Lazybones tt-3

by Mark Billingham

  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 o..

  'Which all brings us bang up to date,' Jameson said. To 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 which 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 towards 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 backwards and pushing his groin down towards 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.'

  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 post-mortem. 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 on to 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 towards 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 recognised one of the voices as Thorne's.

  The relief turned into something that tasted bitter in his mouth, as Holland realised 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 on to 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 towards 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 towards 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 towards 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 on to 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 which 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 on to 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 an
d, 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 Ell, towards him, and Thorne could do little but turn his face away ad 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 towards 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 back-up 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

  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 straight away. 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 towards police cars and ambulances, saucer-eyed and colourless.

  Now they would need to go through it all again. The case was 365 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 smack-head who'd burgled Thorne's flat and, without knowing it, saved his life.

  It was down to something else to6, 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 recognise 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, n 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 foxed 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 greyer 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 passer-by into taking the picture. He stared down at the boy, grinning happily at the camera. The brown eyes round and bright, the shadows yet to fall across his face.

  Long before anybody died.

  TWELVE

  Carol Chamberlain felt twenty years younger. Every thought and sensation was coming that bit quicker, feeling that bit stronger. She felt hungrier, more awake. The night before in bed, she'd leaned across and 'helped herself', for heaven's sake, which had certainly surprised and delighted her old man. Maybe the battered green folder on her lap would prove to be the saving of both of them… Jack was still smiling twelve hours later, as he brought a plate of toast through to her. She blew him a kiss. He took his anorak from the stand in the corner, off to pick up a paper.

  Carol had been fifty-two, a DCI for a decade, when the Met's ludicrous policy of compulsory retirement after thirty years had pushed her out of the force. That had been three years ago. It had rankled, for each day of those three years, right up to the moment when that phone call had come
out of the blue.

  Carol had been amazed, and not a little relieved… She knew how much she had to offer, still had to offer, but she also knew that this chance had come along at the very last moment. If she was being honest, she would have to admit that recently she'd felt her self slowly giving in, throwing in the towel in much the same way that her husband had.

  She heard the gate creak shut. Turned to watch Jack walking away up the road. An old man at fifty-seven…

  Carol picked up the folder from her knees. Her first cold case. A sticker on the top right-hand corner read 'AMRU'. The Area Major Review Unit was what it said at the top of the notepaper. The Cold Case Team was how they thought of themselves. In the canteen they were just called the Crinkly Squad. They could call her what they sodding-well liked, but she'd do the same bloody good job she'd always done…

  The day before at Victoria, when she'd collected the file from the General Registry, she'd noticed straight away that it had been pulled only three weeks earlier by a DC from the Serious Crime Group. That was interesting. She'd scribbled down the officer's name, made a mental note to give him a call and find out what he'd been looking for…

  Three years away from it. Three years of reading all those books she'd never got round to, and cooking, and gardening, and catching up with friends she'd lost touch with for perfectly good reasons, and feeling slightly sick when Crimewatch came on. Three years out of it, but the flutter in her stomach was still there. The butterflies that shook the dust from their wings and began to flap around as she opened the folder and started to read.

  A man throttled to death in an empty car park, seven years earlier…

  A week into his forty-fourth year. The discovery of his burnt-out car being far from the low point, Tom Thorne was already pretty sure that the year was not going to be a vintage one. Seven days since he'd rushed back from a wedding to attend a post-mortem. Seven days during which the only developments on the case had been about as welcome as the turd he'd found waiting for him in his bed.