Mark Billingham - Lifeless

“Crime report?”

“He’s not actually been back at work that long. He was mugged in a pub car park three months ago. Nasty attack, fractured his skull.. .”

Thorne didn’t need her to tell him that the mugger had never been caught. Or that, among other things, Sergeant Trevor Morley’s warrant card had been stolen during the attack. He didn’t need to tell her that the warrant card would have been the reason Morley had been attacked in the first place.

He thanked the WPC for her help. She told him she’d pass a report to the information room’s chief inspector, who might well need to get in touch with him. Thorne said that would be fine before he hung up.

“Not a real copper,” Thorne said. “He was using stolen ID.”

The information didn’t seem to make Brendan Maxwell feel any better. “It had his photo in it.”

“Easy enough to paste in. How closely did you look?”

Maxwell shook his head. About as closely as anybody looked at anything.

“Whether you’re remembering his face or imagining it, we still need to get you somewhere and get it down. I’ll call someone and get it sorted.”

“I don’t know how much detail I can give anyone.”

Thorne started pressing buttons on his phone, searching for Brigstocke’s number on the memory. “Just start with the general stuff,” he said. “Height, build, coloring…”

“He was big. Six foot two or three, and well built. He looked pretty fit.”

“Hair?”

“Medium, I suppose, fairly neat. And he had a beard. Not ginger, but sandy-ish. He was that kind of coloring. Light-skinned… blue eyes, I think… and maybe a bit freckly, you know?”

Thorne knew.

He felt that rare, yet familiar, tickle of excitement. The shuddery spider crawl of it at the nape of his neck, moving beneath the hair and the collar of his dirty gray coat. “Do you recycle?” he asked.

Maxwell looked and sounded confused. “Yes…”

“Where?”

“Out by the wheely bins.”

Maxwell opened his mouth to say something else, but Thorne was already on his feet and moving toward the door.

Fucked-up weather and busybodies. Jason Mackillop reckoned they were both about as British as you could get.

It was one of those bizarre, early-autumn afternoons that couldn’t make up its mind: sunshine, wind, and rain in a random sequence every half an hour or so. Now it was spitting gently, and Mackillop stared through the streaked windscreen at the man with the plastic carrier bags, who was walking toward the car and staring back with undisguised curiosity.

Stone had called a few minutes earlier to say that he was running late. Mackillop had heard the grin in Stone’s voice; the implication that it was all due to his phenomenal staying power. Now Mackillop would be sitting there like a lemon for another twenty minutes or more

…

The man carrying the plastic bags walked a few yards past the target address, then stopped and came back. He stared until he caught Mackillop’s eye. He adjusted the grip on each bag and took slow steps toward the car.

Mackillop leaned on the switch. He let the window slide down as far as possible without letting in the drizzle.

“Can I help you?” the man said.

Mackillop had been about to ask much the same question. He reached into his jacket, produced his warrant card. “No, I’m fine, thank you.”

The man gave a small nod, hummed a reaction, but showed little inclination to move.

“Do you live there?” Mackillop asked.

“Yes, I do.” He turned and stared back at the house, then spun back around to Mackillop. “It’s four flats, actually.”

“I know.”

“I think they made a nice job of the conversion.”

“Right…”

The man looked round at the house again. “I’ve not lived there for very long, mind you.”

Mackillop decided that it couldn’t hurt to get a bit of background information while he was waiting for Stone to show up. The man seemed keen enough to help. “Do you know a Mr. Mahmoud?”

“I’m not sure.”

Mackillop fished under the newspaper on the passenger seat, pulled out his page of notes. “Asif Mahmoud…”

“What does he look like?”

“He’s the tenant on the ground floor.”

The man leaned down a little closer to Mackillop’s window. The spatterings of rain darkened the material of his knee-length raincoat and baseball cap. “The one with the dope, right? You can smell it when you come in late sometimes.”

“Right, thanks,” Mackillop said. If the man was right, the likelihood of their visit being a complete waste of time had just rocketed. “Mr. Mahmoud’s helping us with something, that’s all.”

The man smiled to himself, looked both ways along the street.

“Can I ask which flat is yours?” Mackillop asked.

“Flat D. Up with the gods. All those stairs keep you fit, I tell you that…”

“Top floor?”

When the man saw Mackillop looking, really looking, at him for the first time, he smiled again, and swallowed. Then his expression became suddenly serious, and he asked Mackillop exactly who he was, which branch of the police he was with, and where he was based. Mackillop calmly gave him all the information he asked for.

“Trainee?” the man said. “Like a junior doctor kind of thing?”

“That’s right.”

“Sort of like doing your basic training.”

“Listen…”

The man took a couple of paces backward, to allow Mackillop room to open the car door. “ I’m Ryan Eales,” he said. He held up his plastic bags. “I need to go and put this shopping away…”

Thorne and Maxwell pushed through an emergency exit into a covered service yard at the rear of the building. The recycling bins-half a dozen of them, each filled with clear glass, green glass, plastic, or newspapers-were lined up next to three huge wheelies. The place smelled of catpiss and damp wool, and every available inch of brickwork was covered in graffiti, elaborate and largely illegible. Thorne knelt down, threw the lids off the bins until he found the one he was after, and began pulling out piles of old newspapers.

Maxwell walked to the edge of the covered area, put his hand out into the rain. “I suppose you’ll tell me what you’re doing when you’re good and ready.”

“I’m hoping we won’t need to bother with that e-fit.”

“And last week’s copies of the Sun are going to help, are they?”

“This might be utter bollocks, of course. I could be way off the mark.”

“From what I’ve heard, that would be my bet,” Maxwell said.

With a wide range of staff and clientele, the Lift catered for a variety of tastes when it came to reading matter. Thorne dug through back copies of most of the daily tabloids and broadsheets. He picked up and threw away dozens of freebies aimed at Australians and New Zealanders, music papers, TV magazines, and issues of Loot until he found something he was interested in. He seized on a crumpled edition of the Evening Standard. The headline disturbed him no less than when he’d first seen it: rough sleeper killings. met goes undercover.

Maxwell looked over Thorne’s shoulder. “That’s when the cat came out of the bag, right?”

Thorne opened the paper and began to read. “ This is how he knew. ..”

“Knew what?”

“You asked me back in there. How did he know to come here and start asking questions? I don’t think he knew to come here specifically, but he knew it would be a good idea to visit places like this one, because they fucking told him. Listen…”

He read from the newspaper story: “ ‘It’s understood that the Metropolitan Police has liaised closely with an organization working with rough sleepers, in order that the undercover officer concerned can integrate with the homeless community as smoothly as possible.’ ”