Exclusive extract – What the Night Brings by Mark Billingham
Read an extract from Mark Billingham’s most shocking, gripping thriller yet.
It was funny, how a certain sort of man’s attitude changed dramatically when he was the one staring down the barrel of a gun.
Or happily, in this case, several of them.
It wasn’t the first time Thorne had witnessed behaviour so seemingly out of character when someone got nicked. When they knew their future was no longer looking as rosy as it had before half a dozen armed officers crashed into their front room. There might have been the odd one who had to be dragged away spitting and lashing out, but in Thorne’s experience they were the minority and, even then, it had all felt like a pantomime staged for any family, friends and business associates who happened to be around at the time. A last, if pointless hurrah.
A lot of it was down to movies and TV dramas, Thorne reckoned. A cliché every bit as tired as the detective faced with one last, dangerous case before retirement. The hard man who went down fighting, vowing revenge on all those doing the nicking and swearing that no prison could hold him, even if statistically the majority of His Majesty’s bang- ups made a fairly decent job of it.
Thankfully, Nick Cresswell was showing rather more restraint. Thorne watched as the armed officers withdrew from the room and one of the uniforms led Cresswell’s dumbstruck wife out into the hall. While two other local uniforms kept hold of the prisoner’s arms, Thorne nodded to DI Dave Holland, who stepped forward to recite the caution.
Thorne studied Cresswell’s reaction, such as it was to begin with. It wasn’t as if the man hadn’t been arrested before, though Thorne knew that few of those arrests had amounted to very much and, more importantly, none had been for murder.
Cresswell looked across at him when Holland said the M-word.
Thorne smiled and nodded. ‘Yeah, sorry, Nick. What . . . did you think we’d gone to all this trouble because you’d not taken your library books back?’
There was a glimmer of anger then, a narrowing of the eyes, but for the most part the man in the khakis and the ratty cardigan just looked disappointed, sorrowful even. For a moment or two, Thorne wondered if Cresswell might be experiencing something strange and confusing, like empathy. Was he finally able to understand just how helpless and terrified all those people he’d pointed a shotgun at over the years had felt? What a twenty-four-year-old security guard named Jordan Wainwright had been feeling three months earlier, right before Cresswell had blown his face off? Was he fuck, Thorne decided.
He waited until Cresswell had been led from the room, then followed the guard of dishonour out of the house and across the moonlit front garden towards the road. There were a good few smiles and handshakes. Yes, there would certainly be a drink or two taken in the Oak after his shift tomorrow, but more than any thing, Thorne felt a huge sense of relief. Relief that the intel had been sound and that the arrest had gone without a hitch, which was important when the hitch could easily have involved Cresswell being armed and shots being fired.
It bothered Thorne more than slightly that the shitehawk who had provided the crucial intelligence – one of Cresswell’s own crew – had done so in exchange for a place in Witness Protection. Such compromises were necessary, of course, but it rankled all the same and he couldn’t help hoping that the man in question didn’t find himself quite as protected as he was banking on. Thorne imagined spending an evening in one of the less salubrious pubs on Cresswell’s manor a few months from now and blurting out the informant’s new name and address a little too loudly after one too many.
Or after none at all.
Thorne watched as Nicholas Cresswell was ungently bundled into the back of a van, then turned and walked away.
Two squad cars were parked close together across the entrance to the cul-de-sac, and the four uniformed officers – two men and two women Thorne did not recognise – who had been stationed to ensure no pedestrians entered were leaning against their vehicles, chatting and laughing. Gathered beneath a streetlight, they were drinking coffee and snarfing doughnuts, which Thorne found more than a little irritating because he hadn’t snarfed any thing since lunchtime.
‘Sir.’ The taller of the two male officers licked his fingers and had the decency to look slightly embarrassed.
‘Looks like that all went off a treat,’ his colleague said, between mouthfuls. ‘Job done.’
Thorne nodded towards the half a doughnut in one of the female officers’ hands. ‘Any more of them going?’
‘Sorry, there were only four in the box.’
‘Great,’ Thorne said.
‘I’d normally buy enough for everyone,’ she said. ‘These were a freebie, though. Someone left them on the car.’ The woman reached for the empty box on the bonnet of the squad car and held it up so that Thorne could see what had been scrawled on it.
Thanks for everything you do!
The tall officer grinned and raised his coffee cup in salute.
‘Who says nobody likes us?’
‘Yeah, well, I’m very happy for you, but it’s no good to me, is it?’ Thorne watched the woman pop what was left of the doughnut into her mouth, then squeezed between the two vehicles and walked away, muttering. I mean, she could have offered him half a bloody doughnut, couldn’t she? What hap- pened to basic human decency and, more to the point, did rank count for nothing these days?
Thorne looked at his watch and saw that it was after three a.m.
He’d be lucky to find a kebab shop that was still open.
Someone was screaming in Thorne’s dream, ragged and desperate and, just when he’d decided that the terrible noise was coming from him, he opened his eyes, took a second to remember where he was and realised that it was his phone doing the screaming.
He reached for the handset on his bedside table, saw who was calling and sat up. It was just before one o’clock in the morning. He answered the call and mumbled a hello.
‘Tom . . . ?’
Something in the way DCI Russell Brigstocke had said his name made Thorne sit up a little straighter, wide awake now.
‘What?’
‘The Cresswell arrest the other night.’
Thorne immediately began to wonder what he’d done wrong. ‘It was by the book, Russell, I—’
‘There were four uniformed officers from Wood Green station working the wider scene, managing the neighbours, whatever.’
‘Yeah, I spoke to them,’ Thorne said. ‘Afterwards.’
‘So, each of them was rushed into hospital at various points over the last couple of days.’
Thorne threw back the duvet and felt Helen shift next to him. ‘What?’
‘Convulsions, vomiting . . . all sorts. Poisoning looks like the best bet, but who knows—’
‘Doughnuts,’ Thorne said. ‘They were all stood around eating doughnuts when we brought Cresswell out.’
Brigstocke took a few seconds. ‘OK . . . but how on earth—?’
‘They were a present. Someone left them as a thank you.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Brigstocke said.
‘How are they doing?’ Thorne waited for an answer, and the catch in Brigstocke’s breath as he said nothing gave it to him.
‘You’re fucking kidding me.’
‘Three of them died in the last few hours and there’s a young woman in a coma who’s looking very much like she’s going the same way.’ The DCI’s voice broke a little before he cleared his throat and let out a long sigh. ‘Three dead coppers, Tom, maybe four by lunchtime.’
Now it was Thorne who had nothing to say.
He was trying to remember their faces.
‘You’d better get in here,’ Brigstocke said.
When he’d put the phone back on the table, Thorne sat up and moved slowly to the edge of the bed. The room wasn’t cold, but he was starting to shiver as he remembered just how much he’d wanted one of those doughnuts. He thought about how – if he’d been just a little pushier – he might have maybe snaffled half a one.
He felt the mattress move beneath him, then, a few seconds later, Helen’s fingers against his shoulder. She asked him if he was all right, who it had been on the phone. She pressed herself against his back.
Try as he might, Thorne still couldn’t remember the tall lad’s face, but sitting there in the dark he could still picture the goofy grin, the coffee cup held aloft in mock- triumph.
Who says nobody likes us?
