They stared at each other, across six yawning feet of gleaming white space, the rain hammering on the roof above their heads.
Thorne jumped, and they both turned their heads when the bleeper went off.
He remembered that Anne was on call. The bleeper was inside her handbag, dumped on the floor next to her. By the time the bleeping had stopped Thorne had worked something else out. The phone call that Margaret Byrne had seen him make: Bishop had been calling his father, to see if he'd been called in to work. Checking his availability. 'You bleeped your father on the way to the hospital. That night with Alison. You were probably sitting outside, waiting for him to arrive, giving him an alibi that was almost watertight, putting his name on a list.' Bishop smiled modestly. 'Same with the drugs in Leicester-'
Bishop cut him off. 'Yes, a mistake of a sort, obviously. Had you even worked that out?'
Thorne looked across at Anne. Everything was going to be fine. 'Anne worked it out.'
Bishop smiled. 'I'm impressed. But it did, as you say, put my father's name on a list. That was the hook. It got you interested…'
It had certainly done that.
'But it would never have worked, James. It was all circumstantial. There wasn't any real evidence.'
'That never seemed to bother you, though, did it, Tom?'
Thorne could say nothing, his tongue sticky against the roof of his mouth.
Suddenly Bishop grinned. Thorne could see that his fingers were locked in position, as was the look of something approaching rapture on his face.
'This is my favourite part, Tom. It all begins here.'
The muscles in Bishop's chest flexed as he began to squeeze Rachel's carotid artery. Thorne remembered Hendricks with his hands on his neck, taking him through it. They had about two minutes until she stopped breathing. Thorne glanced at Anne. The look on her face was desperate. A snarl came from somewhere deep down inside her.
Save my daughter.
Thorne had no idea how. Bishop killed when he needed to, that much was obvious. The hands that were squeezing away Rachel's life in front of them were as dangerous as any weapon. He could snap her neck in a heartbeat…
Thorne felt leaden, useless. Mummified.
Ten seconds gone already. Her tongue lolling out.
'How does this hurt him, James? How does this make him suffer?'
Bishop said nothing. His lips moved soundlessly as he counted away the time in his head.
'This won't bring your mother back, James.' Thorne was shouting now. Anything to get a reaction, to make him stop. James was lost in concentration, readying himself for the difficult part, once the girl had stopped breathing. The manipulation.
Time ticking away. Thorne felt the seconds hurtling past him, Rachel's breath rushing past him as he stood frozen and useless.
'Please, Tommy…'
'Helen?'
'She's a child…'
' What can I do? WHAT CAN I DO?'
Then suddenly, a voice from below them. 'James?'
A reaction from Bishop. A reaction to the voice of his father. Fear maybe? Certainly a tension in his body and in his face. Tension in his fingers…
'James? I saw you driving away with Anne – what's going on? Is everything all right? Somebody's forced open your front door.'
Half a minute gone…
There was no way of knowing what James would do with his father here but Thorne had little option.
Ninety seconds left. Rachel was nearly half-way dead. Thorne shouted, 'Bishop. We're up here!'
Jeremy Bishop appeared in the attic like a ghost rising up through the trap in a stage. The image was completed instantly as the blood deserted his face and the light vanished from the eyes.
Thorne knew what he would look like when he was dead.
'My God -James?' He leaned forward and for a second Thorne thought he was going to pass out. At the last moment Thorne realised he was moving towards his son and reached out an arm to stop him. Bishop glared angrily at him and then, as if woken from a dream, nodded slowly, taking in the full, horrific implications of what he could see around him.
Anne. Rachel. James.
Thorne watched the son glare at the father. Couldn't be much more than a minute now…
James's voice was childish, taunting. 'What is it, then?
Horror? Outrage? Or just surprise that I know how to do it? A pretty advanced procedure, all in all, considering that I couldn't cut it. Considering what a major disappointment I was…'
'Please-'
James screamed, 'Shut up! Fucking shut up, will you?'
Rachel's eyes were rolling up into her head. Sixty seconds, if that…
'I always meant to ask you something. When exactly did you start believing the things you do? There must have been a time when you thought the same as the rest of them.
About the human body, I mean. All that bollocks about a miracle of design and efficiency. Christ, I'm grateful you 388 taught me what crap that was. Your belief in technology was inspiring, did you know that? Truly inspiring. I'm just sorry I couldn't repay the faith you had in me academically. But even when I was fucking it all up, even when I was failing so brilliantly to become the doctor you wanted me to be, I still believed in all the things you did.' He started to cry. 'I still remembered everything you taught me.'
The tears stopped as suddenly as they had started and the voice regained its edge. 'So, when was it? When did you start thinking that the human body was just a worthless piece of shit? Was it when you saw how easily it could be manipulated by drugs? How a body could be slowed up, and shaped if you filled it full of tranquilisers? Was she the wife you wanted then? Afterwards? Me and Becks used to call her Snow White – did you know that? Becks said that every rime she saw Doc, she went Sleepy and Dopey…'
Rachel's breathing was starring to slow. Half a minute…
'No, I bet I know when it was. It was when you saw how easily it got damaged, wasn't it? How fragile it was. How easily the skin could be torn by flying glass, or how little it took for a torso to be crushed or twisted. Or perhaps it was both those things. How the body softened up by tranquilisers reacts that much slower in an emergency, in an accident, and becomes a bigger target. Yes, that would make sense. I'd call that a road-to- Damascus sort of moment, wouldn't you? From then on you just saw patients decomposing in front of your eyes. Breaking down, rot ring, dying, faster than you could stitch them together or prop them up or overhaul them.
'You'd learned a valuable lesson. A powerful lesson.
Once you'd learned that, it was about teaching us. Then pushing and pushing…'
Rachel had stopped breathing in. Just the last few messy exhalations.
'I would so like to have seen you in prison. Watched your skin go yellow and your bones turn powdery and your hope evaporate. You're soft and vain, and prison would have killed you very slowly. Then you'd have found out just how frail the body really is. Just how frail, Daddy…'
Thorne couldn't hear Rachel breathing any more. James Bishop closed his eyes and whispered, 'Night night,…'
Anne Coburn screamed. A roar from somewhere down in her guts, and suddenly the room was full of noise and movement. Jeremy Bishop rushed forward, shouting his son's name as if ordering a dog to drop and play dead. James moved with the instinctive obedience of a frightened child, recoiling, taking his hands off Rachel, letting her tumble helplessly forward on to her face. Thorne ran to turn the girl over and began searching for a pulse.
Come on…
He got one. She was still breathing. He picked her up, carried her across to Anne and gently laid her in the recovery position next to her mother. Anne's eyes turned up to him, the spark still strong, the relief evident in
