Mark Billingham - From the Dead

'You think my Ellie's dead? I will not listen to that crap.'

'You're not listening to anything…'

Donna flicked the kettle on, paced up and down the five feet of worn linoleum. 'I know what this is about,' she said.

'It's not about anything, OK? I just think you need to be realistic.'

'You're threatened by her,' Donna said. 'You're threatened by Ellie.'

'Don't be stupid.'

Donna nodded, suddenly sure of herself. Spitting out the words. 'You think that if I had my daughter around, I wouldn't have time for you. You're scared shitless about being number two.'

'You're pathetic.'

'I should have worked it out before,' Donna said. 'Same as when we were inside. You were always a stupid, jealous bitch.'

'How can I be jealous of someone who isn't even here? Someone you don't even know?'

'I know you, though,' Donna said. 'I fucking know you!'

'You don't know anything.' Kate stood up and walked to the door. 'You don't know anything, and I can't help you.'

They stared at each other for a few seconds, until Kate turned and walked out. Donna leaned against the kitchen worktop, feeling the anger and the panic wheeze in her chest as the grumbling of the kettle grew louder behind her.

No more than a couple of days into it, Dave Holland had to face the fact that they might never discover the identity of the man who had died in Alan Langford's place.

It wasn't that the numbers were daunting. Although more than two hundred thousand people were reported missing each year, only a third of them were adults. Of those, the majority were found safe and well within seventy-two hours, and almost ninety-nine per cent turned up within a year. So the number still missing ten years on was in the dozens rather than the hundreds. The parameters within which Holland was working narrowed down the search even further. He was looking for a man of roughly the same height and build as Alan Langford, who had probably been reported missing a week or two either side of the body being discovered in Epping Forest.

Thus far, however, there was only one name on the list of likely candidates.

Jack Shit.

Holland had started from the assumption that, when faking his own death, Alan Langford had barbecued two birds in one Jag and got rid of someone he wanted dead. It was the ideal opportunity to knock off a business rival, or at the very least to get shot of someone who had simply pissed him off. But having cross-referenced the Police National Computer, the National Policing Improvement Agency's Missing Persons' Bureau and the relevant section of every police force website in the country, no obvious name had emerged. No gangsters, major or minor, no legitimate businessman who might have found themselves in Alan Langford's way, in fact nobody with any visible connection whatsoever to him who had been reported missing around the time that the man himself had apparently been killed.

It was a shame, but hardly unprecedented in this sort of case. The optimism had been knocked out of Dave Holland long ago, and these days he was surprised when any aspect of an inquiry turned out to be a walk in the park.

With no obvious enemy fitting the bill, everybody else had to be checked out – those few dozen men of the requisite build who were still unaccounted for ten years after their loved ones had first reported them missing. After two days, Holland was already ranking this as one of the most unpleasant spells of donkey-work he had ever done. Calling the relatives of the missing men, he was always careful not to raise their hopes by suggesting that their loved ones might have been found, especially when that hope would quickly turn to horror as soon as the circumstances were explained. So he was as vague, occasionally as evasive, as he needed to be until he felt sufficiently confident to ask the person on the other end of the line if they would be willing to provide a DNA sample. 'This is purely to help us eliminate your son/brother/father from our inquiries…' That usually did the trick. The sample could then be compared with tissue taken at the original post-mor tem and now stored at the FSS lab in Lambeth.

But plenty of people could be ruled out before that stage. The PM report had detailed two metal pins holding together the bones of the victim's right leg and though there was little of anything left, Phil Hendricks had been unable to find any trace of an appendix in the victim's body. At the time, in light of Donna Langford's confession, no one had felt it necessary to check whether her husband had suffered a serious leg injury and undergone an appendectomy.

'You look like you could do with this.'

Holland looked up and smiled, relieved to see an attractive trainee detective constable brandishing a cup of coffee. She had been paying him a good deal of attention over the previous few weeks, but he couldn't decide if she fancied him or was just arse-licking. He was happy enough either way and certainly grateful for the drink.

'Bit of a slog, is it?'

Holland had just got off the phone with a woman whose younger brother, a soldier in the British Army, had disappeared after going AWOL from his unit.

'Can't you just tell me if he's dead?' The woman had sounded wrung out. 'It'd be so much bloody easier if we knew he was dead…'

'Yeah, a slog,' Holland said.

He had found himself constructing scenarios in a bid to explain the often baffling disappearances laid out in the files before him. The twenty-eight-year-old who had vanished on the way home from the pub during a stag weekend in Newquay could have been bundled into a car by Alan Langford or one of his cronies. Equally, he could simply have wandered off the road, three sheets to the wind, and tumbled into the sea from a cliff-top. The thirty-seven-year-old man with a history of mental illness last seen at a bus stop in Willesden could have been picked up by Langford. But he was more likely to have drifted into the shadows and lost himself, to die later in rather more banal circumstances than the man Dave Holland was looking for.

It was a long and laborious process: tracing the relatives; dispatching officers to collect samples; testing the DNA. With no guarantee of a result at the end of it. There was a real possibility that Langford had deliberately selected someone whose disappearance might not even be noted; someone who had already slipped through society's cracks and would not merit a missing person's report. It made a sick kind of sense, Holland understood that, and was far less risky than targeting someone whose nearest and dearest would go running to the police as soon as he didn't show up for his dinner.

If that were the case, they might never identify the victim.

They might never pin the murder on Alan Langford.

Holland took the tea, asked where the biscuits were, then told the blushing TDC that he was only kidding. 'Pull up a chair,' he said. 'I'll take you through it.'

As soon as Thorne returned to the office, he called Gary Brand, the DI he had spoken to in the Oak a few nights earlier. Before being drafted into the Langford inquiry ten years earlier, Brand had worked on the old Serious and Organised Crime Squad. In fact, his expertise in that area had been the very reason why he had been drafted in.

Thorne hoped that same expertise might come in handy again.

'I heard about Monahan,' Brand said. 'Sounds like you've opened a right can of worms.'

'It was opened for me,' Thorne said.

'Doesn't really matter, does it?'

Thorne told Brand about his conversations with Jeremy Grover and with Cook, the bent prison officer. Brand did not seem remotely shocked at any of it, but he was more surprised when Thorne told him what Donna had said about the possibility of Langford being in Spain.

'Really? I mean, it was my first thought when you told me about the photograph, but you would have thought he'd be slightly more imaginative. The Costa del Crime's a bit bloody predictable, don't you reckon?'