Mark Billingham - Death Message

Enough people were thinking badly of him as it was.

‘How’s it been?’ Louise asked, flat.

‘Same as ever. However you feel at the start of the day, it’s downhill from breakfast.’

‘You must be knackered,’ she said. ‘Sorry…’

‘It’s fine.’ He could hear something being shouted in the background. Told her about the text he’d received from Hendricks that morning.

‘Did he? He never said anything.’

It was hardly a surprise. Even as Thorne recounted Hendricks’ you’re the best message, he couldn’t help but think it would be the last joke coming from that direction in a while.

‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘Inaccurate, but funny.’

Thorne was relieved to hear a smile in her voice.

‘When can you get over?’

‘Shouldn’t be too late. Eight, half eight.’

‘Maybe we can finally get to see this movie. There’s usually late shows on a Saturday.’

‘Or the three of us could do something together,’ Thorne said. ‘Might be easier to just get a DVD out.’

‘OK,’ Louise said, frosty again.

‘I’m booked out for the whole day tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, fine. Whatever.’

Thorne guessed that the ‘whatever’ meant anything but; that Louise had been banking on the two of them spending some time alone. But he hadn’t quite been able to forget about that video clip. Perhaps he should simply have told her, because by the time he’d hung up, after half a minute more of fuck all, he knew that Louise was thinking badly of him anyway.

He was on his way out of the door when the panic took hold…

Hurrying across the Incident Room, thinking about ways to get back in Louise’s good books. Pulling on his jacket and cheerfully telling those he wouldn’t see until Monday to enjoy their Sundays at work. Walking past the whiteboard, and glancing at the photographs; the bodies of the first two victims. Tucker and Hodson.

Dead white flesh and coloured ink.

Two thoughts, fragments of conversations, came together – smashed together – in his mind and started the wheels racing.

The feeble joke Bannard had cracked about all bikers looking the same: all long hair and tattoos. And something Hendricks had said at Tucker’s post-mortem, the one they’d watched together…

Thorne walked back to his office, pressed his body against the door after he’d closed it. Wondering, hoping that this was no more than cabin-fever. He used his prepay to call Louise’s flat, then Hendricks’ mobile.

Got no reply from either.

He thought hard, breathed hard for a minute or more, then dialled another number.

By the time he got off the phone, it was as sorted as it was ever going to be, but Brooks wasn’t happy. It didn’t feel right having to involve other people; having to rely on anybody. Each one should have been his alone, by rights.

This wasn’t the way he did things.

He sat up on the soft bed in Tindall’s spare room, looked at himself in the mirror on the dressing-table opposite.

It was almost beyond belief, this shit-house he’d become.

The way he did things.

Christ…

And it wasn’t like he was talking about the way he packed a suitcase or drove a car. These weren’t things he’d ever thought about, not seriously; even at the darkest moments, just after he’d gone inside. But everything changed you, big or small, didn’t it? Turned you into someone else. Every single thing you saw or thought, so that you were never the same person from one second to the next. How the fuck could you be? Maybe, eventually, good and bad, that made you into the person you were always meant to become.

Murder was now something he did, simple as that. And he was a damn sight happier doing it on his own.

Nobody made him take the advice, or accept the offer of help, on this one, but it made sense under the circumstances. It squared things. And this fucker clearly deserved it as much as anyone else.

He pulled faces at himself…

It wasn’t like he couldn’t work with other people. He’d really enjoyed those couple of years when him and Angie were doing the houses together; loved them. But you had to be working for the same thing, doing it for the same reasons. The two of them had nicked shit and sold it to put food on the table. To pay for clothes and holidays and stuff for Robbie. End of story. They both had the same attitude to the work, so they thought the same way when it came to whether a risk was worth taking, whether the payoff was worth it, whatever. They had the same boundaries.

Nobody else involved in what he was doing could feel the same way he did. Not when he was bringing the hammer down. There’d have to be a moment, some point, when any other person would think they’d had enough, and walk away. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to reach that point.

Nobody else could feel as much, or as little, as he did.

He shuffled forward and off the bed; moved across to the mirror on his knees and pressed his face up close to it. Fuck, he looked like he was pushing fifty. Like his dad had looked those couple of times in the visitors’ room.

Sorry, baby, he thought. I swear I was looking good right before it all happened; looking better than this, anyway. I’d even been working out for a few months, watching what I ate and all that. I didn’t want to come back to you flabby and fucked, like Nicklin and the rest of them, you know?

Everything changes you, big or small; changes your plans. Course, I didn’t know that when I was leaving my spuds at dinnertime and doing circuits in the gym at Long Lartin. Didn’t think you were going anywhere, did I?

That I’d be walking out of one prison and into another.

‘Mr Yashere? DI Thorne.’

A pause. ‘I left a message with you three days ago.’

‘The missing training shoe.’

‘Correct. The shoe that has gone walkabout. Do you have it?’

‘No…’

‘Losing such an important piece of evidence is causing something of a problem, to put it mildly.’ Yashere spoke slowly, with precision. A Nigerian accent.

‘I promise that I will find it,’ Thorne said. ‘And when I do, I will personally deliver it to you, in a box, with a fuckoff red ribbon round it. But right now I need a favour.’

‘I was just about to go home.’

The Crown Prosecution Service had a small office round the corner at Colindale station, but via the out-of-hours service Thorne had been put through to their Criminal Justice Unit at the main station in Edmonton. This was where Anthony Yashere and his fellow-caseworkers were based: collating exhibits; ensuring the integrity of evidence chains; firing off snippy emails and phone calls when blood stained training shoes disappeared.

Thorne explained what he needed.

Yashere took details, dates and names. Told Thorne that he could probably get him the trial transcript in a few days.

‘Not quick enough,’ Thorne said. ‘Sorry.’

Yashere began to think out loud, guiding Thorne through the process as he logged into his IT system. It provided a summary of all ongoing cases, but was not yet fully up to date with trials whose details had been on the system it had replaced three years before.

Thorne listened to the click of computer keys. To grunts and sighs of frustration.

‘We are going back quite a long way,’ Yashere said. ‘Perhaps I should ask a colleague who knows his way around the system better than I do.’

Thorne had a better idea. ‘Who was the prosecutor? You must have that on record.’

‘I think so.’

‘Do you have a number?’

Yashere logged out of one system and into another. More clicking, more waiting.

‘I think you will need a home number,’ Yashere said. ‘There are not too many fools like you and I still working at this time on a Saturday.’ He said that he’d try to get hold of Stuart Emery and have him call Thorne back.