Thorne - Lifeless Part 11

"G.o.d, no," she said. "I've got a mate at work who is, and you're a lot like him. It doesn't bother me, though."

They drove on, making small talk until the traffic began to thin out at the top end of the Tottenham Court Road. Hendricks checked the clock on the dash. "It'll be close, but I think we'll make it," he said.

Next to him, Susan Jago clutched the handles of her bag a little bit tighter.

Chloe Holland took half a dozen unsteady steps toward her father, and banged her head against the top of his leg. "Dada . . ."

Holland picked up his daughter and carried her over to the sofa in the corner of the living room.

"Come on then, chicken. A quick cuddle before bed . . ."

His girlfriend, Sophie Wagstaffe, stood in the doorway. "Don't get her too excited, Dave."

He thought about saying something about how any excitement round the place would be welcome, but he bit his tongue. Its absence was almost certainly down to him. Yes, they were both tired at the end of the day, and fractious, but he was also bringing the frustration of the case home with him. His mood flung a coa.r.s.e, heavy blanket across everything. He couldn't blame Sophie for being thoroughly fed up.

The little girl pointed to her favorite video, lying on the carpet in front of the VCR. "Arnee," she said.

"Barney, yes. Good girl . . ."

His daughter would be a year old in a couple of days.

Chloe had been conceived just in time to stop his relationship with Sophie from falling apart completely. Pregnancy changed the emphasis of everything. The stupid affair he'd had became a weapon that was wielded only rarely, and most of the conversations that took place in raised voices became about the Job. Did he not think that perhaps now he should find something a bit safer? Something that paid a bit more, maybe, before he became completely inst.i.tutionalized?

Once Chloe had been around for a while, once they'd got over the heart-stopping, joyous sh.e.l.l shock of it, they discussed their future again, though now n.o.body had the energy to do a lot of shouting. Or to do a lot of anything else. The flat they'd shared for years in Elephant and Castle was far too small, no question, so they talked about moving; about getting out of London altogether. They'd decided that Holland should sit the sergeant's exam, but the increase in pay had been more than canceled out by a greater caseload. With Sophie back teaching again, and child care to be paid for, they were no better off. Any move in the short term was out of the question.

"Come on, Dave."

"All right . . ."

"I need to change her and get her down."

"Just give me a minute . . ."

The tiredness never seemed to ease up. Just as Chloe had started to sleep that bit longer, he'd been required to do longer tours of duty. His new seniority, together with the seriousness of this particular case, meant that sixteen- and eighteen-hour shifts were becoming increasingly common. He wanted nothing more at that moment than to hug his baby girl tight to his chest, close his eyes, and stay where he was until the morning.

"Dave, please."

That was what was really going on, he thought, when couples stayed together because of the children. The truth was that they were just too exhausted to leave.

It wasn't that bad, of course. He knew that actually he could count himself lucky that Sophie hadn't walked out on him. It was amazing that she hadn't packed a bag and done a bunk with someone. Some teacher maybe, same as Tom Thorne's missus. Creative-writing lecturer that had been, years back. Jesus . . .

Holland opened his eyes as he felt Chloe being lifted from him.

"Right, okay then. I need to make a call anyway . . ."

He watched as Sophie gathered stuff up: the necessary books and an armful of soft toys. He waved his daughter good night as Sophie carried her through into the bedroom. If only they could get away, he thought. Just the two of them. Leave the baby with grandparents, then head off somewhere to laze around and f.u.c.k each other's brains out in the sunshine. He'd see what he could manage when the case had cooled down a little.

Holland crossed to the door and pushed it shut. He took out his mobile, scrolled through for the number, and dialed. He needed peace and quiet to make this call, but he also needed the privacy. He couldn't tell Sophie anything about Thorne working undercover.

Though she'd only met him a couple of times, Sophie had never been a fan of Tom Thorne. She'd decided early on that he would be a bad influence on Holland and had tried, without much success, to make as much obvious to Holland himself. She was not, though, the type to kick anyone too hard when they were down, and had hardly mentioned Thorne's name since she'd heard about the death of his father, and the problems he'd had since. As far as she knew, Thorne had been taken off the squad and given something a little less taxing to do.

Holland waited for an answer, smiling at a memory of Sophie badgering him one night when he'd been cooking dinner. It had been just before the second part of his sergeant's exam, when candidates were faced with hypothetical problems to solve. "Let the b.u.g.g.e.r really help you for a change," she'd said. "If you get stuck, just think about what Tom Thorne would do, then make sure you do the exact opposite . . ."

"Sir?"

There was a grunt at the other end of the line.

"Can you talk?"

Another grunt, but definitely in the affirmative.

Holland told Thorne about Susan Jago having failed to identify the body of the first victim. The reaction had been predictably blunt and blasphemous. Holland guessed that if Thorne, wherever he was, was being watched at that moment by pa.s.sersby, his p.i.s.sed-up dosser act would be highly convincing.

Thorne began to sound a little more upbeat as he spoke about a possible pattern to the killings. He was talking about the different groups of rough sleepers, and a possibility that the killer was carefully selecting victims from among each one.

Holland reached for a pen and a sc.r.a.p of paper. He began to scribble it down.

"Are you getting this down?" Thorne said.

He'd write it out properly later, pa.s.s as full a version as possible on to Brigstocke in the morning. For now he jotted down the bare essentials. Killer's basis for choosing. Junkie/Alcoholic/Mental Case . . .

From next door he could hear Sophie softly singing the "I Love You" song from Barney.

TWELVE.

Thorne remembered what Brendan had said about real London grime as he watched it darkening the water. Running to his shins in inky trails and spinning away down the waste in a gray-black gurgle. A knock on the door told him that somebody else was waiting, so he tried to get a move on. It wasn't easy. The flow from the shower head was little more than a trickle, and he had to slam his palm repeatedly into a steel b.u.t.ton on the tiled wall to keep the water coming.

As he scrubbed himself, he sang an old Patsy Cline song, quietly enough to go unheard by whoever was outside the door. He didn't know what had put the tune into his head, but it was appropriate enough; he'd certainly been doing a fair amount of walking after midnight. Sometimes he thought that sitting and walking were virtually all that any rough sleeper did when they weren't actually sleeping. Come to think of it, weren't they all that anybody did? Sitting behind a desk or at a till or in a doorway. Walking to work or to the pub or to wherever you could get what you needed to help you through the next few hours. Everyone was sitting and walking and scoring something . . .

There was another knock, louder this time. Something was shouted through the door.

For a final few seconds, he stood letting the warm water run across his face and thought about what he'd said to Holland the previous night. Maybe what looked like a pattern was in reality no more than simple chance. Was it likely that the killer would be selecting his victims so carefully when, as Thorne still believed, they were only there to cover up something rather more down-to-earth? It was perfectly possible, of course, that both theories were true. Even if the later victims were there purely as dressing, selecting them in this way would hardly take a great deal of time and effort. The junkies and the drinkers were easy enough to spot as they tended to hang out in their own groups, and you could hardly miss the likes of Radio Bob.

Things had been made nice and easy for him. All the killer had to do was wait, and watch for the people that the rest of the world avoided.

Brendan Maxwell came into the locker room as Thorne was changing back into his dirty clothes. "Why don't you put clean ones on?" he said.

Thorne shoved a plastic bag containing soap and shampoo into the top of his locker. He turned to a mirror on the wall and stared at himself. "I'm okay with these."

"Everyone else uses the washing machines . . ." "These are fine."

Maxwell moved so that Thorne could see him in the mirror. He stuck out his bottom lip, shrugged his shoulders, and struck a pose. "You talking to me? You talking to me?"

Thorne laughed, stepped right to obscure the Irishman's reflection. "f.u.c.k off."

Though he'd been into the cafe at the London Lift a couple of times, this was the first time Thorne had seen Brendan Maxwell in over a week. The first time since Radio Bob Asker's funeral.

"How was it?" Thorne asked.

"Even grimmer than you'd expect. We took a few of Bob's mates up in a minibus, you know? A couple of the older guys he used to knock around with." He began to gesture with his hands. "So, it's us and all of them on the right and his ex-wife and kid plus a couple of cousins or whatever on the left."

Thorne, thinking there were probably more people there than at the last funeral he'd attended.

"It was f.u.c.king weird," Maxwell said. "Like you've got this poor old fella's two lives right there, one on either side of the church. No prizes for guessing which side was having the most fun, either. There was a bottle of something in a pocket or two, right, and all his mates were going on about what a laugh Bob had been, you know? How they should have been playing appropriate songs in the church like 'Radio Ga-Ga,' and how b.l.o.o.d.y funny Bob would have thought that was."

He smiled wryly and Thorne reciprocated.

Maxwell's smile became a snort. "That would have been funny, right?"

Thorne had wanted to have something meaningful played at his dad's funeral, but he hadn't been able to think of a particular song or piece of music. He'd never had a chance to ask. They'd settled for some dirge of a hymn that his father would have hated.

Maxwell leaned back against a locker. "No chance of any laughter, though. No f.u.c.king way. No chance of any joy. Bob's ex-wife sat there like the whole thing was keeping her from something important like a manicure, and the daughter just cried and cried. All the way through." He kicked his heel against the metal door behind him. "They're burying Paddy Hayes day after tomorrow. I'm getting plenty of wear out of the black suit."

"We're doing our best, Bren."

Maxwell raised his eyebrows as if to ask exactly what const.i.tuted Thorne's or anybody else's best? Thorne was well aware that, although Maxwell was privy to his role within the investigation, he couldn't say too much about how it was progressing.

"We need to find out who the first bloke was," he said. "The first victim."

Maxwell said nothing for ten, maybe fifteen seconds, then pushed himself away from the locker. "Good luck with that. Because I want to put the f.u.c.king suit away for a while." He put on the De Niro voice to lighten the mood a little: "Do you know what I'm saying here?" He stopped at the door. "Phil's coming in later, by the way, for the fortnightly surgery. I think he wants a word."

"Fair enough." Hendricks had been providing an ad hoc medical service to some of the Lift's clients for the last couple of years. Doling out bandages, plasters, and, best of all, the odd prescription. He had some cracking stories about the absurd lengths people had gone to to get him to prescribe something. To get him to prescribe anything . . .

"He's got a bee in his bonnet about something or other," Maxwell said.

"About the case?"

"G.o.d knows. He wouldn't tell me if it was."

"Right."

Thorne looked at him and wondered if that was true. He knew very well that where partners were concerned, the rules about not discussing certain aspects of a case could become distinctly bendable. When it came down to it, Thorne really didn't give a monkey's, but he reckoned he knew his friend pretty well: Phil Hendricks would sell state secrets for a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b or a Thierry Henry hat trick.

The morning briefing was becoming more like morning a.s.sembly all the time.

Brigstocke stopped in midsentence, waited for the murmuring at the back of the room to die down. "What's so f.u.c.king important?" he said.

"Sorry, sir. We were just talking about the horse." The last word was more spluttered than spoken, and the rest of the room immediately broke up.

"Right." Brigstocke sighed. "Anyone not heard the horse story?"

A few hands were raised among the forty or so in the room. One or two blank faces . . .

The area car had, by all accounts, been called out in the early hours after reports of a horse running along the A1. Having caught the animal, the two officers were then faced with the problem of getting it anywhere, and hit on the bright idea of towing the horse. They wrapped a length of "Police-Do Not Cross" tape around the animal's neck and while one officer drove, his mate crouched in the open boot of the car and pulled the horse along. This worked fine for a while, with the car gradually speeding up and the horse cantering along quite nicely. Unfortunately, what they had fashioned was less of a tow rope and more of a noose, so that without warning the horse had suddenly collapsed in a heap on the road and begun to shake dramatically. Certain that he'd killed it, the officer climbed out of the boot and walked over to the stricken beast, just in time for the horse to leap to its feet and charge through the nearest hedge, dragging the stunned copper behind him.

Brigstocke wound up by explaining that the officer concerned was recovering in Chase Farm Hospital, while the horse, who was still at large, had last been sighted galloping gaily along a B-road near the gloriously named Trotter's Bottom.

Then he finished his briefing.

"That sort of thing's good for morale," Brigstocke said. "Pretty welcome round here at the moment."

Holland piped up. "It can't hurt to remind ourselves every so often that it isn't all murder and mayhem . . ."

"Right, and you told it very well," Kitson said.

Russell Brigstocke seemed pleased with the compliment as he walked around his desk and sat down in the chair behind. His office was one of three on a corridor that snaked alongside the large, open-plan incident room. Holland and DC Andy Stone were based in one of the other two; and while the man she usually shared it with was on gardening leave, Yvonne Kitson was sole occupant of the third. These officers-together with office manager DS Samir Karim-had followed Brigstocke into his office. As the everyday core of Team 3, it was their practice to gather here after the formalities of the morning and catch up. To brainstorm and to b.i.t.c.h a little. It was off-the-record, and what was said was usually nearer the mark than much of the official briefing that preceded it.

"It's not . . . hugely exciting, is it?" Brigstocke said. Holland and Stone were leaning against the wall near the door. Kitson and Karim had commandeered the available chairs.

Holland replied for all of them: "We nearly got lucky with Susan Jago. We'll get lucky next time."

"Right," Kitson said. "There's still plenty of calls coming in."

"Plenty of 'em from fruitcakes." Brigstocke straightened the picture of his wife and kids that sat on his desk in a scarred, metal frame. This sole attempt at personalizing his office had made it far more attractive than most of the other airless, magnolia boxes that honeycombed Becke House. "Why do these morons ring up?"

"I've got three officers on the phones full-time," Karim said.

Stone shrugged. "It's got to be our best bet, though."

Brigstocke was not one of them, but there were plenty of senior officers who spoke, who thought only in cliches. As the case stood, they'd have been spoiled for choice. Every available drawing board had been located and gone back to. The book by which things were done was being pawed until its spine cracked. "Our only bet," Brigstocke said.

There'd been a flurry of activity in the days following Robert Asker's murder, but now, in reality, there was little to be done but donkey work. The response to appeal posters, press updates, and the continuing profile being appended to the picture of the first victim meant dozens of calls to be chased up daily. There were the obvious cranks to be eliminated; those who turned out to be cranks and were then eliminated; and those, like Susan Jago, who were genuine, but proved to be ultimately worthless. The team's dedicated Intelligence Unit, meanwhile, was sifting through endless hours of CCTV footage taken in and around the relevant area. Aside from the predictable brawls and drug deals, and the occasional bout of drunken coupling in a doorway, there was nothing much to merit pressing freeze-frame. It was hard when n.o.body really knew what they were looking for.

Suspicious behavior in London's glittering West End? There was plenty of that. Dodgy-looking characters? More than you could shake a s.h.i.tty stick at . . .

What few officers were left had gone back out onto the streets, but with even less luck than before. If there was any information out there to be gathered, people were keeping it to themselves. The latest death had only led those who might still be at risk to close ranks even further.

There were tighter lips and still greater suspicion.

"Trevor Jesmond was less than thrilled with last night's Standard," Brigstocke said.

Kitson groaned. "It was silliness, guv, that's all . . ."

"It just got blown up," Karim said.

Close enough to the responses Brigstocke had heard when he'd raised the subject at the main briefing. But it was still embarra.s.sing . . .

The day before, an officer had been trying to question a group of older rough sleepers by the Embankment. When they'd become what he deemed to be overaggressive, he'd panicked and handcuffed one of them to some railings. The old man's caseworker had contacted the team at Charing Cross, and although the mess had eventually been sorted out, some bright spark had called the Evening Standard and the old man had cheerfully re-created the incident for a photographer.

Russell Brigstocke had spent an hour on the phone the night before, having his ear chewed. He looked up at the four in front of him. "This is not how we deal with this community. Especially not now."

"It was a one-off," Holland said. "I know it looked bad . . ."