Bloodline-9 Read Free

then ran out into the street screaming the place down.’
    ‘Made the cal first ?’
    ‘Right. Then lost it, by al accounts,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Banging on doors, tel ing everyone she was dead, screaming about blood and bottles. Definitely not what the good people of Finchley are used to.’
    ‘Finchley’s easy,’ Thorne said.
    ‘Right, nice local one for you.’
    Five or six miles north of Kentish Town. He’d be more or less driving past the Whittington Hospital. ‘I’l need to make a quick stop on the way,’ Thorne said. ‘But I should be there in half an hour or so.’
    ‘No rush. She isn’t going anywhere.’
    It took Thorne a few seconds to realise that Brigstocke was talking about a dead woman and not about Louise Porter.
    ‘Give me the address.’

    TWO
    It was a quiet street, a few turnings east of the High Road. Edwardian houses with neat front gardens and off-road parking. Many, like number 48, had been divided into flats, though this house was now itself divided from its neighbours: a tarpaulin shielding the side-al ey, uniformed officers stationed at each corner of the front lawn and crime-scene tape fluttering above the flower beds.
    Thorne arrived just before eight, and it had already been dark for almost an hour. It was light enough in the kitchen of the downstairs flat, where the beams from twin arc-lamps il uminated every mote of dust and puff of fingerprint powder, bounced off the blue plastic suits of the CSIs and washed across the linoleum on the floor. A retro-style, black-and-white check, its simple pattern ruined by a few spots of blood. And by the body they had leaked from.
    ‘I think I’m about ready to turn her,’ Phil Hendricks said.
    In the corner, a crime scene investigator was scraping at the edge of a low cupboard. She barely glanced up. ‘That’l be a first . . .’
    Hendricks grinned and gave the woman the finger, then looked around and asked Thorne if he wanted to come closer. To squeeze in where he could get a better view.
    Thorne doubted that the view would get any better, but he walked across and placed himself between the stil - and video-camera operators, opposite the pair of CSIs who were preparing to give Hendricks the help he needed. To add the necessary degree of strength to his gentleness.
    ‘OK, easy does it.’
    The woman was face down, arms by her sides. Her shirt had been lifted, or had ridden up, showing purplish patches on the skin just above her waist where the livor mortis had started and revealing that her bra had not been removed.
    ‘Something, I suppose,’ a female CSI said as she walked past.
    Thorne raised his eyes from the body and looked towards the single window. There were plates and mugs on the draining board next to the sink. A light was flashing on the front of the washing machine to let somebody know that the cycle had finished.
    There was stil a trace of normality.
    Assuming they didn’t get a result in the first few days, Thorne would try to come back at some point. He found it useful to spend time where the victim had lived; even more so if it was also where they had died. But he would wait until he didn’t have to weave between crouching CSIs and negotiate the depressing paraphernalia of a crime scene.
    And until the smel had gone.
    He remembered some movie where the cop would stand in the houses where people had been murdered and commune with their kil er. Was this where you killed them, you son of a bitch? Is that where you watched them from?
    Al that shit . . .
    For Thorne, it just came down to wanting to know something about the victim. Something other than what their last meal had been and what their liver weighed at the time of death.
    Something simple and stupid would usual y do it. A picture on a bedroom wal . The biscuits they kept in the kitchen cupboard or the book that they would never finish reading.
    As for what went on in the mind of the kil er, Thorne was happy knowing just enough to catch him, and no more.
    Now, he