The Dying Hours Read Free Page B

the fridge, until he heard the front door close.
    He carried his tea across to the kitchen table. He spent a minute or two turning the pages of the previous day’s
Evening Standard
. He moved across and switched on the TV in the corner, watched the news without taking any of it in.
    Three months, since he and Helen Weeks had begun more or less living together. ‘More or less’, because they had never really talked about it as a formal arrangement, the understanding being that as long as he was based at Lewisham, it was far more convenient for Thorne to stay in Tulse Hill than it was for him to travel all the way down from his own place in Kentish Town. They had talked once or twice about renting Thorne’s flat out, but Thorne was reluctant, despite the fact that the extra income would have come in useful. He didn’t particularly want strangers in his place and could not be bothered with the legal hassles of being a landlord, but if he were being really honest, it was more to do with the hope that he might find himself back in north London sooner rather than later.
    The truth was, Thorne would always be a north Londoner and anywhere south of the South Bank still felt alien to him. Sprawling and soulless; dun-coloured. The air just that little bit harder to breathe. Estate agents and arty types in the south-east doing their best to make ‘edgy’ and ‘gritty’ sound like selling points. The better-off in the greener bits talking about the tennis or the rugby or the deer in Richmond Park and all of them looking enviously across the water towards Camden, Islington and Hackney. The abysmal transport links and the terrible football teams…
    Thorne knew very well that a good many south Londoners would view north London with the same horror, but he didn’t care. North London was the city he knew, that he loved.
    Not that he had said any of that to Helen.
    He still crossed the river as often as he could. He went back to meet up with Phil Hendricks at the Grafton Arms or the Bengal Lancer, and occasionally with Dave Holland, a DS in the Murder Squad at Becke House in Colindale. Thorne’s old squad…
    ‘How you finding it?’ Holland had said, the last time. Then he’d seen the look on Thorne’s face and gone back to studying his pint, knowing he could not have asked a more stupid question if he’d tried.
    Three months, since the case that had brought Thorne and Helen together, the case that had seen him demoted to uniform.
    ‘Not a demotion strictly speaking, of course,’ the chief superintendent had told him. ‘You’re still an inspector at the end of the day.’ The man had barely been able to conceal his glee at finally being shot of Thorne, having tried on many previous occasions. ‘Who knows? You might end up feeling that this was a very good move.’
    Slapped down, that was how Thorne
felt
. Though bearing in mind how he had earned it, he supposed that he’d got off relatively lightly. He knew that what he had done – what he had
needed
to do – to ensure a young mother’s survival during an armed siege in a local newsagent’s was never going to play well with the powers that be. Ultimately though – as he told himself often, pulling on that crisp white shirt with the epaulettes, straightening that cap – he had saved Detective Sergeant Helen Weeks and, much to the surprise of both of them, ended up in bed with her.
    ‘
Another
one?’ Hendricks had said when Thorne had told him. ‘After the last one turned out so well?’
    Thorne’s previous girlfriend, another copper. They had split up only a few months before he and Helen had got together.
    ‘You want to knock this business with women on the head, mate. Come to the dark side.’
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘You know it’s always been a matter of time.’
    ‘Actually, it’s not even the sex that bothers me,’ Thorne had said. ‘It’s having to like small dogs and musicals.’ It was the kind of crack Thorne could get away with, as