Their Little Secret

by Mark Billingham

  Still thinking about that contact on Conrad’s phone.

  A name and number he had recognised.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  It hadn’t been her only testing kit of course, the one she’d left with the note for Conrad. That first time, she’d gone down to the local chemist with no more than the faintest of hopes; thinking she was probably being stupid, because her periods had never been regular anyway and there were any number of reasons why she might be throwing up. Afterwards, she’d done another test almost straight away – unable to believe it, her hands shaking so much she could barely hold the thing – and she’d bought four or five more after that, simply because she’d enjoyed watching those pink lines slowly materialise.

  Sitting in that little hotel bathroom, the grin making her jaw ache, while Conrad went from bad to worse on the other side of the door.

  She’d cried every time.

  ‘I’m having a baby,’ she said.

  The taxi driver glanced at her in his rear-view mirror. ‘Congratulations,’ he said.

  She folded her hands across her belly. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘First one, is it?’

  She actually laughed a little, before starting to cry again. ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘You all right, love?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She reached into her bag for tissues. ‘Hormones kicking in early, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, they can be a bugger,’ the driver said. ‘My wife was all over the shop with hers.’

  Sarah let her head fall back, exhausted. There was a long journey ahead and she was done with the conversation for the time being. She stared out at the blur of dark hedges rising on one side, a sliver of moon over grey fields on the other. She turned her face away from the lights of a vehicle coming in the other direction and smiled, remembering the look of suspicion on the kid’s face. It was funny, because hadn’t it all begun with a very different look on the face of a very different kid?

  Do you fancy going for a walk?

  That boy in Margate had thought what he was being offered was too good to be true, and he’d been spot on. Tonight though, talking through their deal a few streets away from the hospital, the kid’s doubts had evaporated the moment he’d seen what she had to offer. A large bag of weed in exchange for dropping off an envelope, what was not to like?

  ‘All of it … for real?’

  ‘It’s no good to me any more,’ she’d told him. ‘I’m having a baby.’

  ‘Cool,’ the kid had said, snatching the bag and then the envelope. ‘Maybe you could name him after me.’

  He’d told her what he was called and she’d said that she would think about it. He’d gone away happy. The truth, though, was that, boy or girl, she had already chosen her baby’s name.

  ‘So, when’s it due, then?’

  She had worked it out already, of course, sitting in that hotel bathroom with a diary. They had made their baby seven weeks before. That first night, the only time they had made love without using a condom.

  It had felt perfect, and it had been.

  ‘First week of November,’ she said.

  The driver nodded. ‘You’ll be big through the summer, then. Let’s hope it’s not as warm as last year.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘It’s not supposed to be easy, is it?’

  ‘What do I know?’ the driver said.

  Harder the better, she thought. Sacrifice. She wanted to feel her baby inside her every precious minute of every day, however uncomfortable. To suffer if she had to, because she needed to prove that she could bear this child, bear whatever that took. That she was worthy of it.

  All those years before, she had been unable to claim the gift that was rightfully hers. What had been given, then taken away. She had not been able to drag that bike out of its grave, but she was a lot stronger now.

  ‘Well, good luck with it all, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve already been lucky,’ she said.

  ‘I should try and get some sleep if I was you.’ The driver turned his radio down. ‘Be a good couple of hours yet …’

  Michelle Littler was smiling again as she closed her eyes. Having been forced to let the love of her life go and made to deal with more than her fair share of loss and betrayal, she decided that a little good fortune at this stage of the game was no more than she deserved.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  More than anything, Thorne had hoped he was wrong, that the simple explanation was the only one, but it had taken no more than half an hour to confirm his darkest suspicions. His worst fears about that name he had seen on Conrad’s phone, that phone number he’d recognised. A few emails, armed with the serial number and IMEI of the handset, and he’d been able to find out exactly where, and more importantly when, Conrad had purchased the phone.

  An O2 store in Southgate. January the twenty-second. The day after Philippa Goodwin had committed suicide and almost two weeks before Kevin Deane had been murdered in Margate.

  It did not come as a shock, because it made complete sense. It was the reason Thorne had been so immediately uneasy when he’d spotted that name. Why would someone whose life revolved around duplicity and subterfuge not change his phone number and list of contacts – real or fictitious – each time he changed his identity?

  After Philippa Goodwin …

  It was why, after a series of unanswered calls to a contact that was, sadly, all too real, Thorne was standing alongside Tanner on the pavement outside a metal door, with a warrant tucked inside his jacket and a borrowed set of keys in his hand.

  ‘Look, there’s no point standing out here freezing our tits off, is there?’ Tanner said. ‘We won’t know anything for sure until we actually go in.’

  He had told her what he had seen on Conrad’s phone just before they’d travelled home from Bury St Edmunds the night before. Standing together in the hospital car park, Thorne could see at once that she was struggling as much as he had to find an innocent explanation.

  ‘Remember what Denise Fry said?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Thorne had recalled their conversation in Glasgow almost straight away; waiting in that hospital room, the minutes crawling by, sitting next to the bed in which the man Denise Fry had known as Paul Jenner lay fighting for his life.

  ‘This might be that other woman Denise was talking about.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘I mean it would be seriously weird,’ Tanner said. ‘Bearing in mind …’

  Thorne nodded. The truth was, there was very little about this case that wasn’t weird. Off-kilter, unnatural. It felt as though something misshapen had woken and begun crawling towards him into the light; had done ever since the morning at Highgate tube station, when he’d watched that bag being lifted from the tracks.

  An ambulance raced past on the main road going south towards Highbury Corner as Thorne stepped forward and, having found the right key, pushed it into the lock. There was mail piled up on a shelf just inside, a bicycle chained to a pipe. The heavy door slammed loudly behind them as they turned and began climbing the metal stairs towards the top-floor flat.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Tanner said. ‘If she’s done a bunk, we’ll find her. Same as we’ll eventually find Michelle.’

  Thorne trudged upwards, wondering if Tanner really was that optimistic, or if they had simply fallen into a pattern, wherein she needed to make positive noises, simply to counter his own … predilections. And, just occasionally, vice versa. He said, ‘Right.’

  Two floors up and Thorne was as breathless as he’d been the first time he was here. He stopped in the same place, ostensibly to wait for Tanner; the landing from which he’d looked up seven weeks before and seen Ella Fulton leaning over the railing and watching him.

  Used to be the local dole office …

  Half a minute later, they stopped to exchange a look outside Ella Fulton’s door, before Tanner leaned forward and knocked twice. They didn’t wait long before Thorne used the key provided by Ella’s mother and the two of them stepped inside.

/>   The place was empty. The huge room was every bit as crowded and messy as Thorne remembered, but there was no sign—

  ‘Fuck …’

  Thorne turned to Tanner, then looked up.

  Ella Fulton’s feet were bare and bluish, the toenails painted pink. Thorne raised his eyes further still, past the comfy-looking cardigan and the washing line that had bitten into her neck … past her face, the fat, black tongue … to where the line had been tied off on the balcony above the spiral staircase.

  It had not been a long drop, certainly not enough to make it quick.

  He wondered how much time it had taken.

  Tanner already had her phone in her hand. ‘Looks like it’s been a few days, at least.’ With ‘recognition of life extinct’ clearly a given, she made the necessary call to the coroner’s office to arrange transport to the mortuary, while Thorne wandered across to where the most recent set of framed photographs had been hung.

  He stopped in front of a picture he had first noticed when he’d come to see Ella Fulton the second time, to inform her that Patrick Jennings the con-man was almost certainly a murderer too. It was something, Thorne now understood, that she may well have already known, or at the very least suspected. Perhaps they would never discover exactly how much Ella had known about the man she’d been involved with.

  How much of what they knew had been passed on to him.

  Thorne looked at the photo of the man staring up at the camera from beneath the peak of a cap and realised why the man in the hospital bed had seemed so familiar. Something around the eyes. There in the photograph of Ella Fulton’s lover that had been on her wall all along. He leaned towards the photo and carefully lifted away the envelope that had been pinned to it.

  An envelope that had his name on the front.

  ‘What have you got?’ Tanner asked.

  ‘Hang on …’

  Thorne carried the envelope across to the desk and opened it. He nudged several books aside to make some room, then emptied the contents out on to the desktop. Some photographs, a flash-drive.

  ‘You were right.’ Thorne used the tip of a pen to separate the photographs and lined them up. ‘In Glasgow, when you were talking about an accomplice. She picked out his marks for him …’

  The women in the pictures had clearly not been aware they were being photographed. Dining alone in a restaurant, talking into a mobile phone, stepping out of a car. Thorne immediately recognised Philippa Goodwin and Denise Fry and guessed that the other three were victims they had yet to identify. He turned the photos over and saw that there were names written on the back.

  Had Ella Fulton wanted to help, right at the end, or had she simply been trying to explain?

  ‘Have you got gloves?’

  Having finished her call, Tanner pulled gloves from her pocket, put on a pair and carried another across to him. Thorne used them to pick up the flash-drive and insert it into Ella Fulton’s computer. Tanner leaned across to hit a few keys, and a couple of seconds later Ella Fulton’s face appeared on the dusty screen.

  Clawing at her hair, she looked washed-out and jittery. As she leaned towards the camera, its harsh light showed the shadows beneath her eyes and something crusted at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘Everything turned to shit after Auntie Pip.’ Her voice was hoarse. She took a breath and cleared her throat. ‘It was only ever about the money, because she had loads and I was trying to help him, same as I always did. I thought if I stopped helping I’d lose him, and … suddenly there was his next payday, right under my nose all the time. I never dreamed it would do that to Pip or what Pip killing herself would do to Mum.’

  She closed her eyes for a few seconds. Her fingers were at her hair again.

  ‘Maybe there’s something in the genes.’ She shook her head. ‘All so stupid and unforgivable and all messed-up anyway, because now he’s found someone else and if I don’t put a stop to me then she probably will. She’s a bit … scary, but you probably know that already.’ She leaned away and for half a minute or more was very still, the terror and the shame etched across her haggard features. She looked like the subject of one of her own photographs. The image, unforgiving.

  ‘Most people doing this don’t leave a note, not even a fancy one on video. Someone told me that once.’ There was a hint of a smile then, though her eyes remained dead and unblinking. ‘Typical me, right? I could never bear to be like most people …’

  She reached forward quickly to turn off the camera and the image froze.

  Thorne turned away, walked slowly back into the main part of the room and sat down on one of the ratty old sofas, his back to Ella Fulton’s body.

  Tanner followed and sat down next to him.

  ‘They’re on the way,’ she said.

  Thorne nodded and kept his head down, hoping they’d be quick, because he could not remember wanting to leave anywhere quite as much as he wanted to be away from this flat. He hoped, too, that Tanner would be content to sit and say nothing until others arrived and that he might be spared the task of delivering the second death message that Mary Fulton would receive in less than two months.

  Sister, daughter …

  More than anything, he hoped that, before slipping away into that nice, peaceful coma, Patrick or Paul or Conrad or whatever the fuck he was actually called, had suffered.

  PART FOUR

  Knowledge and Ignorance

  SIXTY-NINE

  Phil Hendricks and his boyfriend, Liam, were both happily drunk, and their friend Grace was not very far behind. The three of them were laughing a lot, talking a little too loudly, and each time one of them reached for something they threatened to knock a glass or a candle over. It wasn’t ten-thirty yet and Liam had only just brought coffees across, but Tanner was already sneaking looks at her watch.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘What?’ Grace asked.

  Tanner glared at Hendricks for ratting her out.

  ‘Come on, Nic.’ Hendricks put his arm round her. ‘Fun hasn’t even started yet.’

  ‘Right.’ Liam poured himself another drink. ‘We’re going to play some games. That one where you stick a bit of paper on your head.’

  ‘What about dirty charades?’ Hendricks said.

  Tanner saw that he was serious and briefly considered feigning a heart attack.

  ‘I’m up for that.’ Grace grinned at Tanner across the table.

  Despite Hendricks’s entreaties, his assurance that she’d have a much better evening if she left the car at home and an offer to put her up for the night, Tanner had driven across to Camden. She was very glad, now, that she had. She never felt relaxed around drunks anyway, a hang-up she’d never managed to shake, but being stone-cold sober while her fellow diners were necking the booze like alkies was not the only reason Tanner was feeling uncomfortable and wishing she’d stayed at home.

  A book or a box set and a good night’s sleep.

  ‘I’m guessing it’s a bit tricky for you,’ Grace said. ‘Late nights or parties, whatever. Because of your job, I mean. You never know what’s coming the next day, right?’

  ‘Actually, that’s one of the reasons I like it,’ Tanner said.

  ‘Yeah, but still, it must be hard to enjoy yourself.’ She reached past Liam for the wine. ‘Staring down at a body first thing the next morning, feeling like shit.’

  ‘Some of us can manage it,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘All I care about is what you can manage the night before,’ Liam said.

  The three of them laughed and Tanner did her best to join in.

  Grace was nice enough; nicer, in fact. An NHS health-care assistant – ‘we’re a dying breed’ – who lived and worked in Islington. She was in the same ballpark as Tanner age-wise, short and slim with a lopsided smile and cropped dark hair. She was sharp and funny and sported several tattoos Hendricks would have been proud of. Tanner could see why they got on so well.

  Still, it had taken her a while to click.


  Early on, Grace had mentioned the names of several clubs she visited regularly, but Tanner hadn’t cottoned on. It was only when she’d begun talking about a female comedian from Australia who even Tanner knew was a lesbian poster-girl that the penny had finally dropped, and she’d felt rather stupid. She’d told Thorne a few weeks earlier that her Gaydar was unreliable at best, but she hadn’t realised it had stopped functioning altogether.

  Now, she felt awkward about being fixed up and angry with herself for being too dim to spot it.

  ‘There’s a mate of mine coming along.’ Hendricks had been the picture of innocence when he’d invited her a week or so before. ‘I reckon you’ll get on with her, she’s a right laugh.’

  Tanner wasn’t laughing.

  ‘Right, then.’ Grace stood up. ‘I just need …’ She walked towards the bathroom, then stopped. ‘And don’t start the game without me. I’ve got a cracking mime for Die Hard.’

  As soon as Grace had left the room, Tanner turned to Hendricks. ‘Look, I’m not really comfortable with this, Phil.’

  ‘What?’ He looked across at Liam, mock-horrified. ‘It’s just a bit of dinner—’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘She’s gorgeous though, isn’t she? Look, I just thought—’

  ‘She’s great,’ Tanner said. ‘I just don’t think I’m ready. God knows, maybe I should be, but whenever I think about it, I feel … slaggy.’

  Hendricks leaned into her. ‘Come on. You’ve got needs, haven’t you?’

  Tanner reached for the cafetiere. ‘Right now, I need to stop myself pouring hot coffee in your lap.’

  ‘Leave her alone,’ Liam said.

  ‘I’m a widow who lives alone with her cat,’ Tanner said. ‘I’m not sure your friend’s that excited anyway.’

  They stopped talking as soon as they heard the toilet flush and the silence continued and grew awkward once Grace had sat down again. She looked around and said, ‘What the hell have I missed?’ When nobody seemed terribly keen to answer, she pointed to Hendricks and leaned across the table towards Tanner. ‘He’s a sneaky bastard, but I’m sure you already knew that, and, for what it’s worth, I’m not that much happier playing “fix up a single lesbian” than you are. So … no sweat, all right? Maybe we could just meet for a drink, if you fancy it, have a proper natter. A coffee, maybe …’