Mark Billingham - Death Message

Thorne had heard similar tales a hundred times. ‘Right, but he couldn’t tell you who they were?’

‘Oh yes, he could. He kept on telling us. Gave us their names, details of meetings, the lot.’

Thorne waited.

‘Well, it was bollocks, obviously. We looked into it and basically DI “Jennings” and DC “Squire” didn’t exist. Not in the Met, anyway. We did find a copper called Jennings, but he was doling out traffic tickets in North Yorkshire somewhere…’

They were jammed together on one side of a small table, in a corner next to the cigarette machine. Thorne watched as an attractive blonde struggled to find the right coins while jabbering into her mobile. He got a filthy look and turned back to his pint.

‘Is any of this shit helping?’ Lilley asked.

Thorne told her about the murders of Raymond Tucker and Ricky Hodson. Seeing no reason not to, he told her that he’d been sent pictures of both dead men. He answered Lilley’s question without waiting for it to be asked. ‘No, I haven’t the faintest fucking idea why,’ he said.

The blonde was still on the phone. Now she was trying to extract a cigarette from the packet using her teeth.

‘Tell me about Brooks,’ Thorne said. ‘You said his prints were on record.’

‘Marcus had been a bad lad, no two ways about it. He was your typical south London tearaway, sort of kid who would’ve been drowning in ASBOs today, know what I mean? He does a couple of years in the army, buys himself out and ends up doing odds and sods for one or two of the nastier local firms. Deliveries, some security work, whatever. Nothing too heavy himself, as far as we could tell, but he was useful, you know?’

‘Hard man?’

‘If he needed to be, definitely. Then, round about ’95, ’96, Marcus meets this girl, has a kid and changes careers. I don’t mean he becomes an accountant or a brain surgeon or anything, but he walks away from the organised end of things – from anything that’s going to get him in serious trouble – and him and this girl start working for themselves. Some sort of burglary scam they worked together. He’d been doing that, keeping his head down, until he showed up in Simon Tipper’s house and went mental.’

‘Ever find the knife?’

‘No, but we had the prints on the glass, so we never needed to.’

‘You said Brooks was never into anything too heavy himself. Just working on the fringes, right?’ Lilley hummed agreement. ‘Stabbing someone to death sounds a bit out of character.’

She acknowledged the thought with a look then dismissed it with another. ‘People like Brooks are always going to fuck up. Maybe they get carried away when they’re just supposed to be threatening someone. A routine job goes tits up and they panic. Whatever. I wouldn’t have put him down as someone who could lose it that easily, but this shit happens all the time, right?’ She closed her eyes as she drank, then widened them, leaning towards him. ‘Come on, are you telling me you’re still surprised by anything?’

Thorne looked at Lilley’s fingers curled around the stem of her glass. He noticed that the nails were chewed beyond the quick. ‘How long did he get?’

‘Well, here’s where Mr Brooks did surprise me. Once he’d stopped banging on about these fictitious coppers that had stitched him up, he was offered the chance to come up with some real information. He certainly knew stuff about all sorts of characters and, if he’d given the Organised Crime Unit something, we might have been able to make the Tipper murder look a bit more like self-defence. Get the charge knocked down to manslaughter, whatever. But he wouldn’t go for it.’

Thorne could see the sense in refusing to grass. ‘He gets a few years more, maybe, but if he’s kept his mouth shut, he’s not watching his back every minute he’s in there.’

‘I suppose,’ Lilley said. ‘He was put away for eleven years in the end. Did six.’

‘He’s out?’

‘Released five months ago.’

For a second, Thorne had the urge to reach up and scratch at the tickle of excitement crawling beneath his collar. He was pleased that he’d read Lilley right; impressed that the woman had kept such close tabs on someone she’d put away so many years before. He told her as much.

She laughed. ‘Listen, I’m not saying there aren’t one or two I keep a close eye on. And I’m chuffed that you think I’m so… diligent, or whatever. But I wouldn’t have had a fucking clue when Marcus Brooks was getting out of prison if someone else hadn’t asked me about him earlier in the year.’

‘Who?’

‘Bethnal Green CID got in touch in June, when Brooks’ girlfriend and kid were killed in a hit and run.’

‘Christ.’

‘Yeah, nasty…’

‘Hang on.’ Thorne held up a finger. Did the maths. ‘This would have been right around the time Brooks came out, surely?’

‘A fortnight before. A couple of the local boys went to see him inside, to deliver the death message. Can’t have been an easy one.’

‘Hit and run?’

‘Car jumped the lights, went into them on a zebra crossing. On their bloody doorstep, more or less.’

‘Did they get the driver?’ Thorne asked.

‘They got the car, burned out.’

‘No possibility it was deliberate?’

‘It was joy-riders,’ Lilley said. She stared, like she was trying to work out what he might be thinking. ‘Pissed up…’

She was probably right, but Thorne was remembering Bin-bag’s old lady, the look on her face, a couple of hours before.

‘ We’ve got long memories.’

‘Even if it was an accident, maybe Brooks thought it was something else.’ Thorne was talking low and fast. ‘What if he decided the Black Dogs had killed his girlfriend and his kid as revenge for Tipper?’

‘Six years on?’

‘No better time to do it, is there? Just when Brooks is about to be released, when he thinks he’s getting his life back.’

‘So, he comes out of prison and starts to even things up?’

‘Tucker, then Hodson…’

Lilley frowned and emptied her glass. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s a thought…’

The music seemed to have been turned up. Meat Loaf had long since given way to Coldplay, or an equally miserable soundalike. Thorne listened, letting things settle. He had a fair idea of what grief and rage could drive someone to do, but still, he wondered if he wasn’t looking too hard for something. ‘Square-peg thinking,’ Jesmond had once called it.

They talked for another few minutes, then Thorne said he should be getting off. He reached for his coat, but Lilley said she was staying put for a while. Thorne offered to get her another drink as a thank you, but she waved him away. He watched her reaching for her purse and wondered if she had anyone to get home to; if there was a way of asking if she fancied something to eat without it sounding like a come-on.

Lilley squeezed out from behind the table. ‘I tell you what, though,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t make a fat lot of difference if it was the Black Dogs who killed Marcus Brooks’ girlfriend or not.’ She smoothed down her skirt. ‘If they didn’t want revenge then, they certainly will now.’

It was past nine-thirty, and Thorne was starving by the time he reached Louise’s place in Pimlico. She went into the kitchen, defrosted some bread to make a sandwich. ‘You should have eaten something in the pub with this DCI,’ she said. ‘What was his name, anyway?’

‘Sharon.’

Louise stuck her head round the kitchen door.

‘Jealous?’ Thorne asked.

‘Do you want this sodding sandwich or not?’

Thorne ate while Louise filled him in on her day. Her kidnapped drug dealer was still refusing to admit that anyone had kidnapped him. She told Thorne that she envied his job; that at least murder victims couldn’t pretend they weren’t dead. Thorne told her she should be grateful to escape the paperwork.