Mark Billingham - Bloodline

There was still a little water trapped inside the plastic bag, which now lay plastered to the man’s face, distorting what was left of it even further. Thorne thought it looked like an old cushion. The sodden stuffing leaking out, the material ragged and rotten.

‘Somewhere around thirty-six hours in the water,’ Hendricks said now. ‘Not that it would have been very pretty beforehand.’

‘Definitely dead before he went in, then?’

‘You saw his face, mate. That wasn’t the fish.’ Hendricks sat back in his chair. ‘And dead for a few hours before that, I reckon. Four or five at least.’

‘So he was killed somewhere else?’

‘Well, I don’t think the killer battered him, stuck a bag over his head and then stood around on the canal bank waving at passers-by.’

Thorne acknowledged the inanity of his question with a nod, already thinking that their best chance of working out where he was killed would normally have been provided by forensics. But that was virtually a dead end, those thirty-six hours in the water having ruined more than just the victim’s good looks. He blinked away an image of the tattered flesh inside the plastic bag. ‘Doesn’t seem much point in a personal ID,’ he said. ‘No birthmarks or anything, and I can’t see anyone recognising him.’

Hendricks shook his head. ‘Good job we don’t need one.’

‘First piece of luck we’ve had,’ Thorne said. ‘Mind you, he was only ever going to be one of three people.’

The treatment meted out to the dead man’s face made even a check of dental records tricky to say the least and the chances of getting any fingerprint or DNA samples from a reliable source to match with his corpse were almost non-existent. So, the items found on the body itself were liable to be as close as they would come to identify Anthony Garvey’s latest victim as Simon Walsh: an old driving licence in the back pocket of his jeans; a barely decipherable letter from his aunt tucked inside the protective wallet.

‘The aunt’s the next of kin, right?’

Thorne nodded.

‘How did she take it?’

‘Brigstocke got the shitty end of the stick on that one.’

‘I still don’t know how you lot do that,’ Hendricks said. ‘Cutting ’em up’s a doddle by comparison.’

‘I’d take a room full of widows and grieving parents any day.’

Hendricks shook his head, adamant. ‘I always know how the dead ones are going to react.’

Thorne was about to say, ‘You get used to it,’ but Hendricks knew him too well. Knew otherwise. ‘I think his aunt was pleased that Walsh still had her letter. That he thought about her, you know?’

There was a sudden clatter, and the squeak of rubber wheels outside the door as a trolley was pushed past. It faded quickly, lost beneath the echoing conversation of the mortuary attendants; an everyday cadence.

Hendricks turned to his computer, opened his email browser and scanned his inbox. Thorne watched him, the elaborate Celtic band tattooed around his biceps moving as he pushed the mouse around. ‘Fancy a couple of days in Gothenburg?’ Hendricks asked, peering at the screen. ‘A seminar on “image analysis in toxicological pathology” and all the pickled herring you can eat?’

‘Why change his method?’ Thorne asked. ‘Why did Walsh get it from the front? And why was he so violent this time?’

Hendricks spun around on his chair. ‘That’s a “no” to the pickled herring, then, is it?’

‘Come on.’

‘Maybe he’s getting cocky, thinks he’s good at it.’

‘Nobody’s arguing.’

‘So, he doesn’t feel like he’s got to sneak up. I don’t know. Maybe he was in a hurry, or didn’t have time to get to know this one, like he did with Macken.’ Hendricks thought for a few seconds. ‘Maybe he’s just getting angrier.’

‘Why kill him somewhere else, then dump him, though?’ Thorne said. ‘He’s never worried about the body being found before.’

‘Nobody said he didn’t want the body found. If he killed him outdoors, he’s pretty much got to dump him outdoors, I would have thought. Where else is he going to stick him?’

‘Yeah…’

‘Even if he’d wanted to use the same MO as before and kill him indoors, it sounds like Walsh might not have been living anywhere Garvey could have done it.’

‘Yeah… you’re probably right,’ Thorne said. He puffed out his cheeks and let the air go slowly, forcing himself to his feet, though he would have been happy to stay in his chair for a few more hours. Walking towards the door, saying he’d phone later and asking for the report to be faxed across as soon as it was ready, he was aware that Hendricks was still looking at him. Thorne knew that expression well enough – the eyes narrowed behind the glasses – and that Hendricks was concerned about him. Him and the case, him and Louise, he couldn’t be sure which, but he was certainly not going to ask.

In the end, Hendricks just said, ‘You’re positive about the Gothenburg trip? They do seriously good vodka in Sweden, you know. And they haven’t banned Red Bull.’

Back at Becke House, the atmosphere in the Incident Room was strange, as though the workforce at a call centre – which today it resembled even more than usual – had been incentivised with a mystery prize that everyone suspected would not be worth winning. The discovery of a body would always light a fire under a team, even one that was becoming used to it, but the urgency seemed somehow perfunctory. The sense of futility was there if you looked hard enough – in each glance from colleague to colleague, in every stab at a keyboard and snatch of a phone from its cradle.

As office manager, DS Samir Karim had been rallying the troops since the call out to Camden the previous afternoon. He found Thorne by the coffee machine, hunting fruitlessly for biscuits.

‘Headless chickens,’ Karim said.

Thorne slammed the door of the cupboard above the fridge. ‘Not a lot else we can do.’

As expected, the wizards at the FSS were twiddling their thumbs, any forensic evidence having been destroyed in the water. There was always the chance that a call might come in from a member of the public who had seen something, either at Camden Lock or at the murder scene – wherever that was – and there were plenty of officers out conducting a house-to-house, but save for the handful of trendy apartments a few hundred yards from where the body was found, it was not a residential area.

‘There was a chicken in America who lived for eighteen months without a head,’ Karim said.

‘What?’

‘Straight up. Fifty-odd years ago. One of my kids showed me on the internet. “Miracle Mike the Headless Chicken”. They used to feed it with an eyedropper straight down its neck and it went round fairs and circuses and stuff. A year and a half, running around with no head.’

‘We haven’t got that long,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke appeared on the far side of the Incident Room and beckoned him over. Thorne left Karim to continue the search for biscuits and followed the DCI into his office.

‘Just had a lovely chat on the phone with Simon Walsh’s aunt,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Usual bullshit and diplomacy. Telling her that her nephew was the victim of a random attack and trying to convince her that she really doesn’t want to come and have a look at him just yet.’

‘I’ve been talking about miraculous chickens,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke blinked and Thorne gave a small shake of the head to let him know that it wasn’t important. Brigstocke walked round and sat behind his desk. ‘So, as soon as we can find a piece of this poor sod’s jaw with any teeth left in it, we’ll be looking at dental records to confirm the ID. Got to find his dentist first, of course, so I’m not holding my breath.’ He suddenly seemed to notice Thorne’s appearance for the first time. ‘Bloody hell, I’m the one with three kids. How come you look so knackered?’