Mark Billingham - Bloodline

‘No.’ Collins had gone noticeably pale.

‘Exactly how he stalked and murdered four people, what he used to kill them. Would that make you take this seriously? Get you off your arse and make you start packing?’

‘It wouldn’t make any difference,’ Mitchell said, raising her voice. ‘We need to stay here.’

The women had moved even closer together. Thorne could see that Jason had stopped playing with his train and was on his knees by the side of the sofa, pulling at his mother’s hand, trying to rub it against his cheek.

‘Are you worried about Jason?’ Kitson said. ‘Is that the problem? Because you wouldn’t be separated.’

Mitchell started shaking her head, but it wasn’t clear if she was answering the question or just didn’t believe what Kitson was telling her.

‘We have special accommodation designed for families.’

‘No.’

‘You need to get out-’

‘He got into their houses,’ Thorne said. ‘Don’t you understand? They all thought they were safe and he got inside and murdered them.’

‘I’ll look after them,’ Collins said.

Thorne flicked his eyes to her. ‘What, even at night, Nina? You’ll be working, won’t you?’ Thorne had checked Collins’ record and seen that she’d had more arrests for soliciting than Debbie Mitchell. He watched her blink, glanced across in time to see something pass across Kitson’s face, and felt a stab of guilt; felt the wind leak out of him. However stupid and stubborn these women were being, it was clear that Nina Collins was hugely attached to Debbie Mitchell and her son; that her affection for them was fierce and unconditional. ‘Look, I’m just saying…’

When Collins came back at him, her voice had dropped a little. The nerves were evident in the staccato drags on her cigarette and the stutter as she blew out the smoke. ‘Can’t you look after us?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to do,’ Thorne said.

‘We can’t go,’ Mitchell said. She was staring at Jason, watching the teeth move across his bottom lip as he squeezed her hand. ‘You don’t understand. He needs routine. We both do. It’s the only way we can manage to keep everything on an even keel, you know? The only thing that stops it all going to pieces.’

In the desperation that had masked her face, Thorne caught a glimpse of what was driving her. He could see that her terror in acknowledging the threat – the crippling fear of change that could see a spiral back into drugs and might conceivably cost her custody of her child again – was even greater than her fear of the man who wanted to kill her.

‘He would be so unhappy,’ she said.

Thorne understood, just, but it didn’t matter. ‘How happy would he be if you were dead?’

Mitchell suddenly cried out in pain and yanked her hand away from Jason’s mouth, her knuckles having caught on the boy’s teeth as he squeezed and kissed it. His face was frozen for a few seconds in shock and she quickly got off the sofa to comfort him, but he was already starting to whimper and turn back to his plastic train.

Collins stood up too. ‘That’s enough, I reckon,’ she said. She waited for Thorne and Kitson to get up, then ushered them towards the front door.

Kitson stopped and turned at the end of the hallway. ‘Please try and talk some sense into her, Nina.’

Collins reached past her and opened the door. ‘What would make sense is for you lot to stop pissing about and catch this nutter. All right, love? Then we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation, would we?’

‘For Jason’s sake,’ Thorne said.

Collins all but pushed them both out on to the front step and stared Thorne down, her swagger returned. She said, ‘I liked you better when you were telling your shit jokes.’

Then she slammed the door in their faces.

‘Looks like it’s got to be an arrest then,’ Kitson said, as they walked towards the car.

Thorne shook his head and moved quickly ahead of her. ‘Last chance,’ he said. He opened the door of the BMW, reached inside for a large brown envelope and walked back past Kitson, towards Debbie Mitchell’s front door.

‘Tom…?’

He said nothing when Nina Collins opened the door. Just pushed the envelope into her hand and wheeled away. He was halfway back to the car when he heard the door close behind him.

Kitson stared at him as he turned the ignition over. ‘Was that what I think it was?’

‘Impossible to answer that,’ Thorne said. He held up his hand to stop her speaking again, as if it might help the engine catch. ‘I have no idea what you think it was.’

Back at the office there were still a few Anthony Garveys to trace and eliminate. There was paperwork for the DVLA and assorted credit-reference agencies to be completed as part of the hunt for Graham Fowler and Simon Walsh; liaison with forces in the north in an effort to track down Andrew Dowd. So, in terms of excitement, there was nothing to match the small wager that Thorne and Kitson had made with each other on the way back from Whetstone.

‘By the end of the day, I reckon,’ Kitson had said.

‘No chance.’

‘I’m telling you. Collins is the type who likes to have her say.’

There was every chance Kitson was right, but Thorne was in the mood to argue that white was black. ‘Tomorrow,’ he’d said. ‘Earliest, if at all.’

‘Tenner?’

Being of a mind to argue – ‘chopsy’, his father used to call it – was one thing, but this was cold, hard cash. Thorne had read somewhere that the buzz of gambling lay in the fear of losing far more than in the possibility of winning, and having recently kicked an online poker habit, he’d been looking for something to make his heart beat a little bit faster. ‘You’re on,’ he’d said.

With fifteen minutes until going-home time, Sam Karim put his head round the door to say that Brigstocke wanted a word, and Thorne’s heart-rate increased for all the wrong reasons. ‘How are you going to spend the money?’ he asked on his way to the door.

‘I’m saving up for shoes,’ Kitson said. ‘Do you want to go double or quits?’

‘On what?’

‘Another tenner says Spurs lose tomorrow.’

At home against Aston Villa. Should be guaranteed at least a point. It was Spurs, though…

‘I think somebody’s bottle’s gone,’ Kitson said.

Karim was still standing in the doorway. ‘The guv’nor did say now.’

‘Stick it up your arse,’ Thorne said. ‘Both of you.’

‘I think maybe you should make another appointment to see that brain doctor,’ Brigstocke said. He leaned back against the edge of his desk, arms folded.

Thorne said nothing. It was usually best just to sit there and take it.

‘Tell him to have a look, see if he can find one.’

Brigstocke had moved on from the straightforward, high-volume bollocking – he had done that while recounting his fifteen-minute phone conversation with Nina Collins – and was now on to the sarcasm. Before long he would be into the last phase, which Thorne enjoyed the least: the one where the pitch dropped and the tone became one of sadness and disappointment, as though the offence for which he was dishing out the dressing down had actually wounded him. Thorne knew that Brigstocke had learned this ‘you’ve let me down, you’ve let yourself down, you’ve let the whole school down’ approach from Trevor Jesmond, who considered himself a master of it. Thorne had been on the receiving end many times, had looked suitably chastened at the slowly shaking head and the puppy-in-need-of-a-home expression, but in Jesmond’s case he always relished it, working on the principle that if he was upsetting the superintendent, he was clearly doing something right.