The Dying Hours Read online

  The music, now that was an issue, the dead dogs and the lost loves, but it was a minor irritation, all things considered.

  Helen tried to focus. The neighbour of the injured child who demanded to know why it had taken this long for the police to do anything. ‘We could all hear the poor little beggar crying,’ she’d said.

  Things had certainly been tense between the two of them over the last few days, since that Friday night shift. Thorne had got a bee in his bonnet about those suicides, about being so firmly put in his place and it was clear that he had been expecting a little more support from her. They had not spoken since the afternoon before, when he’d driven off to meet up with Phil Hendricks. She looked at her watch. He was probably still sleeping off a hangover; the last day’s rest before he was back at work.

  A little more support…

  Helen glanced across and saw that Gill Bellinger was watching her from the other side of the office. She turned back to her screen and reminded herself that were it not for the bee in Thorne’s bonnet three months before, she might not be sitting where she was.

  He would still be doing a job he loved.

  She would call him at lunchtime, she decided. See what he was up to. She could see if her sister would take Alfie for a few hours, then offer to drive up to Kentish Town and they could have dinner in that Indian place he was always banging on about.

  A young DC stopped at her desk on his way back from the Gents. She looked up at him and smiled.

  ‘Everything all right, Helen?’ he asked.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘A couple of hours, Dave. That’s all.’

  ‘So, what?’ Holland said. ‘I just stroll out, do I?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Nip down there on my lunch break and pretend I got lost on my way to the canteen?’

  ‘You’ll think of something,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Maybe you can say you were visiting a source.’

  Thorne waited, listened to Holland breathing on the other end of the phone. He pictured the space Holland was in, one he knew well. He imagined him at his desk in the Incident Room, head down, keen to avoid eye contact with anyone during a conversation he almost certainly should not be having. Holland had known as soon as he’d answered the phone. Thorne had heard it in his tentative greeting, the nervousness as his voice had dropped to a whisper, the pause before the inevitable question.

  What can I do for you?

  ‘What about afterwards?’ Holland asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Good to know you’re thinking ahead.’

  ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

  ‘It’s the we that’s worrying me.’

  ‘Come on, Dave…’

  Thorne waited again. Blinked away the faces of Andrew Cooper, Neil Hackett, Trevor Jesmond. Wasn’t crossing the bridge what had got him into this situation to begin with? He drummed his fingers against the edge of the table, reached for his mug and took a slurp of lukewarm tea. The low rumble of a train heading from Kentish Town to Gospel Oak rose up through the floorboards and was swiftly followed by the gentle tinkling of glasses in the kitchen cabinet. One of the reasons he’d been able to buy the flat so cheaply.

  ‘Dave…⁠?’

  He had not slept much the night before. The rush after finding Margaret Cooper’s message had only intensified as he and Hendricks had driven north again, as they had talked, argued about what to do next. Now, he could still taste the adrenalin, its metallic tang like a reminder of a heavy night’s boozing on that first morning belch. Eight o’clock on a shitty Monday and, notwithstanding the lack of sleep, he felt fresher, more awake than he had in a long time. He wanted to crack on. He wanted to be out of the door and away before any of those second thoughts Hendricks had been so insistent upon.

  ‘Let’s talk about career suicide,’ Hendricks had said when Thorne had dropped him off. Standing on the pavement, the thump of a bass and the shouts of late-night revellers drifting down from Camden High Street. Leaning down to stare back at Thorne through the open car door. ‘You know that’s what this is, don’t you?’

  ‘You a shrink now, as well?’

  ‘Just a mate,’ Hendricks had said.

  ‘This about the other night?’ Holland asked now. ‘You showing up at that suicide in Stanmore?’

  ‘It’s… connected, yeah.’

  ‘I think I might need a bit more than that.’

  Thorne could hear phones ringing in the background, the buzz of voices in the Murder Room. The same seductive hubbub that had made his blood pump a little quicker for so many years, that had left him feeling dizzy when he’d walked into the MIT at Lewisham.

  He glanced around his living room. He could do it from here if he had to, from one room, with one phone. Push came to shove, he could do it from his car.

  He gave Holland the highlights, swallowed the last of his tea.

  ‘So… say I go down there,’ Holland said. ‘I talk to whoever and it is part of the same thing—’

  ‘The same series of murders.’

  ‘Yeah, say it is. Then you hand this over, right? You make sure there’s a proper investigation.’

  ‘I’ll do whatever needs to be done.’

  ‘I’ve known you too long,’ Holland said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For that to fill me with any confidence. To be thinking anything except I should run a mile.’

  Thorne pressed the phone against his ear. Rubbed the side of his face. ‘Listen, maybe I should ask somebody else.’

  ‘Who?’ Holland asked. Spat on a whisper, the anger clear enough. ‘Who else are you going to ask?’ Now, it was Holland’s turn to wait. ‘Give me one good reason,’ he said, eventually. The anger was gone and now there was only resignation. ‘Just one.’

  Because you’re a friend? Thorne thought. No. Because you’re a good copper, because once, at least, you wanted nothing more than to be one. Maybe. Thorne remembered what Christine Treasure had said to him, the excitement she felt coming into work, and he remembered the way she had disparaged the desk-jockey detective.

  ‘What else are you going to be doing, Dave?’ he asked. ‘Watching CCTV footage for hours on end? Talking to the wankers at mobile phone companies?’

  When the call was finished and Holland had folded the piece of paper on which he’d scribbled the relevant information into his pocket, he looked up to see Yvonne Kitson on the other side of his desk.

  ‘All very secret squirrel,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘All that whispering.’ She smiled and nodded, sipped from a plastic cup of coffee. ‘Now, you’re blushing. Something I shouldn’t know about? Something Sophie shouldn’t know about?’

  Holland tried to manufacture a story and quickly decided that some truth would make the lie more convincing than none at all.

  ‘Thorne,’ he said.

  Kitson raised an eyebrow. ‘He tell you what the hell he was up to the other night? Aside from getting a bollocking, that is.’

  ‘He’s got a spare ticket for the Spurs game, Wednesday night.’

  ‘You don’t like football.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anyone else he could ask,’ Holland had said.

  They talked for a few minutes about a case they had caught the day before: a fatal stabbing at a christening in Tufnell Park. When Kitson had gone, Holland went back to the report he had been working on when Thorne called. He thought about those few seconds spent staring at the caller ID and wondering whether to let the call go through to his answerphone. He wondered whether choosing to answer it would rank as one of the stupidest decisions he’d made in a while. He wondered how well Yvonne Kitson’s bullshit detector was working that morning, and how long he could reasonably get away with taking for lunch.

  Twenty minutes or so before his destination, Thorne pulled into a service station on the M4. He filled up the car with petrol, bought a coffee and took one bite of
a croissant that tasted as though it had been baked several days earlier. Then, he called Helen.

  ‘Heavy night, was it?’ she asked.

  ‘Not particularly.’ He pulled off the forecourt and eased the BMW on to the slip road back to the motorway. He glanced at the clock on the dash. It was just after nine thirty. ‘It’s not that late.’

  ‘No, I just thought you might have called last night.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Thorne waited for a lorry to go by in the inside lane, then pulled out and accelerated past it. ‘Just putting the world to rights with Phil, you know how it is. By the time I got home it was after eleven and I didn’t want to wake you up.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Helen said. ‘I don’t know why you didn’t have a lie-in this morning though. Make the most of your days off.’

  ‘I know,’ Thorne said. Two more days until he was back at work on the early shift. ‘I’ve got a fair bit of running around to do, so…’

  ‘Are you driving?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m just going up to the garage in Highgate,’ Thorne said. He pulled into the outside lane and pushed the car up to eighty. ‘The brakes felt a bit spongy yesterday, so I’m going to try and get the pads changed.’

  ‘You’ve still not got that hands-free kit sorted, have you?’

  ‘I’ll get round to it.’

  ‘Last thing you need is to get nicked.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Why don’t you talk to the garage about it while you’re there? See if they can fit one while you wait?’

  Thorne grunted, thinking that getting pulled over for using his mobile while driving would not be too much of a blot in a copybook that was already full of them. More blot than copybook, if truth be told.

  Not that there was much of that going on.

  ‘Listen, I was thinking about tonight,’ Helen said.

  ‘Actually, I might be seeing Phil again,’ Thorne said quickly.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Boyfriend problems.’ He glanced at the sign for the next turnoff; three more to go. ‘I mean God knows why I’m the only one he can talk to about this stuff, but there you go.’ Helen said nothing. All Thorne could hear was crackle on the line and the soft shush of his tyres on a motorway still wet after early-morning rain. ‘Obviously I’m going to try and get back, but I don’t know how late it’ll be, so…’

  ‘Not if you’ve had a drink,’ Helen said.

  ‘Well, if I can’t, I’ll make sure I’m there for when you get in tomorrow night, yeah?’

  ‘OK, whatever.’ There was another pause. ‘I’d better get back anyway, so—’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll let you go.’

  ‘Don’t forget about that hands-free thing.’

  ‘Have a good day,’ Thorne said.

  Helen said, ‘You too,’ and hung up.

  Thorne tossed his phone on to the passenger seat and slowed a little as he drew close to a van that showed no inclination to pull over. He reached to reload the CD that had been playing when he’d stopped. Listening to George Jones and Tammy Wynette, loved-up and singing, ‘We’re Gonna Hold On’, he tried not to think about the concern in Helen’s voice and how many lies he had told her in a two-minute phone conversation.

  George and Tammy had divorced two years after recording that song.

  Ten minutes later he was drifting on to the slip road at Junction 10 and trying to imagine how the conversation he was about to have might go. How to play it. Along with the coffee and the sugary cardboard of that croissant, he could still taste the metal in his mouth.

  A dozen, he had told her. A dozen lies at least. And all to cover up the biggest lie of all.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘I’ve got a spare key,’ she said. ‘Just to be on the safe side, you know? I suppose I could always have called a neighbour or the police or whatever, asked them to pop round, but I just had this feeling when he wasn’t answering the phone, so I drove down there and let myself in.’ The woman’s face tightened. ‘I could smell it the second I walked through the door.’

  ‘How long had it been?’ Thorne asked.

  It was not in the information he had been sent by Elly Kennedy, so Thorne did not know how many days the body of Brian Gibbs had lain undiscovered in the bath before his daughter had found it. How advanced the decomposition had been.

  She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t much more than a few hours, I don’t think, but it wasn’t… that. It was the blood. I could smell the blood.’

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Like meat, when it’s on the turn.’

  They were sitting in the front room of a three-bedroom semi, in a quiet cul-de-sac that backed on to a golf course a mile or so from the centre of Wokingham. Looking around as Thorne had entered, it was apparent that the woman he had come to see was fond of crime novels, Impressionist prints and scatter cushions, while the sweat that began to bead on his forehead almost immediately told him that she liked to keep the temperature in her home ridiculously high. He was happy enough to take his jacket off, though he still felt far from relaxed. Perched on the edge of the armchair opposite him, fingers interlaced on her knees, Jacqui Gibbs was clearly no more relaxed than he was.

  ‘Like meat,’ she said again, a little more quietly this time.

  During the silence that followed, a small, fat terrier wandered into the room. It was not the prettiest of dogs, with rheumy eyes and a pronounced underbite, but Jacqui clearly found it adorable. She rubbed its ears for half a minute and talked softly to it, before ordering the dog back to its basket in the kitchen. As it waddled away, Thorne said, ‘I don’t mind dogs.’

  ‘He’s old,’ Jacqui said. ‘Starting to do his business all over the place, bumping into things. I know I should really take him to the vets, but I can’t bring myself.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ Thorne said.

  She looked around the room as though seeing it for the first time. ‘I mean, it’s just me, isn’t it, rattling around in here? Be even worse once he goes and I don’t think I could get another one. Not for a while, anyway.’

  The room was immaculate; it smelled of polish and some kind of plug-in freshener. People often tidied up before the police paid a visit, but Thorne guessed that this woman had not made a special effort. He looked down at the plate of perfectly arranged digestives and chocolate fingers that she had brought in with the tea.

  ‘Have one,’ she said.

  Thorne said, ‘Thank you,’ and took a digestive. The chocolate fingers were already starting to melt.

  ‘My husband and I got divorced as soon as our youngest went to college,’ she said. Chewing, Thorne looked across at her and she smiled. ‘Stupid really. You stay together because of the kids and then just when they’re all set to head out into the big bad world you make it clear that you’ve actually been unhappy for however many years and they feel terrible. Why do people do that?’

  Thorne shrugged. ‘I’ve not got any kids, so…’

  ‘So, that’s why I’m a Gibbs,’ she said. ‘Went back to my maiden name as soon as we’d separated. In case you were wondering.’

  Thorne had already worked it out, but said, ‘OK,’ anyway.

  ‘I’m Gibbs on the internet,’ she said.

  Thorne waited.

  ‘Internet dating, you know?’ She waved away any comment that he might be about to make, though Thorne had no intention of saying anything. ‘And yes, you do have to watch out for the odd perv or whatever, but there’s hundreds of thousands of people doing it these days, especially if you’re my age and there’s not much chance of meeting anyone at work. I do all the IT at an estate agent’s in town and they’re all about twelve!’

  Thorne laughed and she laughed too, and he could feel a trickle of sweat moving behind his ear. Jacqui Gibbs was somewhere in her mid-to-late forties. She was the kind of woman Christine Treasure would have described as ‘milftastic’ and slowed the Fanny Magnet down to get a good look at. If there was any grey in her dark hair she had dyed it out and
her jeans and well-cut white shirt accentuated a figure that a woman twenty years younger would have been happy with. Thorne guessed that she would attract rather more ‘pervs’ than she had bargained for.

  ‘I mean, I’m looking for someone who’s at least eighteen!’

  Nerves or loneliness? Whatever the reason, it was evident that Jacqui Gibbs wanted to talk. Thorne was happy enough to let her, relieved to see her relaxing a little, though he was keen to get back to the subject of her father and the manner in which he had died. As it was, she did not make him wait very long.

  ‘He was doing so well, that’s the stupid thing.’ She spoke casually, as if they had been talking about her father’s death the whole time, as though she had not yanked the conversational wheel and veered away on to her search for love, the way her divorce had messed up her kids or the health of her terrier. ‘He was in a right state after Mum went, but that was five years ago now and he’d sorted himself out. There were a few bits and pieces health-wise, course there were… he couldn’t get around as well as he had done and his hearing was definitely getting a lot worse… but he was happy enough.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Thorne said.

  ‘No, not happy enough. He was happy.’

  ‘What did you think when you found him like that?’

  ‘I thought it was… ridiculous,’ she said. ‘It sounds a bit mad, I know, what with the knife and all that, but looking at him lying there, and all that blood… I thought it must have been an accident or something. I mean, all sorts of stupid things go through your head, don’t they?’

  ‘Course they do,’ Thorne said.

  She looked at him. They listened as a car drove slowly past, the low growl and frantic thump of oversized speakers turned up way too loud. Some drum ’n’ bass fanatic on his way to play golf.

  ‘You said something about “looking at Dad’s death again”.’ Once more she moved her hands on to her knees, the fingers locked around one another. ‘On the phone, that’s what you said. What does that mean exactly?’