Their Little Secret

by Mark Billingham

  ‘I told you, it’s just a trial thing.’

  ‘Course it is.’

  ‘We’re seeing how it goes.’

  ‘Right. So, how’s it going, then? What’s it been … six weeks?’

  Thorne said nothing.

  It had been almost two months, in fact, since his partner Helen – if he could still call her that – had dropped the bombshell and announced that she needed some space, that perhaps they would both be happier if they tried living apart for a while. It was hard wasn’t it, she’d said, two coppers together? Harder than normal. There were extra … stresses.

  A break might do us both some good, and it feels like I need to spend some time on my own with Alfie …

  Thorne had not bothered to argue, knowing Helen as he did and seeing straight away that there would be little point. Hendricks had been the first person he’d told and, knowing him as well as he did, he had not been expecting anything as conventional as sympathy.

  Which was fortunate.

  ‘Yeah, well, I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Hendricks had told him. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love Helen to bits, but I always wondered how long she’d put up with you.’

  ‘Great, cheers, Phil. So, how did that stint with the Samaritans work out for you?’

  ‘You ask me, deep down you always knew this was going to happen.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Hanging on to your old flat, just in case. A lifeboat, kind of thing.’

  ‘That’s bollocks. The rent came in seriously bloody handy. Besides, this was Helen’s idea, not mine.’

  ‘She dumped you?’

  ‘No. Like I told you—’

  ‘So, what happened?’

  In truth, Thorne was still far from sure. He had certainly been happy enough and had believed that the same went for Helen. There had been some tension a few months before the split, but certainly nothing he saw as terminal and largely down to what Thorne had seen as interference from her younger sister, Jenny. It was ironic, in retrospect, that Helen’s need for ‘space’ had manifested itself only a short time after he and Jenny had cleared the air, when she had confessed that she was the one trapped in a miserable relationship and had, in actual fact, been jealous of his and Helen’s.

  Had she been lying?

  Had she continued to undermine him, thinking he would no longer suspect?

  Or had she simply not known her sister as well as she thought she did?

  It was all academic anyway, because Helen had made her decision and there was no shifting her. In time he thought he might come to understand why and, despite his best friend’s cynicism, he still wanted to believe there was a chance she might decide to try again. He loved Helen, he remained fairly confident that she still loved him, they had been through so bloody much together.

  And yet …

  He knew that a good deal of the pain he had felt, still felt, was down to nothing more than a bruised ego. He’d known how that went since his first girlfriend had chucked him for some knob in the school rugby team. He knew that it didn’t last. The truth was that, for all the misery that was part and parcel of his re-acquaintance with a – theoretically – single life, he was slowly getting used to it.

  He was even starting to enjoy himself just a little.

  His flat, his favourite restaurant, his local pub. It was good to be based somewhere close to Hendricks again. Thorne had never quite made peace with living at Helen’s place in Tulse Hill and that had not just been because of a more difficult journey to work every day.

  He was happier, always had been, on this side of the river.

  He felt more like himself.

  They slowed, then stopped at the corner of Prince Of Wales Road. From here, Thorne would be heading right, just five minutes’ walk from his flat, while Hendricks would continue on to Camden, to his own.

  ‘I really miss Alfie,’ Thorne said. Helen’s five-year-old. Thorne had packed up and left when the boy was at school and had only seen him a few times since.

  ‘Meaning you don’t miss Helen?’

  ‘No, you daft twat. Course I do.’

  ‘Helen doesn’t mind you seeing him, does she?’

  Thorne shrugged. ‘She’s fine about it. I had dinner round there last week, matter of fact.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘So … nothing. Just saying, that’s all.’

  Hendricks was about to say something when a man coming in the opposite direction gave him a long, hard stare. Hendricks stared right back, turning to carry on staring when the man had walked past. ‘Bang up for it, he was.’

  ‘What would Liam say?’

  ‘Liam’s well aware how irresistible I am. He knows I’m going to get checked out.’

  Thorne pointed at the man who was now disappearing. ‘That, mate, was astonishment, pure and simple.’

  ‘Too right it was.’

  ‘Not in the way you’re thinking. It’s not everyone who’s used to coming across someone with quite that much metal in their face. Not even round here. You need to stop thinking that look of horror …’ Thorne opened his mouth and widened his eyes to demonstrate, ‘is the same as someone fancying you.’

  Hendricks laughed, then belched again. ‘What you were saying, about Alfie.’

  ‘Nothing.’ Thorne sniffed and adjusted his grip on the precious brown bag. ‘Just …’

  ‘Come here.’ Hendricks stepped forward and pulled Thorne into a fierce and only partially drunken hug. Thorne was happy enough to be drawn in and to hold on. ‘I know you better than anyone, remember? You don’t need to prove to me that you’re as soft as shite.’

  When they had separated, Hendricks straightened his leather jacket, rubbed a palm across his shaved head. He said, ‘Anyway, I hope you get this conman business sorted, so you can get back to nicking killers. It’s not like they’ve all taken a holiday, is it? There’s no shortage of bodies on my slab, mate.’

  ‘He is a killer,’ Thorne said. ‘As good as.’

  ‘Come on, I’m not sure you really believe that.’

  ‘Either way.’

  Thorne had told Hendricks about the case while they’d eaten: the suicide; the man who had destroyed the life of an innocent woman; the small window of opportunity granted them by Brigstocke. A window that would only stay open while there was a chance that the forensic sweep of Philippa Goodwin’s flat yielded significant results.

  ‘There was sod all on her phone,’ Thorne said.

  ‘You told me.’

  ‘This bloke managed to erase every picture, every text, whatever, before he scarpered.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Covered his tracks very nicely, and I’m betting he’s done it plenty of times before. So we’d better hope we get lucky with the DNA.’

  Hendricks was already moving away, shaking his head and saying, ‘You told me,’ again. Without turning round, he shouted, ‘Now, you hurry up and get home, mate. And keep cheerful, for God’s sake. I hear there’s a lot to be said for wanking into a tear-stained pillow …’

  When Thorne got back to his flat, he put the leftover curry in the fridge, stuck the kettle on and mooched around. He turned on the TV and changed channels for ten minutes. He drifted off to sleep, but woke again soon afterwards, his neck aching.

  Then he called Helen.

  He said, ‘It’s me,’ then realised he was talking to her voicemail. He swore quietly and said, ‘Sorry, I’m guessing you’re in bed. Course you are … just calling to see how you’re doing, really. Anyway, hope you’re OK and give the boy a cuddle from me. That’s it …’

  The second he hung up, he began to wish he hadn’t called. He was feeling maudlin, there was no more to it than that, and the two pints in the Lancer hadn’t helped. Or the two in the Grafton Arms before that. A garbled, late-night message wouldn’t change Helen’s mind, after all, and he couldn’t swear that he wanted her to change it.

  He stood up and walked towards the bedroom.

  Not too much he was sure abo
ut.

  Curry always tasted better the next day.

  George Jones had a better voice than Frank Sinatra.

  And manipulative, sociopathic arseholes weren’t actually killers just because he wanted them to be.

  TEN

  Of late, Thorne had grown used to waking up feeling a little out of sorts, but today was different, because he had dreamed about his mother.

  It did not happen often and always left him feeling … bruised and somewhat discombobulated. He did not feel comforted, as anyone dreaming about a dead parent might have expected, and there was never anything pleasant to dwell upon after these dreams about a woman he missed as much as he did.

  It was not as if they were ever extraordinary. There was nothing to mull over or pour out to a therapist, had he been the sort to waste his time doing that. This, like the others when they came, was simple enough. Memories of things that probably never happened.

  Mundane. …

  Her voice and her smell; Camay and Parma violets. Watching her in the garden from his bedroom window. Her hair tied up in a red scarf.

  All the same, he woke fidgety and irritable.

  It was guilt, he felt, hard as it had been to name and to accept. Guilt that was completely irrational, he knew, but no less painful for it, because he did not dream about his mother as much as perhaps he should.

  Nothing like as much.

  It was only natural, he guessed, that he should dream about his father more. Thorne had been there throughout a terrible decline that had dragged out over a number of years; watching as the Alzheimer’s had slowly drawn the old man into the darkness, then locked a door to which Thorne had no key. When he dreamed of him, his father was almost always as sharp and quick-witted as he had been when Thorne was a boy. He was the parent again and Thorne the child, the way it was supposed to be. When these dreams of his father came, they made Thorne feel good. He woke, miserable at their brevity, their transience, at being unable to hang on to them for longer; angry at being torn away.

  No. The guilt was not because he dreamed about his father more than his mother. It was because he dreamed of her so very rarely, while dreaming far too often about others.

  He dreamed about a man called Stuart Nicklin more than he dreamed of his mother. About men named Francis Calvert and Arkan Zarif. He dreamed about killers and rapists the way other people dreamed about flying or falling or sleeping with a celebrity. About men who hated and hurt because they were breathing and for whom life only sang when others were in pain.

  Monsters, if you believed in that sort of thing.

  While the woman he had worshipped and who had loved him more than any other person on the planet was given no more than a walk-on role.

  ‘All good, Tom?’

  Thorne looked up from behind his desk to see Tanner settling into a chair on the other side. He grunted and let his gaze drop once again to the same piece of paperwork he had been staring at for the previous fifteen minutes.

  He tried to focus.

  He said, ‘Ticking along.’

  ‘To be honest, I’ve seen you look happier,’ Tanner said. ‘Actually, I’ve seen corpses look happier.’

  Thorne did his best to match that, at least. ‘I’m fine. Just … any news on the Goodwin thing, yet?’

  The thing. Not a case, not yet.

  ‘Should be today sometime.’

  Thorne looked at his watch. It wasn’t even eleven o’clock.

  ‘To be honest, I’d thought you’d be a bit more cheerful about it. I mean it’s all going in the right direction so far. We know they got plenty of prints and some decent samples, right?’

  A historic blood trace in the bathroom, where Patrick Jennings might have cut himself shaving. Hair with follicles and roots intact and flakes of dried skin. It had been easy enough to obtain DNA from the body of Philippa Goodwin, so separating the two profiles before running Jennings’s sample against the national database would not be an issue. Same with the fingerprints.

  ‘Even so,’ Tanner said, ‘I can’t see much point in holding your breath.’

  ‘I thought you were with me on this.’

  ‘I am.’ Tanner leaned forward to straighten the in-tray on Thorne’s desk, nudging it one way, then the other, until she was satisfied. She sat back. ‘Up to a point.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘When you stop being realistic.’

  The forensic team had been dispatched to Philippa Goodwin’s flat in Tufnell Park almost forty-eight hours earlier, as soon as they had got the grudging go-ahead from Russell Brigstocke. Thorne knew he was being overly optimistic at best and knew equally well that his impatience for a result was misplaced. In some cases – rape being the prime example – DNA could be analysed and samples compared within a matter of hours, so as to shorten the ordeal of victims. When a life was deemed to be at stake or a clock was ticking down to the release of a suspected killer, stops would obviously be pulled out, but that certainly didn’t apply in this case.

  Not for a suicide.

  This was nobody’s idea of a rush job.

  ‘And anyway, whatever we said to Russell the other day, it’s not like we’ve got any shortage of stuff to be getting on with. Well, I’m certainly not sitting around twiddling my thumbs.’

  Tanner was right, of course, and Thorne was well aware that he had plenty on his plate already. He needed to prepare evidence for a trial the following week. A man charged with strangling his girlfriend to death, who persisted in claiming that he acted in self-defence; his legal team cocky as hell thanks to the superficial stab wounds on his arms, until it was pointed out that their client’s fingerprints were the only ones found on the knife. A suspicious death at a hospital in Edmonton had come in overnight and there were still the three gang-related stabbings in Tottenham that he had been tasked with reviewing.

  Nothing making his blood jump quite the way this was, though.

  Patrick Jennings …

  He could not have told anyone why.

  Thorne wasn’t holding his breath, not exactly. He knew as well as Tanner that they would need to get seriously lucky, that a man as smooth, as careful as Jennings would not have taken too many risks when it came to masking his identity. It was how he lived, after all, how he earned. Still, a slim chance was better than none. Perhaps he had been done for punching a copper when he was a student or nicked for drink driving. Either way, his prints would almost certainly have been taken and potentially a DNA swab.

  He would be in the system.

  Plenty on his plate, but because that chance was slim – more or less anorexic, Hendricks had said – Thorne would need to think of other ways forward. A strategy that did not rely on knowing who this individual was and would not drop him in it too much with his DCI.

  He was already thinking, but so far had produced precisely nothing.

  When Thorne looked up to see Tanner still sitting there, he said, ‘This what you call not twiddling your thumbs?’

  She stood up. ‘I only popped in to see if you fancied coming round for dinner tomorrow night.’

  ‘Your place?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well …’

  She scowled. ‘I’m getting better. I mean it’ll only be pasta. Presuming you’re free … you know, Saturday night, I’m sure you’re beating them off with a shitty stick.’

  ‘I’ll need to look at my diary, obviously.’

  ‘You’re still …?’

  Thorne only just stopped himself saying wanking into a tear-stained pillow. ‘On my own, in my flat, yeah.’ Tanner knew what had happened between him and Helen and had been rather more sympathetic than Phil Hendricks. To his relief, she hadn’t asked too many questions since he’d told her. Though perhaps, Thorne thought, that was what the dinner invitation was all about.

  Pasta and a spot of casual interrogation.

  ‘About half-seven, then,’ Tanner said.

  ‘I’ll make sure I eat before I come.’

  ‘And there’s no poi
nt looking at your watch every five minutes, because it won’t make the results come any faster. “Wait and see pudding”. What my mother used to say …’

  And Thorne remembered his dream.

  And the bubble of guilt rose up hard into his throat, sudden and sour.

  It was a good job that Tanner had already turned away and was walking towards the door, because Thorne’s expression would have made a corpse look positively gleeful.

  ELEVEN

  They’re sitting in Pizza Express on Silver Street, across the road from Enfield Town overground station. They’re sharing a large bottle of Peroni, small plates of garlic bread and olives. They’ve been talking almost constantly since the moment she arrived and joined him at the table, and now they’re laughing about how much time – or rather how little time – he had let go by before calling her again.

  ‘OK, but it wasn’t like I was suggesting we get together the next day, was it?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Sarah says.

  ‘That would have seemed too keen, I reckon.’

  ‘Yeah, a bit needy.’

  ‘Anyway, I wanted to give you a day to get your childcare sorted.’

  ‘Very thoughtful.’ She pops an olive into her mouth. ‘I admire the planning.’

  ‘It pays to think ahead,’ he says.

  A waiter arrives and lays down the pizzas. She smiles and shakes her head as she unfolds the napkin into her lap. ‘Why do blokes always go for the meatiest thing on the menu?’ She points and laughs as he drizzles chilli oil over his pizza. ‘And then make it as spicy as they can? Do you think it makes you seem more … manly, like there’s testosterone pouring out of your ears? You know …’ She growls. ‘Meat! Like it makes us go all daft and floppy, like it makes us think you’re probably animals in bed.’

  He glances up, already tucking in. ‘You’re absolutely right.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘All of it.’

  They carry on chatting while they eat, though it’s as if both have taken the decision to avoid anything … weighty. So they talk about the extortionate prices of almost everything in London and the chocolate bars they liked as kids. His pathological dislike of being late and her somewhat bizarre addiction to darts on TV.