Free Dancing Towards the Blade and Other Stories by Mark Billingham

months Thorne had been working there. Binns was several years younger than Thorne, somewhere in his mid-forties, and he was carrying a lot less weight. He had shaved what little hair he had left to the scalp and over-compensated for the appearance and demeanour of a cartoon undertaker with a grey suit and a tie that might have been a test for colour blindness. He gave Thorne a nod and walked over to the bed as though he were browsing in the furniture department of John Lewis.
    ‘So?’ he asked after a minute. ‘What am I doing here?’
    Before Thorne could answer, a message came through from one of his team’s patrol cars. Things were kicking off at a house party on the Kidbourne estate and it was suggested that Thorne might want to get down there. He said that he was still tied up, ordered two more units to head across, then turned the volume on his radio down. ‘I told one of my constables to call you,’ he said.
    ‘Yeah, I know why I’m here.’ The nod from the doorway had clearly been as polite as the detective intended to get. He pointed towards the bodies, straightened his cuffs. ‘Seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it?’
    What the doctor had said.
    Thorne moved to join Binns at the end of the bed. ‘There’s something off.’
    Binns folded his arms, barely suppressed a long-suffering sigh.
    ‘Go on then, let’s hear it.’
    ‘The old woman took her teeth out,’ Thorne said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘False teeth. Top set. They’re in a plastic case in the bathroom, probably the same place she leaves them every night.’
    ‘So?’
    ‘You take your teeth out when you’re going to bed. When you’re going to sleep, right? That’s what you do on an ordinary night, isn’t it? It’s not what you’d do if you were planning to do … this. It’s not what you’d do if you and your old man were going to take an overdose of insulin and drift off to sleep in each other’s arms. Not if you knew you weren’t ever going to wake up.’
    Binns stared at him.
    ‘It’s not how she would have wanted to be found ,’ Thorne said.
    ‘You knew her, did you?’ Binns shook his head, sniffed, snapped his fingers. ‘Next!’
    Thorne took a breath, took care to keep his voice nice and even. ‘Where did they get the insulin from? There’s no label on the bottle, so it obviously wasn’t prescribed. Nothing anywhere else in the house to suggest either of them was diabetic.’
    ‘They could have got it anywhere.’
    ‘So could a third party.’
    ‘I’m not exactly getting excited here.’
    ‘Where did it come from?’
    ‘How should I know?’ Binns said. ‘Internet? I saw there was a computer downstairs.’
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘Come on, you can find anything on there, you look hard enough.’
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘You decide to top yourself, you find a way, don’t you?’
    Thorne said nothing.
    ‘That it, then?’ Binns asked. ‘The false choppers and the insulin? Seriously?’
    Thorne stared down again at the bodies of John and Margaret Cooper, aged seventy-five and seventy-three respectively. The duvet had been pulled up high, but it was obvious that Margaret Cooper’s arm was wrapped around her husband’s chest, her face pressed against his shoulder. Spoons, he thought. Couples ‘spooned’ in some of the old songs his mother had listened to, crooning love’s tune or whatever it was; the same songs this pair might have heard on the radio when they were teenagers. The old woman’s mouth hung slightly open. The cheeks, hollowed. The top lip sucked in towards the gap where the plate would otherwise have been. Her husband’s lips were curled back, yellowing teeth showing, a sliver of greyish tongue just visible. His eyes were screwed tightly shut.
    They had died pressed close to one another, but Thorne could not pretend that they looked remotely peaceful.
    ‘Anything else?’ Binns asked. ‘I’ve got paperwork I could be getting on with.’
    There was something. Thorne knew there was.
    His eye