She’d held him tightly and thanked him before climbing into the taxi she was sharing with Phil Hendricks. Thorne had told her not to be stupid, that he was the one who owed her. ‘All debts are cleared, Tom,’ she’d said. ‘OK?’
‘OK,’ Thorne said.
Then she had lowered the taxi window and nodded towards Hendricks. ‘If your friend was ever likely to turn, do you think he might go for an older woman?’
Thorne had wished her luck.
Afterwards, he had put on a Laura Cantrell album while he and Louise did their best to clear up. He sang along to her cover version of ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ while he ferried cups and plates through to the kitchen and Louise loaded the dishwasher.
Ten minutes later, with only half the clearing away done, they were in bed, neither of them willing to get up and turn off the light they’d left on in the hall and the song still rattling around in Thorne’s head.
‘This baby business,’ Louise said.
Thorne turned over, leaned up on one elbow.
‘There’s no reason to rush things, is there?’
He did not know what the right answer was, settled for a hesitant ‘no’.
‘We can just wait and see what happens.’
Thorne nodded and they looked at each other for a while. Then he turned over again and lay awake, with the words of the song outstaying their welcome as he waited for sleep to take him.
And all that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.
Life and love and murder, kids, whatever.
It was more or less all you could do, he thought.
Wait and see what happens.
Acknowledgements
I am hugely grateful to Dr Brian Little, who opened my eyes in more ways than one, and to Dr Bob Bradford for his patience and expertise. Both helped to make the complex workings of the human brain a little clearer to my own less than perfect one.
As always, I owe an enormous debt to everyone at Little, Brown, whose support and enthusiasm make the publication of each book more enjoyable and exciting than the last.
Thanks, as always, to Sarah Lutyens, Wendy Lee and Neil Hibberd.
To Peter, the better half of Will Peterson.
And to Claire, of course. For the title and so much more.
Mark Billingham
Mark Billingham was born and brought up in Birmingham. Having worked for some years as an actor and more recently as a TV writer and stand-up comedian his first crime novel was published in 2001.
Sleepyhead was an instant bestseller in the UK. It has been sold widely throughout the world and will be published in the USA in the Summer of 2002.
Though still occasionally working as a stand-up comic, Mark now concentrates on writing the series of crime novels featuring London-based detective Tom Thorne. The second novel, Scaredy Cat is published in July 2002 and will be followed in 2003 by Lazybones…
Mark lives in North London with his wife and two children.
