Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne nodded. He knew…

  “No booze.” Jim Thorne cleared his throat, lowered his voice, tried to sound like a DJ. “Straight in at number three in the Alzheimer’s Hit Parade…” Thorne and Victor laughed. Thorne’s father began to hum the theme to Top of the Pops, then stopped suddenly and looked across at Victor, his face creasing with panic. “Who are the top three chart acts of all time? In terms of weeks on the chart, I mean…”

  Victor leaned forward, the mood suddenly urgent. “Elvis…Cliff Richard…”

  “Obviously, yeah,” Jim said, agitated. “It’s the third one I can’t bloody think of. Christ, I know this…”

  Thorne tried to help. “The Beatles…?”

  With the perfect timing of a music-hall double act, his dad and Victor looked at each other, then at Thorne, before answering simultaneously, “No…”

  Thorne could see his father beginning to sweat, to breathe heavily. The fact that he was wearing two sweaters was not helping. “I can see his bloody face. You know, bloke who fancies other blokes.” He began to raise his voice. “Christ, he plays the…the thing with keys on, black and white keys…”

  “Piano,” Thorne said. His father often spoke like this, when the right word wouldn’t come. The thing you put in your mouth to clean your teeth with. Bacon and…those things that come out of a chicken.

  Victor thumped his fist on the table triumphantly. “Elton John,” he said.

  “I know,” Jim said. “I fucking know…” He began stabbing at the chips on his plate, one after the other, looking as if he might weep at any moment.

  “I’ll get some more drinks in,” Thorne said quickly. “If you’re going to break one of your rules, you might as well really break the fucker…”

  Victor drained his pint, handed Thorne the empty glass. “’Course, your dad might not have Alzheimer’s at all…”

  Thorne shot him a look. This kind of discussion was pointless, though Victor was, strictly speaking, correct. Alzheimer’s could not be, could never be, confirmed. They were 90 percent sure, though, which was about as good…or bad, as it got.

  “Same again, Victor…?”

  “Are you listening, Jim?” Victor said. “You can’t be certain it’s Alzheimer’s…”

  Thorne put a hand on Victor’s arm. “Victor…”

  Then Victor shot him a look, and Thorne suddenly saw what was happening. He saw that he was trampling all over one of his dad’s favorite lines. He felt sick with shame…

  His father put down his knife and fork, picked up his cue. “That’s right, Vic. The consultant told me that the only way they can be sure is to perform a postmortem. I said, ‘No, thank you very much. I don’t think I’m too keen on one of those just yet!’”

  Victor and his father were still laughing loudly as Thorne stood at the bar waiting to get served…

  The “middle stage” of the dementia was how it had been described to him. It all sounded a bit vague, but Thorne figured that as long as there was another stage to go, things would be all right for a while longer. As long as the bad jokes outnumbered the moments of terror and despair, he would try not to be too worried.

  Just briefly, for a minute or two, Carol had wondered about what she was doing, had thought about swapping places with her husband. She was a middle-aged woman, for heaven’s sake! She ought to be inside like Jack, curled up on the sofa in front of the TV instead of wrapped up in an overcoat, rummaging through filthy cardboard boxes in their freezing garage.

  That had been before she got into it. As soon as she began to delve into all that was left of Alan Franklin’s past—his first past—she’d stopped feeling the cold. She’d rediscovered that bizarre and exciting feeling of looking for something, getting after it, without having the foggiest bloody idea of exactly what “it” was.

  All around her, in front rooms and kitchens on her quiet little road in Worthing, women her age were doing crosswords, or losing themselves in crappy romances or pouring breakfast cereal into bowls ready for the morning…

  Carol pulled a pile of dusty blank paper out of one of the boxes, swept away the grime with the side of her hand. She wouldn’t have swapped places with any one of those women…

  There was lots of paper in both boxes; reams of the stuff in a variety of sizes, once presumably white, but now yellowed and slightly damp. There were envelopes, too, and smaller packages of file cards, sticky labels, and rusted staples. Franklin had met Sheila while working for an insurance firm in Hastings, but had clearly wanted to hold on to a few odd souvenirs of the working life he’d had before.

  None of the other stuff would have caused pulses to quicken at the Antiques Roadshow: a couple of unused diaries from 1975 and 1976; a bunch of keys on a Ford Escort key ring; plates and teacups wrapped up in old newspaper; a couple of Polaroids inside a manila envelope—two boys; one a baby, the other a toddler, and later the same two as a pair of gawky, unsmiling teenagers.

  Carol unwrapped the dry newspaper from around what turned out to be a large silver tankard. She laid it to one side and smoothed out the crumpled page on the garage floor. It was from a local paper. She looked at the date—presumably the day Franklin had walked out on, or been thrown out by, his wife. Not a great deal seemed to have happened in Colchester that day: a small protest about a proposed ring road; a leisure center reopening after a refit; a smash-and-grab at the jeweler’s on the High Street…

  Carol smiled at a phrase she hadn’t heard for many years. Smash-and-grab. Not much more than twenty years ago and even the crimes seemed more innocent somehow…

  She picked up the tankard, which, after a closer look, she could see was silver-plated. In spite of the newspaper, it had blackened slightly on one side, but she could make out an engraving. She held it up to the light from the bare bulb, and read:

  From the boys at Baxters, May 1976.

  Welcome back.

  Have one to celebrate or more than one to forget the whole thing!

  Carol thought about ringing Sheila Franklin, but knew instinctively that she wouldn’t be a great deal of help. Her husband had not shared his past with her. Maybe he went up into the loft once in a while and peered at it, or perhaps he was trying to forget it himself. Either way, Carol was pretty sure that she would have to work it out on her own. She’d start tomorrow. It couldn’t be that hard. She’d get that lazy bastard McKee to make a few calls.

  Wincing, Carol hauled herself up from where she’d been kneeling on the floor. She’d put a cushion down on the concrete, but her knees still felt very sore. She switched off the garage light and stood for a few seconds in the darkness before going inside.

  Wondering what Alan Franklin had cause to celebrate back in 1976. And what he might have wanted to forget…

  On the twenty-five-minute train journey back from St. Albans, Thorne had the entire carriage to himself.

  He reached into his bag for his CD Walkman and a couple of discs. He opened up an album by a band called Lambchop—a birthday present from Phil Hendricks that, until he’d shelled out three hundred pounds in Tower Records, had been the only CD he’d owned for a day or two after the burglary. It was “alt. country,” Hendricks had told him. Apparently, Thorne needed to move with the times a little…

  Thorne pressed PLAY, let it come, and thought about the curious good-bye he and the old man had shared.

  Half an hour after Victor had left and whatever tea was still in the pot had gone stone-cold, Thorne and his father had stood together on the doorstep. Both, for very different reasons, trying to find the right thing to say.

  Jim Thorne had never been one for tactile displays of affection. Occasionally a handshake, but not today. Instead, with a twinkle in his eye, he had leaned in close and, as if imparting a great pearl of wisdom, told Thorne that “Three Steps to Heaven” by Eddy Cochrane had been number one in the hit parade on the day he’d been born.

  Thorne kicked off his shoes, put his feet up on the seat opposite. What his father had said, what he’d remem
bered, was, he supposed, touching in its own way…

  The music in his headphones was slow, and lush and strange. Thorne couldn’t make head or tail of the lyrics and there were horns, for crying out loud. Not Ring of Fire–style Tijuana trumpets, or mariachi, but proper horns, like you’d hear on a soul record…

  Thorne ejected the Lambchop CD, put it back into its jewel case. Another time, perhaps. He put on Steve Earle’s “Train a Comin’” and closed his eyes.

  Soul was all well and good, but there were times when guts sounded a whole lot better.

  It was stupidly easy.

  He never ceased to be amazed at how pathetic these animals were. How simple it was to lead them by the nose. By the nose between their legs…

  It was less than a week since the first casual remarks had been exchanged and already he could start thinking specifically about when and where Southern was going to be killed. It had been such a piece of cake that he half regretted all that effort with the others. The months of planning, the buildup, the letters. It might have been just as easy to wait until after they’d been released and collar them in a bar somewhere. Just smile and say hello.

  People like that, like Southern, didn’t need subtlety. Fuckers didn’t understand it, wouldn’t recognize it. Using their cocks like blunt instruments…

  He’d won Southern’s trust quickly, and now that he had it, the rest was fairly straightforward. Times and places. Arrangements.

  It was all about trust, about getting it and keeping it. The gaining of trust was something he was good at. People gave it to him all the time, like a gift, without his needing to ask for it.

  By contrast, he never, ever gave it. Not anymore. He knew very well what could happen if you did.

  FIFTEEN

  Carol lifted the handset and dialed, checking the number on her pad twice as she pressed each button carefully. She reached over to straighten a picture on the wall as the phone at the other end began to ring.

  She had only been able to stand watching McKee mess around for so long before she’d taken over herself. Two and a half days spent on the phone, digging through records at Companies House, getting wound up. Reminding herself of how shit the job was most of the time.

  “Nobody made you do it,” Jack had said. “Nobody would think any the worse of you if you chucked it in.”

  Nobody except her…

  Tracking down Baxters, the company Alan Franklin had worked for in Colchester nearly thirty years before, had proved enormously frustrating. She’d discovered quickly that the company, a stationery wholesaler, had not only left the area in the early eighties, but had changed its name. She was pretty much starting from scratch. She had spoken to every company in the south of England able to provide so much as a plain brown envelope, and got precisely nowhere. Then, just at the point when Jack was starting to talk about divorce, she got lucky. The personnel manager of a firm in Northampton knew everybody in the stationery supply business, played golf with most of them, God help him! He was only too delighted to tell her exactly where to find the person she needed to talk to, and gave her the name of a company in King’s Lynn…

  “Hello, Bowyer-Shotton, may I help you?”

  “Yes, please,” Carol said. “I’d like to speak to Paul Baxter.”

  “I’ll put you through…”

  Andy Stone sat, sweating through his white linen shirt, some small fraction of his mind on the report he was writing up…

  He thought about the woman he’d woken up next to. He remembered the look on her face the night before, and the look she’d given him as she’d slipped out of his bed that morning without a word…

  She’d been attending a tedious conference at the Greenwood Hotel a couple of weeks earlier, when Ian Welch had been killed. Stone had interviewed her, given her his number in case there was anything else she remembered. She’d remembered that she fancied him, rung, and asked if he wanted to go for a drink.

  He guessed that she was turned on by the fact that he was a copper. A lot of women seemed to find it exciting. The power, the handcuffs, the war stories. Whatever the reason, once the novelty wore off, most of them seemed to lose interest in him very quickly.

  Meantime, the sex was usually pretty good…

  He wanted to control things in bed. He liked to be on top, the woman’s arms flung above her head, his hands around her skinny wrists, pushing himself up and away from her while he was doing it. He’d done weights, built up his chest and arms so that he could hold the position for as long as he needed to.

  Last night had started really well. She’d looked up at him, her eyes wide, and said all the right things, just the sort of words he imagined hearing whenever he thought about it. She told him he was too big, that he might hurt her. He threw back his head, gritted his teeth, pushed harder…

  Then she’d spoiled things. She’d begun to moan, to grab at his shoulders, to say that she liked it rough. Then, between ragged breaths, she’d told him that she wanted him to hurt her.

  In seconds he had shrunk and slipped out of her. He dropped down and rolled onto his side, listening to her sigh, aware of her inching across to her own side of the bed so that no part of their bodies were touching…

  Stone looked up at the greeting of a colleague passing his desk. He smiled and continued to type. He remembered the warm feeling of his hand, cupped between his legs, and the sound of the woman’s body sliding across the sheet as it edged away from him.

  Carol had been put on hold…

  She had probably been listening to Celine Dion for no more than a couple of minutes, but she could feel herself growing a hell of a lot older.

  Moments like this, the empty minutes that made up so much of any case, made her glad she’d agreed to take the job on the clear understanding that she could work from home. She’d guessed that AMRU would not be given the swankiest office facilities, and working as they did (or were supposed to do) in teams of just two, she’d have been lucky to get a cupboard.

  Jack had cleared a space for her in the spare room. They set up the old computer that his daughter had used, and shelled out twenty pounds on an extra handset for the cordless phone. Her filing system consisted of yellow Post-it notes stuck around a picture frame, her husband doubled as a coffee machine, and when Carol glanced at the mirror above her desk, she saw dusty hatboxes, old lamps without plugs, and a collection of china dogs that had seemed like a good idea a couple of years before.

  It was cramped, but she liked her things around her.

  The day she’d taken up residence in her new office, Jack had stood behind her and they’d both stared into the mirror. Carol sat at her desk and smiled at the rubbish they’d amassed together down the years, piled up on the single bed behind her. The reflection of her retired self.

  “That’ll stop you getting too carried away,” Jack said.

  The Muzak came to an abrupt and merciful halt. “Can I help you?” a man asked.

  “Yes. Paul Baxter, please…”

  “Wrong department, love. You’ve come through to accounts. Let me try and transfer you…”

  Ten seconds of clicking and then a familiar voice. Carol’s heart was already sinking as she spoke.

  “Paul Baxter, please…”

  “Is that you again? Sorry, dear, you’ve come back to the switchboard. I’ll put you through…”

  The sun, blazing through even the grimiest of the big windows, had turned the Major Incident Room into a sauna by midday. Yvonne Kitson didn’t really need to reapply her lipstick, but did it all the same. Any excuse to spend a few minutes in the cool of the toilets was welcome.

  She didn’t usually wear a great deal of makeup. Just enough to feel good, but that was all. In this job more than most, people were quick to judge, to form instant opinions that would be passed around and set in stone before you’d so much as got your workstation organized.

  She knew very well what people thought about her. She knew what the likes of Tom Thorne thought she was, thought she did. She k
new just how wide of the mark they were.

  Makeup—the colors, how much, when you wore it—gave off a signal. It said you were this or that. Concealing, lying, making it up…

  She stood for a few moments, looking at herself in the cracked mirror. She moved her head a few inches, until the crack ran right down the middle of her face. Until it looked about right.

  She would give it one more minute…

  She began to count down the time in her head. Fifty-five seconds more, then she would slam the phone down, make some tea, and go and shout at her old man for a while. No, she would snatch the phone back up, call McKee and shout at him…

  Carol began to swear repeatedly under her breath. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She’d turned her back on gardening, and old films in the afternoon, and the Reader’s Digest, for this…

  “Paul Baxter’s phone…”

  She almost cheered. “Thank God. Is Mr. Baxter there?”

  The woman sounded unsure. “Well, he was here a minute ago. He might have grabbed an early lunch. Let me see if I can find him for you…”

  There was a clatter as the receiver was dropped, then silence. Thirty seconds later Carol heard voices, then muffled laughter, which grew suddenly louder before the receiver was picked up and abruptly replaced. Then she just heard a dial tone.

  Carol took a deep breath and dialed again, jabbing at the buttons as if each were the eyeball of a Bowyer-Shotton employee.

  “Hello, Bowyer-Shotton, can you hold for a moment…?”

  Carol shouted. “No!”

  It was too late…

  Dave Holland was in a reasonable mood until the little fucker started to get cocky.

  “Listen, I don’t think I have to go into the details…”

  “Well, that depends, doesn’t it?” Holland said. “On just how much of a pain in the arse you want me to be.”

  “I did some modeling up there. Fair enough?”