Sleepyhead

'Well, luck… I don't know what you're supposed to say…'

'I think you just said it.'

She slid off the sofa on to the floor next to him. 'So?'

'Well, these trousers have got Tesco's own lager all over them now. They'll have to come off…'

He leaned across and kissed her. She put down her lager and placed a hand on his neck. He broke the kiss, looked at the floor. 'Now, this carpet has unhappy memories and I'm still not a hundred per cent sure I've got the smell of vomit out of it…'

'You smooth-talking bastard.'

'So, the palatial bedroom suite?'

She nodded and they stood up. There was still a hint of awkwardness between them. Nothing had yet been abandoned, but taking hands would have seemed a little silly all the same. Thorne held open the bedroom door. 'I have to warn you, I've got a Swedish virgin in here.'

Anne raised her eyebrows and looked into the room, seeing only a small fitted wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a neatly made bed. She didn't get it. 'Eh?'

'The bed…' Thorne pulled her to him. 'It doesn't matter…'

Thorne woke and looked at the clock. It was nearly two thirty in the morning and the phone was ringing. He was instantly wide awake. He slipped out of bed and hurried naked into the living room where the handset was recharging on the base unit just inside the front door. The heating couldn't have been off for very long but the flat was already freezing.

'Sir, sorry it's so late. It's Holland.'

Thorne pressed the phone tight to his ear and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. He could still hear Leftfield. The CD was on repeat and they'd forgotten to turn it off.

'Yes?'

'We might have something here. A woman rang through. She'd seen the reconstruction – waited a couple of days wondering whether to call.'

'Go on.'

'Nine months ago a man knocked on her door claiming to be looking for a party. She thought he looked all right you know, friendly enough. She invited him in. He was carrying a bottle of champagne.'

Thorne stopped shivering.

'I haven't got much more than that at the minute, sir. For some reason he left, and she didn't really think anything of it until the programme. She reckons she can give us a pretty good description, though.'

'Does Tughan know about this?'

'Yes, sir. I've already called him.'

Thorne felt a twinge of annoyance, but he knew that Holland couldn't have done anything else. 'What did he say?'

'He thought it sounded hopeful.'

'Anything about me?'

He could hear Holland thinking.

'Don't spare my feelings, Holland, I haven't got any.'

'There was some crack about you and Miss Willetts, sir. I don't really remember – just a joke, really.'

Nobody was taking it seriously.

'When are you going to interview her?'

'Myself and DI Tughan are going to see her tomorrow morning.'

Thorne took down the details, scribbling the woman's name and address on a Post-it note next to the phone. The initial buzz was wearing off a little and he could feel the cold again. He wanted to get back to bed.

'Thanks for that, Holland. One quick thing…'

'Don't worry, sir, I'll call you as soon as we've seen her.'

'Great, thanks. But I was going to say, if anybody should ask, your girlfriend trapped her hand in a door this morning…'

He realised as soon as he'd hung up on Holland that he was terribly awake. He turned off the music and scurried around the living room with a bin liner, picking up empty beer cans. For a second he was tempted to look inside Anne's bag, which still lay where she'd dropped it. Had she brought a change of clothes with her?

He thought better of it and instead grabbed the spare duvet from the cupboard in the hall and sat on the sofa in the dark.

Thinking.

Things were moving quickly. There had been cases before where he'd felt like an outsider – he would come at things from a different angle – but he was still, if only nominally, part of a team. This time it was different. He'd felt good marching out of Keable's office but within minutes he was wondering if he'd done the right thing. He still wondered. He knew why he'd walked away. Whatever Keable had told his bosses about politics and personality clashes, it still came down to judgment.

Their passing of it; his lack of it.

His judgment and theirs, and that of those long gone. But even the judgment of the dead could not always be trusted. Any conviction based on such testimony would surely be flawed. Only one man could judge him. And Tom Thorne was the harshest judge of all. He thought about the woman asleep in his bed. Anne wasn't the first woman he'd slept with since Jan. There had been some drunken fumbling with an ambitious young sergeant and a short fling with a legal secretary – but this was the first time he'd felt frightened afterwards. Once upon a time Anne had been involved with Bishop. Thorne still wasn't sure to what extent, but that hardly mattered. The killer who had all but turned his life upside down had once had sex with the woman who was now, at least for the moment, sharing his bed. He suddenly wondered if Bishop might be jealous. It made sense. The anonymous phone call, the accusation, had seemed a little.., beneath him. Could the attack here in this room have been, at least in part, a warning to stay away from Anne? On top of everything was there actually a sexual rivalry? The idea was comforting. It began to give him back a sense of control. He'd felt it slipping away as the anger had swept over him after the accusation about Alison. Now he was calmer.

Back in the hospital. Oh, he'll find out exactly what type I A man trained to save life was taking it in the name of something Thorne could never understand. Didn't care about understanding.

If Thorne was going to stop him, it was important to maintain the initiative.

He went to fetch the phone, curled up on the sofa and dialed 141

…

A few minutes later, he crept back into the bedroom, slid under the duvet and lay there blinking, unable to sleep. Around four o'clock Anne woke up and did her best to help him.

'How do you feel?'

A question I'm asked every day. Sometimes more than once. It's not that I don't understand why. It's that I'd-better-say something kind of thing. Better than sitting there looking at the clock and wondering which nurse gets to wipe my arse, I suppose. It's hospitals. It makes people feel strangely compelled to buy fruit and breathe through their mouth and ask ridiculous questions. But why questions, for fuck's sake? Don't ask me questions. Tell me things, if you like. I'm a good listener. Getting to be very, very good. Tell me anything you like. Bore me rigid. Sit there and waffle on about how your boss doesn't understand you, or your husband's not interested in sex any more or you want to travel or nursing's badly paid, or you like to drink in the afternoons but don't – ask – me – things. How do you feel?

It's not like you're actually expecting an answer, is it? You'd be bored off your tits if I decided to play along. If I wanted to respond with a pithy 'Not too bad, thank you for asking, and how are you?' that would take, at present levels of blinking proficiency and taking into account the fatigue factor, approximately forty-five minutes. Sorry you asked? Well, don't, then. How do you feel?

Grateful that you're there, don't get me wrong. All of you. Visitors, nurses popping heads round the door, cleaners. Say hello. Come in and tell me lies. Just don't be predictable. The one reason you're asking, really, is that you can't tell precisely just by looking at me. Not exactly. I mean, you could take a wild stab in the dark. You could make a pretty good guess. You wouldn't need to phone a friend, would you? I'm lying in hospital. Utterly fucked. I'm hardly going to be over the moon. But most of the time you don't have to ask people how they feel. It's