Death Message Page 3

  It sounded to Thorne like the second fantastic motto he’d heard so far that day. Maybe he should get off the force and start a company selling greetings cards with realistic messages.

  ‘Let me know if you need any more help,’ Parv said, sounding almost like he meant it.

  Thorne couldn’t help but feel guilty at being the black hole into which the kid had poured his considerable knowledge and enthusiasm. Quickly assuring him that he would buy something, but had just a few more questions, Thorne took a step back towards the display of G3 handsets and asked if it was possible to play online poker by phone.

  It was four-fifteen, over an hour past the end of his shift and already starting to get dark. The clocks had gone back the week before and, as always, there had been the usual complaints from those trumpeting the trauma of seasonal affective disorder. Thorne was less than sympathetic. Glancing up from his desk, he decided that the darkness certainly improved the view from his window. Besides, who needed SAD, when ten minutes on the phone with a tiny-cocked jobsworth could depress even the happiest of souls so effectively?

  It had taken Thorne a little over an hour to set up and register his new phone; now all that remained was to divert calls to his newly issued prepay number. Unfortunately, the mobile from which he needed to activate the divert had already been couriered to a properly equipped laboratory so that the photograph could be examined in detail. Thorne had put a call through to Newlands Park, the technical facilities base in Sidcup that handled image manipulation, audio/visual enhancement and other such tasks beyond the wit of those who could barely programme a VCR.

  ‘It’s easy enough,’ Thorne had said. ‘I’ve got the manual in front of me and I could talk you through it in ten seconds. I just don’t want to miss any calls, you know…’

  ‘Really, you don’t need to talk me through it.’ The technician had been unable, or hadn’t bothered trying, to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. His name was Dawson, and Thorne immediately pictured bad skin and overlarge ears, a tie with egg stains and a vast collection of porn. ‘I can’t make changes to the settings, d’you see?’

  ‘Sorry, no.’

  ‘The phone has been submitted to us as evidence.’

  ‘No, it hasn’t,’ Thorne had said. ‘The picture is the evidence.’

  ‘And the picture is on the phone. I can’t tamper with the phone.’

  ‘It’s just setting up a simple divert on my personal calls. How’s that tampering?’

  ‘All I’m permitted to do is extract and enlarge the photograph, which is what we’ve been requested to do. I’ve got it in writing.’

  ‘I’m sure you have, but this is just about common sense, right? If I get sent a videotape with footage of a murder on it, and I watch it, it doesn’t mean I can’t change the settings on my video recorder, does it?’

  ‘We’re not talking about what you do,’ Dawson had said. ‘There are set procedures here.’

  Thorne’s favourite word. It could only get worse from this point.

  ‘We have to remain sensitive to the integrity of evidence.’ It had sounded like Dawson was reading from a printed card. ‘We need to be aware of any forensic issues.’

  ‘There aren’t any forensic issues,’ Thorne had said. He had done his best to sound joky, but it was a tall order. ‘It’s my phone. It’s not like you’ll be smudging the killer’s fingerprints, is it?’

  There had been a pause. ‘All I’m permitted to do-’

  ‘This is fucking ridiculous.’

  ‘Bad language isn’t going to help anybody.’

  It had helped Thorne immensely. ‘Who else can I speak to?’ Waiting for an answer, he had pictured Dawson leaning casually against a workbench, with a Rubik’s cube and an erection.

  ‘I’m guessing that your senior officer needs to make an official request to my shift manager.’

  ‘It’s a very thin line,’ Thorne had said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Between loving your job and bending over while it fucks you up the arse…’

  Thorne had only given Brigstocke the edited highlights of the conversation when he’d spoken to him. Though his new phone still hadn’t rung yet, he presumed that the DCI had got straight on to Dawson’s boss to authorise the divert, and Thorne sat trying to choose one of several dozen equally irritating ringtones while he waited.

  ‘Don’t use any of those hip-hop ones,’ Kitson said. ‘People will think you’re having a mid-life crisis.’

  Thorne looked up. He hadn’t heard her come in.

  ‘You can download them now, you know,’ she said. ‘You could get some Hank Williams, or Johnny Cash.’

  ‘“Ringtone of Fire”,’ Thorne suggested. He watched as his fellow DI ordered her desk and scribbled something on a piece of paper. When she said his new phone looked flash, he passed it across to her and explained the hassle he’d gone through buying it, while she scrolled through some of its features. Though Kitson had heard the jungle-drum version of the photo-on-the-phone story, Thorne talked her through the true sequence of events: the message in the early hours; the picture of a dead man.

  ‘It’s the same as when people show you their holiday snaps,’ Kitson said.

  ‘Like a souvenir, you mean?’

  ‘Only up to a point. They’re really saying: “Look how well off and wonderful we are. Look at where we’ve been.”’

  ‘You think he’s bragging?’ Thorne said. He blinked, saw the black inside the open mouth, the wet mess behind the ear. Spoke as much to himself as to Kitson: ‘“Look what I’ve done”…’

  She nodded, handing back the phone. ‘I still don’t see why you needed to get this. Why didn’t they just send the SIM card to the lab?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’ Thorne did not want to explain that he hadn’t known how to swap over his contact numbers. Or the fact that he was rather enjoying his tasty new phone.

  ‘You could have got a prepay SIM card and put it in your old handset.’

  Thorne shrugged, stared down at the phone. ‘Yeah, well, I’ll know next time.’

  ‘Anything from the lab yet?’

  ‘Nothing useful,’ Thorne said. ‘Tell me about this knife.’

  It was, according to Kitson, a bog-standard, six-inch kitchen knife, fished from a litter bin in a park opposite the pub where Deniz Sedat had been stabbed to death. The council street-cleaner who’d found it, having seen enough episodes of CSI to know about such things, had put his hand inside a plastic bag before picking it up and carrying it carefully along to Finsbury Park police station.

  Thorne told Kitson he didn’t watch a lot of cop shows. She said he wasn’t missing much, but at least they were good for something. He asked her if she thought they’d found the murder weapon.

  ‘It looked like there was blood smeared on the blade.’

  ‘Brigstocke told me there was all sorts of shit on it,’ Thorne said. ‘You sure it wasn’t chilli sauce?’

  ‘Size of the blade fits with the fatal stab wound, according to Hendricks.’

  ‘What does he know? Useless Mancunian twat…’

  Kitson grinned.

  Phil Hendricks was the pathologist attached to Team 3 at the Area West Murder Squad. He was also Tom Thorne’s closest friend, or the closest thing to it.

  ‘I’d be surprised if S &O are quite as excited as they were,’ Thorne said. ‘Does the average East European hitman, or whoever they’ve got pegged for this, usually chuck his weapon in the nearest litter bin?’

  Kitson still had a pen in her hand, but from where Thorne was sitting, it looked like she was doodling. ‘Well, they don’t normally use knives, so fuck knows.’

  ‘Knives, guns… dead is dead.’

  ‘Right, and it was certainly quick,’ Kitson said. ‘Professional, you know? How long was Sedat out of his girlfriend’s sight? One minute, two?’

  Harika Kemal had announced that she’d needed to visit the ladies’ as the two of them were leaving the Queen’s Arms. Sedat had reached for his ciga
rettes and said he’d wait for her in the car park. Harika told the police afterwards that she’d gone outside a couple of minutes later and found Sedat dying on the floor. Kitson had seen the horror in the girl’s eyes as she’d made her statement; could only imagine her feelings at seeing her boyfriend slumped against the front wheel of a car, leaking blood into the dirt and gasping for air, like a fish in an angler’s fist.

  ‘Yeah, certainly quick,’ Thorne said. ‘Dispassionate.’

  Kitson jabbed the air with her ballpoint. ‘Nice and clean. Straight through the heart.’ She leaned back in her chair, dropped the pen on the desk and let out a long breath. ‘Fuck, I could murder a cigarette.’

  ‘Since when?’ Thorne had given up years before, but still got pangs every now and then. Holland had recently started smoking, much to his girlfriend’s disgust. Maybe nicotine-stained was becoming the new black.

  ‘Just a couple in the evening, you know? With a glass of wine or a cup of coffee, whatever.’

  It sounded good. Thorne looked at the clock. ‘Let’s piss off, shall we?’

  They talked as they gathered up their things, Kitson rooting in her bag for car keys, Thorne shoving papers into a tatty brown briefcase he’d found in the bottom of his father’s wardrobe.

  Kitson turned off the lights. ‘Well, whether hitmen use knives or throw them into bins afterwards, they don’t tend to leave a lot of fingerprints, so we’ll know soon enough…’

  The Homicide offices were on the third floor of Becke House. Thorne and Kitson gave the lift a minute, then decided to walk. The communal areas had recently undergone a modest upgrade, which had included carpeting the stairs. The smell, which lingered three weeks on, reminded Thorne of moving house, sometime when he was a kid: cardboard boxes, and his dad bringing home takeaways.

  It also made him feel a little apprehensive.

  ‘What have you got on tonight, then?’

  He wondered if it was carpet beneath the head of the dead man in the picture. It had been impossible to tell. Maybe when they enhanced the photo…

  ‘Tom?’

  Thorne turned, stared until Kitson repeated her question. ‘Just stopping in,’ he said, after a moment. ‘You?’

  ‘The usual madness,’ Kitson said, sounding a little envious of Thorne’s empty schedule. ‘Actually, even madder than that. My eldest has GCSEs coming up, so things are a bit tense.’

  ‘I bet.’ They turned on to the final flight. Kitson rarely spoke about life at home and Thorne felt vaguely honoured.

  ‘It’s hard for him,’ Kitson said. ‘You know? It’s a lot to cope with at that age. They don’t know how to handle the pressure.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  Thorne grimaced. ‘I’m three times that, near enough.’ He leaned his shoulder against the door. The cold slapped him in the face as he stepped out into the car park. ‘I wish some bugger would tell me how to handle it.’

  At the flat, Thorne had grated cheese into a bowl of tomato soup and stared at his new phone, willing it to ring. Finally, it had, twice in quick succession. Now Thorne was sitting in his living room, watching the two callers drink his lager and cheerfully take the piss out of him.

  It was a continuation of a discussion that had been going on for the last week, since Halloween, when Thorne had voiced his considerable antipathy towards the practice of ‘trick or treating’.

  ‘It’s a paedophile’s dream,’ he said now. ‘An endless parade of kids knocking on the door.’

  Phil Hendricks took a slurp of Sainsbury’s own-brand lager. ‘That’s bollocks. You’re just tight, and you can’t be arsed to get any sweeties in.’

  ‘It’s a stupid bloody Americanism. We never used to do it…’

  ‘You’re such a miserable git,’ Louise said.

  ‘Most of them don’t even make any effort. They don’t dress up or anything.’

  ‘They’re kids…’

  ‘It’s just an excuse for ASBO fodder to chuck fireworks and stick dog-shit through old people’s letterboxes.’

  ‘I think Louise is right,’ Hendricks said. ‘You’re tight and miserable.’

  Thorne got up to fetch more beer from the kitchen. Hendricks was perched next to Louise on the sofa, and Thorne leaned in close as he walked past. As always, the pathologist was dressed in black, with the usual array of metalwork through eyebrow, nose, lip, cheek and tongue. ‘You just like it because you don’t need to wear a mask,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks gave him the finger. ‘Homophobe!’

  Louise laughed and knocked over her beer can. She scrambled to pick it up but there wasn’t too much left in it anyway.

  Walking back into the living room, Thorne was struck, as always, by how alike Hendricks and Louise were. They were both thirty-four, which, to their endless glee, gave them ten years on Thorne. Each was dark-haired and skinny, though Hendricks’ hair was shaved rather than short, and Louise had far fewer piercings. Save for the differences in their accents, they might have been mistaken for brother and sister.

  Thorne handed each of them a fresh can.

  The two had become friends very quickly, gone out together to gay bars and clubs, and sometimes, watching them together, Thorne felt envious in a way he didn’t care to spend too long analysing. When he and Louise had first started seeing one another, he’d been slightly annoyed that Hendricks hadn’t seemed overly threatened; especially as Thorne, on occasion, had found himself to be more than a little jealous of Hendricks’ boyfriends. As it happened, the three of them had spent a good deal of the last few months together; Hendricks having split from his long-term lover around the same time that Thorne and Louise had hooked up. The break-up had been over children: Hendricks was desperate to be a father and was now searching for a partner who shared his enthusiasm. More than once, he and Louise had joked about how she might help him out; about cutting Thorne out of the picture altogether.

  ‘Come on, Lou,’ Hendricks had said. ‘You’d be far better off with me. I’ve got decent taste in clothes, music, everything.’

  ‘Yeah, OK. Why not?’

  ‘I mean, obviously we won’t actually do anything. There’s ways and means. Besides, I don’t think you’d be missing much, sex-wise.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that.’

  Hendricks had hugged Louise and leered at Thorne. ‘Right, that’s sorted. Me and your girlfriend are buggering off to get creative with a turkey-baster…’

  Tonight, they drank a good deal more and emptied the cupboard of every available snack. They watched some TV and talked about football, and facelifts, and the tumour Hendricks had found inside the stomach of a middle-aged woman which had turned out to be a long-unborn twin.

  The usual stuff.

  Around eleven-thirty, Hendricks phoned for a cab back to his flat in Deptford and, while they waited, they talked about the photograph some more. They’d discussed it earlier, in three separate phone conversations: Thorne and Louise; Louise and Hendricks; Hendricks and Thorne. Then they’d spoken about it when each had arrived at the flat, and again when the three of them were finally together. It was always just a question of when they’d get back to it.

  ‘Until you find a body, it’s just a picture,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘You didn’t see it.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You should listen,’ Louise said. She put a hand on Thorne’s arm, nodded in Hendricks’ direction. ‘He’s spot on. It’s just a photograph. You might never find a body.’

  ‘What am I supposed to do, then?’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Like I said to Phil…’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen it, but I know what death looks like. Come on, Tom, we all do.’

  Thorne knew she was right, but couldn’t shake the unease. It was like a draught he kept walking through. ‘It feels like it’s mine, though… It is mine.’ He hunched his shoulders, the chill at them again, bracing himself as Louise leaned in against him. ‘It was sent to me.’
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  Hendricks nodded slowly. His eyes flicked momentarily to Louise, then dropped to his watch. He stepped across to the window, pulled back the curtain and peered out on to the street.

  ‘The cab firm said to give it ten minutes,’ Thorne said.

  They all moved into the hall and stood a little awkwardly around the front door. Though Thorne had spent the better part of twenty-four hours trying to avoid it, he suddenly felt the question hanging there between them; could feel the weight and the heat of it. Certain as nausea.

  Hendricks was as good a person as anyone else to voice it.

  ‘Why you?’ he asked.

  After Hendricks had gone, Thorne and Louise didn’t take too long to get into bed, but nothing that came afterwards was any more than half-hearted. Tiredness, beer or something else altogether had dampened the desire, and warmth or simple proximity had been enough for both of them.

  ‘I don’t think you’re a miserable git,’ Louise said, just before she turned over.

  Later, Thorne lay awake in the dark, fighting hard to silence the shrill, insistent, ‘Why?’ Until, in the end, it became like a car alarm to which you grew accustomed. It was not exactly a comfort, but he knew there was every chance that the answer would present itself before he’d had to spend too long worrying about the question.

  With Louise snoring quietly next to him, he thought about something he’d said earlier. When Kitson had asked him why he hadn’t just handed over the SIM and kept his handset.

  He’d said it casually then, without thinking.

  ‘Well, I’ll know next time.’

  He’d done a lot of walking at night. During the last few months, anyway.

  It was partly because he could, obviously; because the novelty had still not worn off. The flat wasn’t small, not by a long stretch, but anywhere started to close in after a week or two; and it felt nice to get out. He didn’t care a whole lot about the rain or the wind. It was just weather, and all of it was good.

  Tonight it was cold and dry as he walked quickly along the main road, past the shuttered-up shops and the all-night garages. He turned into a side street, letting his hand rest against the spanner in his coat pocket as he moved towards a group of teenagers on the corner.