bloodbath of Sunday lunch with one set of parents or another. Oh, and a trip to the garden centre, or maybe B amp; Q if I'm really lucky…'
Thorne laughed, looking around, sharing it. He thought about e last Sunday he'd spent. Something' Brigstocke had said sparked another memory and Thorne turned to watch Yvonne Kitson heading back across the room, drinking from a paper cone filled with cold water.
'Did you get my message last Sunday?' She swallowed, looked at him blankly. 'I called. Late morning, I think…'
Kitson dropped the empty cone into a wastepaper basket. 'Any particular reason?'
'Well, if there was, I'm buggered if I can remember it,' Thorne said. Kitson looked at him for a second or two, her face showing nothing.
'I didn't get the message.'
Thorne shrugged. 'Doesn't matter.' He nodded towards where Brigstocke had been just a minute before. 'I'd thought it would be a good time to catch you, you know? Reckoned you'd be another one with a family routine on a Sunday.'
Kitson moved past him, picked up the magazine she'd been reading and dropped it into her bag. She took a step towards the toilets, then turned to Thorne, nodding as though she'd just remembered something.
'I was at the gym…'
The Incident Room was coming to life, starting to fill with noise and movement. Holland walked across it, evidently catching the tail-end of Thorne and Kitson's conversation.
'You should get together with Stoney,' he said. 'He's well into weights and all that.' Holland looked over to where Andy Stone was sitting on the edge of a desk, chatting to a trainee detective. 'He might be a lanky streak of piss, but he looks like a light-heavyweight with his shirt off…'
Kitson looked at Thorne and raised her eyebrows. Her face was open and relaxed again. Her tone, when she spoke to Holland, was matey and suggestive. 'Easy, tiger,' she said. Holland started to say something else, but Thorne was already moving away from them. He knew that by the end of the day the heat and the frustrations of the case would combine to leave him as tightly wound as the E-string on a pedal-steel guitar. He wanted to get into his office, call Eve and organise something that would help lessen that tension just a little.
'Christ, you sound even more harassed than I am…'
'I told you, Saturdays are the busiest day.'
'Keith's mum still no better, then?'
'Sorry?'
'Keith not around to help out?'
'Oh. No…'
Thorne looked up as Kitson walked in and moved across to her desk. Her look told him that she knew exactly who he was talking to. Thorne lowered his voice…
'Fancy going to see a film tonight?'
'Yeah, why not. There's a copy of Time Out in the flat, I'll see what's on…
From nowhere, and for no immediately obvious reason, the case burst its way into their conversation. Into Thorne's head. The image that would not focus. The thought that would not reveal itself. Something he'd read and something he hadn't…
At the sound of Eve's voice, the phantom thought vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. 'Tom?'
'Yeah… that's fine. Maybe we could do a bit of shopping tomorrow.'
There was a pause. 'Anywhere in particular?'
Thorne dropped the volume even further, cupped his hand around the mouthpiece.
'The bed shop…'
Eve laughed, and when she spoke again, her voice was lowered. Thorne guessed from the noise that she had a shop full of customers.
'Thank fuck for that,' she said.
'I'm pleased you're pleased,' Thorne said.
'Yes, well, it's about bloody time. I'd decided I wasn't going to mention it again. I didn't want to sound desperate.' I, Thorne glanced up. Kitson was hunched over some paperwork.
'Listen, I had a long look at myself in the mirror this morning. I'd say 'desperate' is a pretty good word for it…'
Fiona only had a couple of rooms left.
The girls usually worked to a set pattern in terms of floors, corridors and so on, but the order in which individual rooms were cleaned varied from day to day. Rooms with a DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the door would obviously get done later than those with used breakfast trays left outside, while some rooms would get knocked on to a later shift. There were two rooms at the end of her corridor on the first floor that still needed doing. She looked at her watch. It was twenty to ten…
Fiona grabbed a bucket crammed with sponges, sprays and bottles, nudging the Hoover towards the bedroom door with her foot. She knocked on the door and counted to five, thinking about eggs and bacon and bed. It was the same most mornings. By this time, by the end of this corridor, she would be thinking about home, a late breakfast and a few more gorgeous hours wrapped up in her duvet. Twenty minutes. She might get both rooms done before the end of her shift if she was lucky, though it would obviously depend on what sort of state they were in.
She reached down for the pass-key card hanging from a curly, plastic chain around her waist…
There was a tune going through her head. The song that had woken her on the clock-radio, a present from her Nan when the exams had finished. The song was very old fashioned, just a singer and a guitar, but the tune had stayed with her all morning. She eased the card into the lock and slid it out again. The light below the handle turned green. She pushed down and leaned against the door…
From the corner of her eye, she saw someone coming towards her along the corridor. It looked like one of the snotty old cows that ran housekeeping. She couldn't be sure' because the woman's face was all but hidden behind an enormous arrangement of lilies. Turning sideways, she eased open the door with her hip. The Hoover was kicked across the threshold, left to hold the door ajar while she turned back to the trolley to grab her other bits and pieces…
Two months later, Fiona would be offered her chance, her place on the drama course in Manchester, but she would not take it up. Not that September, at any rate. She would get her two Bs and a C but it would not mean a great deal to her. Two months later, her mother would remove the slip of paper from the envelope and read out the results and try to sound excited, but her daughter would still not be hearing very much. The scream that had torn through her body eight weeks earlier would still be echoing in her head and drowning out pretty much everything.
The sound of a scream and a picture of herself, of a young girl stepping through a doorway and turning. Faced with a peculiar kind of filth. Stains that she could never hope to remove with the bleaches and the waxes and the cloths which spill from a bucket, tumbling noisily to the bedroom floor.
It wasn't much past ten yet, but Thorne was already starting to wonder what the lunchtime special at the Royal Oak might be, when the middle-aged woman walked into his office.
'I'm looking for DC Holland,' she said.
She'd marched in without knocking, so Thorne wasn't keen from the kick-off, but he tried to be as nice as he could. The woman was short and dumpy, probably pushing sixty. She reminded him a bit of his Auntie Eileen, and he suddenly had a good idea who she was.
'Oh, right, are you Dave's…?'
The woman cut him off and, as she spoke, she dragged a chair from behind Kitson's desk, plonked it in front of Thorne's and sat self down.
'No, I'm not. I'm Carol Chamberlain. Ex-DCI Chamberlain from AMRU…'
Thorne reached for a pen and paper to take notes, thinking, Fucking Crinkey Squad, all I need. He leaned across the desk and proffered a hand. 'DI Thorne…'
Ignoring the hand, Carol Chamberlain opened her briefcase and began to rummage inside. 'Right. You'll do even better. I only asked for Holland' – she pulled out a battered green folder covered in yellow Post-It notes, held it up – 'because his was the name.., attached to this.'
Emphasising the last word, she dropped the folder down on to Thorne's desk.
