Mark Billingham - Death Message

Thorne gave Yashere his prepay phone number. ‘Can you tell him that it’s very urgent?’ he said.

‘Please don’t forget my missing training shoe, Inspector…’

Thorne tried Hendricks’ mobile again, and got no answer. He paced the office; told Kitson he’d see her on Monday when she stuck her head in to say goodnight; checked his watch every couple of minutes.

Ten minutes after Thorne had spoken to Yashere, Stuart Emery called.

Brooks climbed back up the bare wooden stairs from Tindall’s cellar. There was no electricity down there and he’d had to use a shitty little torch he’d dug out of a kitchen drawer. A kid’s thing with a thin, milky beam. He’d managed to find a couple of hammers, in a dusty canvas tool-bag, among the piles of damp magazines and boxes of videos, and he carried them both up to get a good look in the light.

He chose the smaller of the two: a claw hammer with green paint on the handle. Dropped it into a plastic bag which he carried down the hall and left by the front door.

There was plenty of time yet.

He wandered back into the kitchen and knelt to peer into the fridge. Tindall’s dog immediately climbed from her basket in the corner and scampered across to see what might be going. Milk, beer, onions. There were some tinned tomatoes in a dish, and Brooks thought about making some toast to go with them. In the end he settled for the plate of cooked sausages, set in fat under greasy cling-film.

He carried the plate to the small table against the wall and dropped half a sausage to the floor for the dog. It was chucking it down outside. He could see the rain bouncing off the felt on the shed roof.

He remembered Angie screaming at him one Sunday after he had taken Robbie over the field for a kick-about and they had both come home soaked, bouncing a muddy ball. Robbie thought it was funny, and shook his wet hair all over the kitchen before Angie could fetch a towel, which made her even angrier. The two of them pissing themselves. Angie shouting while she stripped off Robbie’s tiny West Ham shirt.

The dog was on its hind legs, pawing at his shins, so he lifted her up on to his lap. Let her lick the grease off the plate. He rubbed the dog’s bristly belly, and tried to stretch the memory out. In the end, he wasn’t sure if there were bits he was only imagining, but he had a clear enough picture of his son’s face; Robbie shaking his wet head, his two front teeth still coming through.

That would be the picture he’d try to hold on to when he was reaching into the plastic bag later on.

Stuart Emery was brisk, just the right side of surly, asking Thorne what he wanted the information for. Thorne tried to keep it quick and simple.

I want to be proved wrong, he thought.

For the second time, Thorne listened as someone at the end of a phone tried to call up the information that would confirm or assuage his worst fears.

‘Got twelve years of review notes on here somewhere,’ Emery said.

Thorne tried to stay calm while the wind threw rain against the window like tin-tacks.

‘Regina versus Brooks, yes?’

‘September 2000. Middlesex Crown Court.’ Thorne waited, willing each tap of a computer key to be the last.

‘Good job I’m organised,’ Emery said. ‘“Anal”, according to my wife.’

For pity’s sake…

‘Here we go… right. “Sentencing remarks”, “witness statements”, “pathology reports”, “grounds for appeal”… These are just my notes, you understand?’

Thorne stopped him, asked him to go back. Emery read, gave him a name. Then another.

His worst fears.

He spluttered out a ‘thank you’, then jerked the phone back to his mouth as he was about to hang up. He needed to move fast, but there was one more question he needed to ask: ‘Can anybody get hold of this stuff? Is it online?’

‘Well, by and large, it’s just specialist rulings,’ Emery said. ‘Judgements that pass into case law, that kind of thing. Mind you, I suppose most things are on the bloody Internet somewhere, if you can be bothered to look hard enough.’

If you’ve got the time, Thorne thought…

The panic fizzed in him, and anger tightened every muscle, every thought. Anger at Brooks, at the man Thorne knew was putting him up to this, and above all at himself. The procedure in this kind of emergency, this kind of nightmare , should have been straightforward. But Thorne knew too bloody well that he’d left himself no easy options.

He punched in Brigstocke’s mobile number.

Russell, I’ve been fucking stupid and I don’t care what happens when this is finished, but we’ve got a serious situation…

He changed his mind and tried Louise one more time.

‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been calling.’

‘I nipped out to the supermarket.’

‘Is Phil with you?’

‘No, he left about an hour ago. You OK?’

‘I’ve tried calling him. Shit…’

‘Tom, what’s the matter?’

So, Thorne told her what he’d discovered: about the message that was far from being a wind-up. And in a rush, garbled and guilty, he told her everything else. The evidence he’d kept to himself; the conversations that had gone unreported; the cracked and rotten limb he’d gone out on.

There wasn’t even a pause. ‘You’re a fucking idiot.’

‘I know, and I don’t have time,’ Thorne shouted. ‘You can call me everything under the sun later on. Now, I need to get hold of people. To find Phil.’

‘You said you’d tried to call him…’

‘His phone just kept ringing. He hasn’t got it with him, or he can’t hear it.’

‘I know where he is,’ Louise said. ‘There’s three or four places in town, could be any one of them. He asked me to go with him.’

‘Three or four?’

‘Some nights he calls in on all of them. Depends who he meets.’

‘Christ…’

‘Listen, I’ve been to these places. I know where they are.’

Thorne was finding it hard to concentrate. He was dizzy with the panic; with the increasing odds against everything turning out the right way.

Who gets to do your PM, Phil?

‘Tom…?’

‘I should call Brigstocke. Tell him everything.’

‘Wait.’ Louise’s voice was quiet, steel in it, suddenly. ‘You don’t have to call anyone.’

‘We need to get officers out there.’

‘You willing to fuck your career up?’

‘It doesn’t seem very important now.’

‘We can do this.’

Thorne leaned against his desk, thinking for a moment that he might be sick. There were pinpricks of sweat across his shoulders, in the small of his back. He felt murderous. Helpless. ‘How?’

‘Who do you trust?’ Louise asked.

‘I don’t know. Holland… Kitson…’

‘Just get Holland.’

Thorne felt the urge to argue, but said nothing. Louise had given him orders before, when they’d worked together. She was better at it than he was. ‘Right.’

She told him to stay calm and listen; gave him the addresses of two gay clubs in the West End. ‘You and Holland get to those. I’ll round a couple of my boys up and we’ll take the other two. They’ll do it for me if I tell them it’s important. No questions asked.’

‘It’s Saturday night.’

‘There are plenty of people I can trust, OK?’

Thorne hung up and flew along the corridor. He found Holland at his desk, his nose in a copy of Auto Trader.

‘Remember what I said about leading you into trouble?’

Holland took one look at Thorne’s face and stood up. Thorne began to talk, explaining and apologising, as he all but dragged Holland towards the exit; filling him in as best he could as they took the stairs two at a time and crashed out through the doors, into the rain.