Death Message

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne shook his head slowly; frowning with concentration, trying to remember. ‘There were dogs on his wallpaper… brown on green. And he had a collection of cards out of packets of tea. Hundreds of the things, with old footballers and cricketers on them. Tom Finney and W.G. Grace. Me and this other copper were picking them off the carpet while we waited for the ambulance.’ He pulled up his legs, arranged the duvet around the two of them. ‘They smashed his face up pretty badly, broke his arm and two or three ribs. Could have been worse, I suppose, but he was in hospital for a couple of weeks.’

  He turned his eyes to Louise’s. She was waiting; knowing there had to be more.

  ‘Anyway, we got called back, a month after the break-in. I remember seeing that the address was the same and presuming the poor old sod had been done again, you know? As it was, his neighbours had phoned, and when we got there we had to pull him down off the balcony. He was just stood up there, terrified. Trying to summon up the courage to jump.

  ‘We got him down and made him a cup of tea, what have you, but he was all over the place. He hadn’t been able to sleep since the attack, wasn’t eating properly. The place stank. There was dog-shit all over the kitchen floor…

  ‘He was like a different bloke, Lou. Skinny and scared to death, and without a clue how he was supposed to carry on. What the point was in carrying on. He just stood there in his front room, clutching this old box with his cards in them, and he was ranting at me. Trying to shout, but his voice was… cracked, you know?’

  Thorne summoned half a smile. By now his own voice was no more than a whisper. ‘Wanted me to know that when he was younger he’d have sorted the little bastards out, no problem. “No fucking problem,” he said. He’d have defended himself, done what he had to, protected his home. Now he couldn’t do anything. Told me he was pathetic, because he wasn’t even man enough to top himself. On and on about how useless he was, how he wished they’d killed him. And all the time he was talking, he was smacking his walking stick against a tatty old armchair. Dust flying up each time he did it. Standing there, whacking this stick against the chair and crying like a baby.’

  ‘What happened to him?’ Louise asked.

  ‘He was put into a care home afterwards, as far as I know.’ He let out a long, slow breath. ‘Wouldn’t have thought he’d have lasted too long.’

  Louise inched closer. Pushed her head against Thorne’s shoulder.

  ‘I can’t even remember his fucking name,’ Thorne said.

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘Anything come up on Saturday I should know about?’ Brigstocke asked.

  ‘Not that I can think of,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Just the Kemal stuff, really.’

  ‘Nice to come back to some good news,’ Brigstocke said.

  Hakan Kemal had been arrested at his cousin’s house in the St Paul’s area of Bristol in the early hours of the morning and driven back to London overnight. While Thorne and Brigstocke were busy catching up, Yvonne Kitson was having first crack at her prime suspect in an interview room at Colindale station.

  ‘And how was your day off?’

  The questions weren’t getting any easier. ‘Typical bloody Sunday,’ Thorne said.

  He couldn’t recall a Monday morning when he’d been so pleased to get back to work, and even the grey sky that bore down on the city did little to dampen his enthusiasm. It was good to see Brigstocke back, too. It wasn’t clear if his problems had disappeared completely, but if they were still around, he seemed to be rising above them.

  The DCI was clumsily multitasking: breaking off from the conversation to sign memos; scribbling on assorted bits of paper; then firing off more questions and comments while he tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing. ‘Be even better if we got a break on the Brooks inquiry. Tell you the truth, that was the one I was expecting the result on.’

  ‘I still think you’ll get it.’

  ‘I sincerely bloody hope so. I’m just grateful he seems to have gone quiet for the time being. Maybe you’ve done something to upset him.’

  Thorne swallowed hard. ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lot more than those messages to go on, though.’

  Brigstocke scribbled again, sucked his teeth. ‘Nothing we took out of that flat is helping very much. Not helping us find him, at any rate. We’ve got plenty to put him away with if the time comes, but bugger all that’s telling us where he is.’

  ‘If we do put him away, where d’you think he’ll end up?’ Thorne wandered across to the small window. Brigstocke had a view only marginally less depressing than his own. ‘He’s got to have a decent case for diminished responsibility.’

  ‘It’s not going to be clear cut. He planned everything over a period of months, you know? It wasn’t like he just lost it suddenly.’

  ‘What happened to his family, though. When it happened…’

  ‘He killed a copper, don’t forget that.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not.’

  ‘Never goes down well with a jury.’

  ‘Skinner wasn’t exactly one of our brightest and best.’

  ‘Yes, well. The powers-that-be might be keen to play down that aspect of things ever so slightly.’

  ‘Jesus…’

  They talked for a few more minutes about other cases. The trial of the man accused of caving in his wife’s head with a Smirnoff bottle was well under way, and his defence team were pushing for manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The prosecution argued that such grounds were not constituted merely by discovering your wife was shagging her best friend’s husband seven ways from Sunday.

  Apparently, the smart money – Karim was running a book, and usually managed to turn a profit – was on the bloke getting away with murder and going down for the lesser charge.

  Makes sense, Thorne thought. He guessed that Marcus Brooks would not get quite such an easy ride when the time came.

  Nobody liked a slag, did they? Or a cop-killer.

  As Thorne was about to leave, Brigstocke said, ‘How did you enjoy the stint as DCI?’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Thorne said. ‘The power gives me a stiffy, and I’d like a bigger office. It’s just the responsibility and having to make decisions I’m not so keen on.’

  ‘Since when have you worried about making decisions?’

  ‘OK then, having to make good ones.’

  ‘You’re right about the responsibility, though…’

  Thorne hovered in the doorway, sensing there was more to come.

  ‘I should have told you what was going on with the DPS,’ Brigstocke said.

  ‘No problem. And you don’t have to tell me now.’

  ‘It’s fine, it’s sorted, more or less.’ Brigstocke took off his glasses and pushed his paperwork away from him. ‘Basically, another officer had one too many in The Oak a few months back and made “inappropriate remarks” to a female member of staff.’

  Thorne nodded. He didn’t need to be told who they were talking about.

  ‘I was there when these remarks were made, sitting at the same table. I’d probably had one too many myself, if I’m honest, but the fact remains that because I didn’t say anything to this other officer at the time, because I was negligent, I’m equally responsible, apparently.’

  ‘But now they’ve decided to drop it?’

  ‘Thank fuck. Stays on my record, though.’

  ‘What about Andy Stone?’

  Brigstocke smiled. ‘We don’t know yet.’

  Thorne leaned back against the door jamb, marvelling at the different ways people found to waste time and money. Such incidents raised profound questions about where the energy and resources of the capital’s police service should be focused, and Thorne knew he should be seriously questioning an ethos which pilloried good men like Russell Brigstocke for no good reason.

  In the meantime, though, there were more important questions to be asked. ‘Come on then, spill the beans,’ he said. ‘What exactly did St
one say?’

  It wasn’t that Hakan Kemal was saying nothing; but he might just as well have been.

  Kitson had seen plenty of suspects struck dumb on the advice of a solicitor, but less so since the law had changed. These days, interviewees were advised that, later on, judge and jury could draw adverse influence from their silence during questioning. Could presume that they had something to hide. That tended to loosen people’s tongues a little, but Hakan Kemal was anything but chatty.

  ‘We will have your fingerprint results back by tomorrow,’ Kitson said. ‘And we both know they’re going to match the prints we took off the knife.’

  ‘Let’s wait and see.’

  Kemal was perhaps ten years older than his sister. A small man, with thinning dark hair and glasses. The voice was high-pitched, with just the trace of a Turkish accent.

  Kitson looked across at the young black woman sitting next to Kemal. Gina Bridges, the duty solicitor, wore a beautifully tailored grey jacket and trousers and was perfectly made-up. She made Kitson feel like a badly dressed bag of shit.

  ‘You should tell your client that he isn’t going anywhere,’ Kitson said. ‘He can sit there being monosyllabic for twenty-four hours if he wants. Then I’ll happily get an extension and we can start all over again.’

  Bridges smiled. Her teeth were perfect as well. ‘Until these prints of yours come back, presuming they’re of any use to you, I really don’t see that you have enough to hold him. Mr Kemal is cooperating fully, as far as I’m concerned.’

  Kitson turned back to Kemal. ‘I don’t think you thought this murder through, Hakan. I think you panicked, which is why you dumped the knife in a litter bin. Nobody’s got you pegged as a master criminal, OK? Maybe you and Deniz had some kind of argument which got out of hand. Maybe he said something you didn’t like. You probably didn’t mean to kill him.’ She tried to make eye contact. ‘Is that what happened?’

  Kemal was staring at a point somewhere to the left of her. He shook his head.

  ‘If you didn’t kill Deniz Sedat, why did you run? Why close up the shop and try to hide in Bristol?’

  ‘There is no evidence that Mr Kemal was hiding from anybody,’ the solicitor said. ‘He informed me that he was staying with his cousin.’

  Kitson took a deep breath, glanced up at the camera in the corner of the interview room. At the digital clock that told her she’d been banging her head against a wall for nearly forty minutes. ‘Did you know Deniz Sedat?’

  Kemal wiped his mouth, nodded.

  ‘For the benefit of the recording, please.’

  ‘Yes. I knew him.’

  ‘And did you see him on Saturday, November the sixth?’

  He dropped his eyes to the tabletop. The grunt sounded positive.

  ‘Did you see Deniz Sedat at the Black Horse public house in Finsbury Park on the evening of November the sixth?’

  ‘I saw him.’

  Kitson tried to keep the excitement from her voice. ‘What happened, Hakan?’

  Kemal placed his hands against his head; pressing as though he were trying to push through the skull. After half a minute he looked up, and directly at Kitson for the first time.

  She repeated the question, although Kemal’s gaze was making her bristle with discomfort. She’d felt sized-up plenty of times, and stared right back at men whose darker thoughts were all but dripping down their faces, but she couldn’t remember feeling quite so… disapproved of.

  Kemal refused to say another word.

  Later, having terminated the interview, Kitson blew off a little steam with the custody sergeant, then wandered across to the small waiting area, where Gina Bridges was sitting, a bundle of papers balanced on her knees.

  Off duty, the woman was friendly enough for Kitson to forgive her appearance. They chatted for a few minutes about schedules and kids, and Kitson moaned about interviewing people who were determined to say as little as possible.

  The solicitor laughed, and even though she was looking at things from the other side of the fence, she was happy to admit that Hakan Kemal was a particularly difficult customer. She told Kitson that she’d barely been able to get two words out of him herself.

  ‘Hi, it’s me again. Just ringing to see how you’re doing. Give us a call when you get this.’

  For the third time that day, Thorne left a message on Hendricks’ answering machine. For the third time, Hendricks’ mobile had rung and the machine had cut in when the call had been dropped. Thorne thought about ringing Louise. He knew she would have spoken to Phil by now. In the end he decided he wasn’t going to chase him.

  He was getting more than slightly annoyed at Hendricks’ attitude to what had happened. What right did he have to be so angry; so self-righteous? Thorne thought that it had more than a little to do with the fact that his friend – if he was still his friend? – had been caught with his pants down.

  Stupid fucker.

  It could have been an awful lot worse…

  Outside Thorne’s office window, the sky was brooding as much as he was. It was dense and darkening; there was rain coming.

  He thought about what Brigstocke had told him. It was ridiculous, no question, but it also made him angry that the DPS could go after someone for something like that while Skinner and his partner had got away with so much worse for so long. Not for the first time, he wondered just how many like ‘Jennings’ and ‘Squire’ there were out there.

  When Yvonne Kitson came in carrying coffees for both of them, Thorne guessed that she probably wanted something.

  ‘How’s it going with Kemal?’ he asked.

  ‘I was going to talk to you about that.’

  Thorne was relieved that his powers of detection hadn’t completely deserted him. ‘Not got a result then?’

  She talked him through the session at Colindale. ‘It’s not like he’s denying anything, you know? I just don’t think he wants to talk to me.’

  ‘Have you tried bribing him with coffee?’

  ‘I think he has a problem with women.’

  ‘You say that like it’s a bad thing.’

  ‘Shut up.’ She pressed her chin against the lip of her mug. ‘I don’t know if he’s that way all the time, or if he just doesn’t want to talk to a woman about this. Either way…’

  ‘You want me to have a go.’

  ‘We could have a crack together,’ Kitson said. ‘After lunch, if you’ve got half an hour.’

  Thorne held up his coffee. ‘A biscuit would have done the trick.’

  ‘All gone, mate. Have you not seen how much weight Karim is putting on?’

  Thorne was more than happy to get involved in something where he would be sure of his ground. Where there was a chance of making some progress. He told Kitson he’d think about it, and walked down to the toilets, where he found himself standing next to Andy Stone at the urinal.

  ‘This is where the big knobs hang out,’ Stone said.

  Thorne said nothing. He’d heard it before anyway. When he’d finished, he zipped up and turned away towards the sinks. ‘Keeping out of trouble, Andy?’

  ‘Trying my best.’ A little of the confidence had given way to caution.

  Thorne banged at the soap dispenser to no avail. Stuck his hands under the tap. ‘Good lad.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Oh, you know what it’s like. Some of us need to watch what we’re doing a bit more than others.’

  Stone laughed and nodded.

  ‘And some of us need to watch what we’re saying.’ Thorne let the water run until it was red hot. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  In the mirror, Thorne watched as Stone zipped himself up and walked out without a word. He wondered if he always left without bothering to wash his hands. Guessed he just wasn’t feeling quite as talkative as he did when beer and tasty barmaids were involved.

  When he felt the phone buzz in his pocket, Thorne moved quickly across to the hand-dryer. There was precious little power and the air was cold. He wiped his hands
on the back of his trousers and reached into his jacket.

  The message from Marcus Brooks he’d known was coming.

  Thorne leaned against the sink and played the video clip. He watched as a man walked a small, black dog along a dimly lit street; tossed a cigarette butt into the gutter; waited while the dog sniffed around the base of a tree.

  Thorne recognised the man straight away. He’d had bigger shocks.

  The police officer who had once called himself ‘Squire’ would not be getting away with anything for very much longer.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Thorne sat in a quiet corner of the canteen with a phone pressed to his ear. The meal in front of him was hardly making his mouth water, but the conversation was one he was certainly looking forward to. One he’d been anticipating since his conversation with Sharon Lilley a week and a half before. That was when things had begun to get difficult; when the case had started to smell as bad as his chicken curry.

  It was time to wash the stink off.

  ‘I got sent another message,’ he said, when the call was answered. ‘What kind of dog is that you’ve got?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Marcus Brooks knows where you are.’

  Thorne had expected a pause, but he’d hoped it might be longer.

  ‘That’s nice for him.’

  ‘Actually, I wasn’t sure you’d be around to answer the phone. I mean, he didn’t waste much time with Paul Skinner, did he? With “Jennings”.’

  ‘Who’s Jennings?’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t bother.’

  There was silence for a few seconds. Thorne could hear a door being closed. ‘Well, it’s good of you to call, but some of us are working, so…’

  ‘Every time we talked, you were just trying to find out what I knew, where the case was going.’

  ‘Doing my job, that’s all.’

  ‘I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier.’

  ‘You were hardly being honest yourself though, were you, Tom? I knew you were up to something.’

  A sergeant who Thorne had worked with for a few months walked past the table. They exchanged smiles. ‘Why “Squire”? Did you pick it at random? What’s the first name, just out of interest? Seeing as we’re mates and everything.’