TT13 Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  Robert Weeks’ second marriage had only lasted eighteen months and neither Helen nor her sister knew exactly what had gone wrong. ‘I think Dad just wanted her to be Mum,’ Helen had said once. ‘And she got fed up trying to be.’

  They both looked up at the crunch of footsteps on gravel and watched an elderly couple walking slowly past. The man wore a brown anorak and hat and was carrying a large arrangement of flowers. Thorne smiled at the woman who was half a step behind. She smiled back and, for no reason that he could identify, Thorne knew that they were visiting their child’s grave.

  ‘Come on then,’ Helen said.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I’m freezing.’

  She turned and began walking away and Thorne followed happily. A cemetery would never be a pleasant place to visit, however charming or historic the setting. How could it be if you were stricken with grief or guilt or overwhelmed by bad memories? Not even if you were simply tongue-tied and certainly not when it only served to remind you how long it had been since you had visited your father’s grave. Since you had laid down so much as a tatty bunch of daffs from Tesco.

  As they walked back beneath the ancient archway towards the main road, Helen’s phone rang. It was a brief and terse conversation. Thorne saw Helen’s expression darken, heard her say, ‘right’, ‘when?’ and ‘fine’.

  ‘What?’ he asked, as soon as she had hung up.

  ‘That was Carson. I gave her my number.’

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Looks like I won’t be seeing Linda until later on.’

  ‘She OK?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Helen said. She started walking again. ‘Carson’s driving her to the station at Nuneaton. They want to question her.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  Cornish reminded Linda that the interview was being recorded, that she would be presented with a copy afterwards, that she was being questioned under caution as a witness and that she had waived her right to have a solicitor present.

  ‘I don’t need one, do I?’ Linda asked.

  ‘You have the right to one. We need to make sure you’re fully informed of the fact, that’s all.’

  Linda nodded and smiled nervously across the table at Sophie Carson, who was sitting next to Cornish. Carson did not smile back.

  ‘You’re probably aware that a body was discovered early this morning in woodland to the west of town.’

  Linda nodded. Even if she had not seen the news, the rapid expansion of the crowd outside the house would have told her something significant had happened. She had watched the TV report with a growing sense of dread; a sick feeling spreading from her stomach, prickling on her arms and legs. She had fought to keep it from showing on her face, all too aware that Carson, Gallagher and the other cops in the living room were looking for any reaction; watching her watching.

  ‘Which one is it?’ she asked Cornish. ‘Poppy or Jess?’

  ‘There’s been no formal identification as yet,’ Cornish said. There was a good reason why not, but he did not want to get into that for the time being. He was holding that back until it was needed. ‘But I can tell you with certainty that it was the body of Jessica Toms.’

  ‘God …’

  Cornish and Carson waited a few seconds, watched Linda’s shoulders slump, her head shake slowly.

  ‘Did you know her?’ Cornish asked.

  ‘I knew who she was. But I didn’t know her.’

  ‘What about Steve?’

  ‘Same.’

  ‘She’d never been in his car?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘Right,’ Cornish said. ‘That’s what he told us.’

  Linda had been staring at a spot on the other side of the table, at Sophie Carson’s hand lying across a manila folder. The nicely kept fingernails, pillar-box red. Now, she looked at the woman’s face and at Cornish’s. Neither told her anything. She said, ‘I’ve already answered questions like this.’

  ‘Your husband told us that Jessica Toms had never been in his car,’ Cornish said. ‘But I’m afraid to say he wasn’t telling the truth. The forensic tests prove beyond any doubt that she had been.’

  ‘So there must be a mistake.’

  ‘DNA doesn’t lie,’ Cornish said.

  ‘But people make mistakes. The police make mistakes.’

  Cornish looked away for a few moments. ‘Steve smokes Marlboro Lights, doesn’t he?’

  Linda did not answer immediately. It was starting to feel as if every question they asked, however simple it sounded, was nudging her a little further into a minefield. ‘Yeah, so?’

  ‘We found a cigarette end with the body. Caught in the plastic.’

  ‘What plastic?’

  ‘Jessica’s body was wrapped in bin-bags,’ Carson said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘It was a Marlboro Light.’ Cornish steepled his fingers. ‘We’ll have the DNA results on that later today. By this afternoon with a bit of luck. And I know it’s going to have your old man’s DNA on it.’

  ‘No way,’ Linda said, without missing a beat. ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ Carson said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Say the things you think you should say to cover up for him.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘He’s not the one you should be worrying about, all right?’

  Linda looked at Carson. The officer had leaned a little closer to her, but her expression was blank.

  ‘Me, you mean? You think I know something?’

  ‘If you know anything at all that might help us, now’s the time to speak up. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘I’ve told you what I know and what I don’t know. How could you think I’m trying to hide anything? Why the hell would I?’ She shook her head at Carson, raised her hands. ‘Come on, Sophie, you’ve spent time with me, with my kids.’

  The officer said nothing, showed nothing. ‘Sophie’ when she was making tea, laying a supportive hand on Linda’s shoulder. ‘DC Carson’ in the interview room.

  Cornish opened a file and studied it. ‘You’re aware that we took your husband’s computer from your house.’

  ‘I’m aware that you took all sorts of things.’

  ‘We found certain material on his hard drive which we believe to be significant.’

  Linda stared. She did not need to be told what the copper was talking about. Once or twice, she had walked into the room and seen her husband scrabble to close a screen. She shrugged. ‘Blokes look at that stuff, so what? I bet you look at it, don’t you?’ She waited for a response but did not get one. ‘What you’re talking about, what you found on the computer. You mean like porn, right?’

  ‘Like porn.’ Cornish emphasised the first word.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t really think you want me to go into details, Linda. Let’s just say it was specialised.’

  Linda shifted in her seat. Those prickles were creeping along her arms again. Her belly was starting to cramp.

  ‘Take a minute,’ Carson said.

  Linda closed her eyes for a few seconds, unable to focus on anything but those details they were so thoughtfully sparing her. The vile images she could not help but imagine. ‘I don’t know what you’re expecting me to say.’

  Cornish nodded. ‘OK, let’s talk about the night Poppy Johnston went missing.’ There was a tone Linda recognised in the copper’s voice, suddenly; something like concern, like sympathy. It reminded her of the doctor who had told her that her dad was dying. ‘Last Thursday.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Steve told you he was in the pub.’

  ‘Because he was in the pub.’

  ‘Well, let’s not argue about that. Why would he go to a pub all the way out in Atherstone, sit there drinking on his own?’

  ‘Because that’s where the job was. He’d gone over to take a look at a house.’

  ‘Easy enough to drive back, get a pint here. Magpie’s Nest,
that’s his local, isn’t it?’

  ‘He drinks in a few places.’

  ‘So, why not go to one of them?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘I did ask him.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Same thing you just did.’ Cornish pulled a face, as though pained slightly by whatever he was about to say. ‘Only problem is, Linda, it’s a pack of lies, because I don’t think he was in the pub at all. I don’t think he went to look at any job in Atherstone or anywhere else and there’s no record on your home phone or on his mobile of any call from anyone asking him to come and quote for a job. I think that, whatever he told you, he picked up Poppy Johnston that night and took her somewhere in his car.’ He left a second or two. ‘You’re bright enough to know exactly what we think he did after that.’

  Carson let out a long breath. Said, ‘Had you got any reason to suspect he might be lying to you last Thursday?’

  Linda shook her head.

  ‘Any occasion in the past when you thought he’d lied to you?’

  ‘What? Are you married?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

  Linda shook her head again. Carson nodded towards the recorder. Linda said, ‘No,’ but it sounded as though there was something stuck in her throat.

  ‘Like I said, Linda, I know you’re bright.’ Cornish was leaning forward now. As he spoke, he began removing photographs from the folder in front of him, though Linda could not quite see what they were of. ‘Whatever happens, there’s still you, and there’s still Charli and Danny, and you’ve still got a life together to think about.’ He removed the last picture, began to arrange them. ‘That’s what you need to concentrate on, and I know you would never do anything … I know you would never not tell us anything … that might endanger that.’

  ‘You and your family are victims too,’ Carson said. ‘You need to remember that.’

  Suddenly, all Linda could remember was the face of that lovely Indian doctor. Bright eyes and so many lines on her cheeks, around her mouth. A small woman with thick glasses and grey hair tied back and that small red dot on her forehead, whatever it was called. A whisper of a voice when she spoke, and Linda’s arsehole of a father being horribly rude to her, right up until the end.

  TWENTY-THREE

  They drove north out of town, towards the flooding.

  ‘I know a pub that does a decent lunch,’ Helen had said.

  ‘Where?’

  She had told him there was a place a few miles north, towards Burton-on-Trent. The kind of food he liked, she assured him. Decent portions and a good selection of beers.

  ‘It means we’ll have to go around the area that’s flooded.’ Thorne had said.

  ‘That’s OK.’

  They had been talking across the BMW’s dirty roof, one on either side of the car. ‘There’ll be diversions or whatever. It’ll take ages.’

  ‘What else are we going to do?’

  ‘You don’t fancy somewhere in town?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘What about Dorbrook, then?’ Thorne had asked. ‘Must be one of your old haunts we could try.’ He had considered asking her who had told her about this pub she seemed so keen on, and when. He thought about pointing out that if it was somewhere she’d known about twenty years before, there was no guarantee it would even be there any more. Instead, he shrugged and got into the car, suddenly aware that whether or not the pub was decent, Helen was keen to get away for a while.

  Now, Thorne took the car through the villages of Bramsworth and Warmwood, slowing down each time, as the road signs instructed him to do, though there seemed no real reason for it. Little to see beyond Greggs the bakers and very few pedestrians around. The road soon began to bend and roughen, narrowing as the housing gave way to dark fields; distant industrial estates, grey beyond the overgrown hedgerows and stretches of crumbling dry-stone wall.

  Within fifteen minutes, with no sign of water anywhere, they reached the first diversion. A battered triangular sign reading DANGER OF FLOODING and a makeshift barrier allowing access to emergency vehicles only. A hard-faced copper in a high-visibility jacket, one hand raised, the other imperiously pointing the BMW in a different direction.

  ‘Nice to see people enjoying their job,’ Thorne said. He glanced in the mirror as he accelerated away, raised two fingers.

  ‘Right, like you always enjoy it.’

  ‘Most of the time.’

  Helen smirked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should try letting your face know about it.’

  As they followed the diversion signs that would take them around the perimeter of the flood zone, Thorne told Helen what Cornish had said about having to police the area to keep looters away. The difficulties in allotting manpower.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ Helen said.

  ‘You can see his problem though.’

  ‘Not really.’ Helen stared out of the passenger window.

  ‘Getting it in the neck if he doesn’t do anything, I mean.’

  ‘What’s more important?’

  ‘I know—’

  ‘Extra hands pitching in to find a missing girl or nicking a few arseholes in four-by-fours? Is that really a priority?’

  ‘Not a priority, no.’

  ‘Making sure people don’t come back to discover that some toe-rag in waders has had it away with their widescreen? Jesus …’

  ‘People get upset, don’t they? Bad enough having to leave your home.’

  ‘It’s only stuff, isn’t it?’ Helen turned to look at him. ‘They get it all back on insurance anyway, so what’s the big deal? What are Poppy and Jessica’s mum and dad going to get back?’

  ‘I’m not arguing with you,’ Thorne said.

  Turning a corner, he was forced to slow down as he drew close to a lorry, sand or cement dust spilling from the back and drifting into the BMW’s windscreen. He inched out, muttering, looking for a stretch that would allow him to overtake. ‘Hard to get insurance at all though, I would have thought. Near enough impossible if you’re somewhere that’s likely to flood every couple of years.’ He glanced at Helen, but it appeared that she had said her piece or was thinking about something else. He waited another few minutes, then lost patience and accelerated hard past the lorry when it was not altogether safe to do so. He waited for the dressing-down he would normally have expected, but it never came.

  Despite Thorne’s concerns, the diversions only put forty minutes or so on their journey. The route took them a dozen miles to the west and, after turning north again and passing through Bagford-on-the-Hill, they were able to look left and see the flood-zone spread out below them.

  Thorne pulled the car over.

  It looked somewhat less dramatic than he had been expecting. Water lay across the fields, tea-coloured against the stark outlines of surrounding trees, but walls and hedges were still visible. There were no farms or houses cut off completely, none of those ‘islands’ that had featured so prominently in newspapers and on TV when the Somerset levels had flooded the year before. He remembered the picture he had seen of the family shopping in the dinghy and wondered if the local paper had used an old photo, or even one from somewhere else altogether. He would not have been hugely surprised.

  ‘It’s not as bad as I thought,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Apparently it’s a damn sight better than it was a couple of weeks ago,’ Helen said. ‘No thanks to the powers that be.’

  ‘Not a big shock,’ Thorne said.

  ‘People around here have had to sort it out for themselves. Muck in or whatever. Do what they could.’

  ‘All hands to the pump, sort of thing.’ Thorne left a few seconds. If Helen appreciated his feeble pun, she showed no sign of it. ‘Like Paula’s boyfriend.’

  ‘Right,’ Helen said. ‘It’s pretty bloody obvious that the government doesn’t give a toss. It’s all just talk, until it’s the Thames that’s flooding. Until it’s them and their mates’ big houses in the
Home Counties on the receiving end.’

  Thorne raised a clenched fist. ‘Right on, Comrade!’

  ‘Not funny.’

  Thorne considered a remark about someone getting out of the wrong side of the bed that morning, but thought better of it. It was not just because he feared it might sound obtuse or insensitive, when Helen had so recently been standing at her mother’s grave. Thorne could see that her mood was not one she would be easily shaken out of or questioned about. He realised that he had been second-guessing her reaction to things ever since they’d arrived in Polesford.

  He started the car again and asked how far away the pub was.

  A few miles later, they were back on the road they would normally have reached within fifteen minutes of leaving Polesford. A mile or so further on, Thorne glanced at a sign by a narrow turning and slowed.

  ‘What?’ Helen asked.

  Thorne backed the car up and pointed to the sign.

  PRETTY PIGS POOL.

  ‘Where have I seen that before?’

  ‘No idea,’ Helen said.

  Thorne stared at the words, black paint against a flaking white board, but could not remember why the name was familiar. ‘What’s with the whole pig thing, anyway?’ They had already passed a pub called the Three Pigs. He had seen a variety of pig-related paraphernalia for sale on market stalls in town, there was a collection of ceramic pigs behind the bar in the Magpie’s Nest and pig-shaped condiments in the café.

  ‘Area’s famous for it,’ Helen said. ‘There’s loads of pig farms around here. Polesford sausages are a speciality.’

  Thorne remembered the farmer who had come into the pub the night before, the story about his stolen piglet, and now he remembered where he had seen the name on the sign. It was on one of the plaques on the wall of the Magpie’s Nest, inscribed below some stuffed fish or other. He said as much to Helen, and she said, ‘OK.’

  He looked through the gate to the water beyond: a group of large ponds bordered by grassland with woods along one side and stretching away into the far distance. The land around the pool nearest him appeared to be under water, but not by a great deal. Water was running down on to the road, sloshing into a drain by the side of the car, but it was no more than an inch or so deep on the flat.