Read The Dying Hours for Free Online

make sure that anyone who could be bothered got a good look at his expression. Finally, the man at the computer dragged his backside out of his chair. He walked across to the door as though furious at the absence of a butler to do it for him.
    ‘I want to speak to the DCI,’ Thorne said. He lifted up his ID, held it nice and close.
    The officer studied it for a lot longer than was necessary. He said, ‘What do you want him for?’
    Was there a hint of a smirk?
    ‘What’s your name?’ Thorne asked.
    The officer told him and though Thorne had forgotten the name almost as soon as he’d heard it, he’d got all the information he needed. He knew the man’s rank. Thorne took a second, then walked slowly across until his face was no more than six inches away from the detective sergeant’s. He smiled and whispered, ‘“What do you want him for…
sir
?”’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘You heard,’ Thorne said. ‘Now, I couldn’t give a toss about your flashy suit, because even though I don’t wear one of those any more I’ve still got a nice white shirt with two shiny pips on the shoulder. Now, last time I checked, an inspector was still one notch above a sergeant. Don’t tell me that’s changed as well, since my day.’
    ‘No,’ the sergeant said, confused.
    Thorne waited.
    ‘No, sir.’
    The man was clearly not intimidated, the word spoken with as little colour as possible, imbued with the same level of respect he might have for a pimp or a paedophile. Thorne recognised the tone. It was one he’d used often enough himself; carpeted by some bumptious chief superintendent or desperate to twist the arm of an over-cautious DCI. But he was not going to accept it from a tosser like this. Not now; not simply because the tosser was the ’tec and Thorne was the one with the uniform in his locker.
    The Woody
.
    ‘Well, I’m glad we’ve got that sorted,
Sergeant
,’ Thorne said. ‘Cleared the air a bit. Now piss off and fetch your guv’nor, there’s a good lad.’
    It was not yet eight o’clock in the morning, but the place was already buzzing. Fifteen, twenty officers moving quickly between desks, conferring with colleagues or working alone at screens and on phones. Thorne watched and listened; the noises, the
focus
of it all, painfully familiar to him. He turned and studied the whiteboard that ran the length of one wall: the photographs of suspects, witnesses, victims. The all-important names and dates scribbled in felt pen: closed cases in red, open in green. Thorne had spent so many years in rooms like this, tapping into the same kind of energy, feeding off it. Standing where he was now, as it hummed and crackled around him, he was dry-mouthed suddenly and disoriented. He was slightly dizzy.
    He felt like a man on the wagon, with a beer in his hand.
    After a couple of minutes, a man appeared at the far end of the room and waved Thorne across. He greeted Thorne by name and introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Neil Hackett. Thorne followed him into a large and tidy office, took the chair that was offered and glanced out across Lewisham High Street.
    The view across the DCI’s desk was not an awful lot prettier. Hackett was at least six-four, but his height was not enough to disguise the extra weight he was carrying and when he undid his jacket, the gut that spilled out threatened to burst the buttons on his expensive shirt.
    ‘Let me guess then, Tom.’ Hackett let out a sigh as he sat down and the chair did much the same. ‘This is in relation to your double suicide Thursday night.’
    Thorne took a couple of seconds. Said, ‘Right.’ Clearly, the jungle drums were even louder, or just being beaten more furiously, than he’d suspected. He was certain now that he’d done the right thing in asking Phil Hendricks to look at the Coopers’ PM reports.
    Hackett smiled, as though Thorne’s train of thought was blindingly obvious and he was paying him the courtesy of an explanation. ‘Paul Binns is a mate