Free The Dying Hours by Mark Billingham Page B

short straw,’ Cooper said.
    Thorne and Hendricks followed him into the living room. The furniture had been pushed back against the wall and the centre of the room was now taken up by those boxes and bin-bags Cooper had mentioned. Thorne saw him staring at Hendricks and made the introductions.
    ‘Doctor Hendricks is helping me out,’ Thorne said.
    ‘I’m a pathologist,’ Hendricks said, at a loss for anything else to say.
    Cooper said, ‘You’re not the one who…⁠?’
    ‘No,’ Thorne said.
    ‘No,’ Hendricks repeated, shaking his head. ‘I’m just a consultant.’
    The three of them stood a little awkwardly and looked around the room. Thorne and Hendricks were both still chewing the gum they had stopped off to buy on the drive down. It wasn’t lost on Thorne that he was doing exactly the opposite of what he’d done the night before, when he’d
wanted
the beer on his breath.
    Thorne nodded towards the upright piano against the far wall. ‘Which one of them played?’
    ‘They both did a bit,’ Cooper said. He perched on the arm of an old leather sofa. There were patches of sweat under the arms and at the neck of his baggy grey T-shirt. ‘Still did. The old songs, you know?’
    Thorne nodded, remembering something he’d been thinking about in the room upstairs a few nights earlier.
    Spoon, croon, honeymoon
.
    ‘So what, like Cole Porter or whatever?’
    Cooper laughed. ‘More like Gene Vincent or Eddie Cochran,’ he said. ‘Dad was a Teddy boy.’
    ‘Oh, right,’ Thorne said. It was easy to forget that those who seemed so old – even to him – had once been every bit as rebellious in their day as those who came after them. That bondage trousers and Mohicans were no more shocking than drainpipes and DAs. He tried to picture the old man in all the gear, dressed to the nines in velvet drape coat and winkle-pickers, but the picture would not come.
    The yellowing teeth, the sliver of greyish tongue
…
    Cooper stood up. ‘You said something about the bedroom?’
    They followed him upstairs, waited behind him as he hesitated on the threshold for just a second or two, then stepped inside. There were more bags and boxes. The dressing table and the window ledge, on which Thorne remembered seeing arrangements of family photos, were bare. The bed had been stripped.
    ‘You haven’t thrown anything away, have you?’ Thorne asked.
    Cooper turned to look at him. ‘No.’
    ‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean…’
    ‘Just haven’t had the chance yet,’ Cooper said. ‘That’s all. There’ll certainly be a few trips to the charity shop once I’m finished, mind you. I mean obviously there’s loads of stuff that means a lot, but Paula and I both agreed that there’s no point hanging on to clothes or what have you. The knick-knacks, you know?’
    Thorne nodded, thinking about his father. Thinking that there had been no need to choose what to wrap carefully in brown paper and what to bag up for Oxfam. That there had been nothing much of anything left after the fire.
    ‘All the stuff’s still in here,’ Cooper said. ‘So, help yourself.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Thorne said. ‘Shouldn’t take long.’
    ‘I’m still not exactly clear what it’s all about, mind you.’
    Thorne exchanged a look with Hendricks. ‘Well, there’s still the possibility of an inquest and, if that happens, I want to be sure my memory of exactly what was in this room that night is as clear as possible.’ Cooper considered this for a few seconds and shrugged. ‘Just belt and braces, really,’ Thorne said. In fact, now that the suicide had been signed off on and the cause of death established beyond doubt, an inquest was extremely unlikely, but Thorne’s explanation had obviously sounded reasonable enough. It would have been just his luck had Andrew Cooper turned out to be a lawyer or a coroner’s officer.
    Thorne felt uncomfortable lying, but it was certainly an easier reason to give for his presence than the real one, and