Death Message (6 page)

The waitress pulled a face, as though she'd caught a whiff of something and couldn't decide if she liked it or not. 'Well, don't have that bloke who used to be in
EastEnders
. I can't stand him.'

They watched her leave, one of them enjoying the way her backside moved beneath a tight black skirt considerably more than the other.

'It's an odd one this, though,' Hendricks said.

'They're always odd.'

Hendricks grunted his agreement. He stuffed what was left of his sandwich into his mouth and took a healthy slurp of tea. It always surprised Thorne that someone whose hands could move with such poise and dexterity ate like a half-starved docker.

'Go on then,' Thorne said. 'Why is this one so strange?'

'Killer can't make his mind up.'

Thorne pushed a finger round the rim of his cup. Waited.

'Five, six blows with that hammer. Decent ones, you know? Not that people are usually tentative when it comes to bludgeoning someone to death...'

'Not as a rule.'

'I'd probably call it "frenzied" if I was pushed in a witness box.'

'But...?'

'But then there's this whole picture business. He smashes Tucker's head in; then, while he's stood there covered in blood - and he would have been
covered
- he calmly takes out his mobile phone and starts snapping away. Cool as you like.'

'Maybe he took his time,' Thorne said. 'Went and cleaned himself up a bit. Composed himself.'

'Maybe. Where he
definitely
took his time was in sending the picture to you. I reckon Tucker was dead nine or ten days when his poor old mum walked in and got the shock of her life. So, whoever killed him waited over a week before sending you that message. That's pretty bloody relaxed, I'd say.'

Thorne had already worked it out; had come to the same conclusion when Brigstocke had told him that Tucker's body had lain undiscovered for a while.

'So, what the fuck is he?' Hendricks downed the last of his tea. 'Ordered or disordered.'

Thorne had come across a few who were both. He knew that they were the worst kind. The hardest to catch. 'You can pay for the grub,' he said. 'Seeing as how you've cheered me up so much.'

'I'll tell you something else for nothing.'

'Do you have to?'

'I think there's more to our victim than meets the eye.'

'You're really on form today,' Thorne said.

'I'm telling you.'

'You should stop doing so much cutting and watch more of it. You don't miss a bloody trick.' But once Hendricks had told him what he meant, Thorne could not find much to argue with in his friend's assessment.

They settled up and walked out into what remained of a grey afternoon. For a minute or two, heading towards the car, Thorne was back in the mortuary suite. Watching as the pathologist moved around the slab. The Home Counties monotone raised above the noise of the Tube trains, his commentary echoing off the tiled walls.

Thorne stared at the body again, his eyes moving down from the sunken cheeks and the spots of dried blood caught on lashes and stubble. He saw the intricate designs in blue and green and red. The pictures inked across the chest that disappeared from view as the flaps of skin over the ribs were peeled back and laid aside. Hendricks said he'd seen similar designs on a body before, but nothing as impressive as these: the large outline of a snarling dog's head on one shoulder; the panther that stretched along an arm; the ornate cross and grinning skull.

Hendricks had a point.

Raymond Tucker had a few more tattoos than the average used-car salesman.

Once a body had been removed from a crime scene, the atmosphere changed. Eight hours since the discovery of Raymond Tucker and, in a first-floor flat that was already starting to smell an awful lot better, the scene-of-crime officers had done most of what would be necessary on the first day. Now there were just a few stragglers working the scene, cleaning up: the video and stills cameramen; the woman working as exhibits officer; a couple of fingerprint guys. Many SOCOs - who thought it sounded a little more glamorous - insisted on being called crime scene examiners these days.

To Thorne's mind, 'glamour' in such circumstances was a relative term.

One day into it and, like a well-drilled unit of white-suited locusts, the team, whatever it chose to call itself, had completed the majority of the front-line forensics. Though a few were still moving around with that distinctive, all-too-evocative rustle, Thorne and Holland were at least spared the plastic bodysuits and bootees.

'Small mercies,' Holland said.

They were standing with their backs to the window, the dying light kept at bay by large black screens and the room illuminated by a pair of powerful arc lights. The furniture was modern: smoked glass and chrome; built-in bookshelves and halogen spots; a three-seater sofa covered in dark brown leather and light brown blood.

Thorne dug out some chewing gum from his jacket pocket. 'Not a lot of mercy shown in here...'

The body had been removed from its final position between the sofa and the fireplace, and it was clear that the dead man had not fallen at the first blow. Aside from the blood, spattered in scratches across the sofa cushions, there were patterns in the other direction, thrown against the glass front of a tropical fish tank and, lower down, finely sprayed across a large wooden bowl filled with smooth stones, black and grey.

A passing SOCO/CSE followed Thorne's eyeline. He nodded towards the rectangle of bare boards where the carpet beneath the body had been cut away and removed. 'Central heating was cranked up, so he probably started leaking like a bastard after less than a week,' the officer said. 'Almost as much of him in the carpet as there was anywhere else. Gone right through.' He pointed, keen as mustard. 'Look, can you see?'

Thorne and Holland did, and could. The caramelcoloured blotch on the dusty boards was like damp behind a cistern.

'Are you sure you want this one?' Holland asked.

'Already got it,' Thorne said. 'Brigstocke called when I was on the way over from Hornsey.' He talked Holland through the PM, focusing on the headlines, finishing on Hendricks' notions of what constituted a standard number of tattoos on an average used-car salesman.

Holland was unconvinced. 'Hendricks has got a few more tattoos than your average pathologist.' He counted them off, pointing to the appropriate point on his body as he did so. 'That Arsenal thing on his neck. The Celtic band or whatever you call it on his wrist. That weird symbol on his shoulder. There's probably a couple more that only his very good friends have ever clapped eyes on.'

'I wouldn't know,' Thorne said. He stared hard at a SOCO working near by, a smart-arse he'd come across before who'd glanced over with something like a smirk.

They walked into Tucker's kitchen. There was washing-up stacked next to the sink and the sheen of Luminol across the work surfaces. On their way out through the hallway they casually stepped over a fingerprint specialist working on a stretch of flaking skirting board.

'Maybe it means something,' Holland said. 'That he waited before sending you that picture.'

'Maybe it just slipped his mind.' Thorne took the stairs two at a time. 'You know what it's like. You batter someone to death, take their photo, forget all about it...'

'It might be significant, you know? Something about the day he chose.'

'What? His birthday?' Thorne turned to Holland, palms raised. 'First Monday in the month? Let's not forget how close it was to November the fifth. Maybe this bloke's got a thing about bonfires.'

'I was only thinking aloud.'

Thorne stopped at the door and took a breath. 'Sorry, mate.' There had been more anger than upset in Holland 's tone, but Thorne still felt like a twat for being snappy. 'Maybe he's just another fucking mentalist, Dave. You know?'

Outside, Thorne stopped to talk to the video cameraman who was packing away his equipment, while Holland reached for cigarettes. A young couple with a pushchair appeared from between two unit vehicles and marched up to the crime scene tape.

The man leaned across and shouted to Thorne: 'What are you filming?'

Holland opened his mouth, but Thorne beat him to it. 'It's a new TV show about a maverick, gay pathologist.' He put a hand on Holland 's shoulder, as if to introduce the star of the show. 'You know the sort of thing. Fuzzy black-and-white bits, half a dozen serial killers in every episode...'

The clocks going back seemed to have brought the rush hour forward, and the North Circular was already starting to snarl up as Thorne nosed the car towards Finchley.

'Things seem to be going well with DI Porter,' Holland said. 'It's a few months now, isn't it?'

Thorne searched Holland 's face, but saw only honest curiosity. 'Five, give or take a week. That's a long time for me.'

'It's good...'

Thorne wasn't about to argue. 'How's Chloe?'

Holland grinned. His daughter had turned three years old a couple of months earlier. 'Can't shut her up,' he said. 'Coming out with all sorts of weird shit. Stuff she's picking up at nursery, whatever. She's going a couple of days a week now. I told you that, didn't I?'

It was the first Thorne had heard of it, but he nodded anyway.

'Sophie's trying to do some work part time, you know? That'll be good for everyone, I reckon.'

'Right...'

Holland had been nodding while he spoke. He carried on after he'd turned to look out of the window, as though he were trying to convince himself.

'Definitely,' Thorne said.

It was natural that he hadn't seen quite so much of Holland outside the Job since Chloe had come along. But even when they spent time together at work, Thorne thought that he and Holland weren't connecting in a way that perhaps they once had. He could see that his colleague - was he a colleague now, as opposed to a friend? - had a lot more on his plate since being made up to sergeant the year before, but Thorne wondered if it didn't also have something to do with the more subtle demands of a family. With the grinding drive to become the sort of police officer Holland had once professed to despise: the head-down and shut-the-fuck-up kind of copper his father had been. The copper that sometimes, when he'd upset one too many of the wrong people, Thorne wished he had it in himself to be.

Pulling away from the lights at Henley 's Corner, something beneath the BMW's bonnet began to complain, and as Thorne wondered just how hard the complaint was going to hit his wallet, the jokes began. However uncertain things might be, however far they shifted, there would always be Holland 's shtick about the car: the fact that it was yellow and almost as old as he was, and that Thorne could have bought a new one for what it cost him in repairs every year.

And it was all fair enough.

Coppers solved crimes or they didn't. They laid down their lives to protect others and they shot innocent men for looking swarthy in the wrong place at the wrong time. But smart or stupid, honest or bent, they all took the piss. Took it, and had it taken.

And you didn't need a psychology degree to figure out why.

Some were better at it than others. The likes of Andy Stone had a drawer stuffed with photocopies of colleagues' warrant cards, so that when and if the time came, they could place embarrassing personal ads on their behalf in the back pages of
The Job
and
Metropolitan Life
. Bogus lonely-hearts stuff and requests for mail-order brides. When Samir Karim had split up with his wife a few years before, an ad had appeared the following week with his contact details offering: 'Double bed for sale. Hardly used.'

Karim had laughed along with the rest of them, obviously.

'
Vorsprung, durch
... utterly fucked,' Holland said, getting into his stride.

Thorne steered the car slowly through the mess of traffic at the Brent Cross flyover, then turned north towards Hendon, waiting until Holland had hit him with his best shots.

'Say what you like.' Thorne stroked the steering wheel theatrically. 'Still my baby.'

'Listen to yourself,' Holland said. 'It's a clapped-out piece of German scrap. It's not Herbie...'

Thorne sighed and stared ahead, refusing to dignify the comment with a response. The blocks of single-storey warehouses and furniture superstores crawled by along the length of the A406: Carpet Express; Kingdom of Leather; Staples. His eye was caught by the Carphone Warehouse logo across a set of grey, metal shutters, and it suddenly struck Thorne that the reason for the killer's delay in sending the photograph might have been altogether simpler yet more bizarre.

'Fritz, maybe...' Holland said.

Was it possible that, after committing the murder, the killer had kept a watch on Tucker's flat? On seeing that the body was going undiscovered, had he simply decided to give the police a helping hand?

Ordered or disordered?

Perhaps he wanted someone to go to the trouble of finding out...

Next to him, Holland was saying something about a running joke that ran a damn sight better than the car did, but Thorne was already elsewhere. Thinking that the dead were never decorous. That death itself was rarely dignified, whether you were tottering towards collapse on a mixed ward or rotting into a carpet. But that for the most unfortunate, what was left could barely even be called 'remains'.

Thinking that, when people talked about leaving something of themselves behind, they usually meant more than just a stain on a floorboard.

Back at Becke House, the news was mixed. But then, life itself was perfectly capable of taking the piss...

From Kitson, the familiar two-steps-forward-threesteps-back routine. The blood on the knife retrieved from the litter bin had been identified as belonging to Deniz Sedat. They had also managed to pull a decent set of prints from the handle. Sadly, though, these failed to match with any held on record.