Lazybones

by Mark Billingham

  Thorne lifted his head up and pressed a hand to the gash across his chin. He tried not to let the terror sound in his voice when he spoke.

  “Mark and Sarah…”

  At the mention of his real name, a shadow fell across the man’s face. “Move away from my sister, now.”

  Thorne shuffled across the mattress, oddly uncomfortable with his nakedness. He watched the woman step, nude and smiling, from the other side of the bed and gather up her clothes.

  “Eve, this is so stupid…”

  Ben Jameson’s eyes moved quickly, from his sister’s body back to Thorne. “Get onto the fucking floor…”

  THIRTY-ONE

  While they were preparing him, Thorne tried to take the growing fear, the blood, the pain and keep them somewhere separate. Somewhere he could store them up, stoke them into a rage he might be able to use. The rest of his brain was focusing, coming up with answers, putting it together. Adrenaline causing the engine to race…

  The two of them worked together quickly and efficiently. Before Thorne could even think about how he might move against them, against the two knives, it became an impossibility. Eve slipped the belt from Thorne’s chinos, wrapped it around his wrists until it hurt. Ben manipulated his body, pushing the head down toward the carpet, hoiking up the knees, spreading the calves. They operated as a team, movement and stillness in sync, one busy while the other held a knife close. Thorne was never more than a few inches away from a blade. Any move, other than those he was instructed to make, was out of the question.

  Now his body mirrored those he’d seen before. Distorted and discolored. In hotel rooms and in dreams…

  Thorne lay naked, facedown on the floor, knees pulled up beneath him and hindquarters raised. His head and hands pointed toward the bedroom door. Blood from the knife wound soaked into the carpet and grew sticky beneath his cheek.

  “It didn’t matter in the rest of the room,” Thorne said. “In those hotels, traces just got lost among everybody else’s. But you had to get rid of the bedding, didn’t you, Eve? That would have been clean, that would just have had traces of you and the victim…”

  Though Thorne couldn’t see it, Eve smiled. “Once I got them into bed, they were helpless. Same as you.”

  “I never raped anybody, Eve…”

  “It’s a bit late, don’t you think?” Jameson said. “To be slotting pieces into your little puzzle? It’s rather fucking pointless, considering where you are.”

  “Who wants to die ignorant?”

  “You can’t do much about that,” Jameson said, “however many answers you get…”

  “Is this the pet project you talked about? These killings? The thing of your own you wanted to get off the ground…”

  Jameson laughed. “That’s quite funny. Be a damn sight more interesting than local authority training videos, that’s for sure. There you go, there’s one more piece of your puzzle. One more thing to make you a bit less ignorant…”

  Thorne was already trying to work it out. “It’s how you got into the Register, isn’t it? Not sure where the connection is. Social services?”

  Eve provided the answer. “The National Probation Directorate. Specifically the Sex Offenders and Corrections Unit…”

  “Towards a National Information Strategy isn’t Citizen Kane,” Jameson said. “But they were more than happy for me to do all the research I needed and their security was very sloppy. They were somewhat lax about unattended computers, access to databases, that sort of thing. Mind you, that was exactly why they wanted the video made in the first place…”

  It suddenly struck Thorne that Jameson had probably been on the list that was compiled of contact numbers for Charlie Dodd. A video production company would not have seemed suspicious, bearing in mind the nature of Dodd’s business. Never having known it, Thorne would not have recognized the name of Jameson’s company anyway. It didn’t matter a great deal now…

  “That was fortunate for you,” Thorne said.

  “We all need a bit of luck now and again,” Eve said. “Some of us more than others…”

  Thorne lifted his face from the carpet, feeling fibers and tiny pieces of grit sticking to the dried blood on his chin. He took the weight on his forehead and looked back through the gap underneath his arm. Jameson was delving into the rucksack he’d placed on the end of the bed. Eve stood by his side, her eyes never leaving Thorne.

  “We should get this done,” she said.

  Thorne saw a flash of blue as Jameson pulled out the length of washing line, then one of black, which he presumed was the hood. He felt the fear that was the creature in his chest grow heavier. He closed his eyes and saw it climbing, using the slats of his rib cage like a ladder, heaving itself upward little by little.

  As was so often the way, it was the last part of the journey that was proving the most frustrating. It had taken ages to get across the Holloway Road at the Nag’s Head and up to Tufnell Park. Now the ridiculous number of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings on the Kentish Town Road was providing a last-minute annoyance.

  Holland thought about calling again. He decided that even if Thorne was off the phone or had turned the mobile back on, he was more or less there now anyway, so there wasn’t much point…

  Holland drove down the inside lane, swerving back out right when he came up against a bus and deftly cutting off a black cab in the process. At the next set of lights the taxi came up his inside and the driver wound down his window to give him an earful. Holland held up his warrant card, told the fat cabbie to fuck off, and watched, smiling, as he did.

  When the lights changed, Holland swung into Prince of Wales Road. Thorne’s street was the third on the right. He slowed to a stop, glancing down at the photos while he was waiting for a break in the traffic.

  When one finally came, he turned, wondering if they’d even allow Thorne to be there when they made the arrests.

  “It is the most fantastic story, though,” Jameson said. “Maybe I should write it, change all the names, of course, to protect the innocent…”

  “Whoever they are,” Thorne said.

  “It would be in three parts. Three acts, if you like, same as any classic screenplay…”

  “You live and learn.”

  “Not for much longer.”

  The black thing inside Thorne climbed another rib…

  “For the first part we have to go back in time. Flared trousers and shit hair and a piece of scum who probably has both. A man who drags a woman into a storeroom and rapes her.”

  “Your mother…”

  Thorne felt the vibrations as feet moved quickly across the carpet toward him, then the pain of a heel pressing down onto the side of his face. “Let him tell it,” Eve said.

  “The rapist, thanks largely to the police, is found not guilty. The woman suffers a breakdown. Her husband goes mad.” Jameson emptied the facts from his mouth like he was spitting out dirt. “He kills her and then himself and their bodies are discovered by their two young children, who are subsequently taken into foster care. It’s a dramatic start, don’t you reckon?”

  “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?” Thorne said. The shoe came back down across the side of his face and ear. Jameson said something he couldn’t make out and the foot was lifted. Thorne turned his head and saw Eve moving back across the room toward her brother. “‘Thanks largely to the police,’ that’s what you said. So, I have to die because of the way some fuckwit handled a rape case nearly thirty years ago.” He received no answer. “Yes? Is that about right?”

  “There’s no point bleating about life being unfair,” Eve said. “We’re the last people you’ll get any sympathy from there…”

  “I understand why. I just want to know why me?”

  “Because you answered the phone.”

  And Thorne saw that it really was that simple. The message left by the killer on Eve Bloom’s answering machine had always bothered him, and finally he understood why. It had been “left” so that Eve had an exc
use to call the hotel—a call to a murder scene that would be answered by a police officer. The wreaths had been ordered after the subsequent killings purely to make it look like part of a pattern.

  They had selected their rapists with care. Their final victim, Thorne himself, had been chosen completely at random. He remembered what he’d said to Eve, what she’d said to him, twenty minutes earlier in bed:

  It could easily have been somebody else who answered that phone…

  Then it could very easily have been somebody else who was here now.

  He could still see the look on her face as she’d said it. He imagined the look on his father’s as he received the news of Thorne’s death.

  “I’ve got a great title as well,” Jameson said. “For this sordid little horror story. What do you think of ‘Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire’?”

  “We know about Roger Noble…”

  “Oh, you do?” For the first time, though Jameson did not raise his voice, Thorne could hear emotion behind it, white-hot and lethal. “You might know what he did, but you can’t know how it felt.”

  “Bad enough so that you had to leave.”

  “Well done…”

  “To protect your sister…”

  “Noble didn’t want to hurt me,” Eve said. “He wanted to hurt my baby.”

  “He made you pregnant?”

  Jameson laughed. “We’re back to ignorance. We should have a little bell to ring, or a buzzer, for when you get it wrong or say something stupid. Noble liked boys. The baby was mine.”

  “Ours,” Eve said. “So we left when they tried to make me get rid of it.”

  Thorne realized that it had been shame he’d heard in Irene Noble’s voice when she’d stared into her Marks & Spencer coffee and talked about “behavioral” problems. It had probably been her idea to move in the first place, to get the abortion performed in a different area, to avoid the scandal…

  “What happened to the child?” Thorne asked.

  Jameson answered matter-of-factly. “We lost it. Who knows, when all this is over, we might try again.”

  For perhaps half a minute, nobody spoke. Thorne lay in agony, a breeze from somewhere passing across his bare skin. The feeling had gone from his hands, and the thumping of his heart was lifting his chest clear off the carpet.

  When all this is over…

  He imagined the look that was passing between the two people who planned to kill him. He pictured something tender, an expression of the love between a man and a woman, who talked about having a baby together once he had been raped and strangled to death.

  Thorne moaned in pain as he twisted his head across to the other side. “I’m guessing that the final part of this story involves the murders,” he said. “Remfry and Welch and Dodd and Southern. Me as the symbolic climax. It’s the middle bit that’s still a mystery, after you disappeared. What happened between Franklin and the men in prison? Why did you start killing again?”

  “Lightning struck twice,” Eve said.

  Then the doorbell rang…

  Thorne tensed and raised his head, but their speed, their commitment, was overpowering. In a heartbeat they were on him, a knife pressed into each side of his throat, cutting off the breath he’d need before he had a chance to cry out…

  Hendricks picked up almost immediately.

  “Listen,” Holland said, “I’m outside DI Thorne’s place and I can’t get any reply, but his phone’s engaged…”

  “He probably left it off the hook, while he’s busy giving Eliza Doolittle a good seeing to.”

  Holland felt ice at his neck. “Sorry?”

  “He had a hot date with his sexy florist. I’m not surprised he doesn’t want to answer the door…”

  “Oh, Jesus…”

  “What is it?”

  Holland told Hendricks about the pictures, about Mark and Sarah Foley. Hendricks announced that he was coming straight over. The panic Holland heard in the pathologist’s voice stemmed the rising tide of it he felt in himself.

  Then, looking across the road, he saw the motorbike…

  “Dave…?”

  Holland felt the engine that was ticking over within him moving up a gear. “Listen, Phil, before you leave, get on the phone. Call Brigstocke and fill him in. Get some backup round here now. And an ambulance…”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Holland was walking along the pavement, away from Thorne’s place. He was thinking about the alleyway that he remembered running along the side of a house three or four doors up. “I’m not sure…”

  He was seeing a face through a crash helmet. Seeing the face of a killer, smiling at the lie within the truth.

  I’ve got a BMW myself…

  Smiling, because BMW makes bikes as well as cars…

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Why don’t you just get out now while you still can?” Thorne said. “You’ll spend the rest of your lives in prison. You’ll never see each other again…”

  Jameson sounded unconcerned. “Don’t get worked up. Whoever that was at your door, they’ve gone.”

  Thorne twisted his head, aimed his voice toward Eve. “People know you were coming over here, for fuck’s sake. There’ll be fibers, bits of skin everywhere. In the bed…”

  “Of course there will,” Eve said. “I’m your girlfriend. Which is why I’ll be the one calling the police.”

  Thorne was stunned, but he saw immediately that they would get away with it. It was very simple. With Thorne dead, Jameson would kiss his sister good-bye for a while and slip away. On his way out, he would kick in the door that she’d previously left open for him, make sure there were signs of a forced entry.

  Then she would dial 999…

  He had no doubt that Eve would play the part of the traumatized witness and, later, the grieving girlfriend perfectly. He knew all too well how good she was, how convincingly she would pick up the pieces of her life. He could see the officers falling a little bit in love with her as they took her shocking statement.

  The idea that they would not be made to pay for his death caused a surge of fury to rush through Thorne. He did not need it, but he felt a jolt of added determination to cling on fiercely to every second.

  “Tell me about the lightning, Eve.”

  She said nothing, but Jameson took the bait. “Franklin was always going to pay for what he did. It just took me a while to get round to it…”

  Jameson had moved to stand between Thorne and the door. Eve had crossed back to the bed. He presumed that Jameson was still holding the hood, and the washing line, but he could not be certain. Thorne guessed that Roger Noble had been fortunate, dropping dead when he did. Something in Jameson’s voice suggested that, had he still been alive, Jameson would have “got round” to him as well…

  “So why not leave it there?” Thorne asked.

  “We did,” Eve said. “Carried on with the lives we’d made, that we’d remade, for ourselves, until I had one too many slow dances at a party. Until some piece of shit thought that ‘no’ meant ‘yes’ and followed me home…”

  Facedown on the carpet, Thorne knew full well the expression on her face. He’d seen it before, the night they’d walked across London Fields and he’d told her about the case. Told her things she already knew far better than he did…

  Just think of this bloke as cutting reoffending rates…

  “It would be stupid to ask if you reported the rape to the police,” Thorne said.

  Jameson took a step toward him, his black boots moving into Thorne’s field of vision. “Very fucking stupid. We dealt with that one ourselves…”

  Thorne remembered the other case Holland and Stone had pulled off CRIMINT. A man found raped and strangled in the boot of a car. The ligature had been removed, but Thorne could now be pretty certain that it had been washing line.

  He’d solved another murder in the last few moments before his own…

  “Which all brings us bang up-to-date,” Jameson said.

  T
o me, Thorne thought. He knew he was the last in a line of dead men, connected by the strongest, strangest thread of all. The family tie that refused to break, even when it had become twisted beyond all recognition.

  “You kill the man you blame for the death of your mother and father, and for your abuse at the hands of the foster parent who replaces them. You kill the man who attacked your sister. You develop a taste for it—”

  “Not a taste for killing, no.”

  “My mistake. A taste for some perverted idea of justice…”

  “Listen to yourself…”

  “Tell me you don’t enjoy it…”

  Eve’s voice was flat, barely above a whisper. “I want to do this now,” she said.

  Thorne could feel her walking toward him. At the same time Jameson moved quickly, one step bringing him next to Thorne, another lifting a boot up and across Thorne’s back, until he was straddling him.

  Thorne knew what was coming, but refused to submit to it. He reacted instinctively, thrusting his legs backward and pushing his groin down toward the carpet. Hands grabbed his legs, clawed at his thighs as they struggled to lift them, fought to bring his rear end upright, to make it accessible…

  Pain and numbness had left the top half of Thorne’s body as good as useless. It was no more than a dead thing, with only the dark mass that clung to his ribs still flourishing. Swinging inside him, wet and weighty, clattering off the wall of his chest as he kicked and thrashed.

  “Stop it,” Jameson said.

  Thorne cried out, the terror suddenly far greater than the rage. His voice sounded high and weak, and was quickly replaced by the deafening roar and squeal of agony as Jameson’s gloved fist pounded into the side of his head, again and again, until Thorne could do nothing but let go, and be still, and wait for it to stop.

  Seconds stretched and passed, and though Thorne had lost track of who was where, he was aware of movement, of arms and legs, of pressure…

  He was aware of Eve’s voice as the scream in his head died down a little, and he heard her saying, “Hold him.”