Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  It took Thorne a few seconds to place the name. ‘It’s very early.’

  ‘For you, maybe. I’ve been up since five.’

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘So anyway . . . I’ve been thinking about whoever stole my piglet.’

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said. Helen turned towards him, groaning softly. He reached out to touch her shoulder. Her skin felt cold, so he pulled the sheet up.

  ‘Reckoned you might be interested,’ Patterson said. ‘That’s all. You said, if I thought of anything that might help.’

  ‘Who is it?’ Helen asked.

  Thorne shook his head and sat up. ‘I’m listening, Mr Patterson.’

  ‘I’ve not got time to tell you now, have I?’ The farmer sounded exasperated. ‘I’ve still got animals to feed. I’ll be having my breakfast in an hour or so though . . . ’

  While the farmer gave him instructions, Thorne watched the first thin fingers of light from outside reaching through the gap in the floral curtains. When the call had finished, he tossed his phone on to the bed and sat there as, unbidden, a conversation with his father came into his mind.

  It was more than just the memory of those old springs and speakers on Bob Patterson’s kitchen table. It had been an attempt to understand why his father had felt the need to get up at stupid o’clock every morning, the time getting progressively earlier in inverse proportion to the number of things the old man actually needed to do.

  ‘I can get up when I want, can’t I?’ Jim Thorne had begun to sound irritated, the fuse getting shorter as the Alzheimer’s took hold. ‘Free country last time I checked.’

  ‘I’m only thinking of you,’ Thorne had said. ‘You got up every day to go to work and now, when you’ve got the chance . . . ’

  ‘Why would I want to stay in bed? Festering.’ The old man had been walking quickly from room to room, checking each one out but refusing to say what he was looking for. Now, he stopped and looked at Thorne, an increasingly rare moment of clarity. He said, ‘You get to my age you have to grab hold of every second by the throat. Sleeping it all away would be like giving up.’

  ‘I know that, but most of the time you end up falling asleep again anyway, sitting in front of the telly.’

  ‘It’s a question of making an effort.’

  Paula was working an early shift so Thorne guessed that the central heating had already kicked in, but it had not quite taken the chill off the room yet. He slipped quickly back beneath the covers.

  ‘What did he want?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Something about the pig he had stolen. Says he wants to meet me.’

  ‘Right.’ Helen’s eyes were still closed and she spoke softly, as if she were not quite ready to wake up, to engage.

  ‘Are you going to Linda’s?’

  ‘Don’t know yet.’

  Thorne could hear Paula moving around downstairs. The chink of crockery and the scrape of a chair, a radio being switched on. He tried to place the song, but couldn’t. ‘So, is that all right?’

  Now, Helen opened her eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just . . . if you wanted to talk some more.’

  ‘I think I’ve probably said everything.’

  Thorne nodded. Helen’s words had been mumbled, deadened by the pillow, but still there had seemed an odd emphasis to them. Was there a suggestion there was more she was waiting for him to say? Had he not said enough the night before?

  Had he not said the right things?

  ‘I’ll call you when I’ve spoken to the farmer.’

  Helen turned over slowly. She said, ‘I’m not ill, Tom.’

  ‘Tell you what he said about the pig, I mean.’

  Helen watched him struggle to get dressed in the semi-dark. Moving as quietly as he could, digging for clean socks and underwear in the suitcase he had still not bothered to unpack.

  She was happy for him to go, keen to spend some time alone.

  She had not meant to be sharp with him, but it felt as if the filters that modified her reactions were no longer working, as though they had been slowly eaten away from the moment she had set foot back in Polesford. It was obvious that he had been worried for a while, that her behaviour had seemed strange, but there had been no way to control it. It felt like the circuits in her brain had been rewired by a lunatic; the connections to her heart misfiring or burned out completely. She had been ready to kill that teenager for gobbing at her, that journalist for doing her job. She craved affection and support and yet she had no idea what to do with them when they were offered.

  There was no more than a crumb of comfort in knowing that she was not alone, that Linda Bates probably felt the same way.

  She had told Helen that she would call, but Helen was not expecting her to. She wondered if they would ever see one another again. Their conversation about Aurora Harley, about the things the girl’s grandfather had done, had been no more . . . cathartic than the one with Thorne.

  Tears, but a strange reluctance to touch, to make any kind of physical contact, and when it was over it felt as though they were all but unknown to each other again.

  So many times at work she had told strangers how much better they would feel once they had told this or that terrible story. It was important to share these things, she would blithely tell them, to get it off their chests so that they could move on.

  A weight off their shoulders.

  It had not felt like that telling Tom, did not feel like it now. He had held her for a long time afterwards, said all those things anyone with an ounce of empathy or compassion would say, but she had felt something hardening with each overly gentle touch and promise, every whispered assurance.

  The weight had moved somewhere else, that was all.

  Now, she lay still, knowing that he was dressed and ready to leave but that he was standing at the end of the bed, watching her. Eventually, she heard the door open, the slow drag back across the carpet and the soft snick as he closed it behind him with as little noise as possible. She pulled the bedclothes close around her neck and shoulders, hoped that she might be able to get back to sleep for a while.

  It wasn’t Tom she had needed to tell.

  Hendricks woke to the sound of self-satisfied babble on Radio 4 and the sight of Liam Southworth’s fingers crawling across his chest. They stopped to tease a nipple for a while, then began to move down. Hendricks turned his head and saw the grin he’d quickly come to recognise as meaning it was time to get naughty.

  That was how Liam described it. ‘Getting naughty’.

  ‘Sleep well?’

  Hendricks nodded. ‘Knackered.’

  Liam’s grin widened. ‘Me too.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a lecture first thing?’

  ‘I set the alarm early.’

  ‘Come here.’ Hendricks reached across and drew Liam to him, stretched his arms wide across the pillows as Liam laid his head on his shoulder. ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Yeah, it is,’ Liam said.

  Hendricks meant it. He felt as relaxed as he had in a long time, having finally come to terms with his surprise at not feeling the urge to bolt once he’d got Liam Southworth into bed. He looked at Liam’s fingers, now moving through the sparse tufts of hair on his chest. Liam’s own chest was almost hairless, something else Hendricks liked. His last few boyfriends . . . partners, whatever . . . had been very much on the hirsute side – certainly far hairier than Liam was at any rate – and although he had found it sexy up to a point, there was no denying that a frenzied bout of tongue-thrashing was a lot more fun without the inevitable stubble-rash.

  Recently, the other stuff had been that bit less gentle too, and both he and the men involved would have certainly described what they’d been up to in bed – or more memorably in the toilets at several clubs – in rather more graphic terms than Liam. That had been fine with Hen
dricks at the time. It had been what he had wanted, needed. This though, the last couple of nights, had been something else altogether, something he hadn’t done for a long time. Yeah . . . this was all right.

  Nothing wrong with getting naughty.

  ‘Might be getting some news today from my pal in the lab,’ Liam said.

  ‘That would be good.’ Hendricks was thinking that Thorne would be pleased and that Liam’s accent really was the sexiest thing he’d ever heard.

  ‘She’s done us quite a favour, you know?’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘And she’s still asking questions about who’s going to pay for it. I mean you know how much all this stuff costs, right? The extraction of the sample, the front-end analysis, the bio-chemical procedures.’

  ‘Can’t you just buy her a box of chocolates or something?’

  ‘I mean just the use of the electrophoresic laser, you know . . . ’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Hendricks said. ‘You seriously need to work on your pillow talk.’

  ‘Just telling you.’

  ‘I’m kidding.’ Hendricks was surprised at feeling the need to qualify his remark, to be sure that Liam did not feel bad.

  ‘One thing though.’ Liam’s fingers stopped moving against Hendricks’ chest. ‘I got a call from Tim Cornish.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Not best pleased, as you can imagine.’

  ‘Oh, I can.’

  ‘Once he’d finished shouting the odds, he made it pretty clear that he was the first person I should call. You know, if we got a result.’

  ‘Wanker made out like he wasn’t interested.’

  ‘Yeah, well I can promise you, he is.’

  ‘What’s he going to do with the information when he gets it, anyway?’

  ‘What’s your mate Tom going to do with it?’

  Hendricks sat up a little. ‘Is this going to be a problem for you? I mean with all the consulting jobs?’

  Liam was shaking his head.

  ‘You’re not going to lose any work over it, right?’

  ‘Long as I tell Cornish first, it’ll be fine.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I was worried you’d be pissed off,’ Liam said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘It is what it is.’ Hendricks shrugged. ‘Not sure Tom’s going to be too chuffed, but what can you do?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Let me make it up to you . . . ’

  ‘There’s no need, honest.’ Then Hendricks saw that welcome grin again and watched Liam raise the duvet above his head and duck down beneath it.

  Hendricks lay back and said, ‘I’ve forgotten about it already.’

  SIXTY-SIX

  It was a greasy spoon Thorne had not come across so far, tucked away between a builder’s yard and a dental surgery, a couple of streets behind the market square. It didn’t appear to have a name, but probably because it didn’t need one. In the steamed-up windows were laminated pictures of the delights available within that almost certainly fell foul of the Trade Descriptions Act, but only someone without a sense of smell would need the help.

  Whenever people talked about favourite smells, it was usually something airy-fairy like freshly cut grass or sea air. New books, for pity’s sake . . .

  Thorne had started slavering when he was still a street away.

  It was small, no more than half a dozen tables which were all taken, and Thorne spotted Bob Patterson straight away. He recognised the occupant of the adjacent table too; the chef-cum-poet from the Magpie’s Nest, with whom the farmer seemed to be chatting happily. Patterson still had a plateful, but it looked as though Shelley was about done. He reached for his jacket and tossed a few scraps of bacon rind to Patterson’s dog, which was lying beneath the farmer’s table.

  They both nodded at Thorne as he passed on his way to the counter. He ordered the full English and took a mug of strong tea back to Patterson’s table, taking care not to kick the dog as he sat down.

  ‘Surprised she’s allowed in,’ Thorne said.

  ‘They all know her in here.’ Patterson dropped a morsel of his own and nodded towards the man behind the counter who was watching, seemingly unconcerned. ‘Me and the owner have a good relationship.’

  ‘You supply the bacon?’

  Patterson looked horrified. ‘I hope you’re joking. This is mass-produced, factory shit.’ He pushed a piece of it into his mouth. ‘I’ve got a mate who gets them cheap eggs.’

  Shelley stood up. He said, ‘I’m just off, but . . . ’

  ‘Checking out the competition?’ Thorne looked around. ‘I mean, I presume they’re open for lunch.’

  Shelley scoffed. ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Had you down as the muesli type.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Fruit, maybe.’

  The chef smiled thinly and lifted up a shoulder bag; battered, brown leather. Thorne guessed there was a notebook full of meaningless poetry in there, maybe a novel he could take out at an opportune moment. ‘Decent bit of grease doesn’t hurt once in a while though, does it? Oh . . . ’ He reached for the tabloid next to his empty plate and held it towards Thorne. ‘You seen this?’

  Thorne looked at the picture, the headline. They were enough for the time being. He went back to his tea.

  ‘Talk about putting the cat among the pigeons,’ Shelley said. When it became clear that Thorne had no intention of responding, he dropped the paper on to Patterson’s table, then leaned down one final time to scratch the dog’s ears before he left.

  ‘Arrogant arsehole,’ Patterson said.

  Thorne glanced up from his tea. ‘Looked like you were best mates when I came in.’

  ‘Just making conversation.’

  ‘You don’t still think he nicked your pig, do you?’

  Patterson stared at him, a triangle of fried bread dripping from his fork. ‘Course I bloody don’t.’ He popped the bread into his mouth and carried on. ‘Because whoever took that pig had no intention of eating it, did they?’

  Thorne’s food arrived and he got stuck in. He had put half of it away, almost managing to catch up with Patterson, before either of them spoke again.

  ‘He had a point though, didn’t he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him. Cut-price bloody Shakespeare.’ The farmer waved his fork in the direction of the door and then stabbed at the newspaper. ‘Changes things a bit, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Course you have. We’re not all stupid round here, you know?’

  ‘Never thought you were.’

  ‘You’re involved.’ The farmer looked towards the paper again. ‘With that girl, with all of it.’

  Glancing around, Thorne could see that several other customers were reading the same newspaper. He thought about the Harleys; another set of parents whose lives had suddenly been turned upside down. And he thought about a different girl and the things she had endured to protect her little sister.

  ‘I never intended to be,’ he said.

  Patterson smiled, showing yellowing teeth, a sliver of tomato caught on the bottom set. ‘You get caught up, don’t you? When it’s your job. Something about pigs, I’m interested, I can’t help myself. Same for someone like you, I’m guessing. With murder.’

  Hungry as he was, Thorne pushed the black pudding to one side. ‘You said you had some information.’

  ‘Well, let’s just say I’ve been putting things together.’ Patterson tapped the side of his head. ‘Not very difficult, not once people started hearing things and talking about them. That’s how I found out my pig wasn’t stolen to make bacon sandwiches.’

  Thorne grunted, ate.

  ‘The pig’s important, I know that much.’ The farmer leaned forward. ‘Important to whoever it
was took those girls. Killed one of them.’

  ‘Like you said, I’m involved.’ Thorne was trying to hide his impatience. ‘Bearing that in mind, I’m sorry to say that so far, none of this was exactly worth getting out of bed for.’

  Patterson’s shrug suggested that he didn’t really care, that he had better to come. ‘So, obviously you know that this fella Bates is not the one, right? That the police have ballsed it up and the real killer’s still knocking around somewhere.’

  Thorne nodded again. That was always going to be the problem with deliberately leaking bits of information in the hope it would spread. Eventually you would be the one being told things you already knew. ‘You said you had something to tell me about the man who stole your pig.’ Thorne dropped his voice. ‘The real killer.’

  Patterson laid his knife and fork down and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘Well, I know he was on foot, for a start.’ He waited for a reaction then nodded down at his dog. ‘She barks at people she doesn’t know . . . well you’ve seen, haven’t you? But she’s not psychic, is she? She makes the din of the bloody devil if there’s any car coming towards the place, and she didn’t make a squeak that night. So, I reckon he parked up somewhere and walked the rest of the way. Probably stuck the piglet in a sack, something like that, then carried it back to the car.’ He nodded, pleased with himself. ‘Oh yeah, he certainly planned it all out.’ There was a hint of ‘you’re welcome’ in the look he gave Thorne before he went back to his breakfast. ‘So . . . do with that what you will.’

  Thorne watched the farmer mop up what was left on his plate with a limp slice of toast and controlled the urge to tell him that his dog had probably worked as much out weeks ago. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  ‘Right, well I can’t hang around here gassing all day.’ Patterson pushed back his chair. ‘Things to do.’ He stood and nodded to the man behind the counter, then turned for the door without saying goodbye, the dog at his heels.

  Behind him, Thorne could hear the owner shouting orders through to the kitchen. He watched the farmer leave, thinking that even if being busy meant filling cardboard boxes with yellowing magazines, at least the old man had plans. Thorne had left the house with the distinct impression that Helen was happy to be left alone, and he had no idea what he was going to do with himself.