Thorne - Lifeless Part 28

"He knew more than who I was, Russell. He knew where I'd be." Thorne pictured Terry T, fingering the padlock at his throat, offering to share the doorway that even now they were still trying to scrub the blood out of. "Where I was supposed to be."

Brigstocke said nothing for several moments. His face, distorted as it was through his gla.s.s of water, made it clear he was finding Thorne's point a hard one to argue against. "So who are we talking about? How many people knew where you were sleeping?"

"You, Holland, Hendricks. Brendan Maxwell at the Lift. McCabe and maybe one or two others at Charing Cross."

"Was McCabe's name last for any particular reason?"

"I just think he's worth looking at. Him and a few of his team."

"Looking at?"

"Maybe we could get a couple of Intel lads on it. Keep an eye on him . . . ?"

Brigstocke looked drawn suddenly, like another weight had been added to a load that was already unbearable. "This kind of thing's easy to suggest. It's a piece of p.i.s.s in a pub, but actually getting it done is a f.u.c.king nightmare. You don't really grasp any of that, do you, Tom? Christ, putting a DI under surveillance on the strength of something like this, on the strength of very little, is asking for trouble."

Thorne remembered something he'd said to McCabe that still held true. "I can't speak for you," he said, "but some of us are in plenty of trouble already. I don't think a bit more's going to make a lot of difference."

Thorne stared and Brigstocke stared back at him; a grim expression that stayed frozen on the DCI's face for several seconds, until he stuffed a handful of crisps into his mouth.

Shireen Collins-Ian Hadingham's ex-wife-was a pet.i.te, attractive black woman whom Holland guessed, once he'd seen her up close, to be somewhere just the right side of forty. She presented a fair bit younger- her hair cut in cornrows and her clothes suitably sporty-though with half a dozen kids under five running about, a tracksuit and trainers were probably the most practical choices.

She worked as a child minder, and Holland and Stone had arrived to find that she was looking after four children that day. "Plus two of my own," she told them, pointing out a boy and a girl. "Those are mine, the really evil ones . . ."

"They're nice-looking kids," Stone said.

"The older two, Ian's two, are both at school." The flat, on the southern side of Salford, was on the ground floor; one of three in a Victorian conversion. "The people upstairs work all day," Collins said as she showed them in. "So we can make as much noise as we like, which is great. Four- and five-year-olds make a lot of noise."

From what Holland and Stone could make out, there were a couple of bedrooms and a large living room that ran off a kitchen-diner. They sat at a long kitchen table, from which Collins had been clearing the remains of lunch when they'd arrived. "There's a bit left if you fancy chicken nuggets and potato faces," she said. Having missed breakfast, Holland was seriously tempted, but the offer was declined. In the next room, visible through a serving hatch, the kids were gathered in front of a widescreen TV. Collins leaned through the hatch and issued gentle but firm instructions until there was something approaching quiet.

"They get half an hour with a video after lunch," she said. "So that's about as long as we've got."

Holland threw his overcoat across a kitchen chair. "That'll be plenty, Shireen."

The conversation was not without interruption- punctuated by high-pitched chatter, cartoonish music, and the occasional bout of tears from the next room-but Shireen Collins spoke openly enough. It was obvious that at some point she'd felt a great deal for Ian Hadingham. But it was equally clear that she'd moved on. From their marriage, and from his death . . .

"Ian was always a waste of s.p.a.ce unless he was in a uniform," she said. "When he'd come home on leave or whatever, he'd just sit about feeling sorry for himself. He'd ignore me and he'd ignore the kids most of the time, and to be honest, after a couple of weeks, I couldn't wait for him to get back to his b.l.o.o.d.y regiment. G.o.d, that sounds awful, doesn't it?"

"Have you been talking to my girlfriend?" Holland said.

Collins laughed. She tried to explain how it had felt; how she'd once felt jealous of the bond he'd so clearly shared with his pals in the regiment. How she'd resented it, and fought for her husband's attention, and then, in the end, how she'd simply given up competing.

"What happened after Ian came back from the Gulf?" Holland asked.

Collins laughed again, but rather more sadly this time. "I'm not sure how much of him did come back," she said. "It was like he was somewhere else in his head and it wasn't a place where I was welcome. Actually, I'm not sure it was a place I'd've liked very much. I know they all went through a lot out there."

Holland stared straight at Collins. He did not want to catch Stone's eye; he knew Stone would be thinking the same thing he was: You have no b.l.o.o.d.y idea . . .

"He left the army pretty soon after he came home," Collins said. "It was all right for a while, for a year or so, and we even talked about having more kids, but something told me not to. That we'd've been doing it for the wrong reasons."

"What did Ian do," Holland asked, "after he left the army?"

"All sorts of things, but none of them for very long, you know? He worked in warehouses, did some security work, tried to retrain as an electrical engineer, but he couldn't hold down a job. Had a bit of a problem with authority. It'd be fine for a few months, then he'd blow it. He was fired more than once for threatening people." She opened her mouth to say something else, then changed her mind. "His head was basically messed up afterward."

Stone nodded his understanding. "So he moved out, right?"

"Right. We decided to separate a few years on from that. He moved out and eventually I got this place. He never went far away, like-he wanted to stay close to the kids and that-but he moved around."

"He got a flat?"

"Lots of different flats. He didn't seem to like staying put too long; plus, he kept falling behind with his rent and getting chucked out of places."

"How did he react when you met somebody else?" Holland asked. "It can't have been very easy . . ."

There was a yell from next door. Collins stood to look in on the children, but sat down again quickly enough. "Ian wasn't exactly thrilled and he had a bit of a problem with Owen." She pointed toward her young children. "Owen's their dad. Things got a bit ugly and Ian was a big bloke. He was handy, you know? So we got the police involved and we decided against actually getting married, and it was fine after that. It was fine for me and Owen, I mean, but things went downhill for Ian pretty quickly."

"Downhill?" Stone said.

"He started dossing down all over the place. Sleeping on people's floors and in s.h.i.tty bedsits or whatever. Like he'd stopped caring, basically. He was drinking a lot and p.i.s.sing off all his mates. Not that he had many left by then . . ."

"Did he see any of his old mates from the army?"

"I don't think so."

"Any of the lads on his tank crew, maybe?"

"He never talked about it," she said. "I wouldn't know if he had, but to be honest I'd stopped really listening to him, you know? He went funny the last few years. He talked a lot of rubbish. Before he died he came round to tell me that he was going to turn it all round. Banging on about how he was going to look after me and the kids, how he was going to see us all right. I never told Owen any of that, by the way. He'd've gone mental."

Holland couldn't resist a glance at Stone this time. "Did he say how he was going to turn it round? Was he talking about money?"

"Yeah, I think so, but he always had some stupid scheme or other on the go. He was always on about getting himself sorted again. Silly b.a.s.t.a.r.d . . ."

"Tell us about when Ian died, Shireen?"

A boy came to the hatch and asked for a drink.

Shireen smiled; told Holland and Stone about her ex-husband's death as she mixed orange squash. "It was booze and pills," she said. "He emptied a couple of bottles of both in some p.i.s.sy little room just round the corner from here. They didn't find him for a week because the poor sod had n.o.body to miss him by then."

"They never found a note, did they?"

"No . . ."

"You never thought it was odd that Ian killed himself?" Stone said. "Bearing in mind what he'd said about turning his life around and all that."

She looked at them, unblinking, and Holland thought he could see the unasked question in her confused expression. He thought it said a lot about how Shireen Collins was getting on with her life that she hadn't really asked them why, a year after her ex-husband had died, they wanted to talk to her about him. He also thought that if Hadingham was as big, as handy, as she'd said he was, then it couldn't have been easy for whoever had killed him to have forced those tablets down his throat. Mind you, if Hadingham had been p.i.s.sed before it happened . . .

Suddenly there were other children demanding drinks and attention and it was clear that half an hour had been a generous estimate.

"I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe you could come back . . ."

They'd taken a cab from the station. Stone asked if there was a number they could call or somewhere they could pick up a taxi. She gave them directions to a minicab office five minutes' walk away.

Holland started pulling on his coat. "Do you mind me asking what you did with all Ian's things?"

"All the stuff he'd left here had gone long before he died," she said. "I gave the clothes and a few of his old CDs to a charity shop. A lot of it just went in the rubbish, to be honest."

"Were there any videotapes?" Stone asked.

She seemed slightly thrown by the question. "We had . . . blank tapes for recording stuff on. We still use them, I think, for taping the football or Corrie or whatever . . ."

"What about the things Ian took with him when he left?"

"No, they gave me everything that was in the room where they found him; all his personal belongings."

"You don't remember a videotape?"

She suddenly looked embarra.s.sed. She lowered her voice, and tried to look Stone in the eye, but couldn't quite manage it. "D'you mean like p.o.r.no?"

Handing Stone his jacket, Holland turned to her. "It doesn't matter, really. It's nothing . . ."

It was dry outside, but from the look of the sky it was no more than a lull, so they did their best to make the five-minute walk in much faster time.

"She's going to find out what he did eventually," Stone said.

Holland shook his head. "It's not up to us."

"I don't think she'll be that devastated somehow . . ."

"Maybe she will. On her kids' behalf."

"Right. I suppose it's going to p.i.s.s on their old man's memory somewhat. Blow the whole war-hero thing."

"Just a bit . . ."

"We're bang on about the f.u.c.king blackmail, though. That's for definite. Hadingham as good as told her he was coming into money."

"Yeah. I just wish we had something more than what she says he told her."

"You've become a d.a.m.n sight harder to please since you became a sergeant, do you know that?"

"You're always hoping there'll be like . . . I don't know, a photocopy of the blackmail demand he made to whoever topped him or something. You know, by some miracle . . ."

"Her testimony's a confirmation, though, isn't it?"

"It's just circ.u.mstantial, at the end of the day. I mean, it all helps, I'm not saying it doesn't. It's another piece of it. It's a big piece. But it's way too late to get any physical evidence, any forensics or whatever, so I can't see us actually pinning it on the bloke when we get him."

"What about the tape?"

"Maybe he had it with him, which makes sense if he thinks he's going to make some major money out of it, and the killer took it. Or he never had one, which doesn't really pan out if we're sticking with the blackmail idea. Or it's lost . . ."

"Or he left it at home when he moved out and the bloke his wife was s.h.a.gging taped Match of the Day over it."

"You know, this is one of the many reasons why I'm a sergeant and you're not."

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks!"

The rain came then, suddenly; blowing into them from behind and quickly soaking the backs of their legs. Stone carried on swearing, and though they couldn't have been too far from the minicab office, he started to run.

Holland just kept walking and watching Stone disappear into the distance. He couldn't be a.r.s.ed to try to catch up.

TWENTY-SIX.

Thorne tried and failed to make himself comfortable in the doorway of a tatty souvenir shop on Carnaby Street. There were half a dozen of these places knocking out multicolored Doc Martens and overpriced T-shirts on a street that hadn't been fashionable in donkey's years.

He could remember when London had been the center of everything. When the city could still get away with it, and swing without looking like someone's dad at a school disco. Once or twice around that time, when he'd have been six or seven, his parents had brought him into town to do some shopping, and though they'd tended to avoid the likes of Carnaby Street and had made straight for the department stores, Thorne could still recall seeing young women in floaty dresses and men wearing bright military jackets. Or perhaps he only thought he could. He knew that memory tended to work like that. Maybe he was just filling in the gaps with pictures of Terence Stamp and Julie Christie . . .

Either way, because he had at least been there in the sixties, Thorne had viewed the whole "Cool Britannia" movement of a few years before with a certain degree of cynicism. With Union Jacks on frocks and cars and alb.u.m covers, what started as a trend had quickly become little more than a marketing bandwagon to be hijacked by everyone from Marks & Spencer to New Labour. Still, Thorne had to admit that bands had at least rediscovered guitars, that tourist numbers had picked up, and that it had given a creative spark to many kids of Spike and Caroline's age.

It remained to be seen if tourists would be flocking to the West End for very much longer. Beneath a headline that read the latest victim, a photo of a younger and altogether healthier-looking Terry Turner dominated the front page of the day's Standard. The news was well and truly out that Theatreland had become a killing ground.

Thorne wondered if the killer had seen the newspaper. Did he know yet that he'd killed the wrong man?

Before settling down for the night, he'd been along to Marble Arch, had gone down into the subway to see if he could find Spike or Caroline. He'd got little change out of Ollie, who, if anything, had eyed him with even more suspicion and hostility than when they'd first encountered each other.

"I'm looking for my mates," Thorne had said. He'd pointed along the corridor, to the corner that was now deserted, but where he'd slept alongside Spike and Caroline a couple of nights earlier.

The old man had glanced up from his book. Narrowed his eyes. "Look somewhere else . . ."

It wasn't as though Thorne had been expecting to find them. He was well aware that Spike and Caroline kept strange hours. He knew what woke them and what put them to sleep.

In his doorway, Thorne pulled himself upright and moved his arms to the outside of his sleeping bag. He stared at the lit window displays across the street and listened to the dance music that was coming from one of the flats above.

He thought again about where the leak might have come from. He had to consider McCabe, whatever Brigstocke thought of the idea. Who else knew exactly where he would be sleeping? It was inconceivable that the information could have come from anyone closer to him. What ate away at Thorne was that, somewhere, he knew that he already had the answer. It couldn't be too hard to figure out who had been responsible; it was a basic two-piece jigsaw. Of course, other rough sleepers knew where he was, but they didn't have the other piece of it. None of them knew that he was an undercover police officer. At least, he presumed none of them knew. Certainty, of any sort, was a luxury he'd given up along with the rest of them, when he'd taken the decision to sleep on the street.

Do you want me to tell you how many of those kicks could have killed Terry Turner on their own? How many different bones were broken . . . ?

Earlier, with Brigstocke, he'd played it down. He'd had to. But now there was no point pretending that what jumped in his guts and sucked away at his breath was anything other than fear. He'd felt it from that first moment underground, when he'd heard about Terry T's death, and it had settled, content inside him. It had quickly made itself at home, coating the walls; clingy and seeping . . .

Thorne had felt afraid a lot more lately. In the recent weeks and months there had been a general apprehension that he could not name, as well as a perplexing, irrational fear of specific things. He'd become jumpy in crowds; he was suddenly scared of escalators and of heights; he'd started feeling increasingly wary in cars. Thorne knew that some people became more nervous about flying the more frequently they walked on board a plane, and he wondered if he was moving along the same lines.

Or perhaps this susceptibility to fear in all its forms was simply a part of getting older. His father had been afraid of all sorts of bizarre things. Thorne wondered if he was simply turning into his old man. He'd known it would happen eventually, it happened to just about everyone, but the process seemed to have put on a burst of speed with his father's death. It was as though he were part of some twisted, cosmic equation. He felt like he was changing to fill the hole left by his father's pa.s.sing.

And there was the other thing: the trick that was played on you after the death of a parent. After the death of your last parent, when you became an orphan. The switch that was thrown . . .