Mark Billingham - Lifeless

“My sympathies for recent events are a matter of record…”

“Sir…”

“But if they have left you in an emotionally charged state, where you are not presently fit to work as a member of my team, what on earth makes you think you’d be able to function efficiently as an undercover officer?”

“I don’t think what I’m suggesting is… complicated,” Thorne said. “I think I’m perfectly able-”

Jesmond cut him off. “Or perhaps that’s it.” He blinked slowly. His lashes were sandy, all but lost against his dry skin. He might have been trying to appear knowing and thoughtful, but Thorne watched the thin lips set themselves into what looked to him like a smirk. “Perhaps your emotional state is precisely why you think you should be doing this. Perhaps it’s why you consider yourself suitable; why you consider this job suitable for you. Have I hit it on the head, Tom? Are you going to be dossing down in a hairshirt?”

Thorne could say nothing. He flicked his eyes away and watched the light slide off the chromed edge of the car’s indicators, catching the buttons of Jesmond’s immaculate uniform.

“Look, I’m not saying it’s a completely stupid idea,” Jesmond said. “You’ve certainly had stupider.”

Thorne smiled at the line, seeing the glimmer of possibility. “This one’s not even in the top ten,” he said.

“On the plus side, even if you screw it up, I can’t see that we have a great deal to lose.”

“I can’t see there’s anything to lose.”

“Give me a day or two, yes?” Jesmond stepped between Thorne and the car door. “It won’t be solely my decision anyway. I’ll have to talk to SO10.”

“I really think we can get something out of this,” Thorne said.

“Like I said, a day or two.”

“We can get it quickly as well. There’s no need for a long lead-up time, we just do it.” He stared at Jesmond, trying hard to look relaxed even as his stomach jumped and knotted. “Come on, you’ve seen some of these down-and-outs. Staggering around, ranting at the world with a can of cheap lager in their hand. You know me well enough. How hard can that possibly be?”

The mood of the cafe owner had obviously not improved as he cleared away the plates. Holland had eaten toast before he’d left home, but had done his best with a bacon sandwich. Thorne had made short work of the fullest of full English breakfasts.

“The eggs were hard,” Thorne said.

“So? You ate them, didn’t you? If you don’t like the place, you can fuck off.”

“We’ll have two more mugs of tea.”

The owner trudged back behind his counter. The place was a lot busier now, and he had more to do, so it was difficult to tell whether he had any intention of ever bringing the tea as requested.

“Can you find something to arrest him for?” Thorne said. “Being fat and miserable in a built-up area, maybe?”

“I’m not sure who he hates more, coppers or tramps. We’re obviously not doing much for his ambience.”

Thorne stared hard across the room. “Fuck him. It’s hardly the Ritz, is it?”

“I picked up a couple of papers on my way here,” Holland said. He reached down for his bag, dug out a stack of newspapers, and dropped them on the table. “Our picture of Victim One’s on virtually every front page today.”

Thorne pulled a couple of the papers toward him. “TV?”

Holland nodded. “All the national TV news broadcasts as well. Both ends of London Tonight. It’s pretty comprehensive…”

Thorne stared down at the Mirror, at the Independent, into a pair of eyes that had been generated by a software program, but nonetheless had the power to find his own, and hold them. Victim One was long-haired and bearded. His flat, black-and-white features were fine, the line of jaw and cheekbones perhaps a little extreme to be lifelike. But the eyes, like the heavy bags beneath them, looked real enough. Dark, narrow, and demanding to be recognized. It was a face that said, Know me.

“What do you think?” Holland asked.

Thorne looked at the text that accompanied the pictures. The crucial facts rehashed: a brutal reminder of just how much was known about this man’s death when nothing at all was known about the life that had been stolen from him.

Then the reproduction of the tattoo. The vital collection of letters found on the victim’s shoulder. It had been hoped early on-as Brigstocke had told Thorne in the pub-that this might help identify the body, but that hope had proved as temporary as the tattoo itself was permanent.

AB- S.O.F.A.

The decision not to print a photograph of the tattoo had been taken on grounds of taste. A similar decision with regard to the victim’s face had not been necessary: they’d had no choice but to computer-generate, and not just because the face itself was unrecognizable. It was unrecognizable as a face: every

46 Mark Billingham feature had been all but kicked or stamped clean off the victim’s head. The unmarked face that was confronting thousands of people, that very minute over their cornflakes, had been fashioned by a microchip from little more than bone and bruise.

“It’s like King’s Cross,” Thorne said. “It’s what they did with the victim they couldn’t put a name to.”

The fire at King’s Cross underground station in November 1987 had killed thirty-one people, but only thirty bodies were ever claimed. One victim had remained anonymous-in spite of numerous appeals to those who might have known who he was. Thorne remembered that face, too: the sketch on the poster in a hundred tube stations; the clay reconstruction of the head that was lovingly fashioned and paraded in front of the television cameras. Ironically, the dead man, known for years only as Victim 115, had finally been identified just the year before, nearly twenty years after his death, and had turned out to have been a rough sleeper. Many commentators in the press claimed to have been unsurprised. It was obvious he was homeless, or else someone would surely have come forward much earlier, wouldn’t they? Thorne wasn’t so sure. He doubted that material belongings had a great deal to do with being missed. He thought it was perfectly possible to have a roof over your head, a decent car, and two nice holidays a year, yet still go unacknowledged and unclaimed if you had the misfortune to find yourself trapped on a burning escalator.

Thorne reckoned it was less to do with being unknown than with being un loved.

“I think we’re in with more of a chance, though,” Holland said, looking at the picture. “The quality of this is far higher. It’s got to ring a bell with somebody.”

“Let’s hope somebody loved him enough.”

Thorne handed the Independent back across the table and turned the Daily Mirror over to the sports page. He wondered how many footballers had been accused of rape since the last time he’d read a newspaper.

Thorne leaned in close and stared at himself in the small, square mirror. A week without razor, soap, or shampoo didn’t seem to have made a great deal of difference. Seven days during which he’d tried to start looking the part, while a pair of stroppy sorts from SO10-the unit that ran undercover operations- had done their best to put him through a refresher course.

It had all been fairly straightforward. As Thorne had been keen to stress to Brigstocke, the job would be purely about intelligence gathering. There would be no real need to fabricate a detailed backstory-to create what those who worked in this area called a “deep legend.” When necessary, tax details, Land Registry records, and electoral rolls would be doctored, but there would be no need for any such elaborate preparations in this case. Whatever the reason for their being there, those who ended up on the street tended to reinvent themselves anyway; to keep their pasts to themselves. They were starting again.