Mark Billingham - Bloodline

The brother and sister thing could not have gone a lot better. Students have it pretty bloody easy, if you ask me. I know they moan about paying back loans and all that, but most of them seem happy enough to spend every night in the bar getting wasted. It’s an easier life than most, I reckon. Actually, the brother wasn’t much of a party animal, not like some of them, but after a while it wasn’t the drink he was coming back for anyway.

He wasn’t hard to tempt!

I could see straight away what he’d be attracted to. Just holding the stare for a few seconds longer than normal. The whole ‘bit of rough’ thing. By the time he plucked up the courage to come over and say anything, it was a done deal and we were on the way back to his place quickly enough after that.

The sister had made breakfast for the two of us. I found the tray outside his door afterwards. That was sweet, I have to admit. She knocked first, then I heard the door open and the slap of her bare feet on the stripped floorboards.

He was face down and I was lying across the bed, naked but with the sheet covering the things she didn’t need to see. I knew she’d stopped, was taking it all in, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, work out what had happened. It was really hard to stay still, to control my breathing as much as I needed to.

I heard her say her brother’s name and ‘Oh my God’ a few times. Whisper it.

She went to her brother first and touched him, his shoulder or arm. I heard her breath catch and she started to cry and, when I knew she was looking down at me, I opened my eyes.

Bang! Like a dead man coming back to life.

I stared straight up into her baby blues, all wet and big as saucers. She opened her mouth to scream then, sucked in a nice big breath, but my hand was on her neck quick enough to squeeze and stop it.

By the time I was out of the bedroom the tea was cold and I didn’t take more than a bite or two of the toast. I was enjoying the thought of them getting all worked up about DNA from the spit and teeth marks in the toast, all that.

None of it will matter in the end.

Like all other officers, Thorne was told not to leave important documentation in plain view when he was away from the office. Ancillary staff were instructed not to interfere with workstations while cleaning. However, as neither party adhered particularly closely to best practice, Thorne spent the first half hour of his Monday morning at Becke House searching for several vital scraps of barely intelligible scribble, then carefully reorganising his desktop into the shambolic clutter of paper that passed for a filing system, albeit one that collapsed if someone left a window open.

Or shut the door too quickly.

‘Shit!’

‘Sorry,’ Kitson said. She walked to her desk, smiling as she watched Thorne bend down to pick up the papers that had been blown to the floor. ‘I don’t know, maybe if you used staples or paperclips?’ She eased off her jacket and dropped her handbag, then continued as though addressing a young child or a very stupid dog. ‘Or went completely crazy and typed things up. On. Your. Computer.’

Thorne groaned as he straightened up and again as he dropped back into his chair. ‘You’re a bloody genius,’ he said.

‘It’s just common sense.’ Kitson took the lid from the takeaway coffee she had brought in with her, spooned the froth into her mouth. ‘Unfortunately, most men aren’t exactly blessed with too much of that.’

‘Oh, right,’ Thorne said. ‘Are we talking about me or Ian?’ The name was as much as Thorne knew about the boyfriend Kitson had been seeing for several months, but after her much-discussed fall from grace, he could hardly blame her for keeping her private life as private as possible. ‘Poor sod screwed up over the weekend, did he?’ Her smile told Thorne he was right on the money.

‘I’m just saying, if women ran things…’

‘Be better, would it?’

‘… the world wouldn’t be in such bloody chaos.’

‘Except once a month,’ Thorne said. ‘When things would go extremely tits up.’

Kitson’s smile widened around the plastic spoon. ‘How was your Sunday, smart-arse?’

Thorne had spent most of the previous day alone, which had suited him well enough. Louise had driven down to see her parents in Sussex and although Thorne got on perfectly well with both of them, she hadn’t bothered to ask if he wanted to come along. If Hendricks was right, and Louise had told her mum about the pregnancy, she probably preferred to be on her own when she broke the news that there no longer was one.

He had not seen the need to ask.

He had made himself a toasted ham and cheese sandwich for lunch, then watched Spurs grind out a piss-poor goalless draw against Manchester City. Louise got home just before he had the chance to be bored all over again by Match of the Day 2 and they spent what was left of the evening arguing about when she was going back to work.

She had rung her office from the hospital that first afternoon, telling them she had a stomach bug, and had decided that four days off sick was more than enough. Thorne disagreed, said he thought she needed longer. Louise told him that it was her body and her decision to make, that she felt as fine as she was ever fucking-well going to, and that she was going back first thing on Monday.

Thorne had left an hour earlier than usual this morning, to beat the traffic and to avoid a repeat of the argument. He looked up at the clock on the wall above Kitson’s desk. Louise would be getting to Scotland Yard, where the Kidnap Unit was based, around now.

‘My body, my decision…’

He dropped his eyes, nodded at Kitson. ‘My Sunday was pretty quiet,’ he said.

Once the team had gathered for the morning briefing, it quickly became apparent that others connected to the twin inquiries had been considerably busier than Tom Thorne over the previous thirty-six hours.

‘We’ve been able to match the DNA sample gathered from beneath the fingernails of Catherine Burke in Leicester to that taken from hairs on Emily Walker’s clothing. So we’re now officially looking for the same individual in connection with both of these murders.’ Russell Brigstocke took a moment, looked from face to face.

Said, ‘One killer.’

Karim moved his fist from beneath his chin and raised a finger. ‘Are we releasing this?’ he asked.

‘Not yet,’ Brigstocke said.

‘And we know the Leicester lot won’t, do we?’

‘They know they’re not supposed to.’ Brigstocke shrugged. ‘Look, an inquiry like this means there’s obviously double the chance of something being leaked. Some idiot in uniform out to impress a reporter he’s trying to get into bed, whatever.’ He raised his hands to quiet the predictable reaction. ‘So, all we can do is try to keep the lid on at our end. We all know how the press works, how mental things can get if they catch a sniff of a serial killer.’ He scanned the faces again, pausing for a second or two when he reached Thorne’s, before carrying on.

Thorne knew that Brigstocke was at least half right. The tabloids would certainly go to town. While the broadsheets would use the phrase sparingly and probably use inverted commas, the red-tops would show no such restraint. Same with TV: the BBC would at least want to be seen to avoid sensationalism, while for the likes of Sky News and Channel Five those two words would become something of a mantra.

He also knew very well why Brigstocke had sought him out to push home his point. He guessed that, were he to Google his own name, he would find it cropping up on more than one of those websites he had come across the previous week. His name, alongside those of the men and women he had hunted.