Mark Billingham: Lifeless

“I’ve only got a window box…”

Now the anger rose up again, but quickly gave way to a perverse amusement at yet another, ridiculous euphemism. “Gardening leave,” he said. “How nice. How fucking cozy.”

It made sense, he supposed. You could hardly call it what it was: some pointless, hastily invented desk job designed to get shot of anyone who was causing a problem. Anyone embarrassing, but not quite sackable. Gardening sounded so much better than burned out, or fucked up. So much more pleasant than drunk, traumatized, or mental.

Hendricks had walked slowly toward the kitchen. “I think you should take it,” he said.

The next day, Thorne had discovered how the odds against him were stacking up.

“I’m in a corner here, aren’t I?”

Russell Brigstocke had looked down at his desktop. Straightened his blotter. “We’ll find you something that won’t drive you too barmy,” he said.

Thorne pointed across the desk at his DCI. A jokey threat. “You’d better.”

It was a close call as to which of them had been more embarrassed when the tears had suddenly appeared. Had sprung up in corners. Thorne had pressed the heel of his hand quickly against each eye, and wiped, and kicked the metal wastepaper basket halfway across Russell Brigstocke’s office.

“Fuck…”

Scotland Yard.

Perhaps the single most famous location in the history of detection. A place synonymous with the finest brains and with cutting-edge, crime-fighting technology. Where mysteries were solved and the complexities of the world’s most twisted criminal minds were examined.

Where for three weeks, Thorne had been forced to sit in a room no bigger than an airing cupboard, going quietly insane, and trying to work out how many ways a man could kill himself using only standard office equipment.

He had thought, understandably, that the Demographics of Recruitment could not possibly be as boring as it sounded. He had been wrong. Although, the first few days hadn’t been so bad. He’d been taught how the software program-with which he was supposed to turn hundreds of pages of research into a presentation document, complete with block graphs and pie charts-worked. His computer instructor was about as interesting as Thorne had expected him to be. But he was, at least, someone to talk to.

Then, left to his own devices, Thorne had quickly discovered the most enjoyable way to pass the time. He was just as quickly rumbled. It didn’t take someone long to work out that most of those Web sites being visited via one particular terminal had very little to do with the recruitment of ethnic minorities, or why more dog handlers seemed to come from the southwest. Overnight, and without warning, Internet access was denied, and from then on, outside the job itself, there was little for Thorne to do but eke out the daily paper and think about methods of killing himself.

He was considering death from a thousand papercuts when a face appeared around the door. It looked a little thinner than usual, and the smile was nervous. It had been four weeks since Thorne had seen the man who was at least partly responsible for putting him where he was, and Russell Brigstocke had every right to be apprehensive.

He held up a hand, and spoke before Thorne had a chance to say anything. “I’m sorry. I’ll buy you lunch.”

Thorne pretended to consider it. “Does it include beer?”

Brigstocke winced. “I’m on a bloody diet, but for you, yes.”

“Why are we still here?”

Thorne hadn’t even clocked the name of the place as they’d gone in. They’d come out of the Yard, turned up toward Parliament Square, and walked into the first pub they’d come to. The food was bog-standard-chili con carne that was welded to the dish in places and tepid in others-but they had decent crisps and Stella on draft.

A waitress was clearing away the crockery as Brigstocke came back from the bar with more drinks.

“What’s all this in aid of, anyway?” Thorne asked.

Brigstocke sat and leaned toward his glass. Took a sip of mineral water. “Why’s it have to be in aid of anything? Just friends having a drink.”

“You weren’t much of a friend a few weeks ago, in your office.”

Brigstocke made eye contact, held it for as long as was comfortable. “I was, Tom.”

The slightly awkward silence that followed was broken by murmured “sorrys” and “excuse me’s” as a big man who’d been wedged into the corner next to Thorne stood and squeezed out. Thorne pulled his battered, brown leather jacket from the back of a chair and folded it onto the bench next to him. Relaxed into the space. The pub was busy, but now they had something approaching a bit of privacy.

“Either you want to have a good moan about something,” Thorne said, “or you want to talk about a case that’s pissing you off.”

Brigstocke swallowed, nudged at his glasses with a knuckle. “Bit of both.”

“Midlife crisis?” Thorne asked.

“Come again?”

Thorne gestured with his glass. “Trendy new specs. Diet. You got a bit on the side, Russell?”

Brigstocke reddened slightly, pushed fingers through his thick, black hair. “Might just as well have, the amount of time I’m spending at home.”

“The rough-sleeper killings, right?” Thorne grinned, enjoying the look of surprise on Brigstocke’s face. “It’s not like I’ve been in Timbuktu, Russ. I spoke to Dave Holland on the phone a few nights ago. Saw a bit in the paper before that. A couple of bodies, isn’t it?”

“It was a couple…”

“Shit…”

“ ‘Shit’ is bang on. Deep shit is what we’re in.”

“There’s been a lid on this, right? It literally was a ‘bit’ I saw in the paper.”

“That was the way it was being played until last night. There’s going to be a press conference tomorrow afternoon.”

“Tell me…”

Brigstocke leaned across the table and spoke, his voice just loud enough for Thorne to hear above Dido, who was whining from the speakers above the bar.

Three victims so far.

The first body had been found almost exactly a month earlier. A homeless man somewhere in his forties, murdered in an alleyway off Golden Square. Four weeks on, and his identity remained unknown.

“We’ve spoken to other rough sleepers in the area and can’t get so much as a nickname. They reckon he was new and he certainly hadn’t made any contact with local care services. Some of these people like to matey up and some just want to be left alone. Same as anybody else, I suppose.”

“DSS?”

“We’re still checking missed appointments, but I’m not holding my breath. They don’t all sign on anyway. Some of them are on the street because they don’t want to be found.”

“Everyone’s got some official stuff somewhere, though. Haven’t they? A birth certificate, something.”

“Maybe he had,” Brigstocke said. “He might have left it somewhere for safekeeping, in which case that’s where it’s going to stay. We also have to consider the possibility that he kept it on him, and whoever killed him took it.”

“Either way, you’ve got sod all.”

“There’s a tattoo, that’s about it. It’s pretty distinctive. It’s the only thing we’ve got to work on at the moment…”

There was less of a problem putting a name to the second rough sleeper, killed a couple of streets away a fortnight later. Raymond Mannion was a known drug abuser with a criminal record. He had been convicted a few years earlier of violent assault, and though there was no ID found on the body, his DNA was on record.

Both men had been kicked to death. They were of similar ages and had been killed in the early hours of the morning. Both Mannion’s body and that of the anonymous first victim had been found with twentypound notes pinned to their chests.