The Killing Habit

by Mark Billingham

  ‘I volunteered to drive Uncle Fester,’ she said.

  ‘Since when do you volunteer for anything?’

  ‘When I want to find out what’s going on and the boss won’t tell me.’ She grinned and punched Thorne on the arm. ‘You will, though.’

  His arm had almost stopped hurting by the time he’d told her.

  ‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘Bold.’

  ‘You know me.’

  ‘Yeah well, there’s a thin line between bold and mental.’ She flicked her butt away. ‘Think they’ll go for it?’

  ‘God knows. The only thing with my name on that Jesmond would approve is a resignation letter, but I couldn’t tell you which way the others are likely to jump.’

  ‘Well, if they do, I’d be happy to get involved.’

  Thorne laughed. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Reckon you could pull it off?’

  Treasure’s eyebrows went into full-on Groucho mode. ‘Oh, I’m not sure I’d want to go that far. Certainly not on a first date. To be honest, pulling anything isn’t really my area of expertise.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Pushing, on the other hand. Thrusting…’

  ‘Well, thanks for the offer, anyway.’ Thorne was moving back towards the entrance. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’

  ‘Got my present, yet?’

  ‘What?’

  She shouted after him. ‘Nuptials, mate. I want something decent.’

  ‘I’m saving up.’

  Walking into the Gents, Thorne discovered Brigstocke washing his hands.

  ‘What was all that about, then?’

  Brigstocke shook water from his hands then stepped across and spoke above the roar of the dryer. ‘Nothing much. They just wanted to know what I thought.’

  ‘You already told them what you thought.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Brigstocke turned to look at him. ‘You’re welcome, by the way.’

  Thorne was staring at himself in the mirror. Hendricks, Helen and the rest were right: confident did look like cocky. ‘I owe you one.’

  ‘One?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I want to see that credit card behind the bar next time we’re in the Oak.’

  ‘That might get you half a lager, if you’re lucky,’ Thorne said.

  ‘They wanted to be sure I was completely on board with it,’ Brigstocke said. ‘That’s all. That I wasn’t just saying I thought it was a good idea because I was being loyal to my team.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I lied.’ The dryer stopped. ‘I told them I really thought it was a good idea.’

  ‘Come on, Russell —’

  ‘Look, it’s not a shit idea.’

  ‘Praise indeed,’ Thorne said.

  Brigstocke opened the door and took one step out. ‘Probably what your friend Dr Perera would call counter-intuitive.’

  ‘I think “desperate” is closer to it.’

  A few minutes later, Thorne followed his boss out and saw Tanner waiting in the lobby. The lift doors opened as he reached her and they watched Jesmond and Shand step out together. Deep in conversation, the two senior officers did not look at them as they passed.

  ‘Nice to see the Chuckle Brothers are still working,’ Thorne said. He watched as they pushed through the revolving doors, to where cars were doubtless waiting to ferry them back to their offices. Or crypts.

  ‘I just met your mate Treasure,’ Tanner said.

  Thorne stared at her, eager to hear and gutted to have missed the inevitable fireworks. ‘And…?’

  ‘She’s certainly full-on.’

  ‘One way of putting it.’

  ‘She’s great, though, isn’t she?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She invited me to her wedding. Ashamed to say it’ll be my first lesbian one. You had any thoughts about presents?’

  Thorne was stunned. He shook his head, spluttering his disbelief, his annoyance at having been so wrong about what would happen when these two very different women confronted one another. ‘But that’s like… matter and anti-matter, or something. How the hell can you… like her? I mean, yeah she’s great… you know, in small doses, but I’d never have thought you and her would…’ He gave up, continuing to shake his head as the two of them drifted towards the exit.

  ‘So, how d’you think it went up there?’ Tanner asked.

  Thorne grunted.

  ‘I thought we made a pretty decent job of it. Yes, Jesmond’s obviously a twat and he doesn’t like you much, but I think we’re in with a shout.’ She stopped at the doors. ‘Tom?’

  Tanner and Treasure. Jesmond and Shand.

  Aiden Goode…

  He’d always thought he was good at this stuff, that it was what made him a decent copper. Half-decent. Not instinct, none of that feel-it-in-your-water rubbish, just… experience. But as far as reading people went, reading situations, Thorne was beginning to feel positively illiterate.

  ‘You’re asking the wrong person,’ he said. ‘Right now, it feels like I couldn’t pick the winner in a one horse race.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Four days after the meeting at Scotland Yard, and three since Thorne’s plan had been given operational clearance, Dipak Chall waved Tanner across to his desk. It was the first time she’d seen the DS smiling since she’d tasked him with looking into sales of miniature mobiles over a fortnight earlier. The job satisfaction was clearly every bit as diminutive as the phones themselves.

  ‘Got something?’

  ‘Something,’ he said. ‘Maybe…’

  Chall began scrolling through screenshots as Tanner moved a chair from an adjacent desk and sat down next to him. ‘So, I’ve been talking to people selling these bloody things. Trying to, anyway, because a lot of them are in China or the Middle East and it’s a nightmare just trying to get contact numbers.’

  Tanner looked at the photos: phones even smaller than the ones Chall had first shown her. Handsets pictured alongside coins or paperclips. Chall stopped at one that was shown perched on top of someone’s finger, to illustrate that the finger was bigger than the phone.

  ‘Smaller than a disposable lighter,’ Chall said.

  ‘How would you even press the buttons?’ Tanner asked.

  Chall shrugged. ‘Use a matchstick or something? Anyway, I finally tracked down a seller who sold twenty-five of these last week.’ He called up another screenshot, highlighted the seller’s ID and turned to Tanner. ‘To the same person.’

  ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a name and address?’

  He shook his head, searched and clicked. ‘No way round Data Protection with this stuff, but I’ve got the name they use online.’

  Tanner leaned in closer to see the online profile of the buyer.

  ScreenSiren (63 *****)

  Feedback 98% Positive

  Lives in: Hastings. UK

  ‘I managed to access her purchase history,’ Chall said. ‘Presuming it is a her… which tells me that not only did she buy the same number of handsets a few months ago, but a few days before she bought this latest batch, she also splashed out on a multipack of these.’ He clicked and bought up another screenshot, shrank it and set it next to the buyer’s details.

  100ml Clear Plastic Spray Bottle/Atomizer

  Tanner was smiling as she read the description. ‘“Uniform mist spray”… very nice. “Ideal for water, mouthwash or perfume.”’

  Chall nodded. ‘Yeah, and probably comes in pretty handy if you, I don’t know, wanted to spray liquid Spice on to a letter from home or a kid’s drawing.’

  Tanner reached across and dropped a hand on to Chall’s shoulder as she went back to the buyer’s profile.

  ‘Hastings,’ she said.

  ‘The seaside,’ Chall said.

  Thorne was praying for death when Tanner knocked.

  He was ten minutes into a conversation with a technician from the computer team, having been out of his depth for all but the first few moments,
and the update from the operation’s comms manager half an hour before had been no less difficult to follow. Like trying to understand someone talking in a foreign language on a badly tuned radio. He tried his best to take in everything he was now being told about proxy servers, VPNs and disposable accounts. He grunted politely once in a while, only because he had nothing more useful to offer, but the headache had begun to build well before this second one-sided conversation had even started.

  He said, ‘Yes?’ and enthusiastically beckoned Tanner in when she put her head round the door. He rolled his eyes then closed them as the IT expert continued his verbal download.

  Guerrilla Mail, profile generators, online reputation management.

  Thorne knew how important this stuff was, of course. He understood that the groundwork currently being done by the techies was vital to the operation’s success, and he was well aware that the communications network in use on the day would be far more complicated than anything he was used to, but still.

  He just wanted to tell them all to shut up, to stop talking gibberish at him for a second or two, so that he could ask the only real question to which he needed an answer.

  When?

  ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ That’s what Brigstocke had said, quiet and unsmiling, when news of the operation’s approval had come through three days before. ‘All I’m saying, Tom.’ He had been talking about possibilities far more unpleasant than the tedium of technical briefings, obviously, but still, Thorne could only hope that this was as bad as it was going to get.

  A couple of aspirin would get rid of the headache.

  He held up a hand to let Tanner know he was almost done.

  He was trying to think positively, to be anything but the glass-half-empty doom-monger Phil Hendricks often accused him of being. This was his stupid idea, after all. Even so, these last few days he’d found it hard to shake off the memory of Trevor Jesmond’s nauseating smile in that meeting room, or that moment of fury etched on the face of the Deputy Assistant Commissioner.

  ‘Listen, something’s come up,’ he said. ‘Can you put all of this in an email?’ As the man-child on the other end of the phone was telling him that wouldn’t be a problem, even before the promised email pinged into his inbox a matter of seconds later, Thorne was regretting it; knowing that reading this stuff would be even more tortuous than listening to it.

  ‘I wish you were doing this,’ Thorne said, when he’d finally hung up. ‘Or translating it, at least.’

  ‘Like I haven’t got enough to do,’ Tanner said. ‘I am still working another major inquiry, you know. Those two murders, remember?’

  Thorne rubbed at his temples. It felt only as though he were massaging the pain deeper into his skull. ‘Yeah, sorry. You don’t need to remind me that I’ve not been a lot of help.’

  ‘You sure? Because I’m happy to.’ Tanner saw the pained expression on Thorne’s face. ‘It’s fine. I know you’ve been up against it.’

  He wasn’t going to argue. Even before the kick-bollock-scramble that was now underway, the hunt for Aiden Goode had been full-on, though it had yielded little in the way of results. Almost a fortnight’s covert surveillance on Tracey Goode had revealed nothing beyond the fact that the F1 magazine Thorne had spotted belonged to one of her husband’s mates, who was clearly providing services that her Rabbit was not capable of. The carefully placed stories in newspapers and on TV had not prompted any of Goode’s friends and associates to make contact with him, even discounting the one who might be reluctant because he was currently ‘comforting’ the man’s wife.

  A lot of effort, and expense, and they were still nowhere.

  ‘Actually, I think we might have had a break,’ Tanner said. ‘On the Jandali and Sykes murders.’

  ‘Right.’

  Adnan Jandali…

  Thorne was suddenly struck hard by the realisation that, in recent weeks, it was not a name that had passed through his mind as often as it probably should. While Tanner – with a modicum of help from Thorne – had been preoccupied with arrangements for Andrew Evans and finding the woman who had worked as a go-between for the gang responsible for framing him, the first victim himself had perhaps got a little… lost in the shuffle. He remembered the stirring speech he’d made in front of the team after the Alice Matthews murder. Yes, he had ‘turned it on’ a bit for the troops, pointing at pictures and urging them to remember who they were working for, but those words had come from somewhere.

  He had felt it.

  He understood that Tanner wanted to get Andrew Evans back to his family, that she desperately wanted to find the woman who had supplied him with drugs in prison. But he also knew she felt equally passionate about catching the man who had shot a helpless refugee to death on his doorstep in broad daylight. That she wanted justice for Adnan Jandali, and for two boys who were now orphans. He knew how badly she wanted it, and that she would want to give Kieran Sykes’s family their day in court, too.

  ‘You remember I asked Dipak to do a spot of online shopping?’

  Thorne pretended that he did, even though it actually took him a few seconds. The headache seemed to ease a little as he listened, and when Tanner had finished telling him what Chall had discovered, and what she was planning to do with the information, he said, ‘Count me in.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing useful I can do while they’re setting all this up, is there? Spare prick, really. This technical stuff does my head in, anyway.’

  ‘OK, then,’ Tanner said. ‘Get yourself a bucket and spade and we’ll see if we can make a day of it.’

  FIFTY-SIX

  Though Brigstocke had made sure that Thorne did not forget what was owed, this was the first time they’d managed to get together in the Oak since the plan they’d presented at Scotland Yard had been approved. It was time for Thorne to settle up. It promised to be a long and expensive evening, made even more irksome by a predictably interested onlooker, who had been unable to resist coming along to marvel at Thorne’s having to put his hand into his pocket.

  Repeatedly.

  ‘I might record it,’ Hendricks said, when he arrived. ‘Send it to one of them stupid shows on Channel 5. Weird Happenings or whatever. Great Unexplained Mysteries.’

  Thorne carried the beers across to the table as hands were rubbed gleefully together. It was clear from the look on his friend’s face that Hendricks was fully intent on enjoying himself.

  ‘Your life must be even more shallow and empty than I thought,’ Thorne said, laying down the glasses.

  ‘You can’t begin to imagine.’

  ‘You know, if you’re willing to come all the way up here just to ponce a couple of free drinks.’

  ‘More than a couple,’ Brigstocke said.

  The pathologist touched his glass to the DCI’s. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Why should I pay for you, anyway?’ Thorne asked.

  Hendricks mock-spluttered his first mouthful. ‘You serious? Years’ worth of favours, mate, years. If I was to cash them all in, we’d clear this place out of ale.’ He took another drink, said, ‘Tell you what, I’ll get a couple of bags of nuts in. How’s that?’

  For twenty minutes – and two pints each – or so, Hendricks held court with a fresh batch of dark yet hilarious work-related stories. A successfully suicidal vicar with a hitherto secret Prince Albert. A partially decomposed woman found after neighbours were alerted by the barking of a very well fed wire-haired dachshund. He finished with a story about a young man with mental heath issues, who had hit himself so much, and so violently, that the bruises had formed blood clots which had found their way to his lungs and suffocated him.

  ‘Jesus,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Couldn’t his family have done something?’

  ‘Probably.’ Hendricks’s lips curled slowly into a smile at the rim of his glass. ‘Still, no point anyone beating themselves up about it.’

  Thorne and Brigstocke laughed, as they had done a good deal since Hendricks had started
. Barring the occasional sarcastic comment, though, or the drawing of attention to an empty glass, neither had spoken much directly to the other. Thorne could not help thinking that, as much fun as they both seemed to be having, there was an awkwardness between him and his boss, a tension even. He guessed it was down to how and why the drinks had been earned in the first place.

  Their beautifully presented example of modern, proactive policing.

  After returning to the table with the third round, Thorne decided it was time to at least acknowledge the elephant in the room.

  He said, ‘There’s no guarantee we’ll crack this first time, Russell.’

  Brigstocke looked at him.

  ‘I’d be gobsmacked if we did, to be honest.’

  ‘The ACC quite specifically sanctioned a one-time operation.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Thorne said. ‘But surely she’d do it again.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it.’

  ‘She must think we’re in with a chance, at least.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter what she thinks if there isn’t the money.’ Brigstocke clocked the scorn washing across Thorne’s face. He set his glass down hard and leaned across the table. ‘Look, I know things like budgets don’t keep you awake at night, but I’ve seen the figures. It’s an arm and a leg, mate.’

  ‘He’s killed five women, Russell.’

  ‘I know how many women he’s killed, all right?’

  ‘Sorry —’

  ‘I’m the mug who helped you get this signed off, remember?’

  They drank in silence for half a minute.

  ‘So, what’s likely to happen if we don’t get a result first time?’

  The DCI downed what was left of his drink. ‘Well, off the top of my head… that pointless arsehole Jesmond gets to say “I told you so” and one of us had better start thinking about spending a bit more time with his family.’ He waggled his empty glass on the tabletop. ‘Oh, and it’s not going to be me.’