TT03 - Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  'Of course. I did "Passing the Buck" seminars at Hendon...'

  They were sitting at a table in the shade, outside the small vegetarian caf in the middle of Highgate Woods. It was all a bit organic and right-on for Thorne's taste, but Carol had wanted to eat outside somewhere and it had seemed as good a place as any.

  The poncy bread was hideously overpriced, but it was all on expenses...

  Carol Chamberlain's cold case had been taken away from her as soon as it had become hot again. She'd had no choice in the matter and was already working hard on something else. Still, Thorne knew how much they owed her and considered it the least he could do to keep her up to speed. More than that, he actually enjoyed their discussions, finding Chamberlain to be an incredibly useful sounding-board. They'd met up or talked on the phone a few times now, since she'd first barged into his office. They gossiped, and bitched and bounced ideas around...

  'At least they haven't made the connection with the Foley killing,'

  she said. 'They don't know about Mark and Sarah yet.'

  Thorne reached across for the paper and flipped it over. He scanned the football stories on the back page. 'It's only a matter of time.'

  'It could be good, of course.'

  'How?'

  'It might be the way to find them.'

  'Or frighten them away for good...'

  Once coffee was finished and pudding decided against, Chamberlain stood, and began piling up their plates. 'Let's take the long way back to the cars.' She rubbed her stomach. 'Walk some of this off...'

  'She was asking for you, Dave...'

  Having fetched him from his office, and pointed to the woman in question, Karim left Holland in the doorway of the Incident Room. Stone appeared silently at Holland's shoulder, and they stared across at where Joanne Lesser sat in a chair by the window.

  'Mmmm,' Stone groaned. 'Soul food...'

  Holland nodded, turned to him. 'Racist and sexist in two words. That's bloody good going even for you, Andy...'

  'Fuck off.' '

  'Blimey, you're on cracking form; mate...'

  'Seriously, she's bloody tasty, though. You're a right jammy sod.'

  Holland looked at him. 'Well she's obviously up for it. First she's on the phone, now she's come in to see you personally...'

  Holland led the way across the Incident Room, Lesser standing eagerly as he and Stone approached. He was sure that what Stone had been suggesting was only in his own, sexually skewed imagination. Still, for more than just the obvious reasons, he hoped that Joanne Lesser had something important to say.

  Five minutes later, they sat, the three points of a small triangle, in Holland and Stone's office. Plastic cups of tea on the edges of desks...

  'The dates have been bothering me,' Lesser said.

  'The dates of the foster placements?' Holland began sheafing through the notes on his lap.

  'It's slightly different now, but back then we'd have ceased to monitor a placement once the child had turned sixteen. From then on, they were no longer deemed to be the responsibility of social services...'

  'Right.' Holland was still searching.

  'I double-checked the information on the index cards - you know, the information that I sent to you - and it doesn't quite make sense.'

  'What doesn't?' Stone said.

  'The last recorded monitoring date was February 1984. That would have been a home visit, most probably. At least a phone call...'

  Holland had found the page he was looking for. He ran his finger down the list, stopped at the date Lesser had mentioned. 'Mr. and Mrs. Noble'. The Nobles should have been back from their holidays by now. He'd left a message, but they hadn't got back to him... Lesser leaned forward on her chair, looking from Stone to Holland as she spoke. 'I checked the children's dates of birth, just to be on the safe side, but there's still a problem.'

  Holland looked at the dates. He turned the page, looking for something else, and when he'd found it, he saw the anomaly. 'They weren't old enough,' he said. .

  Lesser nodded, the blush beginning around her throat. Holland could almost have blushed himself. This was something he should have seen, would have seen if he'd been giving it the proper attention. He'd been half-arsed, hadn't considered it important enough. He should have let Stone give him a hand when it had been offered. Now, Stone was the one sitting there, probably enjoying every minute of it, as simple, evident facts were spelt out for Holland by a member of the public...

  '1984?' Stone said. 'So, the kids would have been...'

  'Fifteen and thirteen,' Lesser said. 'Mark was almost sixteen, fair enough. If it had just been him I wouldn't have been concerned, but the little girl was nowhere near old enough for monitoring to stop. You can see why I thought it might be important...'

  'What are the reasons you might stop monitoring a case?' Holland said.

  'There's only two that I can think of. If a family moves away it would be handed over to a different area, or even a completely different county.'

  'I reckon that's it,' Holland said. He began turning pages again until he found the current address for the Nobles. 'Romford far enough?'

  Lesser nodded. 'Doesn't come under us.'

  'Does it say how long they've been riving there, though?' Stone asked.

  'No, I'll have to check. Last record in any local school is 1984, so there's every chance that's when they moved.' He turned back to Lesser. 'What's the other reason, Joanne? You said one reason was moving...'

  'Adoption.' Holland and Stone both looked back at her blankly.

  'Again, things are a bit more rigorous now, but then, once the adoption order had been signed, that was it. Not our responsibility any more.'

  'I get the feeling you've already checked this...'

  She shrugged. 'I know someone in Adoption PS so I gave her a ring. Their records are a bit more organised than ours. Have you got a pen?'

  Holland couldn't help smiling. He stretched across and grabbed a pen from his desk. 'Go ahead...'

  'Irene and Roger Noble formally adopted Mark and Sarah Foley on 12 February, 1984. They may well have moved shortly after that, but that was certainly the last contact the children had with Essex social services...'

  Holland scribbled down the information. From everything they knew, it seemed that it was the last contact Mark and Sarah Foley had had with anybody.

  They walked slowly around the edge of the cricket field towards the children's playground; moving along the path of shadow cast by a line of overhanging oaks and hornbeams. Deep into the school holidays, there were plenty of people around. The temperature was starting to drop as the sky clouded over, but here and there were glimpses of a dark blue, like bruises fading on puffy flesh.

  'Mark Foley still sounds like a good bet to me.'

  'Yeah, I think so too,' Thorne said. 'Just wish I could cash it in.'

  'It'll happen. He can't stay hidden for ever.'

  'I've still got a problem with motive, though.'

  Chamberlain threw Thorne a look of theatrical surprise. 'I thought you were the type who didn't care about why...'

  'Ultimately, it's not my job, is it? But if it's going to help me catch him...'

  'Go on...'

  'I can see the motive for killing Alan Franklin...'

  'It's about as good as it gets. Franklin caused everything, might just as well have killed his parents. Took him long enough to get revenge, though.'

  'I think I can understand the waiting,' Thorne said. Chamberlain grinned. 'Maybe he's just a lazy sod.'

  Thorne thought he was pretty well qualified to give an opinion on that one. 'I don't think so...'

  They came slowly to a halt.

  'He was growing up,' Thorne said. 'Letting his body grow strong, letting the hatred grow stronger. Then he waits until Franklin's old, until he feels safe, before he puts an end to it in that car park.'

  'Only that isn't an end to it...'

  'No, it isn't. It should have been though, shouldn't it? Mark settles it,
gets clean away with it, gets on with his life.'

  'Whatever that is...'

  'So why the hell does he pop up again now? Why these others? Why kill Remfry, Welch and Southern?'

  'Maybe he enjoys it.'

  'I'm damn sure he's enjoying it now, but that's not why he started. Not why he started again, I mean. Something else happened...'

  'The rape element is crucial though, you've always said that. Maybe he was raped himself.'

  'Maybe.' Thorne felt like they were going over old ground. They'd considered this back when they thought the killer might have been an ex-prisoner, looking to settle an old score. It was possible, certainly, but it felt stale to him, and unhelpful.

  Chamberlain jumped at a sudden, sharp crack from behind them. Half a dozen boys were messing about in the cricket nets, and for a minute or two, the pair of them stood and watched. When she finally spoke, Chamberlain had to lean in close to make herself heard over the noise the kids were making.

  'Something I remember from a poem at school,' she said. Thorne kept his eye on the action, inclining his head towards her to listen.

  '"Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies..."'

  'What's that from?' Thorne asked as they began walking again.

  'One of those anthologies we had to read. I don't know...'

  As they reached their cars, parked on the main road, Chamberlain stopped and put a hand on Thorne's arm. 'It's good, knocking ideas around like this, Tom, it's useful. But don't forget that if the answer's there, if it's anywhere, it's in the details. It's in the facts that make up the pattern of a case.'

  Thorne nodded, opening the doo of the BMW. He knew that there were answers. He knew too that he already had them somewhere, misfiled and, thus far, irretrievable. Lost among the tens of thousands of facts, relevant or otherwise, to the case. The ever-expanding headfull of shit that he carried around with him all the time: names and places and dates and snippets of statements; words and numbers and small gestures; access codes and times of death; the look on a relative's face; the scuff mark on a hotel guest's shoe; the weight of a dead man's liver... Thorne knew that the answer was buried in there somewhere and it bothered him. Something else bothered him and he thought twice before mentioning it.

  'What you were saying about patterns...'

  'What?'

  'The second and third victims. He changed the pattern of killing between Welch and Southern.'

  'Of course he did. Because he presumed that once you'd connected the killings, you'd contact the prisons and warn them. He had to do the next one differently.'

  'What if he knew, rather than presumed?' Thorne said. 'What if he knew because he's close to the investigation? We always talked about him having access of some kind. Then other stuff came along and the idea got blurred. What if I was wrong to dismiss the idea that the killer's one of us...?'

  When Thorne got back to Becke House, he was directed straight to Brigstocke's office. Holland was telling Brigstocke and Kitson about what Joanne Lesser had said, and his subsequent phone conversation with Mrs. Irene Noble. Thorne made Holland back-pedal, asked him to go over Lesser's visit again until he was up to speed.

  'It's interesting that the dates of the adoption and the move look to be so close together,' Brigstocke said.

  'It gets a lot more interesting. When I finally got hold of Irene Noble, told her I wanted to talk about Mark and Sarah Foley, the first thing she did was to ask me if we'd found them.'

  Thorne looked across at Brigstocke. 'How would she know we were looking?'

  'No, sir, that's not what she meant,' Holland said. He flipped over a page in his notebook, read from it. '"Have you finally found them?" That's what she actually said. She's talking about twenty years ago.'

  Holland looked up and across at Thorne. 'She claims that the kids disappeared back in 1984...'

  'Just after the Nobles adopted them,' Thorne said.

  'Right.' Brigstocke got up, walked around his desk. 'And around the time they moved away from Colchester.'

  Holland stuck his notebook away and leaned back against a chair.

  'Now it gets even better. Mrs. Noble reckons that there Was an official investigation at the time. The children were reported as missing, she says. The police spent weeks looking for them.'

  'You've checked?' Brigstocke asked

  'It's rubbish. I went back to 1983, just in case she was getting the dates confused, and there's bugger all. No records of any search, no records of missing person's reports. There was nothing national, nothing local. It never happened...'

  'What impression did you get when you spoke to her?' Thorne asked.

  'She sounded like she meant it. She was upset...'

  'Turning it on, d'you reckon?'

  'No, I don't think so. Sounded genuine enough...'

  'Where's the husband?'

  'Roger Noble died in 1990. Heart attack...'

  Thorne thought about this for a second or two, then turned to Brigstocke. 'Well, I reckon we'd better have a word with her then.'

  Brigstocke nodded. 'Where is she, Dave?'

  'She lives in Romford, but she's coming into town tomorrow. Likes to do her shopping in the West End, she says...'

  Thorne pulled a face. 'Oh does she...?'

  'I've arranged to meet her at ten-thirty.'

  Brigstocke took off his glasses, pulled a crumpled tissue from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from the frames. 'Well done, Dave. You'd better go over all this with DS Karim as soon as you can. He'll need to reassign, issue fresh actions...'

  'Sir...' Holland opened the door and stepped out.

  'Yvonne, can you get across this as well? We might have a bit more luck finding Mark Foley and his sister, now we know that they changed their names...'

  Kitson, who had said nothing, nodded and took a step towards the door.

  'This is looking good, you know?' Brigstocke said. 'Be great to give the Detective Chief Superintendent some positive news...'

  Thorne couldn't help himself. 'Tell him I thought he looked smashing on the telly the other night...'

  Brigstocke clearly couldn't be arsed to pull him on it. 'Right, a pint later to celebrate?'

  'Fuck all to celebrate,' Thorne said. I'll be there anyway, though...'

  'Yvonne?'

  Kitson shook her head. 'Too much to do.' She turned and stepped through the door, barking back at Brigstocke as she walked away towards the Incident Room, 'Got to change a million and one data searches from "Foley" to "Noble"...'

  Brigstocke looked over at Thorne. 'What's got up her arse?'

  'Don't ask me...'

  'Maybe you should have a word...'

  Thorne's mobile rang. He glanced at the screen and saw who was calling. He told Brigstocke he'd check back with him later and stepped out into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him.

  'Are we still on for Saturday?' Eve said.

  'I hope so.'

  'Right. Dinner somewhere and back to your place.'

  'Sounds good. Fuck, you know what I still haven't done?'

  'Who cares? You've got a sofa, haven't you?'

  He had work to do, professionally and for his other, more personal project. Not that he considered the killing to be personal, not in terms of the self.

  No, not really, and not to him anyway.

  What he did to those animals in those hotel rooms wasn't actually about him, or for him. He'd always denied that, when it had come up, and he would continue to deny it. He was happy to do it, more than happy to put the line around their necks and pull, but if it had only been about him, it wouldn't be happening.

  He was just a weapon...

  Strangely, he felt that he put more of himself into his day job. More of him had passed into what he did, by the time he'd finished working 295

  on something, than it had watching any of those fuckers plead then die. True, paying the mortgage meant being responsible to people, and what he did, even when he did it well, was rarely of any benefit to him per
sonally, but he always felt part of it afterwards. The work usually had his fingerprints on it somewhere.

  He laughed at that, and carried on working. His job was hotting up suddenly: stuff was coming in and he was really earning his money. He had less time now to get the other things organised, but actually there was very little that had to be done, and certainly no need to panic. It was all pretty much sorted.

  Bar a few t's to cross and the odd i to dot, the final killing had been arranged.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Thorne looked unconvinced. 'I've never interviewed anybody in the same place I buy my pants.'

  'There's a first time for everything,' Holland said. They carried the coffees across to where Irene Noble was sitting waiting for them, flanked already - though the place had been open only half an hour or so - by large Marks & Spencer shopping bags. The cafe was a relatively new addition to the large store on Oxford Street, wedged into a corner of the ladies' clothing section and half filled with shoppers who'd obviously made as early a start as Irene Noble. As Thorne squeezed behind the table next to Holland, he glanced around at the dozen or so women getting their breath, ready to start again. Scattered around were one or two bored-looking men, grateful for the chance to sit down and not be asked their opinion for a few minutes.

  Irene Noble took a small, plastic container of sweeteners from her bag. She pressed the top, dropped a tiny tablet into tier latt6, and raised her eyebrows at Dave Holland. 'They probably think I'm your mother,' she said.

  She was pretty well preserved for a woman who had to be sixty or so, though Thorne thought that she was trying a bit too hard. The hair was a little too blond and brittle, the fire-engine-red lipstick applied a touch too thickly. To Thorne, it seemed that this stage was probably the one that came right before giving up altogether. Before mentioning your age to strangers, and always wearing an overcoat, and not giving a toss any more...

  'Tell us about Mark and Sarah, Mrs. Noble.'

  She thought for a moment, smiling briefly before taking a sip of coffee. 'Roger used to joke about it and say that we lost them in the move. You know, like a tea-chest going missing.' She saw the reaction on Thorne's face and shook her head. 'It wasn't a nasty joke, it was affectionate. That was just his way. Something to make me laugh if I was crying, you understand? I did a lot of crying after it happened...'