Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  He downed a third of the pint in one, and as it went down, he watched as hard glances were exchanged on the other side of the bar. Some cousin or other and the bride’s mate, looking like they wanted trouble. Thorne decided that even if they started punching seven shades of shit out of each other right there and then, he wasn’t going to raise a finger.

  He realized that he was wrong about this stuff only happening at family weddings. With the possible exception of the disco, you could get it all at family funerals as well. The key word was family, that first syllable stretched out and said with a metaphorical jab of the finger, if you were a character on EastEnders, or a fake Cockney TV celebrity, or from a particular part of Southeast London.

  Thorne looked across. He guessed that the trouble would kick off a little later. In the car park, maybe.

  It was events like these, he thought, births, marriages, and deaths, that saw the undercurrents rise to the surface and become unstable. Bubbling up and swirling in eddies of beer and Bacardi. Sentimentality, aggression, envy, suspicion, avarice.

  History. The ties that bind, twisted…

  This was the stuff that was reserved for those closest to us, that was hidden away from strangers, even when that was exactly what most of your family were.

  Thorne saw a lad, sixteen or seventeen, walking across the bar toward him. This was probably the nephew in search of career advice. On second thought, Thorne was in just the mood to give him some…

  He might start with a few statistics. Such as the number of murders committed by persons unknown to the victim, and how tiny they were compared to those committed by persons to whom the victim was actually related. He would tell the boy that when it came to families, to the tensions within them and the acts carried out in their name, he should never, ever be surprised. He would tell the stupid, eager young idiot that families were dangerous.

  That they were capable of anything.

  When the man had come through the door, Welch could see straightaway that he was in trouble.

  There was a look on the man’s face that Welch recognized, that he’d spent years in prison trying to avoid. It was the look he’d seen often on the faces of ordinary honest-to-goodness murderers and armed robbers. The same look of contempt, of threat, that Caldicott must have seen down in that laundry room before they flash-fried his face…

  Welch thought that perhaps he should have struggled more, but there was little he could do. The man was far stronger than he was. The years inside had toughened him up mentally, but his body had gone soft and flabby. Too much time reading and not nearly enough in the gym…

  Welch spent his last moments thinking that pain was so much worse when you were unable to fight it, when you could not protest its presence…

  The scream in his throat was stopped by whatever had been thrown around his neck and pressed back into a strangled, bubbling hiss. His body, too, could do nothing. It drew itself instinctively from the agony, but each jerk away from the tearing, from the stabbing, just tightened the grip of the line that was crushing the breath out of him.

  Welch pushed his head down toward the carpet, feeling the line bite farther into his neck, his teeth deeper into his tongue. He strained against the hands that dragged his neck back, contorting himself, his body fetal in the seconds before death.

  I’m dying like a baby, Welch thought, his eyes wide but seeing nothing inside the hood, a softer, blacker darkness beginning finally to come over him…

  Thorne had just put his father to bed. He was walking across the corridor to his own room when the phone rang. He let it ring until he was inside the room.

  “You’re up late…”

  “Great, isn’t it?” Eve said. “Lie-in tomorrow. So, how was the wedding?”

  “Perfect. Dull speeches, shit food, and a fight.”

  “What about the actual wedding…?”

  “Oh, that? Yeah, that was okay…”

  She laughed. Thorne sat on the bed, wedged the phone between shoulder and chin, and started to take his shoes off. “Listen, I’m really sorry about last night…”

  “Don’t be silly. How’s your dad?”

  “You know, annoying. Mind you, he was annoying before…” Thorne thought he could hear the sound of traffic at the other end of the line. He guessed Eve was out somewhere, but thought better of asking where. “Seriously, though, sorry about rushing off. Did the food get eaten?”

  “Don’t worry, it will…”

  “Sorry…”

  “It’s fine, there would have been tons left anyway. I’d made loads and Denise eats nothing, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Thorne began to unbutton his shirt. “Say thanks to her and Ben for the entertainment, by the way…”

  “Good, wasn’t it? I think I broke it up too early, though. Another minute, and I’m sure we’d have seen a glass of wine thrown in someone’s face…”

  “Next time.”

  She yawned loudly. “God, sorry…”

  “I’ll let you get to bed,” he said. He was imagining her in the back of a cab, pulling up outside her flat.

  “Sleep well, Tom.”

  Thorne lay back down on his bed. “Listen, you know that scale of one to ten? Can I move up to an eight…?”

  Thorne’s phone rang again eight hours later. Its insistent chirrup pulled him up from the depths of a deep sleep. Dragged him from a dream where he was trying to stop a man bleeding to death. Each time he put his finger over a hole, another would appear, as if he were Chaplin trying to plug a leak. Just when it seemed he had all the wounds covered, the blood began to spurt from a number of holes in him…

  “You’d better get back, sir,” Holland said.

  “Tell me…”

  “The killer’s ordered another wreath…”

  Part Two

  Like Light

  November 27, 1996

  Stooping to pick up the car keys he’d dropped, Alan Franklin winced in pain. A fortnight shy of retirement, and his body, like a precision alarm clock, was telling him that it was just the right time. The back pain and the talk of retirement cottages abroad had begun on almost exactly the same day…

  He straightened up, his noisy exhalation echoing around the almost deserted car park. They’d probably talk about it again tonight, the two of them, over a bottle of wine. Sheila was leaning toward France, while he fancied Spain. Either way, they would be off. There was nothing to keep them, after all. The children he’d had with Celia were grown up with kids of their own. Not that he had any contact with his boys anymore, and he’d never seen the grandchildren they’d produced. There were friends, of course, and they’d be missed, but it wasn’t like he and Sheila were going to be far away. They had no real ties…

  He fumbled for the key to the Rover, pushed it toward the lock.

  Sheila would probably get her way in the end, of course, she usually did. It had to be said that more often than not she was right. She’d been right this morning, telling him that it was going to freeze, that he needed to wrap up warm.

  He turned the key, popped up the central locking.

  As he reached for the door handle, something passed in front of his eyes with a swish and bit back, hard into his neck, pulling him off his feet…

  He hit the floor before his briefcase did, before he had a chance to cry out, one leg broken and bent behind, the other straight out in front of him, hands flying to his throat, fingers wedging themselves between line and neck.

  Hands scrabbled at his own, tearing at his fingers, pulling them away. A fist crashed into the side of his head, and as he rocked with the impact, he felt his fingers, numb and running with blood, slipping from beneath the line. And hot breath on the back of his neck…

  He watched his leg shooting out, the foot kicking desperately against the Rover’s dirty gray hubcap.

  He remembered suddenly the face of the woman underneath him. Smelled himself, the aftershave he used to love. Felt again that strength in his arms.

  He saw her l
egs kicking out against the boxes piled high on either side of the stockroom. Heard the dull thud of her stockinged feet on the cardboard. He felt the movement beneath him die down and then stop, saw her eyes close tight.

  It seemed to be getting dark very quickly. Perhaps the lights in the car park were on some sort of timer. Fading to save electricity. He could just make out his foot, the heel of his brogue still crashing into the hubcap, again and again. Cracking the cheap plastic.

  Then, just black and the rushing of his blood, and the sound of his heartbeat, which thumped inside his eyeballs as the line tightened.

  He saw his wife, smiling at him from the garden, and the woman beneath him trying to turn her head away, and his wife, and then the woman, and finally the woman where his wife should have been, telling him how cold it was going to get.

  Laughing, and reminding him not to forget his scarf…

  TEN

  Carol Chamberlain had always been an early riser, but by the time her husband shuffled, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen at a little after seven o’clock, she’d already been up a couple of hours. He flicked on the kettle, nodded to himself. He’d known very well she would have trouble sleeping after the phone call.

  It had come the evening before, in the ad break between Stars in Their Eyes and Blind Date. As soon as the caller had identified himself, begun to tell her what he wanted, Carol had understood the quizzical look on Jack’s face when he’d handed her the receiver.

  She’d listened to everything that the commander had to say. From the audible exasperation in his voice it was clear that she’d asked a lot more questions than he’d been expecting. After fifteen minutes she had agreed to think about what she’d been asked.

  The new team had been set up, she was told, to utilize some of the resources that had been—how had he put it?—wasted in previous years. The basic idea was that highly capable ex-officers could bring years of valuable experience to bear on reexamining old, dead cases. Would be able to cast a fresh eye across them…

  For most of the time since she’d hung up, since they’d gone back to watching Saturday-night TV, Carol had been in two minds. She was certainly a “wasted resource,” but much as she was happy, no, desperate, to do something, she had also heard something dubious in the voice of the unspeakably young commander. She knew immediately that he and many others would be picturing hordes of aged ex-coppers shuffling in from Eastbourne, on sticks and Zimmer frames, waving dog-eared warrant cards and shouting: “I can still cut it. I’m eighty-two, you know…”

  Jack put a mug of tea down in front of her. He spoke softly. “You’re going to do it, aren’t you, love?”

  She looked up at him. Her smile was nervous, but still wider than it had been in a while.

  “I can still cut it,” she said.

  While Thorne had been racing back from Hove, shagging the hired Corsa up three different motorways, Brigstocke had made the scene at the Greenwood Hotel secure. By the time Thorne arrived, it was nearly three hours since the body they would later identify as Ian Welch had been discovered, and more than twelve since he’d been killed. There was little else for Thorne to do but stare at him for a while.

  “Well, it’s a slightly nicer hotel anyway,” Hendricks said.

  Holland nodded. “They even sent us up some coffee…”

  “There’s a CCTV set-up in the lobby as well,” Brigstocke said. “It’s pretty basic, I think, but you never know.”

  It was a classic businessman’s hotel. Trouser presses, Teasmades, and bog-standard soap in the bathroom. The simple, clean room couldn’t have been more different from the pit they’d stood in three weeks earlier. Save, of course, for the one gruesome feature they had in common.

  As with the murder scene in Paddington, the bed had been stripped and the bedding taken away. The clothes lay scattered, but the body itself had been precisely positioned. Dead center with head toward the wall, belt around the wrists, white hands bloodless. The hood, the line around the neck, the dried red-brown trails snaking down the thighs like gravy stains…

  This one looked a little older than Remfry. Late forties maybe.

  Brigstocke gave Thorne what little they had. Thorne took the information in, standing by the window, one eye on the fields beyond the main road. They were two minutes from the motorway, fifty yards from a major roundabout, but on this Sunday morning, Thorne could hear nothing but birdsong and the rustle of a body bag.

  This time the killer had ordered his floral tribute personally. The order had been placed with a twenty-four-hour florist at just after eight-thirty the evening before and paid for with the victim’s debit card. Thanks to that, they already had a name for the dead man…

  “He didn’t fancy leaving a message this time,” Brigstocke said.

  Thorne shrugged. Either the killer had learned from his mistake or had done what he needed to do in leaving his voice on Eve Bloom’s machine.

  “Twenty-four-hour florists?” Thorne shook his head. “Who the hell needs flowers in the middle of the night?”

  “They’re not actually twenty-four hours,” Brigstocke said. “But there’s always somebody there until at least ten o’clock. They don’t guarantee to get your flowers delivered by the next morning, but apparently they made a special effort in this case, due to the nature of the order…”

  At 9 A.M., a deliveryman had waltzed into hotel reception carrying the wreath. The receptionist, somewhat taken aback, had rung room 313 and, on getting no reply, had asked the deliveryman to wait, and had gone up to the room. Five minutes later, her screams had woken most of the hotel.

  “Sir…?”

  Thorne turned from the window to see Andy Stone coming through the bedroom door. He was clutching a piece of paper, grinning, and moving quickly across to where Thorne and Brigstocke were standing.

  “The victim checked in under his own name…” Stone said.

  Brigstocke shrugged. “No real reason for him not to, was there? He thought he was coming here to get fucked.”

  “Looks well and truly fucked to me,” Holland said.

  When Stone had finished laughing, Thorne caught his eye. “Go on…”

  Stone glanced down at the piece of paper. “Ian Anthony Welch.” He half turned toward the body. “Released eight days ago from Wandsworth. Three years of a five-stretch for rape.”

  Thorne spoke to nobody in particular. “I don’t know why we never considered it. Remfry wasn’t killed because of who he was. He and Welch were killed because of what they were. Christ, this is the sort of case we normally get brought in for…”

  Brigstocke stretched, his plastic bodysuit rustling. “Well, this time, we’ve got our very own.”

  Now things were going to change: in the previous week and a half, priorities had shifted. Older cases that had been downgraded in the immediate wake of the Remfry murder had, suddenly, three unsuccessful weeks on, been shunted forward again. Members of the team found themselves knee-deep in court preparations for a domestic, processing the arrest of a teenager who’d stabbed his friend for a computer game or gathering the papers on a drug-related shooting. This reallocation of resources was normal and now it would need to be done all over again. Now that the Remfry murder was the Remfry and Welch murders, the more straightforward cases would slide back onto the back burner.

  Now Team 3 would be handling no other cases at all…

  “One, two, three…”

  Thorne watched as four officers heaved the body off the mattress and onto the black body bag that had been stretched out on the floor next to the bed. The belt had been removed but the hands were still clenched tightly together behind the back, fingers entwined. Rigor mortis had set in hours ago and the body rolled awkwardly onto its side, knees drawn up to the chest. The officers looked at one another and, after a few moments, a DS stepped forward. He placed a hand on the chest, and as he rolled the body onto its back, he pushed the legs downward as far as they would go. Flattening the body just enough to zip the bag up.

 
; “I forgot to ask,” Brigstocke said. “How was the wedding?”

  Thorne was still watching the sergeant, whose eyes were closed the whole time his hands were on the naked body.

  “Not a lot more fun than this,” Thorne said.

  Fifteen minutes later, just after midday, the core of the team gathered in the lobby. They were about to go their separate ways. The postmortem was being rushed through at two o’clock, and while Thorne would be following Hendricks to Wexham Hospital, Brigstocke and the others would be heading back to the office.

  While the DCI spoke on the phone to Jesmond and then to Yvonne Kitson back in the Incident Room, the others sat on mock-leather armchairs and shared a pot of coffee. Less animated than the small gaggle of hotel staff and guests, they stared out through the plate-glass windows in reception at the body being loaded into the mortuary van.

  Brigstocke joined them, sliding his mobile back into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Well, that’s everybody up to speed, me included…”

  “What words of wisdom from the all-knowing detective chief superintendent?” Thorne asked. Outside, the mortuary van was moving away. Hendricks waved as he climbed into his car to follow it. Thorne raised a hand in return.

  “Nothing I can argue with,” Brigstocke said. “We’ll have reporters here before they’ve put new sheets on the bed. So here it is. Officially, we can’t confirm or deny a link with the Remfry murder.” He paused, making sure the message was sinking in. “It makes sense. The tabloids would have a fucking field day with this one. Screaming about vigilantes, running polls. Is the killer doing a good job? Yes or no?”

  “Is that a possibility, you think?” Stone asked. “Could this be some sort of vigilante thing?”

  Thorne reached for the coffeepot, poured himself another cup. “This is something very personal. The man who’s doing this isn’t doing it for you or me…”

  “Maybe,” Brigstocke said. “But all the same, there will be people asking whether or not we should be grateful…”