Mark Billingham - Good as Dead

He reached the car and yanked open the passenger door. ‘Let’s go.’

McCarthy looked up at him. His face was pale and clammy under the sickly interior light. ‘You said it was too early before. You said-’

‘That was before,’ Thorne said. ‘And I’ve never been particularly fashionable.’

Donnelly had taken Thorne’s call in the playground, shivering beneath a Met Police umbrella and helping himself to some slightly stale fruit cake from Teapot One as they had talked. Now, he walked quickly back to the TSU truck to relay Thorne’s news. If they could contain the situation, keep the lid on things inside the newsagent’s for just another couple of hours, then they might well see the result they all wanted before knocking-off time.

As soon as he climbed up into the truck, he could see that he had missed something.

‘What?’ he said.

Pascoe was pale, slumped in a chair. The two TSU technicians were looking at the floor. Chivers shook his head and said, ‘Jesus.’

‘I didn’t think about it,’ Pascoe said. ‘It never even occurred to me.’

‘ What? ’ Donnelly asked again.

‘She kept saying everything was fine.’ Pascoe looked from Donnelly to Chivers. ‘Every time I asked, she told me they were all doing fine. You heard.’

The sounds of the television in Akhtar’s storeroom were still coming through the speakers. Donnelly asked the technicians to lower the volume a little, then stepped across to Sue Pascoe. ‘Exactly what didn’t you think about, Sue? What never occurred to you?’

She looked at him.

The male technician – Yates – cleared his throat. ‘Well, it was Annette who pointed it out.’ He gestured towards the female technician sitting next to him; whip-thin with spiky black hair coloured red at the tips. He tentatively laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘It was her idea, really.’

His colleague nodded and spoke quietly. ‘I was just saying that we’ve been monitoring the conversations in there for about four hours now, and yes I know that the television’s been on for a lot of the time and that nobody’s said a great deal. It’s just that in all that time we haven’t heard anything from the second hostage. From Mr Mitchell.’

‘Not a peep,’ Yates said.

Donnelly stared at the speakers for a few seconds, as though willing Stephen Mitchell’s voice to suddenly burst from them. ‘Oh, Christ.’ He turned and looked at Chivers.

‘DS Weeks assured us that everything in there was fine.’ Pascoe sounded as though she was talking to herself. ‘Repeatedly.’

‘You told us it was fine,’ Donnelly said.

‘Because I believed that it was.’

‘All that guff about her voice being normal and no signs of coercion. “There isn’t a problem,” you said. That was your professional opinion, if I remember rightly.’

‘That’s the way I remember it, too,’ Chivers said.

Pascoe looked as though the breath had been punched from her. ‘This wasn’t just me,’ she stammered. ‘Nobody else seemed too concerned about Mitchell.’ She stood up, fumbling to straighten her jacket. ‘It was not just me… ’

Donnelly reached for a headset and threw it at Pascoe.

‘Call her.’

Helen had been unable to say anything, to do anything but watch, when Akhtar had walked calmly away into the shop with her phone.

Does this have a camera on it?

She had fought to control her breathing as she thought about what he might be taking a picture of, struggled that little bit harder as she considered what he might be thinking of doing with such a photo. After a minute or so, she had finally managed to catch her breath and hold it. She had almost convinced herself she was being ridiculous, when the smell hit her and she knew that she had been right to worry.

He had torn open the bags.

Something like this had been coming for the last few hours, the signs had been clear enough. Or might have been, if she had been able to think clearly and focus for five minutes, if she had not been in such a state herself.

She suddenly remembered something Paul used to say. An expression he’d picked up somewhere.

Up and down like a whore’s drawers.

He’d said it a lot – always in that comedy ‘cockney wanker’ voice he was so fond of – those first few months she’d been carrying Alfie. When the hormone fairy arrived and the mood swings really kicked in.

She felt tears building and held her breath again, refused to let them rise.

She needed to concentrate…

It had been coming. Akhtar’s hand on the gun, cradling it, the talk about being ‘fobbed off’. Being ‘ignored’. She had asked him for tea and he had snapped at her; her well-being or comfort no longer of any concern, no longer something worth worrying about. Not by him, at any rate.

And now he had done something stupid. Worse than stupid.

When he had finally come back in, apologising for the stink and squirting that air-freshener around, there had been this look on his face. Like he’d accomplished something. Triumphant, almost.

‘There,’ he had said. ‘ There ’, like ‘that’ll show them’ or ‘now we’ll see who gets fobbed off’ and more than anything Helen had wanted to strike out hard and smash and claw at his face. To tear the smirk off and demand to know what the fuck he thought he was doing.

At that moment, she knew that she could hurt him.

She looked across at him. Sitting in his chair, his hand was on the revolver in his lap still, but his eyes were fixed happily on the television screen, as though he had done no more than simply cause a little mischief. Put the cat among the pigeons.

Helen knew that if Akhtar had sent a picture of Stephen Mitchell to anyone on the outside, there might not even be time to finish the programme he was watching.

She inhaled through her nose, so she would not have to taste it. The smell was still fierce, the cheap air-freshener no more than a top note, almost as sickening as the stench it was failing to mask. She breathed it in, because she had to.

Rotten meat and lemons.

McCarthy had punched in the code needed to access the private lift. It had been sent by text message the previous day. He and Thorne said nothing as the lift rose up towards the penthouse level, then just before they reached the top floor, McCarthy said, ‘They’re not always about the sex, you know?’ He looked at Thorne. ‘These parties. Sometimes it’s just a question of meeting people and talking, without having to worry about what they’re thinking. It’s about having fun and not having to lie. You said it yourself this afternoon in my office. It’s about being yourself.’

The doors opened.

‘All very touching,’ Thorne said. ‘Except when “yourself” is nuts deep in an underage boy.’

The man who answered the door had the build of a nightclub bouncer, but his suit was somewhat better cut and Thorne doubted he ever had cause to turn people away for wearing trainers. He nodded his recognition at McCarthy then looked Thorne up and down.

‘A guest,’ McCarthy said.

The man at the door sniffed. ‘Nobody said anything.’

‘Sorry.’ Thorne smiled. ‘Should I have brought a bottle or something?’

‘Oh come on, Graham, stop pissing around,’ McCarthy said. ‘He’s with me, all right? And I’m gagging for a drink.’

In the hour and a half since McCarthy had told him about the party, Thorne had been thinking very carefully about the best way to get inside. To make his entrance. At this point of course, it would have been easy enough simply to produce a warrant card, to put a shoulder against the door and march inside shouting the odds. Thorne doubted very much that he would encounter a lot of resistance if he did, certainly none of an aggressive nature, but all the same he had decided on a rather more low-key approach. He wanted to walk in there with the not-so-good doctor and for it to be seen. He needed the man whose evening he was intent on spoiling to see clearly that the chain was broken and that McCarthy was his. To understand, as quickly as Thorne could engineer it, that no amount of wriggling was going to get anyone off the hook.