Death Message

towards a group of teenagers on the corner.

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, marking out a new column in lines of black felt-tip and taping