Lazybones Thorne 3

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne, in spite of himself, was smiling slightly as he recalled the interview with the hotel's formidable owner - a bottle-blonde with a face like Joe Bugner and a sixty-fags-a-day rasp.

  'And who pays for the replacement of those sheets?' she'd asked.

  'All them pillows and blankets that this nutter nicked? They were one hundred per cent cotton, none of 'em was cheap ...' Thorne had nodded, pretended to write something down, wondering if her memory was as good as her capacity to talk utter shite with a straight face. 'And the stains on the mattress. Where do I get the money to get that lot cleaned?'

  I'll see if I can find you a form to fill in,' Thorne said, thinking, Will I fuck, you hatchet-faced old mare...

  In the Incident Room, the trainee detective Thorne had stared at before poked a single finger up. Thorne nodded.

  'Are we looking at the prison angle, sir? Someone Remfry was in Derby with, maybe. Someone he got on the wrong side of...'

  'Someone he got up the backside o02 The comment came from a mustached DC sitting off to Thorne's left towards the back of the room. Thorne did not know the man. He'd been brought in, like many in the room, from different squads to make up the numbers. His 'back side' comment got a big laugh. Thorne manufactured a chuckle.

  'We're looking at that. Remfry's sexual preference was certainly for women before he got put away...'

  'Some of them develop a taste for it inside, though, don't they?'

  This time the laugh from his mates felt forced. Thorne allowed it to die away, let his voice drop a little to regain attention and control.

  'Most of you lot are going to be tracing the most likely group of suspects we've got at the moment...'

  The trainee nodded knowingly. One of the swots. He thought this was some kind of conversation. 'The male relatives of Remfry's rape victims.'

  'Right,' Thorne said. 'Husbands, boyfriends, brothers. Sod it, fathers at a push. I want them all found, interviewed and eliminated. With a bit of luck we might eliminate all of them except one. DI Kitson has drawn up a list and will be doing the allocations.' Thorne dropped his notes on to a chair, pulled his jacket from the back of it, almost done. 'Right, that's it. Remfry's were particularly nasty offences. Maybe someone wasn't convinced he'd paid for them...'

  The DC with the porno moustache smirked and muttered something to the uniform in front of him. Thorne pulled on his jacket and narrowed his eyes.

  'What?'

  Suddenly, he might just as well have been that teacher, holding out a hand, demanding to see whatever was being chewed. The DC spat it out. 'Seems to me that whoever killed Remfry did everyone a favour. Fucker asked for everything he got.'

  It was far from being the first such comment Thorne had heard since the DNA match had come back. He looked across at the DC. He knew that he should slap the cocky sod down. He knew that he should make a speech about their jobs as police officers, their need to be dispassionate, whatever the case, whoever the victim. He should talk about debts having been paid and maybe even dig out stuff about one man's life being worth no more and no less than any other. He couldn't be arsed. deg

  Dave Holland was always happiest deferring to rank or, if he got the chance, pulling it. When it was just himself and another DC, things were never clear-cut and it made him uncomfortable. It was simple. As a DC, he deferred to a DS and above, while he was able to large it with trainee detectives and wooden tops. Out and about with a fellow DC, and things should just settle into a natural pattern. It was down to personality, to clout.

  With Andy Stone, Holland felt outranked. He didn't know why and it niggled him.

  They'd got on well enough so far, but Stone could be a bit 'up himself'. He had a coolness, a flashiness, Holland reckoned, that he turned on around women and superior officers. Stone was clearly fit and good-looking. He had very short dark hair and blue eyes and though Holland wasn't certain, when Stone walked around, it looked as though he knew the effect he was having. What Holland eras sure of was that Stone's suits were cut that bit better, and that around him he felt like a ruddy-cheeked boy scout. Holland would probably still edge it as housewives' choice, but they all wanted to mother him. He doubted they wanted to mother Andy Stone.

  Stone could also be over-cocky when it came to slagging off their superiors, and though Holland wasn't averse to the game himself, it got a bit tricky when it came to Tom Thorne. Holland knew the DI's faults well enough. He'd been on the receiving end of his temper, had been dragged down with him on more than one occasion... Yet, for all that, having Thorne think well of him, consider that something he'd done was worthwhile, was, for Holland, pretty much as good as it could get.

  He'd been on the team a lot longer than Andy Stone, and Holland thought that should have counted for something. It didn't appear to. It had been Stone who'd done most of the talking when they'd shown up bright and early on Mary Remfry's doorstep with a search warrant.

  'Good morning, Mrs. Remfry.' Stone's voice was surprisingly light for such a tall man. 'We have a warrant to enter and...'

  She'd turned away then and, leaving the door open, had trudged away down the thickly carpeted hallway without a word. Somewhere inside a dog was barking.

  Stone and Holland had entered and stood at the bottom of the stairs deciding who should start where. Stone made for the living room where, through the partially opened door, they could see a silver haired man slumped in an armchair, lost in Kilroy. As Stone leaned on the door he hissed to Holland, nodding towards the kitchen where Mrs. Remfry had seemed to be heading.

  'Cup of tea on the cards, you reckon?'

  It wasn't:

  It seemed odd to Holland, needing a warrant to search a victim's house. Still, like Stone had said, Remfry was a convicted rapist and the mother's attitude hadn't really given them a lot of choice. It wasn't just the grief at her son's death turning to anger. It was a genuine fury at what she saw as the implication in one particular line of questioning. Considering the manner and circumstances of her son's death, it was a necessary line to pursue, but she was having no truck with it at all.

  'Dougie was a ladies' man, always. A proper ladies' man.'

  She was saying it again, now, having suddenly appeared in the doorway of her son's bedroom where Holland was methodically going through drawers and cupboards. Mary Remfry, mid-fifties, tugging a cardigan tightly over her night-dress, watched, but did not really take in what Holland was doing. Her mind was concentrated on talking at him.

  'Dougie loved women and women loved him right back. That's gospel, that is.'

  Holland was considerate going through the room. He would have been whether Mrs. Remfry had been watching or not, but he made the extra effort to be respectful as he sorted through drawers full of vests and pants and thrust a gloved hand into pillowcases and duvet covers. In the short time since his release, Remfry had obviously not acquired much in the way of new clothing or possessions, but there seemed to be a good deal still here from the time before he went to prison. There was plenty from before he ever left school...

  'He never went short where birds was concerned,' Remfry's mother said. 'Even after he came out they was still sniffing round. Calling him up. You listening to me?'

  Holland half turned, half nodded and, as if on cue, pulled out a decent-sized stash of porn magazines from beneath the single bed.

  'See?' Mary Remfry pointed at the magazines. 'You won't find any men in them.' She sounded as proud as if Holland was dusting off a degree certificate or a Nobel Prize nomination. As it was, he squatted by the bed, flicking through the pile of yellowing Razzles, Escorts and Fiestas, feeling his face flush, turning away from the proud mother in the doorway. The magazines all dated from the mid-to late eighties, well before Dougie began his days at Her Majesty's pleasure, banged up with six hundred and fifty other men.

  Holland pushed the dirty mags to one side, reached back under the bed, and pulled out a brown plastic bag, folded over on itself several times. He let the bag drop open and a bundle of envelopes,
bound with a thick elastic band, fell on to the carpet.

  As soon as he saw the address, neatly typed on the topmost envelope, Holland felt a tingle of excitement. Just a small one. What he was looking at would probably mean nothing, but it was almost certainly more significant than fifteen-year-old socks and ancient stroke mags.

  'Andy...!'

  Mary Remfry wrapped her cardigan a little tighter around herself and took a step into the room. 'What have you got there?'

  Holland could hear Stone's feet on the stairs. He slipped off the elastic band, reached inside the first envelope and pulled out the letter.

  'So we can definitely rule out auto-erotic asphyxiation, then?' DCI Russell Brigstocke, a little embarrassed, looked around the table at Thorne, at Phil Hendricks, at DI Yvonne Kitson.

  'Well, I'm not sure we can rule anything out,' Thorne said. 'But I think the "auto" bit implies that you do it yourself.' '

  'You know what I mean, smartarse...'

  'Nothing erotic went on in that room,' Hendricks said. Brigstocke nodded. 'No chance it was an extreme sex game that went wrong?' Thorne smirked. Brigstocke caught the look. 'What?'

  Thorne said nothing. 'Look, I'm just asking the questions...'

  'Asking the questions that Jesmond told you to ask,' Thorne said. He made no secret of his opinion that their Detective Chief Superintendent had sprung fully formed from some course that turned out politically astute, organisationally capable drones. Acceptable faces with a neat line in facile questions, a good grasp of economic realities and, as it happened, an aversion to anybody called Thorne.

  'They're questions that need answering,' Brigstocke said. 'Could it have been some sort of sex game?'

  Thorne found it hard to believe that the likes of Trevor Jesmond had ever done the things that he, Brigstocke or any other copper did, day in and day out. It was unimaginable that he had ever broken up a fist fight at chucking-out time, or fiddled his expenses, or stood between a knife and the body it was intended for.

  Or told a mother that her only son had been sodomised and strangled to death in a grotty hotel room.

  'It wasn't a game,' Thorne said.

  Brigstocke looked at Hendricks and Kitson. He sighed. 'I'll take your expressions of thinly disguised scorn as agreement with DI Thorne then, shall I?' He pushed his glasses up his nose with the crook of his first finger, then ran the hand through the thick black hair of which he was so proud. The quiff was less pronounced than usual, there was some grey creeping in. He could cut a vaguely absurd figure but Thorne knew that when he lost it, Brigstocke was as hard a man as he had ever worked with.

  Thorne, Brigstocke, Kitson, Hendricks the civilian. These four, together with Holland and Stone, were the core of Team 3 at the Serious Crime Group (West). This was the group that made the decisions, formulated policy, and guided the investigations with - and even on occasion without - the approval of those higher up. Team 3 had been up and running a good while, handling the ordinary cases but specialising - though that was not a word Thorne would have used - in cases that were anything but ordinary...

  'So,' Brigstocke said, 'we've got everybody out chasing down all the likely relatives of Remfry's victims. Still favourite with everybody?'

  Nods around the table.

  'A long way from odds-on, though,' Thorne said. There were things which bothered him, which didn't quite mesh with the vengeful relative scenario. He couldn't picture an anger carried around for that many years, fermenting into something lethal, corrosive, then manifesting itself in the way it had in that hotel room. There was something almost stage-managed about what he had seen on that filthy mattress. Posed, Hendricks had said.

  And he was still troubled by the early morning call to the florist... Thorne thought there was something odd about the message. He couldn't believe that it was simple carelessness, so the only conclusion was that the killer must have wanted the police to hear his voice on that answering machine. It was as if he were introducing himself.

  'What came up at the briefing,' Kitson said, 'the stuff about Remfry turning queer inside? Worth looking into...?'

  Thorne glanced towards Hendricks. A gay man who was choosing to ignore the word Kitson had used, or else genuinely didn't give a fuck.

  'Yeah,' Thorne said. 'Whatever he might or might not have got up to when he was inside, he was definitely straight before he went in. Don't forget that he raped three women...'

  'Rape's not about sex, it's about power,' Kitson said. Yvonne Kitson, together with DC Andy Stone, had come into the team to replace an officer Thorne had lost, in circumstances he tried every day to forget. Of all the murderers he'd put away, Thorne was happy to remember that the man responsible was serving three life sentences in Belmarsh Prison.

  Thorne looked at Phil Hendricks. 'Never mind Remfry, can we be certain the killer's gay?'

  Hendricks didn't hesitate. 'Absolutely not. Like Yvonne says, the tape's got nothing to do with sex, anyway. Maybe the killer wants us to think he's gay. He may well be, of course, but we have to consider other possibilities...'

  'Whether it was a gay thing or not,' Kitson said, 'he could still have been set up by someone he did time with, someone with a major grudge...'

  Brigstocke cleared his throat, at some level finding this all a bit embarrassing. 'But the buggery...?'

  Hendricks snorted. 'Buggery?' He dropped his Mancunian accent and adopted the posh bluster of the gentleman's club. 'Buggery!!'

  Brigstocke reddened. 'Sodomy, then. Anal intercourse, whatever. How could you do that if you weren't homosexual?'

  Hendricks shrugged. 'Close your eyes and think of Claudia Schiffer...?'

  'Kylie for me,' Thorne said.

  Kitson shook her head, smiling. 'Dirty old man.'

  Brigstocke was unconvinced. He stared hard at Thorne. 'Seriously, though, Tom. This might be important. Could you?'

  'It would depend how much I wanted to kill somebody,' Thorne said.

  There was a silence around the table for a while. Thorne decided to break it before it became too serious. 'Remfry went to that hotel willingly. He booked the room himself. He knew, or thought he knew, what he was getting into.'

  'And whatever it was,' Hendricks added, 'it looks as though he went along with it for a while.'

  'Right,' Kitson said. She turned the photocopied pages of Hendricks's post-mortem report. 'No defence wounds, no tissue underneath the fingernails...'

  The phone on the desk' rang. Thorne was nearest.

  'DI Thorne. Yes, Dave...'

  The others watched for a few seconds as Thorne listened. Brigstocke hissed at Kitson. 'Why the fuck did Remfry go to that hotel?'

  Thorne nodded, grunted, took the top off a pen with his teeth. He took it out of his mouth, put it back on the pen. He smiled, told Holland to get his arse in gear and ended the call. Then he answered Brigstocke's question.

  4 DECEMBER, 1975

  They sat in the Maxi, outside the house.

  She'd held it together all morning, through all the really hard parts, the personal stuff the intrusion. Then, when it seemed the worst was over, she'd begun to wail as she'd stepped through the doors he'd held open for her. Out of the police station and running down the steps towards the street, her heels noisy on the concrete, her sobbing uncontrollable. In the car on the way back, the crying had gradually given way to a seething fury which exploded in fitful bursts of abuse. He kept his hands clenched tightly around the steering wheel as she rained blows down on his shoulder and arm. His eyes never left the road as she screamed words at him that he'd never heard her utter before. He drove carefully, with the same caution he always showed, and as he manoeuvred the car through the lunchtime traffic on the icy streets, he absorbed as much of her pain and rage as he could take.

  They sat in the car, both too shattered to open a door. Staring straight ahead, afraid to so much as look towards the house. The house, which was now simply the place where, the night before, she had told him what had happened. The collection of rooms th
rough which they'd staggered and shouted and wept. The place where everything had changed. The home they'd never feel comfortable in again. Without turning her head, she spat words at him. 'Why didn't you make me go to the police station last night? Why did you let me wait?'

  The engine was turned off the car was still, but his hands would not leave the steering wheel. His leather driving gloves creaked as he grasped it even tighter. "You wouldn't listen, you wouldn't listen to sense:

  "What do you expect? Christ, I didn't even know my own name. I had no idea what I was fucking doing. I would never have had the shower...'

  She'd been too upset to think clearly, of course. He'd tried to explain all this to the WPC that morning, but she'd just shrugged and looked at her colleague and carried on taking the clothes and putting them into a plastic bag 'as they were taken off and handed over.

  'You shouldn't have had a shower, love,' the WPC said. 'That was a bit silly. You should have come straight in, last night, as soon as it had happened...'

  The engine had been off for no more than a minute, but already it was freezing inside the car. The tears felt warm as they inched slowly down his face, running into his moustache. 'You said you'd wanted to wash ... to wash him off you. I said I understood but I told you, you shouldn't have.

  That it wasn't a good idea. You weren't listening to me...'

  Standing there in the lounge after she'd told him. The horrible minutes and hours after she'd described what had been done to her. She wouldn't let him do a lot of things. She wouldn't let him hold her. She wouldn't let him ring anybody. She wouldn't let him go round to the bastard's house to kick what little he had between his legs into a bloody mush and punch him into the middle of next week.

  He looked at his watch. He wondered if the police would pick Franklin up at work or later on at his house...

  He needed to call the office and tell them he wouldn't be in. He needed to call the school to check that everything was OK, that the previous night's explanations for why Mummy was so upset had been believed...