The Dying Hours by Mark Billingham Read Free Book Online

unfolded the piece of paper on which he’d scribbled everything down, set his open laptop on the bed next to him and reached for his phone.
    As offices went, this was certainly the cosiest Thorne had ever worked in.
    Assuming that the deaths of John and Margaret Cooper were not the suicides they appeared to be – and whatever had told Thorne that was the case still refused to make itself known to him – it was safe to say that their two children were not serious suspects. Both were in their fifties, with children of their own. The son, Andrew, had been in Edinburgh at the time of his parents’ deaths and his sister, Paula, lived in Leicester. Both were now staying at a hotel in London while making the funeral arrangements, and when Thorne called Andrew Cooper’s mobile he was able to speak to each of them in turn.
    He passed on his sympathies and assured them that having spoken to the pathologist, their parents would not have suffered. That it would have been over quickly. Each of them told him how shocked they were. Stunned, they both said. Their parents had both been in relatively good health, had seemed well and happy, and nobody in the family would ever have expected something like this.
    ‘The
last
thing…’
    The more Thorne heard, the more certain he became and the less bothered by his own subterfuge; the fact that he was not calling them for altogether benign reasons.
    ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot on your plate,’ he said to Paula. ‘But have you managed to talk to everybody that needs to be informed? I mean, it’s probably the last thing you want to think about, but presuming there was a will… I just wondered if you’d spoken to your parents’ solicitor?’
    It
was
the last thing either of them was thinking about, she told him and when Thorne offered to do it for them, she said there was really no need. She said she did not know this was the sort of thing the police did for bereaved families. ‘It’s not going to be complicated anyway,’ she said. ‘It’s only me and Andrew and it’s not like it’s a fortune or anything.’
    Thorne felt no more than a twinge of guilt when she thanked him for calling.
    ‘We just have no idea
why
,’ she said, before she hung up.
    Paula had been talking about why her parents would have wanted to take their own lives, but lying there, studying the pattern of cracks on the bedroom ceiling, Thorne was equally lost when it came to why anyone would want to murder them and make it appear that way.
    It was certainly not about money. It was not a burglary gone wrong and it was not done in a hurry, or in a rage.
    The bedroom was tidy.
    Nothing had been disturbed.
    So what was wrong with the picture?
 
    The last thing – always the last thing – to be considered was that there simply
was
no clear motive of any sort; nothing that Thorne had come across before, at any rate. Margaret and John Cooper might have died for no other reason than that specific to the individual who had killed them. If this was the case – and more than anything, Thorne hoped that it was not – then another possibility would need to be considered that was altogether more disturbing.
    That whoever killed them had done so simply because it was enjoyable.
    Thorne looked up another number and dialled.
    ‘It’s Tom,’ he said, when the call was answered. When the woman at the other end of the phone did not respond immediately, he added, ‘Thorne,’ then said, ‘Are you busy?’
    Elly Kennedy was a civilian intelligence analyst based at the Peel Centre in Colindale, in an office just along the corridor from the one Thorne had worked in. The two of them had flirted on and off for a while and there had once been some drunken fumbling at a party. Thorne had not spoken to her for over a year.
    She laughed. ‘Well, I might have known it wasn’t a social call.’
    ‘Can you speak?’
    ‘Meaning, can anyone hear me? No, go on, you’re fine…’
    Thorne told her what he needed her to look for