The Dying Hours by Mark Billingham Read Free Book Online Page B

cases would stand out.
    After more than an hour, he was left with two.
    A seventy-one-year-old man from Hounslow had slit his wrists in the bath a fortnight before. The week before that, a seventy-year-old woman from Hendon had left her house in the middle of the night and walked into the Brent reservoir.
    In both cases, the deceased had appeared happy and healthy before their deaths, and the families had said much the same things Thorne had heard from Andrew Cooper and his sister.
    He would never have done anything like that
.
    She’d just booked a holiday, for heaven’s sake
.
    It doesn’t make any sense
…
    Thorne read through all the documentation one more time and nothing that he saw could convince him that these grieving sons and daughters were wrong.
    By the time Thorne was putting his recently acquired reading glasses back in their case, it was after six. He turned on the TV to check the football scores and was happy to see that Spurs had turned Sunderland over at the Stadium of Light. Better yet, Arsenal had only scraped a draw. It was more than an hour since he’d spoken to Helen and, as they were still not back, he could only assume that Alfie had perked up. Thorne was ravenous, and wondered if she might fancy a takeaway when she eventually got back. He was midway through sending her a text suggesting exactly that when his phone rang.
    ‘Did you get everything?’ Elly Kennedy asked.
    Thorne told her that he had just finished reading it and thanked her again.
    ‘Listen, bearing in mind what you’re after, I thought you might be interested in an odd one that came in earlier today. I only just saw it, so—’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Hang on.’
    Thorne could hear the keyboard clicks as she called up the appropriate screen.
    ‘Seventy-three-year-old male. Suspected suicide by overdose and exit bag… nice and thorough… and there are Murder Squad detectives already on the scene. So, something sounds dodgy, doesn’t it?’
    Thorne reached up to scratch at the back of his neck; a strange yet familiar tickle. ‘Where?’
    ‘Stanmore,’ Elly said. ‘Some of your old lot, I think.’
    Thorne wrote down the address and hurried through to the bedroom to get dressed. As he scrambled back into the same clothes he’d come home in that morning, he tried to formulate what would be the perfect opening line for DCI Neil Hackett when he called him.
    ‘
Looks like I won’t be opening that pub just yet
,’ or ‘
Fancy coming out to play detective with me?
’
    Perhaps not, but he would think of something.
     
    Hackett was there before him. Thorne watched the man ease himself slowly out of a BMW that was considerably newer than his own as he pulled up. The DCI had been at Lewisham station when Thorne had called, so could not have got to Stanmore that much ahead of him. Nevertheless, an apology seemed like a good idea.
    ‘Traffic was bad,’ Thorne said.
    Hackett grunted and shoved his hands down into the pockets of a long black overcoat;
de rigueur
for the stylish DCI about town, though Thorne had never seen one in quite this size before. ‘Still not sure what I’m doing here,’ he said. He did not give Thorne the chance to answer and instead nodded past the two patrol cars towards the pair of uniformed officers standing outside the house. ‘Whatever the hell’s going on in there, it’s the wrong side of the river for us anyway.’ There was the first hint of a cold smile. ‘Your old stamping ground.’
    ‘I’m not convinced what happened to the Coopers was a one-off,’ Thorne said.
    ‘No?’
    ‘I think there might be at least two more.’
    ‘Two more suicides that aren’t really suicides?’
    ‘Two more cases that should be looked at again at the very least.’
    ‘All this based on what, exactly?’ Hackett asked. ‘Nothing even a moron would call evidence, I know that much.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Oh, yes of course… sorry, I forgot… we should all just go ahead and allocate money and manpower