The Dying Hours Read Online Free PDF Page B

and, as he walked past her, she put a hand on his sleeve. ‘That suicide last night. Those two idiots playing “whose cock’s the biggest?” You really need to let it go.’

FIVE
    As usual, there was half an hour’s paperwork to be done at the end of the shift. Thorne had to prepare the handover sheet, and add a line or two before signing off on reports of the more serious incidents. Thankfully, there had been fewer than might have been expected. A stabbing outside a club, a late-night grocer robbed at knifepoint, a fight in the Jolly Farmers between a group of less than jolly scaffolders, several of whom had taken scaff bars into the pub with them just in case. As a result of the heavy police presence in the town centre, the Tamil and TTFN boys had restricted themselves to no more than serious eyeballing and verbal abuse. Nastier stuff was coming, but mercifully it had not taken place on Thorne’s final night shift of the rotation.
    As soon as he was done, Thorne changed out of his uniform and stuffed the bits he was taking home into a plastic bag. He took his leather jacket from his locker and put it on. In the courtyard, dropping the bag into the boot of his car, he exchanged a few words with one or two of the lads as they left. They all agreed how much they were looking forward to four days off.
    Thorne said his goodbyes, but he was not going home just yet.
    He walked back inside, past his office and straight on until he came out by the stairwell behind the station’s front desk. He hung his ID around his neck then climbed two flights to the second floor. He skirted the CID offices, interview rooms and forensic suites, and eventually found himself standing at the entrance to the bridge.
    Lewisham station, reputedly the biggest in Europe, was composed of two entirely separate four-storey blocks linked by a covered walkway, thirty feet long and walled in glass. The block in which Thorne worked housed the Borough departments: CID and Uniform, Mounted Unit, Dogs. The other building was home to some of the more specialist squads: Firearms, Serious and Organised Crime and a Murder Investigation Team (MIT) that was the largest in south-east London.
    In the three months Thorne had worked as a uniformed inspector at Lewisham station, he had never crossed the bridge.
    He hesitated for a second or two, then began to walk across. He kept his head down as people passed him in both directions, angry with himself for feeling jittery, as though he were back at school and creeping nervously towards the headmaster’s office. He felt a little better by the time he reached the other side. When he remembered that Treasure called it the ‘Wanker’s Walkway’.
    The smell was different in this block. Or perhaps it was just the absence of those distinctive smells he had become accustomed to in recent months; in the locker room and the custody area. There was carpet rather than painted cement or peeling floor tiles and there was a good deal of polished, blond wood. There was space.
    Thorne pushed at the door to the MIT major incident room, but it would not open. He stepped back and noticed the entry panel; its ten shiny, numbered buttons. He tensed and swore under his breath. There was nowhere in his own building to which he could not gain entry by swiping his ID, but it was clear that access to the hallowed territory of the Murder Investigation Team was only granted to the privileged few who knew the code.
    Privileged did not always mean bright, however. Thorne pressed 1-2-3-4 and pushed again. This time he swore loudly enough to turn the heads of two women chatting further along the corridor.
    He knocked on the door.
    Through the small window in the door, he watched the man at the desk only a few feet away look up, stare blankly at him for a few seconds, then turn back to his computer. A woman on the phone at an adjacent desk spared him no more than a glance.
    He knocked again, a good deal harder, and leaned closer to the glass to