He was aware that he had started to cry, and was grateful that he hadn’t lost control of bladder or bowels.
Thorne raised his head an inch off the floor. The wetness slipped beneath his chin and into the gash, stinging. “One thing,” he said, looking for Jameson, his voice somewhere between a gasp and a rattle, “just for my own satisfaction. Are you going to rape me before or after I’m dead? We never could work that out…”
Jameson was sitting across the top of Thorne’s back. He leaned down close to his ear. “Ding, ding. Stupid again. I’ve never raped anyone…”
Thorne felt his head being lifted up by the hair and twisted around. He quickly forgot about the searing pain in his neck and shoulders when he saw what Eve was holding. It was dull, and dark, and thick as his fist. A warped simulation of a sex organ, designed only for the pleasure of one who sought to invade and to injure.
A weapon, pure and simple.
“No need to bother with the condom, this time,” Eve said.
Thorne thought about the traces found at the first postmortem. The natural assumption that the victim had been penetrated by flesh and blood. That the rapist wore a condom. That the rapist was a man…
In wholly different circumstances, Thorne might even have laughed, but he knew very well what the thing Eve held in her hand would do, condom or not, when she rammed it into him…
“To answer your question, though,” Jameson said, “we find that doing both things at the same time works pretty well for us.”
Holland thought he heard a cry as he dropped down onto the kitchen floor. He froze, listening. There was music playing in the living room. Thorne’s usual country crap. From somewhere, there was a series of dull thuds, and then silence.
He moved slowly and quietly through into the living room, in much the same way as the burglar who’d come in through the same window six weeks earlier. From the table on the far side of the room a red light caught his eye, flashing from the handset that had been taken off the hook. Thorne’s mobile was next to it. Holland didn’t need to go any closer to know that it had been switched off…
The song faded out, and in the gap before the next one started, Holland heard the low murmur of voices. He turned toward the sound as the music began again.
They were in the bedroom. Jameson, and the girl, and…
Though he couldn’t make out what was being said, relief flooded through him as he recognized one of the voices as Thorne’s.
The relief turned into something that tasted bitter in his mouth as Holland realized that he needed to act quickly, that he would have no idea what to expect on the other side of the bedroom door. He thought about Sophie as he stood, rooted to the spot, looking around the room for something he might use as a weapon.
Thorne felt the pain shoot through his neck and shoulders as Jameson shifted his weight. He watched a hand pass in front of his face. The washing line was looped around the fingers…
“Strange how a man’s mind works,” Jameson said. “Even close to death, they were all far more afraid of what was happening at the back end than the front…”
Thorne winced as Eve’s hand pressed down onto the small of his back. He tensed and sucked in a breath at the touch of cold plastic brushing against his thigh.
“On that scale of one to ten,” she said, “how keen are you now?”
Thorne clenched, and drove his pelvis down toward the floor, but he was unable to flatten himself. He felt only the gentle resistance of the pillows that had been placed beneath him, raising his backside just enough, however much he tried to move away…
Jameson grabbed a handful of Thorne’s hair, lifted up his head. “Some advice, for what it’s worth.” Thorne grunted, shook his head. “It’s best not to fight the line when you feel it round your neck…”
Thorne channeled every last ounce of strength he had left into his neck, driving his head back down toward the floor.
He could feel his hair being torn away by the roots…
He could feel the thick tip of the phallus pushing at the crack of his buttocks…
He pushed his face toward the carpet, knowing that Jameson just needed enough room, enough space to get the hood on. The line would quickly follow and then it would all be over…
“Take it or leave it,” Jameson said. “Seriously, though, if you let me get on with it and let the line do its job, you’ll be unconscious long before she’s finished…”
Thorne screamed, and at the same moment, Jameson stopped pulling and smashed Thorne’s head forward onto the floor. Thorne lay still, momentarily stunned, for the few seconds that Jameson needed to slip the hood over his head.
Even as he writhed and jerked, Thorne felt a bizarre calm, which grew deeper as the ligature tightened around his neck. He felt the fear inside him shrivel to nothing. He saw faces burst and scatter as flashes of light. He drifted through a black space so thick that he knew it had more to do with death than darkness.
The crash of the door and the shouting are like distant sound effects that echo and grow suddenly deafening as the pressure around his neck is released…
Thorne sucked air into his lungs and reared up, snarling and snapping his head back into something, feeling it give and soften. The weight fell or was lifted from him, and he pitched forward, rolling over onto his back. He lifted his hands, numbed by the belt, and began scrabbling with dead fingers to remove the hood.
A scream, and then a crack, and the piercing squeal of castors as the bed moves at speed across the floor…
He stared up at the ceiling, heard grunts of effort and pain, and the crash of bodies impacting with something solid. Dropping his head to the side, Thorne saw Jameson and Holland in a heap by the wardrobe. He saw the wardrobe door swing slowly open and, in the mirror on the back, he saw Eve coming at him.
Spinning quickly from the reflection to the real thing….
With her knife raised, she launched herself, or stumbled or fell, toward him, and Thorne could do little but turn his face away and kick up hard at her. As she opened her mouth, grimacing with the effort or with the hatred, Thorne’s foot crashed into the underside of her jaw, knocking her head back and sending a thick string of blood arcing high above them both. The last drops were still raining down long moments after she’d fallen to the floor like a side of meat…
Thorne climbed gingerly to his feet and moved slowly across to where Holland was standing, doubled over and white-faced, panting. Jameson lay moaning on the floor, one arm bent awkwardly behind him and the other stretched toward a knife that he was never going to reach. He looked up, his expression impossible to read through the pulpy red mess that Thorne’s head had made of his face.
A bottle of wine lay on its side, half rolled beneath the wardrobe. Thorne nudged it out with his foot as Holland began untying the belt around his wrists.
“It was all I could find,” Holland said between gulps of air. “I think I broke the fucker’s arm with it…”
Hands free, Thorne turned and walked back to where Eve was sprawled near the bedroom door. She still had the knife in her hand, but barely noticed as Thorne took it away from her. She was busy scanning the bloodstained carpet for half of her tongue, bitten off as cleanly as her father’s had been, when he’d dropped from a banister all those years before.
Thorne sank down to the floor, leaned back against the bed. He felt the pain start to return. In his head, in his arms, everywhere.
From the other room he could hear George Jones singing like nothing had happened.
He stared at himself in the mirror on the back of the wardrobe door. Naked and covered in blood, he looked like some kind of ravening savage. He watched himself slowly move a hand to cover his genitals.
“I phoned Hendricks,” Holland said. “There’s backup on the way.”
Thorne nodded. “That’s good. That’s very good, Dave. Pass me my fucking underpants first, though, would you…?”
Part Four
The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
THIRTY-THREE
Yvonne Kitson rang him on his way to St. Albans.
“Tom, how are you doing?”
“I’m good. What about you?”
“I’m fine. Listen…”
Thorne knew very well that Kitson was far from fine. Her husband had taken the kids after discovering her affair with a senior officer and now her career looked likely to fall apart as comprehensively as her family. It had been her husband who had made the call to her superiors, told them exactly what his wife had been up to, and with whom…
“Listen,” she said, “I thought you’d like to know straightaway. We’ve got a provisional date for the trial.”
It had been six weeks since the arrests of Eve Bloom and Ben Jameson. Since Thorne had been led from his own flat, a hand on his arm and a blanket around his shoulders, like so many victims he’d watched in the past, shuffling toward police cars and ambulances, saucer-eyed and colorless.
Now they would need to go through it all again. The case was already being put together, but now, with a date set, the pace would really pick up. The documentation had to be disclosed to the Crown Prosecution Service and the witnesses properly prepared. Everything had to be carefully gathered and shaped so that professionals could take it into a courtroom and use it to get a conviction.
Thorne of course would be spared the donkey work. His moment would come later, in the witness box.
Not that Thorne had ever stopped going through it…
In stark contrast to real life, Eve Bloom was always disturbingly honest in the Restorative Justice Conferences Thorne imagined with her daily. Of course there had never been the slightest interest in him sexually. If she’d wanted to, she could easily have slept with him at her place. What wouldn’t have been so easy with a flatmate around was what she and her brother had been planning to do all along.
That she hadn’t had the opportunity to do it sooner, to get Thorne where she wanted him at his place, was down to a seventeen-year-old smackhead who’d burgled Thorne’s flat and, without knowing it, saved his life.
It was down to something else, too, of course…
Thorne had called it laziness. A fear of things going further. A reluctance to move a relationship along. Could it really have been something else altogether? Some indefinable instinct for self-preservation? Whatever it was, Thorne was grateful for it. He hoped, God forbid it should ever be needed, that he would recognize it next time around…
Thorne ended the call with Kitson and turned Nixon back up. He’d given Lambchop another chance and was pleased that he had. Their sound, somehow lush and stripped down at the same time, was hypnotic. He listened to the singer’s strange whisperings and thought about the trial. He thought about wounds opening and scars healing, about others whose lives had been nudged, or knocked or smashed forever out of kilter…
Sheila Franklin and Irene Noble and Peter Foley…
Denise Hollins, who’d lived with one murderer and shared her bed with another. Thorne had stayed in touch with her, but their conversations were rarely easy. She could not even start to put together the intricate jigsaw of her shattered life, when so many of the tiny pieces had yet to be found.
Dave Holland, father of a three-day-old baby. Thorne was sure he would do his best to make the history of his own brand-new family a simple one…
Thorne’s exit was coming up and he tried to focus on some of the more mundane elements of the court case.
He indicated and moved across to the inside lane, thinking about shaving off the beard he’d grown to cover the scar, and about getting his suit dry-cleaned. Thinking about reminding Phil Hendricks to take all his earrings out before giving evidence…
Thorne’s father had the bits of two or three different radios spread out on the table in front of him. Every so often he’d slam a piece down or swear loudly in frustration. Then he’d look across at Thorne, sitting on the sofa, and grin like a child who’s been caught misbehaving.
Thorne was looking at a picture of his father from maybe thirty years before. The majority of the old photo albums were faded and falling apart; none had been taken out of the sideboard since his mother had died. She had been the photographer, the one who always remembered to take along the Instamatic, who bought the albums from Boots and spent evenings pasting in the pictures…
Thorne looked from the photo to the real thing, from the young man to the old. His father looked up at him. Thorne noticed, as he always did, the hair that, like his own, was grayer on one side than the other.
“Do you want some tea?” his father said.
Thorne understood the code. “I’ll make you some in a minute…”
He turned a stiff, faded page and stared at a picture of a young couple, their arms around a child of six or seven. The three of them sat, squinting against the sunlight, a deep green sea of bracken rising up behind them.
Thorne smiled at the can of beer in his father’s hand, at the expression on his mother’s face having talked some hapless passerby into taking the picture. He stared down at the boy, mugging happily at the camera. The brown eyes round and bright, the shadows yet to fall across his face.
Long before anybody died.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due to those people who helped this particular lazybones get this one done….
DI Neil Hibberd of the Serious Crime Group (again) for his insight, for fighting off the desire to sleep, and for providing the usual invaluable advice.
Victoria Jones, for answering a thousand stupid questions, and, ironically, opening the right doors.
The governor, staff, and inmates of HMP Birmingham.
Sarah Kennedy, for kind words, very early, where the pictures are best.
Wendy Burns—supervising social worker (Fostering)—and Louise Spanner—family placement panel administrator—at Essex Social Services.
And of course…Hilary Hale, Sarah Lutyens, Susannah Godman, Mike and Alice Gunn, Paul Thorne, Wendy Lee, and Peter Cocks.
And my wife, Claire. I still demand a recount…
About the Author
MARK BILLINGHAM is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Scaredy Cat, Sleepyhead, and The Burning Girl, all international bestsellers. A standup comic, he began working in the alternative comedy circuit in the United Kingdom in 1987. Since then he has appeared on more than thirty radio and television shows. The Sunday Times of London rates him as “one of the very best.” He now writes for the BBC and ITV, where he has twice been nominated for Royal Television Society awards. He lives in London with his wife and two children. You can visit his website
at www.markbillingham.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise
Raves for a new master of terror
and suspense
MARK BILLINGHAM
and
LAZYBONES
“Lazybones isn’t your formulaic murder mystery…Deft touches with character and humor help set it apart from the crowd.”
Detroit Free Press
“It’s difficult enough to write even one exceptional thriller, but when you consistently turn out engrossing tales, you have one exceptional storytelling talent. Mark Billingham has that kind of talent, as his third thriller shows. With Lazybones following Scaredy Cat and Sleepyhead, Billingham has won the trifecta and readers have scored big.”
Denver Rocky Mountain News
“There is a pleasantly nasty streak of mordant humor running just below the surface of this story…Billingham has such a command of his craft and his characters that he quickly lets us know Thorne will do his job—or die trying.”
Chicago Tribune
Mark Billingham is the new-wave leader…Like the best of British and American crime writing rolled up together and delivered with the kind of punch you don’t see coming.”
Lee Child
“Mark
Billingham firmly establishes himself among the upper echelon of his country’s most talented crime novelists. In Lazybones, [he] again shows his affinity for producing excellent dark, contemporary crime fiction. Billingham is able to burrow into our deepest fears while offering a sense of hope…The appealing, at times brooding Thorne…is complemented by a team that Billingham is careful to portray as individuals. Billingham doesn’t deal in stereotypes, but in real people.”
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
“Both the nitty-gritty police work and the gruff camaraderie between Thorne and his teammates ring true. Billingham’s tone is sardonic, even caustic at times, but he lays open the inner lives of his characters—even those who’ve committed ghastly crimes—with consummate sensitivity and skill, presenting a complex, 360-degree view of victims and perpetrators…Billingham knows exactly how to let the tension build gradually in his complex, carefully spun plot, letting the story pick up speed as it races toward a heart-pounding finish.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Billingham writes with a deft hand about violence intruding on the everyday.”
Karin Slaughter
“Mark Billingham has brought a rare and welcome blend of humanity, dimension, and excitement to the genre.”
George P. Pelecanos
“Pitch-dark…[a] gripping climax…In Lazybones, the English and American mystery genre traditions clash together in very satisfying ways. The British tradition, that of P.D. James and Peter Robinson, is represented by Billingham’s attention to detail and character, as each player large and small is fleshed out…The American tradition comes through in the brutality of the crimes, as well as the character of Thorne himself. He’s a middle-aged loner much in the vein of James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux or Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder…And the knotted mystery, with echoes of long-ago misdeeds reverberating through present-day crimes, is satisfyingly unraveled.”
Lazybones Page 35
