Mark Billingham: Sleepyhead

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 every tear that rolled down her cheek and dropped on to her daughter's face.

There was a moment of calm.

Just the noise of the rain coming down, like six-inch nails on to the tiles a few feet above them. Thorne turned to see Jeremy Bishop moving slowly towards his son, his arms outstretched, his face a death mask. James backed into the instrument trolley, which clattered and rolled away from him. He stopped and his head cocked to one side, and then his arm rose gracefully into the air.

Almost as if he were about to take a bow.

It was a movement so casual that he might have reaching to scratch a shoulder-blade. Thorne saw the glint of steel at his fist a second before the blood began to from the artery in his neck.

'No…' Jeremy's voice was a whisper that could have blown down a house.

Thorne leaned against the whitewashed wall and watched as James dropped to his knees and was followed by his father. Jeremy clamped a hand across his son's neck, but the blood gushed between his fingers, running down his arms and pooling across the bleached white floorboards. Up one board.., down another.

Jeremy turned to Thorne, his face already spattered, his hair slick with it. 'Get an ambulance – call somebody.' His voice was thick with desperation. His face implored.

But so did his son's.

James Bishop looked at Tom Thorne and his eyes asked to die. They asked permission to look into his father's face and watch it contort as the blood emptied from the body. He wanted to die watching his father suffer. Thorne was tempted to let him.

Jeremy's voice was hoarse between the sobs. 'For pity's sake, Thorne…'

Then, as Thorne thought about sitting and watching, James Bishop bleed to death, he pictured Maggie Byrne, and Bishop watching as her life poured out on to a cheap duvet.

And he remembered a promise he made to Alison Willetts.

Dying would be easy. He was going to see the fucker tried and put away. He was going to watch James Bishop's hope evaporate.

Jeremy was sobbing uncontrollably, his arms, wrapped tightly around his son's neck, slippery with blood. With a last look at Anne, Thorne stepped down, out of the white room and on to the stairs, hurrying back towards the street, where he hoped Holland would be waiting.

Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted he's dead. Thrilled about it. Prison is all well and good but I wouldn't want to lie here thinking about him writing his life story, cock of the fucking walk, probably out before he's fifty. Or else in some hospital somewhere, convincing them all he's mental while he pads around in comfy slippers, making model aero planes and remembering the women he killed.

Remembering what he did to me.

Sod that, I'd much rather he was dead. If l could get taken somewhere for the day, you know, loaded up into some special van and taken anywhere I want, I'd like to see his grave. Obviously dancing on it isn't really an option but I'd be happy to be laid across it. Lifted up and laid down on top of him. And I'd lie there with my face on the ground and think dark thoughts that would seep down into the earth and eat into his box like poison.

I'm glad he's dead. Stiff and still, like me. No, not like me. He's not scrabbling like a madman at the lid of the coffin, is he? Not tearing his fingers to stumps to try and get out. Not fed. Not wiped. Not breathed for. On the subject of which – no improvement. No response to the antibiotics and no chance of coming off this ventilator in the near future. Apparently the pneumonia in my lungs has been complicated by a fungal infection. Viruses and fungus. It's like I've become a breeding ground…

What I really can't stomach is that it was his choice. He chose this for me and he chose death for himself.

I'll tell you what's really ironic. I'm actually a dead positive. person. I really am. You may not believe that and I know I've been a bit up and down but you can't blame me for that. Try this for a while. Lie on your back and stare at the ceiling until your eyes start to water, and imagine it. Imagine being half dead and half alive, and the two halves not adding up to anything. Cancelling yourself out.

It's not easy to be happy all the time.

I am a positive person. But, lying here, I don't think of myself as a person at all any more. Not even a person alone, without anyone close. I wouldn't feel sorry for myself anyway because of that, but I can't even feel it. I just feel like something in a museum.

I just feel like the thing he created.

And I don't believe in God or anything afterwards. I'm sorry but I just don't, I never have. I believe in the way things are. The way I am. I believe in the capacity for people to do terrible things like he did and I believe that some people can do good.

I'd like to do something good. I want to do something. Most people don't have a choice about a lot of things. They don't choose to be unhappy or poor, and they don't choose to lose children or get cancer. That's just life, though, that's just the lottery, isn't it? It's the same for all of us. But he chose to kill people and he chose to do this to me, to take away my life and give me the one he decided I" should have. And then, when he was good and ready, he chose the manner of his own death… Anne's coming back to work next week, I think. We need to talk.