Mark Billingham - Death Message

The only sound for fifteen seconds was the faint hum of the recording equipment, and the creak of the girl’s short leather jacket as she twisted in her chair. She shook her head, kept shaking it. Whispered: ‘I can’t.’

They sat in silence for a minute more, but it was clear they would get nothing else out of the girl for the time being. Stone looked as though he could happily have stared at Harika Kemal for a good deal longer, but Kitson had better things to do.

Cheap flats anywhere in central London were hard to come by, but all the same, Thorne could see why the owner of this particular property would not have been snowed under with prospective tenants. Why he’d have been happy enough to pocket the cash and not ask too many questions.

Within shouting distance of the Talgarth flyover, the house stood at the grimmer end of an undistinguished terrace. The top-floor flat – one room and a toilet wedged into the eaves – looked out over the roof of Charing Cross Hospital from the front, with the green and grey of Hammersmith Cemetery the marginally more appealing view from the Velux window at the back.

‘No wonder Brooks is in a bad mood,’ Holland said.

Pretty much every expense had been spared to create a uniquely desperate atmosphere: three different patterns of carpet in one room; a two-bar electric death-trap mounted on one wall; a shit-streaked lavatory bowl, and a pink plastic shower tray that appeared to match.

‘Jesus.’

‘I’m surprised he didn’t top himself.’

‘When we’ve got a minute, can we come back and nick the thieving fucker that rented this place out…?’

Thorne walked very slowly from the bed to a chest of drawers. He wasn’t in any hurry, of course, was keen to miss nothing, but he couldn’t have moved much quicker if his life depended on it. He’d had no more than three hours’ sleep the night before. Three hours between drifting away on the sofa with one handset clutched to his chest and being woken by the ringing of the other, with news of the sighting in Hammersmith.

Louise had wandered into her living room just before he’d left, bewildered to see him fully dressed. He’d told her about the body being found the night before. About having to rush off again.

‘I’m really not trying to avoid you,’ he’d said, laughing.

She hadn’t seen the funny side. ‘Nobody said you were.’

As Thorne reached for the handle on the top drawer, he was called across to the far end of the room. A Trainee DC whose name he could never remember had discovered a Tupperware box stuffed with cash underneath a table. As Thorne took the box, he could feel its worn edges through the thin gloves. He flicked through the bundle of notes, then passed it across to the exhibits officer. While he was there, the officer carefully bagged up ballpoint pens, scraps of paper and a wrap of rolling tobacco from the cracked Formica surface of the table. It looked to Thorne as though it had been borrowed from a greasy spoon.

‘There’s a decent amount there,’ the TDC said. ‘All fifties and twenties, by the look of it.’

Thorne called Brigstocke in from the bathroom. They had found clothes scattered about, and personal items on a shelf above the sink. Seeing the cash, though, Brigstocke nodded, as though its discovery had confirmed what he was already thinking. ‘Well, either he left in a hell of a hurry or he’s coming back,’ he said. ‘We should get what we can as quickly as possible and get out. Put some surveillance at either end of the street, just in case.’

A crime scene unit never got out of anywhere quite as quickly as they went in, but Thorne suspected that they would be wasting their time anyway. ‘Yeah, worth a try,’ he said. He walked back to the chest of drawers, took a step past it and spent a few seconds at the dirty window. Remembering what had happened, how he’d felt in the garden at Skinner’s place, he instinctively glanced down at the street and across to the houses opposite, as though Marcus Brooks might be watching them from somewhere.

The drawer refused to slide out easily, and Thorne had to kneel down and wrench it an inch or so at a time. The TDC offered a helping hand and snorted when he looked down and saw what was inside. ‘Bugger me, he could open his own shop.’

There were perhaps a dozen assorted handsets. Spare batteries and chargers. SIM cards lying loose, in blister packs or mounted, unused, on plastic cards.

‘He doesn’t have anything else,’ Thorne said. ‘What he’s doing is everything to him.’ He nudged some of the hardware to one side with a gloved finger. ‘He’s spent time putting it all together.’

‘I hope there isn’t one of those for each message he’s planning to send.’

Thorne knew the young TDC was joking, but caught his breath nonetheless; poking around among the Nokias and Samsungs, as if they were knives or handguns. He remembered what Kitson had said in the pub.

‘How much revenge can anyone want?’

He reached for something at the back of the drawer and pulled out a sheaf of papers, bound with several elastic bands. He read the first page, then gently turned back the corner to look at the second.

The TDC was trying his best to read over Thorne’s shoulder. ‘What you got, old love letters?’

‘Not old,’ Thorne said, eventually. Now he knew for certain that Brooks hadn’t gone anywhere; that if they had missed him, it could not have been by very much. He beckoned the exhibits officer over and handed the letters across. ‘I want copies of those as soon as,’ he said.

‘You want what?’

Thorne repeated the request, his words lost the first time beneath those of Russell Brigstocke, who was walking up and down the room, clapping his hands and urging everyone to get a move on.

Brooks stood with half a dozen others at the end of the road, watching the comings and goings.

As soon as he’d seen the copper waving cars on, seen the tape strung between lamp-posts and the ‘Diversion’ sign, he’d known that something was up. He’d parked a few roads down and walked back to see what was happening.

‘There’s enough of them,’ the man next to him said. ‘Must be pretty serious.’

A woman behind him leaned forward. ‘Someone told me they saw coppers with machine-guns.’

He’d got back to the flat around six that morning, shaved and got changed, then headed out again straight away. There had been no point trying to sleep, he knew that, and with business on the other side of the river, he’d wanted to beat the traffic.

How had they found him? How close had they come to ending it all? He looked up at the window to the flat and found himself wondering if Tom Thorne was in there.

Thought about the text messages the night before.

Losing the flat was annoying, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

There were people he could count on to find him somewhere to crash until all this was over. That wouldn’t be a problem. Same thing with the cash: he was still owed plenty of favours. He could get himself some new clothes, a few new phones, whatever else he needed.

This wasn’t going to hold anything up.

He turned and walked back towards the car. Left the woman moaning about getting back into her house, needing to cook the kids’ tea.

The letters were the only thing that really mattered, of course. But all he’d lost were the bits of paper. Ink and scraps.

Every word was in his head.

It was like being stone-cold sober when everyone around you was three sheets to the wind.

The breakthrough in finding Brooks’ flat had lifted everyone’s mood, and back at Becke House Brigstocke and the rest of the team went about their business with a new enthusiasm, as though an imminent arrest were now a foregone conclusion. But Thorne felt as though he were watching it all from the outside, unable to share in the excitement, knowing that the isolation was of nobody’s making but his own.