Lifeless

THIRTY-FOUR

The Latest Victim. The First Picture…

The newspaper felt a little spongy. It was stained in places by whatever liquid had pooled, brown and viscous, in the bottom of the bin. But the headline remained stark enough; the expression on the face of the young Terry Turner still hopeful, and heartbreaking.

“Weird to see him looking so young,” Maxwell said. “Without the bloody padlock…”

Thorne tore through the pages until he found the one he was after: the photo of another young man, this one in uniform, staring into the camera; wideeyed and half smiling, like it didn’t much matter what was coming.

Thorne got up off his knees. “Look at this.” He folded the newspaper over and handed it across.

Maxwell stared at the picture for a few seconds, at the appeal for information beneath it, then turned back to Thorne. The expression on his face made it clear that he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at; what he was meant to be seeing.

“Could that be him?” Thorne asked.

Maxwell went back to the photo. “ This bloke?”

“Could he be our Detective Sergeant Trevor Morley?”

“How old’s this picture?”

“Just look, Bren…”

Maxwell did as he was told. Let out a long, slow breath…

Thorne moved quickly across to stand alongside him, nodded down at the photograph. “That was taken when he joined up in the late eighties.” He suddenly remembered the digitally aged version that had been broadcast the night before; that Hendricks had talked about watching. “Did you not see this on Crimewatch last night?”

“I was out,” Maxwell said.

“Shit…”

“I was out on the streets, doing my fucking job. Fair enough?”

“Just stick twenty years on his face, all right? He’d be late thirties now, somewhere round there. Hair longer, obviously. A beard. From what you said, the coloring’s the same, right?”

“Sandy, but with some gray. And the freckles are darker, but I suppose that would have happened…”

“Look at the mouth,” Thorne said. “The smile would almost certainly be the same.”

“Maybe. Yeah… this could be him.”

“ ’ Could be,’ or is?”

“Jesus. I should have looked at this properly when I saw it the first time. I read about what had happened to Terry; that’s all. I never really took this in.”

“Well, now’s your chance. Come on, Brendan.”

Maxwell stabbed at the page. “The face has filled out a bit and it’s lined. Not wrinkles exactly; hard lines, like creases, you know? Like it’s weathered.”

It was good enough…

Thorne knew that they’d made a huge mistake; that they should at least have considered the possibility of this for longer and not dismissed it as quickly as they had. Though the evidence had certainly pointed toward the man behind the camera, they’d got it the wrong way round.

“It’s me…”

“What?” Maxwell turned, thinking that Thorne was talking to him, but he saw that Thorne had his phone pressed hard to his ear.

“We’ve been idiots, Russell,” Thorne said. “Ryan Eales isn’t the next one on the list. He’s the one who’s been working his way through it…”

Ryan Eales turned side on, leaned against the wall in the archway between kitchen and bed-sitting room. “Bit of luck that I came back when I did. That you were sitting outside in your car like that.”

“We’d have knocked on your door eventually,”

Mackillop said.

“I might not have answered it.”

Which would, Mackillop thought, have been understandable. All in all, things had turned out pretty well. It was equally likely that, if there had been no reply, and the man in the ground-floor flat turned out to have been the pothead Eales said he was, nobody would have bothered coming back. Mackillop laughed. “I suppose we should be grateful that you’d run out of biscuits,” he said.

“Right…”

The weather had changed suddenly yet again. Sunshine was screaming in through the big bay window and a smaller skylight toward the bathroom, flashing where it kissed the white walls and the varnish on the honey-colored floorboards. From where he was standing, near the top of the stairs, Mackillop saw the gleam from two pairs of boots, highly polished and placed side by side between bed and wardrobe. He saw magazines neatly piled beneath the bedside table and freshly ironed shirts folded symmetrically on a chair next to the bathroom door. “You can tell the person who lives here’s ex-army,” he said.

Eales seemed to find this funny. “How come?” “The boots.” Mackillop pointed across to them. “The way they’re arranged; the way everything’s laid out. Neat, you know, and well organized.”

“It’s just the way we’re taught to do things.”

“It must take a lot of effort, though.”

“Not really,” Eales said. “You do things a particular way because it makes sense. Being organized and tidy makes things simpler.”

Mackillop considered this. “I thought about the army myself before I joined the Met. For a short while, anyway.”

“You’d’ve been good.”

“You reckon?”

“Chances are, if you’re a good copper.”

“Getting there,” Mackillop said. He felt himself redden slightly. Looked around the room once again. “Yeah, definitely a soldier’s place

…”

Eales smiled. “Look underneath the bed.”

Mackillop glanced across, then started to move when Eales nodded his encouragement. As he bent down he could see that the base of the bed was actually a drawer. He pulled it out and found himself staring at a collection of military memorabilia: a dress uniform, pressed and folded; a gas mask; badges and medals displayed in open cases; bundles of photographs. And weapons: grenades, guns, a highly polished bayonet

…

“Bloody hell!”

“Don’t worry, the guns have been decommissioned,” Eales said. “Firing pins removed and barrels drilled.”

Mackillop reached toward one of the pistols. “May I?”

“Help yourself. That smaller one’s a Browning nine-millimeter. It’s Iraqi.”

Mackillop’s hand hovered above the gun. He wondered if it had once belonged to one of those soldiers he’d seen kneeling in the desert. Taken from him before another was put to the back of his head. He picked up the bayonet instead.

“That’s seriously sharp, by the way.”

“I bet.” Mackillop stood and held the bayonet up in front of himself. In the skinny mirror of its blade he could see the refelction of bathroom door, the TV and VCR, the black wire that snaked across the floor from the PlayStation to the controller.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Eales said.

“This might sound morbid, and a bit… geeky or whatever.” Mackillop turned the hilt, throwing a sliver of reflected sunlight across Eales’s face. “Has this thing ever… killed anyone?”

Eales walked across and took the bayonet from Mackillop’s hand. “This?” he said. He examined the blade as if he were seeing it for the first time, leaned forward, and slid it into Mackillop’s belly. “Not until now…”

The policeman’s hands flew to the hilt, wrapped themselves tight around the soldier’s; hands that were bigger and stronger and drier. He tried to push, and when he opened his mouth he produced only the gentle pop of a bubble bursting.

“You ready?” Eales asked. “Here we go.” He nodded, counting quietly to three, before twisting the bayonet and dragging it up hard, through muscle, toward the sternum.

Mackillop sighed, then sucked the air quickly back in, as if he’d just dipped a foot into a hot bath or touched a sensitive filling.

There was only the sound of breathing for a while after that, labored and bubbly, and the low moan of boards beneath shifting feet, as both sets of fingers grew slippery against the hilt.

“Luck always runs out in the end,” Eales said.

And he never broke eye contact, not for a moment. Holding fast to what was bright in Jason Mackillop’s eyes, which seemed to blaze, just for that final second or two, before it went out. Like the last dot of life as a TV screen fades to black, shrinking quickly from a world to a pinprick.

And then nothing.

Part Four

Finished Falling