“Scared of what?”
“Like I said, he was a junkie, so I thought it was just that at first, you know? Then I could see that something had really put the wind up him. Or some one had…”
There was certainly an element of grandstanding to the way Moony was telling it, but Thorne thought he could smell truth as well as bullshit.
“He’d said something before about someone asking him questions. It was just after that first bloke was killed he told me this, the one they can’t identify.”
“Did you know him?”
Moony shook his head.
“So who was asking your friend these questions, then?”
A flash of gold in his mouth, and a snigger that carried the smell of booze right across the table. “Well, this is the thing, isn’t it? Ray reckoned it was a copper, reckoned that he was looking for the bloke that turned up stiff a couple of days later.”
Thorne let a look that said, I’m impressed, pass slowly across his face, while his mind raced. Mannion was a druggie. What he told Moony, if he told him anything at all, could easily have been down to a dose of everyday delusional paranoia. But what if this wasn’t a story cooked up in a dirty spoon? Was it at least possible that Raymond Mannion was terrified because he knew something, because he’d seen something? Did he think that someone he’d spoken to had kicked one rough sleeper to death and might fancy coming back for him?
“So this is what he tells me,” Moony said. “And every time I run into him after that, he looks like he can’t decide whether to leg it or shit himself and, lo and behold, suddenly it’s Ray who’s the one with his brains kicked all over the shop and a twenty-quid note pinned to his fucking chest.” He leaned back, pleased with himself. “You’ve got to admit it’s bloody strange.”
Thorne grunted. He did think it was strange, but he was already thinking about something else, something Moony had just said. There was only one thing it could possibly mean…
He became aware of Moony talking again and looked up. “What?”
“She’s pretty fit,” Moony said. He nodded across to where Spike and his girlfriend were talking to one of the care workers. The three of them were laughing, drinking tea. “ Her. One-Day Caroline.”
Thorne’s mind was still in several places at once, but one part of it was curious enough. “Why d’you call her that?”
Moony looked pleased with himself again, like this was something else he was going to relish passing on. “Because she’s always bleating on about how she’s going to get herself clean ‘ one day.’ Then, when she tries to give up, one day is usually as long as she lasts…”
Thorne looked over, watched Caroline absently trailing her fingers down Spike’s arm as she listened to the care worker, nodding intently.
He pushed his chair away from the table. “So, come on, then,” he said. “You’ve had more than a couple of minutes. What did I do before this?”
Moony looked suddenly serious, as if he were getting in touch with something significant, something profound, deep down in his pickled innards. “It’s business, definitely business,” he said. “Some sort of financial thing. Accountancy or stocks and shares. I reckon you were loaded and then you lost the fucking lot. I’m right, aren’t I? I’m never fucking wrong.”
“Bang on, mate.” Thorne raised his hands. “You are absolutely bang on. That’s seriously spooky.” He stood and walked away, leaving Moony nodding slowly, gently patting the bottle in his pocket as though it were his pet. Or his muse.
Out near the reception desk, Thorne all but bumped straight into the man who’d walked in when he’d been talking to Maxwell and Hendricks that morning. Maxwell’s new boss…
“Oh, hi, I’m Lawrence Healey.”
The tone was not one Thorne had been on the receiving end of for a few days. It was brisk but friendly; respectful, even. Healey proffered a hand and Thorne shook it, wondering for just a second or two if the man knew he was really a police officer.
“Brendan tells me you’re new.”
“New-ish,” Thorne said.
“Well, I know how you feel. I’m a new boy myself.
If there’s anything you need, anything you want to talk about, you mustn’t be shy about it. Yes? You know where we are…”
Thorne said that he did, and that he certainly wouldn’t be.
As he moved toward the exit he could still make out the hiss and blather of Radio Bob’s broadcasts, coming from the cafe, on the other side of the door behind him.
“Are you receiving me? Are you receiving me…?”
EIGHT
London stank of desperation.
This time of night, of course, it smelled of all sorts of things: fags and fast food; piss and petrol. Still, in spite of all the money that was clearly being spent- the wealth on display in the rows of Mercs, Jags, and Beamers, and in the ranks of overpriced restaurants-you could catch the whiff of desperation almost everywhere. Pungent and unmistakable. Classless and clinging, and far stronger than anything being rubbed onto wrists, or rolled across armpits, or sprayed over shoppers by those grotesquely made-up hags in Harrods and Selfridges.
Where he was walking, the desperation was of the common or garden variety. A need for warmth, food, or a fix. A need for comfort. But some of the rarer blends of that distinctive scent were around as well, drifting through the West End, there if you could nose them out beneath the everyday stink of chicken and vomit and beer.
From Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, it floated south-the stale desperation for a smarter phone and a younger partner mingling with those more basic, bodily needs, reeking in Soho and the Circus-before moving along Piccadilly, where the drive to be better dressed, better off, and better than gave off the sharpest stench of all. It was a world away from the gutters and the shitty cut-throughs, of course-from the alleyways that were presently his own area of operation-but he knew that the desperation was of an even headier kind in Old Bond Street and the Burlington Arcade…
It was already clear to him that things had changed since he’d killed the driver. Walking around within that rough square bordered by Oxford Street, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road, he’d noticed that more of them were settling down in pairs. Looking out for each other; one asleep and the other keeping at least one eye open.
It was understandable. More than that, it was commendable.
Word would probably have spread faster than head lice anyway after the driver had been killed. After the second one, for certain. But now the television and the newspapers were all banging on about the danger to what they’d all taken to calling the city’s “most vulnerable citizens.” It was tricky to see it clearly in a community as shifting-as tidal, they said-as this one was, but panic was starting to set in.
Now, that was another smell he knew far better than most people.
He also knew very well that panic wouldn’t save anyone. Panic was what you saw in the eyes of dead men and what stained the floor beneath them.
Moving past Charing Cross Station for the second time that evening and on toward Waterloo Bridge, he peered up every likely-looking side street and into every pool of shadow, humming a song from the mideighties. Something about panic on the streets of London. He couldn’t remember who the song was by…
It wasn’t as if he was going to have any problem finding someone alone and fucked up and begging for a good kicking. The very nature of these people would work against them in the end. If they were cut out to stick together, to bond with others, you’d hardly see them curling up in puddles and sleeping in their own shit, would you?
Singling one of them out would be easy enough.
