Their Little Secret

by Mark Billingham

  She untied the towel and let it drop to the floor.

  She smiled and moved a hand across her stomach.

  She said his name as though hearing herself say it for the first time.

  Hardening in spite of himself, Conrad was already thinking that scratches and slaps would have been so much easier to deal with, as Sarah walked slowly past him, climbed on to the bed and knelt on all fours.

  ‘Sometimes, my love, it’s good to be angry.’ She clutched at the sheets, raised her backside and laid her head flat against the pillow. ‘And you know I don’t mind if it hurts a little bit …’

  FIFTY-ONE

  Thorne followed Andrew Ruston along the narrow hallway in which his girlfriend had been bludgeoned to death ten days before. The carpet had been removed for obvious reasons – though Thorne could not be sure if that had been done by CSIs at the crime scene or later, by Ruston himself – and there were a few gaps, revealing dust-balls and tangles of wiring, where sections of the floorboards had been taken up.

  ‘There’s a couple of nails to watch out for as well.’ Ruston was soft-spoken, a trace of a northern accent. ‘I keep forgetting. Come down in the morning in my bare feet, then have to go straight back upstairs and put some slippers on.’

  If the young man had been remotely taken aback a minute or so before to find a detective he had not met brandishing a warrant card on his doorstep, he had not shown it. The blank expression might have been the same he wore whenever he opened the door to a Jehovah’s Witness or someone selling cleaning goods. When Thorne had asked to come in, Ruston had simply nodded and turned back inside.

  He was fully dressed, in jeans and a checked shirt, but he’d looked to Thorne like someone who was not yet fully awake.

  He asked if Thorne wanted coffee and Thorne thanked him, though as it was late afternoon and, considering the nature of a visit that was more or less off the clock anyway, he had half thought about calling in somewhere on his way over and turning up with a few bottles in a plastic bag.

  He followed Ruston into the kitchen.

  ‘I’m not here with any news.’ Thorne watched Ruston pulling mugs down from a shelf, stepped aside to let him get to the fridge. ‘I should tell you that straight away.’

  Ruston slid a pod into a flashy-looking coffee machine. ‘Why’ve you come, then?’

  Informing someone so recently bereaved in such terrible circumstances that visiting them had seemed a better option than paperwork, was clearly out of the question, so instead, Thorne told what seemed like a relatively small lie.

  He said, ‘I thought I should.’

  Ruston turned to look at him, his expression unchanged, then went back to preparing the coffee.

  ‘Are you … on your own?’

  ‘Only for the last day or two,’ Ruston said. ‘Gemma’s mum and dad were staying, then my mum and dad. They’ll all be back for the funeral, whenever that is.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do about hurrying all that up,’ Thorne said. ‘Getting Gemma … released.’

  ‘So, yeah, on my own until then, I suppose. It’s fine, though. I’m going to have to get used to it, aren’t I?’

  Thorne thought about Nicola Tanner, who by now was probably in Margate talking to Kevin Deane’s parents, and decided that, all things considered, the coin toss had probably worked out best for both of them. This was really no more than a pastoral visit and, bearing in mind how both their partners had died, Tanner and Andrew Ruston might have had a little too much in common for her comfort. Or perhaps he was over-thinking it; underestimating his colleague’s … professionalism.

  Tanner would have handled it perfectly.

  She would probably have recommended somewhere cheap to buy a new hall carpet.

  They took their mugs into a sitting room that showed fewer obvious traces of any previous police presence, though it was rather more untidy – a little less cared for – than Thorne guessed it might otherwise have been.

  There were a few clothes tossed into a corner, a pizza box next to the sofa and an ashtray whose contents explained the strong smell of weed that Thorne had recognised when the front door was opened. A laptop sat open on a low table, a screensaver showing a picture of Ruston and a young woman of whom Thorne had only seen post-mortem photographs but knew to be Gemma Maxwell. It looked as though it had been taken in one of those photo booths that were now so popular at parties. He wore thick, comedy glasses and had a stethoscope around his neck, while she was sporting a mortar board and flexing a cane.

  They were both grinning like idiots.

  Ruston closed the laptop and sat down, invited Thorne to do the same. He said, ‘The hospital have been really great. Told me I can come back whenever I’m ready.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Thorne said.

  ‘God knows when that’ll be. Right now, it feels like I wouldn’t know a migraine from a melanoma.’

  ‘It’s important to take some time.’ Thorne felt like he was quoting from some Bereavement Support Handbook For Morons. ‘That’s … important.’

  ‘What happened to Gemma.’ Ruston looked across at him. ‘It’s to do with that woman who was hanging about at the school, isn’t it? The one pretending to have kids or something. Karl Sturridge told me you’d been asking about her.’

  Thorne took a long sip of coffee, giving himself a few seconds. He had anticipated having to deal with general enquiries about the investigation, but it would have been easier to simply admit that they had made no real progress than answer a direct question such as this one, however much he wanted to. Questions like those Ella Fulton had asked, and Gemma Maxwell’s friends at the school; questions that people in such situations had every right to ask, but to which Thorne was only ever supposed to give regulation responses.

  Saying nothing would probably cover him both ways.

  He said, ‘Yeah, we think it is.’

  ‘So, she’s the one you’re looking for?’

  ‘Her and her boyfriend, yeah.’

  Ruston stared.

  ‘There were two of them here that night.’

  ‘Oh, right. Do you know which one of them actually …?’

  Now Thorne had no need to lie. ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘I told her she should have talked to Rachel Peake about it or gone straight to the police.’ He let out a long sigh, his hand rasping against the stubble on his cheek. ‘Gemma wouldn’t have it, though … said the woman must have problems, that she’d rather try and be nice about it.’

  ‘She’s certainly got problems,’ Thorne said.

  Ruston nodded, as if he didn’t really want to know any more. Like that was enough to be going on with, plenty to be lying awake in the middle of the night thinking about. ‘They told me about the baby,’ he said. ‘That it was only a week or two and Gemma probably didn’t even know about it.’

  Thorne swallowed. ‘Right.’ Fierce as the temptation had been to keep the fact of Gemma Maxwell’s pregnancy from him, Ruston had a right to know any detail of the post-mortem which would later be seen as relevant in the event of a trial.

  ‘If she did, she certainly hadn’t said anything to me, and she would have because we’d been … trying.’ He nodded again. ‘I was thinking … it was probably a good thing she didn’t have any idea. That at the end, she wouldn’t have been thinking about the baby, you know?’ He glanced briefly towards the corridor. ‘That’s something, isn’t it?’

  Watching Andrew Ruston’s head drop and seeing, for the first time, how completely shattered the man’s life was, Thorne felt himself starting to struggle. Flailing for the right words, for any words. The silence began to grow as uncomfortable, in its own way, as the one that had bloomed between himself and Tanner in that Glasgow hotel bar, and he had not the first idea what he should say to end it.

  Everything sounded so pat, so insincere. Should he abandon any notions of support or knee-jerk consolation and just … keep the man company? Should he try to take his mind off what he was going through? Even as the idea oc
curred to him, Thorne realised how ridiculous it was.

  How’s your football team doing?

  Seen any decent films lately?

  Why couldn’t he do this? What was he … lacking? He guessed that Tanner would be having no such trouble in Margate. He had seen her comforting Denise Fry on the phone the night before.

  He said, ‘I thought it was you. You know, initially.’

  Ruston looked at him, then nodded. ‘Makes sense, I suppose.’

  ‘Right. Just statistics, you know? It’s almost always the partner.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ruston said. ‘Almost always.’ He stood up and walked across to gather up some of the clothes in the corner of the room. He held the bundle in his arms and turned to stare out at the street. ‘So, is this some new initiative or something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sending detectives like you out to talk to the victim’s relatives. The caring face of the Met, or whatever.’ He turned to look at Thorne. ‘I’ve already been offered counselling and stuff, had a couple of uniformed coppers dropping in with pamphlets.’

  ‘Not really,’ Thorne said. ‘Just thought it was something we don’t really do enough of. Well, a colleague of mine thinks so. It was her idea, if I’m honest. DI Tanner?’

  Ruston nodded. ‘Yeah, she was nice. Like … she clearly gave a toss, but she didn’t talk to me like I had cancer, you know?’

  ‘She’s one of the good ones.’

  ‘That explains it, though,’ Ruston said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why you don’t look any happier than I am.’

  FIFTY-TWO

  An hour and a half after leaving Walthamstow, Thorne was on home territory again; playing pool with Phil Hendricks in a dank and draughty room above the Grafton Arms that, thankfully, none but the most hardcore of regulars – including those who had reluctantly decamped to south London for a while – seemed to know about. This was ground on which he felt decidedly more comfortable than he had at Andrew Ruston’s place, even if it was, literally, a fair bit stickier.

  ‘Get in!’ Thorne pumped his fist after sinking a long ball into a corner pocket.

  ‘Shot,’ Hendricks said, approaching the table. ‘Shame it was one of mine.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m stripes. You’re spots.’

  ‘Oh, for f—’ Thorne was already three frames down and, with the loser of their best-of-seven match having to cough up for the evening’s bar bill, things were not looking good. He stood and watched as Hendricks put a couple more of the right balls away. He chalked his cue and said, ‘Do you think it’s a bit weird that I don’t dream about my mum a bit more?’

  Hendricks played a safety shot and watched as the white ball nestled nice and close to the cushion. He straightened up. ‘God knows. I think it’s a bit weird that you’re asking me about it.’

  ‘I’ve been dreaming about her loads lately, that’s all.’

  ‘Right …’

  ‘Loads more than I normally do.’

  ‘So, what, you’re worried that you are dreaming about her or that you’re not dreaming about her enough?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Thorne said. ‘Both. I asked Melita Perera about it.’

  ‘You did, did you?’

  ‘Felt like a bit of an idiot asking her, to be honest, but she wasn’t much help anyway.’

  ‘I see. So, it’s the hot shrink’s professional services you’re interested in, is it?’ Hendricks smirked, but when Thorne refused to rise to his bait, he went back to his beer. ‘Look, they’re just dreams, mate. I wouldn’t worry about it. The other night I dreamed I was getting noshed off by Bradley Cooper and the only thing I was worried about when I woke up was the fact that it wasn’t actually happening.’

  ‘Bradley Cooper?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. He knew exactly what he was doing.’

  The rest of the frame played out much as the first three had, though the result was to prove rather more controversial. With four of Thorne’s balls still on the table, Hendricks was left with only the black to put away, and when the white went down as he attempted to pot it, Thorne claimed the frame.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘If you pot the white when you’re trying to pot the black—’

  ‘Yeah, when it’s only the black left.’

  ‘It’s the way we’ve always done it.’

  ‘Since when?’ Hendricks waited, then shrugged and laid his cue down on the table. ‘Fine, you have it, mate. You know, if cheating’s the only way you can avoid a whitewash …’

  While Hendricks gathered the balls and slowly re-racked them, he told Thorne about the long weekend away in Barcelona that he and Liam were planning. Thorne, a little envious, and remembering a trip that he and Helen had taken to Bruges the year before, said, ‘Sounds nice.’

  ‘Can’t bloody wait,’ Hendricks said. ‘Good bars, great food, all that. Bit of shopping on Las Ramblas and the odd gallery to keep Liam happy.’

  ‘He into that, is he?’

  ‘Sadly.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about art a bit lately,’ Thorne said.

  Hendricks said, ‘I’m getting seriously worried about you,’ and broke, hard. When two spots rolled into pockets, he began to strut around the table, singing ‘Werewolves of London’.

  ‘I know bugger all about it,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s all. I know bugger all about loads of things, come to think of it.’ He picked up his beer while Hendricks was lining up his next shot. ‘Wine, politics, history.’ He took a drink. ‘Geography, classical music, books …’

  ‘I know sod all about nuclear physics,’ Hendricks said. ‘But it’s not keeping me awake at night.’

  ‘Sometimes you feel a bit stupid, all I’m saying.’

  ‘For a very good reason.’

  ‘The people that do know about that stuff can make you feel a bit stupid, even if they’re not trying to.’

  Hendricks missed his shot and swore loudly. ‘Listen, mate, I can tell you everything you need to know about art. Or at least how you can make yourself sound like you know what you’re talking about. Basically, if it’s some famous dead artist, Rembrandt or one of them, you just nod a couple of times and say, “Oh, isn’t it fantastic the way he’s done that … horse?” or “look how nicely he’s painted that angel’s tits” or whatever. And if it’s modern art, you know, like squiggles or an “installation” or something … it’s pants. Piece of piss.’

  Thorne laughed.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘Fuck …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My mum,’ Thorne said. ‘She used to paint.’ He was smiling, shaking his head. ‘How could I have forgotten that?’

  ‘That’s great.’ Hendricks pulled a face, like Thorne was losing his marbles. ‘It’s your shot, by the way.’

  Thorne didn’t move, still a little stunned by the memory, the way it had dropped from nowhere into his head. ‘I mean, I’ve no idea if she was any good or anything, but I remember watching her do it when I was … I don’t know, six or seven or something. I had these paint-by-numbers kits, remember them?’

  ‘I think I was too busy masturbating.’

  ‘I’d do one of them and watch her while she was painting … whatever she was painting. She did it for ages.’ He looked at Hendricks. ‘What the hell happened to them all?’

  ‘Wouldn’t your dad have kept them somewhere?’

  Thorne tried to think back to those days and weeks after his father had died. He remembered dealing with all the official stuff, seeking out a few of the old man’s personal items for himself, but much of that period was a bit of a blur. Then he nodded. ‘Auntie Eileen.’

  ‘Auntie Eileen … what?’

  ‘She offered to give me a hand after Dad died. She was the one that went through the boxes and bags in the loft.’

  ‘There you go then,’ Hendricks said. ‘Maybe that’s why you’ve been dreaming about her, maybe there’s a lost Mrs Thorne masterpiece
knocking about somewhere. Why don’t you ask your lovely Dr Perera what she thinks about it?’

  Thorne gave him the finger, then bent over his shot and smashed a stripe into the top corner.

  ‘Four-one.’ Hendricks shook his head, as though saddened to be drinking beer Thorne had paid for. ‘I reckon you’ve lost your edge, living down there.’

  Thorne reached for what he decided would be his final pint of the evening. Recalling his last conversation with Helen, it was certainly starting to look as though his time on the wrong side of the river had come to an end, and he still couldn’t make his mind up how he felt about it. ‘You might be right.’

  ‘And even the one was iffy.’

  They had come back downstairs to the bar. Despite the drubbing he had been on the receiving end of upstairs, and the fact that some sadist had put an Ed Sheeran song on the jukebox, Thorne was feeling a lot more relaxed than he had in a good few days. He and Hendricks had enjoyed a couple of hours together during which they had not once talked about work.

  There had been no mention of blood and blunt-force trauma, of conmen or corpses.

  And now Thorne was going to spoil it, because he had to.

  He said, ‘I had a long chat with Nicola Tanner last night.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ The change in Hendricks’s expression made it clear he understood what the chat had been about.

  Thorne told him exactly what Tanner had said.

  ‘Is she a Catholic?’ Hendricks asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. Why?’

  ‘She does guilt better than anyone I know, that’s all.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what makes her a good copper,’ Thorne said. ‘Maybe she can recognise it.’

  ‘You think she’d ever say anything?’

  ‘No.’ Thorne shook his head, looked at his friend. ‘No, I definitely don’t. She just needed to get some stuff off her chest, I think.’

  They drank in silence for a minute. The Ed Sheeran song gave way to something marginally less annoying.

  ‘There’s an expression, isn’t there?’ Hendricks said. ‘Three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead. Something like that.’