TT13 Time of Death (3 page)

‘It’s pissing down.’

‘There’s an umbrella in the back,’ Thorne said. ‘Go on, knock on the door, see who’s living there.’

Helen shook her head. She was still staring. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Only take five minutes.’

‘Who the hell wants a stranger banging on their door?’ She put the window back up. ‘Poking around.’

‘I just thought you’d be interested.’

‘I want to go and see Linda,’ Helen said, a little sharply. She turned and looked at Thorne, blinked slowly and found a half-smile. ‘What’s the point, anyway?’

The rain was easing as they drove the few miles further on, along snaking lanes with high hedges or skeletal trees pressing in on either side. It had more or less stopped completely by the time
they reached the river, drove across the bridge into Polesford and Thorne saw the sign for the Market Square.

It might have been a Saturday, but Thorne guessed that the place was still somewhat busier than it would usually have been. Not that too many of the residents appeared to be there in search of second-hand paperbacks or knock-off perfume or whatever else was on offer. Though a handful of traders had braved the bad weather in the hope of brisk business, they hardly looked to be beating away customers with sticks. Most were sat nattering and drinking from flasks, beneath striped plastic awnings that snapped and danced in the strong wind.

Hard-faced, disappointed.

Instead, the people milling around the fringes or gathered together between the stalls in threes and fours, seemed more intent on animated conversation. Thorne watched them as he drove slowly around the square. He saw men huddled, smoking in doorways. A trio of young women, each nudging a pushchair back and forth on the spot. He saw the nodding and shaking of heads, the pointing fingers, and, even from a distance, it felt as if the entire place was humming with the jibber-jabber, the feverish speculation.

‘Paula said we should try and park behind the supermarket.’ Helen pointed to a turning and Thorne followed her instructions. ‘We can walk from there.’

Paula. The woman in whose house they would apparently be spending the night, though Thorne had still not found out very much about her, or about her relationship to Helen.

‘You were right,’ Helen had said that morning, packing quickly after a spate of calls. ‘Can’t even find a hotel room in Tamworth, never mind in town. But I think I’ve managed to sort something out …’

Approaching the supermarket, they saw a patch of fenced-off waste ground next to the small petrol station opposite. A man in a dripping green cagoule, the hood tight around his face, stood at
the entrance. He nodded towards the sign that had been taped to a makeshift barrier.
ALL DAY PARKING
£7.50.

‘Jesus,’ Helen said. ‘Making money out of it.’

They stared as they drove slowly past. Plenty had already coughed up.

‘He won’t be the only one,’ Thorne said.

Driving into the legitimate car park behind the supermarket, they saw that half the available space had been coned off and was taken up by a large number of emergency vehicles. Vans, squad cars, an ambulance they knew would be there on permanent stand-by. Helen got out and shifted a cone or two, allowing Thorne to park up next to a pair of police motorbikes. While Helen was grabbing an overcoat and umbrella from the back seat, Thorne moved the cones back into position and laid a printed card on the dashboard.

METROPOLITAN POLICE BUSINESS
.

They walked for a few minutes in silence, past a school and a small parade of shops. The streets were less busy, but there were still one or two people standing outside their houses, chatter spilling from the open doorway of a crowded pub.

The house where Linda Bates – who used to be Linda Jackson – lived was in a terrace not unlike the one Thorne and Helen had stopped to look at in Dorbrook. There were a few photographers outside, but the majority of journalists were elsewhere, knowing very well that the family of Stephen Bates was no longer in residence.

The circus had moved on.

To all intents and purposes, the property now belonged to Warwickshire Police, and would continue to do so until the painstaking process of forensication was complete. Thorne and Helen walked by on the other side of the road, weaving between the handful of smartphone-wielding onlookers. Crime tape ran around the house, which was obscured from view at the front by
a phalanx of police and forensic service vehicles. A uniformed officer stood at each corner of the muddy front garden, two more in the middle of the road to ensure that nobody unauthorised got too close. The coppers looked thoroughly bored, though Thorne noticed that at least one had the good grace to try to disguise the fact when a camera began flashing a few feet away.

An old man with a wire-haired terrier said, ‘Aye aye, there’s PC Plod on the front of the
Daily Mail
.’

Helen nodded, but she and Thorne both knew that when it came to the media, the big boys would be where the action was.

The house Thorne and Helen were on their way to.

It was the kind of estate that had probably caused outrage among more long-standing residents, when it had been built twenty or thirty years earlier. A bulb-shaped collection of identical properties, most already old before their time. Ugly garages and red-tiled roofs that bristled with satellite dishes.

As well as the predictably large gathering of reporters, there were a good few members of the public huddled close together on the pavement opposite number six. Mums, dads, young kids perched on shoulders. Thorne could hear the muttering increase in volume as he marched up to the cordon and showed the uniformed officer his warrant card. Camera shutters began to click behind them as Helen produced her ID and the pair of them ducked beneath the tape and walked towards the front door.

It was open by the time they reached it.

The female detective was in her late twenties. Tall and skinny; ash-blonde hair pulled back hard, dark trousers and jacket. Thorne guessed that she was a family liaison officer, that there would probably be more inside, uniform and CID.

She looked at Thorne and Helen, faces and warrant cards, then waved them inside.

As soon as the front door was shut, she turned and introduced
herself as DC Sophie Carson. Her manner was not especially collegiate and if she had taken in the details on the warrant cards, she did not seem overly concerned that she was talking to two officers of senior rank. She waited for Thorne and Helen to say something and, after a few seconds of awkward silence, she stepped away from the door.

‘Should I know about this?’

‘Nothing to know about,’ Thorne said, thinking that if the woman
was
a family liaison officer, she might want to ratchet up the warmth a notch or three. He introduced himself quickly and when Helen had done the same he said, ‘Detective Sergeant Weeks is an old friend of Linda’s.’

‘Right,’ Carson said. She nodded, but looked uncertain and as she moved towards them, her hand drifted automatically to the Airwave radio clipped to her belt.

The hallway was narrow and Thorne and Helen had to press themselves against the stairs to allow the DC to get past. She knocked on a door and pushed it open. After a cursory glance into the room, she leaned in and mumbled a few words that neither Thorne nor Helen could make out, then nodded again to indicate that they could enter. She followed them inside and closed the door behind her.

A woman wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt sat leaning forward on a battered black-leather sofa, a teenage girl close to her. Two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, sat on hard chairs on the other side of the room. The remains of tea things were scattered on a low table between them: mugs, a carton of milk, an open packet of biscuits. It looked as if they had been watching television, though the sound was turned down.

Thorne and Helen stood side by side, waited. The room was overheated and stuffy and the curtains were drawn. Thorne could hear voices from somewhere above him; a radio or another television.

Carson nodded towards Helen. ‘Says she’s an old friend of yours.’

The woman on the sofa stared at Helen for a few seconds, then stood up slowly, her face creasing as confusion gave way to recognition.

‘Helen?’

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ Carson said. She waved the uniforms out and one by one they stood up and trooped past her into the hallway. Thorne kept one eye on Carson as she followed them. He watched her key the radio and could hear that she was already reporting events to Operational HQ as the door hissed across the thick carpet and finally snicked shut.

A few seconds before Linda Bates rushed, sobbing, into Helen’s arms.

She tries to sleep, but not because she is tired.

Awake, it’s cold, despite the thick coat that he let her keep, and there is not so much as a pinhole of light. The tape is still tight around her mouth and having lost the battle to control her bladder, she is starting to feel sore. It had warmed her a little at first, but quickly became clammy and cold. The floor is rough and wet beneath her backside and the pipe that she is chained to is ridged with bolts that press against her spine, even through her coat. It’s been a long time since she was brought here. A day or two at least, she thinks. It’s hard to tell when it’s so dark, when there’s no sound save for the drip and trickle of the water that’s coming in. She knows she’s below ground, she’s certain about that much at least. He had given her enough of whatever was in that bottle to be sure that she would not fight back, but she hadn’t quite been unconscious. She remembers being taken down out of the rain into the quiet and the stink. She remembers the strangest feeling that this was a place she knew, that it was somewhere she’d been when she was younger.

Awake, she is weak with hunger and her throat burns when she
tries to swallow and though she knows there are things moving in her hair when she’s asleep, running across her legs, anything is better than the pain that screams in her belly, the desperation for food that even the rank smell of the place cannot keep at bay for very long.

Awake, she suffers through every second of every minute alone and uncertain as to when the man who brought her here will be coming back. At first it was terror that he would come back, the thought of what he would do to her when he did. Now it is all about his absence. The thought of being abandoned in this place.

Awake, she tries to tell herself that it’s some kind of attempt to break her spirit or whatever. That there
will
be food, but it will probably be offered in return for those things she’s been so terrified about. But the offer won’t be made until she’s been sufficiently starved. Until she cannot possibly refuse it. Each time she hears something skitter and splash in the darkness, one of the rats she knows are down here with her, she wonders if the man is coming back. If somehow they can hear his footsteps far above them, feel them through the water up above, the damp, rotten fabric of the place. It never happens though. He never comes.

Awake, there is nothing to do but sit and listen and hum and weep and try to tell herself that there will be people trying desperately to find her. Nothing to do but imagine the hell her parents are going through. She moves, tries to get a little more comfortable. The chain is just long enough so that she can lie down. That’s me being nice, he’d said. Last thing he’d said. No, that’s not right, not quite the last thing. Apologies for the whiff, he’d said, climbing back up the steps.

The whiff …

Awake, she holds her breath and fights the constant urge to gag at the rank, meaty stench of it. She imagines that she can feel
particles of it moving against her face, that she is breathing them in through her nose.

She lies down, one arm beneath her head to keep her face dry.

There is so much she doesn’t know or understand. So much she can only guess at and try to make sense of. But she knows she is not alone, not strictly speaking, anyway.

Awake, she knows there’s a body down here with her, in the wet and the dark.

Thorne stayed at the house for another few minutes, but he felt awkward, and more than a little voyeuristic. He was starting to wonder why he had bothered coming at all. He had thought Helen would want the company, but it was quickly becoming clear that she did not really need it. That he was surplus to requirements. He told Helen that she should call when she was ready to leave and he would come back to collect her. She said that she would probably be there a while and would catch up with him later.

‘It’s a small place,’ she told him. ‘I’ll find you.’

He did not speak to anyone else in the house on his way out. Sophie Carson was still on the radio.

The cameras went into overdrive as he walked out and several journalists shouted predictable questions at him as he ducked back beneath the crime tape and picked up his pace. He said nothing, kept his eyes forward. He doubted that he would stay anonymous for very long. Some eagle-eyed journo on a crime desk would almost certainly recognise him eventually. He had made the papers often enough himself, had been plastered all over them just a few months before.

When a prisoner he had been escorting had escaped. When four people had died. When Thorne had almost lost his closest friend.

He walked back to the centre of town and saw that most of the market traders had all but given up and were packing their things away for the day. It was starting to rain again. Walking along the high street, he could see that Helen had been right to say how little the place had in common with the middle-England market town they had left that morning. There seemed to be a proliferation of nail bars and hairdressers. There was an internet café and a small games arcade and Thorne counted four fast food outlets within fifty yards of each other. Not an antiques shop to be seen.

He stopped at a newsagent for a local paper and carried it across the street to a café called Cupz. He ordered coffee and a sausage sandwich and began to read. The first four pages of the newspaper were dominated by the latest on the missing girl and carried the now widely circulated picture of Stephen and Linda Bates on their wedding day. The headline was typically crass and undeniably powerful: