Their Little Secret

by Mark Billingham

  ‘So, when he mentioned poison,’ Tanner said, ‘what did he say, exactly?’

  ‘Well, it was all a bit hectic.’ Another knowing glance at Hendricks, a small shake of the head. ‘You know, because we were trying to save his life, so there wasn’t a lot of time to write anything down.’ She shrugged. ‘He said he’d been poisoned, basically. He said that he knew what she’d done, what that bitch has done. I can certainly remember that, because he kept on saying it. It was probably the last thing he said before we lost him.’

  ‘Did he mention a name?’ Thorne asked.

  The doctor nodded. ‘Sarah. “Sarah did this to me” … something like that.’

  Thorne looked across at Tanner. Neither had been in much doubt as to the poisoner’s identity, but it was good to have it confirmed nevertheless. ‘So, what poison are we looking at?’ he asked.

  ‘We’re still running tests.’ Drummond turned to Hendricks. ‘Based on the symptoms he presented with and the story he told us, we can be fairly sure it’s nothing very common. It’s certainly not arsenic or strychnine … nothing too Agatha Christie … and I doubt very much that it’s antipsychotics or any kind of pesticide. Obviously we’ll be able to find out exactly what it was …’ She looked across at her patient. ‘Afterwards.’

  ‘What about mushrooms?’ Hendricks said. ‘Death Caps, maybe, or Destroying Angels?’

  Drummond thought for a few seconds. ‘Actually … that … might be a very good shout.’

  ‘I’ve never seen it, but I’ve read case studies. There’s definitely something about a honeymoon period. You feel fine after a while, think you’re fit as a flea again, but all the time the poison’s attacking your liver, your kidneys, your cardiac muscles.’

  Drummond was nodding.

  ‘Where the hell did she get poisonous mushrooms in March?’ Tanner looked at Hendricks and Drummond, as though the hole in their new-found theory was obvious. ‘Late summer, early autumn, I would have thought.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ Drummond said. ‘That’s … problematic.’

  They all looked at one another.

  ‘So, what do we do now?’ Tanner asked.

  Thorne had no quick answer.

  ‘I mean …’ Tanner pointed to the man in the coma. ‘He’s not appearing in court any time soon, is he?’

  ‘Make that never,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘So …?’

  ‘Where are his things?’ Thorne took a step towards Drummond. ‘Clothes, personal belongings …’

  Drummond peered around the room and finally pointed to a black bin-bag in the corner. Thorne moved to pick it up, then sat down and began quickly going through its contents, until he found what he was looking for.

  He pulled out a mobile phone.

  He stabbed at a button, cursed when confronted with a pass-code, then stopped, his finger poised above the screen. He looked up at Tanner, then quickly across to Maggie Drummond. He said, ‘I think we’ll be fine on our own for a bit.’

  ‘OK, if you’re sure.’ The doctor moved towards the door. ‘Well, I hope you get … actually I don’t really know what it is you’re after, but … whatever.’

  The moment the door was closed, Thorne was on his feet and moving across to the bed. He was still holding the mobile phone as he lifted Conrad’s hand from the mattress.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Tanner asked.

  ‘Shortcut,’ Thorne said. He held her stare for a moment or two, when it became clear that she understood. There was a time he would never have asked her to be party to anything that might be seen as professionally unacceptable, perhaps even illegal, further down the line.

  Those days were long gone.

  ‘Touch ID, right?’ Hendricks was grinning. ‘That is sly, mate. Seriously fucking sly.’ The grin got wider. ‘Clever though.’

  Thorne held the mobile in one hand and used the other to grasp Conrad’s thumb and press it to the home button. As soon as the app screen appeared, he took the phone back to his chair and began scrolling through contacts.

  ‘I didn’t see you do that,’ Tanner said.

  Thorne did not look up. ‘Yeah, you did,’ he said.

  He scrolled quickly towards the names beginning with S, only stopping once; just for a second or two to catch his breath, having spotted a name he had not expected to see, earlier in the alphabet.

  When he found SARAH MOB, he began to type out a text message.

  Hendricks walked across to try and sneak a look at what Thorne was typing. ‘You going to ask her if she fancies handing herself in?’

  ‘Something like that,’ Thorne said. When he’d finished, he quickly examined a few previous texts to make sure the style was right and to see how Conrad would normally sign off. Obviously, on this occasion, a kiss at the end would only have been suspicious. He scrolled through his message to check it.

  I know what you did. I’m at W. Suffolk hospital and if you don’t come I’m telling the police everything. C

  Thorne looked up, said, ‘Nothing to lose, have we?’ and pressed SEND.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Sarah was just drifting off to sleep when the text arrived.

  She was imagining Jamie – nervous but excited – on his first day at the village school. What if nobody likes me, Mum? The smiling teachers clucking around the new lad, making sure of a warm welcome from his classmates. Kids with ordinary names and without sharp elbows; boys and girls who had not grown up quite so fast as some of those at the schools they’d left behind in London. Hothouse flowers … hothouse weeds. Mini-bitches and cocky little bastards, ruthless and fame-hungry, already welded to their top-of-the-range phones and tablets.

  All so very sure of themselves and the comfortable place in the world that was waiting, that had been reserved for them before they could walk.

  Not loved, not properly.

  She sat up, reached for her phone and read the message. It was a shock, certainly, alarming even, for that first half a minute or so, because she hadn’t been expecting to hear from Conrad again. He was out of her life now and, painful as it was, she had no choice but to get used to it. She already missed him very badly, ached for his touch, his smell, even more than she’d thought she would. She had begun to think back through those wild and wonderful early days and to compose an … ending that such a special relationship deserved. Something she would be able to tell Jamie about one day, a story that was suitably romantic. Passionate, doomed …

  We loved each other so much that it was tearing us apart.

  It was easier for him to walk away in the end.

  There was this man who meant more to me than anything in the world, but one day he became very, very poorly …

  She turned her phone off and got out of bed.

  She was talking to herself as she got dressed, walking from one corner of the room to another, spitting curses or whispering soft declarations. Those words she would have said to Conrad if she’d been able, the things she and Jamie would say to each other before he walked into that little playground on his first day.

  The two people she loved above everything, above everyone else.

  What were the lyrics to that song you found for me? Something about ‘you and me for ever’? I thought that’s what it would be, my love. I feel like an idiot now, obviously, but I really believed that—

  You’ll be fine, darling and I’ll be right here when you come out.

  Did your Mummy take you to school?

  No, darling.

  Did your Daddy take you?

  She moved across to the window, wondering how old Jamie would need to be before she could tell him about his grandfather. A few years yet, almost certainly.

  Sarah looked out into the blackness and could just make out the tops of the trees moving back and forth in the wind. She thought about the swans, gliding across the dark water somewhere beneath her; the invisible effort and the danger in one of those beautiful, white wings.

  A few minutes later, when she was ready, she used the phone to ca
ll down to reception and ordered a taxi.

  SIXTY-SIX

  ‘Hospital food’s a damn sight better than it used to be.’ Hendricks carried his tray across and left it on a trolley by the door, having put away the steak and kidney pie, chips and beans which had been heated up and brought to the room by one of the auxiliary staff. He finished his tea and walked back across to his chair by the window. Thorne, waiting close to the bank of monitors, had barely managed half a ham sandwich, while Tanner, who was sitting on the opposite side of the bed, had eaten nothing.

  It had been an hour since Thorne had sent the text message.

  A quarter of that, since they’d finally been ready.

  The speed at which the ad-hoc operation had been put together made the raid on the house in Enfield seem laborious, but there had been no other option. The fact that Conrad had driven himself here suggested that he and his partner had not been staying too far away. If Sarah was nearby when she received the text, she could easily have got to them in a matter of minutes.

  Using DC Jilani Azad as a conduit, Thorne had quickly managed to recruit a sufficient number of locally based officers, who he had directed to take up positions in and around the hospital. His ‘direction’ had been terse to say the least, the urgency leaving no room for niceties. There could be no uniforms anywhere in sight, no marked cars, no mistakes. If the woman they were waiting for did respond to the text, the officers on site – together with as many members of staff as they had been able to brief – would ensure that, once inside the hospital, she was unable to leave, but Thorne was adamant that she be allowed uninterrupted passage to the ICU and the room he was now sitting in.

  If Sarah showed up, he wanted to be the one to take her.

  The if was more significant than it might normally have been, because Thorne knew that he’d messed up. Sending the text had seemed like a bold idea, but within a few minutes, he’d realised that it had been a very stupid one. As soon as he’d found the suspect’s mobile number, he should have passed it straight on to the Forensic Telephone Unit. They might have been able to use cell sites to pinpoint the phone’s whereabouts and save an awful lot of pissing about, but by the time Thorne had thought about that and made the necessary call, the phone in question had been turned off.

  Of course, it might already have been turned off, in which case Sarah would not have received the text at all. Or she might have seen the message, worked out exactly what was going on and then turned it off.

  All Thorne knew for sure was that he’d screwed up royally and that it was not the kind of basic mistake Nicola Tanner would have made.

  At least she had the good grace not to say as much.

  Hendricks said, ‘Quick game of I-Spy?’

  The look on Tanner’s face when she glanced up was all the answer Hendricks needed. ‘Blimey, I’m just trying to—’

  Thorne snatched at his mobile and answered before the first ring had died away. He listened and muttered, ‘Right, thanks.’ He hung up, looked at Tanner and shook his head. Just shy of midnight, there were still plenty of people coming and going downstairs, especially through A&E, but nobody matching the description of the woman they were after.

  Any of her descriptions.

  ‘You need to calm down, mate,’ Hendricks said. ‘You’ll give yourself a stroke. Yeah, I know you’re in the right place, but even so.’ He waited for a response that wasn’t forthcoming. ‘Listen, if she’s going to come, she’s going to come, right?’

  Thorne nodded without looking up. Stating the obvious wasn’t helping, any more than his friend’s strained attempts at jollity.

  He was still thinking about the mistake he’d made, how costly it could prove, but he was thinking rather more about that other name he’d seen on Conrad’s contacts list. There was a simple explanation for its presence, of course, but still. It would all depend on how long Conrad had owned that particular phone, how careful he’d been about such things.

  Erasing his past …

  Thorne would find out first chance he had, but he could not shake the feeling that the name he had recognised was there for reasons he did not want to think about.

  ‘It was going to be V, by the way,’ Hendricks said. ‘I-Spy.’ He pointed to the monitor and bag above Conrad’s bed. ‘V for ventricular drain … you’d never have got it.’

  They waited.

  The mood in the room, largely dictated by Thorne’s own, had darkened significantly by the time he stood up, just after one o’clock, and said, ‘Right, let’s call it a night.’

  ‘You sure?’ Tanner asked.

  Thorne was already on his way to the door.

  ‘Fair enough.’ Hendricks heaved himself upright and stretched. ‘Gave it a good crack, mate.’

  ‘Fucking stupid,’ Thorne said.

  Tanner walked across and lifted her coat and bag from a stand in the corner. ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Tom. It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Well, it certainly wasn’t anybody else’s.’

  ‘It was worth a try.’

  ‘It was the wrong thing to do.’ Thorne opened the door. ‘You know it was.’

  ‘Yeah, well we’ve all done the wrong thing,’ Tanner said. ‘At some time or other.’ She looked from Thorne to Hendricks, just a moment of eye contact, before the three of them walked quickly out of the room without a backward glance at the man in the bed.

  Thorne called Jilani Azad on his way out of ICU and told her to stand her colleagues down, but he was not surprised to see her waiting for him a few minutes later, when he, Tanner and Hendricks stepped out of the lift into reception. He began to thank her, impatient to leave, but she raised a hand to shut him up.

  ‘I was just on my way up.’ Her tone was somewhere between excitement and panic. ‘I just thought it would be a good idea to double-check, you know? So I went over to talk to the bloke on reception.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘Somebody came in about half an hour ago. Left something for matey-boy upstairs, in the coma.’

  Thorne stared at her. ‘Half an hour ago?’

  ‘Who?’ Tanner asked.

  ‘Not the woman,’ Azad said. She nodded towards the reception desk, the middle-aged man standing behind it looking somewhat confused at the sudden commotion. ‘He said it was just a kid—’ The DC stood smartly aside as Thorne marched past her towards the reception desk, then ran to catch him up. ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ Azad said. ‘He’s not long come on shift, so he had no idea what was going on.’

  Thorne’s precise words were lost beneath the noise of a trolley crashing out of the lift behind them, but the blood had already begun to drain from the receptionist’s face as he reached beneath the counter, as though feeling for the security button.

  Now, Tanner and Hendricks moved towards the desk and, as they seemed a good deal calmer and more reasonable than Thorne at that moment, Azad turned her attention to them. ‘There’s just a first name on the front, so the poor bugger on reception had no idea what to do with it.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Give it to me.’ Thorne held a hand out and the man behind the desk nervously passed across a large brown envelope.

  Thorne stared down at it.

  The name Conrad in what looked like felt-tip on the front.

  A heart drawn underneath.

  ‘This kid came in,’ the receptionist said. ‘I hadn’t got a clue, so …’

  ‘We need some gloves,’ Thorne said, looking around. Though the envelope itself had already been handled by the man at the desk, as well as by the kid who had delivered it, Thorne had no intention of contaminating the contents.

  There had been enough mistakes made already that night.

  In less than a minute, Azad had come running back from A&E with a box full of thin rubber gloves. Thorne pulled on a pair, opened the envelope and carefully took out the single sheet of paper inside. Snapping on gloves of her own, Tanner leaned in close and they read the note together.

 
; My love,

  So, what do you think about THIS?? It breaks my heart that things ended up the way they did, that the big bad world (and certain people in it) conspired against us, but I know you would have been as STUPIDLY happy about this as I am.

  This wonderful thing!!

  This MIRACLE.

  Don’t think there haven’t been buckets of tears, because I know you’d have been SUCH a brilliant dad, and how awful you’ll feel at what you’re missing. Don’t feel too bad though, because I’ll never forget you (how could I??) and I’ll make sure this precious little one knows JUST how much you would have loved him. Or her.

  You and me forever…

  Sarah xxxx

  Thorne turned away and took a few steps towards the doors. They opened automatically, but he stood where he was until they closed again, while behind him, Tanner was reaching into the envelope again.

  ‘Interesting,’ Hendricks said, when he saw what Tanner had taken out.

  ‘Tom …?’ A few seconds later, Tanner arrived at Thorne’s shoulder, a pregnancy-testing stick held gingerly between two fingers. She held it towards him so that he could see the two pink lines in the small window, the positive result.

  ‘Look, I know this could have gone better.’

  ‘You think?’

  She held it up again. ‘But, for what it’s worth, now we’ve got even more of her DNA.’

  Thorne stepped towards the doors and this time, when they slid open, he kept on walking. He trudged out into the car park, thinking that without the woman they had come from, a few drops of piss on a stick were worth less than nothing.