And it had gone off.
Thorne had stepped in a second or two after the first punches and kicks began to fly. Wincing as a stray punch caught him on the side of the head, he'd grabbed the get a-job merchant round the neck and hauled him into a nearby doorway with more force than was strictly necessary. The Big Issue seller, having picked up the magazines scattered during the ruck, had moved in close to watch. Thorne had looked at him, 'Piss off,' then turned his attention back to the one who had a home. Drunk, of course, or maybe stoned. A student, Thorne reckoned, with blood from a split lip running on to his white button down shirt.
Thorne had held him against the door with a stiff arm at his throat arid casually kneed the little tosser between the legs as he removed his badge from the inside pocket of his leather jacket and pushed it into his face. 'Have a guess what my job is.'
Now, back at home, opening the first can of cheap lager, he wondered what might have happened if he hadn't been around with a badge in his pocket and some aggression to offload.
If one of them had been carrying a knife.
These were typical murders. Ordinary killings, simple, banal and understandable. People dying because of anger or frustration or a basic lack of space. Dying for a grand cause or a stupid comment. Or a few pence.
Wives and husbands killing with hammers and fists, or men being men with drink and knives, or drug- dealers holding guns as casually as combs.
Thorne understood them, these deaths died in cities. He knew what they were about. Each made its own strange kind of sense.
But not this. Not killing as a side-effect. Bodies as a byproduct of some sick fucking madness.
He downed the last of the beer, pulled on his jacket, and within forty-five minutes he was standing in a street in Battersea, looking up at the shape that moved behind a light at a second floor window.
He stood for nearly an hour, melting back into the shadows with each twitch of the curtains, real or imagined. Then he stepped back quickly into the anonymous darkness as Jeremy Bishop threw open the curtains and stood looking down at the street.
Bishop stared hard at Thorne, or the place where Thorne was, seeing a shape, perhaps, but certainly no more. As Thorne returned the stare, he felt a glacial tremor run through every bone in his body as Bishop's face suddenly changed.
From this distance, Thorne could not be sure. It might have been a grimace.
It might have been a smile.
I know that I've made jokes before about the NHS and the lack of money and everything. I was taking the piss out of the blackboard when it first appeared, you know, compared with all the flashy stuff they've got in America.
But this?
Anne's been telling me for a while that her and the occupational therapist are going to try to rig up a couple of devices so that I can read and watch TV. Obviously I've been gagging for it, and even more so since I've been back on this bastard ventilator. When a machine is doing your breathing for you, life can get sooo boring, darling. But I didn't realise they literally meant 'rig up'. Honestly, it's spit and fucking earwax. They've screwed some sort of pivoting arm into the ceiling and the TV now hangs down from there so I'm staring up at the screen. Great. If I was in hospital in Fuckwit, Illinois, or wherever, I'd be able to control the volume and, crucially, change the bloody channel with my eyelid. Here, in good old London Town, on the good old National Health Service, those little details seem to have been overlooked. So I have to wait for a nurse to show up, and blink. to indicate that I'd like her to turn over. She does exactly that and buggers off again. Leaving me staring at Supermarket Sweep or some moronic cookery programme until she puts her head round the door again twenty minutes later and I'm blinking my head off in an effort to get the football on.
I don't want to sound ungrateful, but this is heaven compared to my new reading arrangements.
It's based around a music-stand, [think, though there might be a bit of old coat-hanger stuck in there as well. All right, I'm exaggerating, but not much. I get raised up and this metal contraption is placed across my tits with little clamps that fold down to hold in place my book or magazine of choice. Good in theory. First, I'm hardly in a position to make complex requests on the book front. I'm racking my brains to think of books I might fancy reading with really short titles. Same with magazines, though I'm more or less sorted thanks to OK! and Hello!. Not too taxing on the eyelids. The problem is the same as with the telly, though. I'm hardly Brain of Britain, but even I can read a page of pretty much anything in twenty minutes, or however long it is until the nurse comes in again. I don't expect them to come tearing in here every ninety seconds to turn my page for me but there must be something somebody can do. I can't pay for anything, and I haven't got family who can pay for anything or try to raise money, but even so… Everything's fucking half-measures.
Half-measures for half a person.
SIXTEEN
Thorne and Anne Coburn had spent most of the day in bed together. He'd been up once, for about half an hour. Just long enough to make a few pieces of toast, put on American Recordings by Johnny Cash and fetch the papers. The Observer for her (he read the sports section). The Mirror and the Screws for him (she read the supplements). He wasn't planning to get up again until the pubs opened. He'd woken, alone, several hours earlier with the image of Jeremy Bishop's face looking down at him, captured in negative when he closed his eyes, as if he'd been staring too long at a light bulb.
He kept his eyes open and did some catching up. The phone lay on the small cupboard by the side of the bed and he propped a couple of pillows up against the headboard. One extremely comfy office. The call to his dad was surprisingly enjoyable. Jim Thorne hated Sundays, and his irascible commentary on everything from garden centres to 'God-botherers' had made Thorne laugh out loud several times. They'd agreed to have a night out the following week.
Thorne had arranged to meet Phil Hendricks the day after next but this was a less enjoyable prospect. The pathologist had sounded distant and edgy. The call had taken less than a minute. Thorne wondered what Hendricks wanted to see him about. He was pretty sure it had nothing to do with tickets for Spurs-Arsenal. Then he'd rung Anne.
She'd been having breakfast with Rachel. The two of them were planning to spend the day together and she told Thorne she'd ring back. Within fifteen minutes she was on her way over. Rachel had not seemed too disappointed at the change of plan, and by the time she was climbing back into bed with her mobile phone, her mother was climbing into bed with Tom Thorne.
After making up for lost time they'd dozed for a while but now, surrounded by discarded bits of newspaper, they lay in a bed dotted with toast crumbs and smelling of sex. And began to talk.
It was a conversation of a very different nature from the one they'd had nearly a month earlier, on the night Thorne had gone round for dinner; the night he'd been attacked and drugged in his own home. Then, certainly as far as he had been concerned, there had been a lot of lying. There had been the lies implicit in the flirting and the lies behind his questions about Jeremy Bishop.
There was so much he hadn't told her. So many lies by omission.
Now they talked easily, and truthfully. Two people the wrong side of forty with little reason to puff up achievements or suck in stomachs. They spoke about David and Rachel and Jan and the Lecturer. Divorces with children versus divorces without. About her grade-seven piano and the work she'd done on her house and the cups she'd won for tennis before she went to university. About how much he hated poncy tea and brown bread, and how he'd been quite a useful footballer until he'd started putting on weight. '
About how often she'd saved a life and how many times he'd fired a gun.
They talked about how utterly unsuited they were, and laughed, and then made love again.
For a few hours on a damp Sunday afternoon at the fag end of September, the case that had changed both their lives – that would twist and warp their lives, and those of others, even more before it was over – might not have existed.
Then a woman picked up a phone in Edinburgh and changed everything.
