Mark Billingham: Sleepyhead

I can't do very much, but I can choose too. I want to have a say.

I don't want to let him win.

Thorne hadn't been able to make good on his promise of a box. Hendricks wasn't pleased, but they were showing the game on Sky anyway, and he agreed to settle for half a dozen cans of cheap lager and a home delivery from the Bengal Lancer.

There had been no great making up, no moment of acceptance or forgiveness. Hendricks called as soon as he heard what happened and they'd talked for a while. It was all that was needed.

Nearly a month now.

When James Bishop died on the operating table, Thorne had blamed himself. Then the post-mortem revealed the drug, and he knew that, even if he'd reacted quicker, the outcome would have been the same. Warfarin. A drug prescribed to treat certain 'heart and lung disorders and, ironically, used to prevent strokes. An anticoagulant. A drug that prevents the blood clotting,

They couldn't be certain but they guessed he'd been taking it for at least a couple of weeks. Had he been planning it all along? Or had he been taking the drug just in case it ever came down to it? Down to him and his father and a scalpel.

They'd never know for sure.

They'd never know for sure, though Thorne felt pretty certain that Bishop had been the one who'd gone to the press. Leaking the story to free up the channels of information. Once a few decent holes had been torn in the veil of secrecy, he was able to learn so much more about what was happening on the case. The pipeline that fed Bishop information had been a complex one, running back and forth, in many directions and at different speeds from Thorne himself, via Jeremy Bishop, Anne and, of course, Rachel, who James had been seeing for some time. She never re-sat her exams.

Anne wasn't sure when Rachel would go back to school or when she herself would go back to work. That's what she'd said a few weeks ago. Thorne had spoken to her frequently in the days following that night in Bishop's attic, but not since. He thought about her a lot, but never without wondering if his stupidity had somehow contributed to what had happened. Had he been responsible for Anne and Rachel being in that attic?

One of many unanswerable questions with which he liked to torture himself.

It wasn't as if he'd done anything that night to make Anne feel inclined to think better of him. There had been no heroics. Just those who died, and those who nearly did. Perhaps one day she'd call. It needed to come from her. He knew it would take a while for the bruises he couldn't see to fade, but he was starting to feel better. He had got it wrong, and he knew he would do so again. It was a comforting thought. He had been wonderfully, horribly wrong, and in truth, it felt as though a curse had been lifted. Fucking-up might just have saved him.

And Helen and Susan and Christine and Madeleine and Leonie? The girls had gone rather quiet. Thorne knew this wasn't because they were 'at peace' or 'avenged' or anything like that. He didn't believe in that sort of crap. He was pretty sure that the silence was only temporary. They would make enough noise when the time came. Them, or others like them.

Right this minute, they just didn't have anything to say. He watched, confused for a few seconds, as Hendricks jumped from the settee and began to dance around the living room. He glanced at the TV in time to catch the replay. Arsenal had scored. Three more points out of the window and another nail in this season's coffin. Just one more thing to which Tom Thorne was resigned.

Alison and Anne had decided to speed things up. The process was set down and not open to question. It was ponderous, but that was the way of things when those who took the decisions had to be sure. There was no room for clouded judgment or woolly thinking or, God forbid, overdue haste. The agreement, the rubber stamp of a second consultant, and then, finally, the hearing in front of a judge. These were necessary stages in the process. Divorce, the custody of children, domestic violence. The High Court Family Division held sway over a great many lives and Alison did not get priority. If anything, her case might be judged less important than some others. So, it was taking time. Alison had first spoken to her over two weeks ago now, and after the tears, the arguments, the doubts, had come a determination on Anne Coburn's part to do what she'd been asked.

To help a friend.

She'd set everything in motion, but it was all too slow for Alison.

Anne walked towards ITU, willing one foot to go down in front of the other and keep moving. Steeling herself. Jeremy was doing a lot better but it was going to take time. The relationship he'd been having with a junior doctor had ended only a few days before James's death, but even if there had been someone around for him to lean on, to take comfort from, Anne would have wanted to be there as well. As it was, he was alone and desperate, and the twenty-five years she'd known him meant that she would always be nearby, ready to help.

Equally, she could never see Tom Thorne again. It was as if the two of them had survived the +rash of a plane Thorne had been flying. Relieved, but unable to look each other in the eye. Guilt and blame and bad memories were not the stuff of a future.

Her future was Rachel.

Alison had been moved to a side room a couple of weeks earlier. It could not be watched directly from the nurses' station, and they wouldn't disturb her. Anne opened the door. Alison was awake, and pleased to see her.

She moved across to the window and closed the blind. If anything, the room was even more sparse and functional than the one she'd been in before. Anne remembered the half-dead flowers that Thorne had brought from a garage and wondered for a moment where he was and how he might be feeling. She closed her eyes, wiped away the image of him and turned back to Alison.

They spent a few minutes! laughing, and crying, before Anne went to work. Her movements were quick, quiet, professional. She removed the oxymeter peg from the end of Alison's finger and clipped it, at a ninety-degree angle, to its own cable. It was unspoken, but most doctors knew that this would short-circuit the alarm and prevent it sounding when the ventilator was switched off. In twenty minutes or so, she would reattach it, when it was over, and she had turned the ventilator back on again. That had been Alison's idea. Take no risks, make it look natural. Don't fuck about with your career, pet…

Anne moved across to the ventilator and flipped back the plastic cover that protected the switch, as if it were the button that launched nuclear missiles. She looked over at the bed.

Alison had already closed her eyes.

Whatever the quality of the strange, laughable life that Alison had lived these last months, it had been lived to a permanent soundtrack of humming, hissing, beeping, dripping. Twenty-four hours a day. A life defined by noise. James Bishop had condemned her to that, but Alison had refused to let herself be his victim.

Now, finally, the noise had stopped.

More than anything, Anne Coburn hoped that Alison might hold on to life just long enough to enjoy the silence.