Death Message Read Free Page A

and shit. Bits of sodding kebab . . .'
    'Maybe now's a good time to let the S&O boys come in.'
    'They can fuck off,' Brigstocke said.
    The Serious and Organised Crime Unit were convinced that the murder of Deniz Sedat three days earlier was in some way linked to the victim's involvement with a Turkish crime gang. Sedat, found bleeding to death by his girlfriend outside a pub in Finsbury Park, was not a major player by any means. But his name had come up during more than one investigation into north London's thriving heroin distribution industry, and the team from S&O had been quick to start throwing their weight around.
    'Getting seriously fucking territorial,' Brigstocke had muttered the day before. 'Well, two can play at that stupid game . . .'
    Thorne had had dealings with both S&O and some of the Turkish crime gangs that they were up against. There were good reasons - personal reasons - why he would prefer not to get close to either of them again. That said, it was to the DCI's credit that he refused to be bullied, and Thorne knew his boss well enough to be sure it was not a pissing contest. He was one of those coppers, just as Thorne was, for whom a murder was something to be solved, as opposed to something that lay on the desk and threatened to fuck up clearance rates. Three weeks into an inquiry that was stone cold and Brigstocke could be as miserable as anybody else, but once he caught a case, he knew that there were those, dead and alive, to whom he owed the best efforts of his team.
    Now, Thorne was starting to believe that he had his own victim to work for. One to whom his attention had specifically, had purposely , been drawn and on whose behalf he must do whatever he could.
    For now, he'd try not to think too much about the killer; about the man or woman he could only presume had sent him the message.
    Right now, he knew no more than that the man in the picture was dead.
    All Thorne had to do was find him.
    Officers from the various Homicide Assessment Teams on call during the 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift would have faxed in preliminary reports to a central contact desk at Scotland Yard. In turn, those on duty there issued a daily bulletin to which anyone within the Specialist Crime Directorate had access. The report outlined all unexplained deaths - or injuries inflicted that looked to be life-threatening - offences involving firearms, rapes, high-risk missing persons or critical incidents that had been picked up overnight from anywhere within the M25 area.
    Name and address of victim, when available, and brief details of the incident. Cause of death, if evident. Officer in charge of the case where one had been assigned.
    At a spare desk in the open-plan Incident Room, Thorne logged on, called up the email and read through such details as were available of those murders caught the night before. The record for a single night - terrorist atrocities notwithstanding - was eleven; one night a couple of years earlier, when, on top of two domestics and a pub brawl, guns were fired at a house-party in Ealing, a flat was torched in Harlesden, and a gang on the hunt for crack money had sliced up the entire staff of a minicab office in Stockwell.
    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