Lazy Bones (20 page)

The girl's rear end bobbed and swayed. Dodd thought the moaning was a bit over the top - sil y cow sounded like she had food poisoning. There were red blotches at the top of her legs.

Final y, theman on the other end of the phone spoke...

'Come on, Mr Dodd, spit it out. Don't be shy.'

Dodd reached into the top pocket of his shirt for another cigarette. 'I'm not fucking shy, mate...'

'Good, because there's real y no need to be...'

;Not about money, anyway.'

The man laughed. 'There we are. No point in going round the houses. Now, if I remember rightly, there's a cashpoint just round the corner from your studio, isn't there...?'

Thorne was somewhere between Brent Cross and Golders Green

when he began finding it hard to stay awake...

He had been as good as the promise he'd made to himself and Hol and that morning, having left the Royal Oak in time to make the last tube going south. He was tired and there was stil plenty to sort out back at the flat, so it was no great wrench to walk out of the pub before closing time.

He'd left just as Phil Hendricks was starting to let rip. He'd made his feelings about the Sexual Offences Act clear plenty of times before. In the pub, once the subject of the Register had come up, there was no stopping him...

'Don't forget the gay men,' Hendricks had said. 'Those evil bastards

who are twisted enough to enjoy loving, consensual sex with their seventeen-year-old boyfriends.' The words were spat out, the flat Mancunian vowels lending an edge of real anger to the irony.

Thorne knew that Hendricks had every right to be pissed off. It was ridiculous that men convicted of what was stil termed 'gross indecency' should be lumped together with child abusers and rapists. Even when the age of consent for gay men was lowered to sixteen, as one day it would be, Thorne knew that those convicted prior to its equal isation would remain on the Register.

Thorne could only agree with his friend's pithy assessment, the last

words he'd caught as he walked out of the pub.

'It's a queer-basher's charter,' Hendricks had said.

Eve had cal ed to wish him a happy birthday as he was heading for

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the tube station at Colindale. As they talked, Thorne walked past the KFC, the chippy, more than one kebab shop. His stomach urged him to go in, then changed its mind as he told Eve about the burglary, and the little gift that had been left for him.

'Wel , it's certainly original,' Eve had said.

Thorne laughed. 'Right, and a home-made present's so much more thoughtful, isn't it?'

Thorne was walking slowly, absorbed in the conversation but keenly aware, as always, of exactly where he was and what he was doing. Keeping track of any movement on the other side of the street, at the corners up ahead, behind parked cars. This wasn't Tottenham or Hackney, but stil , there was no point in being stupid when people were getting shot for �9.99

handsets...

'So... when are you going to replace that bed?' Eve had asked. 'Oh, I suppose I'l get round to it eventual y...' 'I sincerely hope so.'

They were joking, but suddenly Thorne sensed a real shift. A hint of impatience. Like she was making the running and wanted him to do some catching up. 'Wel , we can always go to your place, can't we?' Thorne said.

There was a pause. Then: 'It's a bit tricky. Denise can be funny about that sort of thing...'

'About you having men over?'

'About men staying over...'

Thorne heard Eve sigh, as if this was a conversation she'd had before. With Denise herself, most probably. 'Hang on, she has Ben round, doesn't she?'

'I know, it's mad. But trust me, it isn't worth going into...'

Then, Thorne had arrived at the station and they'd wound it up. While he fed coins into the ticket machine they'd made a hasty arrangement to meet the fol owing week. She'd said goodbye as he went down on the escalator and he lost the signal before he could say it back.

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The train was al but deserted. A teenage couple sat at the far end of the carriage, the girl's head on her boyfriend's shoulder. He was stroking her hair and muttering things which made her smile.

Thorne took a deep breath. His brain felt fuzzed up. He'd only had a couple of pints but his head was thickening, getting heavier with every lurch and sway of the train. He needed to stay awake. Tempting as it was to close his eyes, to let his head drop back, the last thing he wanted to do was to nod off and wake up in Morden.

He thought about the conversation with Eve. When they'd arranged to meet, why hadn't he pushed to make it sooner? Was that panic he'd felt when she'd been talking about the bed?

Maybe with the case and his old man and the burglary there was too much other stuff going on. Maybe he was just subconsciously prioritising. He was definitely feeling far too fucked to think straight about anything...

At Hampstead, a man got on through the doors to Thorne's right, and despite the availability of seats chose to stand at the end of the carriage, clutching on to the rail above his head.

Thorne looked at the man. He was very tal and thin with chisel ed features and a frenzy of greying hair and a battery of bizarr visual tics from which Thorne found it impossible to avert his gaze...

It quickly became clear that the tic, which Thorne guessed to be Tourette's syndrome, was in three parts. First the man would raise his eyebrows theatrical y and his chin would jerk up. A second later the entire head would be wrenched round to the side, and final y, the jaws would snap noisily together, the teeth clacking like castanets. Thorne watched guilty and mesmerised as this three-part pattern repeated itself over and over, and he found himself assigning a word, a sound effect, to each, distinct spasm. The eyebrows, the wrench of the neck, the snap of the jaws. Three movements that in rapid succession seemed to display surprise, interest and then ultimately, a bitter disappointment. Movements which sounded to Thorne like 'Ooh! Whay-hay! Clack!'

Oh real y? Sounds interesting! Ah, fuck it...

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After a minute or two the man seemed to be bringing the seizure under control and Thorne final y dragged his own head around and his eyes away. The young couple in the left-hand carriage had got off and had been replaced by a pair who were a good deal older and less tactile. The woman caught Thorne's eye and dropped her gaze to the carriage floor like a piece of litter.

When Thorne turned back and looked to his right, the man who was holding on to the rail was now stil , and staring straight at him.

Thorne leaned back until he felt his head, big and wobbly as a

baby's, hit the window. The glass was cool against his scalp.

He closed his eyes.

He was only a couple of stations away from where he'd need to change at Camden. He could afford to spend just a minute or two drifting, wide awake and counting the stops, and floating towards his hil side...

Almost as soon as Thorne had completed the thought, he was asleep.

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He had plenty of stuff to do, a few more images to download from the camera and print, but he thought he deserved a quick break. Ten or fifteen minutes messing about on the Net wouldn't hurt and then he'd get back to business. Put al the pictures together and stick them in the post...

He enjoyed working at the computer, now that he felt like he'd mastered it. He'd needed to learn, so he'd learned. In just a couple of years he'd gone from being a novice to being more than comfortable with pretty much any machine.

He opened the bookmark, drummed his finger against the mouse as he waited for the page to appear...

Once you became skil ed at something, it was easy to enjoy it. Like the work he did on those fuckers" with the knife and the washing line. He was certainly enjoying that. It was funny, He thought, that the word 'skil ed'had 'kil 'sitting right there in the middle of it.

He'd first found the site when he was looking for inspiration, for help with the photos of Jane. Now he just popped back every now and then to keep abreast of it al . Just to see...

It had been a strange week, al in al . By rights he should have been doing other stuff, but he'd been forced to tweak the schedule, to rearrange things a bit in view of the hiccough with Dodd. That's al it had been. It was easily fixed.

There were several new links from the site since the last time he'd been here. One or two were begging to be checked out. He pointed and clicked, held his breath...

He was itching to get back to the serious work. ipart from anything else there was the chal enge of a change in routine. Now that the prisons had been warned, there couldn't be any more letters.

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ffesls . . ,

The woman's head was shaved and she had been hog-tied..d chain ran from a ring in her col ar down to the leather strap between her ankles. The buckled harness snaked across her face like a spider's web, her mouth at its centre, fil ed by a large, red bal -gag...

It was a shame. If he was going to use more pictures, this was just the sort of thing he might have gone for, but now it was academic, lUith Remfry and Welch it had been a lovely, long, slow tease. Pgith the next one things would have to be simple and direct. A bit more 'in your face'.

He hoped it would be as much fun as wooing.

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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. Th 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 stil 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 cal had come out of the blue.

Carol had been amazed, and not a little relieved...

She knew how much she had to offer, stil 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

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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 cal ed the Crinkly Squad.

They could cal her what they sodding-wel liked, but she'd do the same bloody good job she'd always done...

The day before at Victoria, when she'd col ected the file from the General Registry, she'd noticed straight away that it had been pul ed 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 cal and find out what he'd been looking for...

Three years away from it. Three years of reading al those boogs 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 stil 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.

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Welch's movements between his release from prison and the dis

covery of his body, painstakingly reconstructed, had yielded nothing. Forensical y, the photos recovered from the locker in Macpherson HoUse had been a black hole.

A hundred and more interviews with anybody who could feasibly have seen anything, and not a word said that might raise the blood pressure.

The ACTIONS outlined and ticked off on the white board. Al ocated and diligently carried out. Contacting the sex offenders who had themselves been diligent about signing the Register at the right time. Tracking down those who were not quite so assiduous, who had perhaps forgotten, or mixed up the days in their diaries, or buggered off to another part of the country and gone underground. Checking and double-checking the statements of everyone from the traumatised receptionist at the Greenwood Hotel to the semi-pickled dosser who had been occupying the bed next to Ian Welch for the few days before he was kil ed...

This was what 99 per cent of police work real y consisted of. It was procedure like this, together with a little bit of luck, that would provide pretty much the best chance, the only chance, of getting a result. And Thorne, of course, hated every tedious minute of it.

While he was waiting for that elusive bit of luck to arrive, even his one moment of genuine inspiration was proving to have been useless...

Sitting in Russel Brigstocke's office - Monday morning and feeling like it - Thorne listened as he was told just how useless it was. He had thought that the kil er's access to the Sex Offenders Register might hold the key to catching him. Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond was more than happy to disil usion him...

'Fact is,' Jesmond said, 'tabloids or no tabloids, the information's already public property. Every force has a community notification policy. Supposed to be on a case-by-case, need-to-know basis. Information gets released to schools, youth clubs and so on, but, as with anything else, we can't know for certain where that information goes later on.'