Mark Billingham - Lifeless

He looked up at the top floor of the house they would be visiting; it looked like an attic conversion. He dropped his eyes down to the ground floor, where their interviewee lived, then left to where a woman was watching him while her dog relieved itself in the gutter. Saturday afternoon and there were plenty of people around. He smiled at the woman, who bent down smartly, plastic bag at the ready to clear up the mess.

Mackillop thought about what Andy Stone was doing. How long it had been since he’d done the same thing. He’d split up with his girlfriend four months before, and one pissed-up fumble with a Colindale WPC after a lock-in at the Oak was the closest to sex he’d managed since. Mind you, he’d probably get fairly close, at least by association, when Stone showed up, gagging as always to go over the highlights of his performance.

The woman with the dog gave him a good look as she walked past the car; her face like she could still smell the turd in her plastic bag.

He realized that he’d forgotten it was Saturday when he’d been talking to Stone about the best route to take. Traffic could very easily be snarled up on the North Circ. There wasn’t a lot of choice, mind you; it was a pig of a journey by tube, with at least a couple of changes between Willesden Green and West Finchley…

He hoped he wouldn’t have too much longer to wait.

When they started playing cheesy country rubbish, Mackillop quickly retuned the radio. Then he opened the Express to the crossword, folded it across the steering wheel, and dug around in his pocket for a pen.

Maxwell found the page he was looking for and passed the center’s registration book across. He pointed at the date and entry that Thorne would be most interested in.

The name was scribbled rather than printed, but it was legible enough. “DS Morley,” Thorne said, reading. “Detective Sergeant T. Morley.”

“Like I said on the phone, he had a warrant card…”

They were alone in a small storage room next door to the laundry; the Saturday lunch rush was at its height and there were plenty of people in the building, both clients and staff. Thorne was fired up, but in spite of all that had happened, it was still important, especially here, to maintain the integrity of the undercover operation.

Or, at least, as much integrity as he had left…

“What exactly did he say?” Thorne asked.

Maxwell sat down on a cardboard box marked domestos. The room smelled of polish and cleaning fluid. “Fuck… I’m not sure I can tell you exactly…”

“Did he mention me by name?”

“I suppose he must have done. It was definitely you we were talking about.”

“Me specifically?”

“Yeah, as far as I can remember…”

“First name? Second name?”

“I think he knew your first name. I think so…”

“It’s about whether he was looking for me, or just looking for ‘the undercover copper.’ D’you see the difference? It’s about how much he knew.” Thorne stared at the name on the page, reached for his phone, and dialed Scotland Yard.

“He knew enough,” Maxwell said.

As soon as he got through to the information room, Thorne gave his name and warrant number. He told the WPC that he needed a check run on an officer. “The name is Morley,” he said, “first initial T. A sergeant…”

The woman took down details of Thorne’s request, said that she’d call him straight back.

“Any idea how long it’s going to take?”

“You know how it works,” she said. “I’ve got to check you out before I can do anything else.”

Andy Stone thought he’d got this one figured out, that they had an understanding, but she’d really surprised him. He’d thought it was all about sex; that she just wanted a quick session of an afternoon, same as usual. So he’d arranged to pop round for “lunch.” He’d worked out that he’d have enough time to get there, give her what she wanted, and get back in good time to meet up with Mackillop for the next interview. That was the theory, but it hadn’t quite worked out that way. The woman had only gone and cooked him a meal. She’d actually wanted to have lunch. Not that she hadn’t wanted to go to bed as well; she’d left him in no doubt that spaghetti Bolognese wasn’t the only thing on the menu. But he couldn’t just get straight down to it, could he? Not after packing all that pasta away. So twenty minutes for lunch, fifteen minutes to chat while they let it go down, then a decent half-hour bout between the sheets. Now there was no way he could make it across to Finchley in time.

He sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on his socks as quickly as he could and making small talk; sneaking glances at his watch so as not to hurt her feelings. He thought she was starting to like him a bit too much. Maybe the whole cooking-lunch thing meant that she wanted to move things on a bit between them. He’d have to give that some serious thought.

Shit: he hadn’t even ordered a cab yet. He asked her if she had a number she used, and stood as she moved toward him, naked, to fetch the card from her purse. She lowered a hand to cup his balls through his underpants as she passed, and he stepped back, telling her that he really was going to be fucking late and reaching into the corner for his trousers.

She retrieved the card from her handbag and shouted out the number. Stone dropped back onto the bed. Dialed as he watched her walk into the en suite and bend to run the bath…

Fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes behind schedule… if he was lucky. He ordered the cab and looked around for his shoes, deciding that he’d call Mackillop once he was on his way.

The rhythmic drone became a high-pitched whine as one of the machines moved on to its spin cycle in the laundry room next door.

“We’re talking about the killer here, aren’t we?”

Maxwell said. “Tom?”

“There’s every chance.”

“So how did he know to come here and start talking to me as if he knew you?”

Thorne could still not be certain that the killer didn’t know him. He looked up from the phone that was resolutely refusing to ring. “That’s what I’m trying to make sense of,” he said.

Not that any of it made a great deal of sense. The killer may or may not have known the name of the undercover police officer he was looking for; following Thorne’s indiscretions in the aftermath of his arrest, that information was certainly out there. But even if the leak had come from McCabe or one of his team-even if DS T. Morley was one of that team- Thorne couldn’t see how the killer had connected him to the Lift.

“It’s freaky to think that I talked to the fucker,”

Maxwell said.

“You get used to it.”

“Will I have to go to court if you find him?” “Maybe. Phil can give you some tips…” Maxwell smiled, but he looked uncomfortable.

“Thing is, I don’t know if the image I’ve got in my mind is accurate or not? I don’t know whether I’m remembering this bloke or if I’m imagining him. Now that I know what he did, you know?”

“We need to get you to a station as soon as we can,” Thorne said. “Start trying to put an e-fit together.”

“If I hadn’t talked to him, Terry Turner would still be alive, wouldn’t he?”

Thorne looked away. “ I should have put all this together a lot quicker, Bren.”

“If I hadn’t told him where you were supposed to be sleeping.. .”

The phone buzzed in Thorne’s hand.

The information-room WPC told him that there were two T. Morleys serving in the Met. “So I got on to both borough personnel offices.”

“Thank you,” Thorne said.

“Standard procedure. One’s on a Murder Squad in Wimbledon. The other’s a relief sergeant in Barnet. He’s the one that’s got a crime report attached to his records. Trevor Morley-”