kiss his son. He decided that this was because he’d watched his father die a few hours earlier, having just turned off the machine that had been keeping him alive.
For the umpteenth time since he’d been given it, he smoothed down the pages of the handwritten letter and read. The words he’d scrawled in such an adolescent fury a dozen years before seemed rather clumsy now, their intention no more or less than to wound.
He looked up from the page and out of the window.
To wound. It was hard to imagine that they had done otherwise. So why the hell had the stupid, drunken fucker held on to the bloody thing?
You left us like a snake, like we were shit, so you could crawl into a bottle and forget we were there at all. You fucking coward. Crawling, beery snake…
He read the passage over again, each faded loop and slash of his handwriting like a decaying tooth to probe. Like a mouth ulcer to gnaw at.
The buffet trolley was coming down the aisle toward him and he decided that he’d have tea, and perhaps a sandwich. He’d wait and see what they had.
He’d wait and see just how hard the questions would be to answer, and how many times he’d ask them of himself. Questions about his judgment back then. About whether he’d pushed his father away until there’d been nobody for the poor old bugger to turn to except God.
He put the letter away.
He ordered tea and a chicken sandwich. He watched the scenery change as the train carried him farther north, and counted the minutes until he could hold his son again.
Part Two
1991
There are two groups of men, four in each group. The differences between the two groups are strik ing, though the greatest differences are not the most immediate.
Four men are sitting and four standing. The men on the floor are spaced out on the ground, each several feet from the next. Not within touching distance.
They are all wearing drab, olive-colored clothing, though they’re not dressed identically: two have boots on their feet and two are wearing sandals; one has a hat but the other three are bareheaded. The black hair plastered to their skulls is all that can be seen of the men for the most part, until one of them raises his head and takes a bite from what looks like a chocolate bar. He chews mechanically.
The rain and the darkness make everything appear slightly blurred and hard to make out clearly. In contrast to the first group, the men who are standing are dressed identically. Nothing of these men’s faces can be seen beneath the goggles and the multicolored kerchiefs or shamags that cover their mouths. Two are standing together, one of them flicking through a sheaf of papers that flap noisily in the wind. The other pair are placed like bookends: one at either end of the row of men on the f l o o r. Each is pointing a pistol.
The man who is holding the papers waves them in the air, and shouts something across to the men on the floor. It is hard to make out all the words above the noise of the rain: “… are keeping… Do you understand?”
The man on the floor who is chewing looks up at him, then back to the men who are sitting next to him. They all look up, their faces wet. Two of the others are also eating, but none of them says anything. The rain is fat, and black. Sputtering and hissing as it drops onto heads and hands and bodies. The man with the papers shouts louder: “We are keeping these. Do you understand?” And the man who is chewing nods quickly, twice.
Nothing else is said for a while, and some time passes, though it is impossible to say how much. It is suddenly raining more heavily, and the dark hair and the olive clothes of the men on the ground are slick with it.
The men who are standing use their sleeves to wipe the water from their guns.
The light is even poorer than before, but the dull circle in the sky is most certainly the sun rather than the moon. It is dimmest, shittiest daytime, and now all the men with goggles are carrying pistols and pointing them.
It’s virtually impossible to tell the four men who are standing apart from one another. Their faces are hidden, but even if they weren’t, the light would make it hard to read their expressions clearly. Yet, despite all this, the difference between them and the group of men on the floor is suddenly blindingly obvious.
The men with guns are much more afraid.
ELEVEN
“That isn’t Christopher.”
“Are you sure? It’s understandable if you’re not, what with the face being so-”
“No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I can’t help you, I mean… But that’s not him. That’s not my brother’s body…”
Susan Jago turned away as the sheet was lifted and placed back across the dead man’s face. Even though Phil Hendricks tried to be as gentle as he could, the noise of the drawer clanging shut seemed to hang in the air, as awkward as the pause that followed it.
DI Yvonne Kitson put a hand on the woman’s arm. “Dr. Hendricks will show you out,” she said.
“Phil…?”
Hendricks led Jago to the door and through it.
Unlike the heavy steel drawer that had been built to take the weight of the dead, the door closed behind them with a soft snick.
“Fuck,” Kitson said.
Holland groaned. “She sounded so positive on the phone. And I thought we were in, you know, when she first saw his face.”
Jago’s hand had flown to her mouth a second after the breath she’d sucked into it. She’d shaken her head and gasped, “Oh Christ.”
“That could just have been shock at seeing the body,” Kitson said. “Or most likely relief.” “I suppose.”
“It’s a natural reaction.”
“It feels terrible, though, doesn’t it?” Holland walked slowly over to the wall of steel drawers. “Wanting it to be him so much. Is that a natural reaction?” There had certainly been a mood of celebration when Susan Jago had called two days before. She’d seen the picture in the papers and on the TV and was fairly positive that she could identify the man who’d been murdered two months earlier. She was confident that the first victim of the rough- sleeper killings was her missing elder brother. Brigstocke had said it sounded as much like a decent break as any he’d ever heard, and the case certainly needed it. The powers that be were thrilled. More than a pint or two had been downed in the Royal Oak that evening. Holland stuck a thumb inside his sleeve, rubbed at a smear on the metal. “Wanting the body to be her brother’s. It feels selfish…”
Kitson shrugged and walked across to where her coat and handbag were hung in the corner of the mortuary suite. There was a small red sofa and a low table, a box of tissues on a pine shelf. “It’s going to feel a damn sight worse telling Russell Brigstocke that we didn’t get a result. I’d as good as promised him a name.”
Having made pretty much the same promise, Holland would be the one to break the bad news to Tom
Thorne. Kitson didn’t know about Thorne working undercover. As far as Holland was aware, below the level of the DCI, he was the only person who did know.
He wondered why that was.
Maybe he’d been included because of what was perceived as some kind of special relationship between himself and Thorne. Maybe they just thought that dogsbody and go-between were his special areas of
