Lazybones tt-3

by Mark Billingham

  'Something snapped,' Foley said, quietly.

  For no good reason that he could think of, Thorne took a step across the room and bent to pick up the beer can from the floor. He put it down on a dusty, chrome and glass shelving unit next to the TV, then turned back to Foley.

  'What happened to the children?'

  'Sorry…?'

  'Mark and Sarah. Your nephew and niece. What happened to them afterwards?'

  'Straight afterwards, you mean? After they found…?'

  'Later on. Where did they go?'

  'Into care. The police took them away and then the social services got involved. There was some counseling went on, I think. More so for the boy as I remember, he'd have been eight or nine…'

  'He was seven. His sister was five.'

  'Yeah, that sounds right.'

  'So…?'

  'So, eventually, they were fostered.'

  'I see.'

  'Look, there was only Jane's mum and she was already knocking on. No other way, really. I said I'd have the kids, me and my girlfriend, but nobody was very keen. I was only twenty-two…'

  'And of course, your brother had just bashed their mother's brains out with a table lamp…'

  'I said I'd have them. I wanted to have them…'

  'So you stayed in touch with the kids?'

  'Course…'

  'Did you see much of them?'

  'For a while, but they moved around. It wasn't always easy.'

  'You've got the names and addresses?'

  'Which…?'

  'The foster parents'. You said the kids moved around. Were there many?'

  'A few.'

  'You've got all the details?'

  'Not any more. I mean, I did then, yeah. There were Christmas cards, birthdays…'

  'And then you just lost touch?'

  'Well, you do, don't you?'

  'So you'd have no idea at all where Sarah and Mark are living now?'

  Foley blinked, laughed humourlessly. 'What, you mean you lot haven't?'

  'We've traced every Mark Foley in the country. Every Sarah Foley or Sarah Whatever nee Foley, and none of them remembers wandering into the hall and seeing their father dangling from a tow rope. Nobody recalls popping upstairs to find Mum lying in a pool of blood with her skull caved in. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think that sort of thing would slip your mind.'

  Foley shook his head. 'I can't help you, mate. Even if I could, it would go against the bloody grain…'

  Thorne looked at Holland. Time to go. As they stood up, Foley swung his legs up on to the sofa, reached down beside it for another can of lager.

  'Before everything happened, before it all went tits up, Jane and Den were normal, you know? Just a normal couple with two kids and an OK house and all the rest of it. They were a good team, they were doing all right, and I reckon they'd have got over what that arsehole did to Jane. I mean, couples do, don't they, eventually, and Den would have helped her, because he loved her. But what came after, what happened to them in that trial, and the stuff later on… you don't get over that, ever. And that's down to you.'

  Foley was talking about something that had happened a long time ago. He was talking about mistakes that it was too late to put right, and about a police officer long-since retired.

  But he was pointing at Thorne.

  EIGHTEEN

  Thorne enjoyed expensive wine, but rather more often, cheap lager. This particular brand, which had caught his eye in the off-licence, was the same one Peter Folly had been drinking… Another Saturday when he hadn't got home until gone ten o'clock. Eve would probably still have been up, he could have called, but he hadn't bothered. He had only managed to see her once in the last fortnight, and though they'd talked often on the phone, he'd sensed a tension starting to creep in. He was starting to use his workload as an excuse.

  Thorne knew very well that when it came to relationships, he was basically bone idle. He'd been that way with the girls he'd copped off with in the fifth form, he'd been that way with his first serious girlfriends and he'd been that way with Jan. Happy to sink into a rut, wary of changing direction. Eventually, of course, Jan had changed direction herself. Got creative with her creative-writing lecturer… All because he was comfortable being stuck in the mud, and now he could feel it going the same way with Eve.

  There was the bed thing, for a kick-off. As he lay with his feet up on the sofa which would soon become his bed for another night, he thought about the whole, stupid business of his failure to buy a new mattress. The trip they'd arranged the week before had been cancelled for obvious reasons. He'd joked with Eve about burglars and murderers conspiring to keep them from shagging, but in reality, the delays had been.., convenient. There was a part of him, a nasty part he was reluctant to acknowledge, that worried about how interested in Eve he would really be once he'd got her into bed, but that wasn't really the problem. At the end of the day, he was just plain, bloody lazy… From his brand-new speakers came the mournful tones of Johnny Cash, singing his sublime version of Springsteen's 'Highway Patrolman'. As Cash sang about nothing feeling better than blood on blood, Thorne thought that if any voice could capture the love and agony, the hatred and the joy, of family ties, it was his. It helped if you'd lived it, of course.

  On the floor, the cat was yowling, begging to be picked up. Thorne leaned down, put his can on the carpet and pulled her up on to his lap. So often it came down to families…

  He thought about Mark and Sarah Foley, whose family was torn apart in front of them, leaving each with no one save the other. A generation down the line and they were nowhere to be found. It could only be because they wanted it that way.

  Mark Foley, now a man in his mid-thirties, once a terrified little boy in need of professional counseling. Had he grown up, the horror turning to hatred and festering inside him? Had he waited twenty years and then killed the man who'd raped his mother, the man he held responsible for her death and the suicide of his father? Right now, Mark Foley was as good a suspect as they had, but what had happened since 1996, between Alan Franklin's death and this new spate of killings?

  What had sparked off the cultivating and murdering of these completely unconnected rapists…?

  Thorne had always known, somehow, that rape was key to the case. Hadn't he tried to explain it to Hendricks? The rape element in the killings of Remfry and Welch, and now of Howard Southern, had always felt significant. More significant than the killings themselves. Now, Thorne knew why. If he didn't fully understand it, he at least understood that it had a history…

  And still that ambivalence on the part of so many involved in the investigation. A third victim and another convicted rapist. Older, yes, and a lot longer out of prison, but still a sex offender. Still a nonce. One for whom very few people, least of all those trying to catch his killer, seemed to be mourning.

  And still that ambivalence, if Thorne was honest, on his part as well…

  'Seems to me that whoever killed Rein fry did everyone a favour…'.'

  ' There will be people asking whether or not we should be grateful…'

  'It's not like he's chopping up old ladies, is it?'

  Thorne found it hard to argue with the sentiments, but as someone who'd spent his entire adult life if not always catching killers, then at least believing that what they did was wrong, he had to try and stay out of it.

  With some cases it was easy. 'Hate the killer, love the victim. Thorne would never forget the months he'd spent hunting a man who killed women while trying to put them into comas, into a state of living death. Or his last big one: tracking down a pair of killers, one a manipulative psychopath, the other who killed because he was told Then there were the cases where it wasn't quite so clear-cut, where sympathies were not so easily divvied up: the wife, driven to murder an abusive husband; the armed robber, knocked off for grassing on his workmates; the drug-dealer, carved up by a rival… Then there was this case.

  When Thorne swung his legs on to the floor and stood up,
Elvis jumped off and skulked away, grumbling, towards the kitchen. Thorne followed her. He dropped his empties into the bin, and for half a minute he stared into the fridge for no particular reason.

  He walked into the bedroom, gathered up his duvet and pillow from the bottom of the wardrobe.

  Thorne despised rapists. He also despised murderers. To go into which he despised more or less was not going to help anybody. Eve and Denise had done for the best part of a bottle of red wine each. The laughter had been getting louder, and the language a good deal more earthy ever since the pizzas had been finished and the second bottle of red opened…

  'Fuck him if he's not interested,' Denise said. Eve swirled the wine around in her glass, stared through it. 'That's the thing though. He is interested, definitely.'

  'Oh, you can tell, can you?'

  'It wasn't hard…'

  Denise gave a lascivious grin. 'Well, that usually means they aren't interested at all.'

  Eve almost spat her wine across the table. When she'd finished laughing, she stood and began gathering up the pizza boxes. 'I don't know what he's up to. I'm not sure he knows what he's up to…'

  Denise reached over, grabbed a last piece of cold pizza crust before the box got taken away. 'Maybe he's a schizo, like some of these nutters he tries to catch.'

  'Maybe…'

  'Does he talk about his work much? About the cases he's working on?'

  Eve was folding the pizza boxes in half, crushing them down into the bin. She shrugged. 'Not really.'

  'Oh come on, he must say something, surely?'

  'We got into it a couple of weeks ago, this weird murder case.' Eve stepped across to the sink and began washing her hands. 'We ended up sort of arguing about it and he hasn't really mentioned it since.'

  'Right. Except when he's using it as an excuse?'

  'Maybe I'm being paranoid about that…'

  Denise poured what was left in the bottle into her glass. She held the empty bottle aloft triumphantly. The bell rang.

  'That'll be Ben,' Denise said. 'He had to stay late, get an edit finished.'

  She took a hearty mouthful of wine and all but skipped from the room. Eve listened to her flatmate's feet as they hammered down the stairs. She heard the squeal when the door was opened, the low moans as Ben stepped in and they embraced on the doorstep… She made a quick decision to get off to bed before Ben came up. She would read for a while and try not to think too much about Tom Thorne, about whether he might ring the next day. She moved out into the hall, shouting down the stairs to Denise and Ben as she opened her bedroom door.

  'I'm going to turn in, I think. See you in the morning…'

  The last thing she wanted to watch was those two; all over each other.

  The sun was streaming in through two vast windows at the far end of the narrow room, and yet 'the light was somehow cold, as if it were bouncing off the refrigerated doors and steel instruments of an autopsy suite.

  Blinding white light, but Thorne knew very well that it was the middle of the night.

  He wore pyjamas, with his brown leather jacket over the top. He moved quickly around the room, his steps jaunty, bouncing in time to a tune he could hear but not quite place.

  The three beds were equidistant from one another, lined up precisely. The metal bedsteads made them look a little like hospital cots, but they were bigger, more comfortable. They were identical, each with thick pillows, a clean white cotton sheet and a body. Thorne moved to the end of the first bed, wrapped his hands around the metal rail, and peered down at Douglas Remfry. The arse poking into the air, the face buried in the sheet. He began to shake the bed, rattling the frame, shouting over the noise of it. He shook and shook and shouted, filled with contempt for who this man had once been, for what he had done.

  'Come on then, up you get, you idle bastard. There's women out there begging for it. Up and at 'em…'

  And, as the body shook on the bed, the skin began to slip off, until it lay on the sheet, gathered about the bare bones like dirty tights, rolled down around a pair of ankles.

  Thorne laughed and pointed at what remained, at the rapist's skin and skeleton, sloughed away and contorted. 'For heaven's sake, Lazybones, are you ever going to get up out of that bed?'

  He trotted across to the second bed, shook the flesh from Ian Welch's bones. All the time taking the piss. Feeling nothing for these dead men. For these lumps…

  At Howard Southern's bed, Thorne paused and watched as the bed began to vibrate, something passing noisily beneath the floor. A shadow arced across the vast windows and Thorne looked up. He watched the movement, back and forth, until the smell hit him. He laughed when he looked back at the beds, and saw what the body had become. What they had actually been all the time. Thorne could only presume that each had been expertly shat down on to the centre of their beds, by the body dangling at the end of a rope, high above them. As soon as Thorne awoke, the dream began to slide away from him, the images sucked back into the darkness, until only the feelings remained. Scorn and anger and shame.

  It was a little after two-thirty in the morning. When even the feelings had faded, there were only thoughts of the woman whose defilement and death long before had, it seemed, caused everything. Now she moved through his case as surely as if she were still corporeal and Thorne was ready to embrace her. She was nearly thirty years dead, and so was her killer, but that didn't matter.

  In Jane Foley, Thorne had finally got a victim he could care about.

  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 dodgy reputation, and the tired old jokes about the IQs and sexual habits of its womenfolk, 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 council building in the middle of town was what looked like a small stately home in 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 mid-thirties, 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 as to 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 which looked like it might have been an antique itself. At the other end of the desk, an entire army of gonks, action figures and soft 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.

  '1976,' 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 drill 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 organisation 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…'