Lazybones tt-3

by Mark Billingham

  'What did that woman mean?' she said, suddenly. 'That WPC? When she asked if I always wore a dress that nice to go to work?' She slid her hands beneath her legs and began to rock gently in her seat. Snow was starting to fall quite heavily, building up quickly on the bonnet and windscreen. He didn't bother to turn on the wipers.

  THREE

  Later, when they talked about it, both Thorne and Holland admitted to fancying the Deputy Governor of Derby Prison. What neither of them quite got round to admitting was that, attractive as she undoubtedly was, they actually fancied her more because she was a prison governor.

  They didn't really go into it all that much…

  'He's certainly made a very good job of it.' Tracy Lenahan put down the letter, actually a photocopy of one of twenty-odd letters written to Douglas Remfry during his last three months inside, plus a couple to his home address after he'd been released. The letters that Holland had found under Remfry's bed.

  Letters written by a Miler, pretending to be a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Jane Foley.

  Thorne and Holland had already been taken through the procedure for the sorting of prisoners' mail. The letters – five sackfuls a day on average – would have been taken by two, perhaps three, Operational Support Grade officers to the Censor's room for sorting. The X-ray machine had been done away with by the present Governor, but drug dogs might be used and each letter would be slit open and searched for illegal enclosures. The OSG's did not read the letters, and providing there was no good reason, they would not usually be seen by anyone else.

  'A good job of sounding like a woman, you mean?' Thorne asked. He thought the letters were pretty bloody convincing and so did Yvonne Kitson, but other opinions couldn't hurt.

  "Oh yes! But I think he's being cleverer than that. I've seen one or two letters like this before, genuine letters. You'd be amazed how much mail like this people like Remfry really get. This has that same, odd tone to it. It's something slightly crazed…'

  'Something a bit needy,' Holland suggested.

  Lenahan nodded. 'Right, that's it. She's claiming to be a bit of a catch, a sexy bit of stuff looking for fun…'

  'A sexy married bit of stuff,' Thorne added. The fictitious Jane Foley was conveniently hitched to an equally fictitious and awfully jealous husband, so Remfry couldn't write back to her. Lenahan read a few lines of the letter again, nodded. 'All the suggestive stuff in the letter is bang on, but there's still a kind of hopelessness. Something sad underneath…'

  'Like she's a bit desperate,' Thorne said. 'A woman who's desperate enough to write these sorts of letters to a convicted rapist.'

  Holland puffed out his cheeks. 'This is doing my head in. A bloke, pretending to be a woman, pretending to be a different kind of woman…

  Lenahan pushed the letter back across her desk. 'It's subtle, though. Like I said, he's bloody clever.' She didn't need to tell Thorne that. He'd studied every one of 'Jane Foley's' letters. He knew that the man who wrote them was very clever indeed. Clever, calculating and extremely patient.

  Lenahan picked up the photograph. 'And this is the icing on the cake…'

  Thorne was struck by her strange choice of phrase, but said nothing. On the wall behind the desk was the regulation portrait of the Queen, looking rather as if she could smell something unpleasant wafting up from the canteen. To Her Majesty's left were a series of framed aerial views of the prison and, hung next to these very modern images, a pair of large landscapes in oil. Thorne knew next to bugger all about it but they looked pretty old. Lenahan glanced up, followed Thorne's gaze.

  'Those have been knocking around the place since it opened in 1853,' she said. 'Used to be gathering dust down in Visits. Then six months ago, we had an inmate in for receiving stolen antiques. He took one look at them and went pale. Worth about twelve thousand each, so they reckon…'

  She smiled and her eyes dropped to the black and white photo in her hand. Thorne's went to the silver picture frame on her desk. From where he was sitting he couldn't see the photo inside, but he imagined a fit-looking husband – army perhaps, or maybe even a copper – and a smiling, olive-skinned child. He looked again at the woman behind the desk, her dark eyes wide as she stared at the picture. She was ridiculously young, probably not even thirty. Her black hair was shoulder length. She was tall and large-breasted. It would have been clear to a blind man that the Deputy Governor would figure regularly in the fantasies of the men she locked up every night.

  Thorne glanced across at Holland and was amused to see him struggling not to blush, as he waited for Tracy Lenahan to finish studying the photograph of 'Jane Foley'. The picture was of a woman kneeling, her head bowed and hooded, the artful lighting concealing much, but revealing tantalising glimpses of the full breasts, the nearly trimmed thatch of pubic hair. Of the leather belt around the wrists. Holland had earlier expressed surprise that the photos had not been confiscated, especially as Remfry was a sex-offender. Surely this kind of image was risky on 'Fraggle Rock' – the term used by many police officers for the Vulnerable Prisoners wing. Lenahan, bridling slightly at the slang, had explained what she called the Page Three rule. Stuff like this was discretionary. Obviously images of kids were not allowed on the VP wing, but if it was the sort of thing you might see on Page Three, then the OSG's would have a look, pass the odd comment and put it back in the envelope.

  'Jesus,' Holland had said. 'Page Three must be going seriously fucking arty…'

  Lenahan put the picture down, scraped at the edge of it with a long red fingernail.

  'This is clever too. It's the ideal image to have chosen. Just what would be needed to hook an offender like Remfry, to tease him with the promise of something. This is a rapist's wet dream. Wherever your killer got it from, it's perfect.' She swallowed, cleared her throat.

  'Remfry was a man who got off on submission…'

  Thorne and Holland exchanged a glance. They hadn't told Tracy Lenahan, but they were pretty sure the picture wasn't one the killer had just gone out and bought. The naked woman was wearing a hood identical to the one that Phil Hendricks had taken off Douglas Remfry's body…

  'There's half a dozen similar pictures,' Thorne said. 'They were sent with the most recent letters. They start to get more revealing the closer the letters get to his release date.'

  Lenahan nodded. 'Increasing the excitement…'

  'By the time he got out he must have been gagging for it,' Holland said.

  She picked up the photograph again in her left hand and reached for the letter with her right. She brandished them both. 'Your killer is sensitive to the way this kind of woman might think, and to what will best stimulate the man she's writing to.'

  Thorne said nothing. He was thinking that she sounded bizarrely impressed.

  'Sensitive, like a gay man maybe,' Holland said. Thorne shrugged non-committally. They were back to that. He had to agree it was possible, but he was growing irritated at the way the investigation was fixing on what they presumed the killer's sexuality to be. Yes, the violent sodomising of the victim was clearly significant. The rapist had been raped and Thorne was sure that this would prove to be crucial in finding out why he'd been murdered. Thorne was less sure that who the killer chose to sleep with was as important.

  Holland slid forward in his chair, looked at Tracy Lenahan. 'This is an angle we obviously have to consider – that Remfry was killed by someone he'd known in prison. Someone with whom he'd possibly had a non-consensual sexual relationship…'

  Lenahan looked back at him, waiting for the question, not appearing terribly keen to do Holland any favours. Is that possible, do you think? Could Remfry have sexually assaulted another prisoner? Could he have been sexually assaulted himself?.'

  The Deputy Governor leaned back, something dark passing momentarily across her face. It vanished as she clasped her hands together and shook her head. Thorne thought that the laugh she produced sounded a little forced. '

  'I think you've been watching too many films set in American
prisons, Detective Constable. There're some very nasty pieces of work in here, don't get me wrong, but very few of them are called Bubba, and if you're looking for bitches or puppies, you should look in a dogs' home. Prisoners form relationships, of course they do, but as far as I know, nobody's going to get gangbanged if they drop the soap in the shower.'

  Thorne couldn't help but smile. Holland smiled too, but Thorne could see the skin tighten around his mouth and the reddening just above his collar. 'As far as you know?' Holland said. 'Meaning that it's possible.'

  'The week before last, in the kitchens, a prisoner had his ear cut off with the lid from a tin of peaches. That was an argument Over a game of table-tennis, I think.' She smiled, sexy and very cold. 'Anything's possible.'

  Thorne stood and walked away from Lenahan's desk towards the door. 'Let's presume that the man we're looking for is not an ex-con. The obvious question is how he got the information. How did he find Remfry? How could he find out where a convicted rapist was serving his sentence and when he was going to get released, in enough time to set all this up?'

  Lenahan swiveled in her chair to face the computer screen on the corner of her desk. She hit a button on the keyboard. 'He would have had to have got it from a database somewhere.' She continued typing, watching the screen. 'This is a LIDS computer. Local Inmate Data System, which has everything on the prisoners in here. I can send stuff down the wire to other prisons if I need to, but I wouldn't have thought this would be enough…'

  Thorne looked at the nearer of the two landscapes. The dark, thick swirls of the paint on the canvas. He thought it might be somewhere in the Lake District. 'What about national records?'

  'IIS. The Inmate Information System. That's got everything locations, offence details, home address, release date.' She looked up and across at Thorne. 'But you'd still need to type a name in.'

  'Who has access to that?' Holland asked. 'Do you?'

  'No…'

  'The Governor? Police liaison officer?'

  She smiled, shook her head firmly. 'It's headquarters-based only. The system is pretty well restricted, for obvious reasons…'

  Thanks and goodbyes were brisk and Thorne would have had it no other way. Though he hadn't so much as glimpsed a blue prison sweatshirt the whole time they'd been there, he was aware of the prisoners all around him. Beyond the walls of the Deputy Governor's office. Above, below and to all sides. A distant echo, a heaviness, the heat given off by over six hundred men, there thanks to the likes of him.

  Whenever he entered a prison, moved around its green, or mustard or dirty-cream corridors, Thorne mentally left a trail of breadcrumbs behind him. He always needed to be sure of the quickest way out.

  For most of the drive back down the M 1, Holland had his nose buried in a pamphlet he'd picked up on his way out of the prison. Thorne preferred his own form of research.

  He eased Johnny Cash at San Quentin into the cassette player. Holland looked up as 'Wanted Man' kicked in. He listened for a few seconds, shook his head and went back to his facts and figures. Thorne had tried, once, to tell him. To explain that real country music was luck all to do with lost dogs and rhinestones. It had been a long night of pool and Guinness, and Phil Hendricks – with whichever boyfriend happened to be around at the time – heckling mercilessly. Thorne had tried to convey to Holland the beauty of George Jones's voice, the wickedness in Merle Haggard's and the awesome rumble of Cash, the dark daddy of them all. A few pints in, he was telling anybody who would listen that Hank Williams was a tortured genius who was undoubtedly the Kurt Cobain of his day and he may even have begun to sing 'Your Cheating Heart' around closing time. He couldn't recall every detail, but he did remember that Holland's eyes had begun to glaze over long before then…

  'Fuck,' Holland said. 'It costs twenty-five grand a year to look after one prisoner. Does that sound like a lot to you?'

  Thorne didn't really know. It was twice what a lot of people earned in a year, but once you took into account the salaries of prison staff and the maintenance of the buildings…

  'I don't think they're spending that on carpets and caviar, somehow,' Thorne said.

  'No, but still…'

  It was roasting in the car. The Mondeo was far too oId to have air con, but Thorne was very pissed off at being completely unable to coax anything but warm air from a heating system he'd had fixed twice already. He opened a window but shut it after half a minute, the breeze not worth the noise.

  Holland looked up from his pamphlet again. 'Do you think they should have luxuries in there? You know, TVs in their cells and whatever?

  PlayStations, some of them have got…'

  Thorne turned the sound down a little and glanced up at the sign as the Mondeo roared past it. They were approaching the Milton Keynes turnoff. Still fifty miles from London.

  Thorne realised, as he had many times before, that for all the time he spent putting people behind bars, he gave precious little thought to what happened when they got there. When he did think about it, weigh all the arguments up, he supposed that, all things considered, a loss of freedom was as bad as it could get. Above and beyond that, he wasn't sure exactly where he stood.

  He feathered the brake, dropped down to just under seventy and drifted across to the inside lane. They were in no great hurry… Thorne knew, as much as he knew anything, that murderers, sex offenders, those that would harm children, had to be removed. He also knew that putting these people away Was more than just a piece of argot. It was actually what they did. What he did. Once these offenders were… elsewhere, the debate as to where punishment ended and rehabilitation began was for others to have. He felt instinctively that prisons should never become.., the phrase 'holiday camps' popped into his head. He chided himself for beginning to sound like a slavering Tory nutcase. Fuck it, a few TVs was neither here nor there. Let them watch the football or shout at Chris Tarrant if that was what they wanted…

  Sadly, by the time Thorne had formulated his answer to the question, Holland had moved on to something else.

  'Bloody hell.' Holland looked up from the pamphlet. 'Sixty per cent of goal nets in the English league are made by prisoners. I hope they've made the ones at White Hart Lane strong enough, the stick Spurs get from other teams…'

  'Right…'

  'Here's another one. Prison farms produce twenty million pints of milk every year. That's fucking amazing…'

  Thorne was no longer listening. He was hearing nothing but the rush of the road under the wheels and thinking about the photograph. He pictured the hooded woman, the make-believe Jane Foley, feeling a stirring in his groin at the image in his head of her shadowy nakedness.

  Wherever he got it from…

  Suddenly, Thorne knew where he might go to find the answer, at least any answer there was to be found. The woman in that photo might not be Jane Foley, but she had to be somebody, and Thorne knew just the person to come up with a name.

  When he started to listen again, Holland was in the middle of another question.

  '… as bad as this? Do you think prisons are any better than they were back in…?' He pointed towards the cassette player.

  '1969,' Thorne said. Johnny Cash was singing the song he'd written about San Quentin itself. Singing about hating every inch of the place they were all stood in. The prisoners whooping and cheering at every complaint, at each pugnacious insult, at every plea to raze the prison to the ground.

  'So?' Holland waved his pamphlet. 'Are prisons any better now than they were then, do you think? Than they were thirty-odd years ago?'

  Thorne pictured the face of a man in Belmarsh, and something inside hardened very quickly.

  'I fucking hope not.'

  At a little after six o'clock, Eve Bloom double-locked the shop, walked half a dozen paces to a bright red front door, and was home. It was handy renting the flat above her shop. It wasn't expensive, but she'd have paid a good deal more for the pleasure of being able to tumble out of bed at the last possible minute, the coffee steaming
in her own mug next to the till as she opened up. Every last second in bed was precious when you had to spend as many mornings as she did, up and dressed at half past stupid. Walking around the flower market at New Covent Garden, ordering stock, gassing with wholesalers, while every other bugger she could think of was still dead to the world.

  She liked this time of year. The few precious weeks of summer, when she wasn't forced to choose between working in scarf and gloves or punishing her stock with central heating. She liked closing up when it was still light. It made the early starts less painful, gave that couple of hours between the end of the day and the start of the evening a scent of excitement, a tang of real possibility. She closed the door behind her and climbed the stripped wooden stairs up to the flat Denise had wielded the sander and done the whole place in a weekend, while Eve had taken responsibility for the decorating. Most domestic chores got split fairly equally between them, and though there wire the sulks, the occasional frosty silences that followed a pilfered yoghurt or a dress borrowed without asking, the two of them got on pretty well. Eve knew that Denise could be quite controlling, but then she also knew there were occasions when she herself needed to be controlled. She tended to be more than a little disorganised and though Den could be Mother Hen-ish at times, it was nice to feel looked after. The endless list-making could get wearing but there was always food in the fridge and they never ran out of toilet roll!

  She dropped her bag on the kitchen table and flicked on the kettle.

  'Oi, Hollin, you old slapper, you want tea?' Almost before she'd finished shouting she remembered that Denise was going straight out from work, meeting Ben in the pub next to her office. Denise had called the shop at lunchtime, told her she wouldn't be home for dinner, asked her if she fancied joining them.

  Eve walked through to her bedroom to put on a fresh T-shirt while she was waiting for the kettle to boil. No, she'd stay in, veg out in front of the TV with a bottle of very cold white wine. She couldn't be bothered to change and go out. It was sticky outside and uncomfortable. She'd feel dirty by the time she got there. The pub would be loud and smoky and she'd only feel like a gooseberry anyway. Denise and Ben were very touchy-feely…