SIXTY-FIVE

Thorne’s phone rang just after six thirty am and he scrabbled for it, a reflex. Were he not on holiday, a call this early would almost certainly mean that he’d caught a murder.

It was not a number he recognised.

‘Woke you, did I?’

‘Yeah.’ Thorne shifted to the edge of the bed and dropped his voice, hoping that Helen had not been woken up too. Neither of them had got a lot of sleep. ‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Bob Patterson.’

It took Thorne a few seconds to place the name. ‘It’s very early.’

‘For you, maybe. I’ve been up since five.’

‘Well done.’

‘So anyway . . . I’ve been thinking about whoever stole my piglet.’

‘Right,’ Thorne said. Helen turned towards him, groaning softly. He reached out to touch her shoulder. Her skin felt cold, so he pulled the sheet up.

‘Reckoned you might be interested,’ Patterson said. ‘That’s all. You said, if I thought of anything that might help.’

‘Who is it?’ Helen asked.

Thorne shook his head and sat up. ‘I’m listening, Mr Patterson.’

‘I’ve not got time to tell you now, have I?’ The farmer sounded exasperated. ‘I’ve still got animals to feed. I’ll be having my breakfast in an hour or so though . . . ’

While the farmer gave him instructions, Thorne watched the first thin fingers of light from outside reaching through the gap in the floral curtains. When the call had finished, he tossed his phone on to the bed and sat there as, unbidden, a conversation with his father came into his mind.

It was more than just the memory of those old springs and speakers on Bob Patterson’s kitchen table. It had been an attempt to understand why his father had felt the need to get up at stupid o’clock every morning, the time getting progressively earlier in inverse proportion to the number of things the old man actually needed to do.

‘I can get up when I want, can’t I?’ Jim Thorne had begun to sound irritated, the fuse getting shorter as the Alzheimer’s took hold. ‘Free country last time I checked.’

‘I’m only thinking of you,’ Thorne had said. ‘You got up every day to go to work and now, when you’ve got the chance . . . ’

‘Why would I want to stay in bed? Festering.’ The old man had been walking quickly from room to room, checking each one out but refusing to say what he was looking for. Now, he stopped and looked at Thorne, an increasingly rare moment of clarity. He said, ‘You get to my age you have to grab hold of every second by the throat. Sleeping it all away would be like giving up.’

‘I know that, but most of the time you end up falling asleep again anyway, sitting in front of the telly.’

‘It’s a question of making an effort.’

Paula was working an early shift so Thorne guessed that the central heating had already kicked in, but it had not quite taken the chill off the room yet. He slipped quickly back beneath the covers.

‘What did he want?’ Helen asked.

‘Something about the pig he had stolen. Says he wants to meet me.’

‘Right.’ Helen’s eyes were still closed and she spoke softly, as if she were not quite ready to wake up, to engage.

‘Are you going to Linda’s?’

‘Don’t know yet.’

Thorne could hear Paula moving around downstairs. The chink of crockery and the scrape of a chair, a radio being switched on. He tried to place the song, but couldn’t. ‘So, is that all right?’

Now, Helen opened her eyes. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘I don’t know. Just . . . if you wanted to talk some more.’

‘I think I’ve probably said everything.’

Thorne nodded. Helen’s words had been mumbled, deadened by the pillow, but still there had seemed an odd emphasis to them. Was there a suggestion there was more she was waiting for him to say? Had he not said enough the night before?

Had he not said the right things?

‘I’ll call you when I’ve spoken to the farmer.’

Helen turned over slowly. She said, ‘I’m not ill, Tom.’

‘Tell you what he said about the pig, I mean.’

Helen watched him struggle to get dressed in the semi-dark. Moving as quietly as he could, digging for clean socks and underwear in the suitcase he had still not bothered to unpack.

She was happy for him to go, keen to spend some time alone.

She had not meant to be sharp with him, but it felt as if the filters that modified her reactions were no longer working, as though they had been slowly eaten away from the moment she had set foot back in Polesford. It was obvious that he had been worried for a while, that her behaviour had seemed strange, but there had been no way to control it. It felt like the circuits in her brain had been rewired by a lunatic; the connections to her heart misfiring or burned out completely. She had been ready to kill that teenager for gobbing at her, that journalist for doing her job. She craved affection and support and yet she had no idea what to do with them when they were offered.

There was no more than a crumb of comfort in knowing that she was not alone, that Linda Bates probably felt the same way.

She had told Helen that she would call, but Helen was not expecting her to. She wondered if they would ever see one another again. Their conversation about Aurora Harley, about the things the girl’s grandfather had done, had been no more . . . cathartic than the one with Thorne.

Tears, but a strange reluctance to touch, to make any kind of physical contact, and when it was over it felt as though they were all but unknown to each other again.

So many times at work she had told strangers how much better they would feel once they had told this or that terrible story. It was important to share these things, she would blithely tell them, to get it off their chests so that they could move on.

A weight off their shoulders.

It had not felt like that telling Tom, did not feel like it now. He had held her for a long time afterwards, said all those things anyone with an ounce of empathy or compassion would say, but she had felt something hardening with each overly gentle touch and promise, every whispered assurance.

The weight had moved somewhere else, that was all.

Now, she lay still, knowing that he was dressed and ready to leave but that he was standing at the end of the bed, watching her. Eventually, she heard the door open, the slow drag back across the carpet and the soft snick as he closed it behind him with as little noise as possible. She pulled the bedclothes close around her neck and shoulders, hoped that she might be able to get back to sleep for a while.

It wasn’t Tom she had needed to tell.

Hendricks woke to the sound of self-satisfied babble on Radio 4 and the sight of Liam Southworth’s fingers crawling across his chest. They stopped to tease a nipple for a while, then began to move down. Hendricks turned his head and saw the grin he’d quickly come to recognise as meaning it was time to get naughty.

That was how Liam described it. ‘Getting naughty’.

‘Sleep well?’

Hendricks nodded. ‘Knackered.’

Liam’s grin widened. ‘Me too.’

‘Haven’t you got a lecture first thing?’

‘I set the alarm early.’

‘Come here.’ Hendricks reached across and drew Liam to him, stretched his arms wide across the pillows as Liam laid his head on his shoulder. ‘That’s nice.’

‘Yeah, it is,’ Liam said.

Hendricks meant it. He felt as relaxed as he had in a long time, having finally come to terms with his surprise at not feeling the urge to bolt once he’d got Liam Southworth into bed. He looked at Liam’s fingers, now moving through the sparse tufts of hair on his chest. Liam’s own chest was almost hairless, something else Hendricks liked. His last few boyfriends . . . partners, whatever . . . had been very much on the hirsute side – certainly far hairier than Liam was at any rate – and although he had found it sexy up to a point, there was no denying that a frenzied bout of tongue-thrashing was a lot more fun without the inevitable stubble-rash.

Recently, the other stuff had been that bit less gentle too, and both he and the men involved would have certainly described what they’d been up to in bed – or more memorably in the toilets at several clubs – in rather more graphic terms than Liam. That had been fine with Hendricks at the time. It had been what he had wanted, needed. This though, the last couple of nights, had been something else altogether, something he hadn’t done for a long time. Yeah . . . this was all right.

Nothing wrong with getting naughty.

‘Might be getting some news today from my pal in the lab,’ Liam said.

‘That would be good.’ Hendricks was thinking that Thorne would be pleased and that Liam’s accent really was the sexiest thing he’d ever heard.

‘She’s done us quite a favour, you know?’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘And she’s still asking questions about who’s going to pay for it. I mean you know how much all this stuff costs, right? The extraction of the sample, the front-end analysis, the bio-chemical procedures.’

‘Can’t you just buy her a box of chocolates or something?’

‘I mean just the use of the electrophoresic laser, you know . . . ’

‘Bloody hell,’ Hendricks said. ‘You seriously need to work on your pillow talk.’

‘Just telling you.’

‘I’m kidding.’ Hendricks was surprised at feeling the need to qualify his remark, to be sure that Liam did not feel bad.

‘One thing though.’ Liam’s fingers stopped moving against Hendricks’ chest. ‘I got a call from Tim Cornish.’

‘Right.’

‘Not best pleased, as you can imagine.’

‘Oh, I can.’

‘Once he’d finished shouting the odds, he made it pretty clear that he was the first person I should call. You know, if we got a result.’

‘Wanker made out like he wasn’t interested.’

‘Yeah, well I can promise you, he is.’

‘What’s he going to do with the information when he gets it, anyway?’

‘What’s your mate Tom going to do with it?’

Hendricks sat up a little. ‘Is this going to be a problem for you? I mean with all the consulting jobs?’

Liam was shaking his head.

‘You’re not going to lose any work over it, right?’

‘Long as I tell Cornish first, it’ll be fine.’

‘Sure?’

‘I was worried you’d be pissed off,’ Liam said. ‘That’s all.’

‘It is what it is.’ Hendricks shrugged. ‘Not sure Tom’s going to be too chuffed, but what can you do?’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Let me make it up to you . . . ’

‘There’s no need, honest.’ Then Hendricks saw that welcome grin again and watched Liam raise the duvet above his head and duck down beneath it.

Hendricks lay back and said, ‘I’ve forgotten about it already.’