TT13 Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Of course I love her and I want to spend some time with her, I mean what else do you think this has been about, but I need to take care of myself, don’t I?’ He sniffed. ‘If it came down to it, I’d carve her up as easy as I did that pig.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  ‘Up to you,’ Hare said. ‘Take a gamble. You’ll be the one who has to live with it. Something else to keep you awake at night.’

  Helen did not need torchlight to tell her that Hare was grinning.

  ‘So, here’s what’s happening.’ Hare moved the torch beam slowly back and forth between Helen and Thorne. When the light fell on Thorne, Helen could see that he was looking at her. It was never there long enough for her to ascertain his intentions, any message he might be trying to send. ‘You pair need to keep very still while I get this chain unlocked.’ Poppy began to squeal again and this time Hare leaned down quickly and laid the blade of the knife against her cheek. ‘Shush. You really need to keep it down, Pops. Giving me a headache …’

  ‘Please,’ Helen said. ‘Just leave her alone and leave. Lock us all in here and by the time anybody finds us you’ll be long gone.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got part of that right.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Let’s start by getting shot of your phones. Just take them out slowly and chuck them on the floor nice and hard.’

  Helen went first, then Hare moved the beam across to Thorne and watched him do the same. Helen winced at the crack as his phone smashed on the stone floor.

  ‘Very good,’ Hare said. ‘Now, you just need to keep still while I get this done, and we’ll be out of your way.’

  From opposite corners, Thorne and Helen watched as Hare stepped across to where a jacket was hanging on the wall. Using the torch to monitor them every step of the way, he reached first into one pocket and then another, until he found what he was looking for. He held the small key up to the light so they could both see it, then leaned down slowly.

  ‘Right, now this’ll be a bit easier if you … here you go.’ He gently manoeuvred Poppy from her knees on to her backside. She was crying steadily and put up no resistance, struggling to catch her breath between sobs. ‘Soon have this thing off you, love.’

  Thorne watched and waited for the right moment. He knew instinctively that Helen would be thinking the same as he was. If they allowed Hare to take Poppy out of here, then she was dead anyway.

  They both knew what Hare had done to Jessica Toms the moment he was done with ‘loving’ her.

  His back against the wall, Hare struggled to get the key into the shackle around Poppy’s wrist. He said, ‘Bloody thing,’ and tutted as though he was struggling to thread a needle, then when he tried, somewhat clumsily, to move the knife to the same hand that was holding the torch, Poppy lashed out.

  There was a dull crack as her boot connected hard with Hare’s lower leg and then a crash as both torch and knife fell to the floor.

  Thorne and Helen both moved quickly, but so did Hare.

  ‘He’s over here,’ Poppy shouted. ‘He’s here …’

  Helen made for where she thought the knife might have fallen and as she scrabbled for it in the water, she was aware that Thorne and Hare were already struggling. She could hear blows being landed, breath being punched out. It was long seconds before her fingers finally closed around the handle of the knife and she stood and moved back to the bottom of the steps at the same time as she heard bodies go crashing into the far corner.

  There were a few moments of silence.

  ‘Where is he?’ Poppy shrieked.

  ‘Tom?’ Helen heard moaning and then saw a figure rising from the far corner. She moved back, felt the bottom step hard against her heel. ‘Tom, that you?’

  Thorne’s voice came from somewhere closer to the floor; pained, winded. ‘Don’t let him leave …’

  She heard a grunt of anger that she knew had not come from Thorne, a second before the figure ran at her.

  She tightened her grip on the knife, held on tight even as she felt the push, before the blade slipped easily into flesh.

  Hare – and Helen prayed that it was him – sighed as he stepped away and off the knife, and, in that moment when Helen froze, realising what she had done, he was charging at her again, pushing her aside and clambering up the steps.

  Thorne shouted Helen’s name.

  She spun round and watched Hare crash out through the hatch. ‘Tom?’

  A second later there was torchlight dancing across the steps and turning to see where it was coming from, Helen saw Poppy climbing unsteadily to her feet. The girl’s hands were trembling so much that she could barely hold the torch steady.

  Helen lifted the knife, looked at the blood.

  Then Thorne was moving slowly towards her, panting and holding his side.

  ‘He ran on to it,’ she said.

  Thorne nodded and knelt, reached to pick up the two halves of Helen’s handset, the battery. He wiped everything down on his shirt, snapped it all back into place and tried to switch it on. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  As Helen watched Thorne climbing the steps and heading out into the darkness after Trevor Hare, she heard Poppy’s voice behind her.

  ‘I’ll tell them it was me … tell them I did it.’

  Helen turned and walked across, arms outstretched.

  ‘I wish it had been me,’ Poppy said.

  LONDON

  SEVENTY-SIX

  Helen kept on smiling as she walked towards reception, used her pass to go through the security door and took the stairs to the second floor. She returned each nod of recognition, said ‘fine’ and ‘thanks’ every time she was stopped and asked how she was doing. She did her best not to react to the looks of surprise and the whispered conversations that began almost as soon as she had walked past.

  It was like being back in Polesford.

  Three weeks since she had left her hometown for what she guessed would be the final time; four since she had last been in this place.

  It felt like a lot longer.

  She spotted her DCI moving between desks in the incident room. She hung back until she had caught his eye and watched him try to hide his irritation when he saw her. He nodded towards his office and she followed, another ‘fine’, another ‘thanks’ or two along the way.

  DCI Adam Bonner sat back and sighed. He leaned forward again and straightened some papers. ‘You’re not supposed to be here, Helen.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘So, why make it more difficult than it has to be?’

  ‘I’m not trying to make it difficult.’

  ‘It’s just routine, you know that. It’ll all get sorted in a couple more weeks and you can get back to work. But until then …’

  Helen had been suspended on full pay, pending a full investigation into the events leading up to the death of Trevor Hare. The evidence of Poppy Johnston looked more than likely to clear Helen completely, but until the Professional Standards Directorate had finished looking into it all, there was still a … shadow.

  Thorne had told her not to worry. He had lost count of his run-ins with the Rubberheelers. Bonner had said the same and did so again now.

  ‘You’ve just got to sit it out,’ he said. ‘Have a holiday or something. I mean your last one wasn’t exactly relaxing, was it?’

  Hare had been found floating face down in Pretty Pigs Pool at first light the following day. Wedged against the bank, as ducks, lily-pads and empty cans floated nearby. The postmortem had determined drowning to be the cause of death. Trevor Hare was a reasonably fit fifty-five-year-old and, according to his widow, a strong swimmer. In his comments, the pathologist had noted that heavy blood loss due to the knife wound – though not life-threatening in itself – might have contributed to the victim’s inability to get himself out of the freezing water.

  It was unclear, and likely to remain so, how Hare had ended up in the water to begin with. He knew the area well, but it was dark and he was wounded, disoriented perhaps. He could easily have sli
pped. The ground was treacherous.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Thorne had said. ‘Don’t care.’

  ‘What about it?’ Bonner asked now. ‘There’s some good last-minute deals to be had in Greece this time of year.’

  ‘I’m here to report a case of historic child abuse,’ Helen said.

  Bonner looked at her.

  ‘It’s what we do, isn’t it? Well, it was last time I was here.’

  The DCI lifted a notepad from the other side of the desk. ‘How historic are we talking about?’

  ‘Twenty-five years.’

  Bonner gently laid his pen down. ‘Helen, you know as well as anyone what a nightmare these old cases are. You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Helen said. ‘And I know what a nightmare it’s going to be.’

  The DCI picked up his pen again. ‘You got a name for the perpetrator?’

  Helen gave him the name. ‘He’s in a care home near Tamworth. I’ll need to check the exact address.’

  ‘A care home?’

  Helen was already shaking her head. ‘I don’t care if he’s old, Adam. I don’t care if he’s bedridden and living on mashed potato and pissing through a tube. I want him done for this.’

  Bonner had learned over several years of having Helen on his team that there was little point in arguing when she was this fired-up about a case. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘We’ll start the preliminaries, but you know you won’t be able to work it, don’t you? With this Standards thing still going on.’

  ‘I can’t work it anyway.’

  Bonner looked at her again, a flicker of confusion. He went back to his notebook. ‘Right, what’s the victim’s name?’

  ‘It’s me,’ Helen said. ‘I’m the victim.’

  She stopped in the car park and leaned against a wall, keen to get some air and to let her breathing return to normal. A squad car pulled in and parked up and she watched two uniformed officers that she recognised step out. One of them clocked her and looked set to come over, so she stared down at her phone until he had gone inside.

  There were some difficult conversations to be had before she could think about talking shop.

  With her father. With Linda …

  They had not seen one another since the events at Pretty Pigs Pool and, until now, Helen had been content to leave the ball in Linda’s court. She had left her number, but Linda had not called. Helen remembered their last conversation, the night they had talked about Aurora Harley, then, finally about her grandfather.

  It must have been hard coming back.

  Harder staying.

  Home, wasn’t it? Never had a way out.

  Did you ever see him?

  A few times. I wanted Wayne or Steve to kill him, almost told them about it once or twice. He smiled at me in the street …

  Helen had been told that Linda’s house was on the market, but knew little of her plans beyond that, assuming that she and the kids would be looking to start a new life far away from Polesford and from her husband, charges against whom had been quickly dropped and whose whereabouts had not been released to the press.

  Until a photograph had appeared a few days before of Bates and Linda strolling through a Tamworth shopping centre. Now there was speculation about the size of the wrongful arrest settlement.

  There was talk of a book deal …

  Helen would need to tell Linda what she was doing and that she had already passed on her name to those who would soon be arresting Peter Harley. It might well put another zero on to that rumoured contract for a book, but Helen did not know how happy Linda would be about it.

  The same went for Aurora Harley, of course, but having made her decision, Helen could not afford to dwell on that. There were those much closer that she needed to consider.

  She walked to the car, got inside and sat for a few minutes thinking about how best to broach the subject, that there was little point in going round the houses. Worrying that she was thinking way too much. Her thumb moved across the screen of her phone and she rubbed at a smudge with the edge of her shirt.

  Then she dialled her sister’s number.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  When the call had ended, Thorne came out of the bedroom. Hendricks lowered the volume on the TV and turned round. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Pretty good, I think,’ Thorne said. ‘She sounded … up. Her sister’s going round later on.’

  ‘Yeah, well let’s see how long she stays “up” for.’

  ‘Didn’t go too badly on the phone apparently.’ Thorne was trying to be optimistic for Helen’s sake, but he knew what Hendricks meant, how difficult Helen’s sister could be. It was inconceivable that things would be the same between them after tonight and he could only hope it was a change for the better.

  ‘You not going over later then?’

  Thorne shook his head. Since coming back from Polesford, he had spent more than the usual number of nights alone at his own flat in Kentish Town, and he had enjoyed them. Hendricks had been travelling to and from Warwick a fair deal and this was their first chance to catch up in a while.

  ‘Just you and me then, big boy.’

  Thorne went into the kitchen to collect beers. When he came back, Hendricks said, ‘You think she’s doing the right thing?’

  ‘Seeing her sister?’

  ‘All of it.’

  Thorne passed a bottle across and sat down. Having seen how painful it had been for Helen to tell him what had happened all those years before, the thought of her having to going through it again in detail – in interview rooms, from a witness box – was terrible. But that had been her choice and there was nobody else qualified to make it. ‘Right thing for her,’ he said.

  ‘She say anything about the suspension?’

  ‘Still ongoing.’ Thorne took a swig. ‘A good few weeks yet, I reckon.’

  ‘Should have accepted the girl’s offer. To say that she’d been the one holding the knife.’ Hendricks looked as though he had more to say, but then his phone rang and he went into the kitchen to take the call, closed the door behind him.

  Thorne knew that his friend was only half joking. There weren’t too many people mourning the death of Trevor Hare and even though Thorne knew the internal investigation would work out in her favour, it seemed hugely unfair that a good officer like Helen had to spend weeks on suspension for unintentionally sticking a knife in him.

  ‘Helen gets suspended and you come out smelling of roses,’ Hendricks had said back then. ‘You, with an entire drawer in the DPS filing cabinet. I did not see that coming.’

  It was not an outcome anyone with any sense would have bet on. Several days’ worth of very positive press. The letters of thanks from the parents of Poppy Johnston and Jessica Toms.

  Even Russell Brigstocke had forgiven him.

  Once she’d been checked over and released from hospital, Poppy Johnston’s evidence had helped them piece things together a bit more, but with no killer to question, the picture was still largely reliant on best guesses. Poppy had been able to confirm that Stephen Bates had given her a lift on the night she was taken. He had been flirty with her in the car, she told them, made certain suggestions, so she had asked him to drop her off at the bus stop. She had only been there a couple of minutes when Trevor Hare had driven up.

  Whether or not Hare had taken Jessica Toms the same night Bates had given her a lift would never be known, but it was obvious he had been watching Bates for a while and knew very well that he was over-fond of young girls. He knew that Bates had already picked up Jessica and that her DNA was there to be found in his car. He knew that he was safe to target her and then Poppy, now that a ready-made suspect had unwittingly lined himself up.

  It was just a question of providing a little more evidence.

  The cigarette end had been ideal and easy enough to get hold of. The fact that Bates lied to the police could only have been a bonus and the material found on his computer must have been a very pleasant surprise, if Hare hadn’t known about it already.
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  Thorne still believed that Jessica Toms had been killed no more than a day or two before Poppy had been taken. It was his suggestion that her body had been kept in the boot of Hare’s car between then and the time he chose to bury it in the woods after Bates had been arrested. Forensic tests on the vehicle found parked near Pretty Pigs Pool confirmed Thorne’s theory, though there was still nothing close to a ‘thank you’ from DI Tim Cornish. Poppy herself had been convinced that Jessica’s body had been down there with her in Hare’s improvised dungeon the whole time, but it turned out, of course, to have been the seriously decomposed body of Patterson’s missing piglet. What the rats had left of it. By the time it was finally examined, the stinking corpse was still alive with plenty of those useful bugs and beetles that Hare had been planning to use on the body of Poppy herself.

  ‘Your Liam would have had a field day,’ Thorne had said.

  ‘He’s not my Liam,’ Hendricks had said.

  Now, that appeared to have changed, too.

  Hendricks wandered back in and picked up the beer bottle he’d neglected to take with him. ‘That was Liam on the phone,’ he said.

  Thorne had never thought it was anyone else. ‘He well?’

  ‘Yeah …’

  It was clear that there was more and that Hendricks wanted to be asked what it was. ‘And?’

  ‘He’s thinking of applying for another job.’

  ‘What kind of job?’

  ‘Not so much what as where,’ Hendricks said.

  Now, Thorne understood. ‘London?’ Hendricks nodded. ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘Well, he might not get it.’

  ‘So, how would you feel if he did?’

  ‘Actually, I think I’d be … OK with it.’

  Hendricks looked more than OK, and Thorne pulled a suitably shocked face. ‘Bloody hell, you’re full of surprises.’

  ‘Well, one of us has got to be.’