TT13 Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  ‘So?’

  ‘Near enough twenty years, right?’

  ‘I know what that place is like, Tom.’

  ‘Well, I can’t stop you, I suppose, but I think it’s stupid.’

  They said nothing for a few long seconds. Helen opened the wardrobe and took out her suitcase.

  ‘Hang on, you’re not thinking of going tonight?’

  ‘Dad’s expecting us to be away all weekend,’ Helen said. She opened a drawer, took out a handful of socks and underwear and carried them across to the case. ‘So there’s no problem looking after Alfie.’

  ‘I know, but still.’

  ‘We can be there in an hour and a half … less.’ She went back for more clothes. ‘There’s not going to be any traffic now.’

  Thorne got off the bed and grabbed one of the two towelling dressing gowns that had been hanging inside the wardrobe. It was too small, but he pulled it on anyway. He placed himself strategically between Helen and her suitcase. ‘You’ve got no family up there any more, right? Where do you think you’re going to stay?’

  ‘I’ll sort something out.’

  ‘The place is teeming with coppers and reporters. You wouldn’t find anywhere tonight even if you went.’ He waited, relieved that she seemed to be thinking it over. ‘Why don’t we do this tomorrow?’

  She nodded, reluctantly. ‘I’m going though.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  Helen took another look at the TV. There still appeared to be nothing new to report. She walked back towards the bathroom, stopped at the door.

  ‘You don’t have to come with me, you know.’

  ‘I know I don’t, but what am I going to do here on my own?’

  ‘You could go home,’ Helen said. ‘Hang out with Phil for a few days.’

  ‘Let’s talk about this in the morning,’ Thorne said.

  ‘You mean talk me out of it?’

  ‘Well, I do think it’s a stupid idea.’

  ‘I don’t care.’ Helen was about to say something else when her mobile rang. She stabbed at the handset and answered in a way that Thorne had become used to; the voice tightening a little. Helen’s sister, Jenny. Thorne was not her favourite person and the antipathy was entirely mutual. Much of the time, Helen could not bear her sister either, impatient at being patronised by a sibling two years younger than she was.

  ‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘I saw it. I know …’ She rolled her eyes at Thorne and walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

  Thorne lay on the bed, nudged the volume on the TV back up. The reporter was talking to the studio again.

  ‘It’s hard to describe the atmosphere here tonight,’ she said. ‘There’s certainly a lot of anger.’

  Thorne could hear Helen talking in the bathroom, but could not make out what she was saying.

  The reporter was winding up, the crowd behind her larger now than it had been minutes before, the wind whipping at the ends of her scarf. Her voice was measured, nicely dramatic. ‘With two girls still missing and one of their own being questioned in connection with their abduction, the tension round here is palpable.’ She threw a look over her shoulder. ‘This is a community in shock.’

  Thorne watched as the woman attempted to sign off, struggling to make herself heard above raised voices from nearby. Something about ‘our girls’ and ‘justice being done’. Something about stringing the bastard up.

  He reached behind him, punched up the pillow.

  It was not the holiday he’d had in mind.

  TWO

  They drove towards the M40, north through Oxfordshire on small roads crowded with mud-caked Chelsea Tractors, negotiating Saturday morning shoppers as they skirted Banbury. The bad weather had not let up since they’d set off. It was certainly looking like they would be on the road for rather more than the hour and a half it might have taken the night before.

  ‘A week in the sun’s sounding better than ever,’ Thorne said. He turned from the curtain of rain draping itself across the bonnet of the BMW and glanced across at Helen in the passenger seat. ‘What about Portugal? Or Tenerife, maybe?’ Another look. ‘Dave Holland’s always banging on about Tenerife.’

  Helen just nodded, her gaze fixed on the shops and houses, the rain-lashed walls and hedges that drifted past. Since checking out of the hotel, after a disappointing breakfast and a tetchy exchange with the hotel manager, she had said very little. She had spent half an hour on the phone before breakfast making arrangements, but since then had seemed preoccupied. As determined as ever to make the trip, but clearly apprehensive about what awaited them when they reached their destination.

  On the radio, the news led with the latest from Polesford.

  Police were still refusing to confirm the identity of the man they had taken into custody but were, they said, continuing to question him. A senior officer made a short statement. He said that further information would be released, but only when the time was right. Echoing the reporter from the previous night’s television news, the correspondent talked at some length about the atmosphere in the town.

  Anger, fear, profound shock.

  Above all, she said, there was an overwhelming sense from the residents that theirs was not the sort of town where things like this happened.

  Back in the studio, they began to talk about the latest unemployment figures and Thorne turned the sound down. ‘So, come on then, which is it?’ he asked. ‘A small town or a large village? You always talk like it’s a tiny place.’

  After a few seconds, Helen turned to look at him as though she had failed to hear the question. Thorne shook his head to let her know it wasn’t important. He switched from the radio to the iPod connection and cued up some Lucinda Williams. He nudged the wiper speed up, spoke as much to himself as to Helen.

  Said, ‘Yeah, bit of sun sounds good.’

  Ten minutes later, making slow progress on the crowded motorway, Helen turned and said, ‘It’s actually a small market town. We lived in one of the villages just outside. There’s a couple of them a mile or two in each direction.’

  ‘Sounds nice,’ Thorne said.

  ‘It’s not like where we were yesterday.’

  ‘No antiques shops to mooch around in?’

  She barked out a laugh. ‘Hardly. It’s like the Cotswolds, only without men in garish corduroy trousers, and a few more branches of Chicken Cottage.’

  ‘So, not all bad then.’

  Thorne indicated, took the car past a van that was hogging the middle lane. He gave the driver a good hard stare as he pulled alongside.

  ‘I thought it was exciting when I was fifteen,’ Helen said. ‘Polesford was where we used to go on a Friday or Saturday night.’

  ‘Bit of clubbing?’

  She shook her head. ‘As much snakebite as we could afford, a bit of dope in the bus shelter.’

  ‘Never had you pegged as a wild child.’

  Helen smiled for the first time since they’d set off. ‘Just a crafty Woodbine in your day, was it? Or were cigarettes still rationed?’

  Thorne returned the smile.

  The fact that he was closer to fifty than Helen was to forty was something they joked about now and again. He would pretend to be outraged that she could not remember the Sex Pistols. She would ask him what it had been like to see Bill Haley and the Comets. Based on a few things Helen had said, Thorne guessed that the sort of comments her sister and several of her friends made about the age gap were rather more cutting.

  ‘It used to be nice,’ Helen said. ‘There’s still some nice bits. There’s an abbey.’

  Thorne adopted his best countryside accent. ‘Ah … too many incomers, was it? City folks coming in and ruining the place?’

  ‘It’s not in Cornwall,’ Helen said.

  ‘Only rural accent I can do.’

  ‘Well, promise me you won’t do it again.’ She turned towards the window. ‘It’s Warwickshire, for God’s sake. It’s more like the accent on The Archers, if anything.’

/>   ‘Oh, God help us,’ Thorne said.

  An hour later they turned off the motorway and within ten minutes were driving slowly along the main street in Dorbrook, two miles south of Polesford. The village in which Helen had spent her childhood. Thorne could see what she had meant earlier. There was rather more stone cladding on display than thatch and Thorne doubted that, come the summer, there would be too many roses growing over the doorways.

  They turned off the main street, slowed as they drove past a terrace of cottages that looked to be from the twenties or thirties. Cars were parked within a few feet of most front doors, their wheels on the pavement to allow heavy vehicles to get past. There was a convenience store opposite, a Chinese takeaway, a small area of asphalt adjacent, with a swing-set and roundabout.

  Helen pointed, said, ‘There.’ Thorne slowed still further. ‘That was our house.’ She pushed the button and her window slid halfway down. ‘Front door was red when we lived there. There wasn’t double-glazing.’

  Thorne stopped the car, checked to see there was nothing behind him. ‘You want to get out and have a look?’

  ‘It’s pissing down.’

  ‘There’s an umbrella in the back,’ Thorne said. ‘Go on, knock on the door, see who’s living there.’

  Helen shook her head. She was still staring. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Only take five minutes.’

  ‘Who the hell wants a stranger banging on their door?’ She put the window back up. ‘Poking around.’

  ‘I just thought you’d be interested.’

  ‘I want to go and see Linda,’ Helen said, a little sharply. She turned and looked at Thorne, blinked slowly and found a half-smile. ‘What’s the point, anyway?’

  The rain was easing as they drove the few miles further on, along snaking lanes with high hedges or skeletal trees pressing in on either side. It had more or less stopped completely by the time they reached the river, drove across the bridge into Polesford and Thorne saw the sign for the Market Square.

  It might have been a Saturday, but Thorne guessed that the place was still somewhat busier than it would usually have been. Not that too many of the residents appeared to be there in search of second-hand paperbacks or knock-off perfume or whatever else was on offer. Though a handful of traders had braved the bad weather in the hope of brisk business, they hardly looked to be beating away customers with sticks. Most were sat nattering and drinking from flasks, beneath striped plastic awnings that snapped and danced in the strong wind.

  Hard-faced, disappointed.

  Instead, the people milling around the fringes or gathered together between the stalls in threes and fours, seemed more intent on animated conversation. Thorne watched them as he drove slowly around the square. He saw men huddled, smoking in doorways. A trio of young women, each nudging a pushchair back and forth on the spot. He saw the nodding and shaking of heads, the pointing fingers, and, even from a distance, it felt as if the entire place was humming with the jibber-jabber, the feverish speculation.

  ‘Paula said we should try and park behind the supermarket.’ Helen pointed to a turning and Thorne followed her instructions. ‘We can walk from there.’

  Paula. The woman in whose house they would apparently be spending the night, though Thorne had still not found out very much about her, or about her relationship to Helen.

  ‘You were right,’ Helen had said that morning, packing quickly after a spate of calls. ‘Can’t even find a hotel room in Tamworth, never mind in town. But I think I’ve managed to sort something out …’

  Approaching the supermarket, they saw a patch of fenced-off waste ground next to the small petrol station opposite. A man in a dripping green cagoule, the hood tight around his face, stood at the entrance. He nodded towards the sign that had been taped to a makeshift barrier. ALL DAY PARKING £7.50.

  ‘Jesus,’ Helen said. ‘Making money out of it.’

  They stared as they drove slowly past. Plenty had already coughed up.

  ‘He won’t be the only one,’ Thorne said.

  Driving into the legitimate car park behind the supermarket, they saw that half the available space had been coned off and was taken up by a large number of emergency vehicles. Vans, squad cars, an ambulance they knew would be there on permanent stand-by. Helen got out and shifted a cone or two, allowing Thorne to park up next to a pair of police motorbikes. While Helen was grabbing an overcoat and umbrella from the back seat, Thorne moved the cones back into position and laid a printed card on the dashboard.

  METROPOLITAN POLICE BUSINESS.

  They walked for a few minutes in silence, past a school and a small parade of shops. The streets were less busy, but there were still one or two people standing outside their houses, chatter spilling from the open doorway of a crowded pub.

  The house where Linda Bates – who used to be Linda Jackson – lived was in a terrace not unlike the one Thorne and Helen had stopped to look at in Dorbrook. There were a few photographers outside, but the majority of journalists were elsewhere, knowing very well that the family of Stephen Bates was no longer in residence.

  The circus had moved on.

  To all intents and purposes, the property now belonged to Warwickshire Police, and would continue to do so until the painstaking process of forensication was complete. Thorne and Helen walked by on the other side of the road, weaving between the handful of smartphone-wielding onlookers. Crime tape ran around the house, which was obscured from view at the front by a phalanx of police and forensic service vehicles. A uniformed officer stood at each corner of the muddy front garden, two more in the middle of the road to ensure that nobody unauthorised got too close. The coppers looked thoroughly bored, though Thorne noticed that at least one had the good grace to try to disguise the fact when a camera began flashing a few feet away.

  An old man with a wire-haired terrier said, ‘Aye aye, there’s PC Plod on the front of the Daily Mail.’

  Helen nodded, but she and Thorne both knew that when it came to the media, the big boys would be where the action was.

  The house Thorne and Helen were on their way to.

  It was the kind of estate that had probably caused outrage among more long-standing residents, when it had been built twenty or thirty years earlier. A bulb-shaped collection of identical properties, most already old before their time. Ugly garages and red-tiled roofs that bristled with satellite dishes.

  As well as the predictably large gathering of reporters, there were a good few members of the public huddled close together on the pavement opposite number six. Mums, dads, young kids perched on shoulders. Thorne could hear the muttering increase in volume as he marched up to the cordon and showed the uniformed officer his warrant card. Camera shutters began to click behind them as Helen produced her ID and the pair of them ducked beneath the tape and walked towards the front door.

  It was open by the time they reached it.

  The female detective was in her late twenties. Tall and skinny; ash-blonde hair pulled back hard, dark trousers and jacket. Thorne guessed that she was a family liaison officer, that there would probably be more inside, uniform and CID.

  She looked at Thorne and Helen, faces and warrant cards, then waved them inside.

  As soon as the front door was shut, she turned and introduced herself as DC Sophie Carson. Her manner was not especially collegiate and if she had taken in the details on the warrant cards, she did not seem overly concerned that she was talking to two officers of senior rank. She waited for Thorne and Helen to say something and, after a few seconds of awkward silence, she stepped away from the door.

  ‘Should I know about this?’

  ‘Nothing to know about,’ Thorne said, thinking that if the woman was a family liaison officer, she might want to ratchet up the warmth a notch or three. He introduced himself quickly and when Helen had done the same he said, ‘Detective Sergeant Weeks is an old friend of Linda’s.’

  ‘Right,’ Carson said. She nodded, but looked uncertain and as she moved
towards them, her hand drifted automatically to the Airwave radio clipped to her belt.

  The hallway was narrow and Thorne and Helen had to press themselves against the stairs to allow the DC to get past. She knocked on a door and pushed it open. After a cursory glance into the room, she leaned in and mumbled a few words that neither Thorne nor Helen could make out, then nodded again to indicate that they could enter. She followed them inside and closed the door behind her.

  A woman wearing jeans and a baggy sweatshirt sat leaning forward on a battered black-leather sofa, a teenage girl close to her. Two uniformed officers, a man and a woman, sat on hard chairs on the other side of the room. The remains of tea things were scattered on a low table between them: mugs, a carton of milk, an open packet of biscuits. It looked as if they had been watching television, though the sound was turned down.

  Thorne and Helen stood side by side, waited. The room was overheated and stuffy and the curtains were drawn. Thorne could hear voices from somewhere above him; a radio or another television.

  Carson nodded towards Helen. ‘Says she’s an old friend of yours.’

  The woman on the sofa stared at Helen for a few seconds, then stood up slowly, her face creasing as confusion gave way to recognition.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ Carson said. She waved the uniforms out and one by one they stood up and trooped past her into the hallway. Thorne kept one eye on Carson as she followed them. He watched her key the radio and could hear that she was already reporting events to Operational HQ as the door hissed across the thick carpet and finally snicked shut.

  A few seconds before Linda Bates rushed, sobbing, into Helen’s arms.

  THREE

  She tries to sleep, but not because she is tired.

  Awake, it’s cold, despite the thick coat that he let her keep, and there is not so much as a pinhole of light. The tape is still tight around her mouth and having lost the battle to control her bladder, she is starting to feel sore. It had warmed her a little at first, but quickly became clammy and cold. The floor is rough and wet beneath her backside and the pipe that she is chained to is ridged with bolts that press against her spine, even through her coat. It’s been a long time since she was brought here. A day or two at least, she thinks. It’s hard to tell when it’s so dark, when there’s no sound save for the drip and trickle of the water that’s coming in. She knows she’s below ground, she’s certain about that much at least. He had given her enough of whatever was in that bottle to be sure that she would not fight back, but she hadn’t quite been unconscious. She remembers being taken down out of the rain into the quiet and the stink. She remembers the strangest feeling that this was a place she knew, that it was somewhere she’d been when she was younger.