TT03 - Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  'Phil's a pathologist...'

  She nodded, like it meant something.

  'What?' Thorne said.

  'You never really switch off, do you?'

  'Actually, me and Phil talk about football most of the time...'

  'Seriously.'

  Thorne took a gulp of wine, feeling it swill the bits from the surface of his teeth, thinking about what Eve was saying. 'I don't believe that anybody ever leaves what they do behind completely,' he said. 'We all talk shop, don't we? Everyone gets.., reminded of things.' She stared back at him, rubbing the rim of her wineglass across her chin. 'Come on, if you're out somewhere and you see some amazing display of flowers...'

  'Flowers aren't bodies, are they?'

  Thorne was disturbed to feel himself growing slightly irritated. He fought to keep it out of his voice as he picked up the bottle and topped up both their glasses. 'Well, some people might say that they're dying from the moment they're picked.'

  Eve nodded slowly. 'Everything's dying,' she said. 'What's the bloody point of anything at all? We may as well just ask the waiter to put ground glass in the biryani.'

  Thorne looked at her, saw her eyes widen and the corners of her mouth begin to twitch. They began to laugh at almost the same moment.

  'I never know when you're winding me up,' he said. She slid her hand across the table, took hold of his. 'Can you leave it behind just for a while, Tom?' she said. 'Tonight, I want you to switch off...'

  'Kids are a bloody handful,' Irene Noble said. 'They change things beyond all recognition.' She stared across at Holland. 'But you'll still be glad you did it...'

  Holland had supposed that if they talked at all, they might well talk about kids. He never imagined that they might end up talking about his.

  'Just feel so guilty,' he said. 'For resenting what might happen to me. For even thinking about walking away from it.'

  'You'll feel stuff that's a whole lot stranger and more painful than that. You'll feel like you would die for them and the next minute you'd happily murder them. You'll worry about where they are and then you'll wish you could have a second to yourself. Every emotion is unconditional...'

  'You're talking about afterwards, when the baby's there. What about feeling like this now?'

  'It's normal. It's not just the woman's emotions that get messed around with. Mind you, you can't use hormones as an excuse...'

  Holland laughed, the two glasses of wine he'd put away helping him to feel relaxed. An hour or so earlier, he'd felt far less sure of himself. He'd thought, when they'd started to eat and he'd suddenly begun pouring it all out, that there might be more waterworks on the way, but Irene had helped him stay calm, convinced him that everything would work out for the best...

  'I'll take these out.' She stood up, lifting the tray from the empty seat on the sofa next to her.

  Holland passed over his empty plate. 'Thanks, that was great.' He was talking about more than just a lasagne that had been cold in the middle.

  He sat back down and listened as she pottered around in the kitchen. He could hear her talking softly to the dog, loading the dishes into the washing machine.

  It had been a conversation that Holland would never have had with his mother. Irene Noble, give or take a year or two, was the same age as his mother - a woman who'd been buying baby clothes for the last six months. A woman who refused to admit that anything could go wrong ever, and remained blissfully unaware that things were less than hunky-dory between her eldest son and his pregnant girlfriend.

  Irene came back in brandishing choc-ices. 'I always keep a stock of these in the freezer. Bloody marvelous in this weather...'

  For a minute they said nothing. They sat and ate their ice creams, and listened to the noise of the dog's claws skittering across the lino as she scrabbled about in the kitchen.

  As Irene Noble started to speak, pulling her feet up on to the sofa like a teenager, Holland watched her face shift and settle, until every one of her years was clearly visible on it.

  'Whatever problems you have, I hope you work them out together, all three of you. But they won't be in the same league as some of the things that kids have brought with them through my front door. You pass them on, you know. Hand them down, like baldness or diabetes or the colour of your eyes...'

  'You're talking about Mark and Sarah...'

  'The other day I was very harsh about the two sets of caters who had the children before we did. About their inability to cope. The truth is that we weren't really coping any better than they had.'

  'You adopted them.'

  'I think it was our last effort at making them feel part of something bigger. Two parents and two children. We wanted them to come out of themselves, to engage with the rest of the world a bit more.'

  'It's understandable though,' Holland said. 'That they'd be tight knit. That the two of them would be very close, after what happened.'

  He looked away from her, down to the floor, thinking, And what was still happening...

  'They were too close,' she said. 'That was the problem. When they disappeared, Sarah was pregnant, and the baby she was carrying was Mark's.'

  TWENTY-NINE

  They walked slowly back down Kentish Town Road towards 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 which 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 which 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 on to 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.

  Still hand in hand, 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 dispatch riders and trainee cabbies on mopeds. Soon enough, there would be a gap and he would be away, the rucksack bouncing against his back as he drove across sleeping policemen and holes in th
e 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 off. A girl in cut-off jeans rode pillion, 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 licence. He was so excited, so full of what he was about to do, that were some copper to pull him over and risk where he was going, he might just have to tell him.

  Holland looked at his watch and was gobsmacked 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 he 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 towards 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 towards 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 recognised.

  THIRTY

  Thorne lay in bed, listening hard, trying to ascertain exactly what might be happening from the sounds he could hear coming from doe 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 on to 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. Thinking about it, the impetus might have been 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, riddling 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 goodbye. 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 which 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 towards his car, all the time wondering if there was a quicker way back towards 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. H
olland 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 timescale 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 all the running, 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 towards it...

  'You're so gorgeous,' he said, and dropped his mouth down on to hers.