Mark Billingham: From the Dead

'Tom?'

Thorne looked up to see DI Yvonne Kitson standing in the doorway. They shared the office and most of the time Thorne was happy enough with the arrangement. He certainly liked her a lot more than he had back when she was a high-flier, and suspected that she felt the same way about herself. Like Thorne, she could still put noses out of joint without much effort, but it was hard not to admire the way she had rebuilt a career that had plunged so calamitously off the tracks after an extra-marital affair with a senior officer.

'Like a self-assembly wardrobe,' she had once said to Thorne. 'One loose screw and the whole thing fell to pieces.'

Now, she had one eye on Thorne's visitor. He gestured towards Anna, the photograph flapping between his fingers, and introduced her.

Kitson nodded a cursory greeting and turned back to Thorne. 'I just thought you'd like to know that the jury's gone out.'

'Right.' Thorne stood and moved around the desk.

Anna was doing up the buttons on her jacket. 'The case you were in court for?'

Thorne nodded, thinking about the wink he'd given Adam Chambers. 'One that isn't quite so… piss-easy,' he said.

DCI Russell Brigstocke's office was twenty feet along the corridor from the one Thorne shared with Yvonne Kitson. When Thorne walked in, Brigstocke was on the phone, so Thorne dropped into a chair and waited. He thought about an eighteen-year-old girl whose bones still lay waiting for an inquisitive dog and about a man who had died screaming, handcuffed to the wheel of a car in the middle of nowhere.

He tried to separate the two murders, committed so many years apart. To tease out the tangle of pictures, real and imagined.

He wanted to worry about the right thing…

Brigstocke put the phone down and reached for a mug of coffee. He took a sip, grimaced.

'You know the jury's out?' Thorne asked.

Brigstocke nodded. 'No point thinking about it, mate,' he said. 'I heard it went really well this morning.'

'Sam tell you it was in the bag, did he?'

'I'm just saying we've done everything we could.'

'Everything except find her,' Thorne said.

He felt chilly suddenly, aware of how thin and flimsy his suit was, missing the heavy familiarity of his leather jacket. As it went, most coppers dressed the way he was at that moment. It was as if each one graduated to a plain-clothes unit and instantly acquired the fashion sense of a low-end estate agent, but Thorne had always resisted the pull of the off-the-peg M amp;S two-piece, the easy-iron shirt and shiny tie.

'It's bloody cold in here,' he said.

Brigstocke nodded. 'There's air in the radiator and nobody's got a key.'

Thorne got up and walked across to the radiator, bent and put his hand to the metal, which was no better than lukewarm. He stood up, pressed his calves against it. Hearing a sound he had come to recognise and dread, he looked round and saw Brigstocke shuffling a pack of cards.

'I've got a new one for you.'

'Do you have to?' Thorne asked.

For reasons nobody could quite fathom, Brigstocke had developed a keen interest in magic over the previous few months. He attended classes at a club in Watford and had started performing close-up magic for beer money at assorted Met parties and conferences. He also insisted on trying out new tricks on anyone who could not escape quickly enough.

'Just think of a card,' Brigstocke said, slipping into the patter. 'Don't tell me, though. I mean, what kind of a trick would that be?'

The trick was pretty good, and Thorne did his best to sound encouraging, but he had never really seen the point of magic. He had no real interest unless the magician explained how a trick was done. Russell Brigstocke was a decent copper, but he was certainly not a wizard.

'Who was the girl in your office?' Brigstocke asked, putting away the cards.

Thorne told him about Anna Carpenter and the Curious Case of the Suntanned Corpse. Brigstocke had not worked on the Langford inquiry, but he remembered the investigation well enough.

'Coming back from the dead,' he said. 'Now that's a decent trick.'

'It would be impressive.'

'Anything in it?'

Thorne took the photograph from his pocket and passed it over. 'God knows what Donna Langford's up to,' he said. 'I just hope that detective agency's screwing a decent wedge out of her.'

'Does it even look like him?'

Thorne stood at Brigstocke's shoulder and looked again. The dyed hair, the squint, the grin. That faint bell was ringing a little louder now, but surely that was just because Anna Carpenter had told him who it was supposed to be. 'Looks like a lot of people,' he said. 'Looks like a bad actor playing a gangster on his holidays.'

'What did you tell her?'

'That she was wasting her time and we couldn't afford to waste any of ours.'

'Absolutely right,' Brigstocke said. 'Not when we've got the latest Police Performance Assessment Framework to read and twelve-page reports on Standard Operating Procedure to complete by the end of the day.'

Thorne laughed and felt it take the chill off.

They talked about football for a few minutes, then families. Thorne asked after Brigstocke's three kids. The DCI asked Thorne how on earth his girlfriend was handling her job on the Kidnap Unit and managing to share a flat with someone who supported Spurs and listened to country music.

'How does she cope with all that pain and stress, day after day?' Brigstocke asked.

Thorne shook his head and let the punchline come.

'And the kidnaps must be even worse…'

They joked and chatted. Piss-takes and bullshit. Killing time and pretending not to think about the twelve strangers arguing in a room on the other side of the city.

Anna bolted her dinner.

It was always fairly awkward when it was just her, Megan and Megan's latest boyfriend – on this occasion the admittedly gorgeous, but palpably brain-dead, Daniel – and it didn't help that Megan had done the cooking. Anna's housemate could only really manage pasta, and usually just threw in whatever happened to be lying around in the fridge. Her latest creation involved carrots, tinned peas and hard-boiled eggs, and watching Daniel slather brown sauce all over it didn't do much for Anna's appetite. Half a plate was filling enough, in the end.

It still tasted better than sushi, though…

After ten minutes' idle chat, during which nobody asked how her day had been, and ten more growing increasingly annoyed as Daniel sprawled on the sofa, smoking and dodging the washing-up, Anna went upstairs to her room. She lay on the bed and watched TV. Channel-hopped through the local news, a quiz show that left her utterly baffled, and a pointless remake of a sitcom that had been pointless first time around.

That had to be a sign of getting old, Anna thought: when they remake something you've grown up watching. It had to be a bad sign, surely. Looked at objectively by almost anybody – her parents, for example – it made her present circumstances seem that much sadder.

Working for peanuts and living like a student.

The house was only a couple of minutes' walk from the office which, along with the lower-than-average rent, justified for Anna the fact that she hated the area. It helped her forget, some of the time at least, that she had nothing in common with her nineteen-year-old housemate and had actually lived in a far nicer place when she was a student.

Back then, of course, her parents had been happy to chip in a little and help her do the place up. They had arrived unannounced, beaming on the doorstep with the radio she was always borrowing when she was at home and a brand-new microwave. They sent funny letters and food-parcels. Later, though, all of that had changed.

'What the hell did you think you were doing?'