Lifeless

TWENTY-SIX

Thorne tried and failed to make himself comfortable in the doorway of a tatty souvenir shop on Carnaby Street. There were half a dozen of these places knocking out multicolored Doc Martens and overpriced T-shirts on a street that hadn’t been fashionable in donkey’s years.

He could remember when London had been the center of everything. When the city could still get away with it, and swing without looking like someone’s dad at a school disco. Once or twice around that time, when he’d have been six or seven, his parents had brought him into town to do some shopping, and though they’d tended to avoid the likes of Carnaby Street and had made straight for the department stores, Thorne could still recall seeing young women in floaty dresses and men wearing bright military jackets. Or perhaps he only thought he could. He knew that memory tended to work like that. Maybe he was just filling in the gaps with pictures of Terence Stamp and Julie Christie

…

Either way, because he had at least been there in the sixties, Thorne had viewed the whole “Cool Britannia” movement of a few years before with a certain degree of cynicism. With Union Jacks on frocks and cars and album covers, what started as a trend had quickly become little more than a marketing bandwagon to be hijacked by everyone from Marks amp; Spencer to New Labour. Still, Thorne had to admit that bands had at least rediscovered guitars, that tourist numbers had picked up, and that it had given a creative spark to many kids of Spike and Caroline’s age.

It remained to be seen if tourists would be flocking to the West End for very much longer. Beneath a headline that read the latest victim, a photo of a younger and altogether healthier-looking Terry Turner dominated the front page of the day’s Standard. The news was well and truly out that Theatreland had become a killing ground.

Thorne wondered if the killer had seen the newspaper. Did he know yet that he’d killed the wrong man?

Before settling down for the night, he’d been along to Marble Arch, had gone down into the subway to see if he could find Spike or Caroline. He’d got little change out of Ollie, who, if anything, had eyed him with even more suspicion and hostility than when they’d first encountered each other.

“I’m looking for my mates,” Thorne had said. He’d pointed along the corridor, to the corner that was now deserted, but where he’d slept alongside Spike and Caroline a couple of nights earlier.

The old man had glanced up from his book. Narrowed his eyes. “Look somewhere else…”

It wasn’t as though Thorne had been expecting to find them. He was well aware that Spike and Caroline kept strange hours. He knew what woke them and what put them to sleep.

In his doorway, Thorne pulled himself upright and moved his arms to the outside of his sleeping bag. He stared at the lit window displays across the street and listened to the dance music that was coming from one of the flats above.

He thought again about where the leak might have come from. He had to consider McCabe, whatever Brigstocke thought of the idea. Who else knew exactly where he would be sleeping? It was inconceivable that the information could have come from anyone closer to him. What ate away at Thorne was that, somewhere, he knew that he already had the answer. It couldn’t be too hard to figure out who had been responsible; it was a basic two-piece jigsaw. Of course, other rough sleepers knew where he was, but they didn’t have the other piece of it. None of them knew that he was an undercover police officer. At least, he presumed none of them knew. Certainty, of any sort, was a luxury he’d given up along with the rest of them, when he’d taken the decision to sleep on the street.

Do you want me to tell you how many of those kicks could have killed Terry Turner on their own? How many different bones were broken

…?

Earlier, with Brigstocke, he’d played it down. He’d had to. But now there was no point pretending that what jumped in his guts and sucked away at his breath was anything other than fear. He’d felt it from that first moment underground, when he’d heard about Terry T’s death, and it had settled, content inside him. It had quickly made itself at home, coating the walls; clingy and seeping…

Thorne had felt afraid a lot more lately. In the recent weeks and months there had been a general apprehension that he could not name, as well as a perplexing, irrational fear of specific things. He’d become jumpy in crowds; he was suddenly scared of escalators and of heights; he’d started feeling increasingly wary in cars. Thorne knew that some people became more nervous about flying the more frequently they walked on board a plane, and he wondered if he was moving along the same lines.

Or perhaps this susceptibility to fear in all its forms was simply a part of getting older. His father had been afraid of all sorts of bizarre things. Thorne wondered if he was simply turning into his old man. He’d known it would happen eventually, it happened to just about everyone, but the process seemed to have put on a burst of speed with his father’s death. It was as though he were part of some twisted, cosmic equation. He felt like he was changing to fill the hole left by his father’s passing.

And there was the other thing: the trick that was played on you after the death of a parent. After the death of your last parent, when you became an orphan. The switch that was thrown…

For the first time in his life, Thorne was starting to comprehend the pain of being childless; not to feel it, not quite yet, but to understand it. He now knew why those desperate for children spoke of it as a hole that needed to be filled. He had started to feel as though that hole might be inside himself somewhere; growing, but still hidden, waiting only for what covered it to drop away. He’d wondered if having children simply to stop the pain of not having them was a good enough reason. Was it the reason why most people became parents? Certainly, he could now begin to guess at the agony that Caroline must feel at being both childless and a mother at the same time.

Losing parents, and losing children…

Thorne’s mind shifted to the man behind that video camera. The man who had filmed the deaths of four men: four sons; quite possibly four fathers.

How were they ever going to find him if they didn’t trace Ryan Eales? The most obvious place to start would have been the army, of course. They might at least have been able to shed some light on what sort of person was out there. What manner of individual might have stood on the black sand, soaked in shadow and petrol rain alongside that tank crew. It would be very difficult to make advances to the army now of course; not after certain important facts material to the case had been withheld. Brigstocke had confessed to Thorne in the pub that keeping the existence of the videotape secret was a decision he was starting to regret.

Thorne had done his best to be sympathetic. “We’re all Sherlock Holmes with hindsight, mate. Don’t give yourself a hard time about it.”

“If we don’t get a result,” Brigstocke had said, “there’ll be plenty ahead of me in the queue…”

The music from the flat above the shop opposite had stopped. It was replaced by the tuneless singing of a trio of football fans, who came down the street from the side of the Shakespeare’s Head and began to move in Thorne’s direction. He shrank a little farther back into the doorway and watched them pass.

They didn’t see him. Or, if they did, they didn’t give a toss.. .

In those few, brief moments of clarity that come before sleep, Thorne thought of someone he could perhaps speak to, a person who might at least provide some insight into what had happened on February 26, nearly fifteen years before. Thorne would have to be careful how he handled it of course, but nobody had come up with anything better.

He drifted off to sleep, deciding that he’d had worse ideas; thinking that he still had the business card stuffed inside his wallet back at the Lift. Hoping that he’d remember all this in the morning.