The Dying Hours Read online

  Without making it too obvious, he looked around the room again.

  The wardrobe, closed. The curtains, drawn. Cosmetics and other bits and pieces on the dressing table: hairbrush, wallet, wet-wipes. A few coins in a small china bowl. A woman’s dressing gown draped across one chair, a man’s clothes neatly folded on another. Shoes and slippers underneath. A biro, book and glasses case on the wife’s bedside table, a paperback book of crossword puzzles on the floor by the side of the bed, a large black handbag hung on the bedstead. The bottle and syringe on the husband’s side. A half-empty water glass. A tube of ointment, a can of Deep Heat…

  What was wrong with the picture?

  ‘There isn’t a note,’ Thorne said.

  Binns turned round, leaned back against the bedstead. ‘You know that means nothing,’ he said.

  Thorne knew very well, but it had been the best he could come up with while he tried and failed to identify what was really bothering him. His friend Phil Hendricks had told him a great deal about suicide during the last investigation they had worked on together… the last case Thorne had worked as a detective. The pathologist had recently attended a seminar on the subject and delighted in giving Thorne chapter and verse. The fact was that in the majority of cases, people who killed themselves did not leave notes. One of the many myths.

  ‘I know what you’re doing, by the way,’ Binns said.

  ‘Oh, you do?’ Thorne ignored the burst of twitter from his radio. Reports of a suspected burglary in Brockley. The violence escalating at the house party on the Kidbourne. ‘I’m all ears.’

  Binns smiled. ‘Yeah, I mean considering where you were before and where you are now… it makes perfect sense that you’re going a bit stir crazy, or whatever. Only natural that you might want to make something ordinary like this into… something else.’ He casually checked the mobile phone that had not left his hand. ‘I understand, mate. I sympathise, honest.’

  Patronise, Thorne thought.

  ‘If I was in your position, Christ knows what I’d be doing.’

  ‘You’d be getting pissed off with smartarse detectives who think they know it all.’

  ‘Really?’ Binns feigned a shocked expression. ‘What type did you used to be then?’

  Thorne wrapped his hand around the old-fashioned metal bedstead and squeezed. ‘I want to get the HAT car round,’ he said.

  It was the job of detectives on the Homicide Assessment Team to evaluate any possible crime scene and to collect vital evidence where necessary before handing the case over. It was solely their decision as to whether or not a ‘sudden’ death had occurred. A suspicious death.

  ‘Well, you know how that works.’ Binns walked across and leaned back against a wall next to an old-fashioned dressing table. ‘Different system these days. Between your lot and my lot, I mean. Different to your day anyway, I would have thought.’

  ‘You’d have thought right,’ Thorne said.

  Your day. Nearly twenty-five years since Tom Thorne had pulled on the ‘Queen’s Cloth’ every day to go to work. Since he’d worn a uniform.

  Crisp white shirt with his two shiny inspector’s pips on the epaulettes.

  Black, clip-on tie.

  The fucking cap…

  ‘It’s my decision,’ Binns said. ‘Whether or not to bring the HAT team in.’

  ‘I know how it works,’ Thorne said.

  Binns told him anyway. ‘Only a detective inspector can make that call.’

  ‘Got it,’ Thorne said. ‘So, on you go.’ Binns had been right to suggest that the procedure had been somewhat different two decades earlier. The protocol a little more flexible. The chain of command not followed quite so religiously. There might have been a few less backsides covered, but it was certainly quicker.

  ‘Frankly, I can’t really see the point.’

  ‘Can’t you?’ Thorne said.

  ‘That stuff about the false teeth is near enough laughable and I don’t think anyone’s going to give a toss where the insulin came from.’ Binns cast an eye around the room and shrugged. ‘I pull Homicide in here and they’re only going to say the same thing, aren’t they? You know, we both end up looking like idiots.’

  ‘All the same,’ Thorne said, ‘I’d be happier if you made the call.’

  Binns shook his head. ‘Not going to happen.’

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said. He could feel the blood rising to his face. ‘Because of where you are and where I am. Prick…’

  Binns reddened too, just a little, but otherwise gave a good impression of being impervious to an insult he’d clearly been on the receiving end of before. ‘You think whatever you like, pal, but I’m not going to waste anybody else’s time just because you’re seeing murders where there aren’t any.’ He walked towards the door, then turned. ‘Maybe you should have taken a bit more time off after what happened. Maybe you should have chucked it in altogether. King of all cock-ups, that one.’

  Thorne could not really argue, so did not bother trying.

  ‘Take this up with the MIT boys if you want,’ Binns said, gesturing back towards the bed. ‘We’ve got a Murder Investigation Team at Lewisham, haven’t we? A nice big one.’

  A team just like the one Thorne used to be part of. ‘Yeah, well, I might just do that.’

  ‘I mean it’s up to you, if you want even more people taking the piss.’

  Thorne was suddenly more aware than usual of the various pro-active items attached to his Met vest.

  Cuffs, baton, CS gas…

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ Binns said, straightening his cuffs one final time. ‘Leave you to wind this up.’ The detective turned away and was checking his BlackBerry again as he walked out of the bedroom.

  Thorne took half a minute, let his breathing return to normal, then bellowed for Woodley. He told her to contact Lothian and Borders police and get someone to deliver the death message to the Coopers’ son in Edinburgh. He told her to find out if the dead couple had any other children, and, if so, to make sure the message was delivered to them wherever they were. He told her to stay put until the on-call Coroner’s officer arrived.

  ‘Try not to disturb anything in this room though,’ he said. ‘Not just yet.’

  Woodley raised an eyebrow. ‘Guv.’

  Thorne took one last look round, grabbed his raincoat and cap then hurried downstairs and out to the car. No more than a few minutes with the blues and twos to the Kidbourne and if things were still lively he really felt like wading in. There was every chance he would find himself on the end of a smack or two, but it could not make him feel any worse.

  TWO

  It was almost eight o’clock in the morning by the time Thorne got back to the flat in Tulse Hill and, as was usually the case if he didn’t miss seeing her altogether, he walked in to find Helen just about to leave. She was in the kitchen, which opened out into an L-shaped living area: a sofa, armchair, stereo system and TV; the floor littered as usual with toys and children’s books. She finished buttoning her son’s coat and removed an uneaten piece of toast from her mouth. ‘God, you all right?’

  Thorne tossed his raincoat on to a kitchen chair, yanked off the clip-on tie and unbuttoned his shirt. He touched a fingertip to the lump beneath his right eye and winced a little. ‘I’ll live.’

  ‘Did you wind up that bolshy skipper again?’ Helen asked. ‘I said she’d deck you one day.’

  Thorne smiled and walked across to flick on the kettle. ‘Some idiot fancied a party and thought it would be a good idea to put the address on Facebook. Three hundred people trying to crash one of the flats on the Kidbourne.’

  ‘Sounds like fun.’

  ‘It was once we sent a couple of dogs in.’ Thorne reached up to grab a mug. ‘Cleared the place faster than a Phil Collins single.’

  Helen laughed and tore into her toast.

  ‘Nicked half a dozen for affray.’ He touched his face again as he poured the hot water. ‘Plus the lad that did this.’

  ‘Nice.’ Helen chewed. ‘Ot
her headlines?’

  Thorne shrugged. ‘A few break-ins.’ He mashed the teabag against the side of the mug and thought through some of the reports he’d signed off on at the end of the shift. ‘A three-way knife fight come chucking-out time at the White Lion. Two kids trying to smash up the KFC with baseball bats, because apparently they got beans when they asked for coleslaw…’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Helen said, stepping out into the hall.

  ‘A bus driver assaulted with a machete after he told a woman to stop pissing on his bus—’

  ‘What, the woman had the machete?’ Helen reappeared in the doorway, one arm inside a long down coat.

  ‘Obviously,’ Thorne said. ‘A shiny new Volvo driven straight into the front of a house on the High Road when someone tried to nick it. The normal quota of pissheads, the usual domestic argy-bargy. Oh, and a bit of dogging in the car park behind Comet.’

  ‘Well, no harm treating yourself after a long night, is there?’

  He dropped the used teabag into the bin. ‘I was only looking, honestly!’

  ‘Nice easy shift, then?’

  Thorne turned. He cradled the mug as he watched Helen check that everything she needed for work was in her bag, then hang the bag with everything Alfie would need over the handles of the pushchair. ‘There were a couple of bodies as well,’ he said. ‘An old couple, dead in bed.’

  Helen looked up. ‘A couple? What, they killed themselves?’

  Alfie wandered across to the cupboards next to Thorne, began opening and shutting one of them, enjoying the noise.

  ‘Probably,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Probably?’

  Thorne could not quite read her expression. Concern? Suspicion? They still did not know one another quite well enough yet. ‘It’s fine,’ he said.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘I had a bit of a run-in with some DI about it, that’s all.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like you.’

  Thorne smiled. He knew when she was being sarcastic well enough. ‘Tosser wouldn’t give the necessary authorisation.’ He took a mouthful of tea to wash away the taste of the word. The memory of his altercation with Binns.

  ‘Listen, I need to get going…’ Helen moved over to collect her son. She lifted him up and plonked him down in the pushchair, began fastening the straps.

  ‘Why don’t I take him?’ Thorne asked. He stepped across, took the small woollen hat from Helen’s hand and put it on the boy’s head. Once or twice, when Helen had been running very late, Thorne had walked her eighteen-month-old son down to the childminder’s. He enjoyed the time he and Alfie spent together, but the shift patterns meant there was precious little of it. Precious little with his mother, come to that.

  Ships in the night, especially when Thorne was on the graveyard shift.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Helen said. She kissed him and straightened her son’s hat. ‘You get to bed.’

  ‘It’s no trouble.’

  ‘’Nana,’ Alfie shouted.

  Helen said, ‘When we get to Janine’s,’ and pushed her son out towards the front door. ‘I’ll call you…’

  ‘Have a good one,’ Thorne said.

  After a few seconds she reappeared, buttoning her coat, while from the hallway Alfie continued to demand a second breakfast. ‘We can talk about this later if you want,’ she said. ‘OK?’

  ‘Nothing to talk about,’ Thorne said. He turned around to occupy himself, wiping away the ring his mug had left on the worktop, then putting the milk back in the fridge, until he heard the front door close.

  He carried his tea across to the kitchen table. He spent a minute or two turning the pages of the previous day’s Evening Standard. He moved across and switched on the TV in the corner, watched the news without taking any of it in.

  Three months, since he and Helen Weeks had begun more or less living together. ‘More or less’, because they had never really talked about it as a formal arrangement, the understanding being that as long as he was based at Lewisham, it was far more convenient for Thorne to stay in Tulse Hill than it was for him to travel all the way down from his own place in Kentish Town. They had talked once or twice about renting Thorne’s flat out, but Thorne was reluctant, despite the fact that the extra income would have come in useful. He didn’t particularly want strangers in his place and could not be bothered with the legal hassles of being a landlord, but if he were being really honest, it was more to do with the hope that he might find himself back in north London sooner rather than later.

  The truth was, Thorne would always be a north Londoner and anywhere south of the South Bank still felt alien to him. Sprawling and soulless; dun-coloured. The air just that little bit harder to breathe. Estate agents and arty types in the south-east doing their best to make ‘edgy’ and ‘gritty’ sound like selling points. The better-off in the greener bits talking about the tennis or the rugby or the deer in Richmond Park and all of them looking enviously across the water towards Camden, Islington and Hackney. The abysmal transport links and the terrible football teams…

  Thorne knew very well that a good many south Londoners would view north London with the same horror, but he didn’t care. North London was the city he knew, that he loved.

  Not that he had said any of that to Helen.

  He still crossed the river as often as he could. He went back to meet up with Phil Hendricks at the Grafton Arms or the Bengal Lancer, and occasionally with Dave Holland, a DS in the Murder Squad at Becke House in Colindale. Thorne’s old squad…

  ‘How you finding it?’ Holland had said, the last time. Then he’d seen the look on Thorne’s face and gone back to studying his pint, knowing he could not have asked a more stupid question if he’d tried.

  Three months, since the case that had brought Thorne and Helen together, the case that had seen him demoted to uniform.

  ‘Not a demotion strictly speaking, of course,’ the chief superintendent had told him. ‘You’re still an inspector at the end of the day.’ The man had barely been able to conceal his glee at finally being shot of Thorne, having tried on many previous occasions. ‘Who knows? You might end up feeling that this was a very good move.’

  Slapped down, that was how Thorne felt. Though bearing in mind how he had earned it, he supposed that he’d got off relatively lightly. He knew that what he had done – what he had needed to do – to ensure a young mother’s survival during an armed siege in a local newsagent’s was never going to play well with the powers that be. Ultimately though – as he told himself often, pulling on that crisp white shirt with the epaulettes, straightening that cap – he had saved Detective Sergeant Helen Weeks and, much to the surprise of both of them, ended up in bed with her.

  ‘Another one?’ Hendricks had said when Thorne had told him. ‘After the last one turned out so well?’

  Thorne’s previous girlfriend, another copper. They had split up only a few months before he and Helen had got together.

  ‘You want to knock this business with women on the head, mate. Come to the dark side.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You know it’s always been a matter of time.’

  ‘Actually, it’s not even the sex that bothers me,’ Thorne had said. ‘It’s having to like small dogs and musicals.’ It was the kind of crack Thorne could get away with, as Hendricks was the least stereotypical gay man anyone could imagine. Heavily tattooed with multiple piercings and likely to break someone’s arm if they so much as mentioned Judy Garland.

  ‘I give it three months,’ Hendricks had said. ‘Tops.’

  Thorne took his tea and walked into the hall and across to the small bathroom. He laid the mug on the toilet cistern while he pissed.

  Detective Helen Weeks.

  Thorne flushed and told himself he was being an idiot for even thinking that Helen was the sort to play those games. Not in a million years. He took a packet of painkillers from the mirrored cabinet above the sink and shut the door hard.

  Said, ‘Twat.’

  He stared
at the face looking back at him. Duller, deader than it was the last time he looked. Grey hair that was still more pronounced on one side than the other, but was now more pronounced everywhere. The small, straight scar on what had once been the only chin he had.

  Thorne’s mobile rang in the kitchen and he hurried back through to answer it. Helen sounded out of breath. She had just dropped Alfie off and was on her way to the station, she told him.

  ‘So we’ll talk when I get home, then. About last night.’

  ‘I told you, I’m fine,’ Thorne said.

  ‘You didn’t look fine.’

  ‘I’m just tired. Feeling sorry for myself.’

  ‘Well don’t,’ Helen said. ‘Now go to bed, for God’s sake…’

  He walked slowly through to the bedroom that still smelled of sleep and mango body-butter. Helen had not bothered to open the curtains. He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to get undressed, looking forward more than anything to slipping beneath a duvet that he knew would still be warm.

  One of the few perks of incompatible shifts.

  Presuming that Helen got back before he had to leave, he would play it down, the business with the Coopers. He told himself it was because the last thing Helen needed was any of his shit to deal with. Because her own job was stressful enough. Because there was really nothing he could do about it now and he was almost certainly being ridiculous anyway.

  He swallowed three painkillers with the last of his tea.

  Not because he was worried that she might agree with Paul Binns.

  THREE

  He eats in cafés, most days. Always breakfast and lunch, then maybe an Indian or a Chinese come dinner time. He’s way past worrying about his weight or the state of his arteries and he’s spent far too long eating meals cooked by somebody else to start doing any of that for himself.