'I heard a story yesterday about a GP with a morphine addiction. He'd prescribe it to his older patients, then he'd make house calls and steal it back from them. They'd come into the surgery thinking they'd lost it, you know, going doolally in their old age. He'd smile at them, full of understanding, and prescribe them some more. And so on.'
Anne was not hugely shocked. Many doctors had problems with addiction. There was even a rehab centre exclusively for those who worked in the medical profession. Bishop carried on: 'The guy who told me this had known the man for twenty-odd years and had absolutely no idea.'
She looked at him. Holding her breath. His voice was barely a whisper.
'People have secrets, Anne.'
Anne looked down and fixed her eyes on the cigarette she was stubbing out in the ashtray. Carefully and deliberately she removed any trace of burning ember. What did he expect her to say? Was this just a piece of typically theatrical and provocative weirdness or…?
She looked up and signaled for the bill, then turned back to him, smiling. 'Talking of secrets, Jeremy, are you seeing somebody?'
His mood seemed to change in a moment. She saw it, and thought about backing off but decided against it. She wanted to turn the tables a little, to enjoy his awkwardness.
'You are, aren't you? Why are you being so coy?' She saw something like an answer in his eyes. 'Do I know her?'
He stared down at the tablecloth. 'It's not really serious and it's probably not going to last very long for all sorts of reasons, but if I talk about it, it will be like I'm cursing it somehow. Condemning it to an early grave.'
She laughed. Why this sudden superstition? 'Come on, since when have-'
'No.' His tone stopped the tail end of her laughter in its tracks. End of conversation.
'It would be like wishing it dead.'
Thorne arrived home fizzing and fidgety. There were people he needed to call. His dad. Hendricks. Anne, of course. But he felt too energised.
It had happened as he'd stepped out of Kentish Town tube station and was wondering which lucky off-license would have the benefit of his business on the way home. The conversation behind him had gone something like this. 'Big Issue…'
'Get a fucking job!'
'This is my job, you arsehole!'
And it had gone off.
Thorne had stepped in a second or two after the first punches and kicks began to fly. Wincing as a stray punch caught him on the side of the head, he'd grabbed the get a-job merchant round the neck and hauled him into a nearby doorway with more force than was strictly necessary. The Big Issue seller, having picked up the magazines scattered during the ruck, had moved in close to watch. Thorne had looked at him, 'Piss off,' then turned his attention back to the one who had a home. Drunk, of course, or maybe stoned. A student, Thorne reckoned, with blood from a split lip running on to his white button down shirt.
Thorne had held him against the door with a stiff arm at his throat arid casually kneed the little tosser between the legs as he removed his badge from the inside pocket of his leather jacket and pushed it into his face. 'Have a guess what my job is.'
Now, back at home, opening the first can of cheap lager, he wondered what might have happened if he hadn't been around with a badge in his pocket and some aggression to offload.
If one of them had been carrying a knife.
These were typical murders. Ordinary killings, simple, banal and understandable. People dying because of anger or frustration or a basic lack of space. Dying for a grand cause or a stupid comment. Or a few pence.
Wives and husbands killing with hammers and fists, or men being men with drink and knives, or drug-dealers holding guns as casually as combs.
Thorne understood them, these deaths died in cities. He knew what they were about. Each made its own strange kind of sense.
But not this. Not killing as a side-effect. Bodies as a byproduct of some sick fucking madness.
He downed the last of the beer, pulled on his jacket, and within forty-five minutes he was standing in a street in Battersea, looking up at the shape that moved behind a light at a second floor window.
He stood for nearly an hour, melting back into the shadows with each twitch of the curtains, real or imagined. Then he stepped back quickly into the anonymous darkness as Jeremy Bishop threw open the curtains and stood looking down at the street.
Bishop stared hard at Thorne, or the place where Thorne was, seeing a shape, perhaps, but certainly no more. As Thorne returned the stare, he felt a glacial tremor run through every bone in his body as Bishop's face suddenly changed.
From this distance, Thorne could not be sure. It might have been a grimace.
It might have been a smile.
I know that I've made jokes before about the NHS and the lack of money and everything. I was taking the piss out of the blackboard when it first appeared, you know, compared with all the flashy stuff they've got in America.
But this?
Anne's been telling me for a while that her and the occupational therapist are going to try to rig up a couple of devices so that I can read and watch TV. Obviously I've been gagging for it, and even more so since I've been back on this bastard ventilator. When a machine is doing your breathing for you, life can get sooo boring, darling. But I didn't realise they literally meant 'rig up'. Honestly, it's spit and fucking earwax. They've screwed some sort of pivoting arm into the ceiling and the TV now hangs down from there so I'm staring up at the screen. Great. If I was in hospital in Fuckwit, Illinois, or wherever, I'd be able to control the volume and, crucially, change the bloody channel with my eyelid. Here, in good old London Town, on the good old National Health Service, those little details seem to have been overlooked. So I have to wait for a nurse to show up, and blink. to indicate that I'd like her to turn over. She does exactly that and buggers off again. Leaving me staring at Supermarket Sweep or some moronic cookery programme until she puts her head round the door again twenty minutes later and I'm blinking my head off in an effort to get the football on.
I don't want to sound ungrateful, but this is heaven compared to my new reading arrangements.
It's based around a music-stand, [think, though there might be a bit of old coat-hanger stuck in there as well. All right, I'm exaggerating, but not much. I get raised up and this metal contraption is placed across my tits with little clamps that fold down to hold in place my book or magazine of choice. Good in theory. First, I'm hardly in a position to make complex requests on the book front. I'm racking my brains to think of books I might fancy reading with really short titles. Same with magazines, though I'm more or less sorted thanks to OK! and Hello!. Not too taxing on the eyelids. The problem is the same as with the telly, though. I'm hardly Brain of Britain, but even I can read a page of pretty much anything in twenty minutes, or however long it is until the nurse comes in again. I don't expect them to come tearing in here every ninety seconds to turn my page for me but there must be something somebody can do. I can't pay for anything, and I haven't got family who can pay for anything or try to raise money, but even so… Everything's fucking half-measures.
Half-measures for half a person.
SIXTEEN
Thorne and Anne Coburn had spent most of the day in bed together. He'd been up once, for about half an hour. Just long enough to make a few pieces of toast, put on American Recordings by Johnny Cash and fetch the papers. The Observer for her (he read the sports section). The Mirror and the Screws for him (she read the supplements). He wasn't planning to get up again until the pubs opened. He'd woken, alone, several hours earlier with the image of Jeremy Bishop's face looking down at him, captured in negative when he closed his eyes, as if he'd been staring too long at a light bulb.