Free Dancing Towards the Blade and Other Stories by Mark Billingham Page A

had taken something in within those few seconds of entering the room for the first time: a piece of visual information that had not quite made sense, but which his brain had so far failed to process fully. A shape or a shadow, a something that was wrong. It stubbornly refused to come to him, like a tune he recognised but could not place.
    Without making it too obvious, he looked around the room again.
    The wardrobe, closed. The curtains, drawn. Cosmetics and other bits and pieces on the dressing table: hairbrush, wallet, wet-wipes. A few coins in a small china bowl. A woman’s dressing gown draped across one chair, a man’s clothes neatly folded on another. Shoes and slippers underneath. A biro, book and glasses case on the wife’s bedside table, a paperback book of crossword puzzles on the floor by the side of the bed, a large black handbag hung on the bedstead. The bottle and syringe on the husband’s side. A half-empty water glass. A tube of ointment, a can of Deep Heat …
    What was wrong with the picture?
    ‘There isn’t a note,’ Thorne said.
    Binns turned round, leaned back against the bedstead. ‘You know that means nothing,’ he said.
    Thorne knew very well, but it had been the best he could come up with while he tried and failed to identify what was really bothering him. His friend Phil Hendricks had told him a great deal about suicide during the last investigation they had worked on together … the last case Thorne had worked as a detective. The pathologist had recently attended a seminar on the subject and delighted in giving Thorne chapter and verse. The fact was that in the majority of cases, people who killed themselves did not leave notes. One of the many myths.
    ‘I know what you’re doing, by the way,’ Binns said.
    ‘Oh, you do?’ Thorne ignored the burst of twitter from his radio. Reports of a suspected burglary in Brockley. The violence escalating at the house party on the Kidbourne. ‘I’m all ears.’
    Binns smiled. ‘Yeah, I mean considering where you were before and where you are now … it makes perfect sense that you’re going a bit stir crazy, or whatever. Only natural that you might want to make something ordinary like this into … something else.’ He casually checked the mobile phone that had not left his hand. ‘I understand, mate. I sympathise, honest.’
    Patronise , Thorne thought.
    ‘If I was in your position, Christ knows what I’d be doing.’
    ‘You’d be getting pissed off with smartarse detectives who think they know it all.’
    ‘Really?’ Binns feigned a shocked expression. ‘What type did you used to be then?’
    Thorne wrapped his hand around the old-fashioned metal bedstead and squeezed. ‘I want to get the HAT car round,’ he said.
    It was the job of detectives on the Homicide Assessment Team to evaluate any possible crime scene and to collect vital evidence where necessary before handing the case over. It was solely their decision as to whether or not a ‘sudden’ death had occurred. A suspicious death.
    ‘Well, you know how that works.’ Binns walked across and leaned back against a wall next to an old-fashioned dressing table. ‘Different system these days. Between your lot and my lot, I mean. Different to your day anyway, I would have thought.’
    ‘You’d have thought right,’ Thorne said.
    Your day . Nearly twenty-five years since Tom Thorne had pulled on the ‘Queen’s Cloth’ every day to go to work. Since he’d worn a uniform.
    Crisp white shirt with his two shiny inspector’s pips on the epaulettes.
    Black, clip-on tie.
    The fucking cap …
    ‘It’s my decision,’ Binns said. ‘Whether or not to bring the HAT team in.’
    ‘I know how it works,’ Thorne said.
    Binns told him anyway. ‘Only a Detective Inspector can make that call.’
    ‘Got it,’ Thorne said. ‘So, on you go.’ Binns had been right to suggest that the procedure had been somewhat different two decades earlier. The protocol a little more flexible. The