Mark Billingham - Death Message

The seventh book in the Tom Thorne series, 2007

He could tell they were coppers the second he clapped eyes on them, but it was something in how they stood, in that formal awkwardness and the way their features set themselves into an overtight expression of concern, that drilled a hole straight through to his guts; that sucked the breath from him as he dropped into the chair the female officer had advised him to take.

He drew spit up into his dry mouth and swallowed. Watched as the pair of them tried and failed to make themselves comfortable; as they cleared their throats and pulled their own chairs a little closer.

All three winced at the sound of it. The dreadful scrape and its echo.

They looked like they’d been dropped into the room against their will, like actors who had wandered on to a stage without knowing what play they were in, and he felt almost sorry for them as they exchanged glances, sensing the scream gathering strength low down inside him.

The officers introduced themselves. The man – the shorter of the two – went first, followed by his female colleague. Both of them took care to let him know their Christian names, like that would help.

‘I’m sorry, Marcus, but we’ve got bad news.’

He didn’t even take in the names, not really. Just stared at the heads, registering details that he sensed would stay with him for a long time after he’d left the room: a dirty collar; the delicate map of veins on a drinker’s nose; dark roots coming through a dye-job.

‘Angie,’ he said. ‘It’s Angie, isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Tell me.’

‘There was an accident.’

‘Bad one…’

‘The car didn’t stop, I’m afraid.’

And, as he watched their mouths forming the words, a single, banal thought rose above the noise in his head, like a distant voice just audible above the hiss of a badly tuned radio.

That’s why they sent a woman. Because they’re supposed to be more sensitive. Or maybe they think there’s less chance I’ll break down, get hysterical, whatever…

‘Tell me about this car,’ he said.

The male officer nodded, like he’d come prepared for this kind of request; was happier to be dealing with the technical details. ‘We think it jumped the lights and the driver couldn’t brake in time for the zebra crossing. Over the limit, like as not. We didn’t get much of a description at the time, but we were able to get a paint sample.’

‘From Angie’s body?’

The copper nodded slowly, took another good-sized breath. ‘We found it burned out the next morning a few miles away. Joy-riders…’

It was sticky inside the room, and he could smell the recent redecoration. He thought about sleeping, and of waking up from a nightmare in clinging sheets.

‘Who’s looking after Robbie?’ He was staring at the male copper when he asked the question. Peter something-or-other. He watched the officer’s eyes slide away from his own, and felt something tear in his chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘Your son was with Miss Georgiou at the time of the accident. The vehicle struck them both.’

‘They were both pronounced dead at the scene.’ The male officer’s hands had been clutched tightly together. Now he loosened the grip and began to spin his wedding ring around his finger. ‘It wasn’t drawn out, you know?’

He stared at the copper’s thumb and forefinger working, shivering as his veins began to freeze and splinter under his skin. He felt the blood turning black and powdery, whispering beneath his tattoos and his yellowing flesh, like the blood of something that had been dead for a very long time.

‘OK, then,’ the female officer said, meaning: Thank Christ for that. Now can we get the hell out of here?

He nodded, meaning: Yes, and thanks, and please fuck off before I smash my head into your face, or the wall, or the floor.

Walking back towards the door, where the warder was waiting, it was as though each one of his senses were suddenly working flat out; heightened in a momentary rush, before everything began to shut down.

Cracks in the painted brick gaped like crevasses, and he was tempted to push his fingers inside. He felt the material of his jeans, coarse against his legs as he walked. And, from across the room, the whispers of the two police officers came to him easily – deafening above the sound of his own feet and the noise of the water streaming through the radiators.

‘When’s he get out?’

‘A couple of weeks, I think.’

‘Well, at least he won’t have to wear handcuffs to the funerals…’

Tom Thorne wasn’t convinced that the old woman had the ace she was so obviously representing. He wasn’t fooled for a minute by the sweet-old-lady smile and the spectacles; by the candyfloss hair or the cute tartan handbag. He didn’t believe the square-jawed type in the tux either, whose bluff he’d successfully called a couple of hands earlier. He put the guy on a pair of tens at most.

Thorne raised fifteen dollars. The ace he was holding gave him top pair, but with three hearts on the board, he wanted to scare off anyone who might possibly be chasing the flush.

The guy in the tux folded, quickly followed by the bald bloke in the loud shirt who’d spent the entire game chomping on a fat cigar.

Now it was just Thorne and the old woman. She took her time, but eventually laid down her cards and let him take the twenty-five dollars in the pot.

This was the joy and the frustration of online poker. Though the players were real enough, the graphics of the characters around the table never changed. For all Thorne knew, the old woman – who rejoiced in the username Top Bluffa – was in fact a dough-faced adolescent in the American Midwest.

Thorne, who for the purposes of Internet gambling was known as The Kard Kop, had been logging on to Poker-pro.com for a few months. It was just a harmless bit of fun, no more. He’d seen enough of its victims to know that gambling could take away everything you had as efficiently as a smack habit, and that there were many thousands around the country for whom its availability online only sped up that process. For him, it was a relaxing way of winding down at the end of a shift, no more than that. Or, like tonight, killing time while he was waiting for Louise to call.

He glanced at his watch and was amazed to see that he’d been playing for two and a half hours.

Flicking his eyes to the bottom of the screen, he saw that he was forty dollars up for the evening. Two hundred and seventy-five dollars ahead overall. There was no arguing with that, and he reckoned that even if he lost some money now and again, it would still be less than he’d get through in the same amount of time in the Royal Oak.

Thorne got up and walked across to the music system. He ejected the Laura Cantrell CD he’d been listening to and began looking for a suitable replacement, deciding that he’d give it another half-hour; forty-five minutes maybe, until two o’clock. Then he’d call it a night.

He’d been involved with DI Louise Porter since the end of May; since the end of a case they’d worked on together, when Thorne had been seconded to her team on the Kidnap Investigation Unit. The Mullen case had cost a number of lives, some lost and many more shattered beyond repair. Thorne and Louise were as surprised as anyone that they had forged something positive out of the carnage, and even more so that, five months down the line, it was showing no obvious sign of running out of steam.