The Dying Hours

by Mark Billingham

  Fryer sat up. Said, ‘Is he fuck!’

  ‘Afraid so. Sorry to spring sad news on you like that.’

  ‘You’re full of it.’

  ‘Topped himself.’

  ‘Right. Now I know you’re full of it.’

  Thorne reached into his pocket for his phone, called up the photographs he had taken with it two nights earlier and pushed it across the desk. ‘You can use your fingers to blow that up a bit if you want.’

  Fryer didn’t need to. He picked up the phone and stared at the photo. The back of the car, the pipe taped to its exhaust and running round to the rear window.

  ‘Recognise it?’ Thorne asked. ‘Honestly, that thing was rustier than Christ’s nails, so I hope Terry managed to knock the price down a bit.’ He took a few seconds, enjoying the shock on Fryer’s face. ‘Yeah, I know. Bit of a game-changer, isn’t it?’

  Fryer put the phone back down on the desk and shrugged. ‘Well, there you go.’

  ‘So, now the only person you need to be afraid of is me.’

  ‘Why the hell should I be afraid of you?’

  ‘Well, if not me, then my mate here.’ Thorne turned his chair round, drew the man with him into the conversation. ‘This is John Williams, from Trading Standards.’

  The man took a step forward and waved ID. Said, ‘I’m actually based in Barnet, but I’ve got plenty of mates in Tower Hamlets. I think they’d be the ones looking at you.’ He glanced at Thorne. ‘I can check that.’

  ‘John got himself into a spot of bother a year or so ago.’ Thorne closed one nostril with a finger, then sniffed theatrically. ‘Stupid really, but I helped him out, so every so often he does me a bit of a favour in return. You see where this is leading, Keith?’

  Fryer undid his top shirt button and loosened his tie. ‘What’s to stop me going to the authorities?’ He pointed to the man behind Thorne, then at Thorne himself. ‘Telling them he’s bent. That you’re both bent.’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Thorne said. ‘Other than the fact that you’re way more bent than either of us.’ He leaned forward, the mock-friendliness gone from his voice, keen now to get into it. ‘One phone call and John’s mates will be round here in a heartbeat to shut you down. You get that, Keith? Shut you down and bang you up.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Fryer asked.

  ‘Where was Mercer staying?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  Thorne turned to look at the man behind him. ‘What kind of fine are we looking at to start with, John?’

  ‘Five grand for clocking one car,’ the man said, quickly. ‘Same for falsifying service histories with the likelihood of imprisonment if that’s widespread or if the vehicles are unsafe.’ He looked at Fryer. ‘Pretty likely, I’m guessing.’

  Fryer looked as though he was toying with smashing his head down on to the desk. ‘I heard… Deptford, but he was moving around, so I don’t know how long for.’

  ‘Heard where?’

  ‘Some bloke in the pub.’

  It rang true on several counts. However careful Mercer thought he was being, however seriously those he had been staying with had been warned to keep his whereabouts to themselves, somebody always said something. A few years before, a major gang of organised criminals had come up with an ingenious way to dispose of a body, burying it in a grave that had already been dug and which was filled in – complete with the body it was intended for – the following day. It was fool-proof and they would certainly have got away with it, had several members of the gang been able to resist telling anyone they went for a drink with just how clever they’d been.

  Deptford.

  In Thorne’s own borough.

  It made sense. This was the part of the world Mercer knew best. Where he’d worked, where he’d grown up. Though he’d obviously had to travel outside the area to call on some of his victims, Thorne could well understand why a man released after thirty years into a world he didn’t recognise would want to base himself close to home. Or the place that felt most like it.

  ‘Anywhere else?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Deptford was the only thing I heard, I swear.’

  ‘Who was he staying with?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘Thought you might have “heard”.’

  Fryer’s head fell back, then a few moments later he raised it again. ‘Look, I heard him on the phone… out there.’ He nodded towards the lot. ‘He mentioned a name, I don’t know if it was the bloke he was speaking to, or what.’

  ‘What name?’

  ‘Dean,’ Fryer said. ‘That’s the only name I heard. Dean…’

  ‘So, somebody called Dean in Deptford.’ Thorne nodded. ‘I’m going to need a bit more than that, Keith.’

  ‘I don’t know any more.’

  Thorne turned as though to confer with the man from Trading Standards again.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake… look, he might have been a drug dealer.’

  ‘Might have been?’

  ‘He mentioned it,’ Fryer said. ‘When he bought the car. Saying he didn’t want anything flashy, like a drug dealer’s car, all that. He kept going on about it. He never liked blokes who did all that.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t mind one of them putting him up?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’ Fryer was starting to look pale and flustered. He loosened his tie a little more. ‘Look, this is just me putting two and two together.’

  Thorne turned to the man behind him, who was no more a Trading Standards officer than he was. The man gave a small nod.

  It might be nothing. It might be enough.

  Seeing there was a chance that he’d finally given his visitors what they wanted, Fryer sat back and sighed. ‘Now will you please piss off and leave me alone.’ He clamped two hands to his chest. ‘I’m on tablets, you know.’

  Thorne stood up. ‘Just out of interest, what did Mercer pay you for that piece-of-shit Astra?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred,’ Fryer said.

  Thorne shook his head. ‘Scared to death of him, but you were still happy to rip him off.’ He stepped towards the door. ‘You know what, if he wasn’t already dead, I’d be suggesting you might want to take a nice, long holiday.’

  Walking back across the lot, Thorne’s partner stopped to tuck the fake ID he’d knocked up on his computer that morning beneath the Clio’s windscreen wiper. ‘Think you’ve got something to work with there,’ he said. ‘Decent lead.’

  Thorne was already thinking hard about it, trying to decide which way to go next. ‘There’s a lot of drug dealers in Deptford,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t be too many called Dean, can there?’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Talking of names… why “John Williams”?’

  ‘It was that or “Hank Cash”,’ Thorne said.

  The man grinned, and didn’t stop talking about what a good team he and Thorne had made until they had reached the car. Thorne looked up and down the road, checking to make sure that Neil Hackett’s BMW wasn’t parked somewhere close by. Now he was watching out for it everywhere he went, waiting for Hackett to pop up again. He half expected the DCI to be waiting for him whenever he got home.

  Thorne opened the doors and thanked the man with him for helping out.

  Ian Tully said, ‘Any time you want, mate. I haven’t enjoyed myself that much in ages.’

  SIXTY-ONE

  Hendricks changed out of his scrubs and walked back to the office he shared with three other pathologists at Hornsey mortuary. He made a quick call and spent a few minutes responding to emails. He put the kettle on for coffee. He looked up at the Arsenal Legends calendar above his desk, then checked his phone to see if there were any messages from the man he’d swapped numbers with in a bar the previous weekend.

  He hadn’t fancied him that much anyway.

  He tried to forget the face of the girl whose body he had just finished so carefully taking apart and crudely stitching up again. The blackened tattoo of track marks on arms, legs, belly, tongue
. The small, shrivelled heart that had eventually become too diseased to beat.

  Half an hour until the next one and a couple more before the end of the day.

  ‘You got a minute, Phil?’

  Hendricks had been grateful for the knock on the door and surprised to find Dave Holland on the other side of it. He offered him coffee and Holland said he was fine, that he hadn’t got long. He dragged one of his colleagues’ chairs across and told Holland to make himself at home.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Well, I’m a bit all over the place to tell you the truth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thorne.’

  Hendricks laughed, but Holland seemed in no mood to see the funny side of anything.

  ‘I thought it was all over,’ he said. ‘The Mercer thing.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Hendricks said. ‘He’s alive… no, he’s dead… no, he’s alive again.’

  Holland picked at a loose thread on his tie. ‘I mean once they find out who Mallen really is and they ID the body in the car, hopefully they’ll be able to get it sorted, but in the meantime… he’s still going to be chasing about like a one-man Murder Squad. Well, not one man, that’s the bloody point, isn’t it? One man and his stupid mates.’

  ‘Relax, Dave,’ Hendricks said. ‘I’ve been through all this with him and he’s done with it.’

  Holland looked up. ‘You reckon?’

  A trolley clattered past outside; two mortuary assistants chatting as they passed the door.

  ‘Why are you talking to me about this?’

  Now, there was the thinnest of smiles. ‘If I tell Sophie any of it she’ll tear me a new one.’

  ‘Kitson?’

  ‘Yeah, well… she’s sort of in the same place I am.’

  ‘Which is where, exactly?’

  ‘I’ve still got twenty-five years ahead of me in this job,’ Holland said. ‘More, maybe. I’ve got a kid and I want to have another one and… I mean, it’s all right for him, isn’t it? What’s he got to lose?’ He glanced up at Hendricks’ calendar. ‘He’s like some star player who everybody thinks is washed up, and now he’s dreaming about coming off the bench and scoring the winner in the last minute.’

  ‘Spurs player though,’ Hendricks said. ‘Never Arsenal.’

  ‘I’m serious, Phil. There’s cases I’ve neglected because of this, the cases I’m being paid to work on. The ones I’m not going to get chucked off the force for working on.’

  Hendricks sighed. ‘I don’t know what to tell you, mate. It’s really him you should be—’

  ‘I spoke to that bloke whose mother drowned herself, didn’t I?’ Holland waited for a nod of acknowledgement, began counting off on his fingers. ‘I found out who Terry Mercer was, went through the files, like he asked me. I looked through all the trial records, gave him his list of potential victims. I told him when there were new ones, names and addresses, I did all that. I traced Mercer’s car and checked the CCTV footage when he asked me to, but then he asked me to go into the ANPR system… into another system, and that just seemed like a step too far. Like we’d finally reached the point where he really didn’t give a monkey’s how much trouble anyone got themselves into for him.’ He shook his head. ‘I had to draw a line somewhere, you know? I mean… don’t you reckon?’

  Hendricks stared at Holland, watched him sit back and close his eyes and swear under his breath. The jaw muscles were tensing beneath his skin. He looked wretched.

  ‘What have you done, Dave?’

  SIXTY-TWO

  Thorne’s first morning back on early shift was relatively uneventful.

  The previous night’s drunk and disorderlies were released and the burglaries followed up. A supermarket trolley was removed from the front window of a shoe shop. The manager of Boots opened up to discover that every drug on the premises had been stolen in the early hours and a car that had escaped pursuit across half the borough was found burned out behind the leisure centre. A missing girl was located and both her parents arrested. A woman attacked after refusing to make her husband something to eat at midnight was off the critical list, while an RTA that had resulted in serious injury due to the actions of the coked-up teenage girl behind the wheel was now being treated as a manslaughter enquiry as the victim had died overnight.

  Not remotely uneventful, Thorne thought, for any of those involved.

  He spent an hour writing reports, then he and Christine Treasure took a car out.

  As was usually the case on a routine patrol, if there were no incidents that required their attendance they called in at several of the other stations in the borough. Tea at one place or a sandwich mid-shift; five minutes for a fag and a catch-up with colleagues at another.

  Catford, Sydenham, Brockley, Deptford.

  At each station, Thorne contrived to find a few minutes alone with someone he could chat to about the local drug dealers. He took care to slip it casually into conversation; just wanting to know, while he remembered, which of them they might have had dealings with. He mentioned a name he’d heard in passing, just to see if it rang any bells.

  Nobody at any of the stations knew anything about a drug dealer called Dean. Not one of the four different officers he talked to during a longer than normal stop-off at Deptford. A couple offered to ask around for him, but Thorne assured them it wasn’t important.

  ‘Might be something, probably bugger all,’ he said.

  Driving back to Lewisham for lunch, Christine Treasure said, ‘How come you’ve got such a spring in your step today?’

  ‘News to me,’ Thorne said.

  She grinned. ‘Saturday night leg-over was it?’

  ‘A gentleman never tells.’

  As it happened, he and Helen had done nothing more energetic the previous evening than answer the door to the pizza delivery man and point the TV remote, and later on Alfie had been the one sweating and wriggling in bed. Thorne still had very fond and vivid memories of the night before that, though, despite the slapstick with his injured hand.

  Treasure reached to poke him in the arm. ‘Come on then.’

  ‘Just enjoying my job,’ Thorne said.

  Treasure grinned even more.

  Walking out of the rain into the station a few minutes later, Thorne was approached by PC Nina Woodley. She handed Thorne a tatty-looking coloured envelope with his name scribbled on the front.

  ‘I ran into that kid, 2-Tone,’ she said. ‘The one that took a pop at you a couple of weeks back. He said to give you that.’

  Thorne glanced at Treasure and saw that she was clearly every bit as desperate as Woodley to know what the envelope contained. He hadn’t said anything about making the bail order disappear and would tell her the same thing he’d told the custody sergeant if she ever asked. He wandered away towards his office, leaving Treasure and Woodley nattering, then opened the envelope and pulled out a scrap of paper torn from a spiral-bound notepad.

  Dennison had clearly heard the good news from his solicitor.

  this don’t make me your bitch

  The station canteen had long since ceased to be somewhere officers went to queue up for reheated shepherd’s pie and jam roly-poly. These days the shutters at the serving hatch were down more often than not and officers and civilian staff only went in to buy snacks or drinks from the vending machines. At mealtimes, they went in to watch the TV in the corner and eat the food they’d brought in from home or from one of the shops outside.

  Thorne bought himself a burger in the shopping precinct, walked back to the station with it and found himself a table in the corner.

  It was twenty minutes before the woman he was hoping to see walked in.

  He watched her sit down and take a can of Diet Coke and a Tupperware container from a plastic bag. He waited until she’d peeled the lid off and dug a fork in once or twice before he wandered across and asked if he could join her.

  She looked up, reddened. Said, ‘Yeah, course.’

  Jenny Quinlan was a young trainee detective
constable with CID. Thorne had spoken to her once or twice, before running into her at a crime scene in Forest Hill a few months earlier. What had appeared to be a domestic murder had become something rather more headline-worthy, when it emerged that the victim had been responsible for abducting and killing two teenage girls.

  Something had bothered Thorne about that case at the time. Things that had refused to add up. He had kept his concerns to himself though; still only a week or two back in uniform and wary of rocking the boat.

  He thought about what he’d spent the last few weeks doing. That early reticence had vanished quickly enough.

  He asked Quinlan what she was eating. She showed him what was in her lunchbox and moaned about having to eat salad to keep her weight down. He told her she’d have no need to eat rabbit food if she came back to uniform, that nine hours a day lugging a stone of Met vest and belt kit around was the best diet he could think of. She laughed and said the problem was the 20 per cent discount police officers got from Nando’s and Domino’s Pizza.

  ‘Can’t resist cake or a bargain,’ she said. ‘That’s my trouble.’

  They chatted for a few more minutes about nothing in particular. It was enough for Thorne to establish that she was still a trainee. Still eager to please.

  ‘So how are you finding it?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s good,’ she said. She tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear. In a grey skirt and a white blouse that was perhaps a little small for her, she was doing her best to look confident and on top of her game, but something suggested that she did a fair amount of bluffing.

  Thorne puffed out his cheeks. ‘Not all the time.’

  ‘No. Not all the time.’ She took another forkful of salad. ‘Some of the people, the politics.’

  ‘You get past that,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s the other stuff. The stuff that makes you want to do the job in the first place. It’s having to give up thinking you can make a difference.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She put her fork down, reddening again. ‘Stupid, right?’

  ‘Not stupid, but you need to accept that you probably won’t.’ He shrugged. ‘The best you can do is help. Clean up. There’s nothing wrong with that, by the way. It’s a good enough reason to get up every day.’