Authors: Mark Billingham
‘What do you think scares me more?’ Mercer shouted. ‘Going back inside for the rest of my life, or a bullet between the eyes?’
‘I know which one scares
me
,’ Hackett said. ‘So let’s get rid of the gun.’ He was coming gradually closer, every bit as focused on the gun as Thorne was. His eyes left Mercer’s for just a moment, flashed to Thorne’s.
A nod.
‘Seriously,’ Mercer said. He lowered the gun a few inches. ‘That’s no more of a choice than I gave your mate.’
‘Everyone wants to live,’ Hackett said.
‘You think?’
‘Every one of the people you killed.’
‘What about them?’
‘Didn’t they beg for their lives at the end?’
‘Not the same thing.’ Mercer thought for a few seconds, slowly shifting his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Besides which, it doesn’t really matter anyway, because I’m not sure I believe you.’
‘Believe what you—’
Mercer raised the gun again, took half a step across the roof and straightened his arm as if preparing to shoot. He paused, lowered the gun, then turned to look left and right, mock-confused. ‘Looks like your firearms officers have fallen asleep on the job,’ he said. He shook his head and slowly raised his arm again. ‘Nice try, though.’
Now, Hackett looked afraid, eyes wide as Thorne inched across the rooftop, trying to close the gap between himself and Mercer without being seen. He watched the DCI’s mouth fall open when he realised what was about to happen. Mercer smiled, and an instant before he snapped his arm straight again, as the necessary muscles began to move beneath his windbreaker, Thorne threw himself across the few feet that remained between them and made a grab for the gun.
The impact carried them both several feet as they grappled for control of it. They flailed and grunted, wet hands slipping against flesh and metal, faces pressed together. Hackett rushed to help, but was still seconds away from reaching them when Thorne’s shoes lost purchase on the rain-soaked surface and he tumbled backwards, pulling Mercer down on top of him.
The gunshot was deadened by the bodies on either side of it.
Thorne lay on his back and fought for breath. His legs kicked slowly against the sodden asphalt as he watched Mercer get to his feet and saw Hackett begin to run. The old man’s arms hung at his sides. His eyes were down, searching the floor for the gun, and when he finally looked up, there was barely a moment for his face to register the surprise before Hackett’s head had smashed into it.
A noise like stepping on a snail in the dark.
A grunt of pain and realisation.
Mercer tumbled back against the ledge, and over.
It began to get darker as the blood leaked from somewhere in Thorne’s side and the rain poured into his eyes. He was aware of Hackett bending over him, saying something. Before he went under, he thought he could hear Mercer scream as he fell, then realised that he was being stupid, that the old man was dead already.
It was sirens.
Helen leaned against the arms of Thorne’s wheelchair and bent down to kiss him. ‘I’ll be back tonight,’ she said. ‘Anything else you need?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Parked at the end of his bed, Thorne turned in the chair and looked around his room. He had music on his phone, decent biscuits in the cupboard, a pile of books and magazines on the side-table that he would probably never read. ‘Why don’t you bring Alfie in?’
‘I’ll see,’ she said. ‘Probably easier just to leave him with Jenny.’
‘Be nice to see him.’
Helen nodded. ‘Well, let’s see what kind of mood he’s in, shall we? If he’s tired he’ll just be grizzly and if he’s too lively he’ll end up pulling one of your tubes out or switching some machine off.’
‘That won’t be a problem,’ Thorne said. ‘They’ve got some great sedatives in here.’
Helen kissed him again and walked to the door. She told him to call if he thought of anything else.
He picked up the TV remote and began flicking through the channels on the small flat-screen mounted high in the corner of the room. Music videos, cartoons and couples looking at holiday homes. Jeremy Kyle was berating some toothless philanderer but Thorne skipped quickly ahead, having more reason than usual to worry about his blood pressure.
Blood that was no longer wholly his own.
Thorne had already lost a good deal of it by the time he had arrived at hospital two nights earlier. He had needed multiple transfusions. The bullet had missed all his vital organs, but the surgery to remove it had not been straightforward and though he was and never had been in any real danger, he would be in hospital for at least another day or two.
Several weeks’ recuperation at home after that. Helen was already trying to organise compassionate leave.
‘That doesn’t mean you can mope around the flat listening to cowboy music all day,’ she had said the day before. ‘I’m not that compassionate.’
He settled for an episode of
Family Guy
, though it hurt like hell when he laughed and he was happy enough to turn it off when DCI Russell Brigstocke walked in a few minutes later.
‘All right for some,’ Brigstocke said, looking around.
Thorne was pleased to see him, and scared to death.
They were old friends, but months before it had been Brigstocke who had broken the news of his transfer back to uniform. It had not been a pleasant encounter for either of them, but still, Thorne could not help but suspect that Brigstocke was here now to deliver a rather more devastating blow.
‘Nice en-suite too.’ Thorne scraped a smile together and nodded towards the door in the corner. ‘If I’d known the Met were going to stump up for a private room, I’d’ve got myself shot ages ago.’
The DCI perched on the edge of the bed and they made appropriate small talk. Bed baths and nurses’ uniforms, catheters and morphine highs. The growing impatience on Thorne’s face must have been obvious enough though and, after a few minutes, Brigstocke got down to business as if it were something that had merely slipped his mind.
‘They arrested Ian Tully,’ he said.
‘Good,’ Thorne said.
‘Conspiracy to commit, perverting the course of justice. Kidnap thrown in for good measure, obviously.’
Thorne nodded. Unwillingly or not, it had been Tully who had helped Mercer bundle Thorne into the back of the car that night. Helped drag him up to the rooftop.
‘I don’t know what he has or hasn’t told them,’ Brigstocke said. ‘But the DPS
have
been asking a few questions about you and the information you may or may not have withheld about Terry Mercer.’
‘Only a few?’
‘How much you knew, when you knew it. Why you chose not to share that knowledge with the appropriate people.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t think any of this is coming out of the blue, is it?’
‘What about Holland and Kitson?’
‘I haven’t heard anything,’ Brigstocke said. ‘They’ll be interviewed, almost certainly. I mean, I know they were doing stuff for you on the side… and when I say I know, obviously I mean I
don’t
know.’
Thorne nodded his understanding and his thanks.
Brigstocke asked if there was anything to eat and Thorne pointed him towards the cupboard by the bed. Brigstocke rummaged inside for a few moments and came away with a couple of Thorne’s biscuits.
‘Missed breakfast,’ he said.
‘So where are they going with this?’ Thorne asked. ‘The DPS.’
‘Yeah, well.’ Brigstocke swallowed. ‘I talked to your mate Neil Hackett first thing this morning.’
‘That doesn’t sound good.’
Hackett, who had stayed talking to him on that rooftop while the sirens had grown louder, who had been there alongside the paramedics as he was wheeled through the doors of the hospital. Had he still been there hours later when Thorne had come round from the surgery? Looming on the far side of the recovery room? Perhaps Thorne had imagined that. He certainly remembered seeing Helen and Phil…
‘Actually, he’s doing his best to dig you out of a hole.’
‘
What?
’
‘Not all the way out, but it’s certainly not doing you any harm. He’s told them that you
did
go to him with your suspicions and that he chose to ignore them. He’s also told them that you saved his life up on that roof.’
‘He said that?’
‘I don’t think he’s recommending you for a medal, anything like that.’
‘I think it’s fairer to say he saved mine.’
‘You made a pretty decent job of that yourself,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Pressing your
EMER
button. If that ambulance had taken very much longer…’
Surprised as Thorne was to hear it, what Hackett was now doing on his behalf made sense. At the time, Thorne had had more important things to worry about, but Hackett’s appearance on that rooftop had confirmed what he had suspected for a while and explained why the MIT man had not gone to the authorities.
He was every bit the glory-hunter that Thorne was.
From the moment Ian Tully had come to him, drip-feeding information and trying to strike a bargain, Hackett had wanted whatever it was Thorne had stumbled upon for himself. He had been happy to let Thorne do the donkey work. Content to step in at the death to discredit Thorne and claim the credit for Mercer’s apprehension.
The death
.
It had been unfortunate for Hackett that choosing to follow Thorne and the men who had abducted him on to that roof had almost cost him his own life as well as Thorne’s. His actions now were tantamount to an unspoken offer; a suggestion that the pair of them should keep their actions and their motives for them to themselves. An understanding that neither would say anything about what the other had done. That all debts between them were settled.
Most importantly of all, it was an agreement that nothing more would be said about what everyone presumed to have been Terry Mercer’s suicide.
‘So come on, Russell,’ Thorne said. ‘Let’s have it.’
‘Let’s have what?’
‘Jesus, your bedside manner’s bloody awful, you know that?’
‘You’re not even in bed,’ Brigstocke said. The tone was flippant, but he suddenly looked very serious.
Thorne tried not to lose his temper. ‘Are we talking about a few pips getting knocked off or worse than that?’ He waited, but Brigstocke would not look at him. ‘Seriously, if they think I’m going back to wearing a tall hat, they can shove it, and if they want me out altogether I’m happy to chuck it in anyway.’
Brigstocke brushed crumbs off the bed, turned to him. Sighed.
‘You want the good news or the bad news?’
This book would not have been written were it not for the enthusiasm and friendship of NW and KT; two amazing police officers who not only suggested I take Thorne out of a suit and back to the ‘sharp end’ but took the trouble to show me just how sharp it is. Tough, tender and hilarious; they appear in
The Dying Hours
pretty much as themselves.
Bins, Terror… I hope you both approve.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Caroline Haughey for her legal expertise and for brilliance above and beyond in suggesting a great way to nail Frank Anderson! Thank you to Wendy Lee and Tony Fuller, who were as sharp-eyed and helpful as ever, as was NH. Thanks too, to all the officers whose brains I picked during my graveyard shifts in south-east London. I gather that they could have been a lot worse, but believe me, those nights felt anything but Q----.
When it comes to agent and editor, I remain as lucky as any writer could be. Sarah Lutyens’ taste in furniture is never less than immaculate and David Shelley at Little, Brown is quite simply the best in the business.
Most importantly, a long overdue ‘thank you’ to all the readers who have followed Thorne’s ups and downs over eleven novels and who will, I hope, be glad to see him back. There are writers for whom the reaction of readers is not important. I am not one of them. Until a book is read, it is no more than pages and print. It is the readers who bring a book to life and I am hugely grateful to those who continue to breathe life into mine. Oh… I should point out to those readers who are also animal lovers, that the tale of ‘Two-Cats’ Pearson is true and was told to me by a police officer who wishes to remain anonymous!
Finally, thanks and a whole lot more to Claire, as always.
‘
I am like a magpie in reverse. Instead of being attracted to shiny things, I’m attracted to dark things. I don’t subscribe to the idea that crime writers are unique in being sick or twisted in any way. We all have a dark side. I get my ideas from exactly the same place that you do.’
So says Mark Billingham, bestselling crime novelist and the author of the book you have just finished reading,
The Dying Hours
. Billingham’s story is more complex than this self-assessment makes out: his CV also includes actor, stand-up comedian, script-writer and children’s author. But more of those later.
For the time being, it is enough to say that for the past twelve years, and thirteen novels, ‘dark things’ have been Billingham’s stock-in-trade. His central character, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, has pursued serial killers (working alone and in pairs), foiled rapists, child killers, and even a shopkeeper whose desperation for justice drives him to kidnap and violence. He has even appeared on television, thanks to David Morrissey’s impressive performance. It is saying something, then, to suggest that
The Dying Hours
may be Billingham’s bleakest story to date: a tale of coercion and fear, revenge and suicide, injustice and its opposite, whatever that might be.
As with all the best and most successful crime series – from Holmes to Rebus, Maigret to Warshawski, Poirot to Bosch, Marlowe to our own Tom Thorne – the arrival of a new instalment promises a complex kind of pleasure. A fresh episode tantalises with revelations in an ever-expanding fictional universe.
In
The Dying Hours
, Thorne copes not only with a new relationship, but with co-habitation (in
south
London no less) and the prospect of a young stepchild-in-waiting. His professional life is in a similar state of flux. Demoted and back in uniform for the first time in a quarter of a century, he has a new partner, new chips on his shoulder and new criminals on the street. There are familiar faces: regular sidekicks Hendricks, Holland and Kitson. But even this trio is in perpetual motion. Arguably the only stable points are Thorne’s beloved Johnny Cash and Tottenham Hotspur. And murder, of course. There is always murder.
At the same time, the more intricate a detective’s story runs – the further we travel from their often rudimentary beginnings – the closer readers get to the possibility of their end. ‘Every writer goes on too long,’ Billingham acknowledges. ‘You know what no one ever says? “The best book in that series is number seventeen.” If my readers were polled on the best Billingham, the vast majority would say my first novel,
Sleepyhead
.’
Fans needn’t worry – even when Billingham names his own favourite novel as
In the Dark
, a standalone that hardly features Thorne at all. This is not a sign that Billingham’s contrary and contradictory leading man is on the verge of retirement, or worse; his next investigation is already underway.
But as its title implies,
The Dying Hours
is full of endings. This is a thriller revolving around multiple murders after all, and Mark Billingham has proved himself as one of the genre’s most capable executioners. Even so, his latest novel is elegiac in other ways than this. Billingham’s brand of criminal entertainment has inevitably been concerned with matters of life and death. But running beneath the artfully constructed plot are graver meditations on time and change, death and the corrosive affects of violence on the human psyche.
There is the scene in which Thorne meets retired DCI Ian Tully, a dead-ringer for himself only a few years down the line. Aimless, single and lonely, he was one of those ‘unfortunate ones who were lost without a warrant card.’ This foretaste of a possible future-after is bleak indeed. Having taken his dog for a walk, Tully offers to help Thorne with the case. The ‘sincere, desperate’ offer triggers the pathos of the chapter’s final sentence: ‘As things stood, bagging dog shit was clearly the most useful thing ex-DCI Ian Tully did all day.’
No one is exempt from this melancholy, reflective mood. Our villain may seem on first sight like a characteristically sinister Billingham sadist, but even he finds time to ponder the meaning of existence as his victims face their final curtain: ‘What comes afterwards?’, our killer wonders. ‘Nothing, probably. That was what he’d always thought, just darkness, like when you’re asleep and not dreaming about anything. No bad thing,’ he reckons, ‘not considering the shit most people wade through their whole lives…’
A decade spent investigating death and grievous bodily harm has taken a different toll on series regulars. Billingham reveals that an early working title was ‘This Bloody Job’, now reworked as a headline for part two of the novel. Take Dave Holland, first seen in
Sleepyhead
with ‘tidy blond hair and ruddy complexion’ as an enthusiastic and idealist young detective: ‘He doesn’t look like a policeman, Thorne thought, he looks like a prefect.’ Fast forward eleven years: ‘Thorne had watched as the shine was taken off him day by day; seen him graduate from floppy-haired, wide-eyed new boy to an officer whose approach to the realities of the job was now every bit as practical as his haircut.’
This evolution is Thorne’s worst nightmare. The very first line of Billingham’s very first book runs: ‘Thorne hated the idea of coppers being hardened. A hardened copper was useless. Like hardened paint. He was just… resigned.’ And what of Thorne? In
The Dying
Hours
he isn’t hardened or resigned so much as tarnished. Billingham offers a rare physical description of an older, sadder, if not wiser man: ‘He stared at the face looking back at him. Duller, deader than it was the last time he looked. Grey hair that was still more pronounced on one side than the other, but was now more pronounced everywhere. The small, straight scar on what had once been the only chin he had.’
This shift – from scary whodunit to exciting but contemplative
why
dunit – places
The Dying Hours
as a turning point in a series that has already been filled with them. These are not just the devilish plot twists that Billingham is justly praised for planting, but the different stages of the series as a whole: the early trilogy of shockers, through an increasingly naturalistic middle to this new, mature ‘blue period’.
So what better time to catch up with Mark Billingham to discuss cases past and present, where Thorne has been and where he might be going, and trace how a wannabe actor from Birmingham ends up an award-winning crime writer with a penchant for country and western.
When we met at Billingham’s north London home, it seemed that the melancholy mood of
The Dying Hours
was deceptive. Anyone who has seen him perform stand-up or read at literary events knows that his conversation is lively, opinionated (Billingham prefers ‘gobby’) and littered with jokes. He can sound equally light-hearted when faced with heavyweight questions. For example: how does he balance the pressures of marrying classic crime plots with his own literary vision? ‘You listen for the voice in your head telling you to do something different. Having said that, I’m not likely to turn in a slim volume of poetry or a recipe book. I love crime fiction first and foremost. I find it hard to read anything else. I need a body every two or three chapters or at the very least a car chase.’ You can take the crime writer out of The Comedy Store, it seems, but you can’t always do the opposite.
And yet, it is hard to miss the tone and themes of
The Dying Hours
running throughout Billingham’s conversation. ‘I wanted to write a book about old age,’ he tells me at one point. ‘There’s a moment when Thorne is wondering why there aren’t more witnesses and he talks about how people would always remember the kid in the hoodie, but barely notice an old man. I was interested in that notion of the elderly becoming invisible.’
Thorne’s own time-ravaged state came as a mild shock to his creator. Having begun the series by ageing his central protagonist at roughly a year per book, Billingham dispensed with this itinerary in recent episodes.
The Dying Hours
offered an opportunity to catch up with Thorne after a temporary hiatus.
‘I wasn’t specifically saying how old he is, but making it clear he’s somewhere in his late forties – that he has a few years and maybe even a few stone on the policemen around him. At the same time, he is in a place job-wise that he hasn’t been for a long time. He can’t run quite as fast as before. He’s losing a bit of hearing. There are aches and pains, and a lot more grey hair. Thorne is starting to be aware of his own mortality.’ Billingham laughs, a little uneasily.
Thorne is not alone. Billingham admits that he has been reviewing his own life and preoccupations in recent years. Turning fifty a couple of years ago had something to do with it. This notable birthday coincided with another significant anniversary: 2011 marked Billingham’s first decade in crime fiction. He realised he wasn’t the same novelist who published
Sleepyhead
back in 2001. Or not entirely.
‘Being in my early fifties and having written over a dozen books, I’m suddenly less interested in the crash, bang, wallop… less preoccupied with the motor of the narrative. There is still blood and badness but what
really
haunts Thorne now is whether he should have had a kid, not whether he should have caught a particular killer. Alongside a decreasing interest in graphic violence, this shift in emphasis means I am probably going to be writing different books.’
In
The Dying Hours
, we are given more insight than ever before into Thorne’s inner life, thought processes and (although our taciturn Detective Inspector would squirm at the notion) his feelings. ‘These were the parts of the book I used to be least interested in. Now they are the parts I’m
most
interested in. It’s what John Harvey calls the “looking out the window” moments. These are my equivalent to the “back porch” moments in the Harry Bosch novels, where Michael Connelly puts Harry out on the back porch, so he can listen to some jazz, look out across the Valley and
think
about stuff. These days, Tom’s got a lot more to think about.’
Viewed in a broader context, Billingham’s desire to innovate while remaining true to his personal
raison d’etre
– to entertain – has defined his career as a whole. Whether he was working as an actor, a comedian or a writer, he has weighed artistic endeavour against commercial success, the need to express himself and connect with an audience. It was a realisation that came to him as a stand-up:
‘Once you become aware that you’re a crowd-pleaser – and I’ve never understood people who use this as a pejorative term – you realise that it’s your job to stand in front of six hundred people and make sure that you entertain them. I was always happy to be a crowd-pleaser. Don’t people who have paid good money for a ticket deserved to be
pleased
? I remember arguing with a comedian once after watching him scream and shout at a shocked and unamused audience for twenty minutes in what was basically a self-indulgent therapy session. Afterwards I asked him if he genuinely didn’t care about his audience. He basically said, “Sod them, that was for me.” To this day, I have no common ground with writers who don’t give a stuff what their readers think, who claim to write only for themselves. When I write, the invisible reader is looking over my shoulder at the computer screen. Even when I’m finished, it’s still just paper and ink. A book is not actually a
book
until it is read.’
Born in 1961, Mark Billingham grew up in Birmingham. Those looking for the roots of his anti-magpie attraction to ‘dark things’ frequently cite his parents’ divorce and his father’s absence during his formative years. Billingham himself admits he was intrigued when his wife pointed out the recurrence of father– son relationships in his early novels. But, he maintains, his was a happy enough childhood. ‘I wasn’t traumatised by something that was and still is extremely common. It was just a divorce. It wasn’t a horrible thing.’
What darkness there was in Billingham’s infancy and adolescence can be seen in the books he began to devour. A maths teacher introduced him to the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, while a summer reading
Jaws
and
The Godfather
turned him onto the raw power of popular fiction. ‘No book had ever affected me like those. The descriptions of sex and violence knocked me for six. At school, we read novels like
Animal Farm
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Great books of course, but because we read them at school it always felt like homework. They didn’t have that visceral force of a huge popular blockbuster.’
For the moment, murder was restricted to Billingham’s fledgling love of pop music. The first record he remembers buying was Tony Christie’s ‘I Did What I Did For Maria’. The prime draws – or so he remembers – were Christie’s voice, a catchy melody and the mariachi trumpet. It wasn’t until decades later that Billingham suspected a possible attraction to the menacing tale of the lyrics. ‘It’s an
incredibly
dark story about a man about to be executed for taking revenge on the villain who raped and murdered his wife. Part of me wonders whether, even at the age of eleven, I was somehow drawn to that really dark stuff.’ Billingham pauses, shakes his head in mock sorrow. ‘Apparently it was also Jeremy Clarkson’s first single.’
What
was
evident from Billingham’s early years was a predilection for performance. ‘I’m just a huge show-off. Maybe I wanted attention, but it was also what I was good at. It was my nature. I never the quiet, studious type. I’m proud to admit that I have shown off shamelessly in various ways throughout my life.’
For Billingham, performance is the single seam that unites the various stages of his career. From the start, this combined comedy, acting and writing. ‘I would try to write funny stories at school. If the teacher asked me to come forward and read my story out to the class, the buzz of that would get me through the week. It was an incredible high.’
This rush inspired Billingham’s first creative ambition. ‘Thirty years ago, I wanted to be an actor more than anything in the world. At school, unless you were a sporting superstar or an academic genius, you could easily get lost. The only other outlet was the school play. The first time I acted, I realised I was good at it. That reaction from an audience was like crack cocaine.’ It was also, Billingham adds, the only way a pupil at an all boys’ Birmingham grammar school could meet girls.