Sleepyhead

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Oh, I thought you two had no secrets?’

  Not usually, but maybe it was time that changed. She’d need to talk to Rachel. He was now wearing that hideous smirk she remembered him reserving for tiny triumphs or the expectation of dutiful sex. She smiled at him, feeling nothing but pity.

  ‘Why are you here, David?’

  ‘Just because we’re divorcing doesn’t mean that I’m not interested in your life. I am.’

  She stepped towards him. Did she see him actually flinch? ‘There was an Oprah or a Ricki Lake recently about divorcing couples, did you catch it? This woman said that it was only when she was divorcing Duane or Marlon or whoever, that she realised how much she loved him. It’s weird, because all it’s making me realise is how much I wanted to divorce you in the first place.’

  The smirk had gone and she could see that the quiff was beginning to wilt slightly, but she could still feel the sharp tingle of the slap in a parked car, and picture the look in his eye after he’d spat at her in an Italian restaurant. Now he tried hard to look world-weary, but just looked old.

  ‘You’ve become bitter, Anne.’

  ‘And your hair is utterly ridiculous. I’m busy, David.’

  The lift doors moved to close again, and Higgins was finding it hard to retain his balance. ‘Aren’t you at all interested in my life, Anne? What I’m doing?’

  He was getting rusty – dollying up the ball like that. She couldn’t wait to smash it home. ‘OK, David. Are you still fucking that radiotherapist?’

  She heard the doors closing as she walked away up the corridor. She knew that he’d never be certain if she’d heard his pathetic parting ‘Give my love to Jeremy,’ but it didn’t matter either way.

  She couldn’t wait to tell Alison.

  ‘Sit down, Tom.’

  Thorne moved to take the uncomfortable brown plastic seat so generously offered. ‘Fuck, this sounds a bit serious. Am I going to get a bollocking for being whacked over the head and pumped full of shit?’

  ‘Why are you here, Tom? Do you think we can’t manage without you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Stop pissing about, Tom.’ Keable passed a hand across his face. He was probably trying to appear thoughtful, thought Thorne, or maybe he was just tired. All he had succeeded in doing was roughing up his voluminous eyebrows and making himself look like a bald wolfman. Keable puffed out his cheeks. ‘Do you feel rough?’

  ‘What are these leads that Tughan’s talking about?’

  ‘There was a note, Tom.’

  Thorne was out of his chair in a second. ‘At the flat? Show me . . .’

  Keable opened a drawer and produced a dog-eared photocopied sheet of A4. He handed it to Thorne. ‘The original’s still at Lambeth.’

  Thorne nodded. The Forensic Science Services Laboratory. ‘Waste of time . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  Thorne sat down and read. Typed as before. The same smug familiarity in every sentence. The same enjoyment and belief in a unique and wonderfully detached sense of humour. The same sickening self-love . . .

  tom. i’m not a violent man. (he pauses for hollow laughter and to let the detective inspector touch his sore head.) did you need stitches? i’m sorry. i hope the heebie-jeebies weren’t too intense. booze and benzos aren’t the most ­harmonious of bedfellows. sadly i didn’t stay to watch. i simply wanted you to feel something of what it’s like to surrender yourself. i know it wasn’t a surrender in the truest sense of the word but who’s got time to be pedantic? you’ve got murderers to catch after all. a little pain was necessary to bring you up to speed. and the girls felt nothing. remember that. i must apologise for helen but she really didn’t want to live. alison was the only one with enough fight to make it. what was that old advertisement? ‘it’s the fish john west rejects . . .’ that’s rather pat but i’m sure you’ll get my point. i know you’re angry, tom, but don’t let it eat you up. use your anger for good as i have and there’s nothing you can’t achieve. there, i have thrown down a gauntlet . . . or at the very least a surgical glove!!

  speak soon.

  p.s. i have a perfectly healthy sex drive and i wasn’t locked in a cellar as a small child, so don’t waste valuable money or resources on charlatans.

  Thorne felt sick. He took a deep breath and slid the piece of paper back across the desk. Frank Keable raised his head and Thorne looked him straight in the eye. ‘It’s Bishop.’

  Keable put the note into a drawer and slammed it shut. ‘No, Tom, it isn’t.’

  Thorne couldn’t look at him. His gaze drifted away to the green metal wastepaper bin, the cheap black plastic hatstand and expensive Barbour jacket. It floated across the dirty yellow walls and settled gratefully on the calendar. September. A particularly uninteresting view of Exmoor in the mist. A two-dimensional and probably long-dead stag the most animated thing in the room.

  ‘So how did you and Dr Bishop enjoy dinner?’

  Thorne was irritated that they’d put it together so quickly. He rather felt that he’d had his thunder stolen. He nodded, impressed. And curious.

  ‘There was a message from Dr Coburn on your machine. She hoped you enjoyed your evening. We called her.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Did you, by the way? Enjoy your evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was the spaghetti good?’

  ‘How the fuck . . . ?’

  ‘You threw up all over your carpet, Tom. Spaghetti, and a fair amount of red wine . . .’

  Thorne sensed that he might have only the one chance and he needed to perform better than he had last time. A matey tone was best. Conspiratorial. Us against him.

  ‘He’s a slimy piece of shit, Frank. He left before I did and waited.’

  ‘He predicted your every move, then? He toddled off with the note he’d already prepared, tucked in his pocket, did he? And an iron bar and a syringe hidden inside his overcoat?’

  Thorne was thinking quickly. Did Bishop have a bag with him? Had he seen a briefcase in Anne’s hall? He couldn’t remember. He was pretty sure Bishop had come by car anyway.

  ‘He would have left the stuff in his car.’ Standing his ground.

  ‘Come on, Tom . . .’

  Thorne stood up a little too quickly. He felt dizzy and casually reached out a hand to steady himself. He looked. Keable had seen it. It didn’t matter. ‘Surely he’s worth looking at, Frank.’

  ‘Yes, and Tughan’s done it. We’re not completely stupid. There’s nothing there.’

  ‘Tughan hates the idea because it’s mine . . .’

  ‘Nick Tughan’s a professional . . .’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  Thorne was trying hard to sound controlled but he knew that by now the rest of the team would be eavesdropping without much difficulty.

  Keable raised a hand. ‘Go steady now, Detective Inspector.’

  ‘Sir.’ Thorne met Keable’s eye. He pushed himself away from the wall and lowered his voice. ‘I know what you think and I’m well aware of a certain reputation that I may have . . .’

  ‘Let’s not get into that, Tom.’

  Thorne stared hard at him, breathing heavily. ‘No, let’s.’

  Keable wouldn’t hold the stare. ‘There’s no evidence, Tom.’

  ‘Dr Jeremy Bishop has to be considered a major suspect. He worked at the hospital from which the Midazolam was stolen. He now works at the hospital where Alison Willetts was taken after she’d been attacked. I think he took her there after he’d attacked her to try, unsuccessfully, to give himself an alibi. He has no alibi for any of the murders and he fits the general description of the man seen talking to Helen Doyle on the night she was killed.’ He’d said his piece.

  Keable cleared his throat. He was going to say his. ‘Bishop was involved with
Dr Coburn, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Some years ago I believe . . . yes.’

  ‘Are you?’

  They couldn’t confuse what he thought about Bishop with his feelings for Anne, could they? It was necessary to let Anne think that Bishop got to him on that level but Keable would see beyond that surely . . .

  ‘Tughan isn’t the only professional . . . sir.’

  ‘Let’s talk sensibly, Tom. Everybody agrees we’re looking for a doctor.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘The Leicester connection is a red herring due to the date of the theft, if, in fact, the drug stolen was that used on the victims in the first place. Your reasoning as far as the Willetts alibi goes seems to me fanciful at best, and what he was or wasn’t doing when the first three victims were killed is irrelevant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know the game, Tom. The CPS isn’t even going to look at the first three if we make an arrest. It was all pieced together too long after the event. We’ve got to go for Willetts and Doyle if we want to secure a conviction. We don’t even have an accurate time of death for the first three victims.’

  ‘When he decided it was time, Tommy. That was when.’

  ‘Bishop was on call every one of those nights. He’s only on call one night a week, it’s a hell of a fucking coincidence.’ He was almost whispering. ‘I know it’s him, Frank.’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Tom. This isn’t police work, this is . . . obsession.’

  Thorne was suddenly very hot. Here it was, then. Calvert. His mark of Cain. Keable was going to pick away the scab.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you were the one who talked about ­reputations. I’m not interested in reputations, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t aware of . . . recurring patterns.’

  ‘You’re talking like I’m a basket case. How many murderers have I put away in the last fifteen years?’

  ‘You were right fifteen years ago. I know that.’

  ‘And I’ve paid for it ever since. You’ve got no idea.’

  ‘You’ve been right lots of times since then, but it doesn’t mean you’re always right.’

  A minute or so earlier he’d felt like a fight. He’d wanted to get into it, but now he was suddenly exhausted, beyond it. ‘Most of those times I was lucky. I could just as easily have fucked it up. I didn’t always “know”. But I knew fifteen years ago. And I know now.’

  Keable shook his head, slowly, sadly. ‘There’s nothing there, Tom.’ Then, an afterthought: an attempt to damp down the flames a little. He waved towards the main operations room. ‘And you know full well that half the men in that office fit the general description.’

  Thorne said nothing. Jesus, Exmoor looked bleak. Even the majestic stag looked deeply pissed off about the whole thing. Thorne saw himself walking into the mist, a tiny, distant figure leaving this shit behind him and disappearing. He felt the curtain of fog closing behind him, clammy on his shoulders as he marched across the damp, mossy ground with the voices of the girls echoing far behind him. He knew they’d be the only ones who would care about where he’d gone.

  ‘Now, sit down, Tom, and let’s talk about the things we can do. The reconstruction’s already been shot. It’s going out in a couple of days.’

  ‘Let Tughan do it.’

  Thorne was walking quickly towards the door. He’d lost ­Keable. He didn’t care. He opened the door then turned back to the DCI. ‘If, you said.’ Thorne shook his head. Keable stared at him. ‘If we make an arrest. Not when! You really are an inspiration to us all, Frank.’

  ‘DI Thorne—’ Keable was on his feet, shouting, but Thorne was already half-way across the operations room. Those with the imagination picked up conversations where they hadn’t left off and those that couldn’t be bothered stared at their shoes. As Thorne passed him, Tughan looked up, smiling, from his computer screen. ‘I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about, Tom. He’s a doctor not a lecturer.’

  Thorne kept moving. He would make the bastard pay for that one day, but now was definitely not the time.

  Holland stood in the corner brandishing a sandwich and watching his boss stride towards him without looking left or right.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Right, Detective Constable Holland,’ said Thorne. ‘Now you can take me home.’

  Rachel Higgins lay on her bed, listening to her mother moving about in the bathroom. She had the sound turned down on the TV but every so often she glanced at the screen and tried to figure out exactly what was happening plotwise. It was a trashy late-night Channel 5 skinflick so it wasn’t difficult. She heard the toilet flush. Mum was on her way to bed.

  She reached over for her Walkman and swept her long brown hair behind her ears before putting on the headphones. The Manic Street Preachers would take her mind off the fight with her mother. It was so stupid the whole thing. It had started with the usual argument about the bloody resits. So what if her grades for IT and chemistry were not what they’d been expecting? She wasn’t doing any science subjects in the sixth form anyway. They’d knocked that around for a while and got on each other’s nerves and then she’d started on about her ‘privacy’. Her right to have a life! Jesus Christ . . .

  Maybe she and her mum should stop pretending they were mates in that wanky Ab Fab middle-class way. If that was what her mother wanted, that suited her just fine. She’d only been talking to her dad, for fuck’s sake. It wasn’t like she’d been told not to.

  On TV a flabby sound engineer was trying to get some ­session-singer’s bra off. Or maybe he was her manager. He was ugly and she had saggy old tits.

  She quite liked the copper, actually, and didn’t give a toss if her mum wanted to shag his brains out, but now all of a sudden her mum was moving the goalposts. Certain things were ‘her business’ and she was allowed to have a private life.

  It was obvious that the flabby bloke wasn’t going to get his dick out. She picked up the remote, flicked off the TV and lay there in the dark trying not to cry.

  The volume on her Walkman was turned up as high as it would go. The noise would send her to sleep eventually and the row would be forgotten in the morning.

  It didn’t really matter anyway. Her mum could have her secrets if she wanted.

  Rachel had plenty of her own.

  It sounds as if Anne gave that tit of a husband as good as she got by the lift. She’s definitely well shot of him. I wish I could tell her to stop pissing about and make a move on that chunky copper. They’ve done dinner, now she should go for it, no question. Especially now some nutter’s smacked him over the head. Get ’em while their resistance is low. Give him one while he’s still dizzy!

  I’ve always been good at getting people together. It was me who got Paul to go and chat Carol up. I wonder if they’re back from their honeymoon yet. Presumably not or they’d have been in.

  We had a really good laugh, actually, me and Anne. Well, she had a good laugh and I just thought about laughing. It’s fucking freaky to tell you the honest truth. When I’m half out of it, which is most of the time (did I mention that the drugs in here are fantastic?) I imagine that all the nurses are actually inside me instead of outside in the real world. I try and pretend that they’re like these little munchkins running about inside my body and doing all the things that my brain tells them to do. Sweet little mobile body parts. Nursey to open my eyes. Nursey to wipe away the sweat. Nursey to scratch an itchy tit (well, once I’ve mastered telling them it’s itchy). Remember the Numskulls in that old comic? A funny bunch of dwarfs that lived inside this bloke’s head. I think ‘hungry’ and this little thing in a blue uniform with a stiff cap and an upside-down watch comes and sticks something yummy in my feeding tube. I think ‘piss’ and, Bob’s your uncle, the next little slave empties my catheter. Well, fuck it, you’ve got to get through the day.

  That�
�s another thing. I’ve got no bloody idea what time of day it is. Anne makes a point of telling me but ten minutes after she’s gone I’m confused again. There’s a lot of dizziness as well (‘No change there, then,’ the girls at the nursery would say). I wonder how all the kids are doing? Some of them will have moved up into the next room. A new lot for Daniel to start biting. I really miss them.

  I wonder if I could still get pregnant?

  EIGHT

  Hendricks had arrived laden down with cheap lager and by nine fifteen the pair of them were having trouble staying awake. The reconstruction would be shown in ten minutes. Hendricks, who was far too opinionated for his own good, ranted all the way through the news, while Thorne worked his way quietly through another can of beer and wondered why he hadn’t called Anne Coburn.

  Of course, he knew full well why he hadn’t called her. The real question was how much longer he could maintain the pretence of integrity. Of actually having any.

  His resolve was crumbling, can by can.

  The most formal of contact, the most banal conversation would, he knew, be tainted by what he wasn’t telling her. What he was choosing carefully and deliberately not to tell her. Of course, he was right on a procedural level not to involve her, he knew that. Well done him. But he wanted to see her. He wanted to tell her all sorts of things.

  So . . . options.

  He could continue to see her and simply not talk about the case. Or about Alison. Or about how he felt every hour of the day . . . but he really wouldn’t be giving very much of himself in return for what he needed from her, would he? Or he could tell her the truth. If, however, he confided in her that he thought her oldest friend was a multiple murderer then the relationship might well get off to an iffy start. If he told her that her ­medical-school chum – and former lover, let’s not forget that – was a socio­pathic killer then she was hardly going to see him as a prime candidate for getting into her pants, was she?

  From the sofa Hendricks let out a long, contented belch. There was nothing like alcohol for bringing out the northern bloke in the southern professional. Or the ­testosterone-fuelled lad in the tired old man.