Mark Billingham - Bloodline

‘Right, and his bloody taste in music.’

They were talking over an album Hendricks had dug out from the back of a cupboard, a CD he’d left at the flat one time or another, something they both knew Thorne would have hated.

‘I’ve got to say, I was amazed he had it in him at all.’

‘He was sound asleep at the time,’ Louise said. ‘I just helped myself.’

Hendricks laughed for a few seconds longer than he might have done with fewer glasses of wine inside him. Said, ‘So you are going to try again?’

‘We’ve not talked about it, and maybe not yet… but I want to, yeah.’

Hendricks drank, holding the wine in his mouth for a few seconds before swallowing. ‘Funny, I remember sitting here a couple of years ago… well, lying here actually, because I was staying over while I was getting the damp sorted in my flat. I was upset, because I really wanted a kid back then and the bloke I was with at the time wasn’t keen, so…’

Louise shuffled across and let a hand drop on to Hendricks’ knee. ‘I remember telling him about seeing this… exhibition on children’s mortuary facilities, this special room all done up to look like a kid’s bedroom. I’d seen a kid in there and it was like being kicked in the stomach. Anyway, I was telling him all this and suddenly I was just lying here, crying like a girl. No offence.’

‘None taken.’

Hendricks took another swig, emptied the glass. ‘Silly soft sod.’

‘You’d still like to have a child, though?’ Louise asked. ‘“Back then”, you said.’

‘Yeah, ’course I would. But now it’s just like… if it happens, it happens, you know? There’s no point getting worked up about it.’

‘That’s how I feel, I think. I say that – if we get pregnant again I’ll probably be going up the wall – but I reckon I’m less stressed about the whole idea now.’

‘That’s good,’ Hendricks said. ‘I mean, stress can have a lot to do with… you know.’

‘How was Tom? When you got upset?’

‘Awkward.’

Louise nodded, half smiling. ‘That’s how he’s been about this. Like he doesn’t know what to say. Or he wants to say something but he doesn’t know how to get it out.’

‘He’ll get there in the end.’

‘Yeah, that’s him,’ Louise said. ‘Awkward. And only happy when he’s got some awful murder case to get his teeth into.’

‘I don’t know about happy.’

‘OK then, comfortable.’

Hendricks thought, said, ‘Yeah, that’s about right.’

And they sat there and carried on drinking, comfortable enough with one another to say nothing for a while.

Thorne had rounded off a longish day with a quick one in the Oak, which had turned into a couple once Brigstocke and a few of the other lads had turned up. He had not meant to stay quite so long, but was glad he did, knowing now, as he drove back towards Kentish Town, that he had needed to let off a little steam.

It was better for everyone concerned.

He reached across to the passenger seat for his mobile, deciding to compound the fact that he was almost certainly over the limit by committing a second offence. If he were stopped, it would be by one of only two kinds of copper. There were those who would call him all sorts of silly beggar and look the other way and those who did their job properly and would gleefully do him without turning a hair.

He reckoned that fifty-fifty was pretty good odds.

‘Are you hands free?’ Kitson asked.

‘What do you think?’

‘I think that if anyone ever asks, I should deny having this conversation. ’

‘Where are you?’

‘At home,’ Kitson said. ‘Got back about ten minutes ago to a kitchen that looks like a bomb-site and a bloke who’s pissed off because he’s had two kids giving him grief all evening.’

Kitson had already left Becke House for her evening shift when Thorne had returned from his meeting with Sarah Dowd. He had spent the rest of the day being reasonably constructive between long bouts of window-watching. Trying to put together a rough picture of Anthony Garvey’s movements in recent weeks, and asking himself why he’d let Kitson handle the rough-sleeper lead while he had been content to drink coffee and do marriage-guidance duty in Shoreditch.

Now, he asked Kitson how things had panned out in the West End.

‘Aside from having to work with a tosspot of a trainee, pretty well.’ She told him about the sighting of a man who was almost certainly Anthony Garvey, who in all likelihood had been following Graham Fowler, waiting to pick his moment.

‘I was wondering how he does it,’ Thorne said. ‘Pick his moment I mean.’

‘Maybe he wants to do them in a particular order.’

‘I thought about that, but he’s not doing them in the same order their mothers were murdered.’

‘No point trying to second guess a nutcase,’ Kitson said.

Thorne said that she was probably right. He’d wasted too much time trying to do that in the past.

‘Oh, and I bumped into a friend of yours.’

‘Not too many of those about,’ Thorne said.

‘Bloke called Spike. Told me to say hello to you.’

Thorne feathered the brake of the BMW as his memory fired a series of unwelcome images into his mind: a network of tunnels; a couple making love inside a coffin-sized cardboard box; a syringe blooming with blood. ‘Was there a woman with him?’ he asked.

‘Not that I could see,’ Kitson said. ‘He looked pretty far gone, to be honest.’

Thorne thought about Spike and a woman named One-Day Caroline, who had loved each other and the drug that was killing them so fiercely. If Caroline had managed to get off the streets – and he hoped that was why she was no longer around – staying away from the one person who might drag her back on to them was probably a good idea. There had been a child as well, a boy. Thorne squeezed the steering wheel, willing himself to remember the name.

‘I’ll catch up with you tomorrow, then,’ Kitson said, breaking the silence.

He knew this was why he had been happy to let somebody else interview the rough sleepers. He had no desire to revisit a period of his life that had been so out of kilter, both personally and professionally. No need to step back into the shadows.

‘Right. Tomorrow.’ He jumped a red light at the Archway roundabout, still buzzing with the drink and with those images from his past, and wondering who he was trying to fool. Asking himself if his life now – professionally and personally – was really any better than it had been back then.

He cracked the window to let in some cold air, silently wished Spike well and drove on.

‘Tom…?’

Robbie. The kid’s name was Robbie.

Malcolm Reece, the man whose name had been provided by Raymond Garvey’s ex-wife, still worked for British Telecom, though, in the three decades since Jenny Duggan had first met him, he had risen from being an engineer to a service installation manager. He was based in a small office on an ugly industrial park in Staines, a Thames-side town in the London commuter belt that looked as depressing as it sounded.

He was decidedly frosty from the moment Chamberlain walked in.

‘Look, I’ve already spoken to the police once.’

‘I know,’ Chamberlain said.

‘Told them where I was on whatever dates… bloody ridiculous.’

Officers had spoken to Reece a fortnight earlier, as soon as the Garvey connection to the killings had been established. He had been eliminated from their enquiries almost immediately, but the record of the interview meant that Chamberlain had been able to track him down very quickly. ‘I’m actually here to talk to you about something else,’ she said.