Death Message Read Online Free PDF

bet.' They turned on to the final flight. Kitson rarely spoke about life at home and Thorne felt vaguely honoured.
    'It's hard for him,' Kitson said. 'You know? It's a lot to cope with at that age. They don't know how to handle the pressure.'
    'How old is he?'
    'Fifteen.'
    Thorne grimaced. 'I'm three times that, near enough.' He leaned his shoulder against the door. The cold slapped him in the face as he stepped out into the car park. 'I wish some bugger would tell me how to handle it.'
    At the flat, Thorne had grated cheese into a bowl of tomato soup and stared at his new phone, willing it to ring. Finally, it had, twice in quick succession. Now Thorne was sitting in his living room, watching the two callers drink his lager and cheerfully take the piss out of him.
    It was a continuation of a discussion that had been going on for the last week, since Halloween, when Thorne had voiced his considerable antipathy towards the practice of 'trick or treating'.
    'It's a paedophile's dream,' he said now. 'An endless parade of kids knocking on the door.'
    Phil Hendricks took a slurp of Sainsbury's own-brand lager. 'That's bollocks. You're just tight, and you can't be arsed to get any sweeties in.'
    'It's a stupid bloody Americanism. We never used to do it . . .'
    'You're such a miserable git,' Louise said.
    'Most of them don't even make any effort. They don't dress up or anything.'
    'They're kids . . .'
    'It's just an excuse for ASBO fodder to chuck fireworks and stick dog-shit through old people's letterboxes.'
    'I think Louise is right,' Hendricks said. 'You're tight and miserable.'
    Thorne got up to fetch more beer from the kitchen. Hendricks was perched next to Louise on the sofa, and Thorne leaned in close as he walked past. As always, the pathologist was dressed in black, with the usual array of metalwork through eyebrow, nose, lip, cheek and tongue. 'You just like it because you don't need to wear a mask,' Thorne said.
    Hendricks gave him the finger. 'Homophobe!'
    Louise laughed and knocked over her beer can. She scrambled to pick it up but there wasn't too much left in it anyway.
    Walking back into the living room, Thorne was struck, as always, by how alike Hendricks and Louise were. They were both thirty-four, which, to their endless glee, gave them ten years on Thorne. Each was dark-haired and skinny, though Hendricks' hair was shaved rather than short, and Louise had far fewer piercings. Save for the differences in their accents, they might have been mistaken for brother and sister.
    Thorne handed each of them a fresh can.
    The two had become friends very quickly, gone out together to gay bars and clubs, and sometimes, watching them together, Thorne felt envious in a way he didn't care to spend too long analysing. When he and Louise had first started seeing one another, he'd been slightly annoyed that Hendricks hadn't seemed overly threatened; especially as Thorne, on occasion, had found himself to be more than a little jealous of Hendricks' boyfriends. As it happened, the three of them had spent a good deal of the last few months together; Hendricks having split from his long-term lover around the same time that Thorne and Louise had hooked up. The break-up had been over children: Hendricks was desperate to be a father and was now searching for a partner who shared his enthusiasm. More than once, he and Louise had joked about how she might help him out; about cutting Thorne out of the picture altogether.
    'Come on, Lou,' Hendricks had said. 'You'd be far better off with me. I've got decent taste in clothes, music, everything.'
    'Yeah, OK. Why not?'
    'I mean, obviously we won't actually do anything. There's ways and means. Besides, I don't think you'd be missing much, sex-wise.'
    'I can't argue with that.'
    Hendricks had hugged Louise and leered at Thorne. 'Right, that's sorted. Me and your girlfriend are buggering off to get creative with a turkey-baster . . .'
    Tonight, they drank a good deal more and emptied the cupboard