Bloodline by Mark Billingham Page B

familiar.’
    â€˜Sounded what ?’
    â€˜So, this DI was calling to check the details we didn’t give out to the press. See if they matched up with a murder they caught a few weeks back.’
    â€˜That doesn’t sound good,’ Kitson said.
    Thorne was already dialling . . .
    Once the pleasantries were out of the way, DI Paul Brewer told Thorne that the body of Catherine Burke, a nurse aged twenty-three, had been discovered three weeks earlier in the flat she had shared with her boyfriend, on a quiet street behind Leicester City’s football ground.
    She had been struck on the back of the head with a heavy ornament and then suffocated with a plastic bag.
    â€˜It was the suffocation bit that got the old antennae twitching,’ Brewer said, the East Midlands accent not as thick as Thorne had been expecting. ‘When your superintendent mentioned it on the box. Wasn’t me that saw it, but as soon as I heard I thought it would be worth following up. You know, just to make sure.’ He sounded pleased with himself. ‘Looks like I was spot on.’
    â€˜Three weeks ago, you said?’
    â€˜Right.’
    â€˜And?’
    A chuckle. ‘And . . . brick wall, mate. We’ve got a description of a bloke she was seen talking to outside the hospital the day before, but we’ve had sweet FA off that. She was an occasional drug user, tablets mostly, nicked them from her own hospital as it turned out, but that’s led us nowhere. To be honest, it was all going stone cold until your one turned up.’
    â€˜Stroke of luck,’ Thorne said.
    Brewer said something else, but Thorne was too busy mouthing obscenities at Kitson and Holland.
    â€˜What about forensics?’
    â€˜That was the easy bit,’ Brewer said. ‘Looks like she scratched him when he had the bag over her head. We dug plenty of blood and skin from under her nails, so we can match the bastard up as soon as we make an arrest.’
    Thorne scribbled ‘GOT DNA’ on the piece of paper and pushed it across the desk for Holland and Kitson to see.
    â€˜You still there?’
    â€˜So, how are we going to work this?’ Thorne asked.
    â€˜Not a clue, mate,’ Brewer said. ‘I know it won’t be anything to do with me, so it don’t matter what I think. My guv’nor’s probably on the phone to your guv’nor as we speak, carving it up. Politics, budgets, all that shit. We just do what we’re told, right?’
    â€˜Right . . .’
    â€˜Just so you know . . . I’m not bothered about territory, anything like that,’ Brewer said. ‘No need to worry about any of that crap. We can sort out who gets the credit once we’ve caught him, fair enough?’
    Thorne knew that, whatever opinion he was rapidly forming about DI Paul Brewer - Job-pissed and probably disliked by all his colleagues - he was going to have to get along with him. He thanked him for his help, praising his initiative and insisting that the credit would most definitely go where it was due. He called him ‘Paul’ as often as he could manage without gagging, promising him a night on the town when they eventually got together and trying to sound pleased when Brewer promised to take him up on the offer.
    â€˜It’s from an X-ray, by the way,’ Brewer said.
    â€˜What is?’
    â€˜The piece of plastic in her hand.’ Brewer sounded pleased with himself again. He waited. ‘There was a piece of plastic, right?’
    â€˜An X-ray of what?’
    â€˜They can’t tell us that just yet. There’s a few letters and numbers on it but they can’t make sense of them. If we’re lucky, your piece might help.’
    When Thorne looked up he saw the expressions of confusion from Holland and Kitson who had only heard his side of the conversation.
    â€˜X-ray?’ Kitson whispered.
    Thorne put a hand over the mouthpiece, told them he’d be another minute.