Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  Yesterday’s front page had seen to that.

  She remembered the look on the face of that boy outside the toilets the night before. Triumph, amusement, as he’d wiped the back of a hand across his lips and dabbed at the dribble on his polo shirt, a second before he’d turned on his heels and led his friends away.

  You’re a disgrace . . .

  ‘All that crap about our amicable split.’ Linda leaned across to jab at the pages. ‘His great relationship with the kids. You should hear what Danny said about him after he’d gone.’

  Helen read on. ‘I’d die for my kids’, says frantic father Wayne. ‘And I’ll do whatever it takes to protect them!’

  There was a picture of Wayne Smart looking suitably frantic and, most shocking of all, a picture of the children themselves. It was several years old. Both were wearing Man United football shirts; Charli trying to smile and Danny trying not to.

  ‘They can’t do that, can they?’ Linda asked. ‘I mean, what about privacy or whatever it is.’

  ‘They’re his kids,’ Helen said. ‘His picture, I’m guessing. Both the kids are under eighteen, so he can give them permission to print it.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he isn’t a wanker for doing it.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Helen said.

  ‘Making out like he’s whiter than white,’ Linda said. Spat. ‘I bet nobody’s thought to check his criminal record, have they? Criminal damage, theft, assault. We had the police at the house every couple of months because of complaints from the neighbours.’

  ‘Why did you marry him?’ Helen asked.

  Linda got up slowly. ‘I settled, didn’t I? Settled for him, settled for this place.’ She walked across to the window, no more than a blade of dim light cutting in through a gap in the curtains. ‘Settled for a series of shitty jobs . . . not that there’s been any of them in a while.’ She turned, panic-stricken suddenly. ‘Will they stop my benefits?’

  ‘Why would they?’

  ‘All this.’

  ‘You haven’t done anything,’ Helen said.

  Linda nodded, then turned back to the window and calmly opened the curtains. She stood and stared down across the heads of the police officers on the pavement, towards the small crowd gathered on the opposite side of the road. She didn’t move when people began to shout and point, when the phones and the cameras came out.

  ‘You should come away from there,’ Helen said.

  ‘Sod ’em,’ Linda said. ‘Give them what they want, maybe they can find somebody else to crucify.’

  ‘Or they can just keep on crucifying you.’

  Linda turned and for a second it looked as though she might faint. ‘I feel like I’m drowning,’ she said. ‘I need to get out.’

  ‘I know,’ Helen said.

  ‘Not to a police station or a court. I need to get out of here, just for a few hours.’ She heard voices from the next room. ‘I should really go and talk to the kids about what it says in the paper. I mean I’m sure they know already . . . ’

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Do you mean tea?’

  ‘I mean, whatever you want.’

  Walking down the stairs, Helen was thinking about that helpful neighbour who would almost certainly have brought a copy of today’s paper for her father to see. She thought about him reading it and worrying about her.

  She thought about Alfie, oblivious for now, but easily able to find that picture on the internet within a few years. No such thing as ‘tomorrow’s fish and chip paper’ any more. She thought about that look on his face when he stopped walking halfway round the park and folded his arms and demanded to be carried. The way his lips pursed and he just got stroppier the more she laughed. She thought about the soft skin at the back of his neck, the smell of it.

  The rattle in that shitbag’s throat as he had hawked up phlegm.

  She was no disgrace to anyone or anybody.

  Gallagher was sitting at the kitchen table with a male PC. Helen walked across to the fridge and took out the wine. She opened the cupboard and reached for glasses. She could hear Carson on the phone in the living room.

  ‘I wanted to apologise.’ Gallagher stood up, her propensity for blushing obvious yet again. ‘For what I said to you the other day, about Linda. It was out of order.’

  Helen closed the cupboard, set bottle and glasses on the worktop. She said, ‘Do you want to make it up to me?’

  FORTY-SIX

  They met at the edge of the woods and walked to the spot where Jessica Toms had been found. The evidential soil had been replaced and the forensic team had packed up and gone, but it was easy to see where they had been. The nearby undergrowth tramped down by dozens of plastic-covered boots, the marks on the ground where the forensic tent had been erected.

  The shape of the grave still clear enough, if you knew where to look.

  ‘It’s not like we’ve got a secret handshake or anything,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘Still surprises me though.’ Thorne shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. It was dry, but bitterly cold. ‘The way you lot stick together, share information.’ He thought about the smile on Tim Cornish’s face the last time they had seen one another. ‘Coppers aren’t quite so good about that, even if they pretend they are.’

  ‘What can I say? I’m a lot more charming than you are. That’s not saying much, mind.’

  ‘Nobody’s arguing,’ Thorne said.

  ‘So, I took a look at the PM report, then I saw the body.’

  They both stared down at the patch of ground from which the body in question had been removed. Lifted from the damp, black earth with rather more care than the man who put it there had taken.

  Care for Jessica Toms, at any rate.

  ‘Not a lot of her left,’ Hendricks said. ‘But you knew that.’

  Thorne nodded, remembering the photographs he had seen.

  ‘The skin had been burned away from the face and torso . . . rather more left on her back and legs. A good deal of that was then removed by insect invasion.’ Hendricks emphasised those final words, with a look on his face that Thorne had seen before; that told him Hendricks had finally managed to order his thoughts a little. That a suspicion had been confirmed.

  ‘Tell me about the report.’

  ‘Cause of death was impossible to ascertain due to the condition of the body.’

  ‘Best guess?’

  ‘Not even one of those,’ Hendricks said. ‘No sign of blunt trauma to the skull, but that’s about it. I don’t know, strangled, maybe? Suffocated?’

  ‘What about time of death?’

  ‘Yeah, well afterwards, I drove across to talk to the forensic entomologist. Believe it or not, he liked me even more than the pathologist.’

  ‘Yeah, the charm thing, I know.’

  ‘No, seriously.’ Hendricks grinned. ‘He really liked me.’

  Thorne sighed. Said, ‘So?’

  ‘So, time’s a bit easier, but still no more than an approximation. Four weeks, give or take, based on the insect activity. The types found within the remains, the order in which the different species arrive and get stuck in to their dinners. The blowflies first, then the clown and carrion beetles that follow to feed on the maggots in the active decay stage. You know all this stuff, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Thorne was thinking that this was all simply confirming what Cornish had told him. He could only hope there was some other reason Hendricks was so animated.

  ‘I mean, it’s not like you haven’t seen a bug feast before.’

  They turned at the sound of a dog barking, one of several they had seen or heard in the ten minutes since they had arrived at the woods. ‘See what I mean?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Plenty of them around, that’s for sure.’

  ‘And they can’t all have no sense of smell.’
/>   ‘My dog’s got no nose,’ Hendricks said.

  Thorne had no time for old jokes. ‘If Jessica was really dead that long, it means she was murdered almost as soon as the killer had taken her. That’s the line Cornish and his team are taking.’

  ‘But you don’t think she was, do you?’

  ‘No.’ Thorne saw that look on Hendricks’ face again. ‘And now you don’t either, do you?’

  ‘Like I said, all about the bugs. The conclusions that get drawn from them.’

  They turned again at a noise nearby and watched a dog come trotting out of the trees behind them. Thorne recognised the labradoodle, then its owner, who appeared a few seconds later, whistling for it.

  The man ambled across, swishing at low-lying branches with his walking stick. He nodded at Thorne, took a rather longer look at Hendricks.

  ‘Afternoon,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Last time I saw you, you were creeping out from behind some bushes.’

  Thorne looked at Hendricks. ‘I was caught short.’

  Hendricks looked at the dog-owner and shook his head. ‘Don’t believe a word he says.’

  The man stared, as though unsure how to respond, suspicious that he was being made the butt of a joke he didn’t understand. Slowly, a smile appeared. ‘It’s what always happens on TV shows, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The cop coming back to the crime scene.’ He looked at Hendricks. ‘You a copper, as well?’

  ‘No.’ Hendricks bent to make a fuss of the dog, who was nuzzling around his legs.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ Thorne said.

  ‘The copper or the killer,’ the man said. ‘One of them always goes back to the scene of the crime. Both of them, sometimes.’

  ‘Only if the TV show’s run out of ideas,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘Can’t happen though, can it?’ The man snapped his fingers and the dog trotted back to him, jumped up to sniff at his pocket. ‘Not the killer anyway. Not unless Steve Bates fancies breaking out of prison.’ The dog barked at nothing in particular and the man told it to be quiet.

  Thorne looked at Hendricks. ‘We should be getting back.’

  Goodbyes were quickly nodded or mumbled.

  ‘Nice to have it back to normal though,’ the man said. ‘Nice that we can all walk our dogs again.’

  Thorne and Hendricks trudged back the way they had come, the dog following them, until Thorne shooed it away, while its owner stepped forward and used his stick to prod tentatively at the ground beneath which Jessica Toms had been buried.

  ‘It was the burning thing that was bothering me,’ Hendricks said, once they were out of sight. ‘The partial burning. Now I’ve read the report and seen the body, it doesn’t bother me any more.’

  ‘Now it’s something else, though,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Let’s assume you’re right and that she wasn’t dead four weeks, nothing like four weeks.’ Hendricks moved ahead, then turned, stepping backwards a few feet ahead of Thorne. ‘How do you make a body that’s actually relatively fresh look like it’s been rotting a fair while?’

  ‘Never mind how,’ Thorne said. ‘What about why?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t got that far yet.’ Hendricks waved his hands, impatient to get to his point. ‘Anyway, that’s your job, I would have thought.’

  Thorne wasn’t sure what his job was. Right now, all he could do was follow, and listen.

  ‘We both know that once a body’s been dead for more than a week or so, the normal signposts for time of death . . . temperature, lividity, what have you, aren’t really in play any more. Especially when you haven’t got a lot of the body left to work with. We all know it’s pretty much down to the entomologists after that, right? You ask me, almost anyone who’s watched a cop show or two knows that much.’

  ‘Why doesn’t it bother you any more, Phil?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The fact that the body was only partially burned.’

  Hendricks smiled, enjoying it. ‘Because I know why he did it. He burned the body just enough to open it up, didn’t he? To expose what was needed.’

  ‘To open it up for what?’

  Hendricks shrugged and answered as though it were blindingly obvious.

  ‘To put the bugs in.’

  Those watching the house reacted predictably quickly, despite the speed at which the people who came out of it moved down the front path, hurrying towards the waiting car.

  The young male PC leading the woman with a blanket over her head.

  The money shot . . .

  The officers stationed on the pavement opposite could not stop several people pushing past them and moving into the road; one or two getting to within a few feet of the woman, hurling abuse before the door of the squad car was opened and she was pushed down and into the back seat.

  The male PC shouted, ‘Go,’ and ‘Move.’

  Though officers tried to clear a path for the vehicle, those few journalists who weren’t pointing their cameras at the side window moved quickly to position themselves directly in front. They instantly began shooting through the windscreen, so that for ten or fifteen seconds, until they were pushed aside, the car could only nose forward slowly, while those still watching and shouting from the pavement walked quickly or jogged alongside, towards the end of the road. As the police car finally built up a little speed and switched on its blues and twos, people began to run to keep pace with it; motorbikes and scooters were fired up and a small convoy quickly formed to follow the car around the corner and away, their engines buzzing like angry wasps.

  At the same time, the front door to the house opened again and Helen Weeks walked calmly out with Linda Bates towards a second, unmarked car. By this time, there was only a handful of people left outside the house, and nobody was paying a great deal of attention.

  One woman looked up after stamping out a cigarette and tugged at the sleeve of the woman next to her. They both looked towards the corner around which the police car had gone, then back again. The confusion on their faces was clear enough from the other side of the road.

  Linda smiled and climbed into the car.

  She gave the women two fingers as Helen pulled quickly away.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Helen followed the same route she and Thorne had taken a couple of days before. There was still a good deal of chaos, but it was clear that the floodwater had subsided still further, as many of the roads that had been closed then were now just about passable. She stopped first at the pub she and Thorne had eaten in and left Linda in the car to check it out. Even though the food rush had finished, there were still too many customers taking extra-long lunch hours for her liking, so she drove twenty minutes further out, until she found somewhere a little less busy.

  ‘Don’t want a place that’s deserted though, do we?’ Linda had said. ‘We’ll stick out like the proverbial and it probably means it’s a shithole.’

  ‘As long as there’s sandwiches and half-decent wine, I think we’ll survive,’ Helen said.

  The pub provided both and Helen carried food and drink across to a table in the corner, out of sight of the door.

  Linda got stuck in, talking more as she did so than at any time since Helen had arrived. Her spirits had visibly lifted the moment they’d left the house. She had cheered as they’d driven away, clearly relishing the subterfuge, laughing at the thought of Gallagher under that blanket and jabbering excitedly as though she and Helen were Thelma and Louise off on an adventure. Now, the first glass of wine safely put away, she continued talking about her relationship with Wayne Smart. She had known it was a mistake from the beginning, she told Helen, except for the kids who were the only decent thing to come out of it. She had made the best of a bad job once Danny and Charli had come along.

  Helen nodded. ‘What people do.’

  ‘Stupid people,’ Linda said.

  �
��You’re not stupid.’

  ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s arse.’ Linda smiled as she said it. ‘And that’s what it was. What he was.’

  ‘Still is, by the look of it,’ Helen said. She thought about her father again, how upset he would be about the story Smart had given to the newspaper.

  ‘That’s what was so great about Steve,’ Linda said. ‘He was everything Wayne wasn’t. He was great with the kids and he seemed to actually care about me, you know? Basically, he gave a toss and there haven’t been too many people I could say that about over the years.’

  ‘Counts for a lot,’ Helen said.

  ‘I’d always picked the wrong bloke until Steve came along.’ She looked at Helen. ‘Yeah, I’m well aware how that sounds under the circumstances.’

  ‘It sounds fine.’

  ‘Course it bloody doesn’t,’ Linda said. ‘Sounds completely mental, but I still don’t believe he’s done the things they say he’s done, so how can I not stand by him?’ She laughed, poured more wine. ‘God, I sound like that old song, don’t I?’

  She began to hum the tune to the Tammy Wynette classic. A song Helen knew that Thorne liked. Helen looked around. There was a man working behind the bar, but he was not exactly being mobbed by customers. A couple sat at a table in the window and two men were drinking in the opposite corner. A woman sat at the bar, tapping busily at her phone.

  ‘Would you stand by him if you thought he was guilty?’ Helen asked.

  Linda took a drink, thought about it. ‘Yeah, I think I probably would. Better or worse, isn’t it? I always thought women who did that were pathetic, but I’m just being honest.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Helen said.

  Linda sat back and grinned. ‘You and me had a row about a boy once, remember? Because we both fancied him.’

  ‘The one who went lamping?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I didn’t fancy him.’