Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  In that hotel room, with SOCOs and pathologists and an honest-to-goodness body, Thorne had thought that, even standing in the background as she was, Carol Chamberlain had looked as happy as a kid in a sweets factory…

  In the days that followed, the investigation had begun to move forward in two distinct directions. While the latest victim was being processed, and the change in the pattern of the killings was being looked at, Thorne and those closest to him had begun to work on a new front. They would be chasing the major new lead that Carol Chamberlain had given them.

  Holland steered the car into an ordinary-looking road lined with drab sixties houses, and spindly trees that didn’t help a great deal. They’d managed to nab one of the few team vehicles with air-conditioning and the street felt like a sauna as they stepped out of the car. They pulled on their jackets, grimacing.

  As they walked toward Peter Foley’s house, Thorne thought about leads. Why on earth did they talk about “chasing” them? He wondered if it was because, no matter how inanimate they were, or how quick you thought you might be, some had a nasty habit of getting away from you.

  Dennis Foley’s younger brother, the only surviving relative of either Dennis or Jane they had yet been able to trace, was not the most gracious of hosts.

  Thorne and Holland sat perched on the edge of stained velour armchairs, sweating inside jackets they had not been encouraged to take off. Opposite them on a matching sofa, Peter Foley sprawled in baggy shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt, open to the waist. He clutched a can of cold lager, which, when he wasn’t drinking from it, he rolled back and forth across his skinny chest.

  “You were, what, eleven years younger than Dennis?” Holland said.

  Foley swallowed a mouthful of beer. “Right, I was the mistake.”

  “So when it happened you’d have still been a student?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Least you could do is get your facts right. I was twenty-two in ’76. I’d left college the year before…” His accent was pure Essex, the voice high and a little wheezy.

  “And you were doing what?” Thorne asked.

  “I was doing fuck all. Bumming around, being a punk. I was a roadie for The Clash at one point…”

  Thorne had been a punk as well, though he was six years younger than Foley, who was pushing fifty. The man sitting opposite him certainly didn’t look like he listened to “White Riot” much anymore. He was skinny, though his arms were well muscled; worked on, Thorne guessed, to better display the Gothic tattoos. His graying hair was tied back in a ponytail and the wispy beard teased into a point. From the look of him, and the copies of Kerrang! tossed under the coffee table, Thorne figured that Peter Foley was something of an aging heavy-metal fan.

  “What do you think happened to Jane?” Thorne said.

  Foley lifted himself up, pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shorts pocket, and sank back down again. “What? You mean when Den…?”

  “Before that. With Franklin.”

  “Fucker raped her, didn’t he.” It wasn’t a question. He lit his cigarette. “He’d have gone down for it as well if it wasn’t for you fucking lot…”

  Holland bridled a little, opened his mouth, but Thorne cut across him. “What do you mean, Mr. Foley?” Thorne knew exactly what Foley meant and he knew that he was right. The force, back then, was not exactly famed for the sensitivity with which it treated rape victims.

  “You get the transcripts of that trial, mate. Have a look at some of the things they said about Jane in court. Made her sound like a total slut. Especially that copper, talking about what she was wearing…”

  “It was handled badly,” Thorne said. “Back then a lot of rapists got off, simple as that. I’m sure you’re right about what happened to Jane, about Franklin.”

  Foley took a drag, then a drink, and leaned back, nodding. He looked across at Thorne, like he was reevaluating him.

  Thorne glanced at Holland. Time to move on. As far as the interview went, they hadn’t worked out a system—who would ask what, who was going to take the lead—they never did. Holland did the writing. That was about as far as it went.

  “Did you know that Alan Franklin was dead?” Holland said. “He died in 1996.”

  Now it was Thorne’s turn to do the evaluating. He studied Foley’s face, trying to read the reaction. All he saw, or thought he saw, was momentary shock, and then delight.

  “Fucking good,” Foley said. “I hope it was painful.”

  “It was. He was murdered.”

  “Even better. Who do I send a thank-you letter to?”

  Thorne stood up and began to wander about. Foley was getting altogether too comfortable. Thorne was not considering the man to be a suspect, not at the moment anyway, but he always preferred his interviewees a little off balance…

  “Why do you think he did it, Peter?” Thorne said. “Why did Dennis kill her?” Foley stared back at him, sucked his teeth. He emptied the last of the lager into his mouth and crushed the can in his hand.

  Thorne repeated the question. “Why did your brother kill his wife?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Did he believe what they said about Jane in court?”

  “I don’t—”

  “He must have thought about it at least…”

  “Den thought about a lot of things.”

  “Did he think his wife was a slut?”

  “’Course he fucking didn’t…”

  “Maybe they had problems in bed afterward…”

  Foley leaned forward suddenly, dropped the empty can at his feet. “Listen, Jane went weird afterward, all right? She had a breakdown. She stopped going out, stopped talking to anyone, stopped doing anything at all. She was mates with this girl I was seeing at the time, you know, we all used to go out together, but after the trial, no…after the rape, she just wasn’t there anymore. Den pretended like everything was fine, but he was bottling it all up. He always did. So, when Franklin walked out of that court like Nelson fucking Mandela, like he’d been the victim…”

  Thorne watched as Foley leaned back, fell back on the sofa, and began to spin one of the half-dozen silver rings on the fingers of his left hand.

  “Look, I don’t know what Den thought, all right? He said some mad stuff at the time, but he was all over the place. They make you doubt things, don’t they? That was their job in that court, to make the jury doubt, and they did a bloody good job. I mean, you’re supposed to trust the police, aren’t you, to believe them…?”

  Foley looked up and across at Holland, then turned to look at Thorne. For the first time he looked his age. Thorne looked at the cracks across Peter Foley’s face, saw hard drugs in his past and perhaps even in his present.

  “Something snapped,” Foley said quietly.

  For no good reason that he could think of, Thorne took a step across the room and bent to pick up the beer can from the floor. He put it down on a dusty chrome-and-glass shelving unit next to the TV, then turned back to Foley.

  “What happened to the children?”

  “Sorry…?”

  “Mark and Sarah. Your nephew and niece. What happened to them afterward?”

  “Straight afterward, you mean? After they found…?”

  “Later on. Where did they go?”

  “Into care. The police took them away and then the social services got involved. There was some counseling went on, I think. More so for the boy, as I remember, he’d have been eight or nine…”

  “He was seven. His sister was five.”

  “Yeah, that sounds right.”

  “So…?”

  “So, eventually, they were fostered.”

  “I see.”

  “Look, there was only Jane’s mum and she was already getting on in years. No other way, really. I said I’d have the kids, me and my girlfriend, but nobody was very keen. I was only twenty-two…”

  “And of course, your brother had just bashed their mother’s brains out with a table lamp…”

  “I said I
’d have them. I wanted to have them…”

  “So you stayed in touch with the kids?”

  “’Course…”

  “Did you see much of them?”

  “For a while, but they moved around. It wasn’t always easy.”

  “You’ve got the names and addresses?”

  “Which…?”

  “The foster parents’. You said the kids moved around. Were there many?”

  “A few.”

  “You’ve got all the details?”

  “Not anymore. I mean, I did then, yeah. There were Christmas cards, birthdays…”

  “And then you just lost touch?”

  “Well, you do, don’t you?”

  “So you’d have no idea at all where Sarah and Mark are living now?”

  Foley blinked, laughed humorlessly. “What, you mean you lot haven’t?”

  “We’ve traced every Mark Foley in the country. Every Sarah Foley or Sarah Whatever née Foley, and none of them remembers wandering into the hall and seeing their father dangling from a towrope. Nobody recalls popping upstairs to find Mum lying in a pool of blood with her skull caved in. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think that sort of thing would slip your mind.”

  Foley shook his head. “I can’t help you, mate. Even if I could, it would go against the bloody grain…”

  Thorne looked at Holland. Time to go. As they stood up, Foley swung his legs up onto the sofa, reached down beside it for another can of lager.

  “Before everything happened, before it all went belly-up, Jane and Den were normal, you know? Just a normal couple with two kids and an okay house and all the rest of it. They were a good team, they were doing all right, and I reckon they’d have got over what that arsehole did to Jane. I mean, couples do, don’t they, eventually, and Den would have helped her, because he loved her. But what came after, what happened to them in that trial, and the stuff later on…you don’t get over that, ever. And that’s thanks to you.”

  Foley was talking about something that had happened a long time ago. He was talking about mistakes that it was too late to put right, and about a police officer long since retired.

  But he was pointing at Thorne.

  EIGHTEEN

  Thorne enjoyed expensive wine, but rather more often, cheap lager. This particular brand, which had caught his eye in the supermarket, was the same one Peter Foley had been drinking…

  Another Saturday when he hadn’t got home until gone ten o’clock. Eve would probably still have been up, he could have called, but he hadn’t bothered. He had only managed to see her once in the last fortnight, and though they’d talked often on the phone, he’d sensed a tension starting to creep in. He was starting to use his workload as an excuse.

  Thorne knew very well that when it came to relationships, he was basically bone idle. He’d been that way with the girls he’d got together with in the fifth form, he’d been that way with his first serious girlfriends, and he’d been that way with Jan. Happy to sink into a rut, wary of changing direction. Eventually, of course, Jan had changed direction herself. Got creative with her creative-writing lecturer…

  All because he was comfortable being stuck in the mud, and now he could feel it going the same way with Eve.

  There was the bed thing, for starters. As he lay with his feet up on the sofa that would soon become his bed for another night, he thought about the whole stupid business of his failure to buy a new mattress. The trip they’d arranged the week before had been canceled for obvious reasons. He’d joked with Eve about burglars and murderers conspiring to keep them from shagging, but in reality, the delays had been…convenient. There was a part of him, a nasty part he was reluctant to acknowledge, that worried about how interested in Eve he would really be once he’d got her into bed, but that wasn’t really the problem. At the end of the day, he was just plain, bloody lazy…

  From his brand-new speakers came the mournful tones of Johnny Cash, singing his sublime version of Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman.” As Cash sang about nothing feeling better than blood on blood, Thorne thought that if any voice could capture the love and agony, the hatred and the joy, of family ties, it was his. It helped if you’d lived it, of course.

  On the floor, the cat was yowling, begging to be picked up. Thorne leaned down, put his can on the carpet, and pulled her up on to his lap.

  So often it came down to families…

  He thought about Mark and Sarah Foley, whose family was torn apart in front of them, leaving each with no one save the other. A generation down the line and they were nowhere to be found. It could only be because they wanted it that way.

  Mark Foley, now a man in his midthirties, once a terrified little boy in need of professional counseling. Had he grown up, the horror turning to hatred and festering inside him? Had he waited twenty years and then killed the man who’d raped his mother, the man he held responsible for her death and the suicide of his father? Right now, Mark Foley was as good a suspect as they had, but what had happened since 1996, between Alan Franklin’s death and this new spate of killings? What had sparked off the cultivating and murdering of these completely unconnected rapists…?

  Thorne had always known, somehow, that rape was key to the case. Hadn’t he tried to explain it to Hendricks? The rape element in the killings of Remfry and Welch, and now of Howard Southern, had always felt significant. More significant than the killings themselves. Now Thorne knew why. If he didn’t fully understand it, he at least understood that it had a history…

  And still that ambivalence on the part of so many involved in the investigation. A third victim and another convicted rapist. Older, yes, and a lot longer out of prison, but still a sex offender. Still a perv. One for whom very few people, least of all those trying to catch his killer, seemed to be mourning.

  And still that ambivalence, if Thorne was honest, on his part as well…

  Seems to me that whoever killed Remfry did everyone a favor…

  There will be people asking whether or not we should be grateful…

  It’s not like he’s chopping up old ladies, is it?

  Thorne found it hard to argue with the sentiments, but as someone who’d spent his entire adult life if not always catching killers, then at least believing that what they did was wrong, he had to try to stay out of it.

  With some cases it was easy. Hate the killer, love the victim. Thorne would never forget the months he’d spent hunting a man who killed women while trying to put them into comas, into a state of living death. Or his last big one: tracking down a pair of killers, one a manipulative psychopath, the other who killed because he was told to…

  Then there were the cases where it wasn’t quite so clear-cut, where sympathies were not so easily divvied up: the wife, driven to murder an abusive husband; the armed robber, knocked off for squealing on his workmates; the drug dealer, carved up by a rival…

  Then there was this case.

  When Thorne swung his legs onto the floor and stood up, Elvis jumped off and skulked away, grumbling, toward the kitchen. Thorne followed her. He dropped his empties into the bin, and for half a minute he stared into the fridge for no particular reason.

  He walked into the bedroom, gathered up his duvet and pillow from the bottom of the wardrobe.

  Thorne despised rapists. He also despised murderers. To go into which he despised more or less was not going to help anybody.

  Eve and Denise had finished the best part of a bottle of red wine each.

  The laughter had been getting louder, and the language a good deal more earthy ever since the pizzas had been finished and the second bottle of red opened…

  “Fuck him if he’s not interested,” Denise said.

  Eve swirled the wine around in her glass, stared through it. “That’s the thing, though. He is interested, definitely.”

  “Oh, you can tell, can you?”

  “It wasn’t hard…”

  Denise gave a lascivious grin. “Well, that usually means they aren’t interested at
all.”

  Eve almost spat her wine across the table. When she’d finished laughing, she stood and began gathering up the pizza boxes. “I don’t know what he’s up to. I’m not sure he knows what he’s up to…”

  Denise reached over, grabbed a last piece of cold pizza crust before the box got taken away. “Maybe he’s a schizo, like some of these nutters he tries to catch.”

  “Maybe…”

  “Does he talk about his work much? About the cases he’s working on?”

  Eve was folding the pizza boxes in half, crushing them down into the bin. She shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Oh, come on, he must say something, surely?”

  “We got into it a couple of weeks ago, this weird murder case.” Eve stepped across to the sink and began washing her hands. “We ended up sort of arguing about it and he hasn’t really mentioned it since.”

  “Right. Except when he’s using it as an excuse?”

  “Maybe I’m being paranoid about that…”

  Denise poured what was left in the bottle into her glass. She held the empty bottle aloft triumphantly. The bell rang.

  “That’ll be Ben,” Denise said. “He had to stay late, get an edit finished.” She took a hearty mouthful of wine and all but skipped from the room.

  Eve listened to her flatmate’s feet as they hammered down the stairs. She heard the squeal when the door was opened, the low moans as Ben stepped in and they embraced on the doorstep…

  She made a quick decision to get off to bed before Ben came up. She would read for a while and try not to think too much about Tom Thorne, about whether he might ring the next day. She moved out into the hall, shouting down the stairs to Denise and Ben as she opened her bedroom door.

  “I’m going to turn in, I think. See you in the morning…”

  The last thing she wanted to watch was those two all over each other.

  The sun was streaming in through two vast windows at the far end of the narrow room, and yet the light was somehow cold, as if it were bouncing off the refrigerated doors and steel instruments of an autopsy suite.