Death Message

by Mark Billingham

  When Kemal spoke, Thorne felt as though the breath had been punched out of him; as though the air had been sucked out of the room.

  He tried to swallow. Couldn’t.

  Aware of Kitson’s eyes on him, of everyone’s eyes on him, Thorne slowly asked Hakan Kemal to say the name again.

  Kemal could see that something was happening. He hesitated, then said, ‘Zarif…’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The speed camera got him doing fifty-five on the Camberwell Road. He swore and slammed his hands against the wheel; like his mood wasn’t bad enough already. He put his foot down again to make it through a set of lights, and left it there. He’d keep an eye out for any more cameras, but he certainly wasn’t worried about being pulled over. He could easily sort out any jumped-up fucker on traffic duty; was right up for a ruck, if it came down to it.

  He turned left at the Green towards Peckham and New Cross.

  He always got himself out of the shit; that was what he did. Whenever things had got sticky – and they had, plenty of times – he was the one who sorted it. And until a couple of weeks before, until Marcus Brooks turned up, things had been looking pretty good.

  The cash from Martin Cowans and others like him; the pubs he drank in for free; the nods and the favours, and the saunas he could drop into for a late-night freebie at the end of a shitty day.

  He always sorted it.

  He had made the arrangements all those years before, when Tipper had got greedy and needed dealing with; and he had renegotiated an even more lucrative deal with Cowans afterwards. He had been the one to go into Tipper’s place and do the necessary. And he had been the one who had found Marcus Brooks. Lined him up nicely. After that, it was only fair that he’d taken a little more than half of whatever had come their way, and Skinner had known better than to argue.

  Skinner could usually be talked into most things…

  Jesus… as fast as he was going up the Peckham Road, there was still some boy-racer up his arse. He slammed on the anchors, two, three times for no good reason, until the tosser backed off. Then he floored it again.

  Of course, Skinner had been shitting himself after Thorne had been round. Demanding to know what they were going to do; talking rubbish about leaving the country. Cashing in and fucking off.

  He gripped the wheel even tighter, thought about the choice Thorne had given him earlier, when he’d called. The option he’d been offered. It wasn’t hard to work out what Skinner would have wanted to do, had he still been around.

  A week before, there’d been no way of knowing what Skinner might have done; how silly he was likely to get. In the end, there’d only been one sensible option, and it had been easy enough to go in and sort. He’d known very well it would be another body chalked up to Brooks. That he was only saving him the trouble.

  Cowans had been calling even before Skinner had started to panic. Him and the rest of those freaks begging for his help, running around like girls while their mates were dropping like flies.

  Did he know what was happening?

  Did he know why?

  They paid him enough, so couldn’t he do something about it?

  Yeah, well, once he’d found out who was knocking off the bikers, it was fairly obvious why, but he couldn’t do a fat lot, except tell them to keep their hairy fucking heads down.

  It didn’t do them much good, obviously, and it was almost funny, considering how the Black Dogs never had anything to do with Brooks’ girlfriend getting done in the first place. That was certainly funny. Cowans getting irate, screaming about how it wasn’t fair; how when he found out who had done it, he was going to fucking kill them.

  Brooks coming after himself and Skinner though, that was something he hadn’t considered.

  He could do without the headache, no question, but he’d get it sorted. He wasn’t too worried about Brooks; he’d stitched up the toe-rag once already and this time he’d be waiting for him.

  Thorne would be even easier to deal with.

  He knew that the cocky fucker didn’t have anything concrete on him, and he also had a strong suspicion that he wasn’t exactly squeaky clean himself. That would be the way to go at him: he could dig up plenty of shit when he had to and he knew exactly how to make it stick.

  Then he would offer Tom Thorne a few fucking options of his own.

  He swung the car right towards Peckham Rye, then turned into a side street and eventually found a parking space fifty yards from his front door. He’d leave a note on the windscreen of the car outside his house; make sure the owner knew better than to park there again.

  The other car turned into the road as he was stepping out. He’d just slammed his door when he saw the lights; was pressing himself back against the door to let the car past when he saw the headlights flick on to main beam and swing fast towards him.

  He tried to move but couldn’t; knew that he didn’t have time.

  The car’s engine screamed only a little louder than he did, for those few seconds before he was hit. The bumper squealed against the bodywork as it took his legs; spun him up and over the bonnet, into the glass, which smashed him into blackness.

  Then, final moments in the air; fierce and crowded.

  The dull crack of the screen shattering, and his own bones. The car speeding away.

  His ex-wife and the two children he never saw.

  His dog…

  ‘It’s me. Just calling to see how things were going really. Ring me when you get in, and we can see which one of us has had a shittier day.’

  ‘Hello, love, hope you’re well. Just wondered if you were any the wiser about Christmas…’

  ‘If you want to call me later on, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter if it’s late, OK?’

  Messages on Thorne’s machine when he got home: Louise; Auntie Eileen; Yvonne Kitson.

  Thorne hadn’t responded to any of them. He didn’t want to have any of those conversations; knew he wouldn’t be capable. There was only one person he was eager to speak to.

  He could barely remember leaving work, the journey home, or walking through the front door and scattering food into a bowl for the cat. He drifted from room to room like someone waking up. He turned the TV on and turned it off again. He stood and stared at bits of the flat as if he’d never seen them before. The way the ceiling met the wall in one corner. The angle of a door striking him as odd and unfamiliar.

  He walked around the flat and thought about Arkan Zarif.

  Two and a half years before, Thorne had been working on a series of gangland killings; an inquiry which had then widened to include a search for the man who had set fire to a young girl in a playground in 1984.

  It had been a case that had cost many more lives by the time it was over, and although a degree of justice had been meted out, the man responsible for most of those deaths had escaped it.

  Had perhaps meted out a little of his own.

  The Zarif family owned restaurants and minicab companies, but their main income came from elsewhere: extortion; human trafficking; the importation and distribution of heroin. The business was fronted by Memet, Tan and Hassan Zarif, but the decisions were all taken by their father: ‘Baba’ Arkan Zarif.

  Zarif had seen many of those nearest to him die or go to prison, had seen his business suffer through the actions of Thorne and others. But he had taken care to protect himself and had continued to run his unassuming family restaurant: choosing the meat, carefully preparing the diced lamb and the delicately spiced milk puddings. He had remained untouchable.

  And life, business, had carried on as normal…

  Thorne had gone to see him just once, when the inquiry had all but run its course. He had tried to make it clear that he was not a man who liked leaving loose ends around. He had fronted the old man out, made empty threats and talked about honour.

  Later, he had taken steps that led to a man Zarif had agreed to protect being murdered. Then, a month after that, Thorne’s father had died in a fire at his home.

 
; Thorne had gone through that conversation with Arkan Zarif many times since. Recalled every smile, every shift of those powerful shoulders.

  ‘I take my business very seriously,’ Zarif had said.

  Thorne had failed to protect his father, even though he’d known the old man could not look after himself properly. So he had lived with the terrible knowledge that his father’s death had been his fault, whether the fire had been accidental or not.

  Just the mention of Zarif’s name in the interview room had been enough. His mouth had gone dry in a second, and he could taste the sick rising up into his throat. Not knowing what had happened to his father had been bad enough, but whenever Thorne had fantasised about discovering the truth, he had never been able to decide what it was he hoped to find.

  Now, he walked around his furniture and waited for whatever was coming. If Kemal was right, Arkan Zarif had destroyed another family; had indirectly wreaked the havoc of grief among many more people. Thorne felt he might finally have been gifted a chance to tie up at least one loose end.

  But it was closer to dread than excitement.

  Brooks called just before ten o’clock.

  ‘It’s finished,’ he said.

  Thorne knew at once what Brooks meant. The officer he had spoken to earlier that day had made the wrong decision. Or at least had not made the right one quickly enough. Thorne felt no more than if he’d just been told it was going to rain the next day. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It isn’t finished.’

  ‘I’m tired. I don’t care.’

  ‘You need to listen,’ Thorne said. ‘You still believe me when I tell you that nobody is listening to these calls, don’t you? That there’s no trace.’

  Brooks finally sighed, as though it hurt to push out the breath. ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Good.’ Thorne sat down. ‘Because this might take a while…’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Thorne could have made the journey to Green Lanes in his sleep. He’d sat in his car and watched Zarif’s restaurant enough times to be familiar with the routine; to know what times people tended to come and go. He knew where to park so that his car would not be seen, and how to get round to the alleyway that ran along the back of all the businesses in the small parade of shops near Manor House Tube station.

  It was just after eleven o’clock.

  The service entrance to Zarif’s restaurant was no more than a small yard off the dimly lit alleyway. Thorne knew which one it was. He could see the grey plastic wheelie-bins from the end of the alley. He had stood in the same spot several times and watched the old man, or occasionally his wife or daughter, bringing out the leftovers at the end of the night, dumping bottles in the recycling buckets, as the ovens cooled down inside, and the last customers were ushered out of the front door.

  Thorne knew that this usually happened before eleven-thirty, or a little later on a Saturday. Within the next half-hour, most of the clearing up would have been done. Zarif’s wife and daughter would be on their way back to the grand and gated family home in Woodford, leaving the boss to sit quietly alone, as he did every night, with a glass of wine or a strong Turkish coffee.

  Contented and complacent. Thinking about the day’s takings from the restaurant. From his other, more profitable businesses.

  From the end of the alleyway, Thorne watched a skinny cat creep along the top of one of the gates. The animal probably knew just as well as he did when the bins got filled. It had just begun to clean itself when a car alarm started to scream on the main road, and it jumped down and out of sight.

  A minute or so later, Thorne saw another figure emerge from a pool of shadow, a few feet from where the cat had been. He knew that the man could see him; that the street-lamp behind cast enough light to make his small wave visible.

  The man raised a hand in return, then disappeared as quickly as the cat had done. Thorne stood for another minute, then walked back round to his car to wait.

  Forty-five minutes later, he was listening to drops of water falling on to the roof of the BMW from the trees above as he continued to stare across the road.

  Watching as customers left, then the single waitress. Figures still moving around inside.

  The restaurant was set back on a wide pavement, between an estate agent’s and the minicab office. This was another of the family’s firms, run by Arkan’s eldest son, but Thorne knew all three sons’ habits as well as he did their father’s. If Memet or his two younger brothers were in there, Thorne knew that they would be ensconced in the back room by now, deep into a high-stakes card game with associates.

  He was fairly sure he could get into the restaurant unseen. If all went well, there would be no reason for anyone other than the two people who mattered to know he’d been there.

  At around a quarter to twelve, Thorne watched as a dark Mercedes pulled up. Five minutes later, Sema Zarif and her mother, a woman Thorne had never met, hurried out of the restaurant and were driven away. He watched, and remembered what Louise had said: wondering why more of those who had lost loved ones to violence were not driven to it themselves. He could not recall exactly how many times he’d sat where he was now and come close to it himself. To running across the road, and in, and at Arkan Zarif. Taking whatever came to hand: a bottle; a glass; one of those knives of which Zarif was so proud.

  ‘I choose all the meat,’ he had told Thorne once.

  Thorne remembered the smile. The shift of those shoulders.

  He waited another ten minutes to be sure, then got out of the car.

  The area wasn’t one he fancied moving into, so Thorne didn’t bother checking out any properties as he moved past the estate agent’s; walking quickly, keeping close to the window.

  When he reached the restaurant and looked inside, he was alarmed to see that Arkan Zarif was staring straight at him, as though he’d been waiting for Thorne to appear. After a second or two, he realised that it was just a trick of the light. Saw that Zarif was actually staring off into space.

  Thorne let his breath settle; put his face to the glass and knocked.

  Zarif stood up and moved towards the window, curious. Thorne saw the eyes narrow; then, after five or ten seconds, watched them widen as recognition washed across the old man’s face.

  Thorne felt anger flare in his chest at not being recognised immediately.

  Zarif moved to the door and unlocked it. He was smiling when he beckoned Thorne inside, looking at his watch. ‘You must be very hungry,’ he said.

  It wasn’t a big place: half a dozen tables, now with chairs tucked in close, and a couple of booths. The assortment of lanterns that dangled from the polished pine ceiling – glass, metal and ceramic – had all been turned out, and the only light came from a lamp behind the small bar, or drifted up from the bottom of the stairs that curled down to the kitchen in the far corner.

  Zarif walked slowly back to one of those booths, where he had a bottle waiting and a drink on the go. He squeezed in behind the table and slid across the brown vinyl seat. There was low-level music coming from speakers above the bar: a woman singing, pipes and tablas. A zither, maybe…

  Thorne sat opposite. He spread his legs, so that his feet would not come into contact with Zarif’s beneath the table.

  ‘No food,’ Zarif said. ‘We’re closed for the night.’

  ‘It’s not a problem.’

  He’d put on a little weight since Thorne had last seen him, but still seemed bulky rather than fat. He was round-shouldered and had stooped as he’d walked. He wore a white shirt, stretched across his gut and tucked into grey trousers. The sleeves were rolled up, black and grey hairs sprouting above the neck of a white vest where the buttons were open.

  There was more grey in the hair, too, but it was still full, and oiled back above heavy brows. The jowls were stub-bled in white; the thick moustache going the same way. But the eyes were every bit as bright and green as Thorne remembered. He put a hand on the bottle. ‘Raki,’ he said. ‘Lion’s milk. You want some?’

  Thorne
dug into his pocket. ‘Not for nothing, I don’t.’ He took out his wallet. Pulled out a five-pound note.

  Zarif fetched a glass from the bar and poured the drink. ‘The till is closed. It will have to be for nothing.’

  Thorne shrugged but left his money on the table, folded inside a stainless-steel cruet set.

  Zarif touched his glass to Thorne’s. Said, ‘Serefé.’

  Thorne said nothing, but he remembered the toast. Remembered that it meant ‘To our honour’. The drink was clear and tasted like cough medicine, though it didn’t much matter.

  ‘You keep popping up at the end of my inquiries,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s like not knowing where a stink is coming from, then suddenly finding the dead thing behind a cupboard.’

  Zarif brought the glass to his lips; sipped it fast, like it was espresso. ‘Is this police business, or personal?’

  ‘It’s a murder case.’

  ‘Last time I thought it was both, because you were like a dog tearing at something. You remember when we sat in here and talked about names?’ He raised a hand, wrote in the air with a thick finger. ‘Thorne. Something spiky and difficult to get rid of.’ The accent was thick and Zarif searched for the odd word. But Thorne knew very well that he played up a difficulty with the language when it suited him.

  ‘You told me what your name meant, too,’ Thorne said. ‘Arkan, which means “noble blood”, but also means “arse”.’ Zarif cocked his head. ‘That was back when you were putting on the harmless old grandad act. Before I got to know you better.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You’re a very good businessman, no question. I can see why you’ve done so well for yourself.’

  Zarif spread his arms and looked around.

  ‘I don’t mean this,’ Thorne snapped. ‘Don’t take me for a cunt.’

  ‘I will try hard not to.’

  ‘It’s all about spotting new business opportunities, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Working out how to exploit them.’