Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

“No, it isn’t. It should have been, though, shouldn’t it? Mark settles it, gets clean away with it, gets on with his life.”

  “Whatever that is…”

  “So why the hell does he pop up again now? Why these others? Why kill Remfry, Welch, and Southern?”

  “Maybe he enjoys it.”

  “I’m damn sure he’s enjoying it now, but that’s not why he started. Not why he started again, I mean. Something else happened…”

  “The rape element is crucial, though, you’ve always said that. Maybe he was raped himself.”

  “Maybe.” Thorne felt like they were going over old ground. They’d considered this back when they thought the killer might have been an ex-prisoner, looking to settle an old score. It was possible, certainly, but it felt stale to him, and unhelpful.

  Chamberlain jumped at a sudden, sharp crack from behind them. Half a dozen boys were messing about in the cricket nets, and for a minute or two, the pair of them stood and watched. When she finally spoke, Chamberlain had to lean in close to make herself heard over the noise the kids were making.

  “Something I remember from a poem at school,” she said. Thorne kept his eye on the action, inclining his head toward her to listen. ‘Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies…’”

  “What’s that from?” Thorne asked as they began walking again.

  “One of those anthologies we had to read. I don’t know…”

  As they reached their cars, parked on the main road, Chamberlain stopped and put a hand on Thorne’s arm. “It’s good, knocking ideas around like this, Tom, it’s useful. But don’t forget that if the answer’s there, if it’s anywhere, it’s in the details. It’s in the facts that make up the pattern of a case.”

  Thorne nodded, opening the door of the BMW. He knew that there were answers. He knew, too, that he already had them somewhere, misfiled and, thus far, irretrievable. Lost among the tens of thousands of facts, relevant or otherwise, to the case. The ever-expanding headful of shit that he carried around with him all the time: names and places and dates and snippets of statements; words and numbers and small gestures; access codes and times of death; the look on a relative’s face; the scuff mark on a hotel guest’s shoe; the weight of a dead man’s liver…

  Thorne knew that the answer was buried in there somewhere and it bothered him. Something else bothered him and he thought twice before mentioning it.

  “What you were saying about patterns…”

  “What?”

  “The second and third victims. He changed the pattern of killing between Welch and Southern.”

  “Of course he did. Because he presumed that once you’d connected the killings, you’d contact the prisons and warn them. He had to do the next one differently.”

  “What if he knew, rather than presumed?” Thorne said. “What if he knew because he’s close to the investigation? We always talked about him having access of some kind. Then other stuff came along and the idea got blurred. What if I was wrong to dismiss the idea that the killer’s one of us…?”

  When Thorne got back to Becke House, he was directed straight to Brigstocke’s office. Holland was telling Brigstocke and Kitson about what Joanne Lesser had said, and his subsequent phone conversation with Mrs. Irene Noble. Thorne made Holland backpedal, asked him to go over Lesser’s visit again until he was up to speed.

  “It’s interesting that the dates of the adoption and the move look to be so close together,” Brigstocke said.

  “It gets a lot more interesting. When I finally got hold of Irene Noble, told her I wanted to talk about Mark and Sarah Foley, the first thing she did was to ask me if we’d found them.”

  Thorne looked across at Brigstocke. “How would she know we were looking?”

  “No, sir, that’s not what she meant,” Holland said. He flipped over a page in his notebook, read from it. “‘Have you finally found them?’ That’s what she actually said. She’s talking about twenty years ago.” Holland looked up and across at Thorne. “She claims that the kids disappeared back in 1984…”

  “Just after the Nobles adopted them,” Thorne said.

  “Right.” Brigstocke got up, walked around his desk. “And around the time they moved away from Colchester.”

  Holland stuck his notebook away and leaned back against a chair. “Now it gets even better. Mrs. Noble reckons that there was an official investigation at the time. The children were reported as missing, she says. The police spent weeks looking for them…”

  “You’ve checked?” Brigstocke asked.

  “It’s rubbish. I went back to 1983, just in case she was getting the dates confused, and there’s bugger all. No records of any search, no records of missing persons reports. There was nothing national, nothing local. It never happened…”

  “What impression did you get when you spoke to her?” Thorne asked.

  “She sounded like she meant it. She was upset…”

  “Turning it on, d’you reckon?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Sounded genuine enough…”

  “Where’s the husband?”

  “Roger Noble died in 1990. Heart attack…”

  Thorne thought about this for a second or two, then turned to Brigstocke. “Well, I reckon we’d better have a word with her, then.” Brigstocke nodded. “Where is she, Dave?”

  “She lives in Romford, but she’s coming into town tomorrow. Likes to do her shopping in the West End, she says…”

  Thorne pulled a face. “Oh, does she…?”

  “I’ve arranged to meet her at ten-thirty.”

  Brigstocke took off his glasses, pulled a crumpled tissue from his trouser pocket, and wiped the sweat from the frames. “Well done, Dave. You’d better go over all this with DS Karim as soon as you can. He’ll need to reassign, issue fresh actions…”

  “Sir…” Holland opened the door and stepped out.

  “Yvonne, can you get across this as well? We might have a bit more luck finding Mark Foley and his sister, now we know that they changed their names…”

  Kitson, who had said nothing, nodded and took a step toward the door.

  “This is looking good, you know?” Brigstocke said. “Be great to give the detective chief superintendent some positive news…”

  Thorne couldn’t help himself. “Tell him I thought he looked smashing on the telly the other night…”

  Brigstocke smiled in spite of himself. “Right, a pint later to celebrate?”

  “Fuck all to celebrate,” Thorne said. “I’ll be there anyway, though…”

  “Yvonne?”

  Kitson shook her head. “Too much to do.” She turned and stepped through the door, barking back at Brigstocke as she walked away toward the Incident Room, “Got to change a million and one data searches from ‘Foley’ to ‘Noble’…”

  Brigstocke looked over at Thorne. “What’s got up her arse?”

  “Don’t ask me…”

  “Maybe you should have a word…”

  Thorne’s mobile rang. He glanced at the screen and saw who was calling. He told Brigstocke he’d check back with him later and stepped out into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him.

  “Are we still on for Saturday?” Eve said.

  “I hope so.”

  “Right. Dinner somewhere and back to your place.”

  “Sounds good. Fuck, you know what I still haven’t done?”

  “Who cares? You’ve got a sofa, haven’t you?”

  He had work to do, professionally and for his other, more personal project. Not that he considered the killing to be personal, not in terms of the self.

  No, not really, and not to him anyway.

  What he did to those animals in those hotel rooms wasn’t actually about him, or for him. He’d always denied that, when it had come up, and he would continue to deny it. He was happy to do it, more than happy to put the line around their necks and pull, but if it had only been about him, it wouldn’t be happening.

  He was just a weapon…

  Str
angely, he felt that he put more of himself into his day job. More of him had passed into what he did, by the time he’d finished working on something, than it had watching any of those fuckers plead, then die. True, paying the mortgage meant being responsible to people, and what he did, even when he did it well, was rarely of any benefit to him personally, but he always felt part of it afterward. The work usually had his fingerprints on it somewhere.

  He laughed at that and carried on working. His job was hotting up suddenly: stuff was coming in and he was really earning his money. He had less time now to get the other things organized, but actually there was very little that had to be done, and certainly no need to panic. It was all pretty much sorted.

  Bar a few t’s to cross and the odd i to dot, the final killing had been arranged.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Thorne looked unconvinced. “I’ve never interviewed anybody in the same place I buy my pants.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” Holland said.

  They carried the coffees across to where Irene Noble was sitting waiting for them, flanked already—though the place had been open only half an hour or so—by large Marks & Spencer shopping bags. The café was a relatively new addition to the large store on Oxford Street, wedged into a corner of the ladies’ clothing section and half-filled with shoppers who’d obviously made as early a start as Irene Noble.

  As Thorne squeezed behind the table next to Holland, he glanced around at the dozen or so women getting their breath, ready to start again. Scattered around were one or two bored-looking men, grateful for the chance to sit down and not be asked their opinion for a few minutes.

  Irene Noble took a small plastic container of sweeteners from her bag. She pressed the top, dropped a tiny tablet into her latte, and raised her eyebrows at Dave Holland. “They probably think I’m your mother,” she said.

  She was pretty well preserved for a woman who had to be sixty or so, though Thorne thought that she was trying a bit too hard. The hair was a little too blond and brittle, the fire-engine-red lipstick applied a touch too thickly. To Thorne, it seemed that this stage was probably the one that came right before giving up altogether. Before mentioning your age to strangers, and always wearing an overcoat, and not giving a damn anymore…

  “Tell us about Mark and Sarah, Mrs. Noble.”

  She thought for a moment, smiling briefly before taking a sip of coffee. “Roger used to joke about it and say that we lost them in the move. You know, like a tea chest going missing.” She saw the reaction on Thorne’s face and shook her head. “It wasn’t a nasty joke, it was affectionate. That was just his way. Something to make me laugh if I was crying, you understand? I did a lot of crying after it happened…”

  “This was just after you adopted the children?” Holland said.

  “The beginning of 1984. We’d had them four years or so by then. We had a few problems, ’course we did, but then things got on an even keel.”

  It was clear to Thorne that her voice was affected somewhat. A “telephone” voice. Thorne remembered that his mother had used to do the same thing. Airs and graces for the benefit of doctors, teachers, policemen…

  “There were problems before, weren’t there?” Holland said. “With the previous sets of foster parents.”

  “Right, and they gave up on the children straightaway. It was only Roger and I who stuck with it. We knew that it was just something we had to get through. They were very disturbed children and, God only knows, they had every right to be.”

  “What sort of problems?” Thorne said.

  She paused for a few seconds before answering. “Behavioral problems. Adjusting, you know? Roger and I thought we’d got it under control. Obviously we were wrong.” She reached for a teaspoon and stared down into her coffee cup as she stirred. “Behavioral.” She said the word again, as if it were a medical term. Thorne glanced sideways at Holland, who gave him a small shrug in return.

  “So you decided to adopt them?” Holland asked. Mrs. Noble nodded. “How did the kids feel about that?”

  She looked at Holland as though he’d asked a very silly question. “They’d lost their real parents and been let down by every set of foster parents they’d had since. They were delighted that we were going to be a real family, and so were we. Roger and I had always wanted children. We might have missed out on nappies with those two, but we had plenty of sleepless nights, I can tell you…”

  “I can believe it,” Thorne said.

  “And plenty after they disappeared. Plenty…”

  “How did they disappear?”

  She pushed her cup to one side, laid one liver-spotted hand across the other. “We moved on the Saturday morning and it was the usual chaos, you know? Boxes everywhere and removal men sliding about because there was snow on the ground. We told the kids they could sort their own stuff out, so they just got on with it. Shut themselves away upstairs…”

  “Fighting over who was going to get the biggest room, I suppose?”

  She looked quickly up at Thorne. “No. We’d sorted out their bedrooms early on, before we moved…”

  “What happened?” Thorne said.

  “They needed to have their own space, you understand?”

  “What happened, Mrs. Noble?”

  “Nobody heard them go, nobody saw a thing. They crept out like ghosts…”

  “When did anybody find out they’d gone?”

  “We were all over the place, you can imagine, trying to get everything together. Trying to find the tea bags and the bloody kettle or what have you.” She began to pick at a fingernail. “It was around dinnertime, I think. Can’t remember exactly. It was after dark…”

  “So what did you think?”

  “We didn’t really think anything at first. They always went out a lot. They were very independent, always off somewhere together. Mark always looked after Sarah, though. He always took care of his sister.”

  Thorne glanced sideways at Holland. “When were the police called?” Holland asked.

  “The next morning. Obviously we knew there was something wrong when they hadn’t come back. When their beds hadn’t been slept in…”

  Thorne leaned forward. He took one of the fancy Italian biscuits that came with the coffee and broke it in half, asking the question casually. “Who called the police?”

  There was no hesitation. “Roger. Well, actually, he went down to the station himself. He thought things might get handled faster if he went there personally, and he was right. He said they got straight on it. Two of them came to the house while I was out searching in the park and round the local streets.”

  “Roger told you they came round?”

  She nodded. “They had a look in the kids’ bedrooms, you know? Asked all the normal questions. Took some photos away with them…”

  Thorne looked at Holland. A reminder about getting photos of Mark and Sarah for Brigstocke’s digital aging plan. Holland picked up on it, nodded, and made a note. Thorne popped the rest of the biscuit into his mouth, chewed for a few seconds before speaking again.

  “Did the police presume the children had run away right from the start?”

  “Well, that was the problem, wasn’t it? Everything was in boxes, all over the show. It was hard to work out straightaway if they’d taken anything with them…”

  “Eventually, though,” Thorne said. “That was what they must have thought.”

  “Yes, after a day or two I worked out which clothes were missing. There was some money gone as well, but it took me a while to realize. I thought maybe I’d mislaid it somewhere in all the moving. Once the police knew about the children, about what they’d been through, Roger said they started treating it as a runaway thing more than anything else…”

  “What did they do?”

  “Very thorough, they were. Up and down the country. Appeals for information, searches at all the stations, that sort of thing. Roger got updates from them all the time. They were taking it very seriously, Roger said, for the first w
eek or two, anyway.”

  “Roger said…”

  “That’s right. He went down and nagged them every day. Twice a day, sometimes, demanding to know what they were doing.”

  “For the first week or two, you said. After that…?”

  “Well, they told Roger, a chief inspector actually, told Roger that he was sure the children were safe. They were certain that if, you know, any harm had come to Mark or Sarah, they would have found out. I suppose they meant found a body…”

  Thorne saw that the skin below Irene Noble’s fingernail had torn and begun to bleed slightly where she’d been picking at it. He watched as she pressed a napkin to her tongue and dabbed at the pinpricks of blood. When she spoke again, it struck him that the telephone voice had gone, and that the Essex accent was coming through strongly. Whether she was unable to keep it up for long or had simply ceased bothering, it was impossible to tell.

  “Never having had any of my own,” she said, “I can’t say for sure if I felt anything less because Mark and Sarah weren’t mine, weren’t my flesh and blood. D’you understand what I’m getting at?” Thorne nodded. “After the police told Roger they thought the children were safe, it wasn’t so bad, you know? We weren’t so scared. We just missed them. We got used to missing them eventually…”

  “Did you ever see a police officer?” Thorne said. “In all the time they were looking for Mark and Sarah, did you yourself ever speak to a police officer?”

  Thorne had been expecting a pause, perhaps a paling, but instead he got a smile. After a few seconds it wilted a little, and she seemed suddenly sad. Then, as she spoke, her face filled with an affectionate remembrance…

  “Roger wanted to shield me from any of it. He did everything, handled it all. Perhaps it was his way of dealing with what had happened, throwing himself into it like he did, taking the responsibility, but I knew he was trying to protect me. He dealt with all the official side of things. The strain of it, of everything that happened, and that school business on top of it, drove my husband to an early grave.”

  Thorne blinked, took a breath or two. A suspicion, a sense, began to distill into something more potent. “What school business was that?” he asked.