Death Message (3 page)

Predictably, many had been quick to point out that if the Met really was, as its motto boldly claimed, 'Working for a safer London', then it clearly wasn't working hard enough, though there were plenty of people, Tom Thorne included, working their arses off in the weeks following that particular evening.

He scanned the bulletin.

Three bodies was above average for a Tuesday night.

He was looking for 'dark hair', 'head injury' - anything that might match the picture on his phone. The only entry that came close described the murder of a barman in the West End: a white man attacked on his way home and battered to death with half a brick in an alley behind Holborn station.

Thorne dismissed it. The victim was described as being in his mid-twenties, and though death could do strange things to the freshest of faces, he knew that the man he was looking for was older than that.

He could hear DS Samir Karim and DC Andy Stone working at a desk behind him; although 'working' in this instance meant talking about the WPC at Colindale nick that Stone had finally persuaded to come out for a drink. Thorne logged out of the bulletin, spoke without turning round. 'It's obviously a positive discrimination thing.'

'What is?' Stone asked.

'Colindale. Taking on these blind WPCs.'

Karim was still laughing when he and Stone arrived at Thorne's shoulder.

'Heard about your secret admirer,' Stone said. 'Most people just send flowers.'

Karim began to straighten papers on the desk. 'It'll probably turn out to be nothing.'

'Right, you get sent all sorts of shit on your phone these days. I get loads of unsolicited stuff every week. Upgrades, ringtones, whatever. Games...'

Thorne looked up at Stone, spoke as though the DC were as terminally stupid as his comment had made him appear. 'And do many of these come with pictures of corpses attached?'

'I'm just saying.'

Karim and Stone stood rocking on their heels, like third-rate cabaret performers who had forgotten whose turn it was to speak next. They made for an unlikely-looking double-act: Stone, tall, dark and well tailored; Karim, silver-haired and thickset beneath a badly fitting jacket, like a PE teacher togged up for parents' evening. Thorne had time for them both, although Karim, in his capacity as office manager, could be an old woman when he wanted to be, and Stone was not the most conscientious of coppers. A year or so earlier, a young trainee detective with whom he was partnered had been stabbed to death. Though no blame had been formally attributed, there were some who thought that guilt was the least that Andy Stone should have suffered.

'Can't you two find somebody else to annoy?' Thorne said.

Once they'd drifted away, he walked through the narrow corridor that encircled the Incident Room and into the small, ill-appointed office he shared with DI Yvonne Kitson. He spent ten minutes filing assorted memos and newsletters under 'W' for 'Wastepaper Basket' and flicked distractedly through the most recent copy of The Job, looking for pictures of anyone he knew.

He was staring at a photo of Detective Sergeant Dave Holland receiving a trophy at some sort of Met sports event when the man himself appeared in the doorway. Incredulous, Thorne quickly finished reading the short article while Holland walked across and took the chair behind Kitson's desk.

'
Table-tennis
?' Thorne said, waving the magazine.

Holland shrugged, unable to keep a smile from his face in response to the grin that was plastered across Thorne's. 'Fastest ball game in the world,' he said.

'No it isn't.'

Holland waited.

'
Jai alai
,' Thorne said.

'Jai
what?'

'Also called pelota, with recorded speeds of up to one hundred and eighty miles an hour. A golf ball's quicker as well. A hundred and seventy-odd off the tee.'

'The fact that you know this shit is deeply scary,' Holland said.

'The old man.'

Holland nodded, getting it.

Thorne's father had become obsessed with trivia - with lists, and quizzes about lists - in the months leading up to his death. These had become increasingly bizarre and his desire to talk about them more passionate, as the Alzheimer's had torn and tangled more of the circuits in his brain; had come to define him.

The world's fastest ball games. Top five celebrity suicides. Heaviest internal organs. All manner of random rubbish...

Jim Thorne. Killed when flames had torn through his home while he slept. A simple house-fire that any loving son - any son who had taken the necessary time and trouble - should have known was an accident waiting to happen.

Or perhaps something else entirely.

A murder, orchestrated as a message to Thorne himself, altogether more direct than the one preoccupying him at that moment.

One or the other. Toss a coin. Wide awake and sweating in the early hours, Thorne could never decide which was easier to live with.

'
Jai alai
,' Holland said. 'I'll remember that.'

'How's it going with the phone companies?' Thorne sounded hopeful, but knew that unless the man they were dealing with was particularly dim, the hope would be dashed pretty bloody quickly.

'It's a T-Mobile number,' Holland said.

'Prepay, right?'

'Right. They traced the number to an unregistered pay-as-you-go handset, which the user would have dumped as soon as he'd sent you the picture. Or maybe he's kept the handset and just chucked away the SIM card.'

Either way, there was probably nothing further to be gained in that direction. As the market for mobile phones had expanded and diversified, tracking their use had become an ever-more problematic line of investigation. Prepay SIMs and top-up cards could be picked up almost anywhere; people bought handsets with built-in call packages from vending machines; and even those phones registered to a specific company could be unlocked for ten pounds at stalls on any street market. Provided those employing the phones for criminal purposes took the most basic precautions, it was rarely the technology itself that got them nicked.

The only way it
could
work against them was in the tracing of cell-sites - the location of the masts that provided the signal used to make a call in the first place. Once a cell-site had been pinpointed, it could narrow down the area from where the call was made to half a dozen streets, and if the same sites were used repeatedly, suspects might be more easily tracked down, or eliminated from enquiries. It was a time-consuming business, however, as well as expensive.

When Thorne asked the question, Holland explained that, on this occasion, the DCI had refused to authorise a cell-site request. Thorne's response was predictably blunt, but he could hardly argue. With the phone companies charging anywhere up to a thousand pounds to process and provide the information, he knew he'd need more than the
picture
of a corpse as leverage.

'What about where he bought it?' Thorne asked. If they could trace the handset to a particular area, or even a specific store, their man might have been caught somewhere on CCTV. If mobile phones were making life trickier, the closed-circuit television camera was quickly becoming the copper's best friend. As a citizen of the most observed nation in Europe, with one camera to every fourteen people, the average Londoner was captured on video up to three hundred times a day.

'It's a Carphone Warehouse phone,' Holland said.

'Is that good news?'

'Take a guess. According to this geeky DC at the Telephone Unit, their merchandise can never be traced further than the warehouse it was shipped out from. If our man had got it somewhere else, we might have been in with a shout, but all the retailers have different ways of keeping records.'

'Fuck...'

'I reckon he just landed on his feet in terms of where he bought his kit. I don't see how he could have
known
any of that. Not unless he works for a phone company, or he's one of the anoraks I've spent all morning talking to.'

'Thanks, Dave.'

'I'll keep trying,' Holland said. 'We might get lucky.'

Thorne nodded, but was already thinking about other things. About the
nature
of the message he'd been sent. He knew what it was, but not what it meant.

Was it a warning? An invitation? A challenge?

Thinking that, if the powers-that-be ever wanted to change that motto of theirs, he had the perfect replacement. One that gave a far more accurate picture of the job. Thorne imagined the scrap of headed notepaper on the desk in front of him with that tired, blue logo erased from the top. Pictured a future where all Metropolitan Police promotional material came emblazoned with a new catchphrase.

We might get lucky.

'Everyone's got one of these.' The shop assistant pressed the gleaming sliver into Thorne's palm. 'You see the celebs with ' em in
Heat and Loaded
and all the papers. We got some in black, but the silver one's wicked...'

The phone was not much bigger than a credit card. Thorne stared down at the tiny keys, thinking that his fat, stubby fingers would be punching three of them at a time whenever he tried to press a button. 'I think I need something chunkier,' he said. 'Something that's actually going to make a noise if it falls out of my pocket.'

The salesman, whose name-tag identified him as Parv, was a moon-faced Asian kid with spiky hair. He rubbed at a pot belly through a polo shirt that was a couple of sizes too small for him and embroidered with the shop's logo. 'OK, what about a G3? These are bigger because of the keyboards, right? You can do all your email, browse the Internet, whatever.' The kid started to nod knowingly when he thought he saw something approaching genuine interest in his customer's face. 'Oh yeah, high-speed access. Plus you got your live video streaming, your one-to-one video calling, whatever.'

'I don't know anyone else who's got one,' Thorne said.

'So?'

'So who am I going to have a one-to-one video call with?'

Parv considered it. 'OK, this is a pretty basic phone,' he said, reaching for another handset and passing it over. 'Nothing flashy. You got your WAP, your Bluetooth, a voice recorder, a 1.3-megapixel camera - or a 1.5 with a better zoom on the flip-top model - and a built-in MP3 player.'

'Sounds good,' Thorne said. 'Does it send and receive calls?'

Parv stroked his belly again, and did his best to smile, though his eyes made it clear he thought he was dealing with a customer who might produce an automatic weapon from his jacket, or maybe get his cock out at any moment.

'It's just to have as a spare, really.' Thorne was looking around, helpless. 'I don't need any of the flashy shit.'

'Sorry.' The kid took back the handset and began scanning the shop for another customer. 'Everything comes with...
some shit.'

It sounded to Thorne like the second fantastic motto he'd heard so far that day. Maybe he should get off the force and start a company selling greetings cards with realistic messages.

'Let me know if you need any more help,' Parv said, sounding almost like he meant it.

Thorne couldn't help but feel guilty at being the black hole into which the kid had poured his considerable knowledge and enthusiasm. Quickly assuring him that he
would
buy something, but had just a few more questions, Thorne took a step back towards the display of G3 handsets and asked if it was possible to play online poker by phone.

It was four-fifteen, over an hour past the end of his shift and already starting to get dark. The clocks had gone back the week before and, as always, there had been the usual complaints from those trumpeting the trauma of seasonal affective disorder. Thorne was less than sympathetic. Glancing up from his desk, he decided that the darkness certainly improved the view from his window. Besides, who needed SAD, when ten minutes on the phone with a tiny-cocked jobsworth could depress even the happiest of souls so effectively?

It had taken Thorne a little over an hour to set up and register his new phone; now all that remained was to divert calls to his newly issued prepay number. Unfortunately, the mobile from which he needed to activate the divert had already been couriered to a properly equipped laboratory so that the photograph could be examined in detail. Thorne had put a call through to Newlands Park, the technical facilities base in Sidcup that handled image manipulation, audio/visual enhancement and other such tasks beyond the wit of those who could barely programme a VCR.

'It's easy enough,' Thorne had said. 'I've got the manual in front of me and I could talk you through it in ten seconds. I just don't want to miss any calls, you know...'

'Really, you don't need to talk me through it.' The technician had been unable, or hadn't bothered trying, to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. His name was Dawson, and Thorne immediately pictured bad skin and overlarge ears, a tie with egg stains and a vast collection of porn. 'I can't make changes to the settings, d'you see?'

'Sorry, no.'

'The phone has been submitted to us as evidence.'

'No, it hasn't,' Thorne had said. 'The picture is the evidence.'

'And the picture is on the phone. I can't tamper with the phone.'

'It's just setting up a simple divert on my personal calls. How's that tampering?'

'All I'm permitted to do is extract and enlarge the photograph, which is what we've been requested to do. I've got it in writing.'

'I'm sure you have, but this is just about common sense, right? If I get sent a videotape with footage of a murder on it, and I watch it, it doesn't mean I can't change the settings on my video recorder, does it?'

'We're not talking about what you do,' Dawson had said. 'There are set procedures here.'

Thorne's favourite word. It could only get worse from this point.