Mark Billingham - Bloodline

‘It might have been,’ Holland said. He held up his glass. ‘And right now we’d be toasting our success with something a bit more expensive. ’ He swilled the beer around, stared into it. ‘We’ve got to chase up everything, right, even if it is stupid, until we get lucky or this bloke makes a mistake.’

‘I’m hoping he’s already made one,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t want to see any more pieces of that X-ray.’

A few minutes later, Holland asked, ‘So, why are we really here?’

‘I’m not with you.’

‘Sitting in this shit-hole instead of being at home in our own beds.’ The look on Holland ’s face made it clear he was expecting to hear about how Thorne was in the doghouse with Louise, or trying to avoid some tedious dinner with her family and friends. Hoping to hear something he could laugh at or sympathise with; shaking his head in disbelief at the silly shit their girlfriends put them through. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to say.’

Thorne was struggling to answer the question. There was some reason for his reluctance to go home that he could not quite articulate, but which nevertheless made him feel horribly guilty. He would not have felt comfortable sharing it with Holland, or anyone else, even if he had been able to find the right words. ‘I told you,’ he said, happy to exaggerate the perfectly timed yawn. ‘I’m just knackered.’

‘Fair enough.’ Holland stood up and said that he was ready to turn in.

They arranged to meet for breakfast at seven. Holland said he would set the alarm on his phone. Then, instead of walking with Holland towards the lifts, Thorne contradicted himself by announcing that he was staying up for one more: ‘It’ll help me sleep.’

‘Have a couple,’ Holland said. ‘You’ll sleep like a baby.’

Thorne could guess where it was going, but just smiled, letting Holland get to the punchline.

‘You’ll wake up crying because you’ve pissed yourself.’

Thorne walked to the bar and ordered another glass of wine. The woman sitting a few stools along put down her magazine. ‘Your mate abandoned you, has he?’

‘I’ve got a dirty, suspicious mind, apparently,’ Thorne said. He nodded towards the optics. ‘You want one?’

The woman thanked him and moved across. She asked for a rum and Coke and when she spoke it was obvious that it was not going to be her first. She was pale, with shoulder-length dark hair, and wore a cream denim jacket over a shortish brown skirt. The barman in the plum-coloured waistcoat, whose name tag said TREVOR, set about pouring the drinks and raised his eyebrows at Thorne when the woman wasn’t looking.

‘I’m Angie,’ she said.

Thorne shook the woman’s outstretched hand and felt himself redden a little as he told her his name.

‘What business you in then, Tom?’

‘I sell nuts,’ Thorne said. ‘Crisps, nuts… I’m basically a snack salesman.’

She nodded, smiling slightly, as though she wasn’t sure whether to believe him. When the barman had put down the drinks she picked up her glass and waited until he’d moved away. ‘Listen, Tom, it’s almost midnight, and we can sit here getting hammered if you want. Or we could just take these up to your room.’

She did not take her eyes from his as she sipped her drink. Now Thorne felt himself really redden. He could also feel the blood moving to other parts of his body and was grateful that he was sitting down.

He had called Louise earlier from the car-park, at the same time as Holland was speaking to Sophie. She’d said she had no problem with him staying over; had even sounded slightly annoyed that he would think she might have. She’d said that she’d be happy to get an early night and when he’d asked how her first day back had been, she’d told him it was fine; that he had been worrying for nothing.

‘I’ve… got a girlfriend,’ Thorne said. He nodded, like it was self-explanatory, but the woman just stared, as though waiting for him to elaborate. He was trying to swallow, dry-mouthed, thinking that he didn’t really fancy her very much and wondering how he would be reacting if he did. ‘You know, otherwise…’

The woman raised her hands and spun slowly away on her stool. ‘Not a problem.’

Thorne was still nodding like an idiot. She’d said it the same way that Louise had: casual and frosty. He opened his wallet and took out a ten-pound note to pay for the drinks; turned when he heard the woman cursing.

She pointed to the warrant card, shaking her head. ‘I can normally spot you bastards a mile away.’

From the corner of his eye, Thorne could see Trevor smirking as he dried glasses at the end of the bar. Realising now that the woman’s proposition had been a purely commercial one, Thorne did his best not to look overly shocked.

‘Don’t worry about it, love,’ he said. ‘I’m not local, and if it makes you feel any better, I think my professional radar’s working about as well as yours.’ He listened to the music for a few seconds, drumming his fingers on the bar, then he raised his glass. ‘Cheers, Angie.’

‘It’s Mary, actually.’

‘Slow night, Mary?’

‘Cata-fucking-tonic,’ she said.

They hit the rush hour coming out of Leicester, ran into the tail end of another as soon as they got within commuting distance of London, and the drizzle didn’t help. When Brigstocke called just before ten, they were still twenty miles from the city, and still regretting the hideously greasy breakfast they’d eaten two hours earlier.

‘Should have just had the muesli,’ Holland said.

Thorne turned down the radio. ‘And you take the piss out of rosé?’ He pressed the button on his phone that activated the loudspeaker, and passed it to Holland. It was the closest he came to hands-free.

‘How did it go with Paice?’ Brigstocke asked.

‘Nothing to get excited about,’ Thorne said. ‘Catherine Burke never told him about her mum, that’s all.’

‘Worth checking though,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Providing your expenses claims aren’t too stupid.’

‘There might be a claim later on for food poisoning,’ Holland said.

Brigstocke told them that Hendricks was due to perform the first of the Macken post-mortems later that morning, and that, as they had already confirmed a DNA match, he’d asked FSS to prioritise the examination of the two newest X-ray fragments, to see if they could get any more information.

‘Every chance, I reckon,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s leaving them for us to find, so he must want us to know what they are.’

‘Or waste our time trying to find out,’ Holland added.

Another phone had started ringing in the background and there was a hiatus while Brigstocke answered it; then a minute or two of muffled conversation over the loudspeaker.

‘Is that what you think?’ Holland turned to Thorne. ‘He’s leaving them for us. It’s not… ritualistic?’

Before Thorne could say that he had no idea, he was distracted by the car behind. ‘Look at this idiot up my arse,’ he said. He stared hard into his rear-view, stepping on the brake a few times until he thought the driver behind had got the message.

Brigstocke was back on the line, asking them how far away they were, then telling them not to bother coming into the office. ‘Get yourselves straight down to the Holloway Road,’ he said. He explained that they had done a door-to-door across some of the university accommodation first thing and managed to track down a few of the students who had been at the Rocket Club on Saturday night. ‘We may as well save ourselves some time and interview them all together.’

‘Makes sense,’ Thorne said. It would also be a chance to see the last place where anyone, save for their killer, had seen Greg or Alex Macken alive.