Their Little Secret

by Mark Billingham

  ‘But you still haven’t?’

  ‘I’m trying to work things out, that’s all.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Thorne said.

  These days, he was doing much the same thing.

  He looked at his bottle, saw that he had half his beer left. He decided that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to stick a few CDs in a plastic bag as he’d come all this way. There was some George Jones it would be nice to have back at the flat and at least one Hank Williams album knocking around the place somewhere he knew would help. While Helen was working things out.

  What had Tanner said the other week?

  Wait and see pudding.

  TWENTY-NINE

  They stripped, threw a few towels down and had sex on the bathroom floor. Then they showered together, dried one another off and walked back to the bedroom in the fluffy white ‘his and hers’ dressing gowns Sarah had bought the week before.

  She’d bought all sorts of things.

  New sets of underwear for herself and an outfit or two for each of them to wear or enjoy removing.

  Toys …

  She sat at her dressing table and plugged in the hairdryer. ‘That’s nearly every room.’

  ‘What?’ Conrad was stretched out on the bed with a magazine.

  ‘We’ve done it in the two sitting rooms, all the bedrooms, the kitchen and now the bathroom. Just the downstairs toilet and that’s the full set.’ She turned the hairdryer on.

  Conrad spoke, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She saw him waving at her in the mirror and turned the dryer off.

  ‘I think that might be pushing it,’ he said. ‘I’m not a bloody contortionist.’

  ‘You sit down on the lid and I straddle you,’ she said. ‘Easy.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We’ve got to do every room in the house, Conrad, no exceptions. We need to mark them all.’ She grinned at him in the mirror. ‘Then we should start doing it outside. In the park, whatever.’

  She switched the hairdryer back on, and a few seconds later saw that he was waving at her again and switched it off.

  ‘All about the danger, right?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Al fresco shagging.’ He sat up. ‘The possibility of getting caught.’

  Sarah turned slowly round. ‘We’re never going to get caught,’ she said.

  When she had finished drying her hair, she walked across to the bed and sat down gently on the edge. She tightened the belt on her dressing gown and stared at the carpet until, after a minute or so, Conrad looked up. He laid down his magazine and said, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘We’ve been honest with each other, haven’t we?’ she said.

  Conrad took a second or two. ‘Yeah …’

  It seemed as though each had already told the other all there was to tell, that they had shared everything important. There were some details which would probably come out later, of course – childhood memories, travel stories, whatever – but there would be plenty of time for that, and what mattered were those things they needed to know about each other now. So that they could move forward. Sarah knew exactly how Conrad made his living and Conrad knew that Sarah, however good she was at making up stories, was no kind of writer. The house was hers, she’d told him, courtesy of her ex-husband, but the money she needed to buy food and clothes, to pay the necessary bills, had been earned doing market research from home, online or over the phone.

  Asking people what they thought about shampoo, pet food, UKIP, for eight pounds fifty an hour.

  ‘I want to tell you exactly what happened when I split up with Peter,’ she said. ‘That was his real name, by the way.’

  ‘Always good to sprinkle a few facts in,’ Conrad said.

  ‘Seriously. You need to know how it was and why it happened, because then you’ll understand how much I need Jamie.’

  ‘I do understand.’

  ‘Maybe you think you do.’

  ‘Sarah—’

  She shook her head and, when she finally began to tell him, quietly and with her eyes fixed on her bare feet, she did not have to exaggerate the pain or affect hesitation. She had no need to dissemble, because it was the first time she had told her story to anybody.

  She needed Conrad, more than anyone, to know her.

  ‘It’s not like it hasn’t happened to loads of women,’ she said. ‘It’s such a cliché really, that whole mid-life crisis thing … but there’s nothing normal about how it made me feel.’ She looked up, just for a moment. ‘He ran off with a twenty-six-year-old. That’s it in a nutshell. Same old story, right? Bought himself a whole new wardrobe of clothes, got a stupid haircut, started going to a gym, all of it. Can’t be a flabby old bugger when you’ve got a fit young hottie to keep up with, can you? Mind you, when you’re turning yourself into a new man, a desirable man, there are some things you have to say goodbye to, aren’t there? Apart from your wife, I mean. So, obviously the poor bloke couldn’t take all those Second World War books with him, could he? The ones he used to sit and read for hours on the toilet. Oh no, he left them behind … because I don’t think a twenty-six-year-old with nice perky tits and a thing for Disney princesses is going to be too impressed with any of that.

  ‘Hitler books, while you’re shitting …

  ‘And he knew I wanted kids, that was the worst thing. Knew how much I wanted them, always have. Never even gave us the time to find out whose fault it was we couldn’t have them, did he? Well, my fault, clearly, because he managed to knock his girlfriend up. Now, him and this girl, who can’t even remember the Falklands or Princess Di, are playing happy families, with a toddler running about. A little boy. I saw him once.

  ‘He told me I could keep the house, paid off the mortgage … as much out of guilt as anything, and that was about it. I saw him a couple of times after he’d gone, while we were still sorting everything out, and he told me he felt like a … fighter pilot. Can you believe that? Like he didn’t know what was going to happen to him, that it might all end badly, but that he’d never felt so alive. I just stared at him. If I’d had a knife in my hand I would have been happy to put a stop to that right there and then.

  ‘I could have sold the house, I suppose, got myself a little flat, but that wasn’t how I wanted to live. That wasn’t how I saw myself and it certainly wasn’t how I wanted others to see me. Appearances are important, aren’t they? Appearances are everything. For the little girl from a housing estate in south London who managed to lose her accent. The girl whose mum was the clever one but never got a look-in because she was married to an alcoholic waster. For the girl who landed herself a rich husband then got thrown away like a bag of rubbish, but found a way to keep on living …

  ‘I couldn’t do it on my own though, could I? My Jamie came along just when I needed him and saved my life, pretty much.’ She looked up again. ‘I can see him, you know? What he’s wearing, whether he’s happy or if something’s bothering him. I can tell that just by the sound of his voice … just if his smile’s a bit off or whatever that day. I can tell you exactly what he smells like.’

  She raised her hand, moved her fingers. ‘Just here, where it’s soft at the back of his neck. It smells like toffees …’

  Conrad waited until he was sure she had finished. Then he said, ‘You’ve got me too, now.’

  She nodded.

  ‘You know that, don’t you? You know I’ll protect you. There’s two of us … three of us now, and I won’t ever let anything get in the way of that.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘You really have to ask me?’

  ‘I know, my love. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Conrad asked. ‘I mean, the beach …’

  ‘I just needed to hear you say it, to be sure.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘But what we did on the beach was just for us, a commitment we made to each other. Like a blood oath. Now, we need to honour it, because there might be a problem.’r />
  ‘What problem?’

  Sarah opened her dressing gown and began crawling up the bed towards him. ‘Someone who’s threatening us.’

  THIRTY

  Two days after his trip to Margate and his evening with Helen, Thorne’s journey to work was not one he spent relishing the hours ahead. Most of the previous shift had been taken up with pre-trial work on the Tottenham stabbings, but the further he got into liaison with the CPS and the integrity of evidence chains, the more extra work seemed to present itself, as if from nowhere. It felt like one of those scenes in a film where someone has been locked up for being mad and, just as they stumble towards the end of a long corridor, about to escape to freedom, the door begins moving further away.

  Well, it would have felt like that, except Thorne couldn’t even see the door.

  He got to his desk and readied himself to get stuck in again. He logged on to the computer system. He fetched a large coffee and, once he’d had the necessary jolt of caffeine, he arranged the jumble of paperwork into manageable piles.

  Then he pushed them to one side and called Colin Hatter.

  ‘You don’t think I’d’ve let you know?’ Hatter said. ‘If we had anything new.’

  ‘Maybe something just came in and you were about to pick up the phone yourself.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘So, I thought I’d save you the trouble.’

  ‘I wish it had, mate.’ The line was muffled for a few seconds; Hatter covering the mouthpiece to speak to someone else. When he came back to Thorne, he said, ‘This is turning into one of those, you know?’

  Thorne knew all too well. One of those cases that appeared to defy any amount of bog-standard procedure, that would rely on evidence presenting itself that those investigating had been unable to find on their own. A key witness coming forward out of the blue to change the game. A tip-off or an unsought confession. Something that had been missed, perhaps, which would only surface way down the line when the case was re-investigated; months, or even years, after it had been shunted reluctantly on to the back burner before eventually going cold.

  ‘I was wondering if we could get that CCTV footage enhanced.’

  ‘Nothing worth enhancing, mate. Come on, you’ve seen it. We never get a look at her face.’

  ‘OK, so what about trying to knock up a decent e-fit? Have you talked to the people working in the bar that night?’

  ‘No point, is there?’ Hatter was making a good job of sounding breezy while remaining stubbornly negative. ‘What exactly is it we’re supposed to ask? I mean, how many women between, say, eighteen and forty do you reckon were in that bar on a Friday night, and how many of them do you think the bar staff are likely to remember? No … the appeal was definitely our best bet.’

  ‘Nothing from that, then?’ Before he’d left Margate, Thorne had been told that local media would be used in an urgent appeal for information from anyone who might have been in the centre of town that Friday night. A statement from Kevin Deane’s devastated family alongside stills from the CCTV footage. A standard attempt to jog memories or prick consciences when all else had failed.

  ‘Nothing to get too excited about,’ Hatter said. ‘A few more sightings, that’s all. Kevin Deane and the woman walking towards the beach. A man, who for obvious reasons isn’t Kevin Deane, walking away from the beach with a woman, just before eleven-thirty.’

  ‘The same woman?’

  ‘Sounds like it. Baseball cap …’

  ‘Leaving the scene with the killer.’ Thorne waited for Hatter to respond, but there was just silence. ‘That’s hardly nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Well, it’s nothing that really gets us anywhere, is it?’

  ‘They’re a couple. I told you.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose it adds a bit more weight to your theory about them being in it together.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like a theory any more,’ Thorne said. ‘Sounds pretty bloody cut and dried and it’s what we need to base enquiries on moving forward.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ The line was briefly muffled again. Hatter sounded as though he’d already lost interest in the conversation. ‘Any thoughts as to how we actually do that, mate, I’m all ears.’

  Thorne had little to offer, but he was buggered if he was going to let the DI from Kent go without making it perfectly clear what he thought about him, and other coppers like him. The sort who couldn’t get worked up if a result didn’t fall into their laps straight away and only felt they were doing their jobs properly when they were slapping handcuffs on.

  Glory-hunters.

  Thorne had been called one himself more than once, and back then those making the accusations had probably done so with good reason. Of course, there were some cases that got pulses racing more than others, there were times when frustration could lead you to do something stupid, but nine times out of ten it was all about putting the time in. Wanting it. Sometimes, getting that right result would mean long hours of admin and office work, but if that was what it took, it had to be done.

  He glanced across at the heap of folders and files that he had yet to tackle.

  He said, ‘You can’t always have it on a fucking plate, mate.’

  An hour or so later Russell Brigstocke walked past the door of his office and Thorne called him back.

  ‘You doing … paperwork?’ The DCI reached into an inside pocket for his phone. ‘I need to get a picture of this.’

  Thorne flashed a fixed, ha-bloody-ha grin. Said, ‘Look at me, I’m pissing myself.’ Then: ‘Where’s Nicola this morning, anyway?’

  ‘Caught a nasty one first thing,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Still over there with Dipak.’

  ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘You can ask her yourself when she comes back.’ Brigstocke’s phone began to ring in his hand. It was clearly a call he needed to take, so he stepped away. ‘Have a look at what’s already on the CADS. You know …’ he nodded towards Thorne’s desk, ‘if you can bear to drag yourself away from that lot.’

  Thorne logged straight on to the Computer Aided Dispatch System and read through the reports that had begun to come in just before seven o’clock that morning.

  A HAT team dispatched urgently to an address in Walthamstow.

  No obvious signs of forced entry.

  The body of a young woman discovered by her boyfriend half an hour earlier and displaying clear evidence of foul play.

  Thorne looked at his watch and saw that he had been at work for less than two hours. Despite having made a decent crack at it, there was still a good-sized stack of witness statements, evidence logs and CPS correspondence to get through. It was the kind of thing Nicola Tanner would have breezed through by now, would have enjoyed, for pity’s sake.

  Instead, she’d been the one to catch a fresh murder case.

  That was how it went, sometimes.

  He took a folder from the pile and opened it roughly enough to tear the cover sheet. He began to read, knowing how little he was taking in. Thinking about the kind of copper he’d had Hatter marked down as and telling himself that whatever his own shortcomings might be, he could at least put his hand up if he had to and admit that sometimes he was a full-on, solid-gold hypocrite.

  Thorne sat there and hated himself for feeling jealous.

  When Tanner returned to Becke House just before lunch, Thorne all but dragged her into his office.

  ‘What’s happening in Walthamstow, then?’

  ‘Can I take my coat off first?’

  Thorne smiled, like it was really no big deal, and sat waiting impatiently until Tanner had settled into the chair opposite.

  ‘Gemma Maxwell,’ Tanner said. ‘Twenty-six. Discovered at home by her boyfriend just after six-thirty.’ She let out a long breath, as though it was one she’d been holding since leaving the crime scene. She looked wrung out, but there was something fierce, unmissable, around her eyes and, as she let her head fall back, there was an air of what seemed like disbelief at what she’d seen. Incredulity still,
at what people were capable of, despite the fact that she’d attended many such scenes before.

  She looked, Thorne thought, the way any half-decent copper ought to look afterwards.

  He only gave her a few seconds, because he knew she would not need any more. ‘How was she killed?’

  ‘No sign of a murder weapon,’ Tanner said. ‘But it looks like blunt force trauma. Significant trauma, too: there was a lot of blood. So, something the killer brought along to do the job or picked up in the house and took away with him.’

  ‘No forced entry?’

  Tanner shook her head.

  ‘What about this boyfriend?’

  She shook it again. ‘Junior doctor on a night shift, so any number of people can vouch for his whereabouts. The doctor at the crime scene obviously wouldn’t give us anything definitive, but she’d already been dead at least eight hours by the time the boyfriend got in from work.’

  ‘Where’s the hospital?’

  ‘Whipps Cross, about a twenty-minute drive away. Look, I know what—’

  ‘He couldn’t have left work without anyone knowing?’

  ‘He’s a doctor in A and E. I think he might have been missed.’

  ‘Nipped home for an hour?’

  ‘It’s not the boyfriend,’ Tanner said. ‘I’ve been with him for the best part of four hours. He’s in bits.’

  ‘They’re always in bits.’

  ‘I know that, but these days I can recognise the real thing when I see it.’

  Thorne watched her try to smile, but saw the pain spasm behind it, just for a moment. He said, ‘So, what now?’

  ‘The victim was a teacher at a school over in Enfield, so I thought I’d probably start there.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’ Tanner’s partner Susan had been a teacher; a murdered teacher. Thorne looked at her, but whatever he’d seen in her face a few seconds earlier had passed.

  Tanner got to her feet. ‘Talk to a few of her colleagues tomorrow, after the post-mortem.’