Lifeless

FIVE

The mood of the cafe owner had obviously not improved as he cleared away the plates. Holland had eaten toast before he’d left home, but had done his best with a bacon sandwich. Thorne had made short work of the fullest of full English breakfasts.

“The eggs were hard,” Thorne said.

“So? You ate them, didn’t you? If you don’t like the place, you can fuck off.”

“We’ll have two more mugs of tea.”

The owner trudged back behind his counter. The place was a lot busier now, and he had more to do, so it was difficult to tell whether he had any intention of ever bringing the tea as requested.

“Can you find something to arrest him for?” Thorne said. “Being fat and miserable in a built-up area, maybe?”

“I’m not sure who he hates more, coppers or tramps. We’re obviously not doing much for his ambience.”

Thorne stared hard across the room. “Fuck him. It’s hardly the Ritz, is it?”

“I picked up a couple of papers on my way here,” Holland said. He reached down for his bag, dug out a stack of newspapers, and dropped them on the table. “Our picture of Victim One’s on virtually every front page today.”

Thorne pulled a couple of the papers toward him. “TV?”

Holland nodded. “All the national TV news broadcasts as well. Both ends of London Tonight. It’s pretty comprehensive…”

Thorne stared down at the Mirror, at the Independent, into a pair of eyes that had been generated by a software program, but nonetheless had the power to find his own, and hold them. Victim One was long-haired and bearded. His flat, black-and-white features were fine, the line of jaw and cheekbones perhaps a little extreme to be lifelike. But the eyes, like the heavy bags beneath them, looked real enough. Dark, narrow, and demanding to be recognized. It was a face that said, Know me.

“What do you think?” Holland asked.

Thorne looked at the text that accompanied the pictures. The crucial facts rehashed: a brutal reminder of just how much was known about this man’s death when nothing at all was known about the life that had been stolen from him.

Then the reproduction of the tattoo. The vital collection of letters found on the victim’s shoulder. It had been hoped early on-as Brigstocke had told Thorne in the pub-that this might help identify the body, but that hope had proved as temporary as the tattoo itself was permanent.

AB- S.O.F.A.

The decision not to print a photograph of the tattoo had been taken on grounds of taste. A similar decision with regard to the victim’s face had not been necessary: they’d had no choice but to computer-generate, and not just because the face itself was unrecognizable. It was unrecognizable as a face: every

46 Mark Billingham feature had been all but kicked or stamped clean off the victim’s head. The unmarked face that was confronting thousands of people, that very minute over their cornflakes, had been fashioned by a microchip from little more than bone and bruise.

“It’s like King’s Cross,” Thorne said. “It’s what they did with the victim they couldn’t put a name to.”

The fire at King’s Cross underground station in November 1987 had killed thirty-one people, but only thirty bodies were ever claimed. One victim had remained anonymous-in spite of numerous appeals to those who might have known who he was. Thorne remembered that face, too: the sketch on the poster in a hundred tube stations; the clay reconstruction of the head that was lovingly fashioned and paraded in front of the television cameras. Ironically, the dead man, known for years only as Victim 115, had finally been identified just the year before, nearly twenty years after his death, and had turned out to have been a rough sleeper. Many commentators in the press claimed to have been unsurprised. It was obvious he was homeless, or else someone would surely have come forward much earlier, wouldn’t they? Thorne wasn’t so sure. He doubted that material belongings had a great deal to do with being missed. He thought it was perfectly possible to have a roof over your head, a decent car, and two nice holidays a year, yet still go unacknowledged and unclaimed if you had the misfortune to find yourself trapped on a burning escalator.

Thorne reckoned it was less to do with being unknown than with being un loved.

“I think we’re in with more of a chance, though,” Holland said, looking at the picture. “The quality of this is far higher. It’s got to ring a bell with somebody.”

“Let’s hope somebody loved him enough.”

Thorne handed the Independent back across the table and turned the Daily Mirror over to the sports page. He wondered how many footballers had been accused of rape since the last time he’d read a newspaper.