Mark Billingham: Sleepyhead

For a moment he was deeply afraid to go in. He got out of the car and leaned against the bonnet until the moment passed.

As he trudged towards the door, he made a decision. He wasn't going to let anyone put a picture of Alison on the wall.

Fourteen hours later Thorne got home and rang his dad. They spoke as often as Thorne could manage and saw each other even less. Jim and Maureen Thorne had left North London for St Albans ten years before, but since his mum had died Thorne felt the distance between him and his dad growing greater all the time. Now they were both alone and their telephone conversations were always desperately trivial. His dad was always keen to pass on the latest dirty story or pub joke, and Thorne was always pleased to hear them. He liked to let his old man make him laugh – he liked to hear him laugh. Aside from the forced lightheartedness of these phone calls, he suspected that his father wasn't laughing a great deal. His father knew damn well that he wasn't.

'I'll leave you with a couple of good ones, Tom.'

'Go on then, Dad.'

'What's got a one-inch knob and hangs down?'

'I don't know.'

'A bat.'

It wasn't one of his best.

'What's got a nine-inch knob and hangs up?'

'No idea.'

His dad put the phone down.

He sat down and, for a few minutes, he said nothing. Then he began to speak softly. 'Perhaps, in retrospect, the note on the windscreen was a little.., showy. It's not like me, really. I'm not that sort of person. I suppose I just wanted to say sorry for the others. Well, if I'm being truthful, I must admit that a part of me wanted to boast just a little. And I think Thorne's a man I can talk to. He seems like a man who will understand how proud I am about getting it right. Perfection is everything, isn't it? And haven't I been taught that? You can believe it. I have been well taught.

'I mean, it's been a struggle and I'm certainly not saying that I won't make any more mistakes, but what I'm doing gives me the right to fail, wouldn't you say?

The one.., frustration is that I can only imagine how good it feels on the machines. Safe and clean. Free to relax and let the mind wander. No mess. And if I feel proud at liberating a body from the tyranny of the petty and the putrid then I can't be condemned for that, surely. It's the only real freedom left that's worth fighting for, I'd say. Freedom from our clumsy movement through air. Our bruising Our… sensitivity. lb be released from the humdrum and the everyday. Fed and cleaned. Monitored and cared for. All our filthy fluids disposed of. And, above all, to know. To be aware of these wonders as they are happening. What does a corpse know of its vashing? To know and to feel all these things must be wonderful.

'God, what am I thinking? I'm sorry. I don't have to tell you any of this.

'Do I, Alison?'

Sue and Kelly from the nursery came to see me yesterday. My vision's a lot better already. I could see that Sue was wearing far too much eyeliner as usual. There's plenty of gossip. Obviously not as much as usual with me in here, but still good stuff. Mary, the manageress, is really pissing everybody off, sitting on her arse and correcting the spelling on the happy charts. Daniel's still being a little sod. He cried for me last week, they said. They told him I'd gone to Spain on my holidays. They told me that when I came out we'd all go and get completely pissed and that they 'd rather be in here any day than changing shitty nappies on three pounds sixty an hour… There wasn't much else after that.

And, at last, a bit of real excitement. Some bedpan-washer or something got blocked up. I know it doesn't sound earth shattering, but there was water everywhere and all the nurses were sloshing round and getting really pissed off. Excitement is relative, I suppose.

I dreamed about my mum. She was young, like she was when I was at school. She was getting me dressed and I was arguing about what I was going to wear and she was weeping and weeping…

And I dreamed about the man who did this to me. I dreamed that he was here in my room, talking to me. I knew his voice straight away. But it was also a voice I recognised from after it happened. My brain has gone to mush. He sat by my bed and squeezed my hand and tried to tell me why he'd done it. But I didn't really understand. He was telling me how I should be happy. That voice had told me to enjoy myself as he handed me the champagne bottle and I took a swig. I must have invited him in. I must have. I suppose the police know that. I wonder if they've told Tim?

Now that dreams are the closest thing I have to sensation, they've become so vivid. It would be fantastic if you could press a button and choose what you were going to dream about. Obviously someone would have to press the button for me, but a selection of family and friends with a healthy degree of filth thrown in would be nice.

Mind you, once you've been fucked to this degree, a shag is neither here nor there, really, is it?

Thorne had been wrong about the summer: after a fortnight's holiday of its own, it had returned with a sticky vengeance, and the siren call of the launderette could no longer be ignored. He was horribly aware of the smell coming off him as he sat sweltering in Frank Keable's office. They were talking about lists.

'We're concentrating on doctors currently on rotation in inner London, sir.'

Frank Keable was only a year or two older than Thorne but looked fifty. This was more due to some genetic glitch than any kind of stress. The lads reckoned he must have started receding at about the same time he hit puberty, judging by the proximity of his hairline to the nape of his neck Whatever hormones he had left that stimulated hair growth had somehow been mistakenly rerouted to his eyebrows, which hovered above his bright blue eyes like great grey caterpillars. The eyebrows were highly expressive and gave him an air of wisdom that was, to put it kindly, fortunate. Nobody begrudged him this bit of luck – it was the least you could hope for when you looked like an overfed owl with alopecia.

Keable put one of his caterpillars to good use, raising it questioningly. 'It might be best to look a bit further afield, Tom. We'd be covering our bases, should the worst happen. We're not short of manpower.'

Thorne looked skeptical but Keable sounded confident.

'It's a big case, Tom, you know that. If you need the bodies to widen things out a bit, I can swing it.'

'Let's have them anyway, sir, it's an enormous list. But I'm sure he's local.'

'The note?'

Thorne felt again the heavy drops of rain that had crawled inside his shirt collar and trickled down between his shoulder-blades. He could still sense the polythene between his fingers and thumbs, as he'd read the killer's words while the water ran down into his eyes, like tears coming home.

The killer had known where Alison was being treated. He was obviously following the case closely. Theirs as well as hers.

'Yes, the note. And the locations. I think he'd want to be around to keep an eye on things.'

To monitor his work.

'Is it worth putting a watch on the hospital?'

'With respect, sir, the place is crawling with doctors… I can't see the point at the minute.' His eyes drifted to the calendar on the dirty yellow wall – views of the West Country. Keable was originally from Bristol… The heat was making it hard to concentrate. Thorne undid another button on his shirt. Polyester. Not clever. 'Is there any chance of moving that fan round a bit?'

'Oh, sorry, Tom.'

Keable flicked a switch on his black desktop fan, which started to swing backwards and forwards, providing Thorne with a welcome blast of cold air every thirty seconds or so. Keable leaned back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. 'You don't think we're going to crack this, do you, Tom?'