Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  Hare had been found floating face down in Pretty Pigs Pool at first light the following day. Wedged against the bank, as ducks, lily-pads and empty cans floated nearby. The post-mortem had determined drowning to be the cause of death. Trevor Hare was a reasonably fit fifty-five-year-old and, according to his widow, a strong swimmer. In his comments, the pathologist had noted that heavy blood loss due to the knife wound – though not life-threatening in itself – might have contributed to the victim’s inability to get himself out of the freezing water.

  It was unclear, and likely to remain so, how Hare had ended up in the water to begin with. He knew the area well, but it was dark and he was wounded, disoriented perhaps. He could easily have slipped. The ground was treacherous.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Thorne had said. ‘Don’t care.’

  ‘What about it?’ Bonner asked now. ‘There’s some good last-minute deals to be had in Greece this time of year.’

  ‘I’m here to report a case of historic child abuse,’ Helen said.

  Bonner looked at her.

  ‘It’s what we do, isn’t it? Well, it was last time I was here.’

  The DCI lifted a notepad from the other side of the desk. ‘How historic are we talking about?’

  ‘Twenty-five years.’

  Bonner gently laid his pen down. ‘Helen, you know as well as anyone what a nightmare these old cases are. You sure?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Helen said. ‘And I know what a nightmare it’s going to be.’

  The DCI picked up his pen again. ‘You got a name for the perpetrator?’

  Helen gave him the name. ‘He’s in a care home near Tamworth. I’ll need to check the exact address.’

  ‘A care home?’

  Helen was already shaking her head. ‘I don’t care if he’s old, Adam. I don’t care if he’s bedridden and living on mashed potato and pissing through a tube. I want him done for this.’

  Bonner had learned over several years of having Helen on his team that there was little point in arguing when she was this fired-up about a case. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘We’ll start the preliminaries, but you know you won’t be able to work it, don’t you? With this Standards thing still going on.’

  ‘I can’t work it anyway.’

  Bonner looked at her again, a flicker of confusion. He went back to his notebook. ‘Right, what’s the victim’s name?’

  ‘It’s me,’ Helen said. ‘I’m the victim.’

  She stopped in the car park and leaned against a wall, keen to get some air and to let her breathing return to normal. A squad car pulled in and parked up and she watched two uniformed officers that she recognised step out. One of them clocked her and looked set to come over, so she stared down at her phone until he had gone inside.

  There were some difficult conversations to be had before she could think about talking shop.

  With her father. With Linda . . .

  They had not seen one another since the events at Pretty Pigs Pool and, until now, Helen had been content to leave the ball in Linda’s court. She had left her number, but Linda had not called. Helen remembered their last conversation, the night they had talked about Aurora Harley, then, finally about her grandfather.

  It must have been hard coming back.

  Harder staying.

  Home, wasn’t it? Never had a way out.

  Did you ever see him?

  A few times. I wanted Wayne or Steve to kill him, almost told them about it once or twice. He smiled at me in the street . . .

  Helen had been told that Linda’s house was on the market, but knew little of her plans beyond that, assuming that she and the kids would be looking to start a new life far away from Polesford and from her husband, charges against whom had been quickly dropped and whose whereabouts had not been released to the press.

  Until a photograph had appeared a few days before of Bates and Linda strolling through a Tamworth shopping centre. Now there was speculation about the size of the wrongful arrest settlement.

  There was talk of a book deal . . .

  Helen would need to tell Linda what she was doing and that she had already passed on her name to those who would soon be arresting Peter Harley. It might well put another zero on to that rumoured contract for a book, but Helen did not know how happy Linda would be about it.

  The same went for Aurora Harley, of course, but having made her decision, Helen could not afford to dwell on that. There were those much closer that she needed to consider.

  She walked to the car, got inside and sat for a few minutes thinking about how best to broach the subject, that there was little point in going round the houses. Worrying that she was thinking way too much. Her thumb moved across the screen of her phone and she rubbed at a smudge with the edge of her shirt.

  Then she dialled her sister’s number.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  When the call had ended, Thorne came out of the bedroom. Hendricks lowered the volume on the TV and turned round. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Pretty good, I think,’ Thorne said. ‘She sounded . . . up. Her sister’s going round later on.’

  ‘Yeah, well let’s see how long she stays “up” for.’

  ‘Didn’t go too badly on the phone apparently.’ Thorne was trying to be optimistic for Helen’s sake, but he knew what Hendricks meant, how difficult Helen’s sister could be. It was inconceivable that things would be the same between them after tonight and he could only hope it was a change for the better.

  ‘You not going over later then?’

  Thorne shook his head. Since coming back from Polesford, he had spent more than the usual number of nights alone at his own flat in Kentish Town, and he had enjoyed them. Hendricks had been travelling to and from Warwick a fair deal and this was their first chance to catch up in a while.

  ‘Just you and me then, big boy.’

  Thorne went into the kitchen to collect beers. When he came back, Hendricks said, ‘You think she’s doing the right thing?’

  ‘Seeing her sister?’

  ‘All of it.’

  Thorne passed a bottle across and sat down. Having seen how painful it had been for Helen to tell him what had happened all those years before, the thought of her having to going through it again in detail – in interview rooms, from a witness box – was terrible. But that had been her choice and there was nobody else qualified to make it. ‘Right thing for her,’ he said.

  ‘She say anything about the suspension?’

  ‘Still ongoing.’ Thorne took a swig. ‘A good few weeks yet, I reckon.’

  ‘Should have accepted the girl’s offer. To say that she’d been the one holding the knife.’ Hendricks looked as though he had more to say, but then his phone rang and he went into the kitchen to take the call, closed the door behind him.

  Thorne knew that his friend was only half joking. There weren’t too many people mourning the death of Trevor Hare and even though Thorne knew the internal investigation would work out in her favour, it seemed hugely unfair that a good officer like Helen had to spend weeks on suspension for unintentionally sticking a knife in him.

  ‘Helen gets suspended and you come out smelling of roses,’ Hendricks had said back then. ‘You, with an entire drawer in the DPS filing cabinet. I did not see that coming.’

  It was not an outcome anyone with any sense would have bet on. Several days’ worth of very positive press. The letters of thanks from the parents of Poppy Johnston and Jessica Toms.

  Even Russell Brigstocke had forgiven him.

  Once she’d been checked over and released from hospital, Poppy Johnston’s evidence had helped them piece things together a bit more, but with no killer to question, the picture was still largely reliant on best guesses. Poppy had been able to confirm that Stephen Bates had given her a lift on the night she was taken. He had been flirty with her in the car, she told them, made cert
ain suggestions, so she had asked him to drop her off at the bus stop. She had only been there a couple of minutes when Trevor Hare had driven up.

  Whether or not Hare had taken Jessica Toms the same night Bates had given her a lift would never be known, but it was obvious he had been watching Bates for a while and knew very well that he was over-fond of young girls. He knew that Bates had already picked up Jessica and that her DNA was there to be found in his car. He knew that he was safe to target her and then Poppy, now that a ready-made suspect had unwittingly lined himself up.

  It was just a question of providing a little more evidence.

  The cigarette end had been ideal and easy enough to get hold of. The fact that Bates lied to the police could only have been a bonus and the material found on his computer must have been a very pleasant surprise, if Hare hadn’t known about it already.

  Thorne still believed that Jessica Toms had been killed no more than a day or two before Poppy had been taken. It was his suggestion that her body had been kept in the boot of Hare’s car between then and the time he chose to bury it in the woods after Bates had been arrested. Forensic tests on the vehicle found parked near Pretty Pigs Pool confirmed Thorne’s theory, though there was still nothing close to a ‘thank you’ from DI Tim Cornish. Poppy herself had been convinced that Jessica’s body had been down there with her in Hare’s improvised dungeon the whole time, but it turned out, of course, to have been the seriously decomposed body of Patterson’s missing piglet. What the rats had left of it. By the time it was finally examined, the stinking corpse was still alive with plenty of those useful bugs and beetles that Hare had been planning to use on the body of Poppy herself.

  ‘Your Liam would have had a field day,’ Thorne had said.

  ‘He’s not my Liam,’ Hendricks had said.

  Now, that appeared to have changed, too.

  Hendricks wandered back in and picked up the beer bottle he’d neglected to take with him. ‘That was Liam on the phone,’ he said.

  Thorne had never thought it was anyone else. ‘He well?’

  ‘Yeah . . . ’

  It was clear that there was more and that Hendricks wanted to be asked what it was. ‘And?’

  ‘He’s thinking of applying for another job.’

  ‘What kind of job?’

  ‘Not so much what as where,’ Hendricks said.

  Now, Thorne understood. ‘London?’ Hendricks nodded. ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘Well, he might not get it.’

  ‘So, how would you feel if he did?’

  ‘Actually, I think I’d be . . . OK with it.’

  Hendricks looked more than OK, and Thorne pulled a suitably shocked face. ‘Bloody hell, you’re full of surprises.’

  ‘Well, one of us has got to be.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning you can’t always follow the same path. Well you can, but eventually you get hit by a car.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Then Thorne realised that Helen must have told him about the badgers, and more specifically, who was like one. ‘Oh, right, me being predictable. That’s such crap, Phil.’

  ‘Scared of change, then.’

  ‘Are we going to order food, or what?’

  ‘Fine with me.’

  ‘Bengal Lancer?’ He saw Hendricks grin. ‘Because their food’s the best.’

  Hendricks wandered into the kitchen. ‘I’ll sort the plates out . . . ’

  Thorne had the number for the Indian restaurant programmed into his phone. They immediately recognised the incoming number and called up the delivery address. ‘The usual order, Mr Thorne?’

  ‘Yeah, the usual order.’

  The waiter said something else, but it was hard to hear above the noise of Hendricks laughing from the kitchen.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am hugely grateful, as ever, to a great many people for helping to drag this one across the finish line. Without them, it still would be suffering from stitch on the first bend while everyone else had changed and gone home . . .

  Thanks to Elizabeth Orcutt for advice on newspaper print deadlines and to John Manlove PhD for his help with the rather more esoteric business of extracting porcine DNA. Wendy Lee was brilliant as always and I remain extremely fortunate to have benefited from the copy-editing skills of Deborah Adams. Both have stopped me from looking foolish on many occasions.

  For the umpteenth time, I am in the debt of Professor Lorna Dawson from the Environmental and Biochemical Sciences Group at the James Hutton Institute. Not only was her professional expertise invaluable, she possesses a darkly twisted imagination that would put a great many crime writers to shame and a wicked sense of humour. As evidence of this, I need only point out that the subject line of one of her emails, in which she was casually discussing insect infestation on the charred body of a pig, was Smoky Bacon. Thanks, Lorna, and the pork scratchings are on me.

  Thanks to Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish. The songs of My Darling Clementine have been with me throughout the writing of this book and working with them on The Other Half has been an unalloyed pleasure. Long may the heartache continue.

  ‘Thank you’ in neon letters fifty feet high to David Shelley and Sarah Lutyens for being the best in the business. And above all, as always, thanks to Claire. Unlike those unfortunate enough to come up against Tom Thorne, I continue to get away with murder.

  Did you enjoy Time of Death?

  Turn over now for your

  free short story,

  Stroke of Luck.

  STROKE OF LUCK

  So many things that could have been different.

  An almost infinite number of them: the flight of the ball; the angle of the bat; the movement of his feet as he skipped down the pitch. The weather, the time, the day of the week, the whatever.

  The smallest variance in any one of these things, or in the way that each connected to the other at the crucial moment, and nothing would have happened as it did. An inch another way, or a second, or a step and it would have been a very different story.

  Of course, it’s always a different story; but it isn’t always a story with bodies . . .

  He wasn’t even a good batsman – a tail-ender for heaven’s sake – but this once, he got everything right. The footwork and the swing were spot on. The ball flew from the meat of the bat, high above the heads of the fielders into the long grass at the edge of the woodland that fringed the pitch on two sides.

  Alan and another player had been looking for a minute or so, using hands and feet to move aside the long grass at the base of an oak tree, when she stepped from behind it as if she’d been waiting for them.

  ‘Don’t you have any spare ones?’

  Alan looked at her for a few, long seconds before answering. She was tall, five seven or eight, with short dark hair. Her legs were bare beneath a cream-coloured skirt and her breasts looked a good size under a sleeveless top. She looked Mediterranean, Alan thought. Sophisticated . . .

  ‘I suppose we must have, somewhere,’ he said.

  ‘So why waste time looking? Are they expensive?’

  Alan laughed. ‘We’re only a bunch of medics. It costs a small fortune just to hire the pitch.’

  ‘You’re a doctor?’

  ‘A neurologist. A consultant neurologist . . .’

  She didn’t look as impressed as he’d hoped.

  ‘Got it.’

  Alan turned to see his team-mate brandishing the ball, heard the cheers from those on the pitch as it was thrown across.

  He turned back. The woman was holding a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.

  ‘Will you be here long?’ Alan said. She looked hesitant. He pointed back towards the pitch. ‘We’ve only got a couple of wickets left to take.’

  She dropped her hand, smiled without looking at him. ‘You’d better get on with it then.’
>
  ‘Listen, we usually go and have a couple of drinks afterwards, in the Woodman up by the tube. D’you fancy coming along? Just for one maybe?’

  She looked at her watch. Too quickly, Alan thought, to have even seen what time it read.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of time.’

  He nodded, stepping backwards towards the pitch. ‘Well, you know where we are.’

  The Woodman was only a small place, and the dozen or so players – some from either team – took up most of the back room.

  ‘I’m Rachel, by the way,’ she said.

  ‘Alan.’

  ‘Did you win, Alan?’

  ‘Yes, but no thanks to me. The other team weren’t very good.’

  ‘You’re all doctors, right?’

  He nodded. ‘Doctors, student doctors, friends of doctors. Anybody who’s available if we’re short. It’s as much a social thing as anything else.’

  ‘Plus the sandwiches you get at half-time.’

  Alan put on a posh voice. ‘We call it the tea interval,’ he said.

  Rachel eked out a dry white wine and was introduced. She met Phil Hendricks, a pathologist who did a lot of work with the police and told her a succession of grisly stories. She met a dull cardiologist whose name she instantly forgot, a male nurse called Sandy who was at great pains to point out that not all male nurses were gay, and a slimy anaesthetist whose breath would surely have done the trick were he ever to run short of gas.

  While Rachel was in the Ladies, a bumptious paediatrician Alan didn’t like a whole lot dropped a fat hand on to his shoulder.

  ‘Sodding typical. You do fuck all with the bat and then score after the game!’

  The others enjoyed the joke. Alan glanced round and saw that Rachel was just coming out of the toilet. He hoped that she hadn’t seen them all laughing.

  ‘Do you want another one of those?’ Alan pointed at her half-empty glass before downing what was left of his lager.

  She didn’t, but followed him to the bar anyway. Alan leaned in close to her and they talked while he repeatedly failed to attract the attention of the surly Irish barmaid.