He knew they'd be the only ones who would care where he'd gone.
'Now, sit down, Tom, and let's talk about the things you can do. The reconstruction's already been shot. It's out in a couple of days.'
'Let Tughan do it.'
Thorne was walking quickly towards the door. He'd Keable. He didn't care. He opened the door then: back to the DCI. 'If, you said.' Thorne shook his h Keable stared at him. 'If we make an arrest. Not when!' really are an inspiration to us all, Frank.'
'DI Thorne-' Keable was on his feet, shouting, Thorne was already half-way across the operations to. Those with the imagination picked up conversations 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 you're getting so worked up about, Tom. He's a doctor a lecturer.'
Thorne kept moving. He would make the bastard for that one day, but now was definitely not the time. Holland stood in the corner brandishing a sand 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 screen and tried to figure out exactly what was happening plot wise. It was a trashy late-night Channel 5 skin flick 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 results. 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 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 hurter'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 'pissant', 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 he 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.
And now he'd have to deal with this…
It was not a programme he usually watched. He couldn't deny that it often provided useful leads and bumped up the arrest rates. At work they called it Grass Up Your Neighbour and it was truly astonishing how many people were only too pleased to do just that. It was the reconstructions that bothered him, and the grainy CCTV footage. He couldn't help but find the whole concept vaguely hilarious. It was usually about the time the orange coloured presenter talked about 'anything that's jogged your memory' that Thorne stopped paying attention. The city, after all, was chock-a-block with members of the public happily toddling about having completely forgotten that they'd been caught in the middle of a vicious armed robbery a fortnight earlier. That sort of thing can easily slip your mind…
They always saved the reconstructions for the really nasty ones. He knew it was down to the tight budgets in both policing and television but there was still something so… last gasp about it all. There was a mawkishness to the whole process which made him uncomfortable. Every 'Sleep well', each 'Don't have nightmares' seemed desperately forced. One minute they'd be showing you your neighbour being battered, raped, murdered, and the next they were reassuring you that crimes such as this were'extremely rare'. The false security of wonderfully malleable crime figures.
Sleep well, if you're a statistician.
