Death Message

Tindall blocked their way as they tried to leave. ‘Am I not getting something for this?’

Thorne just stared at him, waited for him to move.

‘I’m serious.’ The voice was thin and desperate. ‘Fifty notes, say, just for my time.’

Thorne took one more second of Tindall’s time, to tell him to fuck off.

Over the years, there had been periodic attempts to gentrify the Holloway Road. Delicatessens had come and gone. Idiots had opened antiquarian bookshops and sold their stock on a year later. As a hugely busy main road – the major route north out of the city – it was never going to be Highgate Hill or Hampstead High Street. But Yvo

She watched Harika Kemal coming out through the doors of the student union with two friends and digging into her bag for a scarf. Kitson saw the girl’s face fall when she caught sight of her approaching.

‘Can I just have five minutes, Harika?’

She shook her head. ‘Please…’

The man and the woman who had come out with Kemal were clearly a couple. The man took a step towards Kitson. ‘Is there a problem?’ Kitson thought he might be Turkish. Greek, maybe. He wore a shiny anorak with a fur-trimmed hood and glasses with thin, rectangular lenses.

Kitson reached into her bag for her warrant card.

‘Can’t you just leave her in peace for a bit?’ the student said.

His girlfriend was Asian; plump, with short hair and a nose-stud. ‘Maybe do something useful,’ she said. ‘Like trying to catch the animal that murdered her boyfriend?’ She spoke with the same mid-Atlantic sarcasm Kitson was already hearing from her nine-year-old daughter.

‘It’s OK,’ Kemal said to her friends. ‘I’ll catch you up.’

‘Is there somewhere we could go and grab a sandwich or something?’ Kitson asked.

The girl patted the bag that was slung across her shoulder. ‘I’ve got my lunch.’

They crossed the road and walked just a little way up the side street opposite. Found a bench on a small patch of muddied grass next to an Irish pub. Looking back, Kitson could see that the two students hadn’t moved; were staring from the doorway of the union building. Turning back to Kemal, she watched the girl take a plastic box from her bag. ‘What your friend said. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do.’

‘I know.’ Kemal peeled back tinfoil from her sandwiches.

‘And there’s no point bullshitting you: we’re getting nowhere. We’ve done all the things we’re supposed to do, you know? Everything we can think of. Spoken to everyone we could, put out an appeal on TV. I know you saw that.’

The girl said nothing. A cement lorry rumbled slowly past them, waited to turn left on to the main road.

‘The only lead we’ve got is you,’ Kitson said.

Kemal shook her head, but to Kitson it seemed more about resignation than denial. ‘It’s so hard,’ she said.

‘Of course it is.’ It was a knee-jerk response, but Kitson truly believed that it was difficult for the girl. Dealing with the loss of her boyfriend. With whatever knowledge she had, much as she might wish to be ignorant.

‘How can I face the family?’

Kitson leaned forward on the bench so she could look at the girl square on. ‘Whose family? Deniz’s?’

Another shake of the head, its meaning even more ambiguous than the last.

‘It’s OK, Harika. Really.’ Kitson watched the girl turning the sandwich over and over in her hand without taking a bite. Looking at her, Kitson found it hard to imagine how she’d become involved with a man like Deniz Sedat. She did not seem the type to be impressed by money and flash cars, and she was certainly sharp enough to have known where that money had come from. Kitson wondered if she was reading Harika Kemal all wrong. Or perhaps there had simply been a physical attraction between her and Sedat that had transcended everything else.

‘I would have nobody.’

Kitson nodded back towards the university. ‘You’ve got good friends, that’s obvious. People who care about you a lot. And I told you before, we’ll make sure that you’re protected. You and the people close to you.’

Kemal raised her head suddenly. ‘What if it’s the people I’m close to who I need to be protected from?’ There was anger and impatience in her face, but her voice had broken before she’d finished speaking.

Kitson reached for a tissue. She passed it across, but the girl had already found one of her own. Had been keeping them handy.

‘Whatever you need.’

‘I need Deniz to be alive.’

‘And I need to find the man who killed him,’ Kitson said. She thought about taking the girl’s hand but decided that would be too much. ‘Tell me who it was, Harika.’

The girl sniffed and wiped her eyes, then stuffed the tissue back into her pocket. ‘Hakan Kemal,’ she said.

‘Kemal?’

‘My older brother. My brother killed Deniz.’

Kitson nodded, as though she understood, but her mind was starting to race. She had many more questions. She wanted to tear back to the office and get things moving. But she knew that, for a few minutes at least, she needed to stay on the bench with Harika Kemal.

Kitson glanced back across at the two students, who were still watching from the other side of the Holloway Road. They both looked as though they would happily rip her head off.

… I was sitting in the park in the middle of the night, getting rained on, and thinking what a soft piece of shite I am. That I can get rid of everyone I blame for what happened, and feel next to nothing, but that I don’t have enough bottle to kill myself. It was my first thought back inside, when I got the news. Taking a blade to myself, I mean, and I’ll admit that it was a relief when I started to think about making other people pay instead. Once I had that, I didn’t have to think too hard about topping myself any more; facing up to the fact that I didn’t have the bottle to go through with it.

It might help if I believed in something, I suppose. In fucking anything. If I thought there was even a chance I might see you both again afterwards. I know this much, if I believed in God or whatever else to begin with, I certainly wouldn’t any more…

And look, I know this is never going to happen, not now anyway, but I’ve started to imagine what it might be like to be with someone else one day. To have another kid, even. Christ, I’m so sorry, baby, I can’t stop those stupid things popping into my head. I think about the sex, and going on holidays and Christ knows what, and the rows me and this woman would have. How she’d always be jealous of you, feel like she was competing with a dead woman, whatever. I imagine her flying off the handle big time, and saying something about you or cutting up an old picture, stuff like that. And then I’d just fucking lose it and want to hurt her. End up boozing, probably, messing up everybody’s life.

See? I’ve got far too much time to think about this sort of shit. All the time when I’m not writing letters to a ghost.

I was thinking, though. If it ever did happen, if someone else came along, I mean. Would you leave me then? Would that be when I lost you and Robbie for good? Thing is, I know you’d want me to be happy, to move on, but it’s really not on the cards.

Happy means forgetting…

Thorne stared at the last line for a few seconds, then slipped the photocopy of the letter back into his desk drawer with the others. He nodded to Sam Karim as the DS passed his office door, then sat back and slurped his tea, and thought about the terrible power of grief.

He understood what drove Marcus Brooks. The impulse. Looking again at the newest picture of the man, the one based on the description given by the security guard, he was starting to see behind it. To co