Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  He would definitely sort the message business out later.

  ELEVEN

  It was no more than a ten-minute walk from the tube station, but Thorne had a healthy sweat on by the time he reached Becke House. A figure loitered by the main doors, wreathed in cigarette smoke. Thorne was amazed when it turned around and revealed itself to be Yvonne Kitson.

  “Morning, Yvonne.”

  She nodded, avoiding his eye and blushing like a fourth-former caught smoking behind the bike sheds. “Morning…”

  Thorne pointed at the cigarette, almost burned down to the butt. “I didn’t know you…”

  “Well, you do now.” She tried her best to smile and took another drag. “Not quite so perfect, I’m afraid…”

  “Thank Christ for that,” Thorne said.

  Kitson’s smile got a little warmer. “Oh, sorry. Was I starting to intimidate you?”

  “Well, not me, obviously. But I think one or two of the younger ones were a bit scared.” Kitson laughed, and Thorne saw that she was still carrying her bag across one shoulder. “Have you not even been in yet?” he asked. She shook her head, blowing smoke out the side of her mouth. “Bloody hell, how stressed out can you possibly be, then?” Kitson raised her eyebrows, looked at him like he didn’t know the half of it.

  They stood for a few seconds, looking in different directions, saying nothing. Thorne decided to make a move before they were forced to start discussing the hot weather. He put one hand on the glass doors…

  “I’ll see you upstairs…” he said.

  “Oh shit.” Like she’d just remembered. “Sorry to hear about the burglary…”

  Thorne nodded, shrugged, and pushed through the doors. He trudged up the stairs, marveling at the incredible speed and efficiency of the Met’s jungle-drum system.

  A desk sergeant in Kentish Town, who knows a DC in Islington, who calls somebody at Colindale…

  Throw a few Chinese whispers into the mix and you had a culturally diverse ensemble of rumor, gossip, and bullshit that outperformed any of the systems they actually used to fight crime…

  It took Thorne almost five minutes to get from one side of the Incident Room to the other. Running the gauntlet of digs and wisecracks. A cup of coffee from the reconditioned machine in the corner the prize that awaited him.

  “Sorry, mate…”

  “You look a bit rough, sir. Sleep on the sofa?”

  “Never done a crime prevention seminar, then, Tom?”

  “Many happy returns…” This was Holland.

  Thorne had wanted to keep it quiet. He’d deliberately said nothing in the pub the night before. He must have mentioned the date to Holland sometime. “Thanks.”

  “Not a very nice present to come home to. I mean the burglary, not—”

  “No. It wasn’t.”

  “Somebody said they took your car…”

  “Is that a smirk, Holland?”

  “No, sir…”

  The night before. Thorne, hauling the mattress out through the front door when he remembered that he hadn’t seen the Mondeo outside when he’d arrived home. He didn’t recall seeing his car keys on the table as he’d come in either. He had been worrying about other things at the time…

  He dropped the mattress and stepped out into the street. Maybe he’d parked the car somewhere else.

  He hadn’t. Fuckers…

  “Birthday drink in the Oak later, then?” Holland said.

  Thorne stepped past him, almost within reach of the coffee machine now. He turned and spoke quietly, reaching into his pocket for change. “Just a quiet one, all right?”

  “Whatever…”

  “Not like last night. Just you and Phil, maybe.”

  “Fine…”

  “I might ask Russell if he fancies it…”

  “We can do it another day if you’re not up for it.”

  Thorne slammed his coins into the coffee machine. “Listen, after dealing with the fallout from our second body, and spending fuck knows how long I’m going to have to spend on the phone to house insurance companies and car insurance companies and whichever council department is responsible for taking shitty mattresses away, I think I might need a drink…”

  After Holland had gone, Thorne stood, sipping his coffee and staring at the large white write-on/wipe-off board that dominated one wall of the room. Crooked lines scrawled in black felt-tip, marking out the columns and rows. Arrows leading away to addresses and phone numbers. The ACTIONS for the day, each team member’s duties allocated by the office manager. The names of those peripheral to the investigation. The names of those central to it: REMFRY, GRIBBIN, DODD…

  In a column of all its own: JANE FOLEY??

  And now a second name added beneath Dougie Remfry’s, with plenty of empty space for more names below that one. The heading at the top of the column hadn’t been altered yet. Nobody had thought to add an S to VICTIM, but they would.

  Thorne heard a sniff and turned to find Sam Karim at his shoulder.

  “How’s the head?”

  Thorne glanced at him. “What?”

  “After last night. I feel like shit warmed up…”

  “I’m fine,” Thorne said.

  Samir Karim was a large, gregarious Indian with a shock of thick silver hair and a broad London accent that was delivered at a hundred miles per hour. He planted half of his sizable backside onto the edge of a desk. “Fuck all off those tapes, by the way…”

  “Which tapes?”

  “CCTV tapes from the Greenwood.”

  Thorne shrugged, unsurprised.

  “Couple of possibles,” Karim said. “But only from the back. The cameras only really cover the bar and the area around the desk and the lifts. You can walk in and go straight up the stairs without being seen at all, if you know where the cameras are…”

  “He knew where they were,” Thorne said.

  They stared at the board together for a moment or two. “That’s the difference between our team and all the others, isn’t it?” Karim said.

  “What?”

  “They have a victim. We have a list…”

  There’s a moment in film and TV shows, a particular shot, a cliché to signify that moment when the penny drops. For real people this means remembering where they’ve left their car keys, or the title of a song that’s been annoying them. For the screen copper, it’s usually a darker revelation. The instant that provides the break in the case. Then, when that pure and brilliant comprehension dawns, the camera zooms toward the face of the hero, crashing in quickly or sometimes creeping slowly up on them. Either way, it goes in close and it stays there, showing the light of realization growing in the eyes…

  Thorne was not an actor. There was no nod of steely determination, no enigmatic stare. He stood holding his coffee cup, his mouth gaping, like a half-wit.

  A list…

  The certainty hit him like a cricket ball. He felt a bead of sweat surface momentarily from every pore in his body before retreating again. Tingling; hot, then cold.

  “Feeling okay, Tom?” Karim asked.

  Zoom in close and hold…

  Thorne didn’t feel the hot coffee splashing across his wrist as he marched across the room, up the corridor, and into Brigstocke’s office.

  Brigstocke looked up, saw the expression on Thorne’s face, put down his pen.

  “What…?”

  “I know how he finds them,” Thorne said. “How he finds out where the rapists are…”

  “How?”

  “This could all be very simple. Our man might work for the prison service, or hang about in pubs around Pentonville and the Scrubs, hoping to get matey with prison officers, but I doubt it. At the end of the day, finding out where rapists are banged up isn’t that hard. Families, court records…he could just go to newspaper archives and sift through the local rags if he felt like it…”

  “Tom…”

  Thorne stepped quickly forward, put his coffee cup down on Brigstocke’s desk, and began to pace around
the small office. “It’s about what happens afterward. It’s about release dates and addresses. I had thought that maybe there was some connection with the families, but Welch was NFA. His family disowned him and moved away years ago.” He glanced across at Brigstocke as if he were making everything very obvious. Brigstocke nodded, still waiting. “Release details are fluid, right? Prisoners move around, parole dates change, extra days get tagged onto sentences. The killer has to have access to up-to-date, accurate information…”

  “Do I have to phone a friend?” Brigstocke said. “Or are you going to tell me? How does he find them?”

  Thorne allowed himself the tiniest flicker of a smile. “The same way we do.”

  Behind his glasses Brigstocke blinked twice, slowly. The confusion on his face became something that might have been regret. Or the anticipation of it. “The Sex Offenders Register.”

  Thorne nodded, picked up his coffee. “Jesus, we need shooting ’cause it took us this long…”

  Brigstocke took a deep breath. He began stepping slowly backward and forward in the space between the wall and the edge of the desk. Trying to take this vital but daunting piece of new information on board. Trying to shape it into something he could handle. “I don’t need to say it, do I?” he said finally.

  “What?”

  “About this not getting out…”

  Thorne looked up, past Brigstocke. The sun was moving behind a cloud but it was still baking in the tiny office. He could feel the sweat gathering in the small of his back. “You don’t need to say it.”

  “Not just because it’s…sensitive. Although it is.”

  Thorne knew that Brigstocke was right. The whole issue of the Register had been what the tabloids were fond of calling a “political hot potato” for years. This was just the sort of thing to blow the whole “naming and shaming” debate wide open again. When he looked back to Brigstocke, the DCI was smiling.

  “This might be the way we get him, though, Tom.”

  Thorne was counting on it…

  Brigstocke came around his desk. “Right, let’s start with the bodies that are informed about an offender’s registration requirements. The ones that get fed the notification details as a matter of course.” He started to count them off on his fingers. “Social services, probation…”

  “And us, of course,” Thorne said. “We’d better not forget the most interesting one, had we, Russell?”

  Macpherson House was located in a side street off Camden Parkway. In the course of a century, the building had been a theater, cinema, and bingo hall. Now it was little more than a shell, within which was situated temporary hostel accommodation.

  “Fuck me gently,” Stone said. He was craning back his head, staring at the grimy, crumbling ceiling high above him.

  Holland looked up. There were still traces of gilt on the moldings. Decorative swirls of plaster leaves trailed across the ceiling and then down toward four ornate columns in each corner of the vast room. “Must have been amazing…”

  There was a week-old copy of the Daily Star on the floor. Stone pushed it aside with his foot. He sniffed at the stale air and pulled a face. “It’s a bloody shame…”

  As they walked, Holland took Stone through the simple, ironic history of the place. The theater that had become a cinema. The cinema done for in the seventies by the more popular entertainment of the bingo hall. The bingo hall itself made redundant thirty years later by the easy availability of scratch ’n’ win cards and the National Lottery.

  “From music hall to the Stupid Tax,” Holland said.

  Stone snorted. “I take it those six numbers never came up, then?”

  “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  Their footsteps echoed off the scuffed stone floors, else were muffled as they walked across the occasional threadbare rug or curling square of carpet. “Can’t see what’s going to replace the Lottery, can you?”

  Holland shook his head. “Not as long as there’s a call for it.”

  They were walking ten yards or so behind Brian, the hostel supervisor, a big man in his fifties with long gray hair, a large hoop earring, and a multicolored waistcoat. Without turning around, he held out both arms. Taking in the place.

  “Always be a call for this, though…”

  Now, forty feet below the faded rococo grandeur, the space was taken up with cracked sinks and metal beds. A kitchen and a serving hatch. A pair of small televisions, each attached with a padlock and chain to nearby radiators. Behind the beds, along the walls, stood row upon row of scratched and dented lockers—some without locks, many without doors. All rusting and covered in graffiti.

  “Council got them for a song,” Brian said. “When the swimming pool down the road was knocked down. Same week they got this place off Mecca…”

  Holland looked down at the floor as he walked. Shoes under many of the beds, trainers, mostly. The occasional tatty suitcase. Dozens of plastic bags.

  Stone took off his jacket. “Tramps by and large, is it?”

  Brian looked back over his shoulder. Holland thought he looked powerful, like he could handle himself. He probably needed to on occasion. “All sorts. Long-term homeless, runaways, addicts. The odd ex-con like Welch…”

  “Where do they go during the day?” Holland asked.

  The big man slowed, let Holland and Stone draw level with him. “Wandering about. Begging. Trying to find somewhere to sleep.” He smiled when Holland looked confused. “This place is warm and they can get something to eat, but there’s not a lot of sleeping goes on. Most of them are scared of getting stuff stolen. Even if they do want to sleep, a hundred blokes coughing and shifting around on creaky bedsprings is worse than a neighbor with a drum kit…”

  “My ex-girlfriend kept me awake half the night,” Stone said. “Talking in her sleep, grinding her teeth…”

  Brian smiled thinly. “It’s quiet enough in here now, but you won’t be able to hear yourself think by dinnertime. They’ll start drifting back as soon as it starts to get dark. Be rammed in here by nine o’clock.”

  Holland looked at the lines of beds, three and four deep. Imagined it.

  Eyes down for a full house.

  The supervisor stopped. He tapped on the open door of a locker and immediately began moving away again. “This was Mr. Welch’s. I’ll be in the front office if you need anything…”

  They both pulled on gloves. While Stone went through the locker, Holland got down on his hands and knees and, for the second time in a little over a fortnight, went rummaging under the bed of a recently murdered rapist.

  It took less than two minutes to gather together Welch’s worldly goods: a battered green holdall full of clothes that smelled of charity shops; a plastic bag of dirty pants and socks; a radio spattered with white paint; an electric razor; a couple of tatty paperbacks…

  At the back of the locker, between the pages of one of the books, the photographs of Jane Foley.

  “Here she is,” Stone said, holding one of the pictures up between his fingertips. “Lovelier than ever.”

  Holland got to his feet, moved across to take a look. “How many?”

  “Half a dozen. Can’t see any letters. Must have chucked them…”

  Stone slid the photos into an evidence bag, popped it into an inside pocket. Holland shoved everything else into a black bin-liner. When he’d finished he picked the bag up. It wasn’t heavy.

  “Not a lot, is it?” he said.

  Stone pushed the locker door closed and shrugged. “That’s what you get.”

  It was nearly midday and starting to get really warm. Holland rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck. He thought about what he guessed was going through Stone’s mind. “Do you not give a shit because Welch was an ex-con?” he said. “Or because he was an ex-con who was also a rapist? Honestly, I’m interested…”

  Stone thought about it. Holland bounced the bin bag against his knees.

  “I suppose I’d give a bit more of a shit if he’d been a forger,” Stone
said. “Less if he’d murdered half a dozen schoolgirls…”

  Holland looked at the expression on Stone’s face. He couldn’t help but laugh as they began to move away, back toward the entrance. “I don’t believe it. You’ve actually got a fucking sliding scale…”

  They walked up Parkway, where Stone had parked the Cougar. At regular intervals, rubbish bags like the one Holland was carrying were piled high on the pavement. After Madame Tussaud’s, Camden’s Sunday market was now the second most popular tourist attraction in the city, and cleaning up after it was becoming a little like painting the Forth Bridge.

  “So, what is it now? Couple of months till the baby?” Stone asked.

  Holland swung the bin bag from one hand to the other. “Ten weeks.”

  “Sophie must be the size of a house…”

  Holland smiled, turned to look into the window of a Japanese restaurant. The plates of plastic sushi, red and yellow and pink. He promised himself that one of these days he’d try some.

  They turned left and Stone unlocked the car with a remote. “So? Excited, then?”

  “Yeah, she’s very excited.”

  Stone opened the car door. Looked at Holland across the roof. “I meant you…”

  “Get your arse up. Right up in the air, that’s it. Now let your fingers do the walking…”

  Charlie Dodd was making himself useful. The place had been hired out for a webcam session and he’d thrown in his services, gratis. He was cheerfully relaying on-screen instructions to the bored-looking girl on the bed when the phone rang.

  “Just do some moaning for a minute, sweetheart…”

  His hand was slippery against the receiver as he mumbled a greeting and waited.

  “I got your message…”

  Dodd recognized the voice straightaway. Without looking around, he used his hand to indicate to the girl on the bed that she should carry on, then brought it to his mouth and took out the cigarette.

  “I was wondering when I was going to hear back from you.”

  “I’ve had a busy weekend.”

  Dodd reached for a plastic cup, flicked fag ash into the inch of cold tea at the bottom. “Anything interesting?”