Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  They walked slowly back down Kentish Town Road toward Thorne’s flat. At not much after nine o’clock, it was just starting to darken but was still warm enough to walk without a jacket. The road was as busy and noisy as ever. Cars moved past them constantly; those that could had their tops down; most had sidelights on.

  Despite what Eve had said earlier, they had both tucked a fair amount of food away, though Thorne put the feeling in his stomach down to something else entirely. Before they’d left the flat, Eve had helped him make the bed, laying a clean white sheet across the new mattress she’d brought with her. Thorne knew very well that when they got back there, she was going to help him unmake it again.

  There were some things in his life that he counted as certainties: there was always another body somewhere; you could never get rid of blood completely; people who killed without motive tended to do it again. But this was the sort of promise that Thorne hadn’t been on for a very long time…

  Eve grabbed his hand suddenly and raised it up, bringing their bare forearms together. “You’d look a lot better with a decent tan,” she said.

  “Is that an invitation?”

  “When was the last time you had a proper holiday?”

  Even after thinking about it for a minute, Thorne couldn’t provide anything as specific as a year. Lack of time was not so much the problem as lack of inclination and anybody to go away with. “It’s been a while,” he said.

  “Are you a lying-on-the-beach kind of guy, or do you prefer to do stuff?”

  “Both, really. Or neither. I think lying on the beach gets a bit boring, but probably not quite as boring as walking round a museum…”

  “Not easily pleased, are you?”

  “Sorry…”

  “All right, where would you like to go, if you could go anywhere?”

  “I’ve always fancied Nashville.”

  She nodded. “Right. The country-and-western thing…”

  “Another one of my dark secrets…”

  “I quite liked it.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re not going to get kinky later on, though, are you? Dress up in leather chaps? Bring out the bullwhip and spurs…?”

  They turned right onto Prince of Wales Road, the sound of live jazz coming from the Pizza Express on the corner. Thorne wondered if a pizza might not have been a better idea. The combination of curry and humidity meant that beads of perspiration were popping all over him.

  They were still hand in hand and Thorne could feel the moisture between their palms. He wasn’t sure whether it was her sweat or his own.

  The bike weaved effortlessly through the traffic. Occasionally, where it got really heavy, or the road narrowed, he would have to sit and wait. Idling in line among the bike messengers and trainee cabbies on mopeds. Soon enough, there would be a gap and he would be away, the backpack bouncing against his back as he drove across sleeping policemen and holes in the road…

  He pulled up at traffic lights and checked his watch. He was probably going to get there a bit early, but it wouldn’t matter. He would park up, stroll off somewhere, and wait. Keeping out of sight, until it was time.

  Next to him, a big Kawasaki revved up, ready for the green light. A girl in cutoff jeans rode on the back, squeezing her boyfriend tighter with each growl he twisted from the engine. On amber, the Jap bike was gone, and he watched it go, easing his own machine slowly away from the lights.

  Picking up no more speed than was necessary…

  He had plenty of time, and the last thing he wanted was to be pulled over.

  It wasn’t so much a question of the ticket or the points on his license. He was so excited, so full of what he was about to do, that were some copper to pull him over and ask where he was going, he might just have to tell him.

  Holland looked at his watch and was shocked to see that he’d been there for an hour and a half.

  “I need to be getting back,” he said. “Could I have those photographs?”

  Irene Noble climbed a little wearily from the sofa, slipped her shoes back on. “I’ll go and fetch them…”

  While he was waiting, Holland sat, going over their conversation and marveling at the capacity people had for self-deception. Irene Noble was far from being a stupid woman. He found it hard to understand why, even though she claimed that they, and previous carers, had caught the children in bed together, she had so readily presumed that Sarah Foley had been made pregnant by her brother. Had no other explanation occurred to her?

  He heard her coming down the stairs, shouting to him. “It doesn’t seem five minutes since these were taken.”

  Probably no other explanation she could live with…

  She walked into the room holding out a small bundle of photos, half a dozen Polaroids and a couple of slightly bigger standard prints. Holland took them from her. She stepped back and perched on the arm of the sofa, pointing to the pictures as he began to look through them.

  “Those are the two I had in frames on the sideboard. They’re the ones that were taken at school the year before they disappeared. The others are from a birthday party we had for Sarah. Her eleventh, it would have been. Roger had just bought this instant camera…”

  From the moment he’d looked down at the first photograph, Holland had stopped hearing anything but the sound of his own breathing. A girl in a blue-patterned dress, her hair tied back, smiling as though at something only she found funny. Holland lifted the picture of Sarah up, revealing its companion, the portrait of her brother.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  Irene stood up. “What’s the matter?”

  Holland flicked through the other photos to make sure, stopping at one in particular and staring at it, elated and terrified. He couldn’t hear as Irene Noble continued to ask him what was wrong, didn’t see her moving across the room toward him.

  Sarah Foley sat at the table, the knife in her hand poised above a cake, the girls either side of her looking far more excited than she did. Just visible in the top right of the picture, Mark stood in the corner of the room. His fingers were curled around the edge of the door, as if he were preparing to throw it open and run through it, or else push away from it, launching himself toward the camera and whoever lay beyond it.

  Her face was thinner then, and his perhaps a little fuller. The eyes were wider and the skin smoother, but that was understandable. These were the faces of children, which had yet to weather, but Holland was familiar with their expressions.

  He was looking at pictures of people he recognized.

  THIRTY

  Thorne lay in bed, listening hard, trying to ascertain exactly what might be happening from the sounds he could hear coming from the bathroom…

  For the want of anything more original to say, he’d offered Eve a coffee as soon as they’d got back to the flat, hoping she’d turn it down and delighted when she did. She’d gone to the toilet then, and he’d moved around the flat, opening windows, grinning at himself in the mirror like a schoolboy as he passed the mantelpiece on the way to the stereo. With the first few bars of “Good Year for the Roses” filling the room, Thorne had turned to find her standing only inches away…

  They’d half danced, half stumbled through to the bedroom, and collapsed onto the new mattress. The laughter gave way quickly to more passionate noises as their hands and mouths went to work on each other, the wine and the wait making their movements hungrier, more desperate than they’d been earlier, before they’d left for the restaurant…

  Then suddenly Eve had stopped and begun to laugh again. She’d pushed herself off the bed, grinned, and announced that she needed another visit to the bathroom. As soon as she’d closed the door behind her, Thorne had stripped quickly and slid beneath the duvet, grateful to have avoided that awkward moment when the love handles were revealed, but feeling, all the same, that a certain spontaneity had gone…

  Now he could hear nothing through the wall between bedroom and bathroom. As he thought about it, the impetus might have b
een lost, but no more so than it would have been when the moment came for him to fiddle clumsily around with a condom. He thought about the packet he’d bought the day before, from the machine in the toilets at the Royal Oak. It lay nestled in the drawer of his bedside cabinet, alongside the athlete’s foot cream and indigestion tablets.

  He decided that it might save time and trouble if he took a condom out of the packet and laid it ready. As he reached across to open the drawer, a thought struck him. Perhaps she was in the bathroom, fiddling clumsily around with a diaphragm…

  Thorne heard water running. He sat up a little higher in bed, leaned his head back against the wall, and turned his ear to it.

  She was probably brushing her teeth…

  He wondered whether he should slip out of bed, put on his dressing gown, and join her. How would it feel if her teeth were clean while his mouth still tasted of curry? Would it seem strange, the two of them spitting into the sink together before they’d so much as felt each other up?

  The door opened, and Eve walked back in. She stopped next to the bed and looked down at him. Her clothes were straightened and smooth, as though it were already the following morning and she had come to kiss him good-bye. She looked sexier than anything he could remember, looked as if she found him more attractive than ever, and yet, for a second, Thorne wondered if she was about to turn and leave.

  Before he could say anything, she laid her handbag gently down by the side of the bed, took a step back, and began to undress.

  The home number was engaged, so Holland tried Thorne’s mobile. The phone sat on a table in a tiny alcove beneath the stairs, where Holland fought for space with coats, umbrellas, and plastic bags filled with boots and shoes.

  Irene Noble hovered behind him. “Who are you calling? Are you allowed to tell me?”

  “Detective Inspector Thorne. You met him the other day…”

  “Oh yes. Perhaps he’s got a mobile.”

  “I’m trying it now…” Holland turned away, suddenly uncomfortable with her so close. In his hurry to make the call, to pass on what he’d discovered, it hadn’t occurred to him that he should really be doing it privately. He’d been relaxed, enjoying himself. Now he was on duty again, and he knew there were things he had to tell Thorne that Irene Noble shouldn’t hear. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to…”

  Holland heard Thorne’s voice telling him how sorry he was that he couldn’t talk to him, asking him to leave a message. Holland pressed a button to end the call. This was a message that he wanted to deliver personally.

  Still clutching the photographs of Mark and Sarah Foley, Holland was out of there in less than a minute.

  He thanked Irene Noble as he backed away down the path toward his car, all the time wondering if there was a quicker way back toward North London, telling himself that there was no need to go mad, that their suspects had no way of knowing they’d been identified and would not be going anywhere.

  The last thing Holland told Irene Noble, shouting through his open window just before he pulled away, was that he’d take good care of her photos. In truth, he didn’t know when she was likely to see them again. Holland would show them to Thorne. He would show them to Brigstocke. They would use them to secure a warrant…

  Holland could not know for sure how it would proceed from there, what the timeline would be, how much would be passed on to the media. Every case ended differently. Still, there was a chance, if they wanted to stem the flow of damaging publicity, and made the arrests over the weekend, that the next time Irene Noble saw the pictures would be on the front pages of the papers on Monday morning.

  “You’re gorgeous,” Thorne said, staring down, wanting her. “I can’t believe it’s taken so bloody long to get here.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “Mine, I know.”

  “Glad you’re here now, though?”

  “God, yeah.” Thorne grinned. “I’m thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t answered the phone in that hotel room, when we found the first body. You might have called an hour later. It could easily have been somebody else who answered that phone…”

  She shrugged. “Then it could very easily have been somebody else who was here now.”

  Her body felt warm and smooth against his. He was sure, rusty and as inept a reader of signs as he was, that he saw desire in her eyes. Yet a minute before, when he’d placed a hand for the first time against the naked flesh of her breast, he’d felt a tension. There was a reserve suddenly, which seemed slightly at odds with what Thorne had been led to expect. She’d made the first move, cracked those dirty jokes about the bed, about being up for it. Now, at the last moment, she was revealing herself to be not quite as forward as she pretended to be.

  Thorne felt a barrier go up. Fragile and perhaps only a touch away from collapse, and unbearably sexy…

  She wanted him to do the work, to be a man. It was as though she longed to submit to him, to herself, but needed a little help. Thorne was massively excited. He could sense what might be waiting if she allowed herself to go over the edge. More than anything, he wanted to nudge her toward it…

  “You’re so gorgeous,” he said, and dropped his mouth down onto hers.

  As if on cue, Thorne could hear a song beginning in the other room. This was the one he’d thought would be so perfect. The story of a man whose love for a woman ended only on the day they carried him out of his front door in a box. Thorne let the familiar richness of George Jones’s voice roll over him as he ran his hands across Eve’s body.

  He was dimly aware of another familiar sound. The bedroom door creaked open, hissing as it moved across the carpet. It was a noise that often disturbed him in the early hours, and one that, tonight of all nights, he could well do without.

  Thorne stopped what he was doing and smiled at Eve, waiting to feel the unwelcome weight of the cat landing on the end of the bed…

  Holland took the Romford Road as far as Forest Gate, then cut over toward Wanstead Flats. This was not an area of London he knew well. With one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding open the A-Z, he was making up his route as he went.

  He’d called Sophie as soon as he’d left Irene Noble’s house, to explain why he hadn’t come home. He’d told her that something important had come up, grateful that it was no longer a lie. She had told him that she was tired, that she would be getting an early night, but he could hear in her voice that she was less than thrilled. He managed to tell her that he loved her before she put the phone down.

  Holland tried phoning Thorne’s home number. It was still engaged. He dialed the mobile again, hung up as soon as he heard Thorne’s recorded message…

  He was doing fifty on the long, straight road that cut across Hackney Marshes. It was another area in this strange part of the city that was green enough on the page of the A-Z, but seemed grim and far from welcoming after dark. He’d feel happier once he picked up the A107 at Clapton. He could see it at the bottom of the page, only a fingernail away from where he was now. Then it was pretty much a straight line up through Stamford Hill and on to the Seven Sisters Road. Ten minutes more, past Finsbury Park and across the Holloway Road, and he would be at Thorne’s place.

  Once again, he thought about doing the simple thing and calling Brigstocke. It was probably the correct thing to do, but his first loyalty, as always, was to Thorne. He recalled an American cop show he and Sophie had watched one evening: NYPD Blue maybe, or Homicide. An officer had talked about giving his partner a “heads-up” on something, when really he should have taken the matter higher. Thorne wasn’t his partner, of course, but it was still more or less how Holland felt.

  Thorne would be grateful for a heads-up on this one…

  Surer now of his bearings, Holland laid the A-Z down on the passenger seat and dialed Thorne’s flat again. He listened to the monotonous beep of the engaged signal, wondering why he wasn’t hearing the usual, irritating “call-waiting” message.

  Holland had a good idea
whom Thorne would be talking to. He remembered a night in the Royal Oak when Thorne had been talking about himself and his father, and their “forty-five-minute conversations about fuck all.” Tonight it was likely to be fuck all and a Spurs win in the opening game of the season. Holland could picture Thorne sitting there listening, a can of supermarket lager on the go, desperately trying to get his old man off the line so that they could both settle down and watch the goals on TV.

  Two–one against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. Thorne should at least be in a good mood.

  Holland reached across and retrieved the photographs from beneath the A-Z. He wondered what sort of mood Thorne would be in, twenty minutes or so from now, after he’d taken a look at them…

  Thorne froze, in confusion as much as anything, when he turned and saw the man taking off his crash helmet.

  “How the fuck did you get in?” Thorne said. For a few dizzy and bewildering seconds, all he could think of was that this was some sort of jealous-boyfriend situation he’d unwittingly got caught up in, and that he was about to get involved in a very embarrassing fistfight. It was the look on the man’s face, as much as the knife he was pulling from his rucksack, that told Thorne something altogether different was happening.

  Thorne turned to Eve, whipping his head around fast, and straight into the knife that she held, pointed toward him. The blade sliced a clean line across his chin, the point sinking itself half an inch or so into the soft flesh beneath his jaw.

  He cried out, threw himself sideways, and began to bleed on to the pillow.

  The man took a step toward the bed.

  One small part of Thorne’s brain continued to function rationally, to formulate a thought. The knife was in her bag. The rest of it began to give shape to something dark, to a fear he’d felt before only as something fleeting and skittish, but that was now borne inside him, heavy and hooked beneath his breastbone. He pictured it, alive and feeding in his chest. He felt its strong, thin fingers wrapped around his ribs, hanging from them, pulling him down.