Death Message Read online

  ‘What’s the point? All my numbers are on the card anyway.’

  ‘You don’t know how to swap them over?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  It was obvious to both of them that they didn’t have too much time to mess about. ‘Look, just get one of those prepay things,’ Brigstocke had said. ‘Set up a divert and you won’t miss any calls.’

  ‘How much are they?’

  ‘I don’t know, not a lot.’

  ‘So will the department pay for it?’

  It had seemed like a fair question…

  Brigstocke replaced his glasses and pushed fingers through his thick, black hair. He reached for Thorne’s handset. ‘Now, if we’ve finally sorted out your problematic phone situation…’

  ‘I’d like to see you cope without one,’ Thorne said.

  Brigstocke ignored the jibe, stared down once again at the picture on the Nokia’s small screen.

  Thorne eased off his heavy leather jacket, turned to drape it across the back of his chair. It had been freezing when he’d stepped out of his flat an hour and a half earlier, but he’d begun to sweat after ten minutes inside Becke House, where most of the windows were painted shut and all the thermostats seemed permanently set to ‘Saharan’. Outside, wind sang against the glass. November was just getting into its stride, brisk and short-tempered, and from Brigstocke’s office Thorne could see leaves swirling furiously on the flat roofs of the buildings opposite.

  ‘It’s probably just someone pissing about,’ Brigstocke said.

  Thorne had tried to tell himself the same thing since the picture had first arrived. He was no more convinced hearing it from someone else. ‘It’s not a wax dummy,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe a picture from one of those freaky websites? There’s all manner of strange shit out there.’

  ‘Maybe. There’s got to be some point to it, though.’

  ‘Wrong number?’

  ‘Bit of a coincidence, if it is,’ Thorne said. ‘Like a plumber getting sent a picture of a broken stopcock by mistake.’

  Brigstocke held the phone close to his face, tipping it just a fraction to catch the light and talking as much to himself as to Thorne. ‘The blood hasn’t dried,’ he said. ‘We have to presume he’s not been dead very long.’

  Thorne was still thinking about coincidence. It had played its part in more than a few cases down the years and he never dismissed it easily. But already, he sensed that something organised was at work.

  ‘This isn’t random, Russell. It’s a message.’

  Brigstocke laid the phone down gently, almost as though it would be disrespectful to the as-yet unidentified dead man to do otherwise. He knew that Thorne’s instincts were spectacularly wrong as often as they were right, but he also knew that arguing with them was a short cut to a stress headache, with a stomach ulcer waiting down the road. He certainly didn’t see what harm it would do to give Thorne his head on this one. ‘We’ll get this to the tech boys, see what they can do about isolating the picture. I’ll put someone on to the phone company.’

  ‘Can we get Dave Holland to do it?’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll happily tear himself away from the Imlach paperwork.’

  Darren Anthony Imlach. The man about to stand trial, accused of killing his wife and mother-in-law with a vodka bottle. He had been christened ‘The Smirnoff Killer’ by those red-tops that still had a nipple count in double figures.

  ‘Dave’s good at getting stuff out of people in a hurry, you know? Might save on a few hours’ form-filling.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Brigstocke said. He tapped the phone with his index finger. ‘Why don’t you see if there’s any sign of a body we can put this face to?’

  Thorne was already on his feet, reaching for his jacket. ‘I’m going to log on to the bulletin right now.’

  ‘Did Kitson talk to you about the Sedat case?’

  Thorne turned at the door. ‘I haven’t seen her yet.’

  ‘Well, she’ll fill you in, but we found a knife. Dumped in a bin across the road from the Queen’s Arms.’

  ‘Prints?’

  ‘Haven’t heard, but I’m not holding my breath. It was covered in fag-ash and cider and shit. Bits of sodding kebab…’

  ‘Maybe now’s a good time to let the S &O boys come in.’

  ‘They can fuck off,’ Brigstocke said.

  The Serious and Organised Crime Unit were convinced that the murder of Deniz Sedat three days earlier was in some way linked to the victim’s involvement with a Turkish crime gang. Sedat, found bleeding to death by his girlfriend outside a pub in Finsbury Park, was not a major player by any means. But his name had come up during more than one investigation into north London ’s thriving heroin distribution industry, and the team from S &O had been quick to start throwing their weight around.

  ‘Getting seriously fucking territorial,’ Brigstocke had muttered the day before. ‘Well, two can play at that stupid game…’

  Thorne had had dealings with both S &O and some of the Turkish crime gangs that they were up against. There were good reasons – personal reasons – why he would prefer not to get close to either of them again. That said, it was to the DCI’s credit that he refused to be bullied, and Thorne knew his boss well enough to be sure it was not a pissing contest. He was one of those coppers, just as Thorne was, for whom a murder was something to be solved, as opposed to something that lay on the desk and threatened to fuck up clearance rates. Three weeks into an inquiry that was stone cold and Brigstocke could be as miserable as anybody else, but once he caught a case, he knew that there were those, dead and alive, to whom he owed the best efforts of his team.

  Now, Thorne was starting to believe that he had his own victim to work for. One to whom his attention had specifically, had purposely, been drawn and on whose behalf he must do whatever he could.

  For now, he’d try not to think too much about the killer; about the man or woman he could only presume had sent him the message.

  Right now, he knew no more than that the man in the picture was dead.

  All Thorne had to do was find him.

  Officers from the various Homicide Assessment Teams on call during the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift would have faxed in preliminary reports to a central contact desk at Scotland Yard. In turn, those on duty there issued a daily bulletin to which anyone within the Specialist Crime Directorate had access. The report outlined all unexplained deaths – or injuries inflicted that looked to be life-threatening – offences involving firearms, rapes, high-risk missing persons or critical incidents that had been picked up overnight from anywhere within the M25 area.

  Name and address of victim, when available, and brief details of the incident. Cause of death, if evident. Officer in charge of the case where one had been assigned.

  At a spare desk in the open-plan Incident Room, Thorne logged on, called up the email and read through such details as were available of those murders caught the night before. The record for a single night – terrorist atrocities notwithstanding – was eleven; one night a couple of years earlier, when, on top of two domestics and a pub brawl, guns were fired at a house-party in Ealing, a flat was torched in Harlesden, and a gang on the hunt for crack money had sliced up the entire staff of a minicab office in Stockwell.

  Predictably, many had been quick to point out that if the Met really was, as its motto boldly claimed, ‘Working for a safer London’, then it clearly wasn’t working hard enough, though there were plenty of people, Tom Thorne included, working their arses off in the weeks following that particular evening.

  He scanned the bulletin.

  Three bodies was above average for a Tuesday night.

  He was looking for ‘dark hair’, ‘head injury’ – anything that might match the picture on his phone. The only entry that came close described the murder of a barman in the West End: a white man attacked on his way home and battered to death with half a brick in an alley behind Holborn station.

  Thorne dismissed it. The victi
m was described as being in his mid-twenties, and though death could do strange things to the freshest of faces, he knew that the man he was looking for was older than that.

  He could hear DS Samir Karim and DC Andy Stone working at a desk behind him; although ‘working’ in this instance meant talking about the WPC at Colindale nick that Stone had finally persuaded to come out for a drink. Thorne logged out of the bulletin, spoke without turning round. ‘It’s obviously a positive discrimination thing.’

  ‘What is?’ Stone asked.

  ‘Colindale. Taking on these blind WPCs.’

  Karim was still laughing when he and Stone arrived at Thorne’s shoulder.

  ‘Heard about your secret admirer,’ Stone said. ‘Most people just send flowers.’

  Karim began to straighten papers on the desk. ‘It’ll probably turn out to be nothing.’

  ‘Right, you get sent all sorts of shit on your phone these days. I get loads of unsolicited stuff every week. Upgrades, ringtones, whatever. Games…’

  Thorne looked up at Stone, spoke as though the DC were as terminally stupid as his comment had made him appear. ‘And do many of these come with pictures of corpses attached?’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  Karim and Stone stood rocking on their heels, like third-rate cabaret performers who had forgotten whose turn it was to speak next. They made for an unlikely-looking double-act: Stone, tall, dark and well tailored; Karim, silver-haired and thickset beneath a badly fitting jacket, like a PE teacher togged up for parents’ evening. Thorne had time for them both, although Karim, in his capacity as office manager, could be an old woman when he wanted to be, and Stone was not the most conscientious of coppers. A year or so earlier, a young trainee detective with whom he was partnered had been stabbed to death. Though no blame had been formally attributed, there were some who thought that guilt was the least that Andy Stone should have suffered.

  ‘Can’t you two find somebody else to annoy?’ Thorne said.

  Once they’d drifted away, he walked through the narrow corridor that encircled the Incident Room and into the small, ill-appointed office he shared with DI Yvonne Kitson. He spent ten minutes filing assorted memos and newsletters under ‘W’ for ‘Wastepaper Basket’ and flicked distractedly through the most recent copy of The Job, looking for pictures of anyone he knew.

  He was staring at a photo of Detective Sergeant Dave Holland receiving a trophy at some sort of Met sports event when the man himself appeared in the doorway. Incredulous, Thorne quickly finished reading the short article while Holland walked across and took the chair behind Kitson’s desk.

  ‘Table-tennis?’ Thorne said, waving the magazine.

  Holland shrugged, unable to keep a smile from his face in response to the grin that was plastered across Thorne’s. ‘Fastest ball game in the world,’ he said.

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  Holland waited.

  ‘Jai alai,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Jai what?’

  ‘Also called pelota, with recorded speeds of up to one hundred and eighty miles an hour. A golf ball’s quicker as well. A hundred and seventy-odd off the tee.’

  ‘The fact that you know this shit is deeply scary,’ Holland said.

  ‘The old man.’

  Holland nodded, getting it.

  Thorne’s father had become obsessed with trivia – with lists, and quizzes about lists – in the months leading up to his death. These had become increasingly bizarre and his desire to talk about them more passionate, as the Alzheimer’s had torn and tangled more of the circuits in his brain; had come to define him.

  The world’s fastest ball games. Top five celebrity suicides. Heaviest internal organs. All manner of random rubbish…

  Jim Thorne. Killed when flames had torn through his home while he slept. A simple house-fire that any loving son – any son who had taken the necessary time and trouble – should have known was an accident waiting to happen.

  Or perhaps something else entirely.

  A murder, orchestrated as a message to Thorne himself, altogether more direct than the one preoccupying him at that moment.

  One or the other. Toss a coin. Wide awake and sweating in the early hours, Thorne could never decide which was easier to live with.

  ‘Jai alai,’ Holland said. ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘How’s it going with the phone companies?’ Thorne sounded hopeful, but knew that unless the man they were dealing with was particularly dim, the hope would be dashed pretty bloody quickly.

  ‘It’s a T-Mobile number,’ Holland said.

  ‘Prepay, right?’

  ‘Right. They traced the number to an unregistered pay-as-you-go handset, which the user would have dumped as soon as he’d sent you the picture. Or maybe he’s kept the handset and just chucked away the SIM card.’

  Either way, there was probably nothing further to be gained in that direction. As the market for mobile phones had expanded and diversified, tracking their use had become an ever-more problematic line of investigation. Prepay SIMs and top-up cards could be picked up almost anywhere; people bought handsets with built-in call packages from vending machines; and even those phones registered to a specific company could be unlocked for ten pounds at stalls on any street market. Provided those employing the phones for criminal purposes took the most basic precautions, it was rarely the technology itself that got them nicked.

  The only way it could work against them was in the tracing of cell-sites – the location of the masts that provided the signal used to make a call in the first place. Once a cell-site had been pinpointed, it could narrow down the area from where the call was made to half a dozen streets, and if the same sites were used repeatedly, suspects might be more easily tracked down, or eliminated from enquiries. It was a time-consuming business, however, as well as expensive.

  When Thorne asked the question, Holland explained that, on this occasion, the DCI had refused to authorise a cell-site request. Thorne’s response was predictably blunt, but he could hardly argue. With the phone companies charging anywhere up to a thousand pounds to process and provide the information, he knew he’d need more than the picture of a corpse as leverage.

  ‘What about where he bought it?’ Thorne asked. If they could trace the handset to a particular area, or even a specific store, their man might have been caught somewhere on CCTV. If mobile phones were making life trickier, the closed-circuit television camera was quickly becoming the copper’s best friend. As a citizen of the most observed nation in Europe, with one camera to every fourteen people, the average Londoner was captured on video up to three hundred times a day.

  ‘It’s a Carphone Warehouse phone,’ Holland said.

  ‘Is that good news?’

  ‘Take a guess. According to this geeky DC at the Telephone Unit, their merchandise can never be traced further than the warehouse it was shipped out from. If our man had got it somewhere else, we might have been in with a shout, but all the retailers have different ways of keeping records.’

  ‘Fuck…’

  ‘I reckon he just landed on his feet in terms of where he bought his kit. I don’t see how he could have known any of that. Not unless he works for a phone company, or he’s one of the anoraks I’ve spent all morning talking to.’

  ‘Thanks, Dave.’

  ‘I’ll keep trying,’ Holland said. ‘We might get lucky.’

  Thorne nodded, but was already thinking about other things. About the nature of the message he’d been sent. He knew what it was, but not what it meant.

  Was it a warning? An invitation? A challenge?

  Thinking that, if the powers-that-be ever wanted to change that motto of theirs, he had the perfect replacement. One that gave a far more accurate picture of the job. Thorne imagined the scrap of headed notepaper on the desk in front of him with that tired, blue logo erased from the top. Pictured a future where all Metropolitan Police promotional material came emblazoned with a new catchphrase.

  We might get lucky.
<
br />   THREE

  ‘Everyone’s got one of these.’ The shop assistant pressed the gleaming sliver into Thorne’s palm. ‘You see the celebs with ’ em in Heat and Loaded and all the papers. We got some in black, but the silver one’s wicked…’

  The phone was not much bigger than a credit card. Thorne stared down at the tiny keys, thinking that his fat, stubby fingers would be punching three of them at a time whenever he tried to press a button. ‘I think I need something chunkier,’ he said. ‘Something that’s actually going to make a noise if it falls out of my pocket.’

  The salesman, whose name-tag identified him as Parv, was a moon-faced Asian kid with spiky hair. He rubbed at a pot belly through a polo shirt that was a couple of sizes too small for him and embroidered with the shop’s logo. ‘OK, what about a G3? These are bigger because of the keyboards, right? You can do all your email, browse the Internet, whatever.’ The kid started to nod knowingly when he thought he saw something approaching genuine interest in his customer’s face. ‘Oh yeah, high-speed access. Plus you got your live video streaming, your one-to-one video calling, whatever.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone else who’s got one,’ Thorne said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So who am I going to have a one-to-one video call with?’

  Parv considered it. ‘OK, this is a pretty basic phone,’ he said, reaching for another handset and passing it over. ‘Nothing flashy. You got your WAP, your Bluetooth, a voice recorder, a 1.3-megapixel camera – or a 1.5 with a better zoom on the flip-top model – and a built-in MP3 player.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ Thorne said. ‘Does it send and receive calls?’

  Parv stroked his belly again, and did his best to smile, though his eyes made it clear he thought he was dealing with a customer who might produce an automatic weapon from his jacket, or maybe get his cock out at any moment.

  ‘It’s just to have as a spare, really.’ Thorne was looking around, helpless. ‘I don’t need any of the flashy shit.’

  ‘Sorry.’ The kid took back the handset and began scanning the shop for another customer. ‘Everything comes with… some shit.’