Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  Awake, she tries to tell herself that it’s some kind of attempt to break her spirit or whatever. That there will be food, but it will probably be offered in return for those things she’s been so terrified about. But the offer won’t be made until she’s been sufficiently starved. Until she cannot possibly refuse it. Each time she hears something skitter and splash in the darkness, one of the rats she knows are down here with her, she wonders if the man is coming back. If somehow they can hear his footsteps far above them, feel them through the water up above, the damp, rotten fabric of the place. It never happens though. He never comes.

  Awake, there is nothing to do but sit and listen and hum and weep and try to tell herself that there will be people trying desperately to find her. Nothing to do but imagine the hell her parents are going through. She moves, tries to get a little more comfortable. The chain is just long enough so that she can lie down. That’s me being nice, he’d said. Last thing he’d said. No, that’s not right, not quite the last thing. Apologies for the whiff, he’d said, climbing back up the steps.

  The whiff . . .

  Awake, she holds her breath and fights the constant urge to gag at the rank, meaty stench of it. She imagines that she can feel particles of it moving against her face, that she is breathing them in through her nose.

  She lies down, one arm beneath her head to keep her face dry.

  There is so much she doesn’t know or understand. So much she can only guess at and try to make sense of. But she knows she is not alone, not strictly speaking, anyway.

  Awake, she knows there’s a body down here with her, in the wet and the dark.

  FOUR

  Thorne stayed at the house for another few minutes, but he felt awkward, and more than a little voyeuristic. He was starting to wonder why he had bothered coming at all. He had thought Helen would want the company, but it was quickly becoming clear that she did not really need it. That he was surplus to requirements. He told Helen that she should call when she was ready to leave and he would come back to collect her. She said that she would probably be there a while and would catch up with him later.

  ‘It’s a small place,’ she told him. ‘I’ll find you.’

  He did not speak to anyone else in the house on his way out. Sophie Carson was still on the radio.

  The cameras went into overdrive as he walked out and several journalists shouted predictable questions at him as he ducked back beneath the crime tape and picked up his pace. He said nothing, kept his eyes forward. He doubted that he would stay anonymous for very long. Some eagle-eyed journo on a crime desk would almost certainly recognise him eventually. He had made the papers often enough himself, had been plastered all over them just a few months before.

  When a prisoner he had been escorting had escaped. When four people had died. When Thorne had almost lost his closest friend.

  He walked back to the centre of town and saw that most of the market traders had all but given up and were packing their things away for the day. It was starting to rain again. Walking along the high street, he could see that Helen had been right to say how little the place had in common with the middle-England market town they had left that morning. There seemed to be a proliferation of nail bars and hairdressers. There was an internet café and a small games arcade and Thorne counted four fast food outlets within fifty yards of each other. Not an antiques shop to be seen.

  He stopped at a newsagent for a local paper and carried it across the street to a café called Cupz. He ordered coffee and a sausage sandwich and began to read. The first four pages of the newspaper were dominated by the latest on the missing girl and carried the now widely circulated picture of Stephen and Linda Bates on their wedding day. The headline was typically crass and undeniably powerful:

  LOVE, HONOUR AND ABDUCT?

  Several pages were devoted to the flooding in villages on lower ground to the north. There were pictures of the swollen River Anker, of dirty water lapping at front doors, of a family going to the shops in a small dinghy. The misery was only set to worsen, one story said, with more bad weather forecast and resources stretched to breaking point.

  Thorne glanced out through the window, watched people hurrying to find shelter, the rain dancing off multicoloured umbrellas.

  A young girl brought his food to the table. She nodded down at the newspaper in front of him. ‘It’s terrible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Which?’ Thorne asked. ‘The missing girls or the flooding?’

  The waitress looked a little uncertain. ‘Well, both,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’m obviously not trying to compare them. God knows what those families must be going through.’ She reddened slightly. ‘The families of those poor girls, I mean.’

  Thorne took a sip of coffee which was not as hot as he, or anyone else would have liked. ‘Did you know them?’

  ‘I’d seen them both in here a few times,’ she said. ‘After school, groups of friends, you know?’

  Thorne turned back to the front page of the newspaper and pointed at the picture from the Bates’ wedding. ‘What about him?’

  The waitress pulled a face and shook her head. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘He hasn’t been charged with anything,’ Thorne said.

  ‘He will be.’

  Thorne took a bite of his sandwich and waited.

  ‘Well, there were witnesses, weren’t there? A couple of Poppy’s mates saw her get into his car.’

  Poppy Johnston. The most recent girl to have gone missing. Her name was still mentioned rather more often in the newspaper reports than the girl who had vanished three weeks earlier. Just ‘Poppy’ though now, even to those who had not known her personally.

  ‘Doesn’t prove he abducted her though.’ Thorne looked at the girl, but she had clearly made up her mind.

  ‘I meant to ask, do you want ketchup?’

  ‘Brown sauce,’ Thorne said.

  When he had finished his lunch, Thorne walked back through the market square and followed the signs that led to the single-storey Memorial Hall just behind it. The building, adjacent to a small community library and health centre, had been commandeered and was now functioning as the Police Control Unit. Signs were prominently displayed near the entrance showing the phone number for the incident room and there were uniformed officers talking to members of the public just outside. It was from the PCU that the search teams would be co-ordinated; volunteers organised, or more likely dissuaded, since their usefulness was often outweighed by their capacity to unwittingly destroy evidence. It was where locals would come to pass on information or share tittle-tattle, helping themselves to free tea and biscuits while they did so, and it was usually where the media gathered for any official press briefings.

  Thorne wandered inside.

  He had often heard stories about journalists who had returned from war zones, only to find themselves unable to handle the ordinariness of normal life and desperate to go back. There was, it seemed, a powerful craving for the rush that went with danger. It was a drug, pure and simple. Thorne would not describe his own feelings in quite those terms, but just sensing the excitement, the urgency around a major investigation such as this one, had already got those endorphins kicking in.

  Driving from that twee hotel, he had told himself that he was doing no more than keeping Helen company, that this was nothing to do with him. It wasn’t just a matter of jurisdiction either. He was supposed to be on holiday; a much-needed one since the events on Bardsey Island a few months before. He was rather better at kidding others than he was himself. That slow drive around the market square had been enough, and now the chatter in this place, the smell of stewed tea and damp uniforms, had got his blood pumping a little faster. It was a long way from a Major Incident Room back at home, but that buzz was universal. The urge to poke around and to get a taste of it all was as strong as a drowning man’s impulse to push himself towards the surface.

  Thorne simpl
y could not help himself.

  A uniformed officer, stocky and red-faced, stepped in front of him and asked if he needed any help.

  ‘Can you tell me where they’re holding Stephen Bates?’ Thorne asked.

  The young PC sighed. ‘Move along, would you, sir?’

  It was Thorne’s turn to sigh as he took out his warrant card.

  ‘Oh. Sorry, sir.’ An altogether different ‘sir’. He stepped a little closer and lowered his voice. ‘He’s at Nuneaton, far as I know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Thorne was about to walk away, when it suddenly dawned on the PC that any detective involved in the investigation would surely have known the answer to the question Thorne had asked.

  ‘Can I see your warrant card again, sir?’

  Thorne fished for it, held it close to the officer’s face.

  ‘Since when were the Met involved with this?’

  ‘I’m just here to advise,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Right.’ The PC looked dubious.

  ‘Look, I know the guv’nor, all right?’

  ‘And he would be . . . ?’

  Thorne tried his best to look merely exasperated, while he racked his brains trying to remember the name of the senior detective he had heard talking on the radio. It came to him. ‘I’m a mate of Tim Cornish’s.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Happy?’ The copper nodded and stepped away. ‘Good lad,’ Thorne said. ‘Now go and help some old people across the road or something . . . ’

  Walking back to his car, Thorne began to feel guilty about the way he had spoken to the young constable. He had long ago resigned himself to the person the Job could so easily turn him into; the side-effects of that buzz. The impatience, the intolerance, the capacity to behave like a major-league arsehole.

  He pulled out of the car park, turned the music up good and loud and tried to forget about it.

  FIVE

  Linda’s daughter was sixteen and called Charli. ‘That’s how she prefers to spell it,’ Linda had explained, shrugging: a powerless parent. The girl was taller than her mother and a little heavier, and unlike Linda, her hair was cut short and she wore a lot of make-up. She had not spoken, other than to murmur a small ‘hello’ when Linda had introduced her and, after several minutes staring into space, she got up and walked out of the room without a word. Helen could hear one of the officers in the hallway asking the girl if she was all right, but there was no response. Just the noise of heavy footsteps trudging upstairs.

  ‘Danny’s up there,’ Linda said. ‘Her brother. He’s barely been down since we got here. Just to grab a drink or something to eat then he’s away again. An officer brought them over a computer they could use, which was nice of him. Didn’t have to do that, did he?’ She looked at Helen. ‘They took both the kids’ laptops.’ She shook her head, brushed something from her skirt that wasn’t there. ‘They took everything.’

  ‘I know,’ Helen said.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff they took. CDs, DVDs, the lot. Bags and bags.’

  ‘I know,’ Helen said again. ‘I’m a police officer.’

  Linda stared at her, opened her mouth a little, then closed it again.

  ‘I’m not here because of that, though. I’m not working. I came because I saw your picture on the news and I thought you might need a friend.’

  ‘Oh, you did?’

  Helen saw how what she had said must have sounded. ‘I mean, I’m sure you’ve got loads of friends, but . . . I thought I might be able to help.’

  Linda nodded and leaned across to the table. She picked up a biscuit then put it back. ‘I didn’t know we were friends,’ she said. ‘How long is it since you left?’

  ‘Twenty years,’ Helen said. ‘Good as.’

  ‘And you’ve not been back?’

  Helen shook her head.

  ‘We had a school reunion. You could have come to that.’

  ‘I wanted to . . . ’

  Linda looked as though she was trying to decide whether to believe Helen or not. Either she did, or she decided that it didn’t much matter. ‘It was a laugh, as it happens.’

  ‘Maybe there’ll be another one.’

  Linda ran fingers through hair that was thick and frizzy, with a good deal of grey at the roots. Her face was drawn, the lines pronounced around her eyes and mouth. Her lips were cracked. Helen knew she had changed a good deal herself in twenty years, but the woman sitting next to her was barely recognisable as the smiling bride in the recent wedding photograph.

  ‘Can’t see either of us going now,’ Linda said. ‘Can you?’

  They said nothing for a minute or more. Outside the officers were talking and suddenly music began to play upstairs. Something with no words and a repetitive beat, like a racing pulse.

  ‘God, I must sound like such an ungrateful bitch,’ Linda said.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘No, really, I appreciate you coming. You didn’t have to.’

  ‘I wanted to.’

  There was a knock on the door and a uniformed officer poked his head around it. He asked if anyone wanted more tea and they both said they did.

  When the door had closed, Linda rolled her eyes. ‘Bloody tea,’ she said. ‘I’m swimming in it. They teach you that, do they?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At cadet school or whatever it is? If in doubt, make the poor buggers some more tea.’

  Helen smiled. ‘I know it must seem like they’re just trying to pretend everything’s fine, but it’s not that. Sometimes it’s just about being nice, but mostly it’s because you don’t know what else to do.’

  ‘Yeah, fair enough.’ Linda leaned forward again, took the biscuit this time.

  Helen looked around the room. Like the sofa on which she was sitting, most of the furniture was modern, but well worn. There were colour prints in clip-frames on one of the walls; pictures of motorbikes and drag-racers. The carpet was light green and the curtains a darker shade with prints of leaves. There was a brownish, mock-marble fireplace containing a gas fire and the TV next to it, though certainly big enough, was not a make Helen had ever heard of.

  ‘So, whose place is this, anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘Nobody’s.’ Linda popped the last of the biscuit into her mouth. ‘Well, it was, but I don’t know who they were. It was repossessed.’ She shrugged. ‘Whoever they were, they didn’t have a lot of luck.’ She puffed out her cheeks, clearly aware of the irony in what she’d said. ‘I don’t think we’re doing a fat lot to change things.’ Before Helen could respond, Linda looked up, brighter suddenly, as if fearful of bringing the mood down; of slipping back into a darker place she had been trying to avoid. ‘How’s your dad?’ she asked. ‘I always liked him.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Helen said. ‘Awkward and ridiculous a lot of the time, but that’s how they get, isn’t it?’

  ‘What about your younger sister? Jenny, was it?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s good. Married with a couple of kids.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I’m good, too.’

  ‘Any kids, I mean.’

  ‘I’ve got a two-year-old.’

  ‘Bloody hell, you left it a bit late, didn’t you?’

  ‘The job,’ Helen said. ‘Well, not just that, if I’m honest.’ She grinned, thinking about her son, the rings he’d be running round her father by now. ‘He’s great, though. Keeps me on my toes, anyway.’

  ‘And what about him?’ Linda nodded towards the door. The last place Thorne had been standing. ‘He your old man?’

  ‘Well, we’re not married,’ Helen said. ‘And he’s not Alfie’s dad.’

  Linda waited, but Helen did not want to say any more. She could not be sure that Paul – the man with whom she had been living and who died while she was pregnant – was the father of her child. There
had been an affair. A painful mistake that had not been fully rectified before Paul was killed, though it had been more than paid for since in shame and guilt.

  And there was always Alfie.

  ‘He’s good with him though, is he?’

  ‘Tom? Yeah, he’s great. I mean we haven’t been together very long, so it’s still early days.’

  ‘He a copper as well, is he?’

  Helen said that he was.

  ‘Yeah, he’s got the look.’

  ‘And obviously I haven’t?’

  Linda cocked her head, studied Helen, as though trying to make up her mind. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Going that way.’ She saw Helen’s expression tighten a little. ‘I’m only kidding.’

  ‘I shouldn’t really be surprised anyway,’ Helen said.

  ‘So . . . London then, is it? Must be bloody rough down there.’

  It seemed odd to Helen, that she was the one answering all the questions, talking about her life. She guessed that Linda was finding that easier than saying too much about her own. Perhaps she thought that quite enough speculation about how her family lived was going on already. Either way, whatever put Linda most at ease was fine with Helen.

  ‘It’s not too bad,’ she said. ‘Actually, it’s no worse than anywhere else. I work with kids, so—’ She stopped, aware that she was venturing into territory that might make Linda uncomfortable. If that was the case, the woman showed no sign of it.

  ‘Got to be worse than here though, surely, the crime.’ Another shake of the head, another biscuit. ‘Well, up to now, anyway.’

  ‘What about you?’ Helen asked. ‘How long have you been married to Stephen?’

  Helen saw Linda stiffen momentarily at the first mention of her husband’s name. Linda cleared her throat. ‘Oh, only five years,’ she said. ‘He’s not from round here. Charli and Danny aren’t his kids.’