Death Message

more than one investigation into north London ’s thriving heroin distribution industry, and the team from S &O had been quick to start throwing their weight around.

‘Getting seriously fucking territorial,’ Brigstocke had muttered the day before. ‘Well, two can play at that stupid game…’

Thorne had had dealings with both S &O and some of the Turkish crime gangs that they were up against. There were good reasons – personal reasons – why he would prefer not to get close to either of them again. That said, it was to the DCI’s credit that he refused to be bullied, and Thorne knew his boss well enough to be sure it was not a pissing contest. He was one of those coppers, just as Thorne was, for whom a murder was something to be solved, as opposed to something that lay on the desk and threatened to fuck up clearance rates. Three weeks into an inquiry that was stone cold and Brigstocke could be as miserable as anybody else, but once he caught a case, he knew that there were those, dead and alive, to whom he owed the best efforts of his team.

Now, Thorne was starting to believe that he had his own victim to work for. One to whom his attention had specifically, had purposely, been drawn and on whose behalf he must do whatever he could.

For now, he’d try not to think too much about the killer; about the man or woman he could only presume had sent him the message.

Right now, he knew no more than that the man in the picture was dead.

All Thorne had to do was find him.

Officers from the various Homicide Assessment Teams on call during the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift would have faxed in preliminary reports to a central contact desk at Scotland Yard. In turn, those on duty there issued a daily bulletin to which anyone within the Specialist Crime Directorate had access. The report outlined all unexplained deaths – or injuries inflicted that looked to be life-threatening – offences involving firearms, rapes, high-risk missing persons or critical incidents that had been picked up overnight from anywhere within the M25 area.

Name and address of victim, when available, and brief details of the incident. Cause of death, if evident. Officer in charge of the case where one had been assigned.

At a spare desk in the open-plan Incident Room, Thorne logged on, called up the email and read through such details as were available of those murders caught the night before. The record for a single night – terrorist atrocities notwithstanding – was eleven; one night a couple of years earlier, when, on top of two domestics and a pub brawl, guns were fired at a house-party in Ealing, a flat was torched in Harlesden, and a gang on the hunt for crack money had sliced up the entire staff of a minicab office in Stockwell.

Predictably, many had been quick to point out that if the Met really was, as its motto boldly claimed, ‘Working for a safer London’, then it clearly wasn’t working hard enough, though there were plenty of people, Tom Thorne included, working their arses off in the weeks following that particular evening.

He scanned the bulletin.

Three bodies was above average for a Tuesday night.

He was looking for ‘dark hair’, ‘head injury’ – anything that might match the picture on his phone. The only entry that came close described the murder of a barman in the West End: a white man attacked on his way home and battered to death with half a brick in an alley behind Holborn station.

Thorne dismissed it. The victim was described as being in his mid-twenties, and though death could do strange things to the freshest of faces, he knew that the man he was looking for was older than that.

He could hear DS Samir Karim and DC Andy Stone working at a desk behind him; although ‘working’ in this instance meant talking about the WPC at Colindale nick that Stone had finally persuaded to come out for a drink. Thorne logged out of the bulletin, spoke without turning round. ‘It’s obviously a positive discrimination thing.’

‘What is?’ Stone asked.

‘Colindale. Taking on these blind WPCs.’

Karim was still laughing when he and Stone arrived at Thorne’s shoulder.

‘Heard about your secret admirer,’ Stone said. ‘Most people just send flowers.’

Karim began to straighten papers on the desk. ‘It’ll probably turn out to be nothing.’

‘Right, you get sent all sorts of shit on your phone these days. I get loads of unsolicited stuff every week. Upgrades, ringtones, whatever. Games…’

Thorne looked up at Stone, spoke as though the DC were as terminally stupid as his comment had made him appear. ‘And do many of these come with pictures of corpses attached?’

‘I’m just saying.’

Karim and Stone stood rocking on their heels, like third-rate cabaret performers who had forgotten whose turn it was to speak next. They made for an unlikely-looking double-act: Stone, tall, dark and well tailored; Karim, silver-haired and thickset beneath a badly fitting jacket, like a PE teacher togged up for parents’ evening. Thorne had time for them both, although Karim, in his capacity as office manager, could be an old woman when he wanted to be, and Stone was not the most conscientious of coppers. A year or so earlier, a young trainee detective with whom he was partnered had been stabbed to death. Though no blame had been formally attributed, there were some who thought that guilt was the least that Andy Stone should have suffered.

‘Can’t you two find somebody else to annoy?’ Thorne said.

Once they’d drifted away, he walked through the narrow corridor that encircled the Incident Room and into the small, ill-appointed office he shared with DI Yvonne Kitson. He spent ten minutes filing assorted memos and newsletters under ‘W’ for ‘Wastepaper Basket’ and flicked distractedly through the most recent copy of The Job, looking for pictures of anyone he knew.

He was staring at a photo of Detective Sergeant Dave Holland receiving a trophy at some sort of Met sports event when the man himself appeared in the doorway. Incredulous, Thorne quickly finished reading the short article while Holland walked across and took the chair behind Kitson’s desk.

‘Table-tennis?’ Thorne said, waving the magazine.

Holland shrugged, unable to keep a smile from his face in response to the grin that was plastered across Thorne’s. ‘Fastest ball game in the world,’ he said.

‘No it isn’t.’

Holland waited.

‘Jai alai,’ Thorne said.

‘Jai what?’

‘Also called pelota, with recorded speeds of up to one hundred and eighty miles an hour. A golf ball’s quicker as well. A hundred and seventy-odd off the tee.’

‘The fact that you know this shit is deeply scary,’ Holland said.

‘The old man.’

Holland nodded, getting it.

Thorne’s father had become obsessed with trivia – with lists, and quizzes about lists – in the months leading up to his death. These had become increasingly bizarre and his desire to talk about them more passionate, as the Alzheimer’s had torn and tangled more of the circuits in his brain; had come to define him.

The world’s fastest ball games. Top five celebrity suicides. Heaviest internal organs. All manner of random rubbish…

Jim Thorne. Killed when flames had torn through his home while he slept. A simple house-fire that any loving son – any son who had taken the necessary time and trouble – should have known was an accident waiting to happen.

Or perhaps something else entirely.

A murder, orchestrated as a message to Thorne himself, altogether more direct than the one preoccupying him at that moment.

One or the other. Toss a coin. Wide awake and sweating in the early hours, Thorne could never decide which was easier to live with.

‘Jai alai,’ Holland said. ‘I’ll remember that.’

‘How’s it going with the phone companies?’ Thorne sounded hopeful, but knew that unless the man they were dealing with was particularly dim, the hope would be dashed pretty bloody quickly.

‘It’s a T-Mobile number,’ Holland said.

‘Prepay, right?’