much more bloody luck with her until I started using her maiden name. She’s gone back to calling herself ‘Shireen Collins’…”
“Her and Hadingham split up?”
“Not long after he came out of the army.”
“Did you find her?”
“Yeah. Five minutes. I spoke to her.”
“She confirm the tattoo?” Brigstocke asked.
Holland nodded. “He was very proud of it, by all accounts…”
On the ceiling, a strip light that was on its way out buzzed and flickered. Brigstocke could feel the day grinding toward its arse end. He was aching to get out of the building; to get home and collapse onto a sofa. He wanted nothing more than to open a bottle and let a few children clamber over him for a while. “Does she know where her ex-old man is?” he asked.
“Oh yes, and she’s pretty sure he isn’t going anywhere.”
“Get on with it, Dave…”
“He’s in Denstone Cemetery, just outside Salford.”
Brigstocke stared at Holland. He guessed he wouldn’t be opening that bottle for a while yet.
“That’s the thing,” Holland said. “Ian Hadingham killed himself just under a year ago.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Thorne had parted company from Spike, Caroline, and Terry T a few hours earlier. Caroline had insisted that they’d see him later-“back at our place”-before she and Spike had disappeared, and Terry had wandered off in search of strong drink. On the pretense of doing the same thing, Thorne had gone his own way, grateful for the chance to spend some time alone; to get on the phone to Dave Holland and catch up with developments.
Things had been moving bloody quickly… He’d never been one to write a lot of stuff down; certainly no more than he’d had to, and that was quite enough. He’d grown accustomed to carrying around a lot of information in his head, both mundane and monstrous, and to the fact that some of the grislier details had a habit of lodging there, unwanted, like the melody to some anodyne pop song. Working as he was, though there were a few bits and pieces scribbled on scraps of paper in his rucksack, he was having to remember much more than he normally would.
Now there were four more names he was not likely to forget in hurry. Hadingham, Eales, Bonser, and Jago. A quartet of soldiers, of killers. Perhaps of dead men…
Thorne had been less than gobsmacked to learn that ex-corporal Ian Hadingham was already dead. There were no details as yet, but he’d have put money on the fact that this “suicide” was about as kosher as the “accidental” hit-and-run that had killed Trooper Chris Jago. And there was no doubt whatsoever as to how Alec Bonser, the driver of the tank, had died.
That was three out of four…
It was by no means clear-cut, of course, but it certainly added credence to the theory that the crew was being targeted by the man who had shot the video; that whoever had been behind the camera on that ugly day in 1991 was doing the killing.
The warren of pedestrian subways that ran beneath Marble Arch had probably looked like a good idea on paper; in much the same way that sixties tower blocks had seemed to make perfect sense until those unlucky enough had actually started to live in them. The tunnels honeycombed from Oxford Street to Edgware Road; from the tube station into Hyde Park, in a maze of long, intersecting corridors from which there were no fewer than fourteen different entrances and exits. By day, these subways were eerie enough. Once darkness had fallen, though the subways themselves were well lit for the most part, anyone with any sense would risk sprinting across four lanes of traffic rather than venturing underground.
When Thorne had been here a few days before, the morning he’d met Holland at Speakers’ Corner, an old woman had been sitting on a bench outside Exit 6, feeding pigeons. It had taken Thorne a few moments to notice her, to make her out clearly behind the curtain of wings, the shifting mass of grays and browns and slick-wet blues that surrounded her. The birds had engulfed the tiny figure, walking across her lap and sitting on her head and shoulders. They swarmed in a grubby mass around her feet and perched on every spare inch of the bench and on the handle of the shopping cart by her side. It had been a disturbing image, as though she might be consumed, but as Thorne had walked past he could see that the woman looked perfectly content. She’d sat there smiling, a cigarette dangling from her lips, talking happily to the pigeons as they flocked to devour only the crumbs from her hand. Thorne had slowed to listen, but whatever the old woman had been saying was lost beneath the noise of the feeding frenzy.
Now, as he walked toward the subway entrance, there was only a mottled carpet of pigeon shit around the bench as evidence of the woman’s presence. If she were ever to disappear, the council’s cleaning department would have to be considered prime suspects…
Even halfway down the stairs, the sound changed. The noise of the traffic above had became a hum; a low drone broken only by the bleat of a car horn or the distorted wail of an emergency siren. By the time Thorne was in the subway itself, though the noises from the street had receded, those from closer around him had become amplified. The ordinary sound of a cough, of an empty can blown or kicked along, of his own footsteps, was suddenly spookier; a full second passing between the sound itself and its echo, carried back on the wind that didn’t so much whistle as growl along the concrete corridors.
The tunnels were about eight feet wide and more or less the same high. Once they might have seemed futuristic, these straight tubes with lights mounted every few feet along the walls, but now they were simply unnerving. Stinking of urine, and danger, and something sickly sweet that Thorne couldn’t quite place.
The tiles that ran along some walls, and the complex mosaics that were crumbling from others, contrasted with the graffiti-covered metal doors. Thorne guessed they concealed pipework. Small metal speakers were mounted along the ceiling. They were presumably there to carry underground announcements, but something about the place made it easy to imagine a robotic voice conveying information to the survivors of a nuclear blast.
As Thorne walked deeper into the maze of tunnels, one or two people began to move past him. They all wore rucksacks or carried sleeping bags, and some had large sheets of cardboard folded under their arms. In each corridor there were already a number of people sleeping. At least, Thorne presumed there were; it was difficult to tell, as some of the boxes-the cardboard coffins, eight or ten feet long-could have been empty, but Thorne was fairly sure that most were inhabited. He wondered if the pigeon woman was down here somewhere. He briefly imagined her, boxed up beneath a blanket of dirty feathers, waiting for daylight; for the sound of claw skitter and wing beat.
When she might feel what it was to be needed again…
Thorne came to a T-junction and looked both ways. At the far end of the right-hand tunnel he saw two figures sitting against a wall. Spike and Caroline. He watched as Spike stood and whistled to him. He waved and began walking toward them.
Halfway along the tunnel, Thorne walked past a complex arrangement of boxes: two fastened together, one on top of the other, with a third coming off them at a right angle. A middle-aged black man sat nearby, proprietorial outside his unique sleeping quarters. He wore a baggy gray hat that perfectly matched his beard, and the color of his skin. He looked up from a paperback as Thorne passed and gave him a hard stare. Thorne held the look just long enough to make it clear he knew what he was doing and kept on going.
When he reached Spike and Caroline, Thorne sat down. He pointed back over his shoulder toward the man who, he guessed, was still staring at him. “Neighborhood watch?”
“Ollie’s a cool bloke,” Spike said. “He keeps an eye out, you know?”
Caroline moistened a Rizla and completed a skinny roll-up. “He’s also got the only two-story bedroom down here. It’s like one of those hamster houses.”
Thorne looked at the two huge cardboard boxes end to end against the wall next to them. “Where do you get these things?”
