TT03 - Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  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 only ended 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 which often disturbed him in the early hours, and one which, 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 towards 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, 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 fired, 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 who 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 fist-fight. 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 towards 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 towards 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 which 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 rib, hanging from them, pulling him down. .

  Thorne lifted his head up and pressed a hand to the gash across his chin. He tried not to let the terror sound in his voice when he spoke.

  'Mark and Sarah...'

  At the mention of his real name, a shadow fell across the man's face.

  'Move away from my sister, now.'

  Thorne shuffled across the mattress, oddly uncomfortable with his nakedness. He watched the woman step, nude and smiling, from the other side of the bed and gather up her clothes.

  'Eve, this is so stupid...'

  Ben Jameson's eyes moved quickly, from his sister's body back to Thorne. 'Get on to the fucking floor...'

  THIRTY-ONE

  While they were preparing him, Thorne tried to take the growing fear, the blood, the pain and keep them somewhere separate. Somewhere he could store them up, stole them into a rage he might be able to use. The rest of his brain was focusing; coming up with answers, putting it together. Adrenaline causing the engine to race... The two of them worked together quickly and efficiently. Before Thorne could even think about how he might move against them, against the two knives, it became an impossibility. Eve slipped the belt from Thorne's chinos, wrapped it around his wrists until it hurt. Ben manipulated his body, pushing the head down towards the carpet, hiking up the knees, spreading the calves. They operated as a team, movement and stillness in sync, one busy while the other held a knife close. Thorne was never more than a few inches away from a blade. Any move, other than those he was instructed to make, was out of the question. Now his body mirrored those he'd seen before. Distorted and dis coloured. In hotel rooms and in dreams...

  Thorne lay naked, face down on the floor, knees pulled up beneath him and hindquarters raised. His head and hands pointed towards the bedroom door. Blood from the knife-wound soaked into the carpet and grew sticky beneath his cheek.

  'It didn't matter in the rest of the room,' Thorne said. 'In those hotels, traces just got lost among everybody else's. But you had to get rid of the bedding, didn't you, Eve? That would have been clean, that would just have had traces of you and the victim...'

  Though Thorne couldn't see it, Eve smiled. 'Once I got them into bed, they were helpless. Same as you.'

  'I never raped anybody, Eve...'

  'It's a bit late, don't you think,' Jameson said. 'To be slotting pieces into your little puzzle? It's rather fucking pointless, considering where you are.'

  'Who wants to die ignorant?'

  'You can't do much about that,' Jameson said, 'however many answers you get...'

  'Is this the pet project you talked about? These killings? The thing of your own you wanted to get off the ground...'

  Jameson laughed. 'That's quite funny. Be a damn sight more interesting than local authority training videos, that's for sure. There you go, there's one more piece of your puzzle. One more thing to make you a bit less ignorant...'

  Thorne was already trying to work it out. 'It's how you got into the Register, isn't it? Not sure where the connection is. Social services?'

  Eve provided the answer. 'The National Probation Directorate. Specifically the Sex Offenders and Corrections Unit...'

  ' Towards a National Information Strategy isn't Citizen Kane; Jameson said. 'But they were more than happy for me to do all the research I needed and their security was very sloppy. They
were somewhat lax about unattended computers, access to databases, that sort of thing. Mind you, that was exactly why they wanted the video made in the first place...'

  It suddenly struck Thorne that Jameson had probably been on the list that was compiled of contact numbers for Charlie Dodd. A video production company would not have seemed suspicious, bearing in mind the nature of Dodd's business. Never having known it, Thorne would not have recognised the name of Jameson's company anyway. It didn't matter a great deal now...

  'That was fortunate for you,' Thorne said.

  'We all need a bit of luck now and again,' Eve said. 'Some of us more than others...'

  Thorne lifted his face from the carpet, feeling fibres and tiny pieces of grit sticking to the dried blood on his chin. He took the weight on his forehead and looked back through the gap underneath his arm. Jameson was delving into the rucksack he'd placed on the end of the bed. Eve stood by his side, her eyes never leaving Thorne.

  'We should get this done,' she said.

  Thorne saw a flash of blue as Jameson pulled out the length of washing line, then one of black, which he presumed was the hood. He felt the fear that was the creature in his chest grow heavier. He closed his eyes and saw it climbing, using the slats of his ribcage like a ladder, heaving itself upwards lit-de by little.

  As was so often the way, it was the last part of the journey that was proving the most frustrating. It had taken ages to get across the Holloway Road at the Nag's Head and up to Tufnell Park. Now the ridiculous number of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings on the Kentish Town Road was providing a last-minute annoyance. Holland thought about calling again. He decided that even if Thorne was off the phone or had turned the mobile back on, he was more or less there now anyway, so there wasn't much point... Holland drove down the inside lane, swerving back out right when he came up against a bus and deftly cutting up a black cab in the process. At the next set of lights the taxi came up his inside and the driver wound down his window to give him an earful. Holland held up his warrant card, told the fat cabbie to luck off and watched, smiling, as he did.

  When the lights changed, Holland swung into Prince of Wales Road. Thorne's street was the third on the right. He indicated and slowed to a stop, glancing down at the photos while he was waiting for a break in the traffic.

  When one finally came, he turned, wondering if they'd even allow Thorne to be there when they made the arrests.

  'It is the most fantastic story though,' Jameson said. 'Maybe I should write it, change all the names of course, to protect the innocent...'

  'Whoever they are,' Thorne said.

  'It would be in three parts. Three acts, if you like, same as any classic screenplay...'

  'You live and learn.'

  'Not for much longer.'

  The black thing inside Thorne climbed another rib...

  'For the first part we have to go back in time. Flared trousers and shit hair and a piece of scum who probably has both. A man drags a woman into a storeroom and rapes her.'

  'Your mother...'

  Thorne felt the vibrations as feet moved quickly across the carpet towards him, then the pain of a heel pressing down on to the side of his face. 'Let him tell it,' Eve said.

  'The rapist, thanks largely to the police, is found not guilty. The woman suffers a breakdown. Her husband goes mad.' Jameson emptied the facts from his mouth like he was spitting out dirt. 'He kills her and then himself and their bodies are discovered by their two young children who are subsequently taken into foster care. It's a dramatic start, don't you reckon?'

  'That's why I'm here, isn't it?' Thorne said. The shoe came back down across the side of his face and ear. Jameson said something he couldn't make out and the foot was lifted. Thorne turned his head and saw Eve moving back across the room towards her brother. '"Thanks largely to the police", that's what you said. So, I have to die because of the way some fuckwit handled a rape case nearly thirty years ago.' He received no answer. 'Yes? Is that about right?'

  'There's no point bleating about life being unfair,' Eve said. 'We're the 'last people you'll get any sympathy from there...'

  'I understand why. I just want to know why me?' 'Because you answered the phone.'

  And Thorne saw that it really was that simple. The message left by the killer on Eve Bloom's answering machine had always bothered him, and finally he understood why. It had been 'left' so that Eve had an excuse to call the hotel - a call to a murder scene that would be answered by a police officer. The wreaths had been ordered after the subsequent killings purely to make it look like part of a pattern.

  They had selected their rapists with care. Their final victim, Thorne himself, had been chosen completely at random. He remembered what he'd said to Eve, what she'd said to him, twenty minutes earlier in bed:

  'It could easily have been somebody else who answered that phone...'

  ' Then it could very easily have been somebody else who was here now.'

  He could still see the look on her face as she'd said it. He imagined the look on his father's, as he received the news of Thorne's death.

  'I've got a great title as well,' Jameson said. 'For this sordid little horror story. What do you think of "Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire"'?

  'We know about Roger Noble...'

  'Oh you do?' For the first time, though Jameson did not raise his voice, Thorne could hear emotion behind it, white-hot and lethal.

  'You might know what he did, but you can't know how it felt.'

  'Bad enough so that you had to leave.'

  'Well done...'

  'To protect your sister...'

  'Noble didn't want to hurt me,' Eve said. 'He wanted to hurt my baby.'

  'He made you pregnant?'

  Jameson laughed. 'We're back to ignorance. We should have a little bell to ring, or a buzzer, for when you get it wrong or say something stupid. Noble liked boys. The baby was mine.'

  'Ours,' Eve said. 'So we left when they tried to make me get rid of it.'

  Thorne realised that it had been shame he'd heard in Irene Noble's voice when she'd stared into her M & S coffee and talked about 'behavioural' problems. It had probably been her idea to move in the first place, to get the abortion performed in a different area, to avoid the scandal...

  'What happened to the child?' Thorne asked.

  Jameson answered matter-of-factly. 'We lost it. Who knows, when all this is over, we might try again.'

  For perhaps half a minute, nobody spoke. Thorne lay in agony, a breeze from somewhere passing across his bare skin. The feeling had gone from his hands, and the thumping of his heart was lifting his chest clear off the carpet.

  When all this is over...

  He imagined the look that was passing between the two people who planned to kill him. He pictured something tender, an expression of the love between a man and a woman, who talked about having a baby together once he had been raped and strangled to death. Thorne moaned in pain as he twisted his head across to the other side. 'I'm guessing that the final part of this story involves the murders,' he said. 'Remfry and Welch and Dodd and Southern. Me as the symbolic climax. It's the middle bit that's still a mystery, after you disappeared. What happened between Franklin and the men in prison?

  Why did you start killing again?'

  'Lightning struck twice,' Eve said.

  Then the doorbell rang...

  Thorne tensed and raised his head, but their speed, their commitment, was overpowering. In a heartbeat they were on him, a knife pressed into each side of his throat, cutting off the breath he'd need before he had a chance to cry out...

  Hedricks picked up almost immediately.

  'Listen,' Holland said, 'I'm outside DI Thorne's place and I can't get any reply, but his phone's engaged...'

  'He probably left it off the hook, while he's busy giving Eliza Doolittle a good seeing to.'

  Holland felt ice at his neck. 'Sorry?'

  'He had a hot date with his sexy florist. I'm not surprised he doesn't want to
answer the door...'

  'Oh, Jesus . . .'

  'What is it?'

  Holland told Hendricks about the pictures, about Mark and Sarah Foley. Hendricks announced that he was coming straight over. The panic Holland heard in the pathologist's voice stemmed the rising tide of it he felt in himself.

  Then, looking across the' road, he saw the motorbike...

  'Dave...?'

  Holland felt the engine that was ticking over within him moving up a gear. 'Listen, Phil, before you leave, get on the phone. Call Brigstocke and fill him in. Get some back-up round here, now. And an ambulance...'

  'What are you going to do?'

  Holland was walking along the pavement, away from Thorne's place. He was thinking about the alleyway that he remembered running along the side of a house three or four doors up. 'I'm not sure...'

  He was seeing a face through a crash helmet. Seeing the face of a killer, smiling at the lie within the truth.

  'I've got a BMW myself...'

  Smiling, because BMW make bikes as well as cars...

  THIRTY-TWO

  'Why don't you just get out now while you still can?' Thorne said.

  'You'll spend the rest of your lives in prison. You'll never see each other again...'

  Jameson sounded unconcerned. 'Don't get worked up. Whoever that was at your door, they've gone.'

  Thorne twisted his head, aimed his voice towards Eve. 'People know you were coming over here, for fuck's sake. There'll be fibres, bits of skin everywhere. In the bed...'

  'Of course there will,' Eve said. 'I'm your girlfriend. Which is why I'll be the one calling the police.'

  Thorne was stunned, but he saw immediately that they would get away with it. It was very simple. With Thorne dead, Jameson would kiss his sister goodbye for a while and slip away. On his way out, he would kick in the door that she'd previously left open for him, make sure there Were signs of a forced entry.

  Then she would dial 999...

  He had no doubt that Eve would play the part of the traumatised witness and, later, the grieving girlfriend perfectly. He knew all too well how good she was, how convincingly she would pick up the pieces of her life. He could see the officers falling a little bit in love with her as they took her shocking statement.