Mark Billingham - Death Message

He turned for home. Headed down Goldhawk Road towards Stamford Brook Tube station.

He’d write to her again when he got back.

He’d make a coffee and turn on the radio, then he’d sit down at the crappy little table in the corner and bang out another letter. Tell her how everything was going. Two, maybe three pages if it came easy, and when he’d finished he’d put it with the others; wrapped up in elastic bands, in the drawer that he’d stuffed full of handsets and SIM cards.

Then he’d take out another phone, and sit there, and wait for the sun to come up.

Dawson might have been a sanctimonious little shit, but there was no faulting him and his colleagues when it came to speed. Before the morning’s first cup of coffee had gone cold, Thorne was sitting at a computer in the Incident Room, looking at a high-resolution JPEG of the photograph that had been sent to his phone.

It was carpet beneath the dead man’s head.

‘He’ll never get that mess out of the shag-pile,’ Stone had said, waving around his own hard copy of the picture. ‘I don’t think there’s a Stain Devil for blood, is there?’

Kitson took the photo from him, looked at it for a few seconds, then laid it down. ‘Stain Devil number four. But if it’s this poor bastard’s carpet, I really don’t think he’s going to give a toss…’

Thorne was using one hand to move the cursor across the image, tracing a line around the ragged patch of red, while the other pressed a phone to his ear. He’d emailed the picture straight across to St George’s Hospital, where Phil Hendricks supplemented the pittance the Met paid him by teaching three days a week.

Hendricks had called him straight back. ‘It’s still just a picture,’ he said.

Thorne waited a few seconds. ‘Well?’

‘I’m not exactly sure what it is you want.’

‘An opinion, maybe. Expertise . I’m probably wasting my time…’

‘It might be a high-resolution image, but the photo itself is still pretty low quality. Not enough megapixels, mate.’

‘You sound like that kid in the phone shop.’

Hendricks was right, though. The image remained undefined, and even the magic worked by the boffins at Newlands Park had yielded little in the way of useful information: the body lay on a carpet; the hair was perhaps greyer than it had first appeared; what had looked on the phone’s tiny screen like a patch of shadow at the neck was probably the edge of a tattoo, poking from below the line of the dead man’s collar.

‘So nothing that’s going to help me, then?’ Thorne asked, letting the cursor rest on the single visible eye. ‘Blood not giving you any clues? Bullet wound, blunt instrument, what?’

‘I’m not a fucking miracle worker,’ Hendricks said. ‘Arterial blood is brighter, and there’s certainly enough of it, but it’s impossible to tell from this. Like I said…’

‘Megapixels, right.’

‘I need to see the body. I’ll tell you how many sugars he had in his tea if you let me have a look at him in the flesh. Or what’s left of it.’

Thereafter, the chat was more or less idle: Arsenal’s recent lack of form; a vague arrangement to meet up for a drink later on. There was only one more reference to the picture and to the questions it posed. Hendricks sounded as serious as he had on Thorne’s doorstep the night before; letting him know that, megapixels aside, one thing about the photograph had been clear enough. ‘If it helps, I can see now why you’d want to know,’ he said.

When he’d hung up, Thorne sat around and let the clock run for a while. Aimless, he watched as Karim worked at the whiteboard that dominated one wall of the Incident Room: scribbling, erasing, updating the map of each outstanding murder where there was any change to be made. He listened as Andy Stone tried in vain to milk more laughs from his ‘blood on the carpet’ routine, and as Yvonne Kitson pestered the lab for news on the knife that might have killed Deniz Sedat.

He didn’t catch everything that was said. The previous night’s lack of sleep had been gaining on him since six-thirty that morning – when he’d trudged towards the bathroom, dragging off a sweaty T-shirt, Louise still dead to the world – and four hours later Thorne was already feeling like he’d done a hard day’s graft. Even as he looked up and grunted his response to Brigstocke, he was wondering if he might have nodded off at the desk for a few seconds.

‘When did you last check the bulletin?’ the DCI asked.

‘About an hour and a half ago…’

Brigstocke waved a piece of paper in front of him. ‘This came in just after nine.’ When Thorne reached up for it, Brigstocke snatched the sheet away and read, enjoying himself: ‘Raymond Tucker. 32 Halifax Road, Enfield. Found by his mother around seven this morning. Victim appears to have died from massive head trauma… Signs of forced entry at rear of premises… Blah, blah, blah-di-blah.’ He paused for effect. ‘Sound good to you?’

‘Sounds possible.’

Thorne moved for the paper again and this time Brigstocke let him have it. He carried on talking as Thorne read through the brief report. ‘A team out of Barking caught it, so I called up the chief super over there, got the DCI’s name, and faxed the picture across fifteen minutes ago.’

Thorne stared up, waited, but not for long. ‘Come on, Russell, fuck’s sake…’

‘The man from Del Monte… he say “yes”.’

Thorne stood and started to move, Brigstocke following, towards his office. ‘I’ll ask Hendricks to meet us at the crime scene.’

‘I should skip that for now,’ Brigstocke said, ‘and get down to Hornsey Mortuary. When the DCI rang back about the photo, he said they’d be bringing the body out in the next half-hour or so.’

Thorne nodded and pushed through the door, the tiredness shaken off and left for dead. He was already at his desk, leaving a message on Hendricks’ machine, when Brigstocke, en route to his own office further up the corridor, stopped in the doorway.

‘When I spoke to the DCI, he also told me the body had been there for a while.’ Brigstocke paused for a second or two, until he was sure Thorne understood the implications. ‘Over a week, he reckoned.’

The pictures in Thorne’s head were less than lovely. ‘I bet that carpet’s fucked,’ he said.

By the time Karim was at the whiteboard again, marking out a new column in lines of black felt-tip and taping up the dead man’s picture below Tom Thorne’s name, Thorne and Holland were already in the car.

Raymond Anthony Tucker had died two days shy of his fifty-second birthday. He’d run a small second-hand car dealership in Chingford, which had hardly catered to the top end of the market, but was nevertheless a notch or two above the cut-and-shut merchants working out of yards in the dodgier parts of Tottenham and King’s Cross. His body had been discovered by his mother, who lived a couple of streets away. Despite the fact that her son was a reasonably successful small-businessman, old enough to have his own grandchildren, she’d still popped in to collect his dirty washing once a week or so.

This information had been fed to Thorne and Holland by phone, as they had driven towards Enfield. Thorne had decided that, despite what Brigstocke had said, it would be a good idea for someone from the team to get themselves on site as quickly as possible. He’d dropped Holland off at 32, Halifax Road, told him to get in there and make his presence felt, and said that he’d try to get back to pick him up after the post-mortem. Then he’d pushed on towards Hornsey, hoping that it would prove to be worth the effort.

The arm of the Specialist Crime Directorate that handled murder cases was divided into three areas, with those bodies turning up in the London Borough of Enfield being dealt with by one of the teams from Homicide East. It would be Russell Brigstocke’s job to liaise with the DCI on whichever team had caught the Tucker case. In turn, each would speak to his chief superintendent, who would then pass the final decision on to the commander. He would weigh up the relative merits of each team – or toss a coin, depending on how many meetings he had on that day – and allocate a senior investigating officer to the case.