walk past.”
Thorne caught him up. They were walking north up Greek Street, toward Soho Square. The two of them had hooked up in a greasy spoon for breakfast and been mooching around fairly aimlessly ever since. Now it was raining and they were keen to get indoors; Spike had said he knew somewhere warm where they could get a cup of tea.
“Why?” Thorne said. “What’s he got against you, then?”
“He’s a boozer, so he doesn’t want anything to do with the likes of me, does he? With a junkie.”
It was a word Thorne was used to hearing spoken with distaste. Spike said it casually, as if it were just another word to describe himself, like blond.
In a little under three weeks, Thorne had seen enough to know exactly what Spike was talking about. The homeless community had its divisions like any other; its imagined hierarchies. There were, by and large, three main groups: drug addicts, drinkers, and those with mental-health problems. As might be expected, there were one or two who could claim membership in all three groups, but on the whole they stayed separate. And, those with mental-health problems tended to keep themselves to themselves, so any antagonism festered mainly between the drinkers and the addicts.
“It’s mad,” Thorne said. “The boozers can’t stand the junkies; the junkies hate the boozers; nobody much likes the nutters…”
“And we all hate the asylum seekers!” Spike cackled, loving his own joke, flicking his fingers together like a young black man. “It’s a right old mix, though. I fucking love it, like. You’ve got your immigrants, you’ve got blokes who used to be in the army, you’ve got blokes who’ve been inside. There’s all sorts on the street, mate. All sorts…”
Thorne wasn’t going to argue.
They’d reached Oxford Street, where they waited for a gap in the traffic and started to cross. “You’re right, though, it is a bit mental that we don’t all get on.” Spike spun round, pointed back toward where they’d had their altercation. “Mind you, you saw what that boozer was like. They’re a mad, smelly bunch of fuckers. No offense, like…”
“Eh?”
“See, that’s another reason why the two of us wouldn’t normally get on, apart from the age-difference thing. A junkie and a boozer. You are a boozer, right?”
For as long as he could remember, people had liked to imagine that Thorne drank a lot more than was actually the case. It was something expected of people who did what he did, saw the things he’d seen. The truth was that he liked expensive wine and cheap beer, and though he and Phil Hendricks could put a few away in front of the football, he didn’t have anything like a drink problem… not really.
Yes, he’d drunk a little more than normal of late for obvious reasons, and he was drinking on the street, but only because the undercover role demanded it. As it was, he’d taken to buying piss-weak lager and pouring it into empty cans of Tennent’s Extra and Special Brew. No self-respecting alcoholic would be seen dead with a can of Carling or Sainsbury’s own brand first thing in the morning.
“I mean it’s not like you’re always drinking,” Spike said. “But I’ve smelled it on you.”
Thorne ran a hand through his hair and shook away the water. He winked at Spike. “I like a drink…”
They walked on past the Wheatsheaf and the Black Horse. Past the Marquess of Granby on Rathbone Street. This pub was a favorite of Thorne’s, as it had once been of Dylan Thomas’s. The Welsh poet had been a regular visitor and enjoyed trying to provoke guardsmen, who had popped in to pick on, or pick up, homosexuals.
Spike suddenly cut left, and within a minute or two they were in one of the quiet side streets behind the Middlesex Hospital, where Paddy Hayes had finally died almost a week earlier.
“It’s like it is in prison,” Thorne said. “The way the groups don’t get on. Everyone thinking they’re better than everyone else. The white-collar brigade, the dodgy businessmen, and the con men think they should be kept separate from the real criminals. The honest-to-goodness armed robbers think they’re better than the murderers. Everyone hates the sex offenders…”
Spike stepped ahead and turned round, talked to Thorne as he was half skipping backward, away from him. He looked like an excited, adolescent boy. “So, were you inside, then?”
In retrospect, it hadn’t been the cleverest thing in the world he could have said, but Spike’s presumption wouldn’t do him any harm. He decided to just say nothing.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” Spike said. “I didn’t mean to pry, like, and you don’t have to say nothing if you don’t want to.”
He stopped suddenly, stood still for a second or two before heading up a narrow alleyway. Thorne followed.
It was the sort of crooked cut-through that London was riddled with; that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years. The windowless buildings seemed to press in on either side, closer to one another at the top than they were at street level. The black bricks were greasy, and the floor was rutted and puddled.
A figure stepped into view at the other end of the alleyway and Thorne froze.
“S’all right,” Spike said. He walked toward the man, who had clearly been waiting for him, while Thorne stayed where he was, and watched.
It happened quickly enough: hands emerging from pockets, taking, handing over and put swiftly back again.
While Thorne waited for Spike to finish his shopping, he thought about those different groups within the community of rough sleepers. The junkies, the drinkers, the nutcases. He realized that as far as the dead men who had been identified went, there was one from each group: Mannion was a drug user, Hayes was never seen without a bottle, and Radio Bob had certainly had mental problems. Was this a coincidence? Or could it be part of the way the killer selected his victims?
Thanks to that woman who’d called to say the dead man might be her brother, they could well have a name for the first victim by now. Did he fit into this pattern at all? The postmortem had not told them much. There’d certainly been no evidence of drug use or excessive drinking…
Thorne turned and walked slowly back toward the street. He wondered what his own internal organs, furred and fucked up as they probably were, might one day tell an eager pathologist. What they might have to say for themselves.
He remembered a slight judder; the squeak of the belt as his father’s coffin had slid forward, a second before the organist had picked up her cue.
Stopping and leaning against a wall, he hoped that when the time came, his innards would be there undisturbed and intact. Melting nicely. Burning along with the rest of him, having said fuck-all of any consequence to anyone.
“Why did you never report your brother missing?” Hendricks asked.
“I just kept expecting him to pop up again. He always has done before.” Susan Jago had a red vinyl overnight bag on her knees. She twisted the handles around each other as she spoke. “Chris has been doing this on and off for years. He’ll go a bit funny and vanish off the face of the earth for a while, then come waltzing back like there’s no problem.”
There were a variety of routes from Westminster Hospital to Euston Station, and Hendricks had mentally tossed a coin. He was driving along Victoria Street toward Parliament Square and from there he’d head north up Whitehall and keep going.
“Was he on any medication?”
“Blimey, he’s been on everything at one time or another. You name it…”
“Got a loyalty card at the chemist’s, has he?” She laughed and let her head drop back. “He’s a complete mess, Christopher is. Has been for ages.”
Hendricks steered the Ford Focus skillfully through the traffic, though the wet streets weren’t making him slow down overmuch. He’d already apologized once when he’d jumped a light and the woman in the passenger seat had sucked in a noisy, nervous breath. Now he raced to overtake a bus that was pulling out, and she did it again.
“Sorry…”
“It’s okay.”
“Just trying to get you there a bit quicker. If you miss the next one, you’ll have a bit of a wait.” “Like I said,
