Thorne - Lifeless Part 34

"Thing is, I don't know if the image I've got in my mind is accurate or not? I don't know whether I'm remembering this bloke or if I'm imagining him. Now that I know what he did, you know?"

"We need to get you to a station as soon as we can," Thorne said. "Start trying to put an e-fit together."

"If I hadn't talked to him, Terry Turner would still be alive, wouldn't he?"

Thorne looked away. "I should have put all this together a lot quicker, Bren."

"If I hadn't told him where you were supposed to be sleeping . . ."

The phone buzzed in Thorne's hand.

The information-room WPC told him that there were two T. Morleys serving in the Met. "So I got on to both borough personnel offices."

"Thank you," Thorne said.

"Standard procedure. One's on a Murder Squad in Wimbledon. The other's a relief sergeant in Barnet. He's the one that's got a crime report attached to his records. Trevor Morley-"

"Crime report?"

"He's not actually been back at work that long. He was mugged in a pub car park three months ago. Nasty attack, fractured his skull . . ."

Thorne didn't need her to tell him that the mugger had never been caught. Or that, among other things, Sergeant Trevor Morley's warrant card had been stolen during the attack. He didn't need to tell her that the warrant card would have been the reason Morley had been attacked in the first place.

He thanked the WPC for her help. She told him she'd pa.s.s a report to the information room's chief inspector, who might well need to get in touch with him. Thorne said that would be fine before he hung up.

"Not a real copper," Thorne said. "He was using stolen ID."

The information didn't seem to make Brendan Maxwell feel any better. "It had his photo in it."

"Easy enough to paste in. How closely did you look?"

Maxwell shook his head. About as closely as anybody looked at anything.

"Whether you're remembering his face or imagining it, we still need to get you somewhere and get it down. I'll call someone and get it sorted."

"I don't know how much detail I can give anyone."

Thorne started pressing b.u.t.tons on his phone, searching for Brigstocke's number on the memory. "Just start with the general stuff," he said. "Height, build, coloring . . ."

"He was big. Six foot two or three, and well built. He looked pretty fit."

"Hair?"

"Medium, I suppose, fairly neat. And he had a beard. Not ginger, but sandy-ish. He was that kind of coloring. Light-skinned . . . blue eyes, I think . . . and maybe a bit freckly, you know?"

Thorne knew.

He felt that rare, yet familiar, tickle of excitement. The shuddery spider crawl of it at the nape of his neck, moving beneath the hair and the collar of his dirty gray coat. "Do you recycle?" he asked.

Maxwell looked and sounded confused. "Yes . . ."

"Where?"

"Out by the wheely bins."

Maxwell opened his mouth to say something else, but Thorne was already on his feet and moving toward the door.

THIRTY-THREE.

f.u.c.ked-up weather and busybodies. Jason Mackillop reckoned they were both about as British as you could get.

It was one of those bizarre, early-autumn afternoons that couldn't make up its mind: suns.h.i.+ne, wind, and rain in a random sequence every half an hour or so. Now it was spitting gently, and Mackillop stared through the streaked windscreen at the man with the plastic carrier bags, who was walking toward the car and staring back with undisguised curiosity.

Stone had called a few minutes earlier to say that he was running late. Mackillop had heard the grin in Stone's voice; the implication that it was all due to his phenomenal staying power. Now Mackillop would be sitting there like a lemon for another twenty minutes or more . . .

The man carrying the plastic bags walked a few yards past the target address, then stopped and came back. He stared until he caught Mackillop's eye. He adjusted the grip on each bag and took slow steps toward the car.

Mackillop leaned on the switch. He let the window slide down as far as possible without letting in the drizzle.

"Can I help you?" the man said.

Mackillop had been about to ask much the same question. He reached into his jacket, produced his warrant card. "No, I'm fine, thank you."

The man gave a small nod, hummed a reaction, but showed little inclination to move.

"Do you live there?" Mackillop asked.

"Yes, I do." He turned and stared back at the house, then spun back around to Mackillop. "It's four flats, actually."

"I know."

"I think they made a nice job of the conversion."

"Right . . ."

The man looked round at the house again. "I've not lived there for very long, mind you."

Mackillop decided that it couldn't hurt to get a bit of background information while he was waiting for Stone to show up. The man seemed keen enough to help. "Do you know a Mr. Mahmoud?"

"I'm not sure."

Mackillop fished under the newspaper on the pa.s.senger seat, pulled out his page of notes. "Asif Mahmoud . . ."

"What does he look like?"

"He's the tenant on the ground floor."

The man leaned down a little closer to Mackillop's window. The spatterings of rain darkened the material of his knee-length raincoat and baseball cap. "The one with the dope, right? You can smell it when you come in late sometimes."

"Right, thanks," Mackillop said. If the man was right, the likelihood of their visit being a complete waste of time had just rocketed. "Mr. Mahmoud's helping us with something, that's all."

The man smiled to himself, looked both ways along the street.

"Can I ask which flat is yours?" Mackillop asked.

"Flat D. Up with the G.o.ds. All those stairs keep you fit, I tell you that . . ."

"Top floor?"

When the man saw Mackillop looking, really looking, at him for the first time, he smiled again, and swallowed. Then his expression became suddenly serious, and he asked Mackillop exactly who he was, which branch of the police he was with, and where he was based. Mackillop calmly gave him all the information he asked for.

"Trainee?" the man said. "Like a junior doctor kind of thing?"

"That's right."

"Sort of like doing your basic training."

"Listen . . ."

The man took a couple of paces backward, to allow Mackillop room to open the car door. "I'm Ryan Eales," he said. He held up his plastic bags. "I need to go and put this shopping away . . ."

Thorne and Maxwell pushed through an emergency exit into a covered service yard at the rear of the building. The recycling bins-half a dozen of them, each filled with clear gla.s.s, green gla.s.s, plastic, or newspapers-were lined up next to three huge wheelies. The place smelled of catp.i.s.s and damp wool, and every available inch of brickwork was covered in graffiti, elaborate and largely illegible. Thorne knelt down, threw the lids off the bins until he found the one he was after, and began pulling out piles of old newspapers.

Maxwell walked to the edge of the covered area, put his hand out into the rain. "I suppose you'll tell me what you're doing when you're good and ready."

"I'm hoping we won't need to bother with that e-fit."

"And last week's copies of the Sun are going to help, are they?"

"This might be utter b.o.l.l.o.c.ks, of course. I could be way off the mark."

"From what I've heard, that would be my bet," Maxwell said.

With a wide range of staff and clientele, the Lift catered for a variety of tastes when it came to reading matter. Thorne dug through back copies of most of the daily tabloids and broadsheets. He picked up and threw away dozens of freebies aimed at Australians and New Zealanders, music papers, TV magazines, and issues of Loot until he found something he was interested in. He seized on a crumpled edition of the Evening Standard. The headline disturbed him no less than when he'd first seen it: rough sleeper killings. met goes undercover.

Maxwell looked over Thorne's shoulder. "That's when the cat came out of the bag, right?"

Thorne opened the paper and began to read. "This is how he knew . . ."

"Knew what?"

"You asked me back in there. How did he know to come here and start asking questions? I don't think he knew to come here specifically, but he knew it would be a good idea to visit places like this one, because they f.u.c.king told him. Listen . . ."

He read from the newspaper story: " 'It's understood that the Metropolitan Police has liaised closely with an organization working with rough sleepers, in order that the undercover officer concerned can integrate with the homeless community as smoothly as possible.' "

Maxwell walked back toward the building, taking it in. He turned and leaned against the door. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l . . ."

Thorne read on, growing angrier by the second. Not only had the story announced his presence, it had also, unwittingly or not, given a killer the means to find him.

"So he reads that and he works out that somebody must know something."

"It wasn't rocket science, was it?" Thorne said. "Somebody at one of the hostels, one of the shelters, one of the day centers. At Crisis, or Aquarius, or here. He just made a list. He visited all of them, flashed his nicked card, and asked a few vague questions in the hope of getting lucky and coming across someone who'd been 'liaised with.' You might have been the first person he talked to or the fortieth. Doesn't really matter . . ."

"So, even though he knew your name, chances are he didn't know you?"

"G.o.d knows; probably not. We can be fairly sure he was getting his information from the newspaper as opposed to anywhere . . . closer to home."

There were still many things Thorne couldn't be sure about, like how the killer had known his name. But it was starting to look as though a stolen warrant card was as near as it came to police involvement in the killings themselves. It might therefore be safe enough to take surveillance off McCabe and the others at Charing Cross.

Thorne held up the paper. "I still don't know who leaked this, though." He tossed the Standard toward the ma.s.s that had already been discarded and went back to searching through the main pile. He still hadn't found the newspaper he was actually looking for.

Eales's flat was small, but smart and extremely tidy. Once inside, he saw a tightly winding flight of stairs covered in coir matting rose straight into a bed-sitting room, with an arch at one end leading through to a tiny kitchen, and a door at the other, which Mackillop presumed opened into the bathroom.

Eales was putting his shopping into cupboards while Mackillop sat on a stiff-backed chair in the bedroom, still unable to believe how jammy he'd been.

"I know it's not huge," Eales shouted through from the kitchen. "But I don't have a lot of stuff . . ."

Mackillop was buzzing. He felt like he'd been in the Job for years. He couldn't wait to clock the look on Stone's face when he finally turned up; when the DC saw which of them had really got lucky that lunchtime.

"You still wouldn't believe what the rent is, mind you . . ."

"It's nice," Mackillop said, meaning it. His own flat in a modern block was bigger, but strictly functional. He liked the polished floor in this place, the stripped beams in the ceiling, and the stained-gla.s.s panels in the bathroom door.

"It'll do," Eales said.

"It'd do for me . . ."

"Good job I've just done a shop." Eales was walking in from the kitchen brandis.h.i.+ng an unopened packet of biscuits. "Coffee won't be a sec." He handed the packet across and turned back toward the kitchen. "If your partner's going to be a while, you might as well put your feet up . . ."

While he waited for his coffee Mackillop continued to look around. Eales had said that he didn't have much, but Mackillop thought he could be fairly positive about at least one of the ex-trooper's possessions; the one which, without any doubt, would be the most valuable. There was a VCR beneath the small TV at the end of the bed, and a number of unmarked videotapes piled on top of it. Mackillop couldn't help but wonder . . .

"Why have you not contacted us, Mr. Eales?" he asked.

Eales walked back through, handed a mug to Mackillop, and sat down on the edge of his bed. "I haven't done anything wrong," he said.

"You did know we were trying to trace you, though? You didn't seem very surprised to find a policeman on your doorstep."

"A little, maybe."

"It was obvious you knew who I was looking for."

"I didn't know anything until I saw it on the TV the other night. I've not seen a newspaper in a while. I've barely been out of the house."