Mark Billingham: Lifeless

Thorne saw where it was going. “You’re shitting me…”

“I just double-checked.”

Thorne read the words aloud. “ ‘Callsign 40 from B-Troop, under the command of Corporal Ian Hadingham, engaged with and destroyed an enemy tank, killing all four on board…’ ”

“The Iraqi tank surrendered,” Holland said, “or was captured or whatever. Then, after they’d shot them, Eales and the others just put the bodies back in the tank and blew the thing to shit. Whether anybody ever found out or not…”

“They got commended?” Thorne looked as though he might be close to tears of one sort or another. “Christ on a bike…”

Holland was rummaging in his briefcase again. “Something else that just came through. We finally got the transcript back from that lab in California: the techies who enhanced the sound on the video.” He passed across the sheaf of papers and closed his case.

Thorne took what was handed to him without really looking at it and placed it on the desk with the rest of the paperwork. He groped for the swivel chair behind him and slid clumsily onto it. “Another couple of loose ends tied up. It’s all good, I suppose…”

“None of it gets us anywhere, though. Right?”

The silence that hung between them for the next few seconds was answer enough.

“So what’s happening indoors?”

“Everyone’s busy,” Holland said. “Fired up, like you’d expect, you know, but…”

“Aimless,” Thorne said.

“The Intel Unit’s digging around. Hoping that the paper trail might throw up an address or something. Somewhere Eales might hole up.”

Thorne was dismissive. “He’s long gone.”

And Holland didn’t argue. He suspected that the brass had already taken the decision to scale down surveillance at all ports and airports.

The fact was that Mackillop’s death and Eales’s flight had torn the guts out of the investigation, and everyone knew it. It might, in other circumstances, have been what united the team and drove it on with renewed vigor, but this was more coffin nail than spur. Though they wanted Eales more badly than ever, they had to accept that, for the time being at least, they weren’t likely to find him. And, despite what they now knew, there was little chance, without Eales, of ever catching the man who’d bankrolled at least half a dozen killings over a year or more. Overstretched budgets were always important factors, as were limited resources and time constraints, but once a team lost the appetite for it, everything else became secondary.

“What did Brigstocke say?” Holland asked. He had a pretty good idea, of course, and wondered if he was overstepping the mark by asking. But he guessed correctly that Thorne had long since forgotten, or stopped caring, where such marks were.

“He was ‘officially’ telling me that the undercover operation was to be wound down. That I should go home and have a bath…”

Thorne was obviously making light of it, but Holland wasn’t sure whether to smile or not. “When?”

“I’ll stay out another night, I think.”

“Okay…”

“There’s a few people I need to say good-bye to.”

“Then what?”

“Then a decent curry, a good night’s sleep, probably a very pissed-off cat…”

“That’s not what I meant,” Holland said.

Thorne smiled. “I know it isn’t.”

Brigstocke had called the evening before, when the dust kicked up by Mackillop’s murder had begun to settle. He’d made it clear that he was brooking no argument as far as pulling Thorne off the street was concerned, so Thorne didn’t waste any time by initiating one. Eales had gone. There would be no more killings. There was no longer any point. When it came to exactly what Thorne would be returning to, Brigstocke was a little less dogmatic. It may just have been that the decision had yet to be taken. But it was equally likely that Brigstocke had simply fought shy of delivering one blow on top of another.

As things stood, if it was to be a continuance of his gardening leave, Thorne would give in to it without much of a fuss. The thought of going back to the team, back to how things had been before, unnerved him. He felt as though he’d lost his way during some long-distance endurance event; as if he were staggering, miles off the pace, in the wrong direction. He couldn’t do anything else until he’d completed the course, however laughable his finishing time was.

He knew he couldn’t really compete, but he needed to cross the line…

“ ‘I don’t know’ is the simple answer,” Thorne said. “I don’t know what they want. I don’t really know what I want.”

Holland filled the pause that followed by reaching for his coat. “Do you think Eales spoke to whoever’s paying him before he left? Warned him?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think he had a great deal to warn him about.” Thorne gestured toward the papers on the desk. “There’s nothing there that incriminates anybody. I think Eales knows how to keep his mouth shut. How to keep secrets.”

“Probably a good idea. Considering how many people died because one greedy fucker couldn’t.”

Thorne eased his chair round slowly, one way and then the other. “We set so much store in trying to get hold of Eales, thinking that he’d tell us the name of the man behind the camera. I’m not actually sure it would have done us any good.”

“You don’t think he’d have given him up?”

“Eales is still a soldier,” Thorne said. “Name, rank, and serial number, right?”

Holland picked up his case and crossed to the door. “Are you sticking around here for a bit? I need to get back…”

Thorne grunted; he didn’t look like he was ready to go anywhere.

Holland recalled walking through the cafe on his way up and seeing the addict Thorne had been spending so much time with. The boy had been sitting with his girlfriend, whose name Holland had never learned. Holland thought about what Thorne had said earlier; wondered how difficult he might find it to say some of those good-byes. “Your mate Spike’s downstairs…”

Thorne nodded, like he already knew. “We’re supposed to be playing pool.”

“We can have a game sometime if you want,” Holland said. He hovered at the doorway. “Later in the week, maybe. That pub round the corner from your place has got a table, hasn’t it?”

“I’ll give you a call, Dave,” Thorne said. “When I’ve got myself sorted.”

He sat for a few minutes after Holland had left and let his mind drift. Sadly, however hard he tried, it wouldn’t drift quite far enough.

For want of anything else to do, he reached for the documents scattered across the desk and began to thumb through them. It always came down to paper in the end. Filed and boxed up in the General Registry. And it felt as though this case was heading that way pretty bloody quickly; not cold exactly, but as good as. The case, such as it was, would be handed over to the Homicide Task Force, or perhaps the brand-new, FBI-style Serious and Organised Crime Association. These were the proactive units responsible for tracking down and charging prime suspects who had gone missing. Thorne felt fairly sure that Eales was already abroad; that he would not make himself easy to find. The world was becoming smaller all the time, but it was still plenty big enough…

He stared down at the bank statements; at the payments into each one, representing a man Ryan Eales had killed. He looked at the amounts and was unable to stop a part of his brain making the perverse calculations: fifteen hundred pounds per kick delivered; something like that…

He thought back to the case he’d been working on the previous spring: to the hunt for another man who’d chosen murder as his profession; bookended by two fires, twenty years apart. A young girl dead, and an old man. Now here was Thorne, sitting in the old man’s coat and gnawing at the decisions he’d taken. At the series of judgments, considered and otherwise; from one burning to another.