TT13 Time of Death by Mark Billingham Page A

staring at for the last twenty minutes. She leaned across and pressed PLAY on the portable CD player. They didn’t have a lot of good music on disc; just a couple of albums that her mum or Steve had bought them, thinking they knew what kids were into, not realising that they’d much rather have vouchers and download stuff for themselves. All the decent stuff was on their phones, but those had been taken away too.
    She thought it was probably a good thing. She didn’t even want to think about some of the moronic messages her friends and schoolmates would have sent. Some abuse and stuff, that was only natural, but the sympathetic ones, with the sad-face emoticons, they’d have been far worse.
    When the music kicked in she turned the sound down. She didn’t want to wake her mother. She said, ‘You snore, by the way.’
    ‘Yeah, jokes,’ Danny said.
    ‘Last night you were snoring like a pig. I had to put my hand over your nose.’ She laughed, hoping that her brother might join in, but he didn’t. It was the first time they had shared a room in years. There were only three bedrooms in the house. Their mother was in the big one and the box room had been taken by whichever copper was sleeping over tonight. Last night it hadbeen the male one which was fine by Charli as she thought he was quite fit. She guessed that it might be that bitch Carson tonight. She always had a face on her like someone had just shat in her dinner and was probably a lesbian and Charli had seen her looking at their mother like she
knew
something.
    Like she was so much better than they were.
    ‘How long, do you think?’ Danny asked.
    ‘I’ve got no idea.’
    ‘Until Steve comes back.’
    ‘I told you.’
    ‘Until we can go home then. Days or weeks?’
    Charli shrugged and watched Danny pick up a pillow and throw it at the far wall. She could not help but laugh as it flopped harmlessly down on to the carpet, but once again, she failed to elicit anything but an angry glare.
    ‘How can you laugh?’ He pushed at her feet. ‘Have you been smoking weed or something?’
    ‘I wish.’ She wondered if the police had found the small stash at home in her bedside table. She wondered if they would do anything about it.
    ‘You’re just sick in the head then.’ He turned away in disgust. ‘You don’t hear me or Mum laughing, do you?’
    Charli turned her head away and tried to lose herself in the music. She wondered if she would ever go back to school. The same school, anyway. The coppers had said she was allowed to bring her books after Linda had told them she had important exams coming up. How stupid was that? Like she could just sit and do revision when all this was going on. The Russian Revolution and
The Merchant of
fucking
Venice
.
    She lay there and wondered if the people who marked the exams would take it into account, what had happened. Like when kids were really ill or one of their parents died or something. Would she get better grades, maybe?
    She was a bit ashamed just thinking about it and felt her face redden.
    She thought about that woman who had turned up out of the blue to keep her mother company; her and her boyfriend. Yeah, she was an old friend and all that, but they were both coppers, so maybe she was there for some other reason. Some kind of under-cover thing, like maybe her mum would say something to her she would never say to one of the other coppers. They’d talked a lot, her mum and that woman Helen, but Charli hadn’t really been able to hear it. Her mum had told her to keep an eye on Danny, so it was hard to keep up with everything else that was going on.
    She’d heard the coppers talking though, Carson and the Scottish woman in uniform. Something about how long they could keep Steve at the police station. Something about a magistrate and ‘further detention’. She wasn’t going to say any of that to Danny.
    He stood up and said, ‘I need a piss.’
    On his way out, he picked up the pillow and threw it at her. There