Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  The girl lobbed her empty can into the road and shouted back at Thorne.

  “Poofs! Fucking queers…”

  Thorne lurched forward to chase after them but Hendricks’s hand, which had never left his shoulder, squeezed and held on. “Just leave it.”

  “No.”

  “Forget it, calm down…”

  He yanked his shoulder free. “Little fuckers…”

  Hendricks stepped in front of Thorne, picked up the bag, and held it out to him.

  “What are you more pissed off about, Tom? The fact that I was called a queer? Or that you were?”

  Unable to answer the question, Thorne took the bag and they carried on walking. They veered almost immediately right onto Angler’s Lane, a one-way street that would bring them out close to Thorne’s flat. This narrow cut-through to Prince of Wales Road had once been a small tributary off the River Fleet, now one of London’s “lost” underground rivers. Here, when Victoria took the throne, local boys would fish for carp and trout, before the water became so stinking and polluted that no fish could survive, and it had to be diverted beneath the earth, confined and hidden away in a thick iron pipe.

  Now, as Thorne walked home along the course of the lost river, it seemed to him that nearly two centuries later the stench was just as bad.

  By a little after ten, Hendricks was fast asleep on the sofa, and likely to remain so well into Sunday morning. Thorne tidied up around him, switched off the TV, and went into the bedroom.

  He got no reply from the flat. She answered her mobile almost immediately.

  “It’s Thorne. I hope it’s not too late. I remembered from the sign on the door of the shop that you weren’t open on Sundays, so I thought you might—”

  “It’s fine. No problem…”

  Thorne lay back on the bed. He thought that she sounded pretty pleased to hear from him.

  “I wanted to say thanks,” he said. “I enjoyed today.”

  “Good. Me, too. Want to do it again?”

  During the short pause that followed, Thorne looked up at the cheap, crappy lampshade, listened to her laughing quietly. There was a noise he couldn’t place in the background. “Bloody hell,” he said. “You don’t waste a lot of time…”

  “What’s the point? We only saw each other a few hours ago and you’re ringing up, so you’re obviously pretty keen.”

  “Obviously…”

  “Right, well, tomorrow’s for sleeping and I’m busy in the evening. So, how keen would you say you are, really? On a scale of one to ten…”

  “Er…how does seven sound?”

  “Seven’s good. Any less and I’d’ve been insulted and more would have been borderline stalker. Right then, what about breakfast on Monday? I know a great caff…”

  “Breakfast?”

  “Why not? I’ll meet you before work.”

  “Okay, I’ll probably have to be at work about nineish, so…”

  Eve laughed. “I thought you were keen, Thorne! We’re talking about when I start work. Half-past five, New Covent Garden flower market…”

  July 17, 1976

  It was more than half an hour since he’d heard the noises. The grunting and the shouting and the sounds of glass shattering. He heard her footsteps as she moved around, from her bedroom across that creaky floorboard that he’d never got around to fixing, into the bathroom, and back again.

  He spent that half hour willing himself to get up off the settee and see what had happened. Not moving. Needing to build up some strength, some control before he could venture upstairs…

  Sitting in front of the television, wondering how much longer this was going to go on. The doctor had said that if she kept taking the tranquilizers, then things would settle down, but there was no sign of that happening. In the meantime, he was having to do all the stuff that needed doing. Everything. She was in no state to go to the shops or to the school. Christ, it had been over a week since she’d last come downstairs.

  Walking across to the foot of the stairs, stiff and slow as a zombie…

  Listening to it, watching it, feeling it all come apart. They’d given him the time off work, but the sick pay wasn’t going to last forever and she was contributing nothing and now the debts were growing as thick and fast as the suspicion. Mushrooming, like the doubts that sprouted in every damp, dark corner of their lives; had been, ever since that moment when the foreman of the jury had stood and cleared his throat.

  He walked into the bedroom, feeling the carpet crunch beneath his feet. He glanced down at a dozen distorted reflections of himself in the shards of broken mirror, then across to where she lay, no more than a lump beneath the blankets. He turned and walked back the way he’d come. Back across the creaky floorboard.

  In the bathroom, he skidded in the puddles of ivory face cream. He stepped across the piss-colored slicks of perfume. He kicked away the broken bottles into every corner.

  So much that was designed to smell alluring, desirable, mingled unnaturally on floor and walls, making him heave…

  He moved across to the sink, afraid he would retch. He found it filled with the contents of the cabinet that stood empty above it.

  Blusher and lipstick and eye shadow ground into the porcelain.

  Moisturizer clogging the plug hole like poisonous waste.

  Powder and shampoo and bath oil, thrown and poured and sprinkled.

  The edges of her fancy soaps blunted against the walls. Dents in the plasterboard, pink as babies, blue as bruises. The mirror cracked, and spattered with nail polish, red as arterial spray…

  He ran a tap into the perfumed swamp, splashed water onto his face. He looked around at her handprints in talcum, the fingertrails dragged through brightly colored body lotion. Hints of herself left behind in everything she was trying to discard.

  She’d been fine until they’d found her out, hadn’t she? Fine with the knowledge of what she’d done as long as it stayed just between her and Franklin. Now the guilt was eating at her, wasn’t it? Sending her fucking mental or making her pretend that she was, it didn’t really matter which.

  Half a minute later he was walking back down the stairs, thinking, She lied, she lied, she lied, she lied…

  She. Lied.

  SEVEN

  Thorne might well have gone right off Eve Bloom had she been a morning person—one of those deeply annoying types who is always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed whatever the ungodly hour. As it was, he was relieved to find her wedged into a quiet corner, clutching a polystyrene cup filled with seriously strong tea and grimacing at nothing in particular. She clearly felt as much like a warmed-up bag of shit as he did…

  Thorne cranked his face into action and forced a smile. “And there I was, thinking that you’d be full of the joys of it.” She stared at him, said nothing. “Fired up by the noise and the color, intoxicated by the sweet smell of a million flowers…”

  She scowled. “No chance.”

  Thorne shivered slightly and rubbed his arms through the sleeves of his leather jacket. It might have been the hottest summer for a good few years, but at this time in the morning it was still distinctly bloody nippy.

  “Like that, then?” he said. “Floristry losing its appeal, is it?”

  She took a noisy slurp of tea. “Some aspects get ever so slightly on my tits, yes…”

  They stepped back as a trolley piled high with long, multicolored boxes came past. The porter behind it winked at Eve, laughed when she gave him the finger.

  “You know you want me, Evie,” he shouted, wheeling the trolley away.

  She turned back to Thorne. “So, you love everything about your job, do you?”

  “No, not everything. I’m not big on postmortems or armed sieges. Or team-building seminars…”

  “There you go, then…”

  “Most of the time, though, I think I love it…”

  There was the first hint of a smile. She was starting to enjoy their double act. “Sounds to me like maybe you love it, but you’re not in l
ove with it…”

  “Right.” Thorne nodded. “Problems with commitment.”

  She blew on the tea, her pale face deadpan. “Typical bloke,” she said. Then she laughed and Thorne got his first glimpse that day of the gap in her teeth that he liked so much…

  They moved methodically through the vast indoor market. Up and down the wide concrete aisles. He followed a few steps behind her, cradling his own cup of rust-colored tea and feeling himself coming slowly to life, the creases cracking open. Taking it all in…

  The shouts and whistles of traders and customers alike echoing through the gigantic warehouse. Twenty-and fifty-pound notes counted out and slapped into palms. Porters humping boxes or steering noisy forklifts in their fluorescent green jackets. All the colors—the stock, the signs, the customers’ fleecy tops and puffa jackets—all standing out against the dazzling white buzz of a thousand strip lights, dangling from the girders forty feet above.

  Eve Bloom clearly knew every inch of this space the size of two football fields; where to find every wholesaler and specialist; where to get the pots, the bulbs, the sundries; the location of any plant, flower, or tree among tens of thousands of others. Thorne watched as she ordered, as she haggled, and as she connected with stall holders and market staff.

  “All right, Evie darlin’…”

  “How are you, sweetheart…?”

  “Here she is! Where you been hiding yourself, love…?”

  Despite her earlier stab at grumpiness, Thorne could see that she really enjoyed this part of the job. The smile was instant, the banter good-natured and flirtatious. If her customers liked her half as much as those she was buying from, her shop was probably doing pretty well. For all this, it was clear that she drove a hard bargain and would take nothing unless the price was right. The wholesalers shook their heads as they tapped at their computer keyboards or scribbled in their pink order books. “I’m cutting my throat selling at this price…” Within half an hour she was done and there was no shortage of porters volunteering to load up her boxes and take them out to where her small white van was parked.

  Once business was out of the way, she took Thorne on one last circuit of the market. She showed him a bewildering selection of different flowers—the ones she liked or hated, the sweetest smelling and the oddest looking. She pointed out the red-and-yellow gerberas, lined up neatly in rows and stacked in small square boxes like fruit. The pink peonies, the orange protea like pincushions, and the phallic anthuriums, their heads like something Dennis Bethell might photograph. Thorne saw enough Jersey carnations to fill every buttonhole at a century’s worth of society weddings and enough lilies for a thousand good funerals. He looked at daisies and delphiniums, the stuff of cheap and cheerful bouquets for desperate men to buy from gas station minimarts in the early hours. Then there were gangling blue-and-orange birds of paradise at five pounds a stem and fruiting lemon trees in vast pots, both surely destined for the dining tables and bespoke conservatories of Hampstead and Highgate.

  Thorne nodded, asked the occasional question, looked keen. When she asked, he told her he was enjoying himself. In truth, though he was impressed by her knowledge and touched to a degree by her enthusiasm, he was dreaming of bacon sandwiches…

  Half an hour later, and Thorne’s fantasy had become greasy reality. Eve had kept him company, working her way through sausage, egg, and chips like a long-distance truck driver. It might or might not have been her breakfast of choice, but the café was not the sort of place that offered much in the way of a healthy alternative.

  “How often do you do this?” Thorne asked.

  “Harden my arteries or get up horribly early?”

  “The market…”

  “Just one day a week, thank God. Some people do it two or three times a week, but I’m much too fond of my bed.”

  Thorne swallowed another mouthful of tea. In the two and something hours he’d been up, he’d already drunk more tea than he’d normally consume in a week. He could feel it, sloshing about in his belly like dirty water at the bottom of a tank.

  “So what you bought this morning’s going to last you the week, then?”

  “Well, if it does, the business is in big trouble. The rest of the stock I need comes over from Holland. This mad Dutchman drives a big van over on a Friday, goes round every small florist in East London. It’s more expensive than coming down here, but I get to stay in bed…”

  She reached into a small leather backpack, pulled out a packet of Silk Cut. She offered it to Thorne. “Want one?”

  “No, I don’t, thanks.” This wasn’t strictly true. Fifteen and more years he’d been off the fags, and he still wanted one…

  She lit up, took a long drag. Drew the smoke down deep and let it out slowly with a low hum of contentment. “It’s your birthday a week today, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve got a good memory,” he said. He puffed out his cheeks. “Mine’s getting worse the older I get.” He pulled a mock-sulky face. “Thanks for reminding me about that, by the way…”

  A spark flared briefly inside his head, then fizzled and died. There was something he was trying to remember, something he knew was important to the case. It was something he’d read. Or maybe something he hadn’t read…

  He brought his eyes back to Eve and saw that she was speaking. Saying something he couldn’t hear. “Sorry, what…?”

  She leaned across the table. “Be a nice birthday present to yourself if you solved your case, wouldn’t it?”

  Thorne nodded slowly, smiled. “Well, I had promised myself some CDs…”

  She flicked ash from her cigarette, rubbed the tip around the edge of the ashtray. “You don’t like talking about your job, do you?”

  He looked at her for a few seconds before answering. “There’s things I can’t talk about, especially with you being involved. The stuff I can talk about just isn’t very exciting…”

  “And you think I’d be as bored as you were when I showed you round the market…?”

  “I wasn’t bored.”

  “Do the criminals you interview lie as badly as you do?”

  Thorne laughed. “I wish.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette, leaned back in her chair, and looked at him. “I’m interested. In what you do.”

  He remembered the way he’d felt talking to her in the tearoom. How it had seemed like a long time since he’d spoken to a woman like that. It was a hell of a lot longer since he’d talked about the job. “Murder cases go cold very quickly…”

  “So you need to catch the killer straightaway?”

  Thorne nodded. “If you’re going to get a result it tends to happen in the first few days. It’s been two weeks already…”

  “You never know…”

  “I do, unfortunately.”

  She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. “I need to go and get rid of some of that tea…”

  While she was in the toilet, Thorne stared out of the steamy window. The café was in a side street between Wandsworth Road and Nine Elms Lane. From where he was sitting, Thorne could see the rush-hour traffic moving slowly across Vauxhall Bridge. Cars carrying their occupants north toward Victoria and Piccadilly, or south to Camberwell and Clapham. Toward shops and offices and warehouses where they would moan and joke about another bloody Monday and then not spend it failing to catch a killer.

  It was a close call, but Thorne would not have swapped places with them.

  Eve rejoined him. Above them, a train rumbled by on its way into Waterloo. She had to raise her voice. “I forgot to ask,” she said, “how’s the plant?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The aloe vera plant…”

  Thorne blinked, remembering the vision that had greeted him on stumbling bleary-eyed into the living room at five o’clock that morning. Elvis, squatting awkwardly atop the small metal bucket. Keeping his belly low to avoid the spikes. Looking Thorne straight in the eye as he pissed happily into the white pebbles…

  “It’s doing fine
,” Thorne said.

  Thorne’s phone rang.

  “Where are you?” Brigstocke said. “We’ve got Gribbin—”

  “I’m on my way in…”

  “When I say ‘got him’ I just mean we know where he is, all right? We’ve got to go and get him. Holland’s waiting on your doorstep.”

  “Tell him I’ll be back home in half an hour.”

  “Where the hell are you?”

  Thorne looked across at Eve, who smiled and shrugged. “I’ve been jogging…”

  What does a child-sex offender look like?

  Thorne knew this to be a pointless question. Pointless because, truthfully, it was unanswerable. It was also extremely dangerous.

  And yet people had been taught to believe that they knew the answer. That they should stick their hands up and shout it out. It was always an answer that came too late, though, wasn’t it? After the damage had been done and the children had been hurt. After the man had been caught and that first fuzzy photo had appeared on the front of the newspapers. Then it was as though everything that people already knew had been confirmed. Of course! It was so bloody obvious, wasn’t it? That was what one of those men looked like. Knew it all along…

  If it was so obvious, if the evil that these men did was written clearly across their faces for all to see, then why did they live next door and go undetected? If you could see it in the bastards’ eyes, then why did they pass by unnoticed on the streets? Why did they teach your kids? Why were you married to one?

  Because, as Thorne knew all too well, you couldn’t see it, no matter how much you wished that you could or how hard you looked. Nobody looked like a child-sex offender. Everybody did.

  Thorne looked like one. And Russell Brigstocke. And Yvonne Kitson…

  What Ray Gribbin did not look like was the popular perception of a child-sex offender. He was not your typical tabloid kiddie-fiddler. He did not have bad skin or lank, greasy hair. He did not wear thick glasses, carry a bag of boiled sweets, or wear a dirty raincoat. As well as the misshapen nose that Douglas Remfry had claimed responsibility for, Gribbin had a shaved head, cold eyes, and a smile that said “fuck right off.” He was a child-sex offender who looked like an armed robber.