Bloodline by Mark Billingham

while.’
    Brigstocke groaned. ‘How bloody long have I been doing this?’ he said. ‘And yet hearing stuff like that still depresses me.’ He eased himself up from Thorne’s desk and walked to the window. ‘I mean, I’m not saying it would be any better if her old man had caught her playing away from home and smacked her over the head with something. I know she wouldn’t be any less dead. But Jesus . . .’
    â€˜It should depress you,’ Thorne said. ‘When it doesn’t—’
    â€˜I know, time to retire.’
    â€˜You turn into Trevor Jesmond.’
    Brigstocke smiled. He picked up the piece of paper that had been spewing from the printer when he’d walked in. He looked down at the list of seven names. ‘This anything we should be looking at?’
    â€˜Don’t see why,’ Thorne said. ‘Garvey died in prison three years ago.’
    Brigstocke flapped the sheet of paper, as though he were fanning himself. ‘Just one of those freaky things.’
    The DCI nodded his understanding. The pair of them had worked a case only a few months before in which a man had been beaten to death in front of his family after confronting a noisy neighbour. It transpired that twenty years earlier, and only two streets away, exactly the same thing had happened to that victim’s father.
    â€˜One of many,’ Thorne said.
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    As it turned out, with a briefing that overran by twenty minutes and a Crown Prosecution Service lawyer who refused to get off the phone, lunchtime would have been a tricky time for Thorne to get away. But by then it did not matter: Louise had already called to say that she would be making her own way back to the flat. That she felt OK and needed to get out.
    Driving back at the end of the day, Thorne felt nervous, as though he and Louise had had an argument. He ran through the conversations they might have when he got home, but they all went out of his head the moment he stepped into the silent flat. When he saw her lying on her side in the darkened bedroom.
    â€˜It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I’m not asleep.’
    It was only eight o’clock, but Thorne got undressed and climbed in beside her. They lay still for a while, listening to a motorbike revving up in the street outside, and a song Thorne couldn’t quite place drifting down from the flat upstairs.
    â€˜Do you remember the Garvey killings?’ he asked.
    She grunted and he wondered if he had woken her up, then she said, ‘I was at college, I think. Why?’
    Thorne told her about Susan Sharpe. How a mother and daughter had been murdered, fifteen years apart. It was quiet now upstairs and Thorne still wasn’t sure what the song had been.
    â€˜You’re doing it again,’ Louise said. ‘Trying to make me feel better.’
    â€˜I wasn’t, I swear.’
    â€˜And all you’ve succeeded in doing is making yourself feel old.’
    Thorne laughed, for the first time in a few days. He pushed up close behind her and slid his arm across her stomach. After a few seconds he felt awkward and began to wonder if she would want it there, so he took it away again.

FIVE
    As per the standard system of rotas and rest days, Thorne spent seven Saturdays out of every eight at home. Normally, a Saturday morning would be taken up with sleeping far later than usual, nipping out for a newspaper then coming home for a gloriously unhealthy breakfast. Since Louise had come into his life, these were no longer always solitary activities, and thankfully the same was true of the sex, which could occasionally be squeezed in between the fry-up and Football Focus .
    This Saturday, two days after Emily Walker’s murder, all rest days had been cancelled and overtime approved where necessary. Thorne sat in his office at Becke House, not looking through statements, ignoring the reports on the desk in front of him, wondering instead if the