution while Dipak Chall had delivered it. He folded his arms and smirked some more while they waited for the long tone on the recorder to finish, for Kitson to take him through the formalities.

  When she had finished, she said, ‘I just want to talk to you about some of the things our computer forensics team discovered. What’s been going on with your system.’

  Ablett nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘You were aware that the system had been hacked, you told us that a few days ago, but did you know that the hackers gained access that went way beyond a few hard-core porn shots?’

  ‘You mean a dummy hack?’

  ‘If you’re talking about a hack that looks like one thing but is actually something rather more insidious, that’s exactly what I mean.’ Kitson looked at him. ‘You still think it was kids, Mr Ablett?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Doing it because they can?’

  ‘Or to see if they can.’

  ‘Whoever hacked into the Made In Heaven system gained access to pretty much everything. All the databases, all the privileges, left no trace of his IP address.’

  ‘Well… so, maybe not fourteen-year-olds, but people who are younger than we are, probably. Like that lad who sussed out the ransom-ware attack last year. WannaCry? The one on the NHS?’ The smirk grew a little more pronounced. ‘They gave him a job in cyber security.’

  ‘Right, because he stopped a hack. I’m talking about someone who gained co
nfidential information on all your agency’s clients, then targeted them individually.’

  ‘Spear phishing.’ He nodded. ‘When you tailor a hack to someone specific.’

  ‘You certainly seem to know all about it,’ Chall said.

  ‘I work with computers,’ Ablett said. ‘You pick this stuff up.’

  ‘Picked up enough so that you could do it yourself?’

  ‘Just because I know what things are called —’

  ‘So, you’ve never done it?’

  ‘What, like this?’

  ‘Have you ever hacked into anyone’s computer, Mr Ablett? Have you ever gone “spear phishing”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Really?’

  Kitson glanced down at a sheet of paper on the table. ‘That’s not what Judith Holloway thinks…’

  Ablett sat back and sighed. ‘What the hell are you talking to her for? She’s completely…’ He rolled his eyes and tapped a finger against the side of his head.

  ‘When Miss Holloway went to the police eight months ago, when she first went to the police, she alleged that you had somehow accessed her private emails and text messages.’

  Ablett shook his head.

  ‘She claimed that, by doing that, you were able to find out where she was going and who she was seeing. That you kept turning up out of the blue, that on a number of occasions she saw you watching her. Enough times to convince her that you must have been spying on her remotely.’

  ‘Yeah, well whatever she claimed, there obviously wasn’t any evidence, was there? Else the police would have arrested me. And they didn’t.’

  Chall turned some pages. ‘Actually, Miss Holloway’s allegations alone would have been grounds to arrest you, but for some reason she declined to press charges.’

  ‘There you go, then.’

  ‘An officer who spoke to her back then thought that might have been because she was scared. What do you think about that?’

  ‘Look, I told you, she’s mental. She gets an idea in her head and then the next day she’s off on something else. Bipolar, I reckon.’

  Kitson nodded, as if that was a perfectly reasonable diagnosis. ‘Are you a stalker, Mr Ablett?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘So, you weren’t stalking Judith Holloway?’

  ‘I just said, didn’t I?’

  ‘So, what was the nature of your relationship?’

  ‘There wasn’t one. Yeah, I fancied her, so I asked her out. We went for a drink a couple of times and that was it.’

  ‘She wasn’t interested?’

  ‘Well, it was… mutual, actually. It wasn’t really going anywhere, so…’

  ‘Yet for weeks afterwards you somehow managed to be at the same places she was at the same times. In shops and bars and restaurants. On several occasions she saw you on the other side of the road when she left work.’

  ‘She’s paranoid.’

  ‘She took pictures on her phone.’

  Ablett shrugged. ‘Yeah, maybe I bumped into her a couple of times. Rugby’s not a very big place, not the centre, anyway. I’m always running into friends or whatever.’

  ‘Have you run into Miss Holloway lately?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s probably a good thing,’ Chall said. ‘Because according to the report written at the time, you were told in no uncertain terms that if she made another complaint, you’d be arrested anyway. Whether she wanted to bring charges or not.’

  Ablett said nothing. He tossed his hair back, ran stubby fingers through it.

  ‘Tell me about Sandra Cook,’ Kitson said.

  ‘What about her?’

  They were doing a little fishing of their own now, but a few days before, Thorne had sensed something between Ablett and the woman who looked after Made In Heaven’s financial affairs, so Kitson decided it was well worth a try.

  ‘How would you describe the nature of your relationship with her?’

  ‘I work with her.’

  ‘Nothing else?’ The way Ablett shifted in his seat told Kitson that Thorne’s instinct had been spot on.

  ‘We’ve been out once or twice, that’s all.’

  ‘Been out?’

  ‘Yeah. The pub, the pictures.’

  ‘Are you and Miss Cook having a sexual relationship?’

  Ablett returned Kitson’s stare. ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘And have you ever run into her, accidentally? What with Rugby being such a small place? Ever bumped into her at the shops or when she’s been out with friends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does she know about your… history with Judith Holloway?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The stalking, the spying.’

  ‘I told you —’

  ‘Because she probably wouldn’t be too impressed, would she? I reckon that might scupper your plan a bit.’

  Ablett shifted again, pushed his chair away from the table. ‘You said I was free to go at any time, right?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Chall said. ‘Before you shoot off, though, could you tell us what you were doing on Friday, April the nineteenth?’

  ‘What?’ Ablett puffed out his cheeks, shook his head slowly, like he was trying to remember. ‘I’d need to check my diary.’

  Kitson looked down at her notes. ‘And on June the twenty-second, October the ninth and thirtieth, and… December the twenty-eighth last year?’

  ‘How am I supposed to remember that far back?’

  Kitson smiled. ‘I bet you’re one of those really organised people who has a diary on your phone. Syncs up with your computer, all that.’

  Ablett blinked.

  ‘Easier to get it out of the way now,’ Chall said. ‘Just have a quick look, so we can tick all our boxes, and off you go.’

  Ablett was breathing noisily through his mouth as he reached into the pocket of his soft leather jacket.

  Finally, that smirk had disappeared.

  FIFTY

  The woman shrugged. She’d been doing a lot of shrugging.

  ‘Really?’ Thorne looked at her. ‘You make it sound like your husband just nipped out to pick up a pint of milk one day and never came back.’

  Tracey Goode shrugged again. ‘What it felt like.’

  It was a small house behind Walthamstow station. ‘Cosy’ is how an estate agent might have described it, though ‘poky’ was the word that had sprung to Thorne’s mind when he and Tanner had walked in. They had glimpsed a postage-stamp patio from the narrow hallway and the front room was furnished with a leather three-piece and widescreen TV that barely left space to move.

  Tracey Goode was barefoot, her legs folded beneath her on one of the huge armchairs. She had short, peroxide-blonde hair and piercings that Phil Hendricks would have been proud of. She swigged an energy drink from a plastic bottle and pulled at the neck of a sweatshirt that was far too big for her.

  ‘So, he just went to work,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Well, that’s what I thought.’ Tracey unfolded one leg and stretched it to rub her foot against the large dog that was lying next to her chair. ‘Never got there, though. At the time, I thought he’d just gone on a bender for a day or two, something like that. I mean, it’s not like he was loving going to work or anything. His probation officer encouraged him to take the job, but Aiden couldn’t stand it. A cleaner, I mean, really? He was better than that.’

  ‘Better how?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘He had qualifications.’

  ‘You mean the ones he picked up in prison? The computer stuff?’

  Tracey nodded. ‘He had a couple of O-levels, too. Geography and something else. Too qualified to be pushing a mop around, anyway.’

  ‘He’d done that before, had he?’ Tanner smiled at her. ‘Gone on a bender?’

  ‘A couple of times, yeah. I mean, you can go a bit funny inside, can’t you? You need to let your hair down now and again.’

  Thorne wanted to point out that Aiden Goode had been a bit ‘funny’ before he’d gone to prison. Inst
ead he just nodded and said, ‘So… when he didn’t come back, when you realised he wasn’t just away somewhere letting off steam, what did you do?’

  ‘I called the police.’ Another shrug. ‘What you do, isn’t it?’

  Thorne said that it was.

  ‘Didn’t take it seriously, mind you.’

  Thorne nodded, as if he was sorry, but he didn’t feel very much like apologising on behalf of his colleagues, for whom a forty-two-year-old ex-con walking out on his wife had not been a priority. ‘Where did you think he’d gone? When he didn’t come back?’

  ‘Not a clue,’ Tracey said. ‘But that was when I started to wonder if there was something else going on. Because he’d taken things.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Well, not like his passport, nothing like that. But a bag of clothes, a few bits and pieces. It took me a few days to even realise they were missing. I didn’t know he’d taken anything with him, because I was still in bed when he left that morning.’

  ‘And this was what… a year or so ago?’

  ‘Yeah, almost exactly.’

  ‘And you’ve not heard from your husband since then?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘No phone calls, letters, nothing?’

  ‘I said, didn’t I?’ She didn’t raise her voice, but the icy smile spoke volumes. She swigged from her bottle. ‘He just buggered off.’

  ‘Have you spoken to any of his friends?’ Tanner asked. ‘See if they’ve heard anything?’

  ‘Well, Aiden’s friends weren’t really my friends.’ The smile was slightly less glacial. ‘He liked to spend time with his mates on his own. I think most blokes do, don’t they?’

  ‘Depends on the bloke,’ Thorne said.

  Tanner glanced down at the notebook that was open on her knees. She read out three names.

  ‘Yeah, them,’ Tracey said. ‘You should talk to them.’

  ‘We have,’ Thorne said. The men Aiden Goode was known to have associated with in the months between his release from prison and the time he disappeared. Pubs, clubs, football matches, a boys’ trip to Thailand. All three claimed that they had not spoken to Aiden Goode for over a year and denied any knowledge of his whereabouts.