Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  He slid out of the booth, grabbed his paper, and strolled across to the counter to pay for his lunch.

  He thought about his nephew and his niece and hoped that they were together somewhere a long way away. A place where nobody could ever find them and fuck their new lives up.

  The afternoon stretched ahead. He would go back and lie down and wait for it to get dark. Then he would put some metal on and drink. He would empty can after can, until the noise inside his head was quieter than the screech and the smash of the music that would be filling his bedroom.

  When they got back to Becke House, Thorne filled Kitson and Brigstocke in on how things had gone in Colchester. They conferred about progress on the other flank of the operation. The Southern killing had plenty in common with those that had gone before: the cause of death; the layout of the murder scene; the wreath ordered in person from an out-of-hours floristry service—this time delivered as far as the hotel-room doorway, then hurriedly dropped after one look at the state of its recipient.

  But there were plenty of differences, too. There were new avenues that had to be explored…

  Southern had been released from prison more than ten years previously. He hadn’t been selected in the same way as the previous victims, and he was certainly approached differently. Unlike Remfry or Welch, he had a whole life that had to be sifted through if they were going to find out just how the killer had made himself part of it. Interviews, running into many hundreds, were still being conducted with anyone who had contact with Southern: the people he worked with; the friends he drank with; the members of the gym he worked out at; the girlfriend he’d recently broken up with…

  These people who had been part of his new life would, for the most part, have had no idea that Howard Southern had once served time in prison. Even if he’d told any of them—and with some people it might have gained him kudos or a round of drinks—chances are he wouldn’t have told them what for.

  Unfortunately for him, someone had found out exactly what Howard Southern had once done, and had killed him for it.

  In his office, Thorne went through his mail. As always, it was mostly junk. Pointless memos, press releases, crime statistics, new initiative outlines. He glanced through the monthly Police Federation newsletter, at a story about a local force recording themselves whistling the theme tunes to a host of well-known police TV shows. These recordings were being broadcast in some of the rougher housing developments and shopping centers in an effort to deter street criminals.

  When Thorne had finished laughing, he checked his messages. There’d already been a call from Joanne Lesser to say that she’d start checking the records the following morning, and that some files had apparently been moved from County Hall to a new storage facility on an industrial estate just outside Chelmsford. The next one was from Chris Barratt at Kentish Town. There was nothing from Eve…

  Thorne picked up the phone, wondering at the sharp twinge of disappointment he felt. He marveled, as he dialed, at his seemingly endless capacity for indecision, for fucking off…

  “About bloody time, too,” he said.

  “Calm down,” Barratt said. “We haven’t got him yet. But we know exactly who he is. We’ll pull him first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “How did you find him?”

  “Are you listening? This is funny as fuck…”

  “Go on…”

  “He’d got rid of the stereo, right? Probably sold it the same day, got himself blitzed on the proceeds. Then he has a problem…”

  “Which is?”

  “Your taste in music.”

  “Eh?”

  “The idiot’s had to make himself a bit conspicuous in the end. We got the nod eventually because by all accounts he’s spent the last four weeks trying to get rid of your bloody CD collection.”

  “What?” Thorne’s relief was all but canceled out by his outrage…

  By now, Barratt was making no attempt to hide his enjoyment. “Couldn’t pay anybody to take ’em off his hands, by all accounts. Been dragging them round every market and secondhand place in London…”

  “Enjoy yourself, Chris. As long as I get them all back.”

  “Listen, if I was you, when you do get them back, why don’t you stick a few by the window, where people can see them. You know, as a deterrent…”

  “I’m not listening. Just call me when you’ve arrested him, all right?”

  “Fine…”

  “And I’ll want five minutes.”

  “No problem. I’m here all day…”

  “Not with you, smart-arse. With him…”

  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 appreciate 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 knuckles, 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.