“Tell me…”
Brigstocke leaned across the table and spoke, his voice just loud enough for Thorne to hear above Dido, who was whining from the speakers above the bar.
Three victims so far.
The first body had been found almost exactly a month earlier. A homeless man somewhere in his forties, murdered in an alleyway off Golden Square. Four weeks on, and his identity remained unknown.
“We’ve spoken to other rough sleepers in the area and can’t get so much as a nickname. They reckon he was new and he certainly hadn’t made any contact with local care services. Some of these people like to matey up and some just want to be left alone. Same as anybody else, I suppose.”
“DSS?”
“We’re still checking missed appointments, but I’m not holding my breath. They don’t all sign on anyway. Some of them are on the street because they don’t want to be found.”
“Everyone’s got some official stuff somewhere, though. Haven’t they? A birth certificate, something.”
“Maybe he had,” Brigstocke said. “He might have left it somewhere for safekeeping, in which case that’s where it’s going to stay. We also have to consider the possibility that he kept it on him, and whoever killed him took it.”
“Either way, you’ve got sod all.”
“There’s a tattoo, that’s about it. It’s pretty distinctive. It’s the only thing we’ve got to work on at the moment…”
There was less of a problem putting a name to the second rough sleeper, killed a couple of streets away a fortnight later. Raymond Mannion was a known drug abuser with a criminal record. He had been convicted a few years earlier of violent assault, and though there was no ID found on the body, his DNA was on record.
Both men had been kicked to death. They were of similar ages and had been killed in the early hours of the morning. Both Mannion’s body and that of the anonymous first victim had been found with twentypound notes pinned to their chests.
Thorne took a mouthful of beer and swallowed. “A series?”
“Looks likely.”
“And now there’s been another one?”
“Night before last. Same area, same sort of age, but there are differences. There was no money left on the body.”
“Unless it was taken.”
“That’s possible, obviously. No money was found on the body.”
“You said differences. What else?”
“He’s still breathing,” Brigstocke said. Thorne raised his eyebrows. “Not that the poor bugger knows a great deal about it. Name’s Paddy Hayes. He’s on life support at the Middlesex…”
Thorne felt a shudder, like cold fingers brushing against the soft hairs at the nape of his neck. He remembered a girl he’d known a few years earlier: attacked and left a fraction from death by a man who’d murdered three before her. Helpless, kept alive by machines. When they’d found her, the police thought that the man they were after had made his first mistake. It was Thorne who had worked out that this killer wasn’t actually trying to kill anyone. That what he’d done to this girl was what he’d been attempting with the rest of his victims. It was one of those ice-cold/white-hot moments when Thorne had realized the truly monstrous nature of what he was up against.
There’d been far too many since.
“So you think Hayes is part of the pattern or not?”
“It’s a bloody coincidence if he isn’t.”
“How did you get his ID?”
“Again, nothing official on him, but we found a letter jammed down inside a pocket. Someone from the day center where he hung out took a look at him and confirmed the name. They had to take a damn good look, though. His head looked like a sack of rotten fruit.”
“What sort of letter?”
“From his son. Telling his father just how much of a useless, drunken bastard he was. How he couldn’t give a toss if he never set eyes on him again.” With a finger, Brigstocke pushed what was left of an ice cube around his glass. “Now the son’s the one who’s got to decide whether or not to pull the plug…”
Thorne grimaced. “So I take it you’re not exactly on the verge of making an arrest?”
“It was always going to be a pig,” Brigstocke said. “When the first one wasn’t sorted within a week it started to look very dodgy, and as soon as the second body turned up they were passing the case around like a turd. That’s when we ran out of luck and picked the bloody thing up. Just after you went gardening, as it happens.”
“Maybe God was punishing you.”
“Somebody’s fucking punishing me. I’ve had officers on fourteen-hour tours for three weeks and we’re precisely nowhere.”
“Grief from above?”
“Grief from everywhere. The commissioner’s on our back because he’s getting it in the neck from every homeless charity and pressure group out there. They seem to think because we aren’t making any obvious progress that we must be dragging our feet. That, basically, we don’t care.”
“Do we?”
Brigstocke ignored him. “So now it’s a political issue, and we’re fucked because the homeless community itself has bought into this idea that we’re not trying very hard. So they’ve more or less stopped talking to us.”
“You can hardly blame them, though…”
“I’m not blaming them. They’ve got every right to be suspicious.”
“They’ve got every right to be scared, if there’s a killer out there. These are people who can’t lock the door, remember.”
They said nothing for a few moments. Dido had given way to Norah Jones. Thorne wondered if there was an album titled Now That’s What I Call Scampi in a Basket.
“There’s another reason they’re not talking to us,” Brigstocke said. Thorne looked up from the beer mat. “There was a statement taken early on from a kid sleeping rough. He reckoned that a police officer had been asking questions.”
Thorne jammed a fist under his chin. “Sorry, I’m probably being a bit bloody thick, but…”
“It was before the first murder. He claimed that a police officer had been asking questions the day before the first body was found. Showing a picture. Like he was looking for someone.”
“Looking for who, exactly? I mean, this is the victim you still haven’t identified, right?” Brigstocke nodded. “So didn’t this person who was supposedly looking for him mention his name?”
“We could check if we had such a thing as a name and address for the kid who gave the statement. Honestly, nothing about this is simple, Tom.”
Thorne watched Brigstocke take a drink. Took one himself. “A copper?”
“We’ve had to tread a bit bloody carefully.”
“Keep it out of the press, you mean?”
Brigstocke raised his voice, irritated. “Come on, you know damn well that’s not the only reason we don’t want it plastered all over the papers…”
“ ‘It is considered good practice to deliberately withhold details of the MO used by the offender.’ ” Thorne yawned theatrically as he quoted from the most recent edition of the Murder Investigation Manual, the detective’s bible.
“Right, like the money left on the bodies. So we know the other killings weren’t copycats.”
“You can’t be sure about Paddy Hayes,” Thorne said.
“No…”
Thorne knew that there were certainly sound procedural grounds for keeping things quiet. But he also knew that even the possible involvement of a police officer in a case such as this would make the Job’s top brass extremely jumpy.
Thorne could see that the next day’s press conference made sense. The third body had undoubtedly forced a swift and radical change in media strategy. Now the public had to be told-but only up to a point-what was going
