Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  “Fuck,” Holland said. “It costs twenty-five grand a year to look after one prisoner. Does that sound like a lot to you?”

  Thorne didn’t really know. It was twice what a lot of people earned in a year, but once you took into account the salaries of prison staff and the maintenance of the buildings…

  “I don’t think they’re spending that on carpets and caviar, somehow,” Thorne said.

  “No, but still…”

  It was roasting in the car. The Mondeo was far too old to have air con, but Thorne was very pissed off at being completely unable to coax anything but warm air from a heating system he’d had fixed twice already. He opened a window but shut it after half a minute, the breeze not worth the noise.

  Holland looked up from his pamphlet again. “Do you think they should have luxuries in there? You know, TVs in their cells and whatever? PlayStations, some of them have got…”

  Thorne turned the sound down a little and glanced up at the sign as the Mondeo roared past it. They were approaching the Milton Keynes turnoff. Still fifty miles from London.

  Thorne realized, as he had many times before, that for all the time he spent putting people behind bars, he gave precious little thought to what happened when they got there. When he did think about it, weigh all the arguments up, he supposed that, all things considered, a loss of freedom was as bad as it could get. Above and beyond that, he wasn’t sure exactly where he stood.

  He feathered the brake, dropped down to just under seventy, and drifted across to the inside lane. They were in no great hurry…

  Thorne knew, as much as he knew anything, that murderers, sex offenders, those who would harm children, had to be removed. He also knew that putting these people away was more than just a piece of argot. It was actually what they did. What he did. Once these offenders were…elsewhere, the debate as to where punishment ended and rehabilitation began was for others to have. He felt instinctively that prison should never become…the phrase holiday camps popped into his head. He chided himself for beginning to sound like a right-wing nutcase. Fuck it, a few TVs was neither here nor there. Let them watch the football or join in with game shows if that was what they wanted…

  Sadly, by the time Thorne had formulated his answer to the question, Holland had moved on to something else.

  “Bloody hell.” Holland looked up from the pamphlet. “Sixty percent of goal nets in the English league are made by prisoners. I hope they’ve made the ones at White Hart Lane strong enough, the abuse Spurs get from other teams…”

  “Right…”

  “Here’s another one. Prison farms produce twenty million pints of milk every year. That’s fucking amazing…”

  Thorne was no longer listening. He was hearing nothing but the rush of the road under the wheels and thinking about the photograph. He pictured the hooded woman, the make-believe Jane Foley, feeling a stirring in his groin at the image in his head of her shadowy nakedness.

  Wherever he got it from…

  Suddenly Thorne knew where he might go to find the answer, at least any answer there was to be found. The woman in that photo might not be Jane Foley, but she had to be somebody, and Thorne knew just the person to come up with a name.

  When he started to listen again, Holland was in the middle of another question.

  “…as bad as this? Do you think prisons are any better than they were back in…?” He pointed toward the cassette player.

  “Nineteen sixty-nine,” Thorne said. Johnny Cash was singing the song he’d written about San Quentin itself. Singing about hating every inch of the place they were all stood in. The prisoners whooping and cheering at every complaint, at each pugnacious insult, at every plea to raze the prison to the ground.

  “So?” Holland waved his pamphlet. “Are prisons any better now than they were then, do you think? Than they were thirty-odd years ago?”

  Thorne pictured the face of a man in Belmarsh Prison, and something inside hardened very quickly.

  “I fucking hope not.”

  At a little after six o’clock, Eve Bloom double-locked the shop, walked half a dozen paces to a bright red front door, and was home.

  It was handy renting the flat above her shop. It wasn’t expensive, but she’d have paid a good deal more for the pleasure of being able to tumble out of bed at the last possible minute, the coffee steaming in her own mug next to the till as she opened up. Every last second in bed was precious when you had to spend as many mornings as she did, up and dressed at half past stupid. Walking around the flower market at New Covent Garden, ordering stock, chatting with wholesalers, while every other person she could think of was still dead to the world.

  She liked this time of year. The few precious weeks of summer, when she wasn’t forced to choose between working in scarf and gloves or punishing her stock with central heating. She liked closing up when it was still light. It made the early starts less painful, gave that couple of hours between the end of the day and the start of the evening a scent of excitement, a tang of real possibility.

  She closed the door behind her and climbed the stripped wooden stairs up to the flat. Denise had wielded the sander and done the whole place in a weekend, while Eve had taken responsibility for the decorating. Most domestic chores got split fairly equally between them, and though there were the sulks, the occasional frosty silences that followed a pilfered yogurt or a dress borrowed without asking, the two of them got on pretty well. Eve knew that Denise could be quite controlling, but then she also knew there were occasions when she herself needed to be controlled. She tended to be more than a little disorganized, and though Den could be Mother Hen–ish at times, it was nice to feel looked after. The endless list making could get wearing, but there was always food in the fridge and they never ran out of toilet roll!

  She dropped her bag on the kitchen table and flicked on the kettle. “Oi, Hollins, you old slapper, you want tea?” Almost before she’d finished shouting she remembered that Denise was going straight out from work, meeting Ben in the pub next to her office. Denise had called the shop at lunchtime, told her she wouldn’t be home for dinner, asked her if she fancied joining them.

  Eve walked through to her bedroom to put on a fresh T-shirt while she was waiting for the kettle to boil. No, she’d stay in, veg out in front of the TV with a bottle of very cold white wine. She couldn’t be bothered to change and go out. It was sticky outside and uncomfortable. She’d feel dirty by the time she got there. The pub would be loud and smoky and she’d only feel like a third wheel anyway. Denise and Ben were very touchy-feely…

  She stared at herself in the mirror on the back of her bedroom door, striking a pose in bra and pants. She saw herself smiling as she thought again about the policeman who had answered the phone a week before. Impossible to picture from just the voice, of course, but she’d tried anyway and was pretty keen on what she’d come up with. She was fairly sure that, crime scene or no crime scene, he’d been flirting with her on the phone, and she knew full well that she’d been flirting right back. Or had she been the one to start it?

  She pulled on a white, FCUK T-shirt and went back into the kitchen to make her tea.

  They’d sent a car around the day after she’d called, to collect the cassette from her answering machine. She told the two officers that she’d have been more than happy to bring it into the station, but, understandably, they seemed eager to take it with them.

  Walking around the flat opening windows, she debated whether a week was quite long enough. She couldn’t decide whether she should just turn up, or if it might be better to call. The last thing she wanted was to look pushy. She had every right of course, being involved, to see what was going on. It was only natural that she should be a bit curious after the business with the phone call, wasn’t it? Surely, going along to inquire if there had been any progress in the case was no more than any other concerned citizen would do.

  She suddenly realized that, wandering around the flat, she’d put her tea down and couldn’t remember
where. Screw it, the kitchen was close and she knew exactly where the fridge was.

  Opening the wine, she wondered if Detective Inspector Thorne was one of those funny blokes who got put off by women who appeared a bit keen.

  Maybe she’d leave it another day or two…

  The evening was ridiculously warm.

  Elvis, Thorne’s emotionally disturbed cat, looked uncomfortable, following him from room to room, yowling like she was asking to be shaved. Thorne got sweaty, cooking and eating cheese on toast, wearing an open Hawaiian shirt and a pair of shorts he’d bought during a short-lived dalliance with a nearby gym.

  Thorne lay on the sofa and watched a film. He turned the sound on the TV down and looked at the pictures with the radio on. He flicked through the music section in the previous week’s edition of Time Out, trying to find the band with the most ridiculous name. Finally, just before midnight, his empties cleared away and nothing else to do that might put it off any longer, he reached for the phone.

  It didn’t matter that it was late. His father’s body clock was only one of the systems that had broken down.

  In some ways, the Alzheimer’s diagnosis had come as something of a relief. The eccentricities were now called symptoms and, for Thorne, the vagaries of old age becoming certainties, however unpleasant, had at least provided a focus. Things had to be done, simple as that. Thorne still got irritated with the terrible jokes and the pointless trivia, but the guilt didn’t last as long as it had before. Now he just got on with it, and the shape of the guilt had changed. Hammered into something he could recognize as anger, at an illness that took father and son and forced them to swap places.

  There was a financial burden now that wasn’t always easy to meet, but he was getting used to it. Jim Thorne was, at least physically, in pretty good shape for seventy-one, but still, a carer needed to visit daily and there was no way an old-age pension was going to cover it. His younger sister, Eileen, to whom he had never been close, traveled up from Brighton once a week, taking care to keep Thorne well informed of his dad’s condition.

  Thorne was grateful, though it seemed like a terribly British thing to him. Families eventually behaving well when it was practically too late.

  “Dad…”

  “Oh, thank Christ, this is driving me mad. Who was the first Doctor Who? Come on, this is doing my head in…”

  “Was it Patrick somebody? Dark hair…”

  “Troughton was the second one, the one before Pertwee. Oh shit and bloody confusion, I thought you might know.”

  “Look in the book. I bought you that TV encyclopedia…”

  “Fucking Eileen’s tidied it away somewhere. Who else might know…?”

  Thorne started to relax. His father was fine.

  “Dad, we need to start thinking about this wedding.”

  “What wedding?”

  “Trevor. Eileen’s son. Your nephew…”

  His dad took a deep breath. When he breathed out again, the rattle in his chest sounded like a low growl. “He’s an arsehole. He was an arsehole when he got married the first time. Don’t see why I should have to go and watch the arsehole get married again.”

  The language was unimaginative, but Thorne had to admit that his father had a point.

  “You told Eileen you were going.”

  There was a heavy sigh, a phlegmy cough, and then silence. After a few seconds, Thorne began to think his father had put the phone down and wandered away.

  “Dad…”

  “It’s ages. It’s ages away, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a week on Saturday. Come on, Eileen must have talked to you about it. She talks to me about nothing else.”

  “Do I have to wear a suit?”

  “Wear your navy one. It’s light and I think it’s going to be warm.”

  “That’s wool, the navy one. I’ll bloody roast in the navy.”

  Thorne took a deep breath, thinking, Please your bloody self. “Listen, I’m going to come and pick you up on the day and we’re stopping the night down there…”

  “I’m not going down there in that bloody death trap you drive…”

  “I’ll hire a car, all right? It’ll be a laugh, we’ll have a good time. Okay?”

  Thorne could hear a clinking, the sound of something metallic being fiddled with. His dad had taken to buying cheap secondhand radios, disassembling them, and throwing the pieces away.

  “Dad? Is that okay? We can talk about the details closer to the day if you want.”

  “Tom?”

  “Yeah?”

  To Thorne, the silence that followed seemed like the sound of thoughts getting lost. Slipping down cracks, just beyond reach and then gone, flailing as they tumbled into darkness. Finally, there was an engagement, like a piece of film catching, regaining its proper speed. Holes locking onto ratchets.

  “Sort that Doctor Who thing out for me, will you, son?”

  Thorne swallowed hard. “I’ll ask around and call you tomorrow. Okay?”

  “Thanks…”

  “And listen, Dad, dig out that navy suit. I’m sure it’s not wool.”

  “Oh shit, you never said anything about a suit…”

  December 22, 1975

  They were both in the kitchen. A few feet apart, and nowhere near each other.

  Just a couple of days till Christmas, and from the radio on the windowsill the traditional songs did a good job of filling the silences. Seasonal stuff from Sinatra or Elvis mixed in with the more recent Christmas hits from Slade and Wizzard. That awful Queen song looked like it was going to be the Christmas Number One. He didn’t like it much anyway but he knew that he’d never be able to hear it again without thinking about her. About her body, before and after. Her face and how it must have looked, Franklin pushing her down among the cardboard boxes…

  She stood with her back to him, washing up at the sink. He sat at the table and looked at the Daily Mirror. The newsprint, the soapsuds, the absurdly cheery DJ—things to look at and listen to as, separately, they both went over and over it. Remembering what had happened at the station that morning.

  Thinking about the police officer, pacing around the Interview Room, winking at the WPC in the corner, leaning down on the desk and shouting.

  He thought about the copper’s face. The smile that felt like a slap.

  She was thinking about the way he’d smelled.

  “Right,” the officer had said. “Let’s go over it again.” And then, afterward, he’d said it again. And again. Shaking his head indulgently when she’d finally broken down, beckoning the WPC, who strolled across, pulling a tissue from the sleeve of her uniform. A minute or two, a glass of water, and then they were back into it. The detective sergeant marching around the place, as if in all his years of training he’d never learned the difference between victim and criminal.

  He’d done nothing, said nothing. Wanted to, but thought better of it. Instead, he’d sat and watched and listened to his wife crying and thought stupid thoughts, like why, when it was so cold, when he was buttoned up in his heaviest coat, was the bastard detective sergeant in shirtsleeves? Rings of sweat beneath both beefy arms.

  Now there was a choir singing on the radio…

  He stood up and walked slowly toward the sink, stopping when he was within touching distance of her. He could see something stiffen around her shoulders as he drew close.

  “You need to forget everything he said, okay? That sergeant. He was just going over it to get everything straight. Making sure. Doing his job. He knows it’ll be worse than that on the day. He knows how hard the defense lawyer’s going to be. I suppose he’s just preparing us for it, you know? If we go through it now, maybe it won’t be so hard in court.” He took another step and he was standing right behind her. Her head was perfectly still. He couldn’t tell what she was looking at, but all the while her hands remained busy in the white plastic washing-up bowl…

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s just get through Christmas, shall we, love? It’s not
just for us after all, is it? New year soon, and then we can just keep our heads down, and get on with it, and wait for the trial. We could go away for a bit. Try and get back on an even keel maybe…”

  Her voice was a whisper. He couldn’t make it out.

  “Say again, love.”

  “That policeman’s aftershave,” she said. “I thought at first it was the same as Franklin’s. I thought I was going to be sick. It was so strong…”

  She began to scream the second his hand touched the back of her neck and it grew louder as she spun around, the water flying everywhere, her arm moving hard and fast, striking out instinctively, the mug in her hand smashing across his nose.

  Then she screamed at what she had done and she reached out for him and they sank down onto the linoleum, which quickly grew slippery with blood and suds.

  While the voices of young boys filled the kitchen, singing about holly and ivy.

  FOUR

  Back when the Peel Centre had been the home of cadets in training, Becke House had been a dormitory building. To Thorne it still felt utilitarian, dead. He swore, on occasion, that rounding a corner, or pushing open an office door, he could catch a whiff of sweat and homesickness…

  No surprise when, a month or so earlier, everyone on Team 3 had got very excited at news of improved facilities and extra working space. In reality, it amounted to little more than an increased stationery budget, a reconditioned coffee machine, and one more airless cubbyhole, which Brigstocke had immediately commandeered. There were now three offices in the narrow corridor that ran off the major incident room. Brigstocke had the new one, while Thorne shared his with Yvonne Kitson. Holland and Stone were left with the smallest of the lot, negotiating rights to the wastepaper basket and arguing about who got the chair with the cushion.

  Thorne hated Becke House. Actually it depressed him, sapped his energy to the point where he hadn’t enough left to hate it properly. He’d heard somebody once joking about Sick Building Syndrome, but to him the place wasn’t so much sick as terminally ill.