Mark Billingham - Death Message

At the very least, it should have been distracting.

Pushing his way through a sea of black leather and multicoloured hair extensions ought to have allowed Thorne some time away from thinking about Marcus Brooks. Wondering why there were so many people, relative to the huge amount of quirky pottery and faux-antique tat; moaning about the fact that cleaning up after the market each week was like painting the Forth Bridge; grumbling, sweating in spite of the drizzle, feeling too old to be anywhere near the place. All of that should have taken Thorne’s mind off dead bikers and bent coppers for at least an hour or two.

After the first half-hour, though, Thorne suggested they split up, so that he could browse through the second-hand CDs in the Stables, look for a couple of Cash albums he only possessed on vinyl. In reality, it was because, alone, he could focus more easily on the case: on Brooks and the drive for revenge that Nicklin had stoked up and described with such relish; on Skinner and his partner; on the slow and terrible chain of events that they had begun six years earlier.

He could think about a woman and her child being mown down on a zebra crossing. About men who lived by rules and believed in a reckoning.

About a whirlwind being reaped…

When he caught up with Louise and Hendricks, who were drinking coffee on a crowded pavement, it was only to let them know he’d decided to go into work, even though he was booked out for the day, with a DI from another team covering for him.

Louise wasn’t happy about it. She pointed out that the case would not fall apart without him. He said that she’d do the same thing if she had to.

‘Yeah, if I had to,’ she said.

Hendricks raised his hands. ‘Uh-oh! Domestic…’

Louise threw him a look, in no mood to let it drop.

‘You two can stay,’ Thorne said.

‘Can we? Thanks a lot.’

‘I haven’t got time for this.’

‘No, you’d better get a move on,’ Louise said. ‘They’ll all just be standing around, wondering what to do until you get there.’

Thorne looked to Hendricks for support, for a ‘bloody women’ raise of the eyebrows that might diffuse the situation, but his friend stared resolutely into his coffee cup. Thorne turned back to Louise. ‘We said we wouldn’t do this.’

‘That was when I thought you were “dedicated” or whatever,’ Louise said. ‘That you just liked the job.’ She pressed a hand to her chest. ‘ I like the job, but I’m not a nutter about it…’

Walking back as quickly as he could towards the Tube station, Thorne swore at more than one person for not getting out of his way fast enough. He seethed at being described as a ‘nutter’, shaking his head and muttering to himself, and cursing anyone with the temerity to be sharing his pavement.

Queuing at the ticket barrier, he was approached by an overweight individual with neatly combed blond hair and a warm smile.

‘Do you want to live for ever?’

‘Sounds all right,’ Thorne said.

The man thrust a leaflet at him. ‘You need to let Jesus into your life.’

‘There’s always a fucking catch,’ Thorne said.

As she watched Thorne disappear into the crowd, Louise felt a twinge of guilt cut through her anger – remembering that the case had rather found him, that there had probably been times when she had been equally driven – but the guilt cooled rapidly into resentment at having lost her temper. At being made to feel guilty.

She’d been irritable all day – since Thorne had announced that there would be three of them going out together. She loved Hendricks to bits, how could she not? But she’d been hoping that she and Thorne could enjoy a Sunday without company. Joint days off were few and far between, and she could count on one hand the number of times they’d spent one on their own. She’d hoped that they could relax for a few hours; that they might get the chance to talk about a few things.

There were so many things they’d never discussed…

She turned to Hendricks, pulled a face. ‘Tosser…’

Hendricks lowered his head, then looked up at her, doe-eyed and batting his lashes. He had the voice off to a T: posh and wistful, Princess Diana with piercings: ‘The thing is… there were three of us in that relationship, and, you know… it was a bit crowded . Me, him and the Metropolitan Police…’

Louise smiled, just a bit. ‘It’s not the job.’

Hendricks shrugged, like it was none of his business. They finished their coffees. ‘So, what shall we do?’

Louise wanted to go home. She wanted to spend some time on her own, to let her resentment breathe. To bloom or burn itself out. She wanted to climb into jogging bottoms and kick around in her nice, warm flat for the rest of the day, until she knew whether she should cling on to this relationship or think about cutting her losses.

‘Lou?’

She reached for her bag. ‘I think we should carry on shopping. Buy a few things we don’t need. Then we should both treat ourselves to enormous, fuck-off ice creams.’

The hunt for Marcus Brooks was up and running…

With Nicklin’s information backed up by fingerprint matches from both murder scenes, the team and all resources at its command were now focused in the same direction. The cell-site intelligence on the sending of the Skinner video indicated that the call had been made from a site near Shepherd’s Bush Green.

‘It’s no more than a mile east of Acton, where the first message was sent from,’ Samir Karim said. ‘We know the Hodson message was sent straight away, from the hospital, but maybe these other two came from somewhere closer to home.’

‘Maybe…’

‘We need a few more calls, that’s all.’ Karim handed over the blown-up section of the A-Z , with the relevant cell-sites marked in red. As things stood, the area to which Marcus Brooks may or may not have a connection was no more than two dots on a map. It wasn’t a great deal to go on.

Paper had been passing across Thorne’s desk since he had walked through the door: printouts, statements, diagrams; authorisation documents; memos and maps. Sheaf upon sheaf, building a comprehensive picture of where Marcus Brooks was not. Of what he had done in the few months before he’d started killing anyone. Details of the last known address: the house he’d shared with Angela Georgiou and their son Robert, now empty and locked up. An inventory from the company which had been storing all of the furniture for the last three months; the rental paid a year in advance, the bill settled in cash. Statements from Brooks’ parole officer and from local social services, verifying that he had reported each week as required; had been signing on, seeking work and claiming housing benefit until three months before, when he’d slipped off the system. From his parents, now living in Wales, confirming that telephone contact had stopped around the same time. Requisitions for the usual records and searches: credit and store cards, DVLA, voters’ register, National Insurance…

‘He’ll slip up,’ Thorne said.

Karim’s nod was hopeful at best. ‘He’s been pretty clever so far, though, with all the phone business. I think he’s learned a fair amount about flying below the radar, you know?’

Thorne was coming to the same conclusion. This was stuff that a career criminal like Brooks would have started picking up early in life, and prison was the best finishing school there was.

He would have learned a lot from the likes of Stuart Nicklin.

‘He’s got to be living on something, though.’

‘Cash,’ Karim said.

‘Where’s he getting it from?’ Thorne rifled impatiently through piles of paper for Brooks’ bank and credit-card statements, none of which showed much in the way of funds.