Mark Billingham - Lifeless

Moony squealed and grabbed at Thorne’s fist, but Thorne calmly raised his other hand and slapped him twice, a little harder than he might have slapped someone who was unconscious. Moony’s hands flew to his face and he stopped struggling.

“Only it’s the money that’s bothering me,” Thorne said. “Well, not the money itself so much as the fact that you knew about it. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Moony shook his head.

“There’s been nothing on the news about any money being pinned to the victims’ chests. Nothing in the papers either, as far as I can remember.”

“I don’t understand…”

“My guess is it’s one of those things they’re keeping back, you know? They do that sometimes, the police. They keep certain facts out of the press so they can weed out the cranks and the copycats.”

“I must have read about it somewhere.”

“No. You didn’t. Not unless it was written on the side of a beer can. There are only two reasons why you’d know about money being pinned to the chests of the victims, and as I don’t think you’re the murderer… You’re not, are you?”

Moony was starting to snivel.

“I thought not. Which means that you must be the kind of snot-gobbling tosspot that steals money from the body of a dying man.”

“No…”

Thorne grabbed an ear and twisted. “Tell me.”

“I thought Paddy was just pissed, that’s all.” Moony spluttered out his confession between sniffs and yelps. “I didn’t know he was hurt.”

“You lying little turd. There was blood everywhere.” Thorne knew that now he was revealing a knowledge of the facts few would be privy to, but he also knew that Moony was too far gone, and too terrified, to take it in or realize its significance.

“I didn’t know he was that bad…”

“You didn’t care how bad he was. You just wanted the money.”

“I needed it…”

“Did you take anything else?”

Moony tried to turn away, but Thorne yanked on his ear again, turned his face back around. “There was a watch.”

Long since sold, Thorne knew, and the money-a fraction of whatever the watch might have been worth-spent on cider or sweet sherry.

“Taking the money and the watch is bad enough,” Thorne said. “The fact that you robbed a man who was supposed to be your friend, whose life was bleeding away into the gutter, makes me sick, but it doesn’t surprise me. What I really can’t understand is why you didn’t call the police. Why you didn’t tell anybody…”

“I told you, I didn’t think he was-”

Thorne could feel the cartilage buckle beneath his fingers as he closed his fist hard around Moony’s ear. “If you tell me that again, I’ll rip this off.”

Moony gurgled his understanding.

“See, I’m guessing that if you’d called an ambulance, if they could have got to Paddy a little earlier than they did, he might not be hooked up to a machine right now. I’m not a doctor or anything, but there’s got to be a chance.”

“No…”

“No, you’re probably right. Chances are he was already brain-dead by the time you started going through his pockets. But you couldn’t possibly have known that, could you? You just thought he was… what, exactly? Moderately badly injured? Serious but hopefully not critical? So you took what you wanted and left him there to die, because, basically, at the end of the day, you didn’t give a fuck. Simple as that…”

The recognizable rumble of a diesel engine grew louder as a black cab drove slowly past the end of the street and stopped. Thorne heard a door slam, the exchange of voices, before the cab moved off again.

“Leave me alone,” Moony said.

“I will, but what if I was to hurt you first?”

“Please…”

“What if I was to injure you in some way? I don’t know what exactly, something serious but hopefully not critical.” Thorne watched Moony’s eyelids flutter and close. He caught the sudden, sharp smell of urine that drifted up from his crotch. “If I was to do that and then leave you alone, do you think anyone would help you? What d’you reckon?” Thorne leaned in close to Moony’s face. “Would anyone give a fuck?”

Because the average rough sleeper wasn’t usually to be seen blathering into a state-of-the-art mobile phone, Thorne had been finding discreet locations from which to check in with Holland. Tonight, he couldn’t be bothered, and besides, the phone was small enough to fit easily into his palm. So, sitting in his theater doorway with it pressed close to his ear, he figured he looked no stranger than Radio Bob, muttering happily into an invisible handset…

“So Hayes was definitely a victim of the same killer,” Holland said. “If he had the money on him.”

Thorne swallowed a mouthful of lager. “Looks that way,” he said.

“More than ‘looks,’ I would have thought.”

“Whatever…”

“We’ve got two murders- three, if you count Paddy Hayes, and I think we can.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“You’ve still got a problem with the whole serialkiller angle, though?”

“Look, Raymond Mannion was terrified. I’ve got a witness.”

“Of course he was scared-”

“Not in the general way you mean, because there was a killer around. He was scared of someone. I think he was killed because of what he knew or what he’d seen.”

“It’s a leap.”

“Which means that the killing of the first victim takes on a greater significance. Don’t you think?”

“Maybe…”

“Come on, Dave. While everyone’s looking for all the usual perverse, serial-killer motives, it’s worth considering that there might just be something a bit more basic going on here.”

“That’s just it, though. Everyone here is looking for the perverse serial-killer motives. That’s our major line of inquiry at the moment

…”

“Right.”

“Well, it has to be until we’ve got something better to go on, doesn’t it?”

“So what’s Brigstocke’s profiler come up with?”

“Not a lot at the moment.”

“What? Not even the ‘white, male, started fires as a child, and tortured small furry animals’ cobblers?”

“What do you want us to do about Moony?”

“Nick him.”

“For what?”

“I don’t care. Being a reprehensible shitbag. Think of something. ..”

“It’ll be hard to make a theft charge stick when all we’ve got is what he told you. There’s no material evidence. How did you get him to tell you, by the way, or don’t I want to know that?”

“Look, there’s always a chance Moony might sober up and start asking awkward questions, so let’s just get him off the street. Give him a nice, warm cell and a bottle of Strongbow and he won’t complain.”

“Fair enough…”

They chatted for another few minutes, but Thorne spent most of the conversation thinking about what Holland had just said. About the question he’d asked, only half-jokingly.

Don’t I want to know that…?

As the last major case Thorne had been working on before his leave had moved toward its resolution, he’d been involved in things, he’d done things, far worse than slapping a few answers out of someone.

Holland talked and Thorne talked back, but he was thinking about the smell of flesh beneath the weight of a hot steam iron. Thinking about what Jesmond had said about wearing a hairshirt. Thinking about how good the beer tasted…

He woke violently, knowing for certain that he was being watched.

The room he’d been standing in began to go fuzzy around the edges and then to disappear. Of the men in there, one had been his father; near enough, but not quite as he’d been before the Alzheimer’s. There’d been no violent mood swings, no inappropriate language. Instead, there’d been only a priceless look on his old man’s face: a bemused half smile at knowing that he’d said something funny without having the first idea why. So the three of them-his father, his father’s friend Victor, and Thorne himself-had begun to laugh, until the laughter had become all that mattered. So that even the first, delicate wisps of smoke creeping underneath the door had seemed completely hysterical.