Lifeless Thorne 5 Read online

  “Right …”

  The weather had changed suddenly yet again. Sunshine was screaming in through the big bay window and a smaller skylight toward the bathroom, flashing where it kissed the white walls and the varnish on the honey-colored floorboards. From where he was standing, near the top of the stairs, Mackillop saw the gleam from two pairs of boots, highly polished and placed side by side between bed and wardrobe. He saw magazines neatly piled beneath the bedside table and freshly ironed shirts folded symmetrically on a chair next to the bathroom door. “You can tell the person who lives here’s ex-army,” he said.

  Eales seemed to find this funny. “How come?” “The boots.” Mackillop pointed across to them. “The way they’re arranged; the way everything’s laid out. Neat, you know, and well organized.”

  “It’s just the way we’re taught to do things.”

  “It must take a lot of effort, though.”

  “Not really,” Eales said. “You do things a particular way because it makes sense. Being organized and tidy makes things simpler.”

  Mackillop considered this. “I thought about the army myself before I joined the Met. For a short while, anyway.”

  “You’d’ve been good.”

  “You reckon?”

  “Chances are, if you’re a good copper.”

  “Getting there,” Mackillop said. He felt himself redden slightly. Looked around the room once again. “Yeah, definitely a soldier’s place …”

  Eales smiled. “Look underneath the bed.”

  Mackillop glanced across, then started to move when Eales nodded his encouragement. As he bent down he could see that the base of the bed was actually a drawer. He pulled it out and found himself staring at a collection of military memorabilia: a dress uniform, pressed and folded; a gas mask; badges and medals displayed in open cases; bundles of photographs. And weapons: grenades, guns, a highly polished bayonet …

  “Bloody hell!”

  “Don’t worry, the guns have been decommissioned,” Eales said. “Firing pins removed and barrels drilled.”

  Mackillop reached toward one of the pistols. “May I?”

  “Help yourself. That smaller one’s a Browning nine-millimeter. It’s Iraqi.”

  Mackillop’s hand hovered above the gun. He wondered if it had once belonged to one of those soldiers he’d seen kneeling in the desert. Taken from him before another was put to the back of his head. He picked up the bayonet instead.

  “That’s seriously sharp, by the way.”

  “I bet.” Mackillop stood and held the bayonet up in front of himself. In the skinny mirror of its blade he could see the refelction of bathroom door, the TV and VCR, the black wire that snaked across the floor from the PlayStation to the controller.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” Eales said.

  “This might sound morbid, and a bit … geeky or whatever.” Mackillop turned the hilt, throwing a sliver of reflected sunlight across Eales’s face. “Has this thing ever … killed anyone?”

  Eales walked across and took the bayonet from Mackillop’s hand. “This?” he said. He examined the blade as if he were seeing it for the first time, leaned forward, and slid it into Mackillop’s belly. “Not until now …”

  The policeman’s hands flew to the hilt, wrapped themselves tight around the soldier’s; hands that were bigger and stronger and drier. He tried to push, and when he opened his mouth he produced only the gentle pop of a bubble bursting.

  “You ready?” Eales asked. “Here we go.” He nodded, counting quietly to three, before twisting the bayonet and dragging it up hard, through muscle, toward the sternum.

  Mackillop sighed, then sucked the air quickly back in, as if he’d just dipped a foot into a hot bath or touched a sensitive filling.

  There was only the sound of breathing for a while after that, labored and bubbly, and the low moan of boards beneath shifting feet, as both sets of fingers grew slippery against the hilt.

  “Luck always runs out in the end,” Eales said.

  And he never broke eye contact, not for a moment. Holding fast to what was bright in Jason Mackillop’s eyes, which seemed to blaze, just for that final second or two, before it went out. Like the last dot of life as a TV screen fades to black, shrinking quickly from a world to a pinprick.

  And then nothing.

  Part Four

  Finished Falling

  THIRTY-FIVE

  At first, so he told everyone later, he thought that Mackillop had simply got tired of waiting for him and buggered off …

  By the time Andy Stone’s taxi had finally worked its way through the Saturday-afternoon traffic and reached the house where Asif Mahmoud lived, the Volvo was nowhere to be seen and Jason Mackillop wasn’t answering his phone. Stone had visited the ground-floor flat. He’d been told by Mr. Mahmoud that though he hadn’t seen any police officers, he had heard comings and goings. Someone had come into the house a short time earlier, then left again fairly soon afterward. Stone had immediately knocked at the other three flats in the building—including, of course, the one on the top floor—but had received no reply.

  Confused and pissed off, he had decided to head back to Becke House, so had made his way to the tube station. It wasn’t until thirty minutes later, when he got above ground at Colindale, that the message had come through about Ryan Eales …

  “How long d’you think Stone missed him by?” Thorne asked.

  Holland was pulling sheets of paper from his case. He looked up. “Impossible to say for sure. It must have been pretty close, though. Hendricks has the time of death at somewhere between one-thirty and two-thirty …”

  “I was calling Brigstocke just after two,” Thorne said. “We should have moved faster. I should have moved faster.”

  When, after an hour, TDC Mackillop could still not be contacted, a team had been dispatched back to West Finchley. While the car—which was found in a side street behind Finchley Central Station— was being towed away, witnesses described seeing it parked outside the house on Rosedene Way. A woman who’d been walking her dog gave an accurate description of Mackillop, and a man who lived opposite gave a statement saying that he’d seen the driver of the car talking to someone on the street.

  More officers had gathered, serious and uneasy, as the Saturday began to dim. An armed unit was called into position. Residents were evacuated and the road was sealed off, before finally—five hours after he’d driven into Rosedene Way—the door to the top flat at number forty-eight was smashed open, and Jason Mackillop was found …

  Thorne had never met the murdered trainee. He wasn’t sure whether that made it easier or not to deal with his death, but it certainly made it easier to idealize him as a victim. Thorne didn’t know if Mackillop had bad breath or a foul temper; if he fancied himself or was close to his family. He’d never seen him at work, or fallen out with him, or heard him talk about anything important. Thorne knew only that he was naive, and keen, and almost ridiculously young. This not knowing made Jason Mackillop less real than many victims. But it didn’t mean that the dirty great slab of guilt that had been laid down on top of the others had any less weight.

  “He shouldn’t have gone in there on his own,” Holland said.

  Thorne looked wrung out by exhaustion and anger. “That doesn’t help.”

  “It’s all Andy Stone’s got to hold on to …”

  It was Monday afternoon; two days since Ryan Eales had murdered Jason Mackillop and fled. Police, continuing to investigate the killings of homeless men in and around the West End, had taken a room at the London Lift to conduct interviews, including one with a rough sleeper known only as Tom.

  Thorne and Holland were catching up …

  “He must have got out of there in one hell of a hurry,” Holland said. “No money in the place, but he seems to have left more or less everything else behind.”

  They were in a poky, self-contained office in one corner of the bigger, open-plan admin area: a small sofa and a chair; a desk with a grimy computer and several
heaps of cardboard files. The day was gray outside the frosted glass of a thin window. Thorne took the sheets as they were handed to him. “He knew that after what he’d done it wouldn’t much matter if we got hold of this stuff. And it’s not like any of it gives us a name, is it?”

  Holland passed yet more paper across: photocopies of documentation found during the search of Eales’s flat. All indicated that although Eales had killed the other three men in his tank crew, as well as Radio Bob, Terry T, and the others, he’d actually been working with somebody else. Or rather, for somebody else …

  The man behind the camera.

  Thorne had been made aware of all this within hours of the entry into Eales’s flat, but this was his first look at the material evidence. He flicked through the bank statements and credit-card slips as Holland talked.

  “Half a dozen different accounts, in four different names, and he managed to empty all but one of them before he did his vanishing act. Major payments into one or other of his accounts within a few days of Jago’s death, and Hadingham’s ‘suicide.’ Money paid in after each killing.”

  “All in cash?”

  “All in cash, and completely untraceable to anybody. He was well paid for what he did.”

  “He was very good at it,” Thorne said.

  Holland dug out another piece of paper from his case and held it out. “And very good at not being caught …”

  Thorne took the sheet and began to read.

  “I meant to tell you about this,” Holland said. “Then, when everything kicked off on Saturday afternoon, you know, I thought it could wait.” He pointed. “That’s how they got away with it. Remember, we were talking about what they did with the bodies of the Iraqi soldiers? When we went to Taunton they told us about these war diaries, and at the time I didn’t think it was worth chasing up, because our boys would only have been mentioned if they’d been wounded or commended …”

  Thorne saw where it was going. “You’re shitting me …”

  “I just double-checked.”

  Thorne read the words aloud. “ ‘Callsign 40 from B-Troop, under the command of Corporal Ian Hadingham, engaged with and destroyed an enemy tank, killing all four on board …’ ”

  “The Iraqi tank surrendered,” Holland said, “or was captured or whatever. Then, after they’d shot them, Eales and the others just put the bodies back in the tank and blew the thing to shit. Whether anybody ever found out or not …”

  “They got commended?” Thorne looked as though he might be close to tears of one sort or another. “Christ on a bike …”

  Holland was rummaging in his briefcase again. “Something else that just came through. We finally got the transcript back from that lab in California: the techies who enhanced the sound on the video.” He passed across the sheaf of papers and closed his case.

  Thorne took what was handed to him without really looking at it and placed it on the desk with the rest of the paperwork. He groped for the swivel chair behind him and slid clumsily onto it. “Another couple of loose ends tied up. It’s all good, I suppose …”

  “None of it gets us anywhere, though. Right?”

  The silence that hung between them for the next few seconds was answer enough.

  “So what’s happening indoors?”

  “Everyone’s busy,” Holland said. “Fired up, like you’d expect, you know, but …”

  “Aimless,” Thorne said.

  “The Intel Unit’s digging around. Hoping that the paper trail might throw up an address or something. Somewhere Eales might hole up.”

  Thorne was dismissive. “He’s long gone.”

  And Holland didn’t argue. He suspected that the brass had already taken the decision to scale down surveillance at all ports and airports.

  The fact was that Mackillop’s death and Eales’s flight had torn the guts out of the investigation, and everyone knew it. It might, in other circumstances, have been what united the team and drove it on with renewed vigor, but this was more coffin nail than spur. Though they wanted Eales more badly than ever, they had to accept that, for the time being at least, they weren’t likely to find him. And, despite what they now knew, there was little chance, without Eales, of ever catching the man who’d bankrolled at least half a dozen killings over a year or more. Overstretched budgets were always important factors, as were limited resources and time constraints, but once a team lost the appetite for it, everything else became secondary.

  “What did Brigstocke say?” Holland asked. He had a pretty good idea, of course, and wondered if he was overstepping the mark by asking. But he guessed correctly that Thorne had long since forgotten, or stopped caring, where such marks were.

  “He was ‘officially’ telling me that the undercover operation was to be wound down. That I should go home and have a bath …”

  Thorne was obviously making light of it, but Holland wasn’t sure whether to smile or not. “When?”

  “I’ll stay out another night, I think.”

  “Okay …”

  “There’s a few people I need to say good-bye to.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then a decent curry, a good night’s sleep, probably a very pissed-off cat …”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Holland said.

  Thorne smiled. “I know it isn’t.”

  Brigstocke had called the evening before, when the dust kicked up by Mackillop’s murder had begun to settle. He’d made it clear that he was brooking no argument as far as pulling Thorne off the street was concerned, so Thorne didn’t waste any time by initiating one. Eales had gone. There would be no more killings. There was no longer any point. When it came to exactly what Thorne would be returning to, Brigstocke was a little less dogmatic. It may just have been that the decision had yet to be taken. But it was equally likely that Brigstocke had simply fought shy of delivering one blow on top of another.

  As things stood, if it was to be a continuance of his gardening leave, Thorne would give in to it without much of a fuss. The thought of going back to the team, back to how things had been before, unnerved him. He felt as though he’d lost his way during some long-distance endurance event; as if he were staggering, miles off the pace, in the wrong direction. He couldn’t do anything else until he’d completed the course, however laughable his finishing time was.

  He knew he couldn’t really compete, but he needed to cross the line …

  “ ‘I don’t know’ is the simple answer,” Thorne said. “I don’t know what they want. I don’t really know what I want.”

  Holland filled the pause that followed by reaching for his coat. “Do you think Eales spoke to whoever’s paying him before he left? Warned him?”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think he had a great deal to warn him about.” Thorne gestured toward the papers on the desk. “There’s nothing there that incriminates anybody. I think Eales knows how to keep his mouth shut. How to keep secrets.”

  “Probably a good idea. Considering how many people died because one greedy fucker couldn’t.”

  Thorne eased his chair round slowly, one way and then the other. “We set so much store in trying to get hold of Eales, thinking that he’d tell us the name of the man behind the camera. I’m not actually sure it would have done us any good.”

  “You don’t think he’d have given him up?”

  “Eales is still a soldier,” Thorne said. “Name, rank, and serial number, right?”

  Holland picked up his case and crossed to the door. “Are you sticking around here for a bit? I need to get back …”

  Thorne grunted; he didn’t look like he was ready to go anywhere.

  Holland recalled walking through the café on his way up and seeing the addict Thorne had been spending so much time with. The boy had been sitting with his girlfriend, whose name Holland had never learned. Holland thought about what Thorne had said earlier; wondered how difficult he might find it to say some of those good-byes. “Your mate Spike’s downstairs …”

  Thorne nodded, like
he already knew. “We’re supposed to be playing pool.”

  “We can have a game sometime if you want,” Holland said. He hovered at the doorway. “Later in the week, maybe. That pub round the corner from your place has got a table, hasn’t it?”

  “I’ll give you a call, Dave,” Thorne said. “When I’ve got myself sorted.”

  He sat for a few minutes after Holland had left and let his mind drift. Sadly, however hard he tried, it wouldn’t drift quite far enough.

  For want of anything else to do, he reached for the documents scattered across the desk and began to thumb through them. It always came down to paper in the end. Filed and boxed up in the General Registry. And it felt as though this case was heading that way pretty bloody quickly; not cold exactly, but as good as. The case, such as it was, would be handed over to the Homicide Task Force, or perhaps the brand-new, FBI-style Serious and Organised Crime Association. These were the proactive units responsible for tracking down and charging prime suspects who had gone missing. Thorne felt fairly sure that Eales was already abroad; that he would not make himself easy to find. The world was becoming smaller all the time, but it was still plenty big enough …

  He stared down at the bank statements; at the payments into each one, representing a man Ryan Eales had killed. He looked at the amounts and was unable to stop a part of his brain making the perverse calculations: fifteen hundred pounds per kick delivered; something like that …

  He thought back to the case he’d been working on the previous spring: to the hunt for another man who’d chosen murder as his profession; bookended by two fires, twenty years apart. A young girl dead, and an old man. Now here was Thorne, sitting in the old man’s coat and gnawing at the decisions he’d taken. At the series of judgments, considered and otherwise; from one burning to another.

  He pulled the Gulf War transcript to the front and glanced down at it. The printed dialogue and descriptions were horribly effective prompts. His mind called up the associated images from the videotape in an instant as he read: the groupings of the men, and the rain striking the sand like black candle wax, and luminous horror like a cat’s eye in the darkness.