Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  ‘I was just saying how he was going to be all right in there, how he was going to end up bossing the place and everything. I bet he had people running around doing whatever he wanted, didn’t he?’

  Linda said, ‘Do us a favour love. Go down to the kitchen and get me a glass of wine.’

  Danny looked horrified, pushed at Charli with his foot. ‘Why can’t she go and get it?’

  ‘Mum asked you,’ Charli said.

  ‘Please, love.’

  ‘Can I have one?’

  ‘You can have a Coke or something, and there’s crisps in the cupboard.’

  Grumbling, Danny swung his legs off the bed, and sloped to the door. He said, ‘Taking the piss,’ before he slammed it behind him.

  Linda turned to Charli immediately. ‘There’s something I need to ask you before your brother comes back.’

  ‘What? Has something happened—?’

  ‘Just let me say it, OK?’

  Charli nodded, waited. The wine her mother had sent Danny to get was obviously not going to be her first.

  ‘Did Steve ever . . . touch you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please, baby, you’ve got no idea how hard this is. You know what I’m talking about.’ Linda took a deep breath and said it again quickly. ‘Did he touch you?’

  Charli stared at her mother.

  SIXTY-TWO

  It’s like being high.

  She’s moved beyond the pain now, beyond the fear. The agony has become numbness and she no longer feels as though her arms and legs belong to her, will do what she wants them to do. The terror has given way to a strange kind of excitement; an exhilaration that feels familiar. Her and her friends out in the fields with cider and cigarettes, screaming their heads off then laughing like lunatics.

  It’s not being chilled out, nothing like that, not like she gets on weed when she can afford it. It’s more like that time she was persuaded to try MDMA at a party. The only time she’s ever done it.

  Everything intensified; louder, brighter, lovelier.

  She laughs, remembering how that night was and where she is now.

  It’s funny, she thinks, how the darkness stops being dark after a while, becomes just a different kind of light. It shifts; blooms and withers. It has moods. Maybe it changes when her moods change. Thickens, gets gritty, comes closer.

  Sounds bizarre, but she doesn’t even know if she’s thinking straight.

  She does know that it’s a very different kind of dark when she shuts her eyes. Black velvet behind the lids, with a blanket of speckles, like stars that glow and dart and three bright spots which are always fixed. Close together.

  Her mother, her father, her brother.

  Any time she wants them, there they are.

  The smell, which at any other time would have her chucking up her chips, has become one she is used to, something she breathes in easily now, something she tastes, and the rustlings and scratchings are nearly drowned out by the low drone, which is sometimes in her head and sometimes coming from deep in her throat.

  She remembers the night she took that little blue tablet, the warnings from her mates. Enjoy it while you can, because afterwards it’s not so great.

  Didn’t stop her, of course.

  Now, she drifts high above the pain and the fear. The knowledge that there is a man who did this and who might come back to finish what he started. The thought that when he does, she will probably be dead, if she isn’t already. She smiles, and her dry lips crack, but she doesn’t feel it.

  Being dead would certainly explain a lot.

  Poppy closes her eyes and seeks out those three bright pinpricks.

  Waiting for the comedown.

  SIXTY-THREE

  It was oddly disconcerting, as though Thorne and Helen were invisible. Sitting there, drinking in Paula’s front room; heavy metal providing the unlikely background music while Paula and her boyfriend discussed the Bates case as if they were alone.

  ‘I’m not saying I don’t think he did it, but maybe the police should be looking at alternatives. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Sounds like they’ve got enough evidence.’ Jason Sweeney nodded his head to the music for a few seconds. ‘You don’t charge someone unless you think you can put them away.’

  ‘Something still not right though.’ Paula cast the latest in a series of hopeful glances at Thorne and Helen. Thorne wondered if she’d heard something already, if her friend Donna had been on the phone. ‘I mean, obviously we don’t know because we’re not close to it.’ Another glance, desperate for Thorne or Helen to chip in.

  ‘Closer than most.’ Sweeney pointed his beer can at Thorne and Helen. ‘Not everyone in town’s got coppers as houseguests, have they?’

  ‘Horse’s mouth.’ Paula narrowed her eyes at Thorne. ‘Not that the horse is saying a lot.’

  ‘What are we listening to?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Slayer.’ Sweeney closed his eyes and nodded some more. ‘It’s a compilation I put together. Helps clear my head a bit at the end of the day. Blow some of the shit out.’

  ‘So, your mate Phil gone then?’ Paula sipped her wine casually.

  ‘Yeah, he’s out of your hair.’

  ‘Working on the case somewhere else, is he?’

  Thorne could not help but admire the woman’s determination, her attempt to come at things from a different angle.

  ‘He found a cosier bed,’ Thorne said.

  Paula shook her head, smiling. She knew they were playing a game and was quickly learning that it was one she was not going to win. She growled in mock frustration. ‘Well, because somebody needs to learn to keep their voice down, we know it’s all to do with bugs. Creepy-crawlies or what have you.’

  Sweeney drained his beer. ‘Insects on a body.’ He belched softly. ‘A very accurate way to determine the time of death if there’s significant decomposition.’

  Paula rolled her eyes. ‘Bloody hell, listen to him.’ She looked at Thorne. ‘It is something to do with that though, isn’t it? Whatever you’re secretly working on, your line of inquiry, whatever.’

  Thorne cocked his head as though considering how much to reveal, teasing. ‘Can’t say.’

  ‘Why not? You said yourself you were only here on holiday, that you weren’t really involved.’

  She was trying hard not to show it, but Thorne could see that the woman was growing irritated at her failure to elicit any information. It was as though she felt entitled to something because she had provided him and Helen with a bed for a few nights. Or perhaps it was because Helen had not let her play hopscotch twenty-five years earlier. ‘We don’t want rumours spreading,’ he said. ‘There’s still a girl missing.’

  Paula nodded, but she looked disappointed.

  ‘I suppose it’s like that thing doctors have to swear to,’ Sweeney said. ‘It applies whether they’re working on something or not.’

  ‘Hippocratic oath,’ Paula said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Yeah, well that’s bollocks for a start.’ Paula dug an elbow into her boyfriend’s ribs. ‘This one went to a doctor once with piles, next day all his mates in the pub were pissing themselves and asking if he wanted a cushion.’

  ‘I need to go to bed,’ Helen said.

  Thorne turned to look at her. She had been quick enough to accept the offer of a drink when she and Thorne had got back, but had sat in silence ever since.

  ‘I’ll come up with you,’ he said. When Helen made no objection, he laid the can, still half full, down on the coffee table. ‘Thanks . . . ’

  Paula nodded towards the stereo and nudged Sweeney again. She said, ‘We’ll turn it down a bit.’

  Thorne came out of the bathroom and walked into the bedroom to find Helen crying. She was not making much noise, but the effort involved in staying relatively quiet as she
wept contorted her face between the strangled sobs.

  He asked what the matter was, whispered it. He wasn’t even sure that she’d heard him come in, that she knew he was there.

  After a minute or so, he thought that she did, but perhaps she hadn’t heard him speak. The music was still loud enough downstairs.

  He had no idea what to do.

  She would not look at him.

  He lay down next to her and waited. He watched her chest heaving, stared at the heels of her hands when she pressed them to her eyes. It was several minutes before her breathing returned to something like normal and she was ready to say anything.

  ‘I was abused.’ She looked at him for a second or two then went back to staring at the far wall. ‘Here, when I was twelve. Thirteen, too. It went on for a couple of years, I suppose . . . ’

  She folded her arms across her chest, lay still for a minute or so.

  ‘He was a friend of my dad’s, someone he’d worked with for a while. He said that if I told anyone then he’d go to my dad and say I’d been asking him to do it, that I was just a little slut, and he convinced me that my dad would believe him and not me. He said it was all my fault, that I’d made him do it, and it took a long time before I started to believe that it wasn’t. That I hadn’t encouraged him in some way. It wasn’t just me. It’s what he said to Linda as well . . . how he stopped her from saying anything.’ She glanced at Thorne. ‘We talked about it . . . not at first, but after it had been going on for a while. From then on we tried to look after each other, to stay together whenever we could, to avoid the situations where he could get us on our own. There was a place he took us to, where it first happened, I mean, but afterwards there were times he would come to the house . . . he’d just turn up and pretend to be surprised when my dad wasn’t in. When it was just me and Jenny. He’d help himself to a beer, sit down next to me and talk like he was just waiting for Dad to get home. Sometimes he’d be touching me when Jenny was in the same room . . .

  ‘I swore that I’d never let him get near her, but I don’t know for sure. I couldn’t be with her all day, every day. There might have been times, you know? I knew he was looking at her and once, when he caught me, he said that I’d better keep loving him or he’d have to try somebody else and I knew he was talking about my sister. “Loving” him. That’s how he described it. Like loving means bleeding. Lying still like you’re dead and throwing your guts up afterwards.

  ‘Jenny never said anything, but she was so cold with me after I left and I’ve always wondered. The way she judges me sometimes. I’ve always thought that I must have let her down . . . that she thinks maybe I didn’t do enough to protect her.

  ‘Same with Linda. I think it’s why I wanted to come back when I found out she was in trouble.’ She shook her head. ‘I know that’s why. I needed to be here for her now, because I’d left so suddenly back then. I never even told her I was going . . . and we were supposed to be a team. He’d already stopped by then, because we were too old for him, I suppose, but talking about what he did made it so much easier for both of us afterwards and once I’d left she had nobody. She had to cope with it all on her own. Bumping into him in the pub or in the street, him looking at her, making sure her own daughter stayed well away from him. I can’t imagine what that must have been like. Jesus . . . Steve screwing around, everything that’s going on . . . it isn’t the only reason she puts a bottle away before lunchtime every day.’

  Thorne inched towards her. He reached across until his hand found hers, but she did not return its pressure.

  Lying still, like you’re dead.

  He swallowed and mentally worded a question, but there was no need to ask it.

  ‘He’s not here any more . . . there’s no way I would have come back if he’d still been here. My dad still mentions him sometimes though. They stayed in touch after Mum died and Dad moved down south and I lived in dread of him coming to visit or something. Dad rang me up a year or so back, told me how sad it was that his old mate had gone downhill so fast, that he’d had to go into care. A residential home, somewhere the other side of Tamworth, I think. Sometimes I’d imagine going to visit him in there . . . just so I could see him shrunk and helpless, so then maybe that would be the memory I’d have of him and not the one I’ve had every day for twenty-five years. Saying he was sorry . . . still sweating while he tucked his shirt back in. I’d go to that place, so I could enjoy watching him sit there, weak as a baby and stinking of shit and not able to do anything.’

  Now, Thorne felt his hand being squeezed hard.

  ‘Just so I could watch him.’

  She turned her head to look at Thorne. ‘His name was Peter Harley, and that girl we met in the pub is his granddaughter. That girl with a thing for older men.’

  Thorne remembered Helen disappearing soon after Aurora Harley had introduced herself. The way she had been afterwards. Her face grey, ashen, but something smouldering as she clutched at a skinny girl’s silver jacket.

  There’s no need to be scared . . .

  His thoughts reeled like drunks, lurched and tumbled over one another; scraps and screams and images he would never be able to unsee. Plenty of pictures, but only one word able to find its way into his mouth.

  Just Helen’s name.

  From downstairs, the shriek of a guitar and a bass like a punch to the heart, and, in their bed, only the ragged gulp and moan and the catch in the chest as Helen began to cry again.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  He hears things.

  It’s that kind of place, after all, one of the things he likes best about being here. In a big city, people never get to know what anyone else is up to, not really, never get to care; minding their own business and suspicious about anyone who might be interested in theirs. They casually raise their newspaper or turn their music up while someone is getting attacked in the same train carriage. They slink away, mortified, when others start to argue or laugh too loudly.

  They don’t want to get involved.

  Admittedly, the business that gets talked about here is not always earth-shattering. Who’s shagging who, who’s fallen out, who got pissed and punched someone. Still, it helps you feel part of something. He also knows that what he’s hearing is rarely the unvarnished truth. That’s the nature of rumours when you get down to it. Things get exaggerated, the facts get twisted the more a story is repeated. A stupid row can become an impending divorce within the space of three conversations and a harmless bit of flirting in the pub yesterday is likely to become full-on sex in a toilet cubicle by the same time tomorrow.

  He likes to hear it, all the same, to feel like he’s monitoring the heartbeat of the town. He doesn’t like what he’s been hearing about that policeman, though.

  Thorne.

  Even allowing for the exaggeration, it’s clear that the copper from London has been making a far better job of things than the coppers who are being paid for it. They all did exactly what he’d wanted them to do, went for all that lovely evidence like ferrets down a rathole, thank you very much. How the hell did Thorne and his skinhead boyfriend see something that the rest of those idiots couldn’t?

  Good luck, bad luck. Whichever shade of it you were on the receiving end of, he’d always known that luck was something you could never guard against. He’d had his fair share of the good sort, after all.

  Having someone like Bates around had been the biggest slice of it he could ever ask for.

  He’d known what they were up to for a few days already. There had been some chatter about insects being important and then talk about the visit to Bob Patterson’s farm, so it was pretty obvious that they’d put a lot of it together. But thank God, he was also hearing how nobody else was very interested, telling Thorne and his mate they should mind their own business, which was pretty ironic, all things considered.

  He’d told himself there was no need to panic just yet. He had to carry on as no
rmal, that was all, sit tight and keep his ears open.

  Now though, there were whispers that the case against Bates wasn’t quite as solid as anyone had thought. Now, so he’d heard more than once, people who actually mattered were starting to sit up and ask questions.

  Cornish and his boss, the CPS, for heaven’s sake . . .

  The plan had always been to let things die down a bit. To bide his time until there were a few less coppers knocking about, then go back to see Poppy and celebrate in style. He’d thought things would ease off a little once Bates had been arrested, that they might at least scale down the search and give him a chance to have some fun. The flooding hadn’t made things any easier.

  He hadn’t thought things would get quite as stupid as they did, and it wasn’t like the police could be seen to ease off now, was it? Not with film crews everywhere you looked and half the country’s reporters still hanging around to watch. Hard as it was, he’d resigned himself to the terrible fact that by the time the coast was well and truly clear, there might not be a great deal of his lovely Poppy left to enjoy.

  The very idea that she might not be there for him when all this was over enraged him. Just considering the unfairness of it for more than a few seconds left him feeling scalded, almost breathless. He’d put so much effort into it, so much thought.

  Any more talk about arresting the wrong man though, he might have to take a risk by going back to make sure.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Thorne’s phone rang just after six thirty am and he scrabbled for it, a reflex. Were he not on holiday, a call this early would almost certainly mean that he’d caught a murder.

  It was not a number he recognised.

  ‘Woke you, did I?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Thorne shifted to the edge of the bed and dropped his voice, hoping that Helen had not been woken up too. Neither of them had got a lot of sleep. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Bob Patterson.’