Lifeless

THIRTY-THREE

Fucked-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: sunshine, 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 passenger 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 gods. 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 glass, green glass, plastic, or newspapers-were lined up next to three huge wheelies. The place smelled of catpiss 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 bollocks, 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 fucking 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. “Bloody hell…”

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 ?”

“God 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 mass 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-glass 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 brandishing 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.”

Mackillop took out a biscuit from the packet on the floor, held it up. “Except to go shopping.”

“Once every couple of days,” Eales said. “You’ve got to get supplies in. And when I go, I don’t hang about.”

“You’ve been keeping your head down?”

“Something like that.”

Mackillop knew why, of course. Even with his life under threat, Eales would hardly have been mustard-keen to go to the police; to explain the reason why he was next on a killer’s list. Mackillop also knew that, by questioning him, he was almost certainly moving well beyond his remit. So far, he hadn’t been short of luck, but the sensible part of him was wondering just how far he could push it. “I’m guessing it’s not your name on the rent book…”

“It’s a name I use sometimes.” Eales slurped his coffee. “I pay the rent, and that’s all anyone seems bothered about.”

“You’ve not used your real name for a while, have you?”

Eales walked over, leaned down to grab a few biscuits, then sat again. “Have I not?”

“I know that because we’ve looked. Everywhere…”

“I didn’t think you were here to nick me for not filling in forms correctly.”

“I’m not,” Mackillop said. “But it’s natural to wonder why you might be so keen to stay anonymous.” He watched as Eales downed the rest of his coffee in three or four swift gulps; amazed, as his own mug was still hot to the touch.

Eales stood, gestured with his empty mug. “I’m going to get some more.”

Mackillop followed him toward the kitchen. “Mr. Eales…”

“I’ve moved around a lot in the last few years.” Eales spoke with his back to Mackillop, taking coffee and sugar from the cupboard, moving across to the fridge for milk. “I’ve done a few strange jobs, you know? Worked for one or two dodgy characters…”

“Dodgy how?”

“Dodgy, as in secret. I do what they pay me for, I fuck off and I keep my mouth shut. This isn’t the sort of work you pick up at the Job Centre, you know?”

Mackillop thought about it, guessed that Eales was talking about working as a mercenary. He watched the man’s shoulders moving beneath his sweatshirt. Eales certainly looked as though he kept himself useful. “We’re not really interested in what you’ve been doing,” he said. “We’re actually here for your own good. But I think you know that, don’t you?”

Eales turned, looked at him.

Mackillop was starting to grow impatient with the caginess; tired of going round the houses. Here was someone who’d taken part in a brutal war crime; their only hope of catching a man who’d perpetrated an atrocity of his own fifteen years down the line.

“Do you know why we’ve been trying to find you, Mr. Eales?”

Eales began to look a little nervous. He reached for his mug and dropped his head to sip from it. Mackillop waited a few seconds, then pulled out his phone, deciding that maybe it was a good time to see how far away Stone was…

Eales moved forward, suddenly enough to slop hot coffee across the floor. To make Mackillop step back. “Show me your warrant card again. Straightaway, please.”

Mackillop did as Eales asked. Watched as he took a few moments to regain control and recover his composure.

“I’m sorry for… sorry about that, ” Eales said. “You know damn well that I’ve got every right to be a bit jumpy, so let’s not kid each other.” He snatched a tea towel from the worktop, tossed it onto the spill, and pushed it around with his foot as he spoke. “I knew Ian Hadingham had topped himself last year, all right? Supposedly topped himself. And I knew Chris Jago was missing because I’d tried to get in touch with him. So that, on top of Hadingham, was enough to make me nervous. Then I open a paper three weeks ago and see a picture of a dead man who looks very much like Alec Bonser. I see his picture, and I see a picture like this…” He rolled up the sleeve of his sweatshirt. There were several tattoos: a row of Chinese symbols, two Celtic bands, a lion’s head-but the important one was high up, just below the shoulder.

Letters faded to the blue of his eyes: O+ S.O.F.A.

“I’ve no idea if he killed Chris Jago or not, but I’m the fourth member of that crew, and I want to stay alive as long as possible, thank you very much. I’m not claiming to be Brain of Britain. I was just a pig-thick squaddie, but it seemed like a good idea to keep a fairly low profile. Like you said, I kept my head down, and I’ve got away with it. Until now, at any rate.” Eales shrugged, blew on his coffee. “You lot might want to talk to me, but last time I checked, that wasn’t fatal.”

Mackillop felt like straps were being fastened tight across his chest. Dry-mouthed in a second, he sucked in the words and tried to arrange them into the question that was begging to be asked: You’ve no idea of who killed Chris Jago?

But he said nothing. The suspicion that he was out of his depth had suddenly become a horrible certainty. He felt like he was back on the course, that this was part of some elaborate training exercise. It was as if Eales were one of his tutors playing a role and this was the crucial point in the assessment process. The part where he could fuck up everything if he wasn’t very careful. Mackillop knew that he was being given the chance to put the big question, but he also knew that the moment belonged by right, and by seniority, to others.

Eales nodded toward the mug in Mackillop’s hand. “Do you want another one of those?”

The clever thing to do, the correct thing, was to back off a little. To sit tight, and wait for Andy Stone to arrive. Mackillop handed the mug across and turned back toward the bed-sitting room.