The Killing Habit

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Well, it’s simple enough from where I’m standing. You go and see your sister, or you talk to her on the phone. She can’t stop herself needling you by saying something bitchy about me and you leap to my defence.’ He tried to smile, but it wasn’t altogether successful. ‘At least I hope you do… but then you come back and, for whatever reason, I get it in the neck.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘It’s what happens. You talk to Jenny and I know there’s a row coming. I mean, to be fair, you probably don’t even know you’re doing it.’

  ‘Why would I be pissed off at you?’

  ‘I don’t know… maybe because a bit of you thinks she’s right. I mean, I’m older, we don’t agree about music or football, I’m a miserable sod.’

  Helen smiled, wobbly. ‘I don’t need my sister to tell me any of that.’

  ‘Maybe because I’m not Paul.’

  Helen looked away again, the smile slipping.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that.’ He reached across and lifted her hand. ‘Look, I’ve got no idea why it happens, why your sister keeps making things difficult, if she’s doing it deliberately. But you know… things aren’t great, are they?’

  They said nothing for a minute or so after that; stock-still watching the muted TV, until Helen stood up and moved across to the kitchen. She made herself tea, wiping surfaces that were already clean as she waited for the kettle to boil. Then she said, ‘I’m going to bed.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’m knackered.’

  ‘OK.’

  She stopped at the door and turned, cradling her mug. She said, ‘I do know I’m doing it. What you said.’

  Thorne was already looking at his phone again.

  Tanner rarely dreamed of her murdered partner.

  She was grateful for that small mercy, because afterwards, she remembered each image and word spoken; the details pin-sharp, as though from a movie she had just watched. She remembered every feeling too, the fierce stabs and deadening punches of them. Waves sweeping in suddenly to crash over her again whenever the memory was recalled, unbidden. In a meeting, in a car, during some trivial conversation at work; a familiar phrase or a song on the radio. Sadness, most often – wet and heavy, until she was sodden with it – a hot rush of elation once or twice, but always anger.

  Perhaps it was no kind of mercy at all.

  She had got home just after nine o’clock, read through the report she had made on the interview with Tracey Goode, then double-checked the applications for various forms of surveillance which would hopefully get signed off the following day. She had talked to the SIO on the Murder Investigation team at Edmonton and been told they were wading through treacle and that no more useful evidence on the Kieran Sykes shooting had come in. Not even any that wasn’t useful. She had conferred by phone with the duty officer at Long Barrow Manor and received an update on Andrew Evans’s progress, then immediately put an Airwave call through and spoken directly to the officers on the overnight shift outside Evans’s house, to check that all was well.

  She had fed the cat, thrown away the junk mail and microwaved a baked potato for herself.

  She had taken off her make-up while glancing through the evening paper.

  After making sure that front and back doors were locked, she had showered and got into bed, then she had fallen asleep within minutes and stepped out into the garden to meet Susan.

  Her partner was waiting on the patio in the late afternoon sunshine, relaxing on a chair. One of a set she’d spent a weekend putting together after they’d carted them home from the garden centre. Swearing and sweating, while Tanner had chipped in with unhelpful suggestions and stared at a page of barely legible instructions that might just as well have been written in Chinese. Susan sat there now and swigged from a bottle, the top half of her face in shadow, her hands shielding her eyes from the glare.

  Susan swallowed and smiled. She said, ‘Come on, love, it’s just a couple of beers, don’t make a fuss.’ The smile became a chuckle. ‘Why don’t you have one… stop being so proper and relax for a bloody change? It can’t hurt, can it?’

  The cat had been asleep on her side at Susan’s feet, but now she opened her eyes and rose up slowly to arch her back before hissing her agreement. Just a hiss, but Tanner knew exactly what the cat was saying.

  Life’s too short.

  Let yourself go.

  You’ll wish you had…

  Tanner wanted to, would have loved to take the ice-cold bottle that Susan was proffering, but then she looked at all the other bottles; hundreds of them, emptied and scattered around in carefully laid out arrangements or swinging gently from the branches of a tree. The soft clink as one bottle kissed another.

  The brightly coloured flower placed in each one.

  Their garden of petals and glass.

  Then Susan shook her head and Tanner raised her face up to see the sky bruise, then blacken, and the rain hissed louder than any number of angry cats as it fell. When Tanner looked back, the cat was splayed out among the broken bottles and crushed blooms. Its head and tail were missing, its fur matted and sodden, the blood pooling on one side, running slowly away on the other, tracing the cracks between the concrete slabs. Susan’s hair was plastered to her scalp, and when she removed her hands from her eyes, Tanner saw the ragged holes where her eyes had been before they were burned out. Bleached black…

  She said, ‘Just a beer. For Christ’s sake, Nic.’

  She leaned down blindly, making noises with her mouth and calling the cat —

  Tanner lifted her head fast from the sopping pillow and reached for the phone on her bedside table. It was in her hand as the alert sounded again, a repeat of the tone that had woken her, that told her she’d been sent a text message.

  It was from Thorne.

  All three targets, Hull, Bournemouth, Northampton, safely back at home addresses. Properties being monitored, no sign of suspect. Hate the fact that I’m more disappointed than relieved.

  Hate this bloody job.

  TT

  FIFTY-FOUR

  It was Thorne’s worst nightmare.

  An overly air-freshened conference room at New Scotland Yard; PowerPoint and power games and several people he did not know sitting around the table, quietly sipping their mineral water and making notes with their nice, sharp, Met Police pencils. Some he knew by reputation, but in most cases that was more than enough. A deputy assistant commissioner whose ascent through the ranks had been as quick as the temper she struggled to hold in check. An assistant chief constable who liked to pretend he was one of the lads when he was not cutting their overtime or making them redundant. A media liaison officer who nodded a lot and seemed welded to her iPad, studying Thorne as though trying to work out how much weight he would need to lose before he would look good on camera.

  Whether Botox might be a good idea.

  Fulton was there too, of course, his head as highly polished as the furniture, and at the far end of the table, perched nice and close to the DAC and looking as if he’d eaten several raw lemons for breakfast, Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond seemed as keen as usual to piss on Thorne’s chips. On anyone’s chips. He was someone Thorne had found himself pitted against several times in the past, who had probably left the greasy pole a damn sight greasier by the time he’d scrambled to the top of it.

  Looking at them, Thorne found it hard to believe that any of these people had ever been coppers in the true sense of the word; that any of them had ever been like him.

  Felt the same things.

  Hurt the same way.

  ‘You’re asking a great deal.’ The PowerPoint presentation at an end, Jesmond watched as the media liaison officer stood and raised the blinds to let in the tepid, mid-morning light. He smiled, but the eyes stayed as dead as always. Like a stuffed fish.

  Thorne smiled back, because he had to. It made him want to brush his teeth or at the very least gargle with something.

  ‘What we’re suggesting will cert
ainly require a good deal of effort, yes,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Money and resources. But I trust my team when they tell me it’s necessary and I agree with everything DI Thorne laid out in the presentation.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ Jesmond said.

  Thorne was pleased to have Brigstocke in there with him banging the drum and having Nicola Tanner sitting alongside him could only strengthen his pitch. The support of a good copper with a spotless reputation would surely count for something.

  Jesmond lifted the folder in front of him as though the weight of it might somehow be significant; the visual presentation printed out as a set of operational notes for each attendee. A clutch of laminated pages, meticulously classified and fully indexed.

  Operational aims

  Human resources

  Technical support requirements

  Health and safety concerns…

  ‘It’s very impressive.’ Jesmond nodded towards Thorne, but could not resist a knowing glance at Tanner, clearly well aware which one of them had put everything together. ‘But bearing in mind what you’re asking, it needs to be. The question remains, though, is it impressive enough?’

  ‘I’m not trying to impress anyone,’ Thorne said.

  Brigstocke shot Thorne a look before he could continue; a reminder of what he’d told him on their way in. A simple piece of advice he must surely have known was falling on deaf ears.

  Let me do the talking.

  Jesmond laid the folder down and turned to Fulton. ‘Where are you on this, Simon?’

  Fulton looked like a rabbit trapped in headlights. ‘Sir?’

  ‘Well, seeing as this started off as your investigation, we’d be interested to get your take on these suggestions. On moving the operation forward in this… new direction. I mean, we do appreciate we’re a long way past a few dead cats.’

  Thorne could only marvel at a capacity for callous understatement as unlimited as the man’s ineptitude. He sat back hard and waited, guessing that he’d get pretty decent odds on Uncle Fester taking any position beyond playing it safe, that the man from Kentish Town stepped out of his comfort zone about as often as he had a haircut.

  ‘Well, I can certainly see some merit in what’s being proposed,’ Fulton said. ‘And obviously I applaud the initiative.’ He glanced towards Thorne and Tanner. ‘The ambition. That said, we should also consider the ramifications were this not to prove a fruitful course of action.’ He nodded towards the media liaison officer opposite him. ‘If a failure like that were to come out… well, I’m not sure it would play awfully well in the press.’

  Jesmond hummed his approval as the media liaison officer scribbled something.

  Thorne mentally collected his meagre winnings, fists clenching in his lap as he wondered just how strong this fence that everybody seemed content to sit on could possibly be. When he raised his head and saw the DAC staring at him, he did his best to summon an expression of confidence and readiness, though he knew very well – because he had been told it often enough – that it almost certainly appeared more cocky than confident; as if the only thing he was ready for was a scrap.

  Deputy Assistant Commissioner Lucinda Abbott said, ‘DI Thorne… I’m keen to hear why you’re unhappy with the investigation as it stands.’

  ‘Not unhappy —’

  ‘As I understand it, the monitoring of couples meeting through this dating website was done at your instigation. There had been a suggestion from DCI Brigstocke to shut the website down altogether.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘I was eventually persuaded that to do so would have been a mistake,’ Brigstocke said. ‘That provided all necessary steps were taken to ensure public protection, this was the right course of action.’

  ‘OK,’ Abbott said.

  Thorne nodded, aware that the pints owed to his boss were racking up. ‘I still believe we did the right thing, but the simple fact is, we’re not seeing any results. Yes, we’re keeping people safe, but it’s not getting us any closer to an arrest. We’ve now had two full weeks… two Fridays, two Saturdays and all that’s happened is that a few couples have had some nice dinners and a few coppers have clocked up some decent overtime. Meanwhile there’s still no trace of our main suspect. The only thing we’ve discovered through covert surveillance on Aiden Goode’s wife is that she’s shagging somebody else and the media stories we’ve planted haven’t got us anywhere.’

  Jesmond cleared his throat. ‘Unless I’ve missed something, there’s still no concrete evidence to suggest that Aiden Goode is the man responsible for these murders.’

  ‘As I said, he’s our main suspect.’

  ‘Your only suspect.’

  ‘That’s why he’s the main one.’

  Jesmond ignored the sarcasm. ‘Has it occurred to you that Aiden Goode might be dead?’

  ‘It’s occurred to me that he might want us to think he’s dead.’

  Assistant Chief Constable Allan Shand finally spoke up. ‘That has to be a possibility, Trevor.’

  Thorne reckoned he now owed the ACC a drink, too. ‘We need to make things a bit easier for him,’ he said. ‘For Goode. We’ve got a computer forensics team monitoring the Made In Heaven website twenty-four hours a day, and intelligence from them makes it very clear that it’s still being accessed illegally on a regular basis. Obviously, whoever’s doing it is way too smart to leave any usable trace, any online fingerprint or whatever, but we’ve got concrete evidence that he’s looking.’ He paused, to let that sink in. ‘Now we need to put a victim in his lap, instead of wasting our time while he finds one for himself that we can’t protect. That’s why we need to change things up, and why we’re basing this proposal on solid information from the geographical profiler that Detective Superintendent Fulton brought in.’

  Seeing only blank faces, Thorne decided on an approach that might hit closer to home.

  ‘Aside from anything else, just doing what we’re doing now… if you’ll excuse the language, ma’am… we’re just spunking away money and not seeing any return.’ He looked at Abbott, well aware that, if the stories he’d heard were true, she routinely used language that would upset a docker with Tourette’s. Aware, too, that if he got what he wanted and his plan proved to be less than ‘fruitful’, he would almost certainly find himself on the receiving end of it.

  ‘I appreciate your concern for our budget,’ Abbott said. ‘Or rather I would, if what you were proposing wasn’t going to cost three times as much.’

  ‘At least,’ Jesmond said. ‘It’s a hell of a lot to put together.’

  ‘We’re trying to be proactive,’ Tanner said.

  Thorne turned to look at Nicola, relieved and grateful that she’d finally stepped into the fray. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?’ Tanner looked from Abbott to Jesmond to Shand. ‘I get memos about it every other week. I’ve been to the seminars.’

  Thorne nodded enthusiastically, though he’d rather have stuck needles in his eyes than read official memos or ponce around on beanbags, and watched Russell Brigstocke make a Herculean effort to keep the smile from his face.

  ‘Proactive is good.’ The MLO smiled and looked towards the three senior officers. ‘All our data suggests that the public responds very positively to proactive operations.’

  Shand nodded. ‘Modern policing always plays well.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we’re trying to do,’ Tanner said.

  Thorne was pleased to see that, Jesmond aside, reactions around the table were suddenly looking rather more positive, even if the very concept of ‘modern policing’ was one that made him want to punch something. It was a phrase that tripped easily off the tongues of top brass or media types, but he knew that, in terms of the Job, day to day, it meant less than nothing. Yes, there were new approaches to investigation that harnessed cutting edge scientific or psychological techniques. Things had advanced in terms of the force’s approach to civil liberties and tackling some of the more unpleasan
t crimes that reflected unwelcome changes in society.

  But Thorne also knew that buried at the back of a drawer in his office was a list of rules dating back over a century regarding proper conduct at formal detectives’ ‘luncheons’ that were still enforced today. What to wear, how to address senior officers, the correct implementation of ‘fagging’. He had a similar list regarding the schoolyard punishments to be meted out to newbies in uniform, should they use the Q-word if a shift was less busy than expected or fail to make the sergeant his tea when required. All the forensics in the world and any number of progressive amendments to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act could not disguise the fact that plenty of coppers carried on as though they still had wooden truncheons while blue lamps burned outside police stations.

  ‘I think we probably have enough information to be going on with,’ Abbott said.

  ‘More than enough,’ Jesmond added.

  ‘I want to thank everyone for coming this morning.’ She laid a hand flat on top of her folder, patted it gently. ‘I can promise you we’ll weigh everything up very carefully before we make our decision.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Thorne said. ‘But can you try to do that as quickly as you can?’

  There was just a flash of the temper Thorne had heard so much about, but it was quickly extinguished by an icy smile. ‘We’ll try not to keep you waiting, DI Thorne.’

  After a few seconds of awkward silence, Thorne, Tanner and Brigstocke pushed their chairs away from the table and stood up.

  ‘Actually, Russell,’ Abbott said, ‘would you mind staying on for a few minutes?’

  The DCI dropped somewhat reluctantly back into his chair as Tanner and Thorne gathered up their belongings.

  ‘Just a couple more things to talk through.’

  Turning at the door to see Jesmond smiling at him, those stuffed fish eyes, Thorne felt his stomach turn over. He smiled back, and wondered just how much air freshener would be needed if he were to chuck up his chips on the spot.

  While Tanner used the Ladies, Thorne pushed out through the revolving doors and was surprised to see Christine Treasure leaning against a wall, smoking. She smiled as Thorne approached, then saw the question on his face, right before she gleefully blew smoke into it.