Mark Billingham: Lifeless

Thorne took a mouthful of beer and swallowed. “A series?”

“Looks likely.”

“And now there’s been another one?”

“Night before last. Same area, same sort of age, but there are differences. There was no money left on the body.”

“Unless it was taken.”

“That’s possible, obviously. No money was found on the body.”

“You said differences. What else?”

“He’s still breathing,” Brigstocke said. Thorne raised his eyebrows. “Not that the poor bugger knows a great deal about it. Name’s Paddy Hayes. He’s on life support at the Middlesex…”

Thorne felt a shudder, like cold fingers brushing against the soft hairs at the nape of his neck. He remembered a girl he’d known a few years earlier: attacked and left a fraction from death by a man who’d murdered three before her. Helpless, kept alive by machines. When they’d found her, the police thought that the man they were after had made his first mistake. It was Thorne who had worked out that this killer wasn’t actually trying to kill anyone. That what he’d done to this girl was what he’d been attempting with the rest of his victims. It was one of those ice-cold/white-hot moments when Thorne had realized the truly monstrous nature of what he was up against.

There’d been far too many since.

“So you think Hayes is part of the pattern or not?”

“It’s a bloody coincidence if he isn’t.”

“How did you get his ID?”

“Again, nothing official on him, but we found a letter jammed down inside a pocket. Someone from the day center where he hung out took a look at him and confirmed the name. They had to take a damn good look, though. His head looked like a sack of rotten fruit.”

“What sort of letter?”

“From his son. Telling his father just how much of a useless, drunken bastard he was. How he couldn’t give a toss if he never set eyes on him again.” With a finger, Brigstocke pushed what was left of an ice cube around his glass. “Now the son’s the one who’s got to decide whether or not to pull the plug…”

Thorne grimaced. “So I take it you’re not exactly on the verge of making an arrest?”

“It was always going to be a pig,” Brigstocke said. “When the first one wasn’t sorted within a week it started to look very dodgy, and as soon as the second body turned up they were passing the case around like a turd. That’s when we ran out of luck and picked the bloody thing up. Just after you went gardening, as it happens.”

“Maybe God was punishing you.”

“Somebody’s fucking punishing me. I’ve had officers on fourteen-hour tours for three weeks and we’re precisely nowhere.”

“Grief from above?”

“Grief from everywhere. The commissioner’s on our back because he’s getting it in the neck from every homeless charity and pressure group out there. They seem to think because we aren’t making any obvious progress that we must be dragging our feet. That, basically, we don’t care.”

“Do we?”

Brigstocke ignored him. “So now it’s a political issue, and we’re fucked because the homeless community itself has bought into this idea that we’re not trying very hard. So they’ve more or less stopped talking to us.”

“You can hardly blame them, though…”

“I’m not blaming them. They’ve got every right to be suspicious.”

“They’ve got every right to be scared, if there’s a killer out there. These are people who can’t lock the door, remember.”

They said nothing for a few moments. Dido had given way to Norah Jones. Thorne wondered if there was an album titled Now That’s What I Call Scampi in a Basket.

“There’s another reason they’re not talking to us,” Brigstocke said. Thorne looked up from the beer mat. “There was a statement taken early on from a kid sleeping rough. He reckoned that a police officer had been asking questions.”

Thorne jammed a fist under his chin. “Sorry, I’m probably being a bit bloody thick, but…”

“It was before the first murder. He claimed that a police officer had been asking questions the day before the first body was found. Showing a picture. Like he was looking for someone.”

“Looking for who, exactly? I mean, this is the victim you still haven’t identified, right?” Brigstocke nodded. “So didn’t this person who was supposedly looking for him mention his name?”

“We could check if we had such a thing as a name and address for the kid who gave the statement. Honestly, nothing about this is simple, Tom.”

Thorne watched Brigstocke take a drink. Took one himself. “A copper?”

“We’ve had to tread a bit bloody carefully.”

“Keep it out of the press, you mean?”

Brigstocke raised his voice, irritated. “Come on, you know damn well that’s not the only reason we don’t want it plastered all over the papers…”

“ ‘It is considered good practice to deliberately withhold details of the MO used by the offender.’ ” Thorne yawned theatrically as he quoted from the most recent edition of the Murder Investigation Manual, the detective’s bible.

“Right, like the money left on the bodies. So we know the other killings weren’t copycats.”

“You can’t be sure about Paddy Hayes,” Thorne said.

“No…”

Thorne knew that there were certainly sound procedural grounds for keeping things quiet. But he also knew that even the possible involvement of a police officer in a case such as this would make the Job’s top brass extremely jumpy.

Thorne could see that the next day’s press conference made sense. The third body had undoubtedly forced a swift and radical change in media strategy. Now the public had to be told-but only up to a point-what was going on. It was all spelled out in the Murder Investigation Manual: the public had to be reassured, advised, appealed to.

The Met, of course, was also doing the smart thing by covering its arse. God forbid any more bodies should turn up and they had forgotten that the public also needed to be warned.

“So, what do you think?” Brigstocke said. “Any bright ideas?”

“I think you need to forget about mineral water and go and get yourself a proper drink. A beer gut’s the least of your worries.”

“Seriously…”

“Seriously?” Thorne swilled what little beer there was left around in the bottom of his glass. “You should have tried picking my brains before you bought me three pints of Stella, mate.” He puffed out his cheeks, let the air out slowly. “My afternoon of ‘recruitment demographics’ is shot to shit as it is.”

It was a forty-minute tube ride home from St. James’s Park. As soon as he walked through his front door that evening, he took the CD from his Walkman and transferred it into his main deck. It was part of a boxed set of outtakes and demos from the American Recordings sessions, released a few months after Johnny Cash had died in 2003. Thorne cued up “Redemption Song”-a cover of the Bob Marley classic that Cash had recorded with Joe Strummer. Neither of them had lived to see its release.

Thorne moved around the kitchen, making tea, wondering at how Marley and Strummer could both have gone so young, while Mick Hucknall and Phil Collins were still walking around.

Though he’d been joking with Brigstocke, Thorne hadn’t actually got a whole lot done that afternoon. He’d stared at columns of figures, had stabbed perfunctorily at his keyboard, but all the time he’d been thinking about Paddy Hayes and the machines that were keeping him alive. Thinking about the letter the man had carried in his pocket. About the damn good look those who knew him had needed before they were able to confirm his identity.

Thorne carried his tea through to the sitting room. He sat and considered everything that Brigstocke had told him, and why. Now that those who were seemingly being targeted had stopped talking to the police, the investigation would stutter and stall very bloody quickly. In all probability, it would grind spectacularly to a halt.