But Kitson was in no mood to laugh.
The place smelled of piss and hospital food.
As soon as Thorne had walked through the door he’d remembered what Spike had told him when they’d been talking about the facilities at the Lift; how most places were a lot different. He’d been putting it mildly.
The Aquarius day center in Covent Garden catered purely for those over twenty-five, but they could easily have upped the lower limit by fifteen years. Thorne hadn’t seen a single person younger than himself since he’d got there, and as he looked around, it was hardly surprising. The few people he had encountered were old-before their time or otherwise-and he couldn’t imagine a twenty-five- or thirty-year-old feeling anything other than deeply uncomfortable in the poky, dismal rooms and bare- brick corridors. Where the London Lift was light and well cared for, everything about the Aquarius Centre reeked of neglect, and a lack of the funding necessary to get rid of the stench.
In the closest thing he could find to a lounge, Thorne sat and tried not to breathe too deeply.
It felt like a doctor’s waiting room. A windowless box with a dozen chairs pushed back against its flaking walls, and a table in the center with old magazines and overflowing ashtrays scattered across it like litter.
Ever since he’d worked out how Jago and the other man might have been connected, Thorne had been absorbed in considering why someone who’d served and possibly fought for their country might return to Civvy Street only to wind up sleeping on it. Might end up spending their days in a place like this. The figures were alarming. Some sources claimed that one in every four rough sleepers was ex-armed forces, with the figure even higher for those who had been on the streets long-term. Ironically, squaddies were given the skills that might help sustain them outdoors. They were trained to sleep rough. But what led so many of them to end up doing just that?
There would be the same risk factors that applied to anyone else, of course; the same triggers. And it wasn’t hard to work out that there would be others, too, unique to a history in the services: post- traumatic stress; difficulties with readjustment; drug and alcohol dependen cy arising from either of those two things. But these were just chapter headings from a caseworker’s textbook. Thorne knew that if he wanted to understand, he would have to find some of these people, and talk to them…
A man poked his head around the door, stared at Thorne for a few seconds, and backed out again. The room’s only other occupant had not even looked up. He sat opposite Thorne in a ratty green armchair, the floor around his feet littered with bits of foam stuffing that had leaked from its cushion. He gripped the wooden arms as though they were keeping him from rising up into the air, and stared at the front of a Daily Star that had sat unthumbed on his knees for the past fifteen minutes.
Neither Thorne nor anyone else knew whether Jago and the other man had been killed because of their army background, or because they were homeless, or because of whatever events had led them from one to the other. Brigstocke had contacted the Ex-Ser vice Action Group in hope of guidance. Meanwhile, Thorne knew that his role gave him an opportunity to talk to those who found themselves where Chris Jago and the other victim had once been.
That said, if Thorne had learned anything over the last few weeks, it was that reaching out to someone was never straightforward.
“This place is a shithole,” Thorne said. “Isn’t it? They should just lob a fucking grenade in and be done with it…”
The man sitting opposite rose from his chair-letting the newspaper slide onto the floor among the foam debris-and walked out of the room.
Thorne got up and retrieved the paper. He turned to the sports pages and saw that, despite the draw they had scraped with Liverpool the previous Saturday, Spurs were still flirting dangerously with the bottom three.
Then he followed the man out.
Walking fast toward the exit, he thought about his father’s war stories. Jim Thorne had been no more than nine or ten when the Second World War had broken out, and his army experience had taken him no farther than Salisbury Plain. But he’d been happy to pass on the fact that he hadn’t seen a pineapple until he was eighteen, and recalled nights spent belowground while the bombs fell on north London with a clarity that remained undimmed even at the end. Thorne knew this sort of thing was not uncommon, but still he marveled at how his dad could describe every inch of an air-raid shelter, then forget to put on any underwear.
“For pity’s sake, Dad…”
“I forgot. I fucking forgot the bastard things!”
Thorne’s father had told him, often, that he’d enjoyed his time as a soldier; that he’d needed the discipline and the routine. Thorne wondered if the problems of many of those who left the army each year stemmed from an inability to deal with the chaos, with the lack of any pattern to their lives in the real world. It would certainly explain why so many regained the order they craved in another way, by moving quickly from army to prison.
He wondered if Jago or the other man might ever have done time.. .
Approaching the exit, he saw the man from the lounge, and something in the stance reminded Thorne of his father’s friend Victor. He had a few years on Jim Thorne, had seen active service, and Thorne wondered what a soldier of Victor’s generation would make of all this. He knew about how men with shell shock had been mistreated after the Great War, but did that compare with the fate that awaited so many who’d returned from Sarajevo, Belfast, Goose Green?
Thorne remembered reading somewhere that more British soldiers had committed suicide since returning from the Falklands than had been killed during the entire conflict.
The man from the lounge was standing at the door, arguing with someone who looked like a caseworker. Thorne hovered, pretending to study the row of tatty paperbacks on a shelf, not wanting to push past the men in the doorway.
“We were supposed to fill those forms in together,” the caseworker said. “It’s important, Gerry. You promised me you’d bring them in today.”
Gerry was clearly agitated. “I forgot. I fucking forgot the bastard things…”
Back at Becke House, Holland made sure he got to Andy Stone first.
“Guess how many ways you’re in the shit?” The smile slid off Stone’s face.
“I’ve tried to call you half a dozen times since midday.”
“The phone was off for an hour at the most, I swear,” Stone said.
“That’s only one of the ways. Why didn’t you update the CRIS after you spoke to Susan Jago?” “When?”
“After you rang with the death message. Last Saturday afternoon.”
Stone opened and closed his mouth, looked at the ceiling.
“You’re a fucking idiot,” Holland said. And he knew that he was, too, and that Kitson felt much the same way. She was already in with Russell Brigstocke, and Holland wasn’t so sure that the DCI would be quite so ready to blame himself. “I walked into a meeting this morning, unable to answer the simplest question, because we hadn’t got any of the information about Chris Jago that we should have been given by his sister.”
“I’m not with you…”
“When you spoke to Susan Jago last Saturday, did she tell you that her brother had been in the army?” “No.”
Holland toyed with being pissy just for once demanding a “sir,” but he decided against it. “She said nothing about his service history at all?”
“Fuck, don’t you think I’d have told you if she had?”
“I thought you’d have updated the CRIS,” Holland said. “Looks like I can’t take anything for granted.”
The implications of what Holland was telling him were starting to dawn on Stone. “So she never said anything to anybody?”
Holland answered with his eyes. “ I thought Kitson had the information and she thought I’d got it off the system. It was never on the system in the first place.”
“Bloody hell.” Stone leaned back against a desk, folded his arms. “After Thorne came up with the idea that the tattoo was an army thing, I did think it was strange that she hadn’t mentioned it. I just thought someone would have checked with her. I thought someone would be getting in touch to ask her about it, you know?”
“Well, nobody did.”
“Hang about. Has it not occurred to you that she didn’t say anything about him being ex-army because he wasn’t. It’s only a theory, isn’t it…?” Holland shook his head, adamant. “He was exarmy. That’s an army tattoo.”
