The Dying Hours (2 page)

‘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.

It was almost eight o’clock in the morning by the time Thorne got back to the flat in Tulse Hill and, as was usually the case if he didn’t miss seeing her altogether, he walked in to find Helen just about to leave. She was in the kitchen, which opened out into an L-shaped living area: a sofa, armchair, stereo system and TV; the floor littered as usual with toys and children’s books. She finished buttoning her son’s coat and removed an uneaten piece of toast from her mouth. ‘God, you all right?’

Thorne tossed his raincoat on to a kitchen chair, yanked off the clip-on tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He touched a fingertip to the lump beneath his right eye and winced a little. ‘I’ll live.’

‘Did you wind up that bolshy skipper again?’ Helen asked. ‘I said she’d deck you one day.’

Thorne smiled and walked across to flick on the kettle. ‘Some idiot fancied a party and thought it would be a good idea to put the address on Facebook. Three hundred people trying to crash one of the flats on the Kidbourne.’

‘Sounds like fun.’

‘It was once we sent a couple of dogs in.’ Thorne reached up to grab a mug. ‘Cleared the place faster than a Phil Collins single.’

Helen laughed and tore into her toast.

‘Nicked half a dozen for affray.’ He touched his face again as he poured the hot water. ‘Plus the lad that did this.’

‘Nice.’ Helen chewed. ‘Other headlines?’

Thorne shrugged. ‘A few break-ins.’ He mashed the teabag against the side of the mug and thought through some of the reports he’d signed off on at the end of the shift. ‘A three-way knife fight come chucking-out time at the White Lion. Two kids trying to smash up the KFC with baseball bats, because
apparently
they got beans when they asked for coleslaw…’

‘Fair enough,’ Helen said, stepping out into the hall.

‘A bus driver assaulted with a machete after he told a woman to stop pissing on his bus—’

‘What, the
woman
had the machete?’ Helen reappeared in the doorway, one arm inside a long down coat.

‘Obviously,’ Thorne said. ‘A shiny new Volvo driven straight into the front of a house on the High Road when someone tried to nick it. The normal quota of pissheads, the usual domestic argy-bargy. Oh, and a bit of dogging in the car park behind Comet.’

‘Well, no harm treating yourself after a long night, is there?’

He dropped the used teabag into the bin. ‘I was only looking, honestly!’

‘Nice easy shift, then?’

Thorne turned. He cradled the mug as he watched Helen check that everything she needed for work was in her bag, then hang the bag with everything Alfie would need over the handles of the pushchair. ‘There were a couple of bodies as well,’ he said. ‘An old couple, dead in bed.’

Helen looked up. ‘A couple? What, they killed themselves?’

Alfie wandered across to the cupboards next to Thorne, began opening and shutting one of them, enjoying the noise.

‘Probably,’ Thorne said.

‘
Probably?
’

Thorne could not quite read her expression. Concern? Suspicion? They still did not know one another quite well enough yet. ‘It’s fine,’ he said.

‘Sure?’

‘I had a bit of a run-in with some DI about it, that’s all.’

‘Doesn’t sound like you.’

Thorne smiled. He knew when she was being sarcastic well enough. ‘Tosser wouldn’t give the necessary
authorisation
.’ He took a mouthful of tea to wash away the taste of the word. The memory of his altercation with Binns.

‘Listen, I need to get going…’ Helen moved over to collect her son. She lifted him up and plonked him down in the pushchair, began fastening the straps.

‘Why don’t I take him?’ Thorne asked. He stepped across, took the small woollen hat from Helen’s hand and put it on the boy’s head. Once or twice, when Helen had been running very late, Thorne had walked her eighteen-month-old son down to the childminder’s. He enjoyed the time he and Alfie spent together, but the shift patterns meant there was precious little of it. Precious little with his mother, come to that.

Ships in the night, especially when Thorne was on the graveyard shift.

‘It’s fine,’ Helen said. She kissed him and straightened her son’s hat. ‘You get to bed.’

‘It’s no trouble.’

‘’Nana,’ Alfie shouted.

Helen said, ‘When we get to Janine’s,’ and pushed her son out towards the front door. ‘I’ll call you…’

‘Have a good one,’ Thorne said.

After a few seconds she reappeared, buttoning her coat, while from the hallway Alfie continued to demand a second breakfast. ‘We can talk about this later if you want,’ she said. ‘OK?’

‘Nothing to talk about,’ Thorne said. He turned around to occupy himself, wiping away the ring his mug had left on the worktop, then putting the milk back in the fridge, until he heard the front door close.

He carried his tea across to the kitchen table. He spent a minute or two turning the pages of the previous day’s
Evening Standard
. He moved across and switched on the TV in the corner, watched the news without taking any of it in.

Three months, since he and Helen Weeks had begun more or less living together. ‘More or less’, because they had never really talked about it as a formal arrangement, the understanding being that as long as he was based at Lewisham, it was far more convenient for Thorne to stay in Tulse Hill than it was for him to travel all the way down from his own place in Kentish Town. They had talked once or twice about renting Thorne’s flat out, but Thorne was reluctant, despite the fact that the extra income would have come in useful. He didn’t particularly want strangers in his place and could not be bothered with the legal hassles of being a landlord, but if he were being really honest, it was more to do with the hope that he might find himself back in north London sooner rather than later.

The truth was, Thorne would always be a north Londoner and anywhere south of the South Bank still felt alien to him. Sprawling and soulless; dun-coloured. The air just that little bit harder to breathe. Estate agents and arty types in the south-east doing their best to make ‘edgy’ and ‘gritty’ sound like selling points. The better-off in the greener bits talking about the tennis or the rugby or the deer in Richmond Park and all of them looking enviously across the water towards Camden, Islington and Hackney. The abysmal transport links and the terrible football teams…

Thorne knew very well that a good many south Londoners would view north London with the same horror, but he didn’t care. North London was the city he knew, that he loved.

Not that he had said any of that to Helen.

He still crossed the river as often as he could. He went back to meet up with Phil Hendricks at the Grafton Arms or the Bengal Lancer, and occasionally with Dave Holland, a DS in the Murder Squad at Becke House in Colindale. Thorne’s old squad…

‘How you finding it?’ Holland had said, the last time. Then he’d seen the look on Thorne’s face and gone back to studying his pint, knowing he could not have asked a more stupid question if he’d tried.

Three months, since the case that had brought Thorne and Helen together, the case that had seen him demoted to uniform.

‘Not a demotion strictly speaking, of course,’ the chief superintendent had told him. ‘You’re still an inspector at the end of the day.’ The man had barely been able to conceal his glee at finally being shot of Thorne, having tried on many previous occasions. ‘Who knows? You might end up feeling that this was a very good move.’

Slapped down, that was how Thorne
felt
. Though bearing in mind how he had earned it, he supposed that he’d got off relatively lightly. He knew that what he had done – what he had
needed
to do – to ensure a young mother’s survival during an armed siege in a local newsagent’s was never going to play well with the powers that be. Ultimately though – as he told himself often, pulling on that crisp white shirt with the epaulettes, straightening that cap – he had saved Detective Sergeant Helen Weeks and, much to the surprise of both of them, ended up in bed with her.

‘
Another
one?’ Hendricks had said when Thorne had told him. ‘After the last one turned out so well?’

Thorne’s previous girlfriend, another copper. They had split up only a few months before he and Helen had got together.

‘You want to knock this business with women on the head, mate. Come to the dark side.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You know it’s always been a matter of time.’

‘Actually, it’s not even the sex that bothers me,’ Thorne had said. ‘It’s having to like small dogs and musicals.’ It was the kind of crack Thorne could get away with, as Hendricks was the least stereotypical gay man anyone could imagine. Heavily tattooed with multiple piercings and likely to break someone’s arm if they so much as mentioned Judy Garland.

‘I give it three months,’ Hendricks had said. ‘Tops.’

Thorne took his tea and walked into the hall and across to the small bathroom. He laid the mug on the toilet cistern while he pissed.

Detective
Helen Weeks.

Thorne flushed and told himself he was being an idiot for even thinking that Helen was the sort to play those games. Not in a million years. He took a packet of painkillers from the mirrored cabinet above the sink and shut the door hard.

Said, ‘Twat.’

He stared at the face looking back at him. Duller,
deader
than it was the last time he looked. Grey hair that was still more pronounced on one side than the other, but was now more pronounced everywhere. The small, straight scar on what had once been the only chin he had.

Thorne’s mobile rang in the kitchen and he hurried back through to answer it. Helen sounded out of breath. She had just dropped Alfie off and was on her way to the station, she told him.

‘So we’ll talk when I get home, then. About last night.’

‘I told you, I’m fine,’ Thorne said.

‘You didn’t look fine.’

‘I’m just tired. Feeling sorry for myself.’

‘Well don’t,’ Helen said. ‘Now go to bed, for God’s sake…’

He walked slowly through to the bedroom that still smelled of sleep and mango body-butter. Helen had not bothered to open the curtains. He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to get undressed, looking forward more than anything to slipping beneath a duvet that he knew would still be warm.

One of the few perks of incompatible shifts.

Presuming that Helen got back before he had to leave, he would play it down, the business with the Coopers. He told himself it was because the last thing Helen needed was any of his shit to deal with. Because her own job was stressful enough. Because there was really nothing he could do about it now and he was almost certainly being ridiculous anyway.

He swallowed three painkillers with the last of his tea.

Not
because he was worried that she might agree with Paul Binns.

He eats in cafés, most days. Always breakfast and lunch, then maybe an Indian or a Chinese come dinner time. He’s way past worrying about his weight or the state of his arteries and he’s spent far too long eating meals cooked by somebody else to start doing any of that for himself.

Not that he was ever up to much in the kitchen.

Or anywhere else, come to that
.

He lays down his knife and fork. He can imagine her saying it…

Tossing aside the tattered copy of the
Sun
that was lying on the table when he came in, he signals to the teenage girl behind the counter – what is she, Russian? – and indicates that he wants another mug of tea.

‘One pound fifty,’ she says.

‘A bit stronger this time,’ he says.

It’s certainly pricey, eating out three times a day, a damn sight pricier than it used to be, but there’s enough money sloshing around so he’s not too bothered on that score. It’s good to get out and about now he’s got the chance and besides, the last thing he wants to do is impose more than he already has on the people putting him up by demanding to be fed. A bed for a few nights is enough of an ask as it is.

Not that they wouldn’t be happy enough to do it. Whatever else has happened, he’s always been able to count on his friends. Or the people who might not think of themselves as his friends, but owe him a favour or two anyway. No sell-by date on that kind of thing and he doesn’t need to tell them to keep the fact they’ve got a houseguest to themselves.

‘Stay as long as you like,’ that’s what most of them say. Old times, all that. They’re trying to look like they mean it, but he doesn’t mind the fact that they really don’t. For obvious reasons he doesn’t want to stay anywhere for more than a day or two, plus he’s given himself a fair amount of running around to do if he wants to get things done properly.

Work through his list.

Funny, he thinks, the way people seem to drift and spread out. Families and friends. Going where the work is, most likely, or getting away from the stupid prices.
Forced
out, probably, some of them.

London feels like a dozen different cities.

The girl brings his tea across and lays it down without a word. The old bloke doing the cooking shouts something to her, in Russian or Polish or whatever it is, and she shouts back at him as she clears empty plates from an adjoining table. The tea’s still not strong enough, but he can’t be bothered to say anything.

A lesson he’s learned. A fuss is what gets remembered.

He stares down at what’s left of an obscenely large full English breakfast (£12.99 or free if you can finish it). He moves the tip of a finger through the bright smear of ketchup and thinks about the man in the bath. It’s odd, he thinks, how it’s that one he keeps coming back to, but it’s probably because that was the one where he really saw it. The life leaking out.

He’s been thinking about that question ever since – the
BIG
one – and how strange it was that when he was sitting there watching it happen, it was pearly gates and angels and all that carry-on going round and round in his head. Bloody ridiculous really, when, given the circumstances… given everything that’s happened… he should probably have been thinking about the other place. The fiery furnace, whatever.

Nonsense, all of it, he knows that… but still it’s odd that when he was thinking about what might come after, just wondering if there
could
be something, ‘heaven’ should even have come into it! He’s not an idiot. He knows that he’s never been ‘good’. Not even close. Even his nearest and dearest – back when he’d had any – would never have claimed that.

He stands up and turns to let the girl behind the counter know he’s finished. He picks up his jacket and reaches for his wallet.

He stares out of the steamed-up window at the blur of traffic moving past and thinks: Right, but what if not believing in it doesn’t rule you out? What if by any chance you turn out to be wrong and there’s more of an open-door policy than you thought there was? Forgive and forget, kind of thing. If that’s the case, then all this stuff he’s been thinking about isn’t so odd after all. Because maybe there’s a small part of him hoping that, when the time comes, he might… get away with it.

He takes a twenty-pound note from his wallet.

He remembers the list in the same pocket and decides that getting away with it is going to be a seriously tall order.

He waves the note at the girl, shows her that he’s leaving it on the table and tells her she can keep the change.

She mumbles something that doesn’t sound like a thank you.

He calmly picks up his mug, still half-filled with piss-weak tea, and drops it on to the floor. The other customers turn at the noise of the mug smashing and he walks towards the door, deciding that if heaven and hell did exist, and if there were things that could determine whether you ended up going upstairs or downstairs, fucking politeness would be one of them.