TT13 Time of Death

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne nodded, remembering the photographs he had seen.

  ‘The skin had been burned away from the face and torso … rather more left on her back and legs. A good deal of that was then removed by insect invasion.’ Hendricks emphasised those final words, with a look on his face that Thorne had seen before; that told him Hendricks had finally managed to order his thoughts a little. That a suspicion had been confirmed.

  ‘Tell me about the report.’

  ‘Cause of death was impossible to ascertain due to the condition of the body.’

  ‘Best guess?’

  ‘Not even one of those,’ Hendricks said. ‘No sign of blunt trauma to the skull, but that’s about it. I don’t know, strangled, maybe? Suffocated?’

  ‘What about time of death?’

  ‘Yeah, well afterwards, I drove across to talk to the forensic entomologist. Believe it or not, he liked me even more than the pathologist.’

  ‘Yeah, the charm thing, I know.’

  ‘No, seriously.’ Hendricks grinned. ‘He really liked me.’

  Thorne sighed. Said, ‘So?’

  ‘So, time’s a bit easier, but still no more than an approximation. Four weeks, give or take, based on the insect activity. The types found within the remains, the order in which the different species arrive and get stuck in to their dinners. The blowflies first, then the clown and carrion beetles that follow to feed on the maggots in the active decay stage. You know all this stuff, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Thorne was thinking that this was all simply confirming what Cornish had told him. He could only hope there was some other reason Hendricks was so animated.

  ‘I mean, it’s not like you haven’t seen a bug feast before.’

  They turned at the sound of a dog barking, one of several they had seen or heard in the ten minutes since they had arrived at the woods. ‘See what I mean?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Plenty of them around, that’s for sure.’

  ‘And they can’t all have no sense of smell.’

  ‘My dog’s got no nose,’ Hendricks said.

  Thorne had no time for old jokes. ‘If Jessica was really dead that long, it means she was murdered almost as soon as the killer had taken her. That’s the line Cornish and his team are taking.’

  ‘But you don’t think she was, do you?’

  ‘No.’ Thorne saw that look on Hendricks’ face again. ‘And now you don’t either, do you?’

  ‘Like I said, all about the bugs. The conclusions that get drawn from them.’

  They turned again at a noise nearby and watched a dog come trotting out of the trees behind them. Thorne recognised the labradoodle, then its owner, who appeared a few seconds later, whistling for it.

  The man ambled across, swishing at low-lying branches with his walking stick. He nodded at Thorne, took a rather longer look at Hendricks.

  ‘Afternoon,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Last time I saw you, you were creeping out from behind some bushes.’

  Thorne looked at Hendricks. ‘I was caught short.’

  Hendricks looked at the dog-owner and shook his head. ‘Don’t believe a word he says.’

  The man stared, as though unsure how to respond, suspicious that he was being made the butt of a joke he didn’t understand. Slowly, a smile appeared. ‘It’s what always happens on TV shows, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘The cop coming back to the crime scene.’ He looked at Hendricks. ‘You a copper, as well?’

  ‘No.’ Hendricks bent to make a fuss of the dog, who was nuzzling around his legs.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ Thorne said.

  ‘The copper or the killer,’ the man said. ‘One of them always goes back to the scene of the crime. Both of them, sometimes.’

  ‘Only if the TV show’s run out of ideas,’ Hendricks said.

  ‘Can’t happen though, can it?’ The man snapped his fingers and the dog trotted back to him, jumped up to sniff at his pocket. ‘Not the killer anyway. Not unless Steve Bates fancies breaking out of prison.’ The dog barked at nothing in particular and the man told it to be quiet.

  Thorne looked at Hendricks. ‘We should be getting back.’

  Goodbyes were quickly nodded or mumbled.

  ‘Nice to have it back to normal though,’ the man said. ‘Nice that we can all walk our dogs again.’

  Thorne and Hendricks trudged back the way they had come, the dog following them, until Thorne shooed it away, while its owner stepped forward and used his stick to prod tentatively at the ground beneath which Jessica Toms had been buried.

  ‘It was the burning thing that was bothering me,’ Hendricks said, once they were out of sight. ‘The partial burning. Now I’ve read the report and seen the body, it doesn’t bother me any more.’

  ‘Now it’s something else, though,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Let’s assume you’re right and that she wasn’t dead four weeks, nothing like four weeks.’ Hendricks moved ahead, then turned, stepping backwards a few feet ahead of Thorne. ‘How do you make a body that’s actually relatively fresh look like it’s been rotting a fair while?’

  ‘Never mind how,’ Thorne said. ‘What about why?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t got that far yet.’ Hendricks waved his hands, impatient to get to his point. ‘Anyway, that’s your job, I would have thought.’

  Thorne wasn’t sure what his job was. Right now, all he could do was follow, and listen.

  ‘We both know that once a body’s been dead for more than a week or so, the normal signposts for time of death … temperature, lividity, what have you, aren’t really in play any more. Especially when you haven’t got a lot of the body left to work with. We all know it’s pretty much down to the entomologists after that, right? You ask me, almost anyone who’s watched a cop show or two knows that much.’

  ‘Why doesn’t it bother you any more, Phil?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The fact that the body was only partially burned.’

  Hendricks smiled, enjoying it. ‘Because I know why he did it. He burned the body just enough to open it up, didn’t he? To expose what was needed.’

  ‘To open it up for what?’

  Hendricks shrugged and answered as though it were blindingly obvious.

  ‘To put the bugs in.’

  Those watching the house reacted predictably quickly, despite the speed at which the people who came out of it moved down the front path, hurrying towards the waiting car.

  The young male PC leading the woman with a blanket over her head.

  The money shot …

  The officers stationed on the pavement opposite could not stop several people pushing past them and moving into the road; one or two getting to within a few feet of the woman, hurling abuse before the door of the squad car was opened and she was pushed down and into the back seat.

  The male PC shouted, ‘Go,’ and ‘Move.’

  Though officers tried to clear a path for the vehicle, those few journalists who weren’t pointing their cameras at the side window moved quickly to position themselves directly in front. They instantly began shooting through the windscreen, so that for ten or fifteen seconds, until they were pushed aside, the car could only nose forward slowly, while those still watching and shouting from the pavement walked quickly or jogged alongside, towards the end of the road. As the police car finally built up a little speed and switched on its blues and twos, people began to run to keep pace with it; motorbikes and scooters were fired up and a small convoy quickly formed to follow the car around the corner and away, their engines buzzing like angry wasps.

  At the same time, the front door to the house opened again and Helen Weeks walked calmly out with Linda Bates towards a second, unmarked car. By this time, there was only a handful of people left outside the house, and nobody was paying a great deal of attention.

  One woman looked up after stamping out a cigarette and tugged at the sleeve of the woman next to her. They both looked towards the corner around which the police car had gone, then back again. The
confusion on their faces was clear enough from the other side of the road.

  Linda smiled and climbed into the car.

  She gave the women two fingers as Helen pulled quickly away.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Helen followed the same route she and Thorne had taken a couple of days before. There was still a good deal of chaos, but it was clear that the floodwater had subsided still further, as many of the roads that had been closed then were now just about passable. She stopped first at the pub she and Thorne had eaten in and left Linda in the car to check it out. Even though the food rush had finished, there were still too many customers taking extra-long lunch hours for her liking, so she drove twenty minutes further out, until she found somewhere a little less busy.

  ‘Don’t want a place that’s deserted though, do we?’ Linda had said. ‘We’ll stick out like the proverbial and it probably means it’s a shithole.’

  ‘As long as there’s sandwiches and half-decent wine, I think we’ll survive,’ Helen said.

  The pub provided both and Helen carried food and drink across to a table in the corner, out of sight of the door.

  Linda got stuck in, talking more as she did so than at any time since Helen had arrived. Her spirits had visibly lifted the moment they’d left the house. She had cheered as they’d driven away, clearly relishing the subterfuge, laughing at the thought of Gallagher under that blanket and jabbering excitedly as though she and Helen were Thelma and Louise off on an adventure. Now, the first glass of wine safely put away, she continued talking about her relationship with Wayne Smart. She had known it was a mistake from the beginning, she told Helen, except for the kids who were the only decent thing to come out of it. She had made the best of a bad job once Danny and Charli had come along.

  Helen nodded. ‘What people do.’

  ‘Stupid people,’ Linda said.

  ‘You’re not stupid.’

  ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s arse.’ Linda smiled as she said it. ‘And that’s what it was. What he was.’

  ‘Still is, by the look of it,’ Helen said. She thought about her father again, how upset he would be about the story Smart had given to the newspaper.

  ‘That’s what was so great about Steve,’ Linda said. ‘He was everything Wayne wasn’t. He was great with the kids and he seemed to actually care about me, you know? Basically, he gave a toss and there haven’t been too many people I could say that about over the years.’

  ‘Counts for a lot,’ Helen said.

  ‘I’d always picked the wrong bloke until Steve came along.’ She looked at Helen. ‘Yeah, I’m well aware how that sounds under the circumstances.’

  ‘It sounds fine.’

  ‘Course it bloody doesn’t,’ Linda said. ‘Sounds completely mental, but I still don’t believe he’s done the things they say he’s done, so how can I not stand by him?’ She laughed, poured more wine. ‘God, I sound like that old song, don’t I?’

  She began to hum the tune to the Tammy Wynette classic. A song Helen knew that Thorne liked. Helen looked around. There was a man working behind the bar, but he was not exactly being mobbed by customers. A couple sat at a table in the window and two men were drinking in the opposite corner. A woman sat at the bar, tapping busily at her phone.

  ‘Would you stand by him if you thought he was guilty?’ Helen asked.

  Linda took a drink, thought about it. ‘Yeah, I think I probably would. Better or worse, isn’t it? I always thought women who did that were pathetic, but I’m just being honest.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Helen said.

  Linda sat back and grinned. ‘You and me had a row about a boy once, remember? Because we both fancied him.’

  ‘The one who went lamping?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I didn’t fancy him.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Linda said.

  ‘All right, maybe I did, a bit.’ Helen smiled. ‘Just not enough to want to go out shooting at things.’

  ‘I think you just had higher standards than I did,’ Linda said.

  ‘They’ve dropped a lot over the years.’ Helen tried to keep a straight face, but couldn’t manage it.

  When Linda had finished laughing, she said, ‘Sorry you’ve been dragged into all this.’

  ‘Dragged myself into it, didn’t I?’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘I got spat at in the pub last night.’

  Linda seemed genuinely appalled. ‘Who by?’

  ‘Gang of teenage gobshites by the toilets.’ Helen looked at her drink. ‘No big deal, really.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have arrested them?’

  Helen had survived a three-day armed siege and faced down an assailant with a knife on more than one occasion. Last night though, in that piss-stinking hallway, she had been confronted with no more than naked animosity, and she had frozen. Like most other coppers, she was well-used to the hatred that a uniform or a warrant card could breed, but this had been something purely personal, and it had shaken her. ‘It wasn’t worth it,’ she said.

  The woman at the bar ordered another drink, then got up and walked towards the toilets. She smiled at Helen as she passed the table and Helen smiled back.

  ‘You’d do the same, right?’ Linda asked. ‘You’d stand by Tom, right?’

  ‘What, if he did something, you mean?’

  ‘Well, not something like this … but let’s say he did something bad, turned out to be bent or whatever.’

  The idea of Thorne being corrupt, at least in the way Linda was talking about, was not one Helen could ever entertain. But she knew there were things he had done which most people would find difficult to understand or condone. ‘Yes,’ she said, eventually. ‘I’d stand by him.’

  Linda looked pleased. She leaned closer. ‘So, what’s going on with you and him, anyway?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he’s a bit older, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s not exactly a pensioner, you know.’

  ‘Sorry. I was just saying.’

  ‘I think I know what I’m doing.’ It was something Helen had said to her sister more than once, with rather more edge than she was saying it now. ‘I bloody hope so, anyway.’

  Linda touched her glass to Helen’s. ‘I think we’re both old enough and ugly enough.’

  ‘Let’s just go with old,’ Helen said.

  ‘Funny, but I don’t feel that old with you back here. Talking, whatever. Feels like we’re fifteen again.’

  ‘I think we’re both dressed a bit better.’

  Linda smiled, emptied her glass. ‘Why did you come back?’

  ‘I told you on the first day.’

  ‘Really, though.’

  ‘I said. I thought you might need a friend.’

  ‘I did,’ Linda said. ‘I just never thought it would be you. You’ve been away for such a long time and it wasn’t like we kept in touch.’

  ‘I felt guilty for leaving.’ Helen felt the jitters in her belly. ‘I still feel guilty.’

  ‘Why?’

  Now they were talking in whispers. ‘Why do you think?’

  Linda’s hand drifted towards the bottle, but it was empty. ‘That was like a lifetime ago.’

  ‘I was a coward,’ Helen said.

  ‘That’s crap.’ Linda sounded angry, suddenly. ‘You took the chance and you got out, and if I’d had a chance I would have done exactly the same. I’d’ve been gone like a shot.’

  ‘I thought you’d hate me for it,’ Helen said. ‘Coming back here, I was scared to death. I thought you’d be the one to spit in my face—’ Helen stopped, aware that someone was standing at their table. She looked up to see the woman who had been at the bar.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt.’ The woman was in her early fifties. Her grey hair was cut stylishly short and a pair of bright red glasses dangled from a chain around her neck. ‘I just wanted to say that I know who you are and I understand what you’re going through. Honestly. So, if you ever want to talk …’ She leaned forward
and laid a business card on the table.

  Helen moved to snatch it and recognised the logo of another huge-selling tabloid. ‘She doesn’t want to talk. Not to you, anyway.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘So you can put your cheque book away.’

  ‘Can’t she speak for herself?’

  ‘Are you still here?’

  The woman raised a perfectly manicured hand, evidently an experienced doorstepper. ‘I just think she deserves a chance to tell her side of the story, that’s all.’

  Helen stood up fast. ‘Are you deaf?’ She saw the shock on the journalist’s face, watched it become fear and enjoyed the rush. ‘No, I thought not. Now, piss off and crawl back under your rock, before I come round this table and stick those stupid glasses up your bony arse.’

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Donna Howland would never have described herself as nosy, because it was one of those words that made you sound bad. ‘Curious’ was a better word, she reckoned. Interested. Some people just had the sort of jobs which gave you a chance to talk to people and to listen. Like hairdressers or taxi drivers. You made conversation, nothing wrong with that, was there?

  All sorts of people came into Cupz, so she heard all sorts of things. You didn’t have to eavesdrop, because most of the time customers were happy to talk while you made their drinks or sandwiches and other times you couldn’t help but catch a snippet or two as you served at a nearby table or cleared the plates away.

  She’d known this pair would be interesting as soon as they’d walked in.

  She recognised the copper of course, and from what Paula had told her when she’d been in that morning, the other one had to be his mate, the one who was sleeping on her settee. Some kind of CSI type, worked on bodies. Couldn’t be two people in town who looked the same as him, could there?

  Two teas, a chicken salad baguette and a toasted ham and cheese.

  When the place was quiet, she liked to listen to music while she worked behind the counter. Cleaning up, restocking the fridge, whatever. A bit of Ed Sheeran, or maybe Rihanna if she fancied dancing. She didn’t want to disturb the customers, obviously, so she always wore headphones. She thought she probably looked like a right nutcase, nodding along, singing along now and again, when she forgot there was anyone around. It was easy enough to slip an earbud out though and maybe turn the music right down, if it looked like there might be something more interesting to listen to.