Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  For a few seconds there was nothing but the crackle of static. “You said something about doing me a favor.”

  “Done you a favor, mate,” Dodd said. “Already did it. A big favor.”

  “Go on…”

  Dodd thought that the man on the other end of the phone sounded relaxed. He was probably putting it on, of course, trying to sound cool because he could guess what was coming. Because he knew he might have to part with some money and wanted to be in control in case there was haggling to do. It was a pretty convincing act, though. Sounded like he knew what Dodd was going to say…

  “The police were here with one of the photos you did. A photo of the girl with the hood on.” Dodd waited for a reaction. Didn’t get it. “I got asked a lot of questions…”

  “And did you tell any lies, Mr. Dodd?”

  Dodd pinched the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, took a final drag. “A couple of little white ones, yeah. And one dirty big fucker.” He dropped the nub end into the plastic cup, turned, and watched the girl on the bed. “I told them I never saw your face. Said you never took the crash helmet off…”

  The girl’s rear end bobbed and swayed. Dodd thought the moaning was a bit over-the-top—silly cow sounded like she had food poisoning. There were red blotches at the top of her legs. Finally, the man on the other end of the phone spoke…

  “Come on, Mr. Dodd, spit it out. Don’t be shy.”

  Dodd reached into the top pocket of his shirt for another cigarette. “I’m not fucking shy, mate…”

  “Good, because there’s really no need to be…”

  “Not about money, anyway.”

  The man laughed. “There we are. No point in going around the houses. Now, if I remember rightly, there’s a cash-point machine just around the corner from your studio, isn’t there…?”

  Thorne was somewhere between Brent Cross and Golders Green when he began finding it hard to stay awake…

  He had been as good as the promise he’d made to himself and Holland that morning, having left the Royal Oak in time to make the last tube going south. He was tired and there was still plenty to sort out back at the flat, so it was no great wrench to walk out of the pub before closing time.

  He’d left just as Phil Hendricks was starting to let rip. He’d made his feelings about the Sexual Offences Act clear plenty of times before. In the pub, once the subject of the Register had come up, there was no stopping him…

  “Don’t forget the gay men,” Hendricks had said. “Those evil bastards who are twisted enough to enjoy loving, consensual sex with their seventeen-year-old boyfriends.” The words were spat out, the flat Manchester vowels lending an edge of real anger to the irony.

  Thorne knew that Hendricks had every right to be pissed off. It was ridiculous that men convicted of what was still termed “gross indecency” should be lumped together with child abusers and rapists. Even when the age of consent for gay men was lowered to sixteen, as one day it would be, Thorne knew that those convicted prior to its equalization would remain on the Register.

  Thorne could only agree with his friend’s pithy assessment, the last words he’d caught as he walked out of the pub.

  “It’s a queer basher’s charter,” Hendricks had said.

  Eve had called to wish him a happy birthday as he was heading for the tube station at Colindale. As they talked, Thorne walked past the KFC, the chippy, more than one kebab shop. His stomach urged him to go in, then changed its mind as he told Eve about the burglary and the little gift that had been left for him.

  “Well, it’s certainly original,” Eve had said.

  Thorne laughed. “Right, and a homemade present’s so much more thoughtful, isn’t it?”

  Thorne was walking slowly, absorbed in the conversation but keenly aware, as always, of exactly where he was and what he was doing. Keeping track of any movement on the other side of the street, at the corners up ahead, behind parked cars. This wasn’t Tottenham or Hackney, but still, there was no point in being stupid when people were getting shot for £9.99 handsets…

  “So…when are you going to replace that bed?” Eve had asked.

  “Oh, I suppose I’ll get around to it eventually…”

  “I sincerely hope so.”

  They were joking, but suddenly Thorne sensed a real shift. A hint of impatience. Like she was making the running and wanted him to do some catching up.

  “Well, we can always go to your place, can’t we?” Thorne said.

  There was a pause. Then: “It’s a bit tricky. Denise can be funny about that sort of thing…”

  “About you having men over?”

  “About men staying over…”

  Thorne heard Eve sigh, as if this was a conversation she’d had before. With Denise herself, most probably. “Hang on, she has Ben around, doesn’t she?”

  “I know, it’s mad. But trust me, it isn’t worth going into…”

  Then Thorne had arrived at the station and they’d wound it up. While he fed coins into the ticket machine they’d made a hasty arrangement to meet the following week. She’d said good-bye as he went down on the escalator and he lost the signal before he could say it back.

  The train was all but deserted. A teenage couple sat at the far end of the carriage, the girl’s head on her boyfriend’s shoulder. He was stroking her hair and muttering things that made her smile.

  Thorne took a deep breath. His brain felt fuzzed up. He’d only had a couple of pints but his head was thickening, getting heavier with every lurch and sway of the train. He needed to stay awake. Tempting as it was to close his eyes, to let his head drop back, the last thing he wanted to do was to nod off and wake up in Morden.

  He thought about the conversation with Eve. When they’d arranged to meet, why hadn’t he pushed to make it sooner? Was that panic he’d felt when she’d been talking about the bed? Maybe with the case and his old man and the burglary there was too much other stuff going on. Maybe he was just subconsciously prioritizing. He was definitely feeling far too fucked to think straight about anything…

  At Hampstead, a man got on through the doors to Thorne’s right, and despite the availability of seats chose to stand at the end of the carriage, clutching onto the rail above his head. Thorne looked at the man. He was very tall and thin with chiseled features and a frenzy of graying hair and a battery of bizarre visual tics from which Thorne found it impossible to avert his gaze…

  It quickly became clear that the tic, which Thorne guessed to be Tourette’s syndrome, was in three parts. First the man would raise his eyebrows theatrically and his chin would jerk up. A second later the entire head would be wrenched round to the side, and finally, the jaws would snap noisily together, the teeth clacking like castanets. Thorne watched guilty and mesmerized as this three-part pattern repeated itself over and over, and he found himself assigning a word, a sound effect, to each distinct spasm. The eyebrows, the wrench of the neck, the snap of the jaws. Three movements that in rapid succession seemed to display surprise, interest, and then ultimately a bitter disappointment. Movements that sounded to Thorne like “Ooh! Whay-hay! Clack!”

  Oh really? Sounds interesting! Ah, fuck it…

  After a minute or two the man seemed to be bringing the seizure under control and Thorne finally dragged his own head around and his eyes away. The young couple in the left-hand carriage had got off and had been replaced by a pair who were a good deal older and less tactile. The woman caught Thorne’s eye and dropped her gaze to the carriage floor like a piece of litter.

  When Thorne turned back and looked to his right, the man who was holding on to the rail was now still, and staring straight at him.

  Thorne leaned back until he felt his head, big and wobbly as a baby’s, hit the window. The glass was cool against his scalp.

  He closed his eyes.

  He was only a couple of stations away from where he’d need to change at Camden. He could afford to spend just a minute or two drifting, wide-awake and counting the stops, and floatin
g toward his hillside…

  Almost as soon as Thorne had completed the thought, he was asleep.

  He had plenty of stuff to do, a few more images to download from the camera and print, but he thought he deserved a quick break. Ten or fifteen minutes messing about on the Net wouldn’t hurt and then he’d get back to business. Put all the pictures together and stick them in the post…

  He enjoyed working at the computer, now that he felt like he’d mastered it. He’d needed to learn, so he’d learned. In just a couple of years he’d gone from being a novice to being more than comfortable with pretty much any machine.

  He opened the bookmark, drummed his finger against the mouse as he waited for the page to appear…

  Once you became skilled at something, it was easy to enjoy it. Like the work he did on those fuckers with the knife and the washing line. He was certainly enjoying that. It was funny, he thought, that the word skilled had kill sitting right there in the middle of it.

  He’d first found the site when he was looking for inspiration, for help with the photos of Jane. Now he just popped back every now and then to keep abreast of it all. Just to see…

  It had been a strange week, all in all. By rights he should have been doing other stuff, but he’d been forced to tweak the schedule, to rearrange things a bit in view of the hiccup with Dodd. That’s all it had been. It was easily fixed.

  There were several new links from the site since the last time he’d been here. One or two were begging to be checked out. He pointed and clicked, held his breath…

  He was itching to get back to the serious work. Apart from anything else there was the challenge of a change in routine. Now that the prisons had been warned, there couldn’t be any more letters.

  “Jesus…”

  The woman’s head was shaved and she had been hog-tied. A chain ran from a ring in her collar down to the leather strap between her ankles. The buckled harness snaked across her face like a spider’s web, her mouth at its center filled by a large red ball gag…

  It was a shame. If he was going to use more pictures, this was just the sort of thing he might have gone for, but now it was academic. With Remfry and Welch it had been a lovely, long, slow tease. With the next one things would have to be simple and direct. A bit more “in your face.”

  He hoped it would be as much fun as wooing.

  TWELVE

  Carol Chamberlain felt twenty years younger. Every thought and sensation was coming that bit quicker, feeling that bit stronger. She felt hungrier, more awake. The night before in bed, she’d leaned across and “helped herself,” for heaven’s sake, which had certainly surprised and delighted her old man. Maybe the battered green folder on her lap would prove to be the saving of both of them…

  Jack was still smiling twelve hours later as he brought a plate of toast through to her. She blew him a kiss. He took his overcoat from the stand in the corner, off to pick up a paper.

  Carol had been fifty-two, a DCI for a decade, when the Met’s ludicrous policy of compulsory retirement after thirty years had pushed her out of the force. That had been three years ago. It had rankled, for each day of those three years, right up to the moment when that phone call had come out of the blue.

  Carol had been amazed, and not a little relieved…

  She knew how much she had to offer, still had to offer, but she also knew that this chance had come along at the very last moment. If she was being honest, she would have to admit that recently she’d felt herself slowly giving in, throwing in the towel in much the same way that her husband had.

  She heard the gate creak shut. Turned to watch Jack walking away up the road. An old man at fifty-seven…

  Carol picked up the folder from her knees. Her first cold case. A sticker on the top right-hand corner read AMRU.

  The Area Major Review Unit was what it said at the top of the notepaper. The Cold Case Team was how they thought of themselves. In the canteen they were just called the Crinkly Squad.

  They could call her whatever they liked, but she’d do the same bloody good job she’d always done…

  The day before at Victoria, when she’d collected the file from the General Registry, she’d noticed straightaway that it had been pulled only three weeks earlier by a DC from the Serious Crime Group. That was interesting. She’d scribbled down the officer’s name, made a mental note to give him a call and find out what he’d been looking for…

  Three years away from it. Three years of reading all those books she’d never got around to, and cooking, and gardening, and catching up with friends she’d lost touch with for perfectly good reasons, and feeling slightly sick when Crimewatch came on. Three years out of it, but the flutter in her stomach was still there. The butterflies that shook the dust from their wings and began to flap around as she opened the folder and started to read.

  A man throttled to death in an empty car park, seven years earlier…

  A week into his forty-fourth year. The discovery of his burned-out car being far from the low point, Tom Thorne was already pretty sure that the year was not going to be a vintage one. Seven days since he’d rushed back from a wedding to attend a postmortem. Seven days during which the only developments on the case had been about as welcome as the turd he’d found waiting for him in his bed.

  Welch’s movements between his release from prison and the discovery of his body, painstakingly reconstructed, had yielded nothing.

  Forensically, the photos recovered from the locker in Macpherson House had been a black hole.

  A hundred and more interviews with anybody who could feasibly have seen anything, and not a word said that might raise the blood pressure.

  The ACTIONS outlined and ticked off on the white board. Allocated and diligently carried out. Contacting the sex offenders who had themselves been diligent about signing the Register at the right time. Tracking down those who were not quite so assiduous, who had perhaps forgotten, or mixed up the days in their diaries, or buggered off to another part of the country and gone underground. Checking and double-checking the statements of everyone from the traumatized receptionist at the Greenwood Hotel to the semipickled tramp who had been occupying the bed next to Ian Welch for the few days before he was killed…

  This was what 99 percent of police work really consisted of. It was procedure like this, together with a little bit of luck, that would provide pretty much the best chance, the only chance, of getting a result. And Thorne, of course, hated every tedious minute of it.

  While he was waiting for that elusive bit of luck to arrive, even his one moment of genuine inspiration was proving to have been useless…

  Sitting in Russell Brigstocke’s office—Monday morning and feeling like it—Thorne listened as he was told just how useless it was. He had thought that the killer’s access to the Sex Offenders Register might hold the key to catching him. Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond was more than happy to disillusion him…

  “Fact is,” Jesmond said, “tabloids or no tabloids, the information’s already public property. Every force has a community notification policy. Supposed to be on a case-by-case, need-to-know basis. Information gets released to schools, youth clubs, and so on, but, as with anything else, we can’t know for certain where that information goes later on.”

  Brigstocke glanced at Thorne, raised his eyebrows. Jesmond was just getting warmed up…

  “Yes, we might be looking for a prison officer. But we might also be looking for someone who’s a friend of a friend of a teacher with a big mouth. Or someone who lives next door to an indiscreet social worker, who likes to natter while they’re washing their cars on a Sunday morning…”

  “Are you saying that we’ve been wasting our time for a week?” Thorne said.

  The detective chief superintendent shrugged, like he’d been asked if he’d lost weight. “Ask me that again when we’ve caught him…”

  Jesmond seemed to relish moments like this. Thorne looked across at him and thought, You really enjoy raining on my fucki
ng parade, don’t you?

  “I see what you’re getting at, sir,” Thorne said. “But it can’t hurt, I mean, at least in the short term, to carry on assuming that the killer has a direct contact with one of the bodies we’re talking about. Social services, the probation service…”

  Jesmond cocked his head to one side, waiting to be unconvinced. Brigstocke tried to help out. “It’s a decent avenue of inquiry, sir,” he said.

  Thorne sniffed. “Our only decent avenue of inquiry…”

  “Well, I think you’d better go out and find us another one,” Jesmond said. “Don’t you?”

  Thorne said nothing. He watched the hand pushing back the wisps of sandy hair. The strange area on either side of the nose where webs of veins met spatters of freckles. He looked at the dry lips cracking themselves into a smile and it struck him, as it always did, that Jesmond smiled with his eyes closed.

  Thorne smiled himself, remembering how he’d once described Jesmond’s face to Dave Holland. “You know the sort of face,” he’d said. “If you hit it once, you couldn’t stop.”

  Jesmond leaned forward across the desk. “Seriously, though, let’s think about what you’re saying. As an example, why don’t we look at the possibility that the killer has a direct connection with the police service…”

  “A police officer,” Thorne said.

  Jesmond simply repeated himself and pressed on. “A direct connection with the police service. Now, apart from the sheer numbers involved, the methods employed to access and utilize the Sex Offenders Register vary wildly from force to force. Some access it via the Police National Computer. Some graft Register information onto existing systems, or create dedicated databases…”

  Brigstocke puffed out his cheeks. Thorne could already sense things going away from him, could feel himself starting to drift.

  “Some are still using manual, paper-based systems, for heaven’s sake,” Jesmond said. “And we all know just how secure they are.”