Scaredy Cat

by Mark Billingham

  Detective Inspector Paul Binns was based at Lewisham police station, as Thorne was, though CID worked on a different floor, so their paths had crossed no more than a few times in the three months Thorne had been working there. Binns was several years younger than Thorne, somewhere in his mid-forties, and he was carrying a lot less weight. He had shaved what little hair he had left to the scalp and over-compensated for the appearance and demeanour of a cartoon undertaker with a grey suit and a tie that might have been a test for colour blindness. He gave Thorne a nod and walked over to the bed as though he were browsing in the furniture department of John Lewis.

  ‘So?’ he asked after a minute. ‘What am I doing here?’

  Before Thorne could answer, a message came through from one of his team’s patrol cars. Things were kicking off at a house party on the Kidbourne estate and it was suggested that Thorne might want to get down there. He said that he was still tied up, ordered two more units to head across, then turned the volume on his radio down. ‘I told one of my constables to call you,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I know why I’m here.’ The nod from the doorway had clearly been as polite as the detective intended to get. He pointed towards the bodies, straightened his cuffs. ‘Seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it?’

  What the doctor had said.

  Thorne moved to join Binns at the end of the bed. ‘There’s something off.’

  Binns folded his arms, barely suppressed a long-suffering sigh. ‘Go on then, let’s hear it.’

  ‘The old woman took her teeth out,’ Thorne said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘False teeth. Top set. They’re in a plastic case in the bathroom, probably the same place she leaves them every night.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You take your teeth out when you’re going to bed. When you’re going to sleep, right? That’s what you do on an ordinary night, isn’t it? It’s not what you’d do if you were planning to do . . . this. It’s not what you’d do if you and your old man were going to take an overdose of insulin and drift off to sleep in each other’s arms. Not if you knew you weren’t ever going to wake up.’

  Binns stared at him.

  ‘It’s not how she would have wanted to be found,’ Thorne said.

  ‘You knew her, did you?’ Binns shook his head, sniffed, snapped his fingers. ‘Next!’

  Thorne took a breath, took care to keep his voice nice and even. ‘Where did they get the insulin from? There’s no label on the bottle, so it obviously wasn’t prescribed. Nothing anywhere else in the house to suggest either of them was diabetic.’

  ‘They could have got it anywhere.’

  ‘So could a third party.’

  ‘I’m not exactly getting excited here.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘How should I know?’ Binns said. ‘Internet? I saw there was a computer downstairs.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Come on, you can find anything on there, you look hard enough.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You decide to top yourself, you find a way, don’t you?’

  Thorne said nothing.

  ‘That it, then?’ Binns asked. ‘The false choppers and the insulin? Seriously?’

  Thorne stared down again at the bodies of John and Margaret Cooper, aged seventy-five and seventy-three respectively. The duvet had been pulled up high, but it was obvious that Margaret Cooper’s arm was wrapped around her husband’s chest, her face pressed against his shoulder. Spoons, he thought. Couples ‘spooned’ in some of the old songs his mother had listened to, crooning love’s tune or whatever it was; the same songs this pair might have heard on the radio when they were teenagers. The old woman’s mouth hung slightly open. The cheeks, hollowed. The top lip sucked in towards the gap where the plate would otherwise have been. Her husband’s lips were curled back, yellowing teeth showing, a sliver of greyish tongue just visible. His eyes were screwed tightly shut.

  They had died pressed close to one another, but Thorne could not pretend that they looked remotely peaceful.

  ‘Anything else?’ Binns asked. ‘I’ve got paperwork I could be getting on with.’

  There was something. Thorne knew there was.

  His eye had taken something in within those few seconds of entering the room for the first time: a piece of visual information that had not quite made sense, but which his brain had so far failed to process fully. A shape or a shadow, a something that was wrong. It stubbornly refused to come to him, like a tune he recognised but could not place.

  Without making it too obvious, he looked around the room again.

  The wardrobe, closed. The curtains, drawn. Cosmetics and other bits and pieces on the dressing table: hairbrush, wallet, wet-wipes. A few coins in a small china bowl. A woman’s dressing gown draped across one chair, a man’s clothes neatly folded on another. Shoes and slippers underneath. A biro, book and glasses case on the wife’s bedside table, a paperback book of crossword puzzles on the floor by the side of the bed, a large black handbag hung on the bedstead. The bottle and syringe on the husband’s side. A half-empty water glass. A tube of ointment, a can of Deep Heat . . .

  What was wrong with the picture?

  ‘There isn’t a note,’ Thorne said.

  Binns turned round, leaned back against the bedstead. ‘You know that means nothing,’ he said.

  Thorne knew very well, but it had been the best he could come up with while he tried and failed to identify what was really bothering him. His friend Phil Hendricks had told him a great deal about suicide during the last investigation they had worked on together . . . the last case Thorne had worked as a detective. The pathologist had recently attended a seminar on the subject and delighted in giving Thorne chapter and verse. The fact was that in the majority of cases, people who killed themselves did not leave notes. One of the many myths.

  ‘I know what you’re doing, by the way,’ Binns said.

  ‘Oh, you do?’ Thorne ignored the burst of twitter from his radio. Reports of a suspected burglary in Brockley. The violence escalating at the house party on the Kidbourne. ‘I’m all ears.’

  Binns smiled. ‘Yeah, I mean considering where you were before and where you are now . . . it makes perfect sense that you’re going a bit stir crazy, or whatever. Only natural that you might want to make something ordinary like this into . . . something else.’ He casually checked the mobile phone that had not left his hand. ‘I understand, mate. I sympathise, honest.’

  Patronise, Thorne thought.

  ‘If I was in your position, Christ knows what I’d be doing.’

  ‘You’d be getting pissed off with smartarse detectives who think they know it all.’

  ‘Really?’ Binns feigned a shocked expression. ‘What type did you used to be then?’

  Thorne wrapped his hand around the old-fashioned metal bedstead and squeezed. ‘I want to get the HAT car round,’ he said.

  It was the job of detectives on the Homicide Assessment Team to evaluate any possible crime scene and to collect vital evidence where necessary before handing the case over. It was solely their decision as to whether or not a ‘sudden’ death had occurred. A suspicious death.

  ‘Well, you know how that works.’ Binns walked across and leaned back against a wall next to an old-fashioned dressing table. ‘Different system these days. Between your lot and my lot, I mean. Different to your day anyway, I would have thought.’

  ‘You’d have thought right,’ Thorne said.

  Your day. Nearly twenty-five years since Tom Thorne had pulled on the ‘Queen’s Cloth’ every day to go to work. Since he’d worn a uniform.

  Crisp white shirt with his two shiny inspector’s pips on the epaulettes.

  Black, clip-on tie.

  The fucking cap . . .

  ‘It’
s my decision,’ Binns said. ‘Whether or not to bring the HAT team in.’

  ‘I know how it works,’ Thorne said.

  Binns told him anyway. ‘Only a detective inspector can make that call.’

  ‘Got it,’ Thorne said. ‘So, on you go.’ Binns had been right to suggest that the procedure had been somewhat different two decades earlier. The protocol a little more flexible. The chain of command not followed quite so religiously. There might have been a few less backsides covered, but it was certainly quicker.

  ‘Frankly, I can’t really see the point.’

  ‘Can’t you?’ Thorne said.

  ‘That stuff about the false teeth is near enough laughable and I don’t think anyone’s going to give a toss where the insulin came from.’ Binns cast an eye around the room and shrugged. ‘I pull Homicide in here and they’re only going to say the same thing, aren’t they? You know, we both end up looking like idiots.’

  ‘All the same,’ Thorne said, ‘I’d be happier if you made the call.’

  Binns shook his head. ‘Not going to happen.’

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said. He could feel the blood rising to his face. ‘Because of where you are and where I am. Prick . . . ’

  Binns reddened too, just a little, but otherwise gave a good impression of being impervious to an insult he’d clearly been on the receiving end of before. ‘You think whatever you like, pal, but I’m not going to waste anybody else’s time just because you’re seeing murders where there aren’t any.’ He walked towards the door, then turned. ‘Maybe you should have taken a bit more time off after what happened. Maybe you should have chucked it in altogether. King of all cock-ups, that one.’

  Thorne could not really argue, so did not bother trying.

  ‘Take this up with the MIT boys if you want,’ Binns said, gesturing back towards the bed. ‘We’ve got a Murder Investigation Team at Lewisham, haven’t we? A nice big one.’

  A team just like the one Thorne used to be part of. ‘Yeah, well, I might just do that.’

  ‘I mean it’s up to you, if you want even more people taking the piss.’

  Thorne was suddenly more aware than usual of the various pro-active items attached to his Met vest.

  Cuffs, baton, CS gas . . .

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ Binns said, straightening his cuffs one final time. ‘Leave you to wind this up.’ The detective turned away and was checking his BlackBerry again as he walked out of the bedroom.

  Thorne took half a minute, let his breathing return to ­normal, then bellowed for Woodley. He told her to contact ­Lothian and Borders police and get someone to deliver the death message to the Coopers’ son in Edinburgh. He told her to find out if the dead couple had any other children, and, if so, to make sure the message was delivered to them wherever they were. He told her to stay put until the on-call Coroner’s officer arrived.

  ‘Try not to disturb anything in this room though,’ he said. ‘Not just yet.’

  Woodley raised an eyebrow. ‘Guv.’

  Thorne took one last look round, grabbed his raincoat and cap then hurried downstairs and out to the car. No more than a few minutes with the blues and twos to the Kidbourne and if things were still lively he really felt like wading in. There was every chance he would find himself on the end of a smack or two, but it could not make him feel any worse.