Mark Billingham: Sleepyhead

Finally: 'What – you mean is it disastrous?'

'No. Just… is there one?'

Thorne could not get a fix on this woman at all. A vicious temper, a filthy laugh, and a direct lie of questioning. There seemed little point in going round the houses.

'I've moved effortlessly from "disastrous" to just plain "bleak".'

'Is that the normal progression?'

'I think so. Sometimes there's a short period of "pitiful" but not always.'

'Oh, well, I'll look forward to that.'

Thorne watched as she reached into her bag for a cigarette. She held up the packet. 'Do you mind?'

Thorne said no, and she lit up. He stared as she blew the smoke out of the side of her mouth, way from him. It had been a long time since his last cigarette.

'More doctors smoke than you'd imagine. And a surprising number of oncologists. I'm amazed that more of us aren't smack heads to be honest. Do you not, then?'

Thorne shook his head. 'A policeman who doesn't smoke. You must like a drink, then?'

He smiled. 'I thought you worked too many hours to watch television.'

She groaned with pleasure as she took a long drag. Thorne spoke slowly but was still smiling when he answered the question. 'I like more than one…'

'Glad to hear it.'

'But that's pretty much it, as far as the clich6s go. I'm not religious, I hate opera, and I can't finish a crossword to save my life.'

'You must be driven, then? Or haunted? Is that the word?'

Thorne tried to hold the smile in place and even managed to produce a chuckle of sorts as he turned away and looked towards the counter. When he'd caught the eye of the woman at the till he held up his coffee cup, signaling for another. He turned back as Anne was stubbing out her cigarette. She exhaled, enjoying it, running elegant fingers through her silver hair.

When he'd caught the eye of the woman at the till he held up his coffee cup, signaling for another.

'So, does "desperate" and "bleak" involve children?'

Thorne turned back round. 'No. You?'

Her smile was huge and as contagious as smallpox.

'One. Rachel. Sixteen and big trouble.'

Sixteen? Thorne raised his eyebrows. 'Do women still get upset if you ask how old they are?'

She plonked an elbow on the table and leaned her chin on the palm of her hand, trying her best to look severe.

'This one does.'

'Sorry.' Thorne tried his best to look contrite. 'How much do you weigh?'

She laughed loudly. Not filthy, positively salacious. Thorne laughed too, and grinned at the waitress as his second cup of coffee arrived. It had barely touched the table when Coburn's bleeper went off. She looked at it, stubbed out her cigarette and grabbed her bag from the floor. 'I might not be a smack head, but I do an awful lot of indigestion tablets.'

Thorne lifted his jacket from the back of his chair. 'I'll walk you back.'

On the way towards Queen Square things became oddly formal again. Small-talk about Indian summers gave way to an awkward silence before they were half-way there.

When they reached her office, Thorne hovered in the doorway. He felt like he should go, but she held up her hand to stop him as. she made a quick call. The bleep had not been urgent.

'So how is the investigation going?'

Thorne stepped into the office and closed the door. He had thought this was coming over lunch. His capacity to bullshit members of the public had once been endless, but he spent so much of his time exercising that particular skill on superior officers that he couldn't be bothered trying it on with those who had no axe to grind.

'It's a… bleak prognosis.'

She smiled.

'Every day there's some stupid story in the paper about armed robbers tunneling into the shop next door to the building society or burglars falling asleep in houses they've broken into, but the simple fact is that most people who break the law give serious thought to not getting done for it. With murderers, you've got a chance if it's domestic, or when there's sex involved.'

She leaned back in her chair and took a sip from a glass of water.

Thorne watched her. 'Sorry, I didn't mean to make a speech.'

'No, I'm interested, really.'

'Any sort of sexual compulsion can make people sloppy. They take chances and eventually they slip up. I just can't see this bloke slipping up. Whatever's been driving him isn't sexual.'

Her eyes were suddenly flat and cold. 'Isn't it?'

'Not physically. He's perverse.., but he's-'

'What he's doing is grotesque.'

There was a matter-of-factness about the statement that Thorne had no argument with. What shook him was her use of the present tense. There were those who thought or hoped (and, by Christ, he hoped) that perhaps there'd be no need for new pictures on the wall. But he knew better. Whatever mission this man thought he was on, whatever it was he hoped to achieve, he was actually stalking women and killing them in their own homes. And he was enjoying himself. Thorne could feel himself start to redden.

'There's no conventional pattern to this. The ages of the victims seem unimportant to him, as long as they're available. He just picks these women out and when he doesn't get what he wants he just leaves them. Shiny and scrubbed and slumped in a chair or lying on a kitchen floor for their loved ones to stumble across. Nobody sees anything. Nobody knows anything.'

'Except Alison.'

The awkward silence descended again, more stifling than the air trapped inside the tiny office. Thorne felt the retort of his outburst bouncing off the walls like a sluggish bullet. There was none of the usual irritation when his mobile phone rang. He grabbed for it gratefully. DI Nick Tughan ran the Backhand office: an organiser and collator of information, another embracer of procedure. His smooth Dublin brogue could calm or persuade senior officers. Unlike Frank Keable, though, Tughan had the self-awareness of a tree-stump and little time for characters like Tom Thorne. The way the operation had been going up to now meant that it was very much his show and he ran it with an unflappable efficiency. He never lost his temper.

'We've got a fairly major Midazolam theft. Two years ago, Leicester Royal Infirmary, five grams missing.'

Thorne reached across the desk for a piece of paper and a pen. Anne pushed a pad towards him. He began to scribble down the details. Maybe there had been a slip-up, after all.

'Right, let's send Holland up to Leicester, get all the details, and we'll need a list of everyone on rotation from, say, ninety-seven onwards.'

'Ninety-six onwards. Already sorted it. It's been faxed through.'

Tughan was well ahead of him and thoroughly enjoying it. Thorne knew what he would have done next. 'Obvious question then.., any matches?'

'A couple in the South-East and half a dozen in London. But there's an interesting one. Works at the Royal London.'

Interesting was right. Anne Coburn had spotted it straight away. Working on the assumption that Alison had been attacked in her home, then why the Royal London?

Why not the nearest hospital? Thorne took down the name, kept the compulsory, if distasteful, backslapping brief and hung up.

'Sounded like good news.' She didn't apologise for eavesdropping.

Thorne was starting to like her more and more. He stood up and reached for his jacket. 'Let's hope so. Five grams of Midazolam. Is that a lot?'

'That's a hell of a lot. We'd use anywhere up to five milligrams to sedate an average-sized adult. That's intravenously, of course.'

She stood up and moved round the desk to see him out. As she walked to the door she glanced at the scrap of paper, which Thorne had not yet picked up, and stopped dead in her tracks.

'Oh, God!' She reached for it just as Thorne did – he should never have let her see it, but a tussle would have been.., unseemly. What harm could it do? He opened the door. 'Is this man your.., match, Detective Inspector?' She moved back to her side of the desk and sat down heavily.