TT13 Time of Death (2 page)

Thorne’s hand moved instinctively to his gut. He was suddenly regretting the decision to eat dessert. ‘You might need to give me twenty minutes.’

‘Lightweight.’

‘Fifteen, then. But you’ll have to do all the work.’

Helen walked towards the stairs and, as Thorne turned to follow her, he caught the eye of the girl behind the desk. He guessed that she had overheard, as she had suddenly managed to find a smile from somewhere.

Thorne was in the bathroom when Helen called him. He was brushing his teeth, smiling at the orderly way in which Helen had
laid out the contents of her washbag, replacing the range of complimentary toiletries that had already been secreted in her suitcase.

‘Tom …’

He walked back into the bedroom, still brushing. He spattered his Hank Williams T-shirt with toothpaste as he managed a muffled ‘What?’

Helen was sitting on a padded trunk at the end of the bed. She nodded towards the TV. ‘They’ve made an arrest.’

They had been following the story for the past three weeks, since the first girl had gone missing. It had all but slipped from the front pages, had no longer been the lead item on the TV news, until the previous day when a second girl had disappeared. This time the missing teenager had been seen getting into a car and suddenly the media were interested again.

Thorne walked quickly back into the bathroom, rinsed and spat. He rejoined Helen, sat next to her as she pointed the remote and turned the volume up.

‘It was always on the cards,’ Thorne said.

Helen would have been keenly monitoring such an investigation anyway, of course. As a police officer who worked on a child abuse investigation team. As someone all too aware of the suffering that missing persons cases wrought among those left waiting and hoping.

As a parent.

This one was different though.

On the screen, a young reporter in a smart coat and thick scarf talked directly to camera. She spoke, suitably grim-faced, yet evidently excited at breaking the news about this latest ‘significant development’. Behind her, almost certainly gathered together by the film crew for effect, a small group of locals jostled for position in a market square that Helen Weeks knew well.

This was the town in which she had grown up.

The reporter continued, talking over the same video package that had run the night before: a ragged line of officers in high-vis jackets moving slowly across a dark field; a distraught-looking couple being comforted by relatives; a different but equally distressed couple being bundled through a scrum of journalists brandishing cameras and microphones. The reporter said that, according to sources close to the investigation, a local man in his thirties had been identified as the suspect currently in custody. She gave the man’s name. She said it again, nice and slowly. ‘Police,’ she said, ‘have refused to confirm or deny that Stephen Bates is the man they are holding.’

‘Ouch,’ Thorne said. ‘Right now there’s a senior investigating officer ripping some gobshite a new arsehole.’

‘Leak could have come from anywhere,’ Helen said.

‘Not good though, is it?’

‘Not a lot anyone can do, not
there
. Somebody knows somebody who saw him taken to the station, whatever.’ Her eyes had not left the screen. ‘It’s not an easy place to keep secrets.’

Thorne was about to say something else, but Helen shushed him. A photograph filled the screen and the reporter proudly announced that this picture of the man now being questioned had been acquired exclusively from a source close to the family.

‘Another “source”,’ Thorne said. ‘Right.’

Helen shushed him again. She stood up slowly and stepped towards the screen.

It was a wedding photograph, a relatively recent one by the look of it, the happy couple posing outside a register office. The groom – a circle superimposed around his head – in a simple blue suit, grinning, a cigarette between his fingers. The bride in a dress that seemed a little over-the-top by comparison.

Thorne said, ‘Looks like a charmer—’

‘Shit!’

‘What?’

‘I know her.’ Helen jabbed a finger towards the screen. ‘I was at school with her. With the suspect’s wife.’

Thorne stood up and moved next to her. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘Linda Jackson. Well, she was Jackson back then, anyway.’

‘Are you sure?’

Helen nodded, stared at the screen. ‘We were in the same class …’

They watched for a few minutes more, but there was nothing beyond the same news regurgitated and once they had run out of horrified locals to interview and began running the same footage for a third time, Helen wandered into the bathroom.

Thorne turned the sound down on the TV and began to get undressed. He shouted, ‘She looks seriously pleased with herself, that reporter. Obviously reckons she’s got a promotion coming.’

Helen did not respond and, a few minutes later, as Thorne was climbing into bed, she came out of the bathroom. ‘I want to go up there,’ she said.

‘You what?’

‘I want to go home.’

Thorne sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Why?’

‘Think about what she’s going through. She’s got kids.’ She waved a hand towards the television. ‘They said.’

‘Hang on, how long’s it been since you’ve seen her?’

‘So?’

‘Near enough twenty years, right?’

‘I know what that place is like, Tom.’

‘Well, I can’t stop you, I suppose, but I think it’s stupid.’

They said nothing for a few long seconds. Helen opened the wardrobe and took out her suitcase.

‘Hang on, you’re not thinking of going
tonight
?’

‘Dad’s expecting us to be away all weekend,’ Helen said. She opened a drawer, took out a handful of socks and underwear and
carried them across to the case. ‘So there’s no problem looking after Alfie.’

‘I know, but still.’

‘We can be there in an hour and a half …
less
.’ She went back for more clothes. ‘There’s not going to be any traffic now.’

Thorne got off the bed and grabbed one of the two towelling dressing gowns that had been hanging inside the wardrobe. It was too small, but he pulled it on anyway. He placed himself strategically between Helen and her suitcase. ‘You’ve got no family up there any more, right? Where do you think you’re going to stay?’

‘I’ll sort something out.’

‘The place is teeming with coppers and reporters. You wouldn’t find anywhere tonight even if you went.’ He waited, relieved that she seemed to be thinking it over. ‘Why don’t we do this tomorrow?’

She nodded, reluctantly. ‘I’m going though.’

‘If that’s what you want.’

Helen took another look at the TV. There still appeared to be nothing new to report. She walked back towards the bathroom, stopped at the door.

‘You don’t have to come with me, you know.’

‘I know I don’t, but what am I going to do here on my own?’

‘You could go home,’ Helen said. ‘Hang out with Phil for a few days.’

‘Let’s talk about this in the morning,’ Thorne said.

‘You mean talk me out of it?’

‘Well, I
do
think it’s a stupid idea.’

‘I don’t care.’ Helen was about to say something else when her mobile rang. She stabbed at the handset and answered in a way that Thorne had become used to; the voice tightening a little. Helen’s sister, Jenny. Thorne was not her favourite person and the antipathy was entirely mutual. Much of the time, Helen could
not bear her sister either, impatient at being patronised by a sibling two years younger than she was.

‘Yes,’ Helen said. ‘I saw it. I know …’ She rolled her eyes at Thorne and walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

Thorne lay on the bed, nudged the volume on the TV back up. The reporter was talking to the studio again.

‘It’s hard to describe the atmosphere here tonight,’ she said. ‘There’s certainly a lot of anger.’

Thorne could hear Helen talking in the bathroom, but could not make out what she was saying.

The reporter was winding up, the crowd behind her larger now than it had been minutes before, the wind whipping at the ends of her scarf. Her voice was measured, nicely dramatic. ‘With two girls still missing and one of their own being questioned in connection with their abduction, the tension round here is palpable.’ She threw a look over her shoulder. ‘This is a community in shock.’

Thorne watched as the woman attempted to sign off, struggling to make herself heard above raised voices from nearby. Something about ‘our girls’ and ‘justice being done’. Something about stringing the bastard up.

He reached behind him, punched up the pillow.

It was not the holiday he’d had in mind.

They drove towards the M40, north through Oxfordshire on small roads crowded with mud-caked Chelsea Tractors, negotiating Saturday morning shoppers as they skirted Banbury. The bad weather had not let up since they’d set off. It was certainly looking like they would be on the road for rather more than the hour and a half it might have taken the night before.

‘A week in the sun’s sounding better than ever,’ Thorne said. He turned from the curtain of rain draping itself across the bonnet of the BMW and glanced across at Helen in the passenger seat. ‘What about Portugal? Or Tenerife, maybe?’ Another look. ‘Dave Holland’s always banging on about Tenerife.’

Helen just nodded, her gaze fixed on the shops and houses, the rain-lashed walls and hedges that drifted past. Since checking out of the hotel, after a disappointing breakfast and a tetchy exchange with the hotel manager, she had said very little. She had spent half an hour on the phone before breakfast making arrangements, but since then had seemed preoccupied. As determined as ever to make the trip, but clearly apprehensive about what awaited them when they reached their destination.

On the radio, the news led with the latest from Polesford.

Police were still refusing to confirm the identity of the man they had taken into custody but were, they said, continuing to question him. A senior officer made a short statement. He said that further information would be released, but only when the time was right. Echoing the reporter from the previous night’s television news, the correspondent talked at some length about the atmosphere in the town.

Anger, fear, profound shock.

Above all, she said, there was an overwhelming sense from the residents that theirs was not the sort of town where things like this happened.

Back in the studio, they began to talk about the latest unemployment figures and Thorne turned the sound down. ‘So, come on then, which is it?’ he asked. ‘A small town or a large village? You always talk like it’s a tiny place.’

After a few seconds, Helen turned to look at him as though she had failed to hear the question. Thorne shook his head to let her know it wasn’t important. He switched from the radio to the iPod connection and cued up some Lucinda Williams. He nudged the wiper speed up, spoke as much to himself as to Helen.

Said, ‘Yeah, bit of sun sounds good.’

Ten minutes later, making slow progress on the crowded motorway, Helen turned and said, ‘It’s actually a small market town. We lived in one of the villages just outside. There’s a couple of them a mile or two in each direction.’

‘Sounds nice,’ Thorne said.

‘It’s not like where we were yesterday.’

‘No antiques shops to mooch around in?’

She barked out a laugh. ‘Hardly. It’s like the Cotswolds, only without men in garish corduroy trousers, and a few more branches of Chicken Cottage.’

‘So, not all bad then.’

Thorne indicated, took the car past a van that was hogging the middle lane. He gave the driver a good hard stare as he pulled alongside.

‘I thought it was exciting when I was fifteen,’ Helen said. ‘Polesford was where we used to go on a Friday or Saturday night.’

‘Bit of clubbing?’

She shook her head. ‘As much snakebite as we could afford, a bit of dope in the bus shelter.’

‘Never had you pegged as a wild child.’

Helen smiled for the first time since they’d set off. ‘Just a crafty Woodbine in your day, was it? Or were cigarettes still rationed?’

Thorne returned the smile.

The fact that he was closer to fifty than Helen was to forty was something they joked about now and again. He would pretend to be outraged that she could not remember the Sex Pistols. She would ask him what it had been like to see Bill Haley and the Comets. Based on a few things Helen had said, Thorne guessed that the sort of comments her sister and several of her friends made about the age gap were rather more cutting.

‘It used to be nice,’ Helen said. ‘There’s
still
some nice bits. There’s an abbey.’

Thorne adopted his best countryside accent. ‘Ah … too many incomers, was it? City folks coming in and ruining the place?’

‘It’s not in
Cornwall
,’ Helen said.

‘Only rural accent I can do.’

‘Well, promise me you won’t do it again.’ She turned towards the window. ‘It’s Warwickshire, for God’s sake. It’s more like the accent on
The Archers
, if anything.’

‘Oh, God help us,’ Thorne said.

An hour later they turned off the motorway and within ten minutes were driving slowly along the main street in Dorbrook,
two miles south of Polesford. The village in which Helen had spent her childhood. Thorne could see what she had meant earlier. There was rather more stone cladding on display than thatch and Thorne doubted that, come the summer, there would be too many roses growing over the doorways.

They turned off the main street, slowed as they drove past a terrace of cottages that looked to be from the twenties or thirties. Cars were parked within a few feet of most front doors, their wheels on the pavement to allow heavy vehicles to get past. There was a convenience store opposite, a Chinese takeaway, a small area of asphalt adjacent, with a swing-set and roundabout.

Helen pointed, said, ‘There.’ Thorne slowed still further. ‘That was our house.’ She pushed the button and her window slid halfway down. ‘Front door was red when we lived there. There wasn’t double-glazing.’

Thorne stopped the car, checked to see there was nothing behind him. ‘You want to get out and have a look?’