That phrase though . . .
Afterwards, they sat in the corner near the water-dispenser, facing away from the main part of an open-plan waiting area. Four plastic chairs bolted together. A nice, lemon-coloured wal and children’s drawings tacked on to a cork board. A wicker table with a few magazines and a box of tissues.
Thorne squeezed Louise’s hand. It felt smal and cold inside his own. He squeezed again, and she looked up; smiled and sniffed.
‘You OK?’ she asked.
Thorne nodded, thinking that, as euphemisms went, it was a pretty good one. Bland yet final. Probably softened the blow for most people, which was, after al , the point.
Not viable
.
Dead. Dead inside you.
He wondered if he should try it for size himself, trot it out the next time he had to meet someone at a mortuary or knock on some poor sod’s door in the middle of the night.
Thing is, your husband ran into some drunken idiot with a knife in his pocket. I’m afraid he’s
. . .
no longer viable.
Fine, so it made the victim sound like an android, but that detachment was important, right? You needed the distance. It was that or a few more empty wine bottles in your recycling bin every week.
Softening the blow for you just as much as for them.
I’m sorry to have to tell you that your son has been shot. Shot to non-viability. He’s as non-viable as a doornail.
‘Tom?’
Thorne glanced up at the smal nudge from Louise, watched as the woman who had performed the scan came across the waiting area towards them. She was Indian, with a wide streak of red through her hair. Somewhere in her early thirties, Thorne guessed. Her smile was perfect: sorrowful, but with a spring in its step.
‘OK, I think I’ve managed to find you a bed.’
‘Thank you,’ Louise said.
‘When did you last eat?’
‘I’ve not had anything since breakfast.’
‘That’s good. We’l try to get the D and C done straight away.’ The woman handed Louise a sheet of paper, told her how to get to the ward she needed. Then she looked at Thorne.
‘You might want to go home and pick up a few things for her. Nightdress, whatever . . .’
Thorne nodded while the woman talked about Louise needing to put her feet up for a couple of days. Kept on nodding when she said that they should
both
take things easy, that there were phone numbers on the sheet for people they could talk to, if that was what they wanted.
He watched her walk back towards her room, turning to cal the next couple inside when she was at the door. There was a TV mounted high on the wal in the opposite corner. A middle-aged couple was being shown round a vil a in France or Italy, the wife saying something about how colourful the tiles were.
‘D and C?’
Louise was studying the instructions on her piece of paper. ‘Dilatation and curettage.’
Thorne waited, none the wiser. It sounded horrible.
‘Scraping,’ Louise said, eventual y.
A thin woman in green overal s pushed a trol ey stacked with cleaning equipment along the corridor towards them. She stopped alongside the wicker table, took a rag and plastic spray-gun from her trol ey and squirted one of the empty chairs. She looked across at Thorne and Louise as she wiped.
‘What are you crying for?’
Thorne studied the woman for a few seconds, then turned to Louise, who was staring at the floor, folding the paper over and over. He was very hot suddenly, could feel the short hairs prickling at the back of his neck and the film of sweat between his hand and Louise’s. He nodded to the sign on the door of the Antenatal Scanning Suite, then snapped his head back to the cleaner.
‘Take a fucking guess,’ he said.
It took Thorne nearly fifteen minutes to drive the mile or so from the Whittington Hospital to Kentish Town, but at least the journey gave him time to calm down a little. To stop thinking about the heave in Louise’s chest when that cleaner had spoken to them. About wanting to stuff that rag in the woman’s stupid mouth.
She’d looked at him like he was being
rude
, for Christ’s sake!
Back at the flat, he threw some food into a bowl for Elvis and stuffed the things Louise had asked for into a plastic bag: a clean T-shirt; bra and knickers; a hairbrush and a few bits of make-up. He stopped at the door on his way out, needing to lean on the wal for a few seconds before walking back into the living room. He dropped on to the sofa hard and sat there, staring into space, for a while, with the plastic bag cradled on his lap.
It felt cold in the flat. Three weeks into September and high time the heating was put back on. Time for the petty squabbles to start again, with Thorne nudging up the thermostat and Louise nudging it back down again when she thought he wasn’t looking. Secretive readjustments of the timer. The constant fiddling with radiators.
The sil y sit-com stuff that Thorne loved, despite the bickering.
They had been arguing - rather more seriously - since Louise had first learned she was pregnant, about what their long-term living arrangements would be. Though they spent most of their time at Thorne’s place, Louise stil had her own flat in Pimlico. She was reluctant to sel it, or at least reluctant to accept the assumption that she would. Though they were both keen on sharing a place
somewhere
, they could not agree which property to put on the market, so they had started talking about sel ing
both
flats, then buying somewhere new together, as wel as maybe a one-bedroom flat they could rent out.
Thorne stared at the fireplace and wondered if al that would be put on hold now. If lots of the things they’d discussed - some more seriously than others - would be shifted quietly on to the back burner, or become subjects that were simply never mentioned again.
Moving a bit further out of the city.
Getting married.
Quitting the Job.
Thorne stood up and col ected the phone from the table near the door, carried it back to the sofa.
They had been talking hypothetical y when most of those things had been mentioned; certainly the stuff about weddings and leaving the Force. Just stupid talk, that was al , along with the jokes about not wanting ginger kids and the barmy baby names.
‘
What about Damien?
’
‘
I don’t think so.
’
‘
Wasn’t his name
“
Thorne
”
in the film?
’
‘
Without an
“
E
”
. Anyway, who says he’s going to be a
“
Thorne
”
. Why can’t he be a
“
Porter
”?
Come to think of it, who says he’s going to be a “he”?
’
Thorne jabbed at the buttons on the phone. He’d only signed out for two hours, so now he needed to let them know that he wouldn’t be back until sometime the fol owing day. He’d have been happiest leaving a message, but he was connected straight through to Detective Sergeant Samir Karim in the Incident Room.
‘You must be psychic.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The DCI’s in the middle of leaving a message on your phone.’
Thorne reached into his jacket for his mobile. He’d turned it off in the hospital and forgotten to switch it back on again. By the time the screen had come back to life and the tones were sounding to indicate that he had a message, Detective Chief Inspector Russel Brigstocke was on the landline.
‘Good timing, mate. Or bad.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve just caught a job.’ Brigstocke took a slurp of tea or coffee. ‘Nasty one, by the sound of it.’
Thorne swore quietly, but not quietly enough.
‘Look, I was about to give it to Kitson anyway.’
‘You were right before,’ Thorne said. ‘Bad timing.’
‘It’s yours if you fancy it.’
Thorne thought about Louise, what the woman had said about needing to take things easy. Yvonne Kitson was perfectly capable of dealing with a new case, and he had plenty on his plate at work as it was. But he was already on his feet, hunting for a pen and paper.
Elvis was mooching around his ankles while Thorne scribbled a few notes. Brigstocke was right, it was a nasty one, but Thorne wasn’t overly surprised. It was usual y The nasty ones they put his way.
‘Husband?’ Thorne asked. ‘Boyfriend?’
‘Husband found the body. Made the cal , then ran out into the street screaming the place down.’
‘Made the cal
first
?’
‘Right.
Then
lost it, by al accounts,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Banging on doors, tel ing everyone she was dead, screaming about blood and bottles. Definitely not what the good people of Finchley are used to.’
‘Finchley’s easy,’ Thorne said.
‘Right, nice local one for you.’
Five or six miles north of Kentish Town. He’d be more or less driving past the Whittington Hospital. ‘I’l need to make a quick stop on the way,’ Thorne said. ‘But I should be there in half an hour or so.’
‘No rush. She isn’t going anywhere.’
It took Thorne a few seconds to realise that Brigstocke was talking about a dead woman and not about Louise Porter.
‘Give me the address.’
TWO
It was a quiet street, a few turnings east of the High Road. Edwardian houses with neat front gardens and off-road parking. Many, like number 48, had been divided into flats, though this house was now itself divided from its neighbours: a tarpaulin shielding the side-al ey, uniformed officers stationed at each corner of the front lawn and crime-scene tape fluttering above the flower beds.
Thorne arrived just before eight, and it had already been dark for almost an hour. It was light enough in the kitchen of the downstairs flat, where the beams from twin arc-lamps il uminated every mote of dust and puff of fingerprint powder, bounced off the blue plastic suits of the CSIs and washed across the linoleum on the floor. A retro-style, black-and-white check, its simple pattern ruined by a few spots of blood. And by the body they had leaked from.
‘I think I’m about ready to turn her,’ Phil Hendricks said.
In the corner, a crime scene investigator was scraping at the edge of a low cupboard. She barely glanced up. ‘That’l be a first . . .’
Hendricks grinned and gave the woman the finger, then looked around and asked Thorne if he wanted to come closer. To squeeze in where he could get a better view.
Thorne doubted that the view would get any better, but he walked across and placed himself between the stil - and video-camera operators, opposite the pair of CSIs who were preparing to give Hendricks the help he needed. To add the necessary degree of strength to his gentleness.
‘OK, easy does it.’
The woman was face down, arms by her sides. Her shirt had been lifted, or had ridden up, showing purplish patches on the skin just above her waist where the livor mortis had started and revealing that her bra had not been removed.
‘Something, I suppose,’ a female CSI said as she walked past.
Thorne raised his eyes from the body and looked towards the single window. There were plates and mugs on the draining board next to the sink. A light was flashing on the front of the washing machine to let somebody know that the cycle had finished.
There was stil a trace of normality.
Assuming they didn’t get a result in the first few days, Thorne would try to come back at some point. He found it useful to spend time where the victim had lived; even more so if it was also where they had died. But he would wait until he didn’t have to weave between crouching CSIs and negotiate the depressing paraphernalia of a crime scene.
And until the smel had gone.
He remembered some movie where the cop would stand in the houses where people had been murdered and commune with their kil er.
Was this where you killed them, you son of a
bitch? Is that where you watched them from?
Al that shit . . .
For Thorne, it just came down to wanting to know something about the victim. Something other than what their last meal had been and what their liver weighed at the time of death.
Something simple and stupid would usual y do it. A picture on a bedroom wal . The biscuits they kept in the kitchen cupboard or the book that they would never finish reading.
As for what went on in the mind of the kil er, Thorne was happy knowing just enough to catch him, and no more.
Now, he watched as what remained of Emily Walker was moved, saw the hand flop back across the leg as it was lifted and turned in one slow, smooth movement. Saw those strands of hair that were not caked in blood fal away from her face as she was laid down on her back.
‘Cheers, lads.’
Hendricks worked with a good team. He insisted on it. Thorne remembered one CSI in particular - back when they were content to be cal ed scene of crime officers - handling the partial y decomposed body of an old man no better than if it were a sack of spuds. He’d watched Hendricks pushing the SOCO up against a wal and pressing a heavily tattooed forearm across the man’s throat. He couldn’t recal seeing the two of them at the same crime scene since.
The cameramen stepped forward and went to work. When they’d finished, Hendricks mumbled a few preparatory notes into his digital recorder.
‘How much longer, Phil?’ Thorne asked.
Hendricks lifted one of the dead woman’s arms; began bending back the fingers of a fist that was closed tight. ‘Hour and a half.’ The thick Manchester accent stretched out the pathologist’s final word, flattened the vowel. ‘Two at a push.’
Thorne checked his watch. ‘Right.’
‘You on a promise or something?’
Thorne did his best to summon the right expression, something conspiratorial and devilish, but he wasn’t sure he’d managed it. He turned to see where Detective Sergeant Dave Hol and had got to.
‘She’s got something in her hand,’ Hendricks said.
Thorne turned back quickly and bent down to get a closer look, watched as Hendricks went to work with his tweezers and lifted something from the victim’s fist. It appeared to be a smal square of plastic or cel uloid, dark and wafer thin. Hendricks dropped it into an evidence bag and held it up to the light.