TT13 Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  ‘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 page.’

  ‘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.

  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.’