Lifeless Page 21

  These days, though, Thorne could feel little else…

  He’d spent most of the afternoon mooching around the Strand; begging for a couple of hours, chatting to a pair of old boys who drank near the Adelphi, and hanging around at a lunchtime soup run. Now, as the day turned from gray to charcoal, he moved quietly among the few tourists still left in the courtyard at Somerset House. This eighteenth-century riverside palace had, at one time or another, been home to the Inland Revenue, the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages, and Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Now it was just another of the city’s attractions: a place for visitors to take snapshots of history, or for families to gather in winter, when the water fountains were replaced with a skating rink. Thorne remembered that they’d filmed an ice-skating sequence here for that stupid film with Hugh Grant as the prime minister. Yeah, right. Another one of those picture-postcard movies where London looked dreamy in beat-bobby blue and Routemaster red. Where the snow never turned to slush, and the ethnic communities were mysteriously absent. Where, if there was no one sleeping rough, it wasn’t because they’d been swept off the streets or were being kicked to death.

  When Holland had rung the night before, Thorne had put on a good enough display of frustration and annoyance: at the way things had gone down in Somerset; at the polite inquiries about how they’d panned out for him at Charing Cross nick. In reality, he’d been feeling guilty as hell. He was screwing things up, and not just for himself.

  He’d heard it in Holland’s concern every bit as much as it had been there, loud and clear, in Brigstocke’s curses. In that final comment from the doorway of the interview room when he’d talked about Thorne looking the part.

  Thorne accepted that he wasn’t always completely honest with himself. But why had he ever thought that his going undercover would be a good idea? Had he only convinced himself as a reaction to those who made it clear what a terrible idea they thought it was?

  Maybe everything that had happened in the last year—what he’d done and what had been done to him in return—had skewed his judgment permanently, made it no more reliable than if he were the one now suffering from dementia…

  When he was eleven or twelve, his father had taken him skating a couple of times. Thorne had hated it. The Silver Blades at Finsbury Park was nobody’s idea of a romantic location, with the frequent stabbings as much a feature of the place as the ice itself. Thorne remembered struggling around the outside of the rink, cultivating blisters, and getting knocked on his arse by older boys with earrings and feather cuts. He remembered getting to his knees, pulling in his hands quickly as the blades flashed by, then looking across to see his dad rushing onto the rink. He’d been embarrassed because his father had broken the rules by coming onto the ice in his shoes. He remembered the look on his father’s face, the blush that had spread across his own, as Jim Thorne had skidded toward the boy who’d knocked him down and shoulder-charged him into the barrier. He remembered his dad pulling him off his knees, and brushing away the slivers of ice. Taking him over to hand in his skates. Across to where they could buy hot dogs and limeade…

  Thorne knew very well that guilt caused such memories to bubble up and burst, the air inside permanently fouled. Guilt poisoned a well that it should have been sweet to drink from.

  “I’m fine honestly, Victor. I really didn’t ring to talk about him.”

  “’Course you didn’t…”

  It took Thorne a few seconds to work out that the vibration in his pocket was his phone ringing. He moved to a corner and stole a glance at the handset; saw that the missed call was from Phil Hendricks. More concern from a friend, and more false assurances. Another small measure of poison.

  Thorne needed to find somewhere secluded from where he could return the call. He walked back out onto the Strand and turned east toward Fleet Street. The City would be emptying rapidly now, as the rush hour took its grip on the streets. A hundred yards along, he stopped at a stall selling the late edition of the Standard. Stunned, he read what was on the hoarding, then stepped closer to look down at a front page.

  After no more than a few seconds, the man behind the stack of papers leaned across. “Buy one or piss off…”

  Thorne just stared at the headline.

  He woke up, cold and clammy, and certain that he’d been crying in his sleep.

  The copy of the Standard that Thorne had shelled out for was flapping, two steps down from his doorway, the headline partially revealed as the page caught the wind: rough sleeper killings: met goes undercover.

  A few steps farther down, Spike was sitting, much as he’d been two nights previously, just before the trouble had started. He looked high and happy, and he stared at Thorne for a full ten seconds before seeming to notice that he was awake. He pointed toward Thorne’s sleeping bag. “New…”

  “Yeah. Not new new, but…”

  “S’nice, like. Brown…”

  By the time Thorne had got back to his pitch after being released from Charing Cross, his sleeping bag—which had been left in the street during the melee—was nowhere to be found. He’d picked up this newer secondhand one from the Salvation Army center on Oxford Street.

  Spike stretched out an arm for the newspaper and dragged it toward him. Thorne watched, wondering what his response should be if Spike were to say anything about the headline. As it was, he turned straight to the back and began to flick very slowly through the sports pages.

  “You follow a team?” Spike said eventually.

  “Spurs, because I’m stupid. What about you?”

  “Southampton. Not properly for a few years, like…”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  Spike lowered the Standard, then folded it. “Not far away. Just some shitty little seaside town.” He ran his hand slowly back and forth along the crease he’d made in the paper. Stared at a spot approximate to where Thorne was sitting. “Couldn’t wait to get the hell out of it, tell you the truth. And they couldn’t wait to get rid of me…”

  It sounded like Spike had got himself into trouble before he’d come to London. It was the same story to one degree or another in most provincial towns. Kids reached a certain age, ran out of things to do, and looked around for something to combat the boredom. It was usually drink, drugs, crime, or a combination of all three. Some got out and got lucky. Others were drawn to those places where their blighted lives might flourish among like-minded souls. Many were destined to fare no better in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh than they had at home, but they would not be short of company; equally doomed perhaps, but not quite as freakish.

  “They let you out on police bail, right?” Spike asked.

  “Right…”

  “But what if you needed to be bailed out? If you needed someone to come and get you, to pay to get you out. Would you have anybody?”

  Thorne said nothing. Thinking it would probably be Hendricks; Holland at a push. But beyond them…

  “It’d be my sister, I think,” Spike said. “It’d have to be. She bailed me out a year or so back, when I got caught with my stuff as well as Caroline’s and this other bloke’s, and they done me for dealing. So my sister stumped up the bail and gave me some extra cash on top of that.” His head dropped, and when he raised it again a smile was smeared across his face. His eyeballs were starting to roll upward, creamy under the streetlight and cracked with red. “She wanted to set me up for a bit, you know? To tide me over. I told her I was going to try and get myself clean, but I went straight out and used the money she gave me to score. Surprise, surprise, right? I think deep down she knew I would, ’cause she knows well enough what I’m like. She knows me better than anyone.” He stared at Thorne for half a minute, blinking slowly. “She knows, right?”

  Thorne nodded. From a club somewhere nearby came the deep thump of a bass line. It was not 2 a.m. yet.

  “I’d really have to be in the shit before I’d ask her for help again. Really deep in it. D’you know what I mean? Because I know bloody well I’d
only let her down, and life’s hard enough without feeling guilty all the time, right? It’s not like she can’t afford it, mind you. She’s done brilliantly. She’s got a really posh job, got herself a flash car and a swanky flat in Docklands and all that. It’s just like it’s become dead important for me not to ask my sister for anything. I’m fucked, right? I know I am. We’re all completely fucked. But whatever happens, I’m not going to disappoint her again…”

  Spike unfolded the paper and turned it over. He stared down at the front page, mouthing the first few words of the headline. Thorne was looking down at him from six feet away, but even if he’d been eyeball to eyeball, there would have been no way to tell if Spike was really taking in what was in front of his face.

  If he was, something in the story made him suddenly laugh out loud. He cackled and hissed, chortled to himself for the next minute or more.

  Thorne could only wish he found it that funny.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Dan Britton’s not here,” McCabe said. “In case you’ve come to apologize.”

  Nothing could have been further from Tom Thorne’s mind. “Still pissed off, is he? Maybe he decided to get his own back by opening his mouth…”

  They were standing on the corner of Agar Street, on the north side of the Strand, a hundred yards or so from Charing Cross Station. Thorne had asked the desk sergeant to pass on a message; he needed to meet Inspector McCabe outside, urgently.

  “I’ll tell him,” the desk sergeant had said. “He’s most likely up to his neck.”

  Thorne had leaned onto the counter. “Tell him I’ve got information that could help prevent a serious assault…”

  Outside, the wind whipped the litter in front of passing cars. “I saw the paper.” The lopsided smile appeared. “It’s unfortunate.”

  “It’ll be a lot more unfortunate when I break his nose all over again.”

  “Don’t even think about accusing anyone on my team.”

  “Well, someone’s got a big mouth.” Thorne realized what he’d said straightaway, and the mileage that the man would enjoy getting from it.

  “Talk about pots and fucking kettles,” McCabe said. “I don’t know how long you’ve been mixing with smackheads and winos, mate, but you’re starting to make about as much sense…”

  McCabe began to walk. He turned right along Chandos Place toward Covent Garden. Thorne watched him, then followed, a hundred yards or so behind. At a corner of the piazza, McCabe stopped and Thorne caught him up. They stood on the edge of the Saturday-morning crowd that had gathered in front of a heavily tattooed juggler.

  “This bloke’s good,” McCabe said.

  Thorne grunted. There were a lot of people watching, and if one in five of them chucked a bit of money his way, the juggler would do all right for himself. Maybe he’d tell Spike to start practicing…

  “Better than those arseholes who paint themselves silver and stand around pretending to be statues. I think I’d rather have junkies and dossers on the streets than out-of-work actors.”

  “Shame our killer doesn’t agree with you,” Thorne said.

  McCabe turned slightly to look at him, as if he wasn’t sure whether Thorne was joking. As if he wasn’t sure about Thorne, full stop. “Seriously,” he said, “I tried to make certain everyone got the message. I did as much as I could to keep the lid on.”

  “Fair enough…”

  Thorne was starting to calm down a little. It didn’t matter whether McCabe was telling the truth or not. There was nothing anyone could do about the leak now. But still, Thorne couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would bother going to the paper with the story. “It’s not like it’s a royal sex scandal, is it?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not giving Princess Anne one, are you?”

  “Come on, they don’t pay big money for this kind of tip, do they? So what’s the bloody point?”

  “Not big money, no,” McCabe said. “But if it was one of your rough-sleeper mates, they’d settle for a few quid, or a bottle of scotch. They’d take anything they could get.”

  “Nobody I’ve met on the street has a clue…” Then Thorne remembered the drunk outside St. Clement Danes: the one who’d known he was a copper, who’d shouted about it until Spike had come along and shut him up. Could he have told the Standard? Could Moony have said something to somebody? Either was a possibility, of course, but Thorne was far from convinced.

  “You wouldn’t know if they did,” McCabe said. “The Drugs Squad sent a UCO in a year or two back; before my time. He was sussed within five minutes. Silly beggar was buying everyone beer and sneaking off to hotels every night.”

  “I’ve not been that stupid,” Thorne said. He continued quickly before McCabe could say anything. “Not quite that stupid.”

  McCabe turned back to the show, his interest waning suddenly. “If it isn’t about money, I haven’t got a clue.”

  “That’s why I was only half joking when I suggested Britton. He’s got a motive. I could understand him wanting to make me look like a mug.”

  “It wasn’t Britton.”

  The juggler was tossing meat cleavers into the air. He deliberately let one clatter to the cobbles, making the stunt look that bit more dangerous. The crowd didn’t seem overly impressed.

  “Whoever opened their mouth did so for a reason,” Thorne said. “They must be getting something out of it.”

  There was one major change to the layout on the whiteboard at the far end of the incident room: the list of victims had been divided into two. The names of Mannion, Hayes, and Asker now constituted a column of their own. Next to it, in black felt-tip, was written: Unknown Vic 1 and Jago, with a line in red leading from those names to 12th King’s Hussars and another to Tank Crew.

  Beneath that were two question marks.

  Of the large number of calls and e-mails that Brigstocke had fielded so far that day, he’d hoped that one or two might have gone some way toward replacing those question marks. He’d hoped that, despite everything Kitson and Holland had been told in Somerset, the army would have found some way to dig up the names of the other soldiers who had served on the tank crew with Christopher Jago in 1991.

  One already dead. Two who might be, or might soon be…

  As it was, far too many of those calls and e-mails had been about Tom Thorne.

  “It’s a pain in the arse,” Brigstocke said. He and Holland were sitting in his office, having polished off a lunch of ham rolls and cheese-and-onion crisps brought across from the Oak. “I’ve had that tosser from the Press Office on half a dozen times at least. Norman? He reckons he’s got papers and TV all over him…”

  Holland grimaced. He remembered Steve Norman from a case a couple of years before, when the MIT had been forced to work more closely than they’d have liked with the media. “Slimy sod deserves something a lot worse all over him.”

  Brigstocke didn’t think it was funny or he wasn’t listening. “I said as little as I could get away with, but I think they’re happy enough to let the story run for a while. Nobody seems desperate to squash it, anyway.”

  “It’s a bit late, I’d’ve thought…”

  “Norman’s not an easy bloke to read, but he’s sharp enough. We were going round the houses a bit, you know, discussing the story, talking about the UCO.” He raised his fingers, used them to put the initials in inverted commas. “But I got the distinct impression that he knew we were talking about Thorne.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Holland lowered his voice. “Should he know?”

  “He shouldn’t, but if it was a copper who leaked the story, then it’s hardly a major surprise.”

  Holland remembered a little more about the case during which he’d first come across the senior press officer; about the way Norman had clashed with one officer in particular. “Him and Thorne have got a bit of history…”

  Brigstocke barked out a humorless laugh. “Is there anyone Tom Thorne hasn’t got history with?”

>   Another knock, and on being invited in, Yvonne Kitson put her head round the door. Holland saw something pass across her face on seeing that he and Brigstocke were ensconced, on guessing that they’d just stopped talking. But whatever she was feeling—curiosity, envy, suspicion—its expression was only momentary. He hoped that when the investigation was over, Kitson wouldn’t be pissed off that he’d been privy to the workings of the undercover operation while she had not. Holland thought he knew her well enough. He was pretty confident that she wouldn’t feel slighted; that she’d put it down to the close working relationship he had with Tom Thorne.

  “Am I interrupting, sir?”

  “No, you’re fine, Yvonne. Everyone okay after the briefing this morning?”

  “I think so…”

  Once the story had appeared in the previous day’s Standard, Brigstocke had been forced to say something to his team. He’d been forced to lie, told them that, yes, there was a UCO working as part of the investigation, but that the officer had been recruited, as might have been expected, from SO10. There was nothing else they needed to know.

  There was no reason for anyone to doubt that this was the unvarnished truth. Even if they did, they certainly wouldn’t have imagined that the officer at the center of it all was Tom Thorne.

  “You okay, Dave?” Kitson asked.

  “Yeah, I’m good…”

  Thinking about it, Holland might have preferred it if Kitson had been the dealing with Thorne. To be honest, he could have done without the stress.

  Kitson and Brigstocke spent a few minutes talking about another case. While the rough-sleeper killings was far and away the most high profile and demanding of the team’s cases, there were, at least theoretically, another forty-seven unsolved murders on their books: dozens of men and women stabbed, shot, and battered. Murders that were horrific and humdrum. Predictable and perverse. Gangland executions, domestic batteries, hate crimes. From sexual predation to pub punch-ups. Killings of every known variety, as well as a few that seemed to have been created just for the occasion. Some had come in since the rough-sleeper murders had started, but some dated back to long before. Thankfully, a healthy number were in the pretrial stage, but there were still many that showed no sign of progress, and these were the ones that had been shoved onto the back burner. It always struck Holland as a ridiculous mixture of metaphors: some cases had gone so cold that no amount of time on any sort of burner would do them any good. The top brass had their own way of describing such things: they were fond of words like de-prioritizing. He could almost hear Thorne’s voice: