Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  “Rape’s not about sex, it’s about power,” Kitson said.

  Yvonne Kitson, together with DC Andy Stone, had come into the team to replace an officer Thorne had lost, in circumstances he tried every day to forget. Of all the murderers he’d put away, Thorne was happy to remember that the man responsible was serving three life sentences in Belmarsh Prison.

  Thorne looked at Phil Hendricks. “Never mind Remfry, can we be certain the killer’s gay?”

  Hendricks didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely not. Like Yvonne says, the rape’s got nothing to do with sex, anyway. Maybe the killer wants us to think he’s gay. He may well be, of course, but we have to consider other possibilities…”

  “Whether it was a gay thing or not,” Kitson said, “he could still have been set up by someone he did time with, someone with a major grudge…”

  Brigstocke cleared his throat, at some level finding this all a bit embarrassing. “But the buggery…?”

  Hendricks snorted. “Buggery?” He dropped his Manchester accent and adopted the posh bluster of the gentleman’s club. “Buggery!!”

  Brigstocke reddened. “Sodomy, then. Anal intercourse, whatever. How could you do that if you weren’t homosexual?”

  Hendricks shrugged. “Close your eyes and think of Claudia Schiffer…?”

  “Kylie Minogue for me,” Thorne said.

  Kitson shook her head, smiling. “Dirty old man.”

  Brigstocke was unconvinced. He stared hard at Thorne. “Seriously, though, Tom. This might be important. Could you?”

  “It would depend how much I wanted to kill somebody,” Thorne said.

  There was a silence around the table for a while. Thorne decided to break it before it became too serious. “Remfry went to that hotel willingly. He booked the room himself. He knew, or thought he knew, what he was getting into.”

  “And whatever it was,” Hendricks added, “it looks as though he went along with it for a while.”

  “Right,” Kitson said. She turned the photocopied pages of Hendricks’s postmortem report. “No defense wounds, no tissue underneath the fingernails…”

  The phone on the desk rang. Thorne was nearest.

  “DI Thorne. Yes, Dave…”

  The others watched for a few seconds as Thorne listened. Brigstocke hissed at Kitson. “Why the fuck did Remfry go to that hotel?”

  Thorne nodded, grunted, took the top off a pen with his teeth. He took it out of his mouth, put it back on the pen. He smiled, told Holland to get his arse in gear, and ended the call.

  Then he answered Brigstocke’s question.

  December 4, 1975

  They sat in the Maxi, outside the house.

  She’d held it together all morning, through all the really hard parts, the personal stuff, the intrusion. Then, when it seemed the worst was over, she’d begun to wail as she’d stepped through the doors he’d held open for her. Out of the police station and running down the steps toward the street, her heels noisy on the concrete, her sobbing uncontrollable.

  In the car on the way back, the crying had gradually given way to a seething fury that exploded in fitful bursts of abuse. He kept his hands clenched tightly around the steering wheel as she rained blows down on his shoulder and arm. His eyes never left the road as she screamed words at him that he’d never heard her utter before. He drove carefully, with the same caution he always showed, and as he maneuvered the car through the lunchtime traffic on the icy streets, he absorbed as much of her pain and rage as he could take.

  They sat in the car, both too shattered to open a door. Staring straight ahead, afraid to so much as look toward the house. The house, which was now simply the place where, the night before, she had told him what had happened. The collection of rooms through which they’d staggered and shouted and wept. The place where everything had changed.

  The home they’d never feel comfortable in again.

  Without turning her head, she spat words at him. “Why didn’t you make me go to the police station last night? Why did you let me wait?”

  The engine was turned off, the car was still, but his hands would not leave the steering wheel. His leather driving gloves creaked as he grasped it even tighter. “You wouldn’t listen, you wouldn’t listen to sense.”

  “What do you expect? Christ, I didn’t even know my own name. I had no idea what I was fucking doing. I would never have had the shower…”

  She’d been too upset to think clearly, of course. He’d tried to explain all this to the woman police constable that morning, but she’d just shrugged and looked at her colleague and carried on taking the clothes and putting them into a plastic bag as they were taken off and handed over.

  “You shouldn’t have had a shower, love,” the WPC said. “That was a bit silly. You should have come straight in, last night, as soon as it had happened…”

  The engine had been off for no more than a minute, but already it was freezing inside the car. The tears felt warm as they inched slowly down his face, running into his mustache. “You said you’d wanted to wash…to wash him off you. I said I understood but I told you you shouldn’t have. That it wasn’t a good idea. You weren’t listening to me…”

  Standing there in the lounge after she’d told him. The horrible minutes and hours after she’d described what had been done to her. She wouldn’t let him do a lot of things. She wouldn’t let him hold her. She wouldn’t let him ring anybody. She wouldn’t let him go around to the bastard’s house to kick what little he had between his legs into a bloody mush and punch him into the middle of next week.

  He looked at his watch. He wondered if the police would pick Franklin up at work or later on at his house…

  He needed to call the office and tell them he wouldn’t be in. He needed to call the school to check that everything was okay, that the previous night’s explanations for why Mummy was so upset had been believed…

  “What did that woman mean?” she said suddenly. “That WPC? When she asked if I always wore a dress that nice to go to work?” She slid her hands beneath her legs and began to rock gently in her seat.

  Snow was starting to fall quite heavily, building up quickly on the hood and windshield. He didn’t bother to turn on the wipers.

  THREE

  Later, when they talked about it, both Thorne and Holland admitted to fancying the deputy governor of Derby Prison. What neither of them quite got around to admitting was that, attractive as she undoubtedly was, they actually fancied her more because she was a prison governor.

  They didn’t really go into it all that much…

  “He’s certainly made a very good job of it.” Tracy Lenahan put down the letter, actually a photocopy of one of twenty-odd letters written to Douglas Remfry during his last three months inside, plus a couple to his home address after he’d been released. The letters that Holland had found under Remfry’s bed.

  Letters written by a killer, pretending to be a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Jane Foley.

  Thorne and Holland had already been taken through the procedure for the sorting of prisoners’ mail. The letters—five sackfuls a day on average—would have been taken by two, perhaps three, operational-support-grade officers to the censor’s room for sorting. The X-ray machine had been done away with by the present governor, but drug dogs might be used and each letter would be slit open and searched for illegal enclosures. The OSGs did not read the letters, and providing there was no good reason, they would not usually be seen by anyone else.

  “A good job of sounding like a woman, you mean?”

  Thorne asked. He thought the letters were pretty bloody convincing and so did Yvonne Kitson, but other opinions couldn’t hurt.

  “Oh yes, but I think he’s been much cleverer than that. I’ve seen one or two letters like this before, genuine letters. You’d be amazed how much mail like this people like Remfry really get. This has that same odd tone to it. It’s something slightly crazed…”

  “Something a bit needy,” Holland suggested.

&nb
sp; Lenahan nodded. “Right, that’s it. She’s claiming to be a bit of a catch, a sexy bit of stuff looking for fun…”

  “A sexy married bit of stuff,” Thorne added. The fictitious Jane Foley was conveniently hitched to an equally fictitious and awfully jealous husband, so Remfry couldn’t write back to her.

  Lenahan read a few lines of the letter again, nodded. “All the suggestive stuff in the letter is bang on, but there’s still a kind of hopelessness. Something sad underneath…”

  “Like she’s a bit desperate,” Thorne said. “A woman who’s desperate enough to write these sorts of letters to a convicted rapist.”

  Holland puffed out his cheeks. “This is doing my head in. A bloke, pretending to be a woman, pretending to be a different kind of woman…”

  Lenahan pushed the letter back across her desk. “It’s subtle, though. Like I said, he’s bloody clever.” She didn’t need to tell Thorne that. He’d studied every one of “Jane Foley’s” letters. He knew that the man who wrote them was very clever indeed. Clever, calculating, and extremely patient.

  Lenahan picked up the photograph. “And this is the icing on the cake…”

  Thorne was struck by her strange choice of phrase but said nothing. On the wall behind the desk was the regulation portrait of the Queen, looking rather as if she could smell something unpleasant wafting up from the canteen. To Her Majesty’s left were a series of framed aerial views of the prison and, hung next to these very modern images, a pair of large landscapes in oil. Thorne knew next to bugger all about it but they looked pretty old. Lenahan glanced up, followed Thorne’s gaze.

  “Those have been knocking around the place since it opened in 1853,” she said. “Used to be gathering dust down in Visits. Then six months ago, we had an inmate in for receiving stolen antiques. He took one look at them and went pale. Worth about twelve thousand each, so they reckon…”

  She smiled and her eyes dropped to the black-and-white photo in her hand. Thorne’s went to the silver picture frame on her desk. From where he was sitting he couldn’t see the photo inside, but he imagined a fit-looking husband—army perhaps, or maybe even a copper—and a smiling, olive-skinned child. He looked again at the woman behind the desk, her dark eyes wide as she stared at the picture. She was ridiculously young, probably not even thirty. Her black hair was shoulder length. She was tall and large-breasted. It would have been clear to a blind man that the deputy governor would figure regularly in the fantasies of the men she locked up every night.

  Thorne glanced across at Holland and was amused to see him struggling not to blush as he waited for Tracy Lenahan to finish studying the photograph of “Jane Foley.” The picture was of a woman kneeling, her head bowed and hooded, the artful lighting concealing much, but revealing tantalizing glimpses of the full breasts, the neatly trimmed thatch of pubic hair. Of the leather belt around the wrists.

  Holland had earlier expressed surprise that the photos had not been confiscated, especially as Remfry was a sex offender. Surely this kind of image was risky on “Fraggle Rock”—the term used by many police officers for the Vulnerable Prisoners wing. Lenahan, bridling slightly at the slang, had explained what she called the Page Three rule. Stuff like this was discretionary. Obviously images of kids were not allowed on the VP wing, but if it was harmless—the sort of thing you might see on Page Three of the Sun—then the OSGs would have a look, pass the odd comment, and put it back in the envelope.

  “Jesus,” Holland had said. “Page Three must be going seriously fucking arty…”

  Lenahan put the picture down, scraped at the edge of it with a long red fingernail.

  “This is clever, too. It’s the ideal image to have chosen. Just what would be needed to hook an offender like Remfry, to tease him with the promise of something. This is a rapist’s wet dream. Wherever your killer got it from, it’s perfect.” She swallowed, cleared her throat. “Remfry was a man who got off on submission…”

  Thorne and Holland exchanged a glance. They hadn’t told Tracy Lenahan, but they were pretty sure the picture wasn’t one the killer had just gone out and bought. The naked woman was wearing a hood identical to the one that Phil Hendricks had taken off Douglas Remfry’s body…

  “There’s half a dozen similar pictures,” Thorne said. “They were sent with the most recent letters. They start to get more revealing the closer the letters get to his release date.”

  Lenahan nodded. “Increasing the excitement…”

  “By the time he got out, he must have been gagging for it,” Holland said.

  She picked up the photograph again in her left hand and reached for the letter with her right. She brandished them both. “Your killer is sensitive to the way this kind of woman might think, and to what will best stimulate the man she’s writing to.”

  Thorne said nothing. He was thinking that she sounded bizarrely impressed.

  “Sensitive, like a gay man maybe,” Holland said.

  Thorne shrugged noncommittally. They were back to that. He had to agree it was possible, but he was growing irritated at the way the investigation was fixing on what they presumed the killer’s sexuality to be. Yes, the violent sodomizing of the victim was clearly significant. The rapist had been raped and Thorne was sure that this would prove to be crucial in finding out why he’d been murdered. Thorne was less sure that who the killer chose to sleep with was as important.

  Holland slid forward in his chair, looked at Tracy Lenahan. “This is an angle we obviously have to consider—that Remfry was killed by someone he’d known in prison. Someone with whom he’d possibly had a non-consensual sexual relationship…”

  Lenahan looked back at him, waiting for the question, not appearing terribly keen to do Holland any favors.

  “Is that possible, do you think? Could Remfry have sexually assaulted another prisoner? Could he have been sexually assaulted himself?”

  The deputy governor leaned back, something dark passing momentarily across her face. It vanished as she clasped her hands together and shook her head. Thorne thought that the laugh she produced sounded a little forced.

  “I think you’ve been watching too many films set in American prisons, Detective Constable. There’re some very nasty pieces of work in here, don’t get me wrong, but very few of them are called Bubba, and if you’re looking for bitches or puppies, you should look in a dogs’ home. Prisoners form relationships, of course they do, but as far as I know, nobody’s going to get gangbanged if they drop the soap in the shower.”

  Thorne couldn’t help but smile. Holland smiled, too, but Thorne could see the skin tighten around his mouth and the reddening just above his collar. “As far as you know?” Holland said. “Meaning that it’s possible.”

  “The week before last, in the kitchens, a prisoner had his ear cut off with the lid from a tin of peaches. That was an argument over a game of table tennis, I think.” She smiled, sexy and very cold. “Anything’s possible.”

  Thorne stood and walked away from Lenahan’s desk toward the door. “Let’s presume that the man we’re looking for is not an ex-con. The obvious question is how he got the information. How did he find Remfry? How could he find out where a convicted rapist was serving his sentence and when he was going to get released, in enough time to set all this up?”

  Lenahan swiveled in her chair to face the computer screen on the corner of her desk. She hit a button on the keyboard. “He would have had to have got it from a database somewhere.” She continued typing, watching the screen. “This is a LIDS computer. Local Inmate Data System, which has everything on the prisoners in here. I can send stuff down the wire to other prisons if I need to, but I wouldn’t have thought this would be enough…”

  Thorne looked at the nearer of the two landscapes. The dark, thick swirls of the paint on the canvas. He thought it might be somewhere in the Lake District. “What about national records?”

  “IIS. The Inmate Information System. That’s got everything—locations, offense details, home address, release date.” S
he looked up and across at Thorne. “But you’d still need to type a name in.”

  “Who has access to that?” Holland asked. “Do you?”

  “No…”

  “The governor? Police liaison officer?”

  She smiled, shook her head firmly. “It’s headquarters-based only. The system’s pretty well restricted, for obvious reasons…”

  Thanks and good-byes were brisk and Thorne would have had it no other way. Though he hadn’t so much as glimpsed a blue prison sweatshirt the whole time they’d been there, he was aware of the prisoners all around him. Beyond the walls of the deputy governor’s office. Above, below, and to all sides. A distant echo, a heaviness, the heat given off by over six hundred men, there thanks to the likes of him.

  Whenever he entered a prison, moved around its green, or mustard or dirty cream corridors, Thorne mentally left a trail of bread crumbs behind him. He always needed to be sure of the quickest way out.

  For most of the drive back down the M1, Holland had his nose buried in a pamphlet he’d picked up on his way out of the prison. Thorne preferred his own form of research.

  He eased Johnny Cash at San Quentin into the cassette player.

  Holland looked up as “Wanted Man” kicked in. He listened for a few seconds, shook his head, and went back to his facts and figures.

  Thorne had tried, once, to tell him. To explain that real country music was fuck all to do with lost dogs and rhinestones. It had been a long night of pool and Guinness, and Phil Hendricks—with whichever boyfriend happened to be around at the time—heckling mercilessly. Thorne had tried to convey to Holland the beauty of George Jones’s voice, the wickedness in Merle Haggard’s, and the awesome rumble of Cash, the dark daddy of them all. A few pints in, he was telling anybody who would listen that Hank Williams was a tortured genius who was undoubtedly the Kurt Cobain of his day and he may even have begun to sing “Your Cheating Heart” around closing time. He couldn’t recall every detail, but he did remember that Holland’s eyes had begun to glaze over long before then…