Mark Billingham - Bloodline

‘You’re up early.’

‘Some things are worth getting out of bed for,’ Brigstocke said. ‘I’m in such a good mood I might pop back between the sheets, start Mrs Brigstocke’s day off with a bang.’

Thorne thought about the night before and felt himself start to stiffen. He had hoped that the guilt might have gone, but it was still there, solid and stubborn in his chest.

‘Let’s have it then.’

‘Graham Fowler walked into Charing Cross station at eleven o’clock last night with a copy of the Standard he’d been planning to sleep on.’

‘Bloody hell!’

‘It gets better,’ Brigstocke said. ‘About half an hour ago, they took a call from Andrew Dowd in the Incident Room. Looks like he finally turned on his phone and picked up our message.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Kendal,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Where the mint cake comes from. Someone’s on the way up there to get him.’

Careful not to wake Louise, Thorne pushed back the duvet and stood naked by the side of the bed in the dark. ‘So, Jesmond and his cronies might get away with it after all.’

‘We all might.’

‘Jammy bastards.’

Brigstocke laughed. ‘Us or them?’

‘I was talking about Fowler and Dowd,’ Thorne said.

At the worst moments, when she feels like lashing out, she knows that there’s only one man really responsible for what happened, but it’s hard not to blame those two extras from The Bill who had been sitting in the car outside. Or that tosser Thorne and his cronies, the ones who’d stuck it there twenty-four hours a day, since the day Debbie and Jason had moved in.

Working from home the way she does, the way she did, a police car on your doorstep is hardly good for business, after all.

She’d always preferred to do business from her own place, and most of the girls she knew felt the same. She felt safer inside her own four walls and in control. But she could hardly expect any of her regulars to come strolling in past a pair of boys in blue, could she, and the money wasn’t going to earn itself. So she’d had to make a few more visits to crappy hotels and dodgy flats. A few more hand-jobs in cars, parked up behind the football ground. She’d had to take a few more risks.

And she hardly ever worked in the afternoon, that was what was so stupid! She was rarely up for it, preferring to sleep in after a long night. To keep the days for herself and get slowly geared up for as many punters as she could squeeze in the next evening.

A balding, flabby businessman down from Manchester for some conference or other was the reason why she wasn’t there when it happened. Not that her being at home would have made a lot of difference. He got past those two coppers easily enough.

Sick fucker was too clever for all of them in the end.

Worst thing of all was that she’d made a promise to Debbie a week or so before it happened. Told her she’d get clean and sort herself out. Talked all sorts of shit about the three of them getting away somewhere for a couple of weeks once they’d got enough money together. One of those places that was covered up, so the weather wouldn’t matter. Somewhere with a decent club for her and Debbie to have fun in the evenings, with a swimming pool and plenty of rides and stuff to keep Jason happy.

‘Long as there’s a railway line somewhere near by,’ Debbie had said. ‘Somewhere he can blow at the trains.’

Christ…

All gone for nothing now, the promise and the plans.

She’s been pissing away almost everything she earns on gear ever since that day Anthony Garvey came. It isn’t like she needs the stuff more than she used to; she just needs to get out of it more often. She can’t face thinking straight and worrying about what the future is going to be like. But it’s getting so that however much she does, the high isn’t lasting long enough.

Some days, with some punter or other sweating away on top of her, it was like she’d just… wake up, and remember what had happened, and it was all she could do to stop herself screaming and clawing at his neck. Lately, she’s found herself taking even more risks. Getting into iffy-looking cars when she knows she should step away; letting an arsehole or two get rough with her, feeling better when it hurts.

Feeling like she deserves it.

Nina stands in front of the mirror by the front door. Slapping on the last bits of make-up before she goes out to work: a head teacher who likes her to talk dirty and who has arranged to pick her up in front of the petrol station.

She checks her bag for condoms, KY and tissues, stares at herself.

Rough as fuck, she thinks, knowing that, before, she’d have said it out loud and that Debbie would have laughed. Would have told her that she looked great and that whoever handed over cash for the pleasure of her company that night should be bloody grateful.

She runs fingers through the spikes in her hair and does her best to smile at herself. Says, ‘God bless.’

Fumbling for one of the tissues in her handbag, Nina turns towards the front door.

Thorne drove south towards Euston, through the skinnier end of the morning rush hour. The headache he had woken up with showed no sign of easing off, and a heated argument about Spurs’ lack of form on Five Live was not helping. Monday morning, and it felt like it.

He had spent the majority of the weekend quite happily on his own, save for an hour or two in the Grafton with Phil Hendricks, Sunday lunchtime. Louise had gone to stay with her parents for a couple of days, got back late the night before and left early in the morning.

‘She’s on the mend,’ Hendricks had said in the pub.

‘Yeah, she is.’ Thorne had spoken slowly, careful to avoid stressing the she.

‘The pair of you should get away, soon as you can.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘You might have a chance. Now this Garvey thing isn’t quite as frantic.’

‘For you, maybe.’

Hendricks had been right, though. Everything had calmed down a little. There were five unsolved murders – six, if you factored in Chloe Sinclair – and there was still a killer to be caught, but there had certainly been a change of focus, now that the last two people on Anthony Garvey’s list had been found safe and well.

A small team of specially trained officers had spent the previous two days ‘debriefing’ Andrew Dowd and Graham Fowler. In practice, this meant explaining the threat they had been under as sensitively as possible, emphasising that they were now completely safe and talking them through their new living arrangements. This had not gone altogether smoothly, according to the reports Thorne had been sent. Neither man had been completely cooperative, with both described as ‘difficult’ on paper and ‘not quite the full shilling’ in a phone conversation Thorne had had with one of the liaison officers.

‘Understandable, I suppose.’ The officer had sounded relieved that his day was over. ‘Mums murdered, some nutter trying to do the same to them, and it looks like the pair of them are on medication, of one sort or another.’

‘Is it going to be a problem?’

‘We’ve got tasers.’

Thorne had laughed, but he had seen the havoc that grief, fear and drugs were each capable of wreaking on their own. All three were likely to be a volatile and dangerous combination.

Understandable, I suppose…

He turned into a wide, newly tarmacked street behind Euston station, a little apprehensive about the conversations he was shortly to have with two men he would be meeting for the first time. He wished he had Kitson with him, or Holland. They were both better than he was when it came to putting people at their ease, his own gifts tending towards the opposite.