TIME of DEATH
Also by Mark Billingham
The DI Tom Thorne series
Sleepyhead
Scaredy Cat
Lazybones
The Burning Girl
Lifeless
Buried
Death Message
Bloodline
From the Dead
The Demands (published as Good as Dead
in the United Kingdom)
The Dying Hours
The Bones Beneath
Other fiction
In the Dark
Rush of Blood
MARK
BILLINGHAM
TIME of DEATH
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Little, Brown
Copyright © 2015 Mark Billingham Ltd
Jacket design by Marc Cohen/mjcdesign
Jacket photographs © Mark Swan
Author photograph by Charlie Hopkinson
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2363-3
eISBN 978-0-8021-9137-3
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Caroline Braid. She knows why.
PROLOGUE
EVERYONE,
EVERYBODY
He’s sitting in the only half-decent café there is, drinking tea and picking at a muffin, when he sees the car slow down and pull over to the kerb on the opposite side of the road, and watches a girl, just like the one he’s been thinking about, walk up to it, smiling, as the passenger window glides down.
Of course she’s smiling, she knows the driver.
Why wouldn’t she smile?
Now, she’s leaning down towards the open window. She tosses her hair and grins at something the driver says; pushes her shoulders back, her chest out. She nods, listening.
He finishes the muffin, closes his eyes for a second or two, enjoying the sugar rush. The rush upon the rush. When he opens them again, the waitress is hovering, asking if she can take the empty plate away, if he needs another tea.
He tells her he’s fine and says, ‘Thank you.’
She knows his name of course and he knows hers. It’s that kind of place. She starts to talk, high-pitched and fast, something about the river that has burst its banks again a dozen or so miles away, how terrible it must be for those poor people living nearby. All that filthy water running into their living rooms. The stink and the insurance, the price of new carpets.
He nods at the right moments and says something in return, one eye on the car and the girl, then looks at the waitress until she takes the hint and wanders away with his empty plate.
The girl stands up and steps back on to the pavement, casts a glance each way along the street as the driver leans across and opens the passenger door. Even though she knows him, trusts him, she knows equally well that she shouldn’t get into his car, not really. She’s not worried about anything bad happening, nothing like that would ever happen here. She probably just doesn’t want to be seen doing it, that’s all, doesn’t fancy the dressing-down she’ll more than likely get from the ’rents later on.
Cradling his mug, he inches his chair a little closer to the window and watches without blinking. He’s enjoying her few seconds of caution, and the fact that it is only a few seconds, that there’s not really any good reason to be cautious, makes him think about what it’s like to live here, just how long it’s been since he moved out of the city.
The reasons he came to this place.
A jolt to begin with, no question about that. A city boy all his life, then waking up to the whiff of cowshit. Birds he couldn’t name and bells singing from fields away and several weeks until he realised that the sound he wasn’t hearing was the blare of car horns from drivers every bit as stressed out and pissed off as he used to be.
The feel of the place though, that was the main thing. The community spirit, whatever you wanted to call it. It was what he supposed you’d describe as tight-knit . . . well, relative to what he’d been used to anyway. The people here weren’t living in each other’s pockets, not exactly, but they were aware of one another, at least. The size of the place has a lot to do with it, obviously. With that closeness and sense of concern. With the whispered tittle-tattle and the perceived absence of threat.
There was still trouble, still drunks around on a Friday night, of course. There was no shortage of idiots, same as anywhere else, and he knew that one or two of them could easily have a knife in his pocket or might fancy taking a swing because they took a dislike to someone’s face. But it hadn’t taken very long before he knew most of their names, who their friends or their parents were.
The girl pulls the passenger door closed.
Her head goes back and he can see that now she’s laughing at something as the driver flicks the indicator on and checks his mirror. She reaches for the seatbelt like the good girl she is. Like the good girl all her friends, her teachers up the road at St Mary’s, her mum and dad and brother know her to be.
She knows the driver and he knows the driver and the driver knows the waitress and the waitress knows the girl.
That’s how it is here. It’s why he likes it.
He drains his mug and turns at the door to wave and say goodbye to the waitress, before stepping out into the cold and standing beneath the awning, buttoning his jacket as he watches the car disappear around the corner.
It’s the sort of place where everyone knows everybody else’s business.
But they don’t know his.
PART ONE
ALL LOVELY AND SCREAMING
ONE
‘So, a big Sunday roast?’ Thorne had asked. ‘That kind of thing?’
‘And a cream tea on the Saturday with a bit of luck.’
‘No mooching around in antiques shops.’
‘No mooching.’
They stopped, holding their breath as they listened to Alfie coughing in the next room. Thankfully, he stayed asleep.
Thorne adjusted his pillow. Sniffed. ‘A decent pub with a toasty fire.’
‘I bloody well hope so.’
‘And definitely no walking?’
‘Only as far as the pub.’
Thorne had grunted cautiously and pulled Helen closer to him, thinking about it. ‘Just the weekend though, right . . . ?’
Now, on their first night away, a month after those tentative and delicate bedtime negotiations, walking back to their hotel after dinner in a more than decent pub, Tom Thorne decided that he’d got off reasonably lightly. It had taken a good de
al of organisation, not to mention the calling in of several favours from sympathetic colleagues, to co-ordinate the holidays they were both due and he knew that Helen had been angling to spend at least a week of it holed up in the Cotswolds.
‘It was nice food, wasn’t it?’ Helen asked.
‘Yeah, it was all right.’
She shook her head. ‘You miserable old git.’
Thorne could see the sly smile, but had no way of knowing that Helen Weeks too thought she’d had a result. Thorne was not the most adventurous of souls. He was still uncomfortable spending time south of the Thames, so she knew that, given the choice, he would rather stick needles in his eyes than spend precious free time in the countryside. Just hearing the theme tune to The Archers was normally enough to give him the heebie-jeebies.
‘Home-made chutney and bloody am-dram,’ he’d said once. ‘I couldn’t care less.’
All things considered, she had decided that a weekend – a long Valentine’s Day weekend – was a fair return for the time spent trying to persuade him that it would be good to get out of the city for a few days. A few days on their own, before they’d head off somewhere good and hot for a week; a nice resort with a toddlers’ club, where they could really kick back and do sweet FA until they were due back on the Job. The ‘no walking’ agreement had been a sacrifice she was prepared to make and the somewhat contentious ‘mooching’ issue had been worth giving ground on. That said, she had her walking boots stashed in the boot of the car and there was a nice-looking antiques shop on the main road. Helen took a gloved hand out of her pocket and put her arm through Thorne’s. She felt quietly confident that the four-poster bed that was waiting for them back at the hotel might lead to the re-opening of discussions.
‘I’ll accept the miserable,’ Thorne said. ‘But less of the old.’
They turned on to the cobbled side street that led to their hotel. Halfway along, a middle-aged woman passed by with a spaniel that appeared to be feeling the cold every bit as much as Thorne and Helen were. Thorne smiled at the woman and she immediately looked away.
‘See that?’ Thorne shook his head. ‘I thought they were supposed to be friendlier in the countryside. I’ve met serial killers who were friendlier than that. Sour-faced old bag.’
‘You probably scared her,’ Helen said. ‘You’ve got a scary face.’
‘What?’
‘If someone doesn’t know you, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘Great,’ Thorne said. ‘So, that’s miserable, old and scary.’
Helen was grinning as Thorne stepped ahead of her and shouldered the front door of the hotel open. ‘Those are your good qualities.’
Inside, Thorne smiled at the teenage girl behind the reception desk, but did not get a great deal more in return than he’d got from the old woman with the dog. He shrugged and nodded towards the small lounge bar. ‘Quick one before bed?’
‘I think we should head up,’ Helen said. ‘Maybe have a quick one in bed.’
‘Oh . . . ’
‘Or a slow one.’
Thorne’s hand moved instinctively to his gut. He was suddenly regretting the decision to eat dessert. ‘You might need to give me twenty minutes.’
‘Lightweight.’
‘Fifteen, then. But you’ll have to do all the work.’
Helen walked towards the stairs and, as Thorne turned to follow her, he caught the eye of the girl behind the desk. He guessed that she had overheard, as she had suddenly managed to find a smile from somewhere.
Thorne was in the bathroom when Helen called him. He was brushing his teeth, smiling at the orderly way in which Helen had laid out the contents of her washbag, replacing the range of complimentary toiletries that had already been secreted in her suitcase.
‘Tom . . . ’
He walked back into the bedroom, still brushing. He spattered his Hank Williams T-shirt with toothpaste as he managed a muffled ‘What?’
Helen was sitting on a padded trunk at the end of the bed. She nodded towards the TV. ‘They’ve made an arrest.’
They had been following the story for the past three weeks, since the first girl had gone missing. It had all but slipped from the front pages, had no longer been the lead item on the TV news, until the previous day when a second girl had disappeared. This time the missing teenager had been seen getting into a car and suddenly the media were interested again.
Thorne walked quickly back into the bathroom, rinsed and spat. He rejoined Helen, sat next to her as she pointed the remote and turned the volume up.
‘It was always on the cards,’ Thorne said.
Helen would have been keenly monitoring such an investigation anyway, of course. As a police officer who worked on a child abuse investigation team. As someone all too aware of the suffering that missing persons cases wrought among those left waiting and hoping.
As a parent.
This one was different though.
On the screen, a young reporter in a smart coat and thick scarf talked directly to camera. She spoke, suitably grim-faced, yet evidently excited at breaking the news about this latest ‘significant development’. Behind her, almost certainly gathered together by the film crew for effect, a small group of locals jostled for position in a market square that Helen Weeks knew well.
This was the town in which she had grown up.
The reporter continued, talking over the same video package that had run the night before: a ragged line of officers in high-vis jackets moving slowly across a dark field; a distraught-looking couple being comforted by relatives; a different but equally distressed couple being bundled through a scrum of journalists brandishing cameras and microphones. The reporter said that, according to sources close to the investigation, a local man in his thirties had been identified as the suspect currently in custody. She gave the man’s name. She said it again, nice and slowly. ‘Police,’ she said, ‘have refused to confirm or deny that Stephen Bates is the man they are holding.’
‘Ouch,’ Thorne said. ‘Right now there’s a senior investigating officer ripping some gobshite a new arsehole.’
‘Leak could have come from anywhere,’ Helen said.
‘Not good though, is it?’
‘Not a lot anyone can do, not there. Somebody knows somebody who saw him taken to the station, whatever.’ Her eyes had not left the screen. ‘It’s not an easy place to keep secrets.’
Thorne was about to say something else, but Helen shushed him. A photograph filled the screen and the reporter proudly announced that this picture of the man now being questioned had been acquired exclusively from a source close to the family.
‘Another “source”,’ Thorne said. ‘Right.’
Helen shushed him again. She stood up slowly and stepped towards the screen.
It was a wedding photograph, a relatively recent one by the look of it, the happy couple posing outside a register office. The groom – a circle superimposed around his head – in a simple blue suit, grinning, a cigarette between his fingers. The bride in a dress that seemed a little over-the-top by comparison.
Thorne said, ‘Looks like a charmer—’
‘Shit!’
‘What?’
‘I know her.’ Helen jabbed a finger towards the screen. ‘I was at school with her. With the suspect’s wife.’
Thorne stood up and moved next to her. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘Linda Jackson. Well, she was Jackson back then, anyway.’
‘Are you sure?’
Helen nodded, stared at the screen. ‘We were in the same class . . . ’
They watched for a few minutes more, but there was nothing beyond the same news regurgitated and once they had run out of horrified locals to interview and began running the same footage for a third time, Helen wandered into the bathroom.
Thorne turned the sound down on the TV and began to get undresse
d. He shouted, ‘She looks seriously pleased with herself, that reporter. Obviously reckons she’s got a promotion coming.’
Helen did not respond and, a few minutes later, as Thorne was climbing into bed, she came out of the bathroom. ‘I want to go up there,’ she said.
‘You what?’
‘I want to go home.’
Thorne sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Why?’
‘Think about what she’s going through. She’s got kids.’ She waved a hand towards the television. ‘They said.’
‘Hang on, how long’s it been since you’ve seen her?’
‘So?’
‘Near enough twenty years, right?’
‘I know what that place is like, Tom.’
‘Well, I can’t stop you, I suppose, but I think it’s stupid.’
They said nothing for a few long seconds. Helen opened the wardrobe and took out her suitcase.
‘Hang on, you’re not thinking of going tonight?’
‘Dad’s expecting us to be away all weekend,’ Helen said. She opened a drawer, took out a handful of socks and underwear and carried them across to the case. ‘So there’s no problem looking after Alfie.’
‘I know, but still.’
‘We can be there in an hour and a half . . . less.’ She went back for more clothes. ‘There’s not going to be any traffic now.’
Thorne got off the bed and grabbed one of the two towelling dressing gowns that had been hanging inside the wardrobe. It was too small, but he pulled it on anyway. He placed himself strategically between Helen and her suitcase. ‘You’ve got no family up there any more, right? Where do you think you’re going to stay?’
‘I’ll sort something out.’
‘The place is teeming with coppers and reporters. You wouldn’t find anywhere tonight even if you went.’ He waited, relieved that she seemed to be thinking it over. ‘Why don’t we do this tomorrow?’
She nodded, reluctantly. ‘I’m going though.’
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