Read Online Death Message by Mark Billingham - Free Book Online Page B

gambling. He sat and thought, scribbling notes on a piece of paper normally reserved for assessments of rival poker players. Then he fired off an email to Hendricks, proposing Stiffies! and Queer Eye for the Slab Guy. But he couldn't come up with anything he liked better than Is That Rigor Mortis, or Are You Just Pleased to See Me?
    Waiting to see if Hendricks would come back with anything, Thorne remembered his phone. His original handset had been sent back from Newlands Park that lunchtime and was now sitting, sealed inside its Jiffy bag, on the table by the front door.
    Thorne fetched scissors from the kitchen and cut into the parcel while keeping one eye on a potentially dirty film on Channel Five and racking his brain for more comedy titles. He decided, as he worked, that this was male multitasking at its most advanced. That the tight-arsed jobsworth at Newlands Park was clearly trying to get his own back, having wrapped up the phone in several layers of impenetrable plastic packaging.
    It took him almost ten minutes to dig out the Nokia. Then ten more to retrieve the battery and the SIM, each of which had been mummified separately. By the time Thorne finally put everything together, the film had finished and he'd used up all the swear words he knew.
    He switched on the phone. Watched as the signal and battery indicators appeared. He looked at the screen for ten seconds... fifteen, then laid the handset down and went back to the computer.
    The moment he sat down, the tone sounded, and the phone began to vibrate on the table. Calls were being diverted through to his new phone, but you couldn't divert text and MMS.
    He had a message waiting.

SIX
    Mid-morning, Thursday, and for the second time that week Brigstocke sat staring at Tom Thorne's mobile phone. He tapped at the screen. 'Is that some sort of wire on the right-hand side?'
    Thorne walked around the desk, leaned down and looked over Brigstocke's shoulder. He stared at the picture which had arrived the night before. There was no blood this time, no signs of violence. To the casual observer, the man on the screen might even have looked asleep; a notion reinforced by the fact that his head was resting on a white pillow.
    But Thorne was no casual observer.
    He looked hard at the light, wavy line that snaked down one edge of the picture and almost touched the dead man's face at the bottom of the screen. 'It's clear,' Thorne said. 'Like a tube, or a cable...'
    Brigstocke stared then shook his head, defeated. 'Let's see what they can do at Newlands Park.'
    Holland peered in at the glass and pushed the door open at the signal from Thorne. He announced that T-Mobile had finally come back with details on the original message: the call had been made via a mast on top of an office block in Acton.
    In the Incident Room and beyond, the team was working flat out. As of a few hours previously, when Thorne had received the second photograph, the inquiry had been substantially upgraded. Officers moved across from other cases - including the Sedat murder, and several being worked by other teams - had already established that this latest message had been sent from another prepay handset, this time on the Orange network. A request for cell-site intelligence had been lodged overnight and steps were being taken to locate where the phone had been purchased. Providing they were able to pinpoint the retail outlet, and based on an average turnover of stock, this could mean wading through a month's worth of CCTV footage or more. It might provide evidence that could be useful if they ever got an offender into a courtroom, but it was highly unlikely to help in catching them. Like much else that the team were busy knuckling down to, it was like collecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, with no idea what the finished picture was supposed to look like.
    'How quickly can Orange get us the cell-site?'
    Holland looked pleased with himself. 'I lied and told them T-Mobile had really pulled the stops out for