Mark Billingham - Lifeless

Again, it was quieter than it might have been. By far the loudest noise came from a big, white-haired man at the other end of the table from Thorne. The man beamed and frowned-pushing a spoon distractedly through his food-far more intent on the two-way conversation he was having with himself on an invisible radio. Every half a minute or so he would hiss, imitating the sound of static, before delivering his message. Then, a few seconds later, he would move his hand, switch the “radio” to the other ear, and give himself an answer.

“This is London calling the president,” he said.

Spike went to the counter to collect his pudding. On the way back to his table he saw Thorne and shouted a hello. Thorne briefly waved a spoon, then carried on eating. The stew was thick with pearl barley and the gravy was tasteless, but at?1.25 for two courses, he had little cause for complaint.

Once he’d finished eating, Spike walked over, hand in hand with the girl, to where Thorne was sitting.

“This is Caroline,” he said. “Caz.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Tom…”

The girl had red-rimmed eyes and hair like sticky strands of dark toffee. She wore a faded rugby shirt under a zip-up top and multicolored beads and thin leather bracelets around her wrists.

“Spike and me are engaged,” she said.

Spike and his girlfriend sat and talked to Thorne while he finished his lunch. They told him about the time when they were asleep and they’d been sprayed with graffiti, and how another time they’d been pissed on by a gang of teenage boys. About how Caroline had once been propositioned by a woman off the telly and told her to go and fuck herself. About the flat they were planning to move into together once they had a bit of luck.

“It’s well fucking overdue, you know?”

“I do know,” Thorne said.

Spike did most of the talking. Thorne figured that this was about as close to normal as the boy ever got: a few hours of balance, of numbness between being wasted and needy. It was a window of opportunity that Thorne knew would get smaller and smaller as time went on.

“Everyone deserves a bit of luck, don’t they?”

When Caroline did speak, it was in a low mumble. Her voice had the flat vowels and slightly nasal tone of the West Midlands, but Thorne could hear a stronger influence.

Smack had an accent of its own.

There was a sudden, loud hiss from the other end of the table. The big man was receiving another message. Thorne stared at his red face and fat, flapping hands.

“That’s Radio Bob,” Spike said. He leaned in and shouted. “Oi, Bob. Say hello, you cunt…”

A pair of small dark eyes blinked and swiveled and settled on Thorne. “Houston, we have a problem,” Radio Bob said.

Spike sniffed and pointed to a man sitting on an adjacent table. “And that’s Moony,” he said. “He knew Paddy as well.”

“Did he?”

Spike shouted, beckoned over a skinny character with a sparse, gingery beard. His straw-colored thatch hid the clumps of dandruff far better than the vast lapels of his dirty brown sports jacket.

“This is Tom,” Spike said.

Moony fiddled with the top of what looked like the plastic Coke bottle he had jammed into his pocket. Cooking sherry was Thorne’s best guess. It was certainly a long time since the bottle had seen anything as benign as Coca-Cola.

“Give me a minute or two,” Moony said, sitting. The voice was high and light; effete, even. “Just one minute, and I’ll tell you what you do. I’ll tell you what you did, I should really say. In your previous life. I’m never wrong, never. I’ve got a knack for it…”

Thorne spooned stew into his mouth, grunted a marginal interest.

Spike hauled Caroline to her feet and moved toward the counter. “I’m going to get some tea.” He screwed up his face, put on a posh voice, and brayed, “Perhaps a crumpet, if they have such a thing.”

Moony watched them go, expressionless, stroking the neck of his bottle.

Thorne wondered if Moony was a surname or a nickname, but knew better than to ask. If the latter, then its origin was not obvious. Haggard and pockmarked, he certainly didn’t have a moonface. Maybe he was partial to showing people his arse when he’d had a few too many. If so, a sighting might well be in the cards, judging by the state of him. By the stink of him.

“You knew this poor bastard that was half kicked to death, then?” Thorne spoke without looking up from his dish. “Haynes, was it?”

“Hayes, right. Paddy Hayes. I knew Paddy well enough, certainly. On a life-support machine, according to the television, but we all know that means ‘vegetable,’ don’t we?”

“Right.” Thorne had spoken to Holland about Paddy Hayes first thing that morning. There was no change. None was expected.

“Not that he can think anything now, of course, but if he could, I wonder if he’d still think that everything happened for a reason. I wonder if he’d still be on good terms with Him upstairs. I wonder if he’d be all forgiving.” He scoffed, pointed a finger heavenward. “Mysterious ways, my arse.”

Thorne folded a slice of tacky white bread in half and began to mop up the last of his stew.

“I knew the second victim, too, you know.”

Raymond Mannion. Found fourteen days after the first victim. Killed three streets away. Thorne looked up, but just for a second, doing his best not to appear overly interested.

“Ray and I talked a great deal,” Moony said. “A great deal.”

Thorne pushed a dollop of soggy bread into his mouth and wondered who it was that Moony reminded him of. He realized that it was Steve Norman, the press officer. Moony had that same self-importance that Norman had been full of when he’d introduced Thorne to his friend from Sky. He was enjoying himself.

“What did you talk about?” Thorne asked.

“When you’ve got as much time to talk as we had, you tend to cover the entire spectrum. He was drugfucked, so there were occasions when he couldn’t string a sentence together, but we discussed most things at one time or another.”

“Did you talk to him on the night he was killed?”

“ Hours before he was killed, mate. Just hours before.”

“Christ.”

Moony lowered his voice. “Which is how I know he was scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“Like I said, he was a junkie, so I thought it was just that at first, you know? Then I could see that something had really put the wind up him. Or some one had…”

There was certainly an element of grandstanding to the way Moony was telling it, but Thorne thought he could smell truth as well as bullshit.

“He’d said something before about someone asking him questions. It was just after that first bloke was killed he told me this, the one they can’t identify.”

“Did you know him?”

Moony shook his head.

“So who was asking your friend these questions, then?”

A flash of gold in his mouth, and a snigger that carried the smell of booze right across the table. “Well, this is the thing, isn’t it? Ray reckoned it was a copper, reckoned that he was looking for the bloke that turned up stiff a couple of days later.”

Thorne let a look that said, I’m impressed, pass slowly across his face, while his mind raced. Mannion was a druggie. What he told Moony, if he told him anything at all, could easily have been down to a dose of everyday delusional paranoia. But what if this wasn’t a story cooked up in a dirty spoon? Was it at least possible that Raymond Mannion was terrified because he knew something, because he’d seen something? Did he think that someone he’d spoken to had kicked one rough sleeper to death and might fancy coming back for him?

“So this is what he tells me,” Moony said. “And every time I run into him after that, he looks like he can’t decide whether to leg it or shit himself and, lo and behold, suddenly it’s Ray who’s the one with his brains kicked all over the shop and a twenty-quid note pinned to his fucking chest.” He leaned back, pleased with himself. “You’ve got to admit it’s bloody strange.”