Death Message Read online

Page 4


  He’d walked just to kill time at first; to get through the endless hours without sleep. He was still managing no more than a couple of hours each night, three at the most, in fifteen- or twenty-minute bursts. He didn’t think he’d managed more than that since that morning they’d been in to see him.

  The second time his life had been turned upside down.

  Funny how both times everything had changed, had turned to shit, he’d been sitting there with people who were waving warrant cards at him…

  Over the weeks he’d covered most of west London. He’d spent long nights walking up to Shepherd’s Bush and then along the Uxbridge Road through Acton and Ealing. He’d gone south, around Gunnersbury Park, then turned towards Chiswick, watching the cars rush both ways above him along the M4. He’d walked back towards Hammersmith, zigzagging through the smaller streets and coming out just shy of the bridge, where the river bowed, a mile or two from where the flat lay in the shadow of the flyover; a hospital on one side of it, a cemetery on the other.

  The teenagers at the end of the street paid him no real attention. Maybe there was a look about him.

  There certainly had been at one time.

  He’d got used to it now, doing this instead of sleeping. He enjoyed it. The walking helped him think things through, and though there were plenty of times in the day when he felt completely wiped out, it was like his body was adjusting; compensating, or whatever the word was. He remembered reading somewhere that Napoleon and Churchill and Margaret Thatcher had all made do with a couple of hours’ kip each night. It was obviously all about how you approached things when you were awake. Maybe you could get away with it, as long as you had a purpose.

  He turned for home. Headed down Goldhawk Road towards Stamford Brook Tube station.

  He’d write to her again when he got back.

  He’d make a coffee and turn on the radio, then he’d sit down at the crappy little table in the corner and bang out another letter. Tell her how everything was going. Two, maybe three pages if it came easy, and when he’d finished he’d put it with the others; wrapped up in elastic bands, in the drawer that he’d stuffed full of handsets and SIM cards.

  Then he’d take out another phone, and sit there, and wait for the sun to come up.

  FOUR

  Dawson might have been a sanctimonious little shit, but there was no faulting him and his colleagues when it came to speed. Before the morning’s first cup of coffee had gone cold, Thorne was sitting at a computer in the Incident Room, looking at a high-resolution JPEG of the photograph that had been sent to his phone.

  It was carpet beneath the dead man’s head.

  ‘He’ll never get that mess out of the shag-pile,’ Stone had said, waving around his own hard copy of the picture. ‘I don’t think there’s a Stain Devil for blood, is there?’

  Kitson took the photo from him, looked at it for a few seconds, then laid it down. ‘Stain Devil number four. But if it’s this poor bastard’s carpet, I really don’t think he’s going to give a toss…’

  Thorne was using one hand to move the cursor across the image, tracing a line around the ragged patch of red, while the other pressed a phone to his ear. He’d emailed the picture straight across to St George’s Hospital, where Phil Hendricks supplemented the pittance the Met paid him by teaching three days a week.

  Hendricks had called him straight back. ‘It’s still just a picture,’ he said.

  Thorne waited a few seconds. ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m not exactly sure what it is you want.’

  ‘An opinion, maybe. Expertise. I’m probably wasting my time…’

  ‘It might be a high-resolution image, but the photo itself is still pretty low quality. Not enough megapixels, mate.’

  ‘You sound like that kid in the phone shop.’

  Hendricks was right, though. The image remained undefined, and even the magic worked by the boffins at Newlands Park had yielded little in the way of useful information: the body lay on a carpet; the hair was perhaps greyer than it had first appeared; what had looked on the phone’s tiny screen like a patch of shadow at the neck was probably the edge of a tattoo, poking from below the line of the dead man’s collar.

  ‘So nothing that’s going to help me, then?’ Thorne asked, letting the cursor rest on the single visible eye. ‘Blood not giving you any clues? Bullet wound, blunt instrument, what?’

  ‘I’m not a fucking miracle worker,’ Hendricks said. ‘Arterial blood is brighter, and there’s certainly enough of it, but it’s impossible to tell from this. Like I said…’

  ‘Megapixels, right.’

  ‘I need to see the body. I’ll tell you how many sugars he had in his tea if you let me have a look at him in the flesh. Or what’s left of it.’

  Thereafter, the chat was more or less idle: Arsenal’s recent lack of form; a vague arrangement to meet up for a drink later on. There was only one more reference to the picture and to the questions it posed. Hendricks sounded as serious as he had on Thorne’s doorstep the night before; letting him know that, megapixels aside, one thing about the photograph had been clear enough. ‘If it helps, I can see now why you’d want to know,’ he said.

  When he’d hung up, Thorne sat around and let the clock run for a while. Aimless, he watched as Karim worked at the whiteboard that dominated one wall of the Incident Room: scribbling, erasing, updating the map of each outstanding murder where there was any change to be made. He listened as Andy Stone tried in vain to milk more laughs from his ‘blood on the carpet’ routine, and as Yvonne Kitson pestered the lab for news on the knife that might have killed Deniz Sedat.

  He didn’t catch everything that was said. The previous night’s lack of sleep had been gaining on him since six-thirty that morning – when he’d trudged towards the bathroom, dragging off a sweaty T-shirt, Louise still dead to the world – and four hours later Thorne was already feeling like he’d done a hard day’s graft. Even as he looked up and grunted his response to Brigstocke, he was wondering if he might have nodded off at the desk for a few seconds.

  ‘When did you last check the bulletin?’ the DCI asked.

  ‘About an hour and a half ago…’

  Brigstocke waved a piece of paper in front of him. ‘This came in just after nine.’ When Thorne reached up for it, Brigstocke snatched the sheet away and read, enjoying himself: ‘Raymond Tucker. 32 Halifax Road, Enfield. Found by his mother around seven this morning. Victim appears to have died from massive head trauma… Signs of forced entry at rear of premises… Blah, blah, blah-di-blah.’ He paused for effect. ‘Sound good to you?’

  ‘Sounds possible.’

  Thorne moved for the paper again and this time Brigstocke let him have it. He carried on talking as Thorne read through the brief report. ‘A team out of Barking caught it, so I called up the chief super over there, got the DCI’s name, and faxed the picture across fifteen minutes ago.’

  Thorne stared up, waited, but not for long. ‘Come on, Russell, fuck’s sake…’

  ‘The man from Del Monte… he say “yes”.’

  Thorne stood and started to move, Brigstocke following, towards his office. ‘I’ll ask Hendricks to meet us at the crime scene.’

  ‘I should skip that for now,’ Brigstocke said, ‘and get down to Hornsey Mortuary. When the DCI rang back about the photo, he said they’d be bringing the body out in the next half-hour or so.’

  Thorne nodded and pushed through the door, the tiredness shaken off and left for dead. He was already at his desk, leaving a message on Hendricks’ machine, when Brigstocke, en route to his own office further up the corridor, stopped in the doorway.

  ‘When I spoke to the DCI, he also told me the body had been there for a while.’ Brigstocke paused for a second or two, until he was sure Thorne understood the implications. ‘Over a week, he reckoned.’

  The pictures in Thorne’s head were less than lovely. ‘I bet that carpet’s fucked,’ he said.

  By the time Karim was at the whiteboard again, markin
g out a new column in lines of black felt-tip and taping up the dead man’s picture below Tom Thorne’s name, Thorne and Holland were already in the car.

  Raymond Anthony Tucker had died two days shy of his fifty-second birthday. He’d run a small second-hand car dealership in Chingford, which had hardly catered to the top end of the market, but was nevertheless a notch or two above the cut-and-shut merchants working out of yards in the dodgier parts of Tottenham and King’s Cross. His body had been discovered by his mother, who lived a couple of streets away. Despite the fact that her son was a reasonably successful small-businessman, old enough to have his own grandchildren, she’d still popped in to collect his dirty washing once a week or so.

  This information had been fed to Thorne and Holland by phone, as they had driven towards Enfield. Thorne had decided that, despite what Brigstocke had said, it would be a good idea for someone from the team to get themselves on site as quickly as possible. He’d dropped Holland off at 32, Halifax Road, told him to get in there and make his presence felt, and said that he’d try to get back to pick him up after the post-mortem. Then he’d pushed on towards Hornsey, hoping that it would prove to be worth the effort.

  The arm of the Specialist Crime Directorate that handled murder cases was divided into three areas, with those bodies turning up in the London Borough of Enfield being dealt with by one of the teams from Homicide East. It would be Russell Brigstocke’s job to liaise with the DCI on whichever team had caught the Tucker case. In turn, each would speak to his chief superintendent, who would then pass the final decision on to the commander. He would weigh up the relative merits of each team – or toss a coin, depending on how many meetings he had on that day – and allocate a senior investigating officer to the case.

  All working together for a safer London…

  The mortuary was located two floors below Hornsey Coroner’s Court. As if the place were not spooky enough, proceedings were routinely disturbed by the guttural rumble of Piccadilly Line trains on their way to and from Bounds Green station. On arrival, it hadn’t taken Thorne long to see that the team from Homicide East would not be putting up much of a fight for possession of the case. He’d listened to his opposite number bitch about his workload. He’d watched him smoke a cigarette to the filter in half a dozen desperate drags, and decided that these boys were not exactly gagging to get after Raymond Tucker’s killer.

  ‘Help yourself,’ DI Steve Brimson had said. ‘I can’t remember what my missus looks like as it is.’

  The part of Thorne that relished a decent scrap had felt rather disappointed.

  Convoluted as it could be, there was at least a method for the allocation of officers among the Homicide Squad. No such system existed to decide who might have the honour of slicing up the corpse. As quickly as Thorne had read the lie of the land, Phil Hendricks had marked down the Coroner-appointed pathologist as someone rather less keen on any accommodation. He’d read it in the man’s handshake; in the widening of the eyes when they’d first encountered the spike through Hendricks’ eyebrow and the stud through his tongue. So, Hendricks too had been forced to stand and observe while the body of Raymond Tucker – such as was left of it – had been opened and gone through as dispassionately as luggage in a customs hall.

  Thorne had seen countless post-mortems, many conducted by Hendricks himself, but they’d never been part of the same audience before. Glancing across at Hendricks, standing between himself and Steve Brimson, he’d wondered how involved his friend was getting with the procedure. He’d caught the occasional scowl and an involuntary twitch of the fingers. He’d been curious as to how far Hendricks had been mentally deconstructing his colleague’s work while he watched; critiquing the other man’s delicacy when weighing a liver, or his technique with a bone-saw.

  ‘He wasn’t too bad,’ Hendricks said. ‘But he’s clearly not in my league when it comes to good looks. You know, basic sex-appeal.’

  They were sitting in a greasy spoon a few minutes’ walk from the mortuary. It was the sort of place that served a fried breakfast all day every day, but hungry as he was, Thorne couldn’t quite manage a full English this soon after a post-mortem. He’d settled for scrambled eggs on toast, while Hendricks tucked into a sausage sandwich.

  ‘What about cause of death?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Fuck all to disagree with. Blunt trauma to the brain, massive internal bleed… occipital artery just about shredded. He would have died pretty quickly: first couple of blows would have done it. Now, you can call me Sherlock Holmes, but I reckon that bloodstained lump-hammer they found in Tucker’s flat might have had something to do with it.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Thorne said.

  A waitress stepped up to clear the plates. She’d clearly been earwigging as she’d worked at the next table and Hendricks had caught it. ‘It’s a new TV show we’re writing,’ he said. ‘A maverick, gay pathologist. You know, usual stuff: fuzzy black-and-white bits, half a dozen serial killers every episode.’

  The waitress pulled a face, as though she’d caught a whiff of something and couldn’t decide if she liked it or not. ‘Well, don’t have that bloke who used to be in EastEnders. I can’t stand him.’

  They watched her leave, one of them enjoying the way her backside moved beneath a tight black skirt considerably more than the other.

  ‘It’s an odd one this, though,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘They’re always odd.’

  Hendricks grunted his agreement. He stuffed what was left of his sandwich into his mouth and took a healthy slurp of tea. It always surprised Thorne that someone whose hands could move with such poise and dexterity ate like a half-starved docker.

  ‘Go on then,’ Thorne said. ‘Why is this one so strange?’

  ‘Killer can’t make his mind up.’

  Thorne pushed a finger round the rim of his cup. Waited.

  ‘Five, six blows with that hammer. Decent ones, you know? Not that people are usually tentative when it comes to bludgeoning someone to death…’

  ‘Not as a rule.’

  ‘I’d probably call it “frenzied” if I was pushed in a witness box.’

  ‘But…?’

  ‘But then there’s this whole picture business. He smashes Tucker’s head in; then, while he’s stood there covered in blood – and he would have been covered – he calmly takes out his mobile phone and starts snapping away. Cool as you like.’

  ‘Maybe he took his time,’ Thorne said. ‘Went and cleaned himself up a bit. Composed himself.’

  ‘Maybe. Where he definitely took his time was in sending the picture to you. I reckon Tucker was dead nine or ten days when his poor old mum walked in and got the shock of her life. So, whoever killed him waited over a week before sending you that message. That’s pretty bloody relaxed, I’d say.’

  Thorne had already worked it out; had come to the same conclusion when Brigstocke had told him that Tucker’s body had lain undiscovered for a while.

  ‘So, what the fuck is he?’ Hendricks downed the last of his tea. ‘Ordered or disordered.’

  Thorne had come across a few who were both. He knew that they were the worst kind. The hardest to catch. ‘You can pay for the grub,’ he said. ‘Seeing as how you’ve cheered me up so much.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something else for nothing.’

  ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘I think there’s more to our victim than meets the eye.’

  ‘You’re really on form today,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I’m telling you.’

  ‘You should stop doing so much cutting and watch more of it. You don’t miss a bloody trick.’ But once Hendricks had told him what he meant, Thorne could not find much to argue with in his friend’s assessment.

  They settled up and walked out into what remained of a grey afternoon. For a minute or two, heading towards the car, Thorne was back in the mortuary suite. Watching as the pathologist moved around the slab. The Home Counties monotone raised above the noise of the Tube trains, his c
ommentary echoing off the tiled walls.

  Thorne stared at the body again, his eyes moving down from the sunken cheeks and the spots of dried blood caught on lashes and stubble. He saw the intricate designs in blue and green and red. The pictures inked across the chest that disappeared from view as the flaps of skin over the ribs were peeled back and laid aside. Hendricks said he’d seen similar designs on a body before, but nothing as impressive as these: the large outline of a snarling dog’s head on one shoulder; the panther that stretched along an arm; the ornate cross and grinning skull.

  Hendricks had a point.

  Raymond Tucker had a few more tattoos than the average used-car salesman.

  Once a body had been removed from a crime scene, the atmosphere changed. Eight hours since the discovery of Raymond Tucker and, in a first-floor flat that was already starting to smell an awful lot better, the scene-of-crime officers had done most of what would be necessary on the first day. Now there were just a few stragglers working the scene, cleaning up: the video and stills cameramen; the woman working as exhibits officer; a couple of fingerprint guys. Many SOCOs – who thought it sounded a little more glamorous – insisted on being called crime scene examiners these days.

  To Thorne’s mind, ‘glamour’ in such circumstances was a relative term.

  One day into it and, like a well-drilled unit of white-suited locusts, the team, whatever it chose to call itself, had completed the majority of the front-line forensics. Though a few were still moving around with that distinctive, all-too-evocative rustle, Thorne and Holland were at least spared the plastic bodysuits and bootees.

  ‘Small mercies,’ Holland said.

  They were standing with their backs to the window, the dying light kept at bay by large black screens and the room illuminated by a pair of powerful arc lights. The furniture was modern: smoked glass and chrome; built-in bookshelves and halogen spots; a three-seater sofa covered in dark brown leather and light brown blood.