Sleepyhead tt-1

by Mark Billingham

  She'd only said the one word, whispered it really. Please…

  And then he'd failed again. The distraction of the Margaret Byrne killing only a few hours earlier, was a convenient excuse but he was beginning to realise that the odds were against him. He had elected to perform a horrendously difficult procedure. He accepted that. The success rate would be small. He'd known that all along. Still, failure was deeply upsetting.

  But the results when he got it right made it all worth it.

  He had enjoyed killing Margaret Byrne immensely. It had been a jolt of unadulterated shame admitting that to himself, but there was little point in self-delusion. He had imagined being her. He had imagined feeling the cold blade singing on his skin. Holding his breath for the split second between that sweet song finishing and the blood beginning to flow.

  It was a feeling he had once known and loved, and had almost forgotten.

  The killing had none of the lingering beauty, none of the grace of his normal work. There was some skill needed, of course, but a pale, stiffening cadaver could not compare to what he had achieved with Alison. That was something truly elevated. Something unique.

  All the same, the success rate was incomparable. His work was ground-breaking, of that he was certain, but he had only succeeded once and now doubts were beginning to creep into his mind and squat there like bloated black spiders. Might not the quick kill be the next best thing? Would not this euthanasia be a service in itself?. There was no bright, breathing, painless future like the one he'd given to Alison, but it was.., an ending. He tried to dismiss the idea. He could not picture himself stalking the streets with a scalpel in his pocket. That was not who he was.

  He carried his newspaper-to the counter and fished around for change. A woman stood next to him. A puzzle magazine, a lottery ticket and a fistful of chocolate. She smiled at him and he remembered how important his work still was. Yes, killing her would be simple and she would be far better off, no question. But nothing worth having was ever achieved easily.

  Death was something medieval. He could offer people a future.

  During the short taxi ride from Temple Meads station to the hospital, Thorne and Holland had worked out their plan for talking to Dr Rebecca Bishop. Simply put, they didn't have one. Holland had rung ahead and established that she was working today, but beyond that they were making it up as they went along.

  A year earlier, Bristol Royal Infirmary had been at the centre of a damaging public inquiry into an alarming number of babies and toddlers who had died during heart surgery. The resulting scandal had cast a long, dark shadow across that hospital in particular and the medical profession in general, which some believed was well deserved. Doctors could no longer be trusted to regulate themselves.

  Rather like police officers.

  Since he'd begun working on this case, nothing that happened in hospitals could surprise Thorne. He was becoming used to the strategies employed to get through the days by those who worked in them. All the same, the Bristol Royal Infirmary inquiry had been disturbing. There had been some shocking revelations. One ward had been known as 'the departure lounge'.

  Susan, Christine, Madeleine, Helen. Thorne knew how insistent were the voices of those whose lives had been snatched away. He pitied those who still heard the screams of twenty-nine dead babies.

  Rebecca Bishop worked in the department of orthopedic surgery. Sitting opposite them on moulded green plastic chairs, in a corridor just off a waiting area, her manner left Thorne in no doubt as to the strength of the confidence gene in this particular family. 'I'll give you half an hour. After that, I'm assisting at a riveting lecture on the biomechanics of fracture repair. You're welcome to attend.'

  She smiled coldly. Aside from the dark, frizzy hair and slightly elongated chin, Rebecca had the features of her father and brother. She was a handsome woman, as they were handsome men. Handsome but not pretty. There was nothing soft about her. Thorne wondered where the influence of Sarah Bishop was to be found. Had she been soft?

  Or pretty?

  Maybe he'd ask Jeremy one day, when they had time to talk. In an interview room perhaps.

  Thorne opened his mouth to reply but Rebecca Bishop had her own agenda. 'You could start by telling me why they've sent the man my father believes is responsible for harassing him to talk to me about it.'

  Thorne flicked his eyes to Holland. He got back the facial equivalent of a shrug.

  'Nobody is harassing your father, Dr Bishop. Nobody we are aware of anyway. The very fact that I've come down here myself should assure you that we're taking his allegations seriously.'

  'I'm pleased to hear it.'

  'But you must understand we do have other priorities.'

  She got up and walked across to scrutinise a notice board.

  'Like catching Champagne Charlie? I've been reading all about it.'

  Holland was content to play the ebullient sidekick.

  'Don't believe everything you read in the papers, Dr Bishop.'

  She looked at Holland, and Thorne thought he spotted 270 the merest hint of a blush. Did she fancy him? So much the better. He tried to catch Holland's eye but couldn't. Rebecca Bishop turned and stared at Thorne, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of a baggy brown cardigan.

  'And is my father a suspect, Inspector Thorne?'

  Lying was never pleasant, but it was easy. 'No, of course not. He was questioned routinely and eliminated from the inquiry.'

  She looked at him hard. He felt nothing. Doctors kept patients in the dark. Ditto policemen and members of the public.

  Holland took over. 'Can we talk about this harassment business? Exactly what is happening, as you understand it?'

  She sat down. 'I went over all this on the phone.'

  Holland took out a notebook on cue. Thorne had to admire the timing. She sighed and carried on. 'Right, well, Dad's been getting these phone calls… Oh, and there was somebody taking photos outside his house, but it's mainly the phone calls.'

  'Your dad told you about this?'

  'No, my brother James rang me. Dad's really upset and angry, and James thought I ought to know what was going on. To add another professional voice of complaint, I suppose. James and I don't exactly chat every day, so I guessed it was something important when I got his message.'

  She began to chew intently at a fingernail. Thorne noticed that they were all bitten to the quick, some raw and bloody.

  It was time to dig a little. 'So you and James are not… close?'

  She looked up and he could see her considering a reply, and whether to give it. Was this territory she felt safe bringing strangers into? Maybe it was Holland's smile that did the trick.

  'We're not a hugely close family. You must know most of this…'

  They looked at her as if they didn't "know anything at all.

  'James and I aren't best friends, no. Dad and I don't get on either, if you must know, but that doesn't mean I want to see him upset.'

  Holland nodded, full of understanding. 'Of course not.'

  She began to speak slowly, but with a detectable relish.

  'James and Dad like to think they're close, but really there's a lot of denial flying about. They fell out a bit a few years ago when James went off the rails a little, and now he just sees the old man as a glorified bank manager who's there to dole out cars and deposits on flats, so that good old James can fuck up anything he turns his hand to and not really worry about it.'

  Thorne stirred the pot a little. 'I'm sure he does worry about it.'

  'Oh, yeah, you've had the pleasure of meeting James, he told me. Christ, how bitter do I sound?' She tried to laugh, but it caught at the back of her throat.

  Thorne's voice was quiet, measured. 'And how does your dad feel?'

  'Guilty.' An instinctive answer. Word association. Thorne willed his face to show nothing Let her carry on dishing the family dirt.

  'Guilty that Mum was off her face on tranquilisers and he was too pissed to drive. Guilty that he put her on
the fucking tranquilisers in the first place. Guilty that he screwed up both his kids. Guilty that he didn't die instead of her. We're big on guilt, the Bishops. But Jeremy's the top man.'

  Tranquilisers. That made a lot of sense. Was the Midazolam doing to his victims in a few short minutes what the tranquilisers had done to his wife over a number of years? Was all this about something as prosaic as revenge? No, not revenge exactly but… Thorne didn't know what.

  Almost as soon as he'd thought it, he knew that it was too simplistic and, in a strange way, too poetic. The answer to this case wouldn't lie in everyday motives tied up in Christmas cracker psychology.

  But he was getting under the skin of Jeremy Bishop. He gazed across at Bishop's daughter. She looked exhausted. She had been saying something she had not articulated for a while, or so it seemed to Thorne. She was speaking as if he and Holland weren't there. He needed, gently, to remind her that they were.

  'And what about you, Rebecca? What are you guilty about?'

  She looked at Thorne as if he was mad. Wasn't it obvious?

  'That I wasn't in the car.'

  While Tom Thorne was questioning Rebecca Bishop, a hundred miles away, her father, was having lunch with the woman who, at least in theory, was sleeping with him. He'd rung the night before. Anne had grabbed at the phone, hoping it might be Thorne, and was more than a little thrown when she'd heard Jeremy's voice. They'd agreed to meet. A pasta place in Clerkenwell, more or less midway between Queen Square and the Royal London. The hug was perhaps a little forced but the wine soon relaxed them and the conversation flowed easily enough. They talked about work. Stressful – hard to go home and relax. Tiring – when was it anything else? He was starting to think about a change of direction; she was intrigued. She was disappointed and upset about Alison's setback; he was sympathetic.

  They talked about children. Was she expecting too much of Rachel? Was she too pushy? He told her not to give herself a hard time over it. He'd always expected the best from Rebecca and James and almost certainly had been too pushy. He was proud of Rebecca, and maybe James would work out soon what he wanted.

  She told him he should be proud of both of them. Then a silence, which was just the right side of awkward, when Bishop broke it. 'Did you not phone because your boyfriend told you not to?'

  Anne lit a cigarette, her third since they had finished the meal. 'You didn't call me either.'

  'I was worried it might be awkward. I've read the papers and clearly I can't be a suspect any more, but he still seems to have something of a… problem with me.'

  She flicked non-existent ash into the ashtray. 'I haven't spoken to Tom in over a week.' Bishop raised an eyebrow. More nervous ash-flicking. 'We've never really talked about you, anyway, Jeremy. Best to keep the personal and the professional separate.'

  Bishop leaned forward and smil6d, interlocking long, slender fingers and resting his chin on them. He stared deep into her eyes. 'I do understand all that, Jimmy, and I know this is hard for you. But what do you really think?'

  She held the eye-contact and tried with all her heart and soul to imagine this man the way Tom Thorne did. She couldn't do it. 'Jeremy, I don't…'

  'I heard a story yesterday about a GP with a morphine addiction. He'd prescribe it to his older patients, then he'd make house calls and steal it back from them. They'd come into the surgery thinking they'd lost it, you know, going doolally in their old age. He'd smile at them, full of understanding, and prescribe them some more. And so on.'

  Anne was not hugely shocked. Many doctors had problems with addiction. There was even a rehab centre exclusively for those who worked in the medical profession. Bishop carried on: 'The guy who told me this had known the man for twenty-odd years and had absolutely no idea.'

  She looked at him. Holding her breath. His voice was barely a whisper.

  'People have secrets, Anne.'

  Anne looked down and fixed her eyes on the cigarette she was stubbing out in the ashtray. Carefully and deliberately she removed any trace of burning ember. What did he expect her to say? Was this just a piece of typically theatrical and provocative weirdness or…?

  She looked up and signaled for the bill, then turned back to him, smiling. 'Talking of secrets, Jeremy, are you seeing somebody?'

  His mood seemed to change in a moment. She saw it, and thought about backing off but decided against it. She wanted to turn the tables a little, to enjoy his awkwardness.

  'You are, aren't you? Why are you being so coy?' She saw something like an answer in his eyes. 'Do I know her?'

  He stared down at the tablecloth. 'It's not really serious and it's probably not going to last very long for all sorts of reasons, but if I talk about it, it will be like I'm cursing it somehow. Condemning it to an early grave.'

  She laughed. Why this sudden superstition? 'Come on, since when have-'

  'No.' His tone stopped the tail end of her laughter in its tracks. End of conversation.

  'It would be like wishing it dead.'

  Thorne arrived home fizzing and fidgety. There were people he needed to call. His dad. Hendricks. Anne, of course. But he felt too energised.

  It had happened as he'd stepped out of Kentish Town tube station and was wondering which lucky off-license would have the benefit of his business on the way home. The conversation behind him had gone something like this. 'Big Issue…'

  'Get a fucking job!'

  'This is my job, you arsehole!'

  And it had gone off.

  Thorne had stepped in a second or two after the first punches and kicks began to fly. Wincing as a stray punch caught him on the side of the head, he'd grabbed the get a-job merchant round the neck and hauled him into a nearby doorway with more force than was strictly necessary. The Big Issue seller, having picked up the magazines scattered during the ruck, had moved in close to watch. Thorne had looked at him, 'Piss off,' then turned his attention back to the one who had a home. Drunk, of course, or maybe stoned. A student, Thorne reckoned, with blood from a split lip running on to his white button down shirt.

  Thorne had held him against the door with a stiff arm at his throat arid casually kneed the little tosser between the legs as he removed his badge from the inside pocket of his leather jacket and pushed it into his face. 'Have a guess what my job is.'

  Now, back at home, opening the first can of cheap lager, he wondered what might have happened if he hadn't been around with a badge in his pocket and some aggression to offload.

  If one of them had been carrying a knife.

  These were typical murders. Ordinary killings, simple, banal and understandable. People dying because of anger or frustration or a basic lack of space. Dying for a grand cause or a stupid comment. Or a few pence.

  Wives and husbands killing with hammers and fists, or men being men with drink and knives, or drug-dealers holding guns as casually as combs.

  Thorne understood them, these deaths died in cities. He knew what they were about. Each made its own strange kind of sense.

  But not this. Not killing as a side-effect. Bodies as a byproduct of some sick fucking madness.

  He downed the last of the beer, pulled on his jacket, and within forty-five minutes he was standing in a street in Battersea, looking up at the shape that moved behind a light at a second floor window.

  He stood for nearly an hour, melting back into the shadows with each twitch of the curtains, real or imagined. Then he stepped back quickly into the anonymous darkness as Jeremy Bishop threw open the curtains and stood looking down at the street.

  Bishop stared hard at Thorne, or the place where Thorne was, seeing a shape, perhaps, but certainly no more. As Thorne returned the stare, he felt a glacial tremor run through every bone in his body as Bishop's face suddenly changed.

  From this distance, Thorne could not be sure. It might have been a grimace.

  It might have been a smile.

  I know that I've made jokes before about the NHS and the lack of money and everything. I was taking the piss out of t
he blackboard when it first appeared, you know, compared with all the flashy stuff they've got in America.

  But this?

  Anne's been telling me for a while that her and the occupational therapist are going to try to rig up a couple of devices so that I can read and watch TV. Obviously I've been gagging for it, and even more so since I've been back on this bastard ventilator. When a machine is doing your breathing for you, life can get sooo boring, darling. But I didn't realise they literally meant 'rig up'. Honestly, it's spit and fucking earwax. They've screwed some sort of pivoting arm into the ceiling and the TV now hangs down from there so I'm staring up at the screen. Great. If I was in hospital in Fuckwit, Illinois, or wherever, I'd be able to control the volume and, crucially, change the bloody channel with my eyelid. Here, in good old London Town, on the good old National Health Service, those little details seem to have been overlooked. So I have to wait for a nurse to show up, and blink. to indicate that I'd like her to turn over. She does exactly that and buggers off again. Leaving me staring at Supermarket Sweep or some moronic cookery programme until she puts her head round the door again twenty minutes later and I'm blinking my head off in an effort to get the football on.

  I don't want to sound ungrateful, but this is heaven compared to my new reading arrangements.

  It's based around a music-stand, [think, though there might be a bit of old coat-hanger stuck in there as well. All right, I'm exaggerating, but not much. I get raised up and this metal contraption is placed across my tits with little clamps that fold down to hold in place my book or magazine of choice. Good in theory. First, I'm hardly in a position to make complex requests on the book front. I'm racking my brains to think of books I might fancy reading with really short titles. Same with magazines, though I'm more or less sorted thanks to OK! and Hello!. Not too taxing on the eyelids. The problem is the same as with the telly, though. I'm hardly Brain of Britain, but even I can read a page of pretty much anything in twenty minutes, or however long it is until the nurse comes in again. I don't expect them to come tearing in here every ninety seconds to turn my page for me but there must be something somebody can do. I can't pay for anything, and I haven't got family who can pay for anything or try to raise money, but even so… Everything's fucking half-measures.