Mark Billingham: Death Message

Thorne got up to fetch more beer from the kitchen. Hendricks was perched next to Louise on the sofa, and Thorne leaned in close as he walked past. As always, the pathologist was dressed in black, with the usual array of metalwork through eyebrow, nose, lip, cheek and tongue. ‘You just like it because you don’t need to wear a mask,’ Thorne said.

Hendricks gave him the finger. ‘Homophobe!’

Louise laughed and knocked over her beer can. She scrambled to pick it up but there wasn’t too much left in it anyway.

Walking back into the living room, Thorne was struck, as always, by how alike Hendricks and Louise were. They were both thirty-four, which, to their endless glee, gave them ten years on Thorne. Each was dark-haired and skinny, though Hendricks’ hair was shaved rather than short, and Louise had far fewer piercings. Save for the differences in their accents, they might have been mistaken for brother and sister.

Thorne handed each of them a fresh can.

The two had become friends very quickly, gone out together to gay bars and clubs, and sometimes, watching them together, Thorne felt envious in a way he didn’t care to spend too long analysing. When he and Louise had first started seeing one another, he’d been slightly annoyed that Hendricks hadn’t seemed overly threatened; especially as Thorne, on occasion, had found himself to be more than a little jealous of Hendricks’ boyfriends. As it happened, the three of them had spent a good deal of the last few months together; Hendricks having split from his long-term lover around the same time that Thorne and Louise had hooked up. The break-up had been over children: Hendricks was desperate to be a father and was now searching for a partner who shared his enthusiasm. More than once, he and Louise had joked about how she might help him out; about cutting Thorne out of the picture altogether.

‘Come on, Lou,’ Hendricks had said. ‘You’d be far better off with me. I’ve got decent taste in clothes, music, everything.’

‘Yeah, OK. Why not?’

‘I mean, obviously we won’t actually do anything. There’s ways and means. Besides, I don’t think you’d be missing much, sex-wise.’

‘I can’t argue with that.’

Hendricks had hugged Louise and leered at Thorne. ‘Right, that’s sorted. Me and your girlfriend are buggering off to get creative with a turkey-baster…’

Tonight, they drank a good deal more and emptied the cupboard of every available snack. They watched some TV and talked about football, and facelifts, and the tumour Hendricks had found inside the stomach of a middle-aged woman which had turned out to be a long-unborn twin.

The usual stuff.

Around eleven-thirty, Hendricks phoned for a cab back to his flat in Deptford and, while they waited, they talked about the photograph some more. They’d discussed it earlier, in three separate phone conversations: Thorne and Louise; Louise and Hendricks; Hendricks and Thorne. Then they’d spoken about it when each had arrived at the flat, and again when the three of them were finally together. It was always just a question of when they’d get back to it.

‘Until you find a body, it’s just a picture,’ Hendricks said.

‘You didn’t see it.’

‘So what?’

‘You should listen,’ Louise said. She put a hand on Thorne’s arm, nodded in Hendricks’ direction. ‘He’s spot on. It’s just a photograph. You might never find a body.’

‘What am I supposed to do, then?’

‘Forget it.’

‘Like I said to Phil…’

‘No, I haven’t seen it, but I know what death looks like. Come on, Tom, we all do.’

Thorne knew she was right, but couldn’t shake the unease. It was like a draught he kept walking through. ‘It feels like it’s mine, though… It is mine.’ He hunched his shoulders, the chill at them again, bracing himself as Louise leaned in against him. ‘It was sent to me.’

Hendricks nodded slowly. His eyes flicked momentarily to Louise, then dropped to his watch. He stepped across to the window, pulled back the curtain and peered out on to the street.

‘The cab firm said to give it ten minutes,’ Thorne said.

They all moved into the hall and stood a little awkwardly around the front door. Though Thorne had spent the better part of twenty-four hours trying to avoid it, he suddenly felt the question hanging there between them; could feel the weight and the heat of it. Certain as nausea.

Hendricks was as good a person as anyone else to voice it.

‘Why you?’ he asked.

After Hendricks had gone, Thorne and Louise didn’t take too long to get into bed, but nothing that came afterwards was any more than half-hearted. Tiredness, beer or something else altogether had dampened the desire, and warmth or simple proximity had been enough for both of them.

‘I don’t think you’re a miserable git,’ Louise said, just before she turned over.

Later, Thorne lay awake in the dark, fighting hard to silence the shrill, insistent, ‘Why?’ Until, in the end, it became like a car alarm to which you grew accustomed. It was not exactly a comfort, but he knew there was every chance that the answer would present itself before he’d had to spend too long worrying about the question.

With Louise snoring quietly next to him, he thought about something he’d said earlier. When Kitson had asked him why he hadn’t just handed over the SIM and kept his handset.

He’d said it casually then, without thinking.

‘ Well, I’ll know next time .’

He’d done a lot of walking at night. During the last few months, anyway.

It was partly because he could , obviously; because the novelty had still not worn off. The flat wasn’t small, not by a long stretch, but anywhere started to close in after a week or two; and it felt nice to get out. He didn’t care a whole lot about the rain or the wind. It was just weather, and all of it was good.

Tonight it was cold and dry as he walked quickly along the main road, past the shuttered-up shops and the all-night garages. He turned into a side street, letting his hand rest against the spanner in his coat pocket as he moved towards a group of teenagers on the corner.

He’d walked just to kill time at first; to get through the endless hours without sleep. He was still managing no more than a couple of hours each night, three at the most, in fifteen- or twenty-minute bursts. He didn’t think he’d managed more than that since that morning they’d been in to see him.

The second time his life had been turned upside down.

Funny how both times everything had changed, had turned to shit, he’d been sitting there with people who were waving warrant cards at him…

Over the weeks he’d covered most of west London. He’d spent long nights walking up to Shepherd’s Bush and then along the Uxbridge Road through Acton and Ealing. He’d gone south, around Gunnersbury Park, then turned towards Chiswick, watching the cars rush both ways above him along the M4. He’d walked back towards Hammersmith, zigzagging through the smaller streets and coming out just shy of the bridge, where the river bowed, a mile or two from where the flat lay in the shadow of the flyover; a hospital on one side of it, a cemetery on the other.

The teenagers at the end of the street paid him no real attention. Maybe there was a look about him.

There certainly had been at one time.

He’d got used to it now, doing this instead of sleeping. He enjoyed it. The walking helped him think things through, and though there were plenty of times in the day when he felt completely wiped out, it was like his body was adjusting; compensating, or whatever the word was. He remembered reading somewhere that Napoleon and Churchill and Margaret Thatcher had all made do with a couple of hours’ kip each night. It was obviously all about how you approached things when you were awake. Maybe you could get away with it, as long as you had a purpose.