Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  Blinding white light, but Thorne knew very well that it was the middle of the night.

  He wore pajamas, with his brown leather jacket over the top. He moved quickly around the room, his steps jaunty, bouncing in time to a tune he could hear but not quite place.

  The three beds were equidistant from one another, lined up precisely. The metal bedsteads made them look a little like hospital cots, but they were bigger, more comfortable. They were identical, each with thick pillows, a clean white cotton sheet, and a body.

  Thorne moved to the end of the first bed, wrapped his hands around the metal rail, and peered down at Douglas Remfry. The arse poking into the air, the face buried in the sheet. He began to shake the bed, rattling the frame, shouting over the noise of it. He shook and shook and shouted, filled with contempt for who this man had once been, for what he had done.

  “Come on, then, up you get, you idle bastard. There’s women out there begging for it. Up and at ’em…”

  And as the body shook on the bed, the skin began to slip off until it lay on the sheet, gathered about the bare bones like dirty tights, rolled down around a pair of ankles.

  Thorne laughed and pointed at what remained, at the rapist’s skin and skeleton, sloughed away and contorted. “For heaven’s sake, Lazybones, are you ever going to get up out of that bed?”

  He trotted across to the second bed, shook the flesh from Ian Welch’s bones. All the time taking the piss. Feeling nothing for these dead men. For these lumps…

  At Howard Southern’s bed, Thorne paused and watched as the bed began to vibrate, something passing noisily beneath the floor. A shadow arced across the vast windows and Thorne looked up. He watched the movement, back and forth, until the smell hit him.

  He laughed when he looked back at the beds, and saw what the bodies had become. What they had actually been all the time. Thorne could only presume that each had been expertly expelled onto the center of his bed, from the body dangling at the end of a rope, high above them.

  As soon as Thorne awoke, the dream began to slide away from him, the images sucked back into the darkness until only the feelings remained. Scorn and anger and shame.

  It was a little after two-thirty in the morning.

  When even the feelings had faded, there were only thoughts of the woman whose defilement and death long before had, it seemed, caused everything. Now she moved through his case as surely as if she were still corporeal and Thorne was ready to embrace her.

  She was nearly thirty years dead, and so was her killer, but that didn’t matter.

  In Jane Foley, Thorne had finally got a victim he could care about.

  NINETEEN

  It was Monday morning. Seven weeks to the day since the body of Douglas Remfry had been found. More than twenty-five years since Jane Foley had been raped and subsequently battered to death. Thorne was still trying to work out the connection between the two murders. He hoped that the woman sitting opposite him might be able to help…

  Despite its somewhat shady reputation, and the tired old jokes about the IQs and sexual habits of its women-folk, Essex was full of surprises. As the oldest recorded town in the country and the capital of Roman Britain, Colchester had more history than most places. Still, the last thing Thorne expected from a municipal building in the middle of town was what looked like a small stately home on its own grounds.

  The area office for the Adoption and Fostering Service was somewhat run-down, admittedly, but amazing nonetheless. Thorne had thought that all the period or faux-period properties in the area had been snapped up by footballers and armed robbers a long time ago. The surprise was evidently clear in his face as he and Holland were greeted by the service manager and shown into a large office with dark oak paneling all around and heavy wooden beams crisscrossing an ornate ceiling above.

  “This was originally the coach house. I know it looks nice, but trust me, it’s a bastard to work in…” Joanne Lesser was a light-skinned black woman in her midthirties, tall and—so Thorne thought—a little on the thin side. Her hair was straight and lacquered, the brows heavy, framing a face that was severe until it broke into a smile. Then it was all too easy to picture her laughing at a dirty joke in spite of herself, or tipsy at the Christmas party.

  “The place is falling to pieces, basically,” she said. “We can only put so much weight on the floors, the filing cabinets have to go against certain walls, and nothing’s level. You can find your chair rolling from one side of the office to the other, if you’re not careful…”

  Thorne and Holland smiled politely, unsure about whether or not she’d finished. After a few seconds, she shrugged and raised an eyebrow to indicate that she was waiting for them.

  The only sound in the room came from a noisy metal fan that looked like it might have been an antique itself. At the other end of the desk, an entire army of trolls, action figures, and plush toys was lined up across the top edge of a grimy, beige computer.

  “You spoke to DCI Brigstocke on the phone,” Thorne said. He raised his voice a little to make himself clearly heard above the fan. “Mark and Sarah Foley?”

  Lesser reached for a piece of paper on her desk and studied it.

  “Nineteen seventy-six,” Holland added, trying to move things along.

  “Right, well, I’m sure you weren’t expecting it to be straightforward…” She looked up and across at them, smiling. Thorne couldn’t quite manage one in return. “All I can really tell you with any certainty is that they were never fostered by anybody who is still registered with us as an active carer.”

  Holland shrugged. “I suppose it would have been too much to hope for…”

  “Right,” Thorne said. He had been hoping nevertheless.

  “We’re talking over twenty-five years ago,” Lesser said. “It’s possible that the people who fostered them are still active, but have moved to another area.”

  “How do we check that?” Thorne said.

  She shook her head. “Not a clue. It’s pretty unlikely anyway, I’m just thinking aloud, really…”

  Thorne could feel a headache starting to build. He shuffled his chair a little closer to the desk, pointed to the fan. “I’m sorry, could we…?”

  She leaned across and switched the fan off.

  “Thanks,” Thorne said. “We’ll try to get through this as fast as we can. Why was what you told us the only thing you could tell us ‘with any certainty’?”

  “Because the only files I have access to here are current. Those are the ones concerned with active carers.”

  “That’s the stuff on computer?”

  She snorted. “It wasn’t until ten years ago that things even started being typed, and even now there’s still a load of stuff that’s handwritten. It’s not just the building that’s past it…”

  Thorne blinked slowly. It was just his luck to need help from an organization whose systems were even more fucked up than the ones he worked with every day.

  “But there are records, in one form or another, that go back further…”

  “In one form or another, I suppose so. God knows what state they’ll be in if you manage to lay your hands on them, a few scribbled pages nearly thirty years old. Hang on, some are on microfiche, I think…”

  Thorne tried not to sound too impatient. “There are records, though?”

  “Dead files…”

  “Right, and the dead files, the files that would have the records from the midseventies, will be stored somewhere?”

  “Yeah, they should be in Chelmsford, at County Hall. The law says we have to keep them.”

  Holland muttered. “Data Protection Act…”

  “That’s it. Everybody who’s received a service from us has a right to see their records, to have access. Some people wait years. They come back in their forties or fifties, looking for details on people who fostered them when they were kids.”

  “How come it takes them so long?” Holland said.

  “Maybe it’s the distance that makes them appreciat
e it. At the time, when they’re kids, it can be a bit traumatic…”

  Thorne thought about Mark and Sarah Foley. Anything they went through as foster children could not possibly have been more traumatic than what had happened before. “What do you tell them?” he asked. “These people that come looking.”

  “Good luck.” She leaned back on her chair, took the material of her blouse between thumb and forefinger, and pulled it from her skin. She flapped it back and forth, blew down onto her chest. “We’ve got the records, but I couldn’t really tell you where. Like I said, they should be over at County Hall, but laying your hands on them is another matter.”

  Joanne Lesser smiled a “nothing I can do” smile and Thorne remembered a similar moment: he and Holland sitting in almost identical positions in Tracy Lenahan’s office at Derby Prison. It seemed like a long time back. A few deaths ago…

  Thorne rolled his head around on his neck. “I know that we’re talking about stuff that dates back a long way and you’ve made it clear that the system’s not all it should be, but surely there’s some sort of central storage place…?”

  “Sorry, I thought I’d explained. We only have the active files because each time you move, each time the office relocates, you leave the dead files behind. Now, in theory, they should get taken back to County Hall and, like you say, stored somewhere. In reality, stuff just gets chucked in boxes. It goes missing…”

  “Why would you move?”

  “Council buildings are interchangeable. Somebody could decide tomorrow that this should be the new headquarters for the DSS or Refuse Collection. Unless the council renews the lease, this place might be a hotel in a couple of years.”

  “Right. So, have you moved often?”

  “I’ve only been doing this ten years and we’ve moved three—no, four—times since I started.” Thorne had to fight quite hard to stop himself from swearing or kicking a hole in the front of the desk. “It gets worse. I know that some stuff got destroyed a couple of years ago when part of the archive was flooded…”

  Thorne and Holland exchanged a glance. They were catching every red light…

  “What about school records?” Lesser said. “You might have more luck…”

  Holland glanced down at his notebook. “They attended local primary and secondary schools until 1984, after which there’s no record of them.”

  She considered this. “Are you sure they’re still alive?”

  “We’re not really sure about anything,” Thorne said. In truth, the idea that Mark and Sarah Foley might be dead was something that had been only briefly considered. It had even been suggested that the suicide of Dennis Foley might have been a second murder made to look like a suicide. That whoever had been responsible might have wanted the children dead, too. Half an hour spent looking at the files on the original case, at the postmortem report on Dennis Foley, had soon put an end to that clever theory.

  “This is probably clutching at straws,” Holland said, “but I don’t suppose there’s anybody still working here, in your department, who was around back in 1976?”

  “Sorry. Staff tend to move around as often as the offices do.”

  “A bit like footballers,” Holland said.

  “I wish we got paid as much.” Thorne thought the smile she gave Holland was of an altogether different sort from the one she’d given him.

  Thorne shifted on his chair. It was enough to drag Holland’s eye from Joanne Lesser back to him. Time to go.

  “Right, well, thanks…”

  “It’s a long way back,” she said.

  Holland reached for his jacket. “There shouldn’t be too much traffic at this time of the day…”

  “No, I meant you’re going back a long way. To look for these people, for Mark and Sarah Foley. I mean, what about National Insurance? Vehicle Licensing? Sorry, I don’t want to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, but—”

  “It’s okay,” Thorne said.

  She leaned forward in her chair. “Why do you want to find them?”

  Holland stuffed his notebook away. “I’m sorry, but we can’t really—”

  Thorne cut him off. What did it matter? “They were fostered after their parents died. Their father killed their mother and then himself. The children discovered the bodies.” Lesser’s lower jaw sagged a little. “We think that what happened back then is connected with a series of murders that we’re investigating now.”

  “A series?” She spoke it like it was a magic word.

  “Yes.”

  “They’re connected to it, you mean? Mark and Sarah Foley?”

  Thorne could see a flush developing at the top of her chest. Her voice was suddenly a little higher. She was excited.

  Thorne stood up and began pulling on his leather jacket. “Listen, Joanne, we’ll be sending someone down to County Hall to start looking for these records. I’m sure you’re busy, but we’d be very grateful if you could give him as much help as you can…”

  She rolled her chair back and stood, too. “You don’t need to send anyone. I’d be happy to do it for you. I mean, yes, I am pretty busy, but I can find the time.” The flush had moved up to the base of her throat. “I’ll probably be quicker on my own, to be honest. You know, without somebody else getting in the way…”

  Thorne thought about her offer. It sounded like such a wild-goose chase that he’d probably only be wasting an officer anyway. He nodded. “Thanks.”

  At the door, while Holland took down Lesser’s phone number and handed her a card, Thorne stared at the posters on the wall next to the door. One image in particular caught his eye: a girl and a boy, hand in hand, staring straight at the camera, their moist round eyes begging. They were much younger than Mark and Sarah Foley would have been, no bigger than toddlers, and they were almost certainly actors. Still, their faces held Thorne’s attention…

  He tensed a little when he felt Lesser’s hand on his arm.

  “It’s funny,” she said, “to think that people can just slip through the net like that, isn’t it?”

  Thorne nodded, thinking that some people were a lot more slippery than others.

  Driving back through the town center, Holland talked about Joanne Lesser. He joked about the sort of woman who looked like she was afraid of her own shadow and then went home and lay in the bath, one hand holding some gruesome true-crime book while the other…

  Thorne wasn’t paying too much attention. He felt as though someone had poured concrete in through his ears. The thoughts floundered in his head, sticky and dismal, while his face, as always, was easy to read.

  “Like she said, we were going a long way back,” Holland said. “Probably wasting our time. We’ll find them somewhere else…”

  Thorne grunted. Holland was right, but all the same, he had been counting on something a bit more positive.

  Holland made for the motorway, heading out of town along the line of the Roman wall. From here at St. Mary’s of the Wall, during the English Civil War, a vast Royalist cannon named Humpty Dumpty was said to have fallen, later to be immortalized in the children’s nursery rhyme. They passed the ancient entrance to the town, through which Claudius, the invading emperor, had once ridden into Colchester on the back of an elephant. Thorne found it strange that two thousand years later, whether by accident or design, the far more recent history of ordinary people could be so impenetrable.

  “I’m betting Miss Marple back there’s already scrounging through her dead files,” Holland said. He laughed, and Thorne dredged up something that might have been a smile, if one half of his face had been paralyzed. “What d’you reckon?”

  Thorne reckoned that he’d been right about chasing leads. This one had sounded solid, like it wasn’t going away. Now it had put on a burst of speed and Thorne felt as if he could do nothing but watch it disappear into the distance.

  The slice of white bread in Peter Foley’s hand was blackened with dabs of newsprint from his fingers. He looked at his hands. There were still scabs on a couple of the knuckle
s, and oil beneath his fingernails from where he’d spent the morning tinkering with his motorbike. He used the bread to mop up the last of his gravy, then picked up his mug of tea and leaned back against the red plastic banquette.

  He stared out of the café window and watched the cars drift by. He thought about his family. The dead and the disappeared.

  Bumming around…

  That’s what he’d told those fuckers when they’d asked what he was doing back when it had happened, and it was pretty much all he’d done since as well. Holding down a job, once he’d got back into the swing of things, had become difficult. He’d developed a tendency to take things the wrong way, to react badly to a tasteless comment or a funny look. He couldn’t say for sure that what had happened was responsible. He might always have been destined to be a shiftless loser with a tendency toward casual violence, but what the fuck, it was comforting to have something to blame.

  To have somebody to blame.

  He should have moved away from the area. There was always some old dear with an opinion, or a pair of young mums whispering and shielding their children. Always some interfering fucker, willing to tell any woman he got close to all about his happy family. People had good memories. Not as good as his, though…

  He remembered the argument he’d had with Den a couple of days before it had happened. He’d wanted to come over, had asked Den why nobody had seen Jane for a while, if everything was all right. Den had lost it and told him to mind his own business, said that he knew very well what was going on. He remembered his brother’s face, the trembling around the mouth as he’d accused him of fancying Jane, all but suggesting they’d been screwing behind his back. He remembered the guilt he’d felt, then and afterward, because he did fancy Jane and always had.

  And he remembered the faces of the children, the last time he’d seen them, before that cow from the social services had driven them away. Sarah had been quiet, she’d probably not really understood what was going on, but the boy’s face, Mark’s face, pressed against the back window of that car, had been streaked with snot and tears.