Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Blimey,’ Hare said, nodding. ‘So, what, professional curiosity or something? Why you’re here, I mean.’

  Hendricks pointed at Thorne. ‘Just here to keep him out of trouble.’

  ‘I think you might have your work cut out,’ Hare said.

  ‘Oh, I know.’

  ‘Not with me,’ Thorne said. Hare had probably read the paper, he thought, or been talking to one of his customers.

  ‘Only pathologists I ever knew wore suits and ties,’ Hare said. ‘Very straight, you know?’

  Hendricks grinned. ‘I’m a bit of a maverick.’

  ‘Another round?’ Hare looked at his watch. ‘Last chance.’

  ‘I think we’re fine,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks was about to demur, until he clocked the disapproving look on Thorne’s face. He drained his glass then stared at it. ‘Yeah . . . ’

  ‘Right, let’s get this lot shifted,’ Hare said. He pushed his way back to the bar and rang the bell.

  ‘Do I smell bacon gone off?’ Hendricks asked.

  Hare shouted, announced that it was time for everyone to get their drinks down their necks. He rang the bell again. People began doing as they were told.

  ‘Ex Met,’ Thorne said. ‘Why this place is full of coppers. Fuller than usual, anyway.’ He watched the landlord clearing glasses from the bar and turned in time to see Helen coming through the door. ‘Here we go. Our ride’s here.’

  ‘Well yours might be,’ Hendricks said. ‘Mine left ages ago.’ He grinned and waggled his eyebrows; like Groucho Marx, if he’d been born in Salford and had a thing for extreme body ornamentation.

  ‘Look at you pair,’ Helen said, when she reached the table. ‘Having fun?’

  They stood up, grabbed jackets and downed what was left of their drinks. Helen leaned in to kiss Thorne on the cheek and was then pulled into a prolonged hug from Hendricks.

  ‘How you doing, gorgeous?’ Hendricks drew Helen even tighter, looked at Thorne over her shoulder. ‘You know it’s you I’ve come to see and not him, don’t you?’

  Helen stepped back and said, ‘Course I do,’ and told Hendricks he was pissed.

  ‘I’m . . . refreshed.’

  ‘As a newt,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Come on then, Laurel and Hardy.’

  ‘So, have I got a bed? Hendricks asked.

  ‘You’ve got a sofa.’

  At the door, Helen stopped and handed Thorne the car keys. ‘Car’s outside,’ she said. ‘I need to nip to the Ladies.’

  Watching her go back in, Hendricks said, ‘If she’s gone to get condoms out of the machine, you know I always carry plenty, don’t you?’ He patted his jacket pocket, gave a clumsy boy-scout salute. ‘Be prepared.’

  ‘Don’t think I’ll need to trouble you,’ Thorne said.

  Helen came out of the toilets into the small hallway that led back towards the bar. It smelled only marginally better than the toilets themselves. Wiping damp hands on the back of her jeans, she looked out through the glass doors into the garden and saw two figures emerge from one of the buildings at the far end. They walked past a table where three teenagers sat smoking and as they passed beneath one of the overhead lights, she recognised a young girl she had seen serving behind the bar, straightening her shirt and leaning close to an older man with a ratty-looking beard and glasses. They opened the door and stepped into the hall. The girl did not look at her, but the man smiled as he passed, clearly pleased with himself. She watched them walk towards the bar, trying to remember the joke about ponytails always having arseholes underneath . . .

  She jumped as the door slammed behind her and turned to see that the three teenagers had come in from the garden.

  ‘Blimey, look at this. It’s Linda Bates’ pet rug-muncher.’ The biggest of the three stepped towards her. Dirty blond, with bad skin, the collar of his polo shirt turned up.

  ‘Shit!’ An Asian kid in a baggy American football shirt. ‘She’s got a nerve.’

  The third one just stared, hands thrust into the pockets of his windbreaker.

  Helen could smell the fags and the beer coming off them.

  ‘How can you show your face in here?’

  ‘Fucking nerve.’

  ‘Where’s your girlfriend then?’

  ‘Waiting for you at home with her legs open?’

  ‘Getting the strap-on oiled up.’

  ‘All right, lads,’ Helen said. A smile, but not in her voice. ‘Just get yourselves off home, all right?’

  The boy in the polo shirt spread his legs and stuck his neck out. ‘Think you can tell us what to do?’

  ‘Cheeky bitch.’

  ‘You know I’m a copper, right?’

  ‘Like I care,’ the Asian kid said.

  Helen glanced down to unzip her bag, rummaged for her warrant card.

  ‘You’re a disgrace . . . ’

  She heard the phlegm being hawked up and raised her head at the same time that the gobbet hit her in the face. She tried to lift her hand to wipe it away, but for a few seconds her body refused to do as it was told. She could only watch, and let the cold slug of spittle crawl down her cheek, as the three boys tore open the door to the garden and bolted, whooping, into the darkness.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Paula Hitchman pronounced herself delighted to have another person staying and her other half sounded equally enthusiastic. Jason Sweeney seemed especially taken with their newest guest and, once he’d thanked them both for the use of their sofa, Hendricks was certainly not shy and retiring. Within ten minutes, with cans of beer opened and sandwiches on the go, he had responded to repeated invitations and shown his hosts more tattoos and piercings than the waitress in the Magpie’s Nest had been privileged to see.

  ‘You like metal?’ Sweeney asked. ‘The music, I mean.’

  ‘I like stuff you can dance to,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘Seen a few people like you at gigs, that’s all. Suppose it’s more like dragons and stuff with them though. Eagles and skulls and that.’

  Paula asked if there were any piercings in more ‘intimate’ regions. Hendricks winked and told her she might find out if she played her cards right.

  Sweeney nodded, impressed. ‘Seriously hardcore, mate. Seriously.’

  ‘They reckon you can get addicted to it,’ Paula said.

  ‘I’m addicted to lots of things,’ Hendricks said.

  Sweeney nudged Thorne, who was next to him on the sofa. ‘Not exactly Quincy, is he?’

  Thorne said no and cradled his can and listened to the noises from the bathroom upstairs. Helen had announced that she was tired as soon as they had arrived, that she wanted a shower and an early night. It was the first thing she’d said since the three of them had set off from the pub. Walking to Paula’s front door, Hendricks had caught Thorne’s eye. A look that said, ‘I see what you mean . . . ’

  ‘Still, at least your patients can’t complain about what you look like,’ Sweeney said. ‘That what you call them, patients?’

  ‘Stiffs,’ Hendricks said. ‘Various categories thereof.’ He began to count off on his fingers. ‘Crispy critters . . . floaters . . . pavement pizzas. Had one of them just before I came here, matter of fact. Banker who forgot he couldn’t fly.’

  ‘Cause of death not too tricky then,’ Sweeney said.

  ‘Oh, I can do all that stuff in my sleep.’

  Hendricks was showing off, or rather the Guinness was; a character he slipped into if an audience demanded it. No more than booze and bullshit. The truth was that Thorne had never known a pathologist with so much empathy for the bodies he worked with; one as willing and able to hear whatever secrets the dead could pass on.

  ‘I’m the corpse whisperer, me,’ Hendricks said, winking at Thorne.

  ‘I like that,’ Paula said. ‘That’s a good one.’

 
Thorne knew the real reason Hendricks had come. They were both hoping that Jessica Toms might have something to say to him.

  ‘Amazing though,’ Sweeney said, ‘the things you can do these days. The technology.’

  ‘I think it’s overrated,’ Hendricks said. ‘I still miss leeches, myself.’

  Sweeney didn’t get the joke. ‘You can get results in minutes now, right?’ He looked at his girlfriend. ‘Did you know you can tell if a suspect’s been in a room just by getting a sample of the air? Just from the air, for Christ’s sake.’

  Paula looked at Thorne. ‘You lot’ll be out of a job soon.’

  ‘No complaints from me,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Let me guess,’ Hendricks said. ‘You’re a big fan of CSI.’

  ‘God, he watches all those shows,’ Paula said. She nodded towards the drawer beneath the TV stand. ‘We’ve got all the box sets under there, anything with a few bodies in it, and he’s always got his nose in some gory book with dozens of murders. I like something a bit more literary myself.’

  ‘So, I like crime stories.’

  ‘Not so much fun when it happens on your doorstep though, is it.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ Sweeney said.

  Thorne thought that the taxi driver looked a little crestfallen. Disappointed by the terrible ordinariness of real murder.

  He listened for a few minutes longer, then when the sandwiches appeared and demands were issued for a few more blood-soaked war stories, Thorne excused himself. He’d heard the shower being turned off ten minutes before.

  ‘Helen said anything about Linda Bates?’ Paula asked. ‘What she thinks about what her old man did?’

  ‘She hasn’t told me a thing,’ Thorne said.

  Thorne had to reach out a hand to steady himself and piss straight. He hadn’t put away as much as Hendricks and he’d eaten before they’d really got stuck in, but he had never been the world’s best at holding his drink.

  He flushed and closed the lid. He washed his face, then sat for a minute or two to try and clear his head.

  It was the very technology Jason Sweeney was so enamoured of that would put Stephen Bates away. The sort that actually existed, anyway.

  His DNA on a fag-end in a shallow grave.

  The victim’s DNA all over his car.

  Rock-solid evidence that showed Stephen Bates to be a liar, that proved a dead girl and a missing one had been where he insisted they had not.

  Technology and good old-fashioned lies.

  But technology didn’t always tell the truth either, because facts were just facts at the end of the day and that wasn’t gospel, was it? That wasn’t the be-all and the bloody end-all. Sums that needed adding up again.

  Thorne stood up slowly, groaning. He should have stopped drinking half an hour earlier.

  When he emerged from the bathroom, Hendricks was waiting on the landing. He stepped close to Thorne. Said, ‘It’s all about the bugs.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This body business.’ Hendricks nodded. ‘How long it was buried in the woods and how long it had been . . . a body. If there’s a difference. Trust me, mate, it’s all about the creepy-crawlies.’ He was wiggling his fingers, making suitably creepy-crawly-ish gestures and grinning.

  ‘Go to bed, Phil,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks leaned even closer, conspiratorial. ‘How can I?’ He spoke like someone who had learned to whisper in a helicopter. ‘Can’t get me head down until they decide it’s time for bed. I’m kipping in the front room, aren’t I?’

  ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks pushed past him into the bathroom, singing; something that had been playing in the pub. Thorne stepped quietly across the landing and into the bedroom.

  The lights were off and Helen was already asleep, or pretending to be.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Helen had left early for Linda’s, driving Hendricks back to pick his car up from the town centre on the way. Hendricks, with several strong coffees inside him, was heading to Nuneaton to see the pathologist who had performed the post-mortem on Jessica Toms. Sweeney had offered to drive Thorne into Polesford, but until he was dressed and ready to do so, Thorne had little choice but to wait and mooch around.

  Sweeney finally came downstairs just after eleven. He made himself breakfast, sat around in the living room in his flappy dressing gown.

  ‘What Paula was saying last night about not liking blood and gore?’ He tore off half a slice of toast with one bite. ‘Probably because she sees a fair bit of it at the hospital. All the messy stuff, you know? She can’t even sit through an episode of Casualty.’

  Thorne nodded. He didn’t know too many coppers who came home and spent the evening watching box sets of The Bill.

  ‘Other way round for me,’ Sweeney said. ‘Not a lot to get your pulse racing, driving for a living. Not round here. Someone throws up in the back of the cab occasionally, that’s about as exciting as it gets.’

  ‘Too exciting for me,’ Thorne said. He quietly belched, tasted last night’s beer. He knew where he was with the smell of blood, meaty and metallic, but just the suggestion of vomit was making him feel a little queasy.

  All about what you were used to, he supposed.

  ‘That’s why people are so worked up about what’s happened,’ Sweeney said. ‘This is not the most thrilling place normally.’

  ‘Thought that was why you moved here.’

  ‘Yeah, it was.’ He thought for a few seconds. ‘Swings and roundabouts though, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s definitely a bit conventional,’ Thorne said.

  ‘It’s a bit . . . safe.’

  ‘Really?’

  Sweeney shook his head, acknowledging the unfortunate choice of word. He pushed the rest of his toast into his mouth. ‘I was probably the funniest-looking bloke in the place until your mate showed up.’

  ‘He certainly turned a few heads in the pub,’ Thorne said.

  ‘So come on then.’ Sweeney brushed the crumbs from his lap, laid his plate on the floor. ‘What’s he really here for? He was being a bit mysterious last night.’

  ‘Well, that’s up to him.’

  ‘Is he here as some sort of consultant on the Bates thing?’

  Thorne shrugged. ‘I think he just fancied a few days away.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Somewhere nice and conventional.’

  ‘Come on, it’s not like I’m going to tell anyone. Is he like an expert witness or something?’

  ‘He just turned up,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s it.’

  Sweeney smiled and nodded, as though the lack of a convincing answer was just the answer he’d been expecting; as if he knew Thorne was keeping something back and got a kick out of being party to the intrigue. He picked up the TV remote, jabbed at it and scrolled through the channels until he reached Sky News.

  A sports round-up, the weather, then the latest from Polesford.

  ‘Here we go.’ Sweeney sat back, then groaned in disappointment when they cut to the reporter. ‘God, this bloke’s so bloody dull, don’t you reckon? It’s much better when that young girl’s doing it.’ He adjusted his dressing gown. ‘I ran her back to her hotel the other night. She’s even nicer in the flesh.’

  The channel was running with a story they’d lifted from the daily papers. Piggybacking on somebody else’s exclusive. They slowly zoomed in on the front page, describing it in detail, though it needed very little explanation. The banner headline was superimposed over the picture.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Sweeney said. ‘I wondered when he’d show his face.’

  Thorne did not recognise the man on the front of the paper, but the words on the screen made it clear enough who he was.

  Sweeney looked across at Thorne. ‘Well at least it’s knocked you and your other half off the front pa
ge.’

  ‘He’s a pig,’ Linda said. ‘He was always a pig. This though . . . ’

  Helen studied the picture. ‘They probably offered him a lot of money.’

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Linda’s knuckles were white as she gripped the edges of the newspaper. ‘He’s the one that did the offering,’ she said. ‘You can bet your life on it, and he’d have done it for fifty quid. Twenty . . . ’

  It was the second day running that Linda had been handed a copy of the newspaper by the police officers keeping her company. Today though, they had passed it across somewhat reluctantly; as though the pages themselves might have been coated in something toxic. There were none of the sly smiles she had seen the previous day, when Helen and her boyfriend had graced the front page.

  ‘It’s why he came,’ Linda said. She handed the paper across to Helen. ‘It was all set up, wasn’t it? It was all just about this.’

  Helen looked at the picture. Wayne Smart wrestling with a uniformed officer at the edge of the front garden. A more formal shot of him alongside; a teaser for the full story on a double-page spread inside. The headline: almost a direct quote from his conversation with Linda the day before.

  IF HE’S TOUCHED MY KIDS, I’LL KILL HIM.

  Linda was right, of course. The fracas outside had been as good as staged, the confrontation inside no more than material for the exclusive story of a traumatised father. Helen remembered Smart stomping around downstairs, shouting and issuing threats; the air of a performance about the whole thing. She found herself wondering if he might have been carrying some kind of recording device.

  She turned to the story inside and scanned the text, her eyes quickly drawn to Smart’s description of her. His ex-wife’s ‘so-called friend’. A serving police officer, he insisted, should know better than to comfort a woman who had allowed a child killer into her home. Into his children’s home.

  The tension in Helen’s shoulders, the distaste that washed across her face, must have been obvious.

  ‘Yeah, you get a good kicking too,’ Linda said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Not your fault.’ Helen was too tired to be overly concerned, and it was too late anyway. It did not make Linda’s ex-husband any less of a sleazeball, but people had known who and what she was for at least twenty-four hours; had already marked her out.