Death Message (20 page)

It had been Angie's idea and it had worked out right from the off.

Once she was in there, trusted enough, and knowing all the family's comings and goings, he'd turn the place over. Go in with the keys, put a window through when he was finished, maybe kick a back door in or whatever to make it look kosher. Usually Angie would leave a few weeks afterwards, start in a new area, although there were a couple of houses he'd robbed where she was still cleaning. Because she liked the people, and the money was so bloody good...

'Very nice,' Jennings said. He licked his lips. 'Sweet as you like and, you know, I'd hate to be the one to fuck it up for you. But I
will.'

Squire threw a fistful of peanuts into his fat mouth. 'You've got a job to do, and so have we.'

'Livings to make.'

'Not sure how good Angie's going to look after a few months in Holloway.'

'Tasty enough for most of the slags in there, mind you...'

He wasn't stupid. He'd come across plenty of coppers like these two before, when he was working with other people. The sort who'd tip you the wink about a raid; come in and help themselves to a bundle of twenties when a take was being divvied up.

'How much are we talking?' he asked.

Squire finished the nuts, wiped his palms against his jeans. 'It's not about money. We just need a favour.'

'Something up your street,' Jennings said.

'Be a real shame if things went tits-up for you now. Especially with a kid and all that.'

Then they explained about the job, Jennings getting excited and licking his lips all the bloody time, some kind of nervous habit; Squire leaning across the table, quieter and scarier. They told him where the house was, when the owner was likely to be out; that they just needed him to go in there and grab whatever paperwork he could find.

He asked them whose place it was and they told him that he didn't need to know. That it was just a favour. That they really didn't like to ask, but they hoped he might see his way clear. They gave him a phone number and told him to think about it, and that was about the lot.

He didn't have a great deal to think about, and a week later he was stepping across broken glass into a darkened kitchen. The place smelled strange. Oily. The house wasn't overlooked from the back and they'd assured him that the man of the house would be away, so he wasn't too worried about being seen or making a lot of noise.

He turned on the light. Stared at the stripped-down engine on the kitchen table...

Then he heard voices, and was about to head straight out the way he'd come in when the music told him there was a television on somewhere. It still wasn't right: the place should have been empty. He'd only done somewhere that was occupied once before, and he wasn't thrilled about doing it again. But it wasn't like he had a lot of choice.

Even then, creeping towards the front, there was no way of knowing there was anything wrong. There was no sign of a struggle until he slowly opened the door to the lounge, where they'd told him all the papers would be.

That was when he started to panic.

There was blood, just fucking everywhere. The armchair was on its back, and there was crap scattered about, and the bloke who wasn't supposed to be there at all was dead as mutton. Lying on his face in front of Coronation Street. The back of his head all wet and shapeless.

He didn't see any papers; guessed that whoever had done the bloke in had taken them. He didn't see an empty glass on the floor behind the settee. But then he didn't see too much of anything; he was far more bothered about getting the hell out of there.

In retrospect, it was probably thick of him, but he didn't grasp it all straight away. Quite how dodgy it was. He tried calling the number they'd given him, but couldn't get hold of Jennings and Squire. It was only later, after he'd been nicked and they brought in the glass with his prints on, that it finally clicked. Then he saw just how seriously he'd been stitched up.

The glass he'd been drinking water from in the pub...

Brooks was amazed how much of the detail he could still remember from that night: what was on the television; the design on the back of the dead man's leather jacket; the material of the armchair and the blood on one of its castors. It was odd, because the idea of revenge had faded during the years he'd spent inside. At first he'd been obsessed with it, with making them pay for fitting him up, but eventually he'd let it go. There had been other things to think about. Angie and Rob. Stuff that made him feel better.

The two men who'd taken six years of his life had as good as got away with it. But then the Black Dogs had gone after his family. And now, all bets were off.

Jennings and Squire. One down and one to go. But there were others he needed to settle up with first, and as he walked back towards the flat, he remembered the piece of paper and the number that he'd scribbled; the message he'd been sent by the man who by all accounts should be trying to catch him.

He'd thought a fair bit about Thorne, asking himself why Nicklin should have had such a thing about him. He was a bloke to be taken seriously, that's what Nicklin had said. Had to be, if he'd managed to put Nicklin away.

Now the copper they'd lined up to be on the receiving end was sending messages of his own. Like an invitation.

Exhausted, he watched the sky beginning to turn pink beyond Hammersmith Bridge, and wondered what the hell Tom Thorne was up to.

'There's one by us, lit up like sodding Disneyland. Big, fuck-off sleigh on the garage roof and a flashing Santa climbing up a ladder on the outside of the house.'

'Some people actually take their kids. Get out of their cars to look at this shit.'

'The electric bills must be a fortune.'

'Have you noticed that the more of this tat anyone's got, the cheaper the fucking house is?'

Halfway through November, and already Christmas was giving the team plenty of things to get worked up about. Plenty to take minds off the job for a minute or two, when the work was frustrating.

The chain of days, and deaths.

Stone looked up from his desk, saw Tom Thorne at the photocopier, and shouted across: 'Tipped your dustmen yet this year?'

Big laughs all round.

A few years before, Thorne had handed over a tenner to men in fluorescent tabards and woolly hats, knocking on his door and wishing him 'Merry Christmas from your dustmen.' When Thorne had discovered that they weren't in fact his or anyone else's dustmen, he'd stormed into work, blood boiling. Told anybody who would listen about the scam and how he'd uncovered it, as though he'd pieced together the Jack the Ripper killings.

'You can't exactly ask for a fucking ID, can you? And you can pick up one of those fluorescent jackets
anywhere
...'

His indignation had only increased the hilarity of his colleagues.

'Bit early for that one, isn't it?' Thorne said, lifting the lid of the copier and gathering his papers.

Karim grinned. 'I don't know. I reckon once they switch on the lights in town we should be allowed to start taking the piss.'

That suggestion met with general approval, and when, a minute or two later, Stone started whistling 'My Old Man's a Dustman', there was scattered applause to go with the laughter. Thorne smiled, but found himself heading out of the Incident Room shortly afterwards.

Tuesday morning, thirty-six hours since they'd gathered as a team, as a
force
, at the scene of Paul Skinner's murder, and Thorne was finding it hard to see too much humour in anything. Along with everyone else, he'd thrown himself into the work, but that hadn't proved an especially helpful distraction. Brooks was still making a good job of keeping himself hidden, and their best bet - until such time as he popped up on some credit-card check or CCTV camera - remained the cell-sites.

Another message might help; might narrow down his location from several square miles of west London to a few streets in which to concentrate their efforts.

Another message like the one Thorne had chosen to keep to himself.

He had taken a step which might open up a channel of communication between himself and a man who had killed at least twice. The implications of his actions were growing more terrible as time passed, but it was too late to do anything about it. He couldn't go back and admit what he'd done. Try to explain why he'd done it.

Killed at least twice...

If Brooks
hadn't
killed Skinner, then who had? The same man who had killed Simon Tipper? The same
police officer?

Ever since he'd sent the text to Brooks, the repercussions had begun to gather at the back of his mind. Elbowing their way forward and crowding out the good stuff. Fucking up any moment when he began to look forward to something; any encounter that should have been pleasant.

Louise had finally called the morning before. Early, when he was still thick-headed, when what had happened at Skinner's place had seemed, for a few precious seconds, like a dream that was refusing to fade.

'You're not a nutter.'

'Thank you.'

'You sound like shit, though. Were you on the piss last night?'

It felt like it. Except that he could remember exactly what he'd been doing. 'I wish,' he said.

'We going to see each other later?'

'Can I call you in a bit?'

'Oh, OK.'

'I'm just on my way out the door.'

He'd been standing in the kitchen wearing nothing but underpants, waiting for the kettle to boil; on his way nowhere. His only thought had been to keep the conversation short. He could hardly say, 'This phone's being monitored, so for Christ's sake don't say anything embarrassing. Anything that might drop me in the shit...'

He'd decided that he'd tell her later on, in person.

Not that he would tell her everything.

As it was, Louise had been the one to cry off the previous evening, when the wife of an Albanian gangster had been hauled into a car outside Waitrose just before the end of the day.

Now, in his office, Thorne thought about Louise; about the look on her face when she stared at him and unhooked her bra. He decided that was definitely something worth looking forward to. And that unless Marcus Brooks decided to step up his game and slaughtered the Mayor, the Commissioner and their families, he
was
going to see her, and that look, later.

The look on Marcus Brooks' face was harder to read. For the umpteenth time, Thorne opened the file on his desk and stared down at the man who'd received the shocking message that had started it all - the death message - five months before. Who had come out of prison, made his plans and begun sending messages of his own.

The hair was dark, short. The eyes were darker; 'brown', according to the information printed below the picture. This was all that Thorne could tell for certain. It wasn't just the blank expression that might equally have been masking simple boredom or murderous fury. Or that the picture itself was six years old, and that prison, as Thorne had seen only too well with Nicklin, could change a person's appearance as radically as any surgery.

Thorne was simply unable to get a handle on who Marcus Brooks was, and his picture did not tell the whole story. Common sense told him he was dealing with a man who knew how to take care of himself; who might watch a man die and not blink. But the man Nicklin had described, the man Thorne had heard in the silence down a phone line, had also been destroyed by grief. Had been hollowed out by it.

He thought that most faces gave it all away. Was sure that almost anyone presented with a photograph of
him
would not have needed more than one quick look. Would say: Copper. Lives alone. Doesn't mix too well with others.

But Marcus Brooks' picture was a lot less revealing. Thorne could only hope that if and when it came to it, he could look into the man's eyes and understand what they were telling him. Lives, his own included, had depended on a lot less.

Meantime, try as he might, he couldn't see the person behind the picture.

It was like looking at one of the cartoons around his online poker table.

DS Adrian Nunn had called earlier in the day for a quick chat. He'd moaned about his workload, about caps on overtime, and had asked Thorne what time his shift was ending.

When Thorne walked out of Becke House a little after six, Nunn was waiting for him. He was wearing his Gestapo coat again.

'Tube or car?' Nunn asked.

'I'm on the Tube.'

Nunn fell into step with him. 'Suits me. I can get the Northern Line straight down to Embankment. District from there all the way to Putney.'

'Going back to work?'

'No, but I only live round the corner from the office. It's pretty handy.'

'That's still a three-hour round trip,' Thorne said. 'I'm guessing you want more than just a quick chat. Mind you, you wanted more than that when you rang, didn't you?'

They walked quickly through drizzle up Aerodrome Road, and left towards the Tube station. Past Colindale Park and the British Newspaper Library. Thorne had used the place several times, trawling through the back copies and the microfiche in search of some crucial piece of information. He'd always ended up spending longer in there than he'd needed. Losing himself in stories and pictures that had no relevance to the case he was working; enjoying the feel of the crisp, yellowing pages of the old editions. Pre-Page Three. When Spurs had a team, and celebrities were famous for doing something.

'I just wanted to stress that everything we talked about the other day remains confidential,' Nunn said.

'Go on then.'

Nunn smiled, but only with his mouth.

'It seems a bit bloody odd,' Thorne said, 'that you should be so adamant about it. Considering Skinner's dead, I mean.'