Lazy Bones (22 page)

been replaced a hundredfold by the time their names were removed.

It was a growth industry...

This one would shape up very nicely, by the look of it. He lived alone in a nice, quiet street. Friends were an unknown quantity asyet, but it didn't look like there was any family around. It might even be possible to avoid using a hotel altogether...

He was ambivalent about that. Doing it in a house or flat would be simpler, but there was an unpredictability that made him uncomfortable. It would be tricky to get inside in advance and look at the layout of the place. He couldn't count on the place being as forensical y friendly as the average hotel room. An unexpected visit from a neighbour couldn't be prevented with a

'Do Not Disturb'sign on the door.

He hadn't had the choice with Remfry or Welch, but using hotels had worked out wel so far and he was somewhat reluctant to change a winning formula. Hotels did mean a lot more possible witnesses and a security

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system to get around but that wasn't too much of a problem. He'd learned that people saw fuck al when they weren't real y looking, and cameras saw even less if you knew how to avoid them.

He'd avoided being seen, being real y seen, for a very long time.

179

THIRTEEN

'I was wondering how much it would cost to send a bouquet of flowers...'

'Wel , we charge five pohnds fifty for delivery, and the bouquets start at thirty pounds.'

'Christ, I don't want to spend that much. I haven't even snogged her yet...'

Eve laughed. 'Are you sure there's snogging on the cards?' 'Definitely,' Thorne said. 'She's wel up for it...' 'Shit, I've got a customer. Better go...'

'Listen, I'm sorry about cancel ing last night. I couldn't...'

'It's fine. Hold that thought, al right? The snogging, I mean. I'l see you later.'

'Yeah... I can't say what time, though.'

'Cal me when you're about to leave. We can just grab a quick drink

or something...'

'Right...'

'Seriously, if you are ever tempted, flowers wouldn't guarantee a snog. Chocolates, on the other hand, wil get you just about anything...'

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She hung up.

Smiling, Thorne reached inside the bodysuit, dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. He took a long swig from a bottle of mineral water and turned, to find himself confronted by a family of backpackers. Mum, Dad and two blonde children were al sporting rucksacks of decreasing size, and staring at him expectantly from the other side of the cordon. Thorne stared back at them until eventual y, having decided that nothing much was going to happen, they wandered away.

Six hours earlier, when there had been something they might have been able to tel their friends back home about, the onlookers had been a little harder to dissuade. With the nightclubs emptying and the streets buzzing, a sizeable crowd had quickly gathered and gawped from behind the lines of police tape. A hundred yards back towards Wardour Street one way and Regent Street the other, they had stood and watched excitedly. The drunks heckled and the tourists took pictures, as the body of Charles Dodd was carried out.

Once the body had been loaded up and taken away, the cordon had been relaxed a little. Now there was just a square of blue tape runnitag from the narrow doorway leading up to Dodd's studio, around to the furthest side of the fishmonger's shop next door. Fluttering ever so gently...

'What's going on in there, mate?'

Thorne looked up at a smal , skinny individual with birdshit highlights and an improbable amount of jewel ery, nodding at him from behind the tape. The man, who was wearing satin tracksuit bottoms and a sleeveless camouflage vest, took three drags of a cigarette in quick succession then flicked it into the gutter.

'It's a raid,' Thorne said. 'Fashion Police. I'd be on my way, if I were you...

The man bounced twice on the bal s of his feet, grimaced and jogged away. On the other side of the narrow street, a girl in a tiny leather skirt and crop top was leaning against the kiosk of a peep show, eating a bacon sandwich. She grinned over at Thorne, having clearly

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heard the exchange. Thorne smiled back at her. It was a little after nine in the morning but evidently not too early to try and get something going inside the shorts of the passing male trade. Already warm enough for the tables of a pavement caf+ to be fil ed with customers downing cappuccino and scoffing pastries. Pretending they were somewhere more exotic.

Thorne watched them. Wishing he was somewhere else. Thinking of things that would put anybody off their breakfast...

When they'd battered down the door early the previous evening, Thorne had known exactly what they would find. The smel , thick against his face-mask, would have told him anyway, but as he'd climbed the narrow staircase, Thorne had been very wel aware of what was waiting for him at the top. He'd already seen the pictures.

The real thing, several long, hot days after the event, was a whole lot worse.

The body had been strung up. The washing line had been tied in a makeshift noose around Dodd's neck and thrown over one of the lighting bars above the studio floor. It was tied off around the foot of the bed, the weight of the body liftihg one end of the bed twelve inches off the ground. The pictures, taken while Dodd was stil alive, had shown the spasms, the desperate clawing at the neck and kicking of the legs. Several days dead, the corpse hung, stiff and stil . It was only the rumble of the tube trains passing beneath them on the Bakerloo Line, that caused the slightest tremor, that made the body start to swing just a little...

Each time, Thorne had fought a bizarre urge to stop the movement. To step across and grasp the legs that protruded from dirty shorts like bloated blood sausages. To clutch the feet, purple with lividity, straining against the straps of the plastic sandals.

Thorne had stood by the bed in the middle of the studio, remembering a pair of pale girls, writhing on nylon sheets.

He had watched a SOCO leaning across the mattress, scraping at whatever had dripped down from the body that dangled above it.

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He had looked up at the tongue that stuck out from Dodd's mouth. Blue, and big as a man's hand. Tel ing him to fuck off.

Once it had been cut down and loaded up, Thorne had been only too grateful to do precisely as Dodd's corpse had seemed to be requesting. Home for a change of clothes, and food he couldn't finish. Four hours not sleeping, and then back to the murder scene.

Opposite him, the girl finished the last mouthful of her sandwich. She wiped the back of a hand across her mouth, reached down behind the kiosk for her handbag. She shrugged at Thorne and began to apply lipstick.

Thorne turned at the sound of the door opening. Hol and stepped out. He moved across to join Thorne, unzipping his bodysuit and gulping down the fresh air as he walked.

'Fuck, it's hot in there.'

Thorne handed Hol and the bottle of water. 'How much longer?' 'Almost done, I think.'

Hol and stood next to Thorne, leaning back against the window;of the fishmonger's shop. They stared across at the peep show and t pavement cafe. A waiter smiled across at them.

They might just have been friends enjoying the good weather, their plastic outfits far from being the most outlandish on display.

'So he's probably just cleaning up after himself,' Hol and said. 'He

kil s Dodd to make sure he can't say anything.'

'Maybe...'

Hol and turned, pressed his hands against the window, already dusted for fingerprints. The fishmonger had been given very little time to get his stock into the freezer room and no time at al to clean up afterwards. Hol and looked at the pink swirl of blood and fishguts, floating on top of the water in a metal tray. 'He knew you'd get it.' He nodded towards the window. Flies bumped against the glass, buzzing around the scattered flaps of puckered skin. 'He knew you'd understand what that photo meant.'

Thorne nodded. 'Oh, he knew I'd been here al right.' Hol and

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looked sideways at him, raised an eyebrow. 'Don't get excited. Yeah, he might have fol owed me, or he might be Trevor Jesmond hearing voices from the devil, but I think there's probably a simpler explanation.' Hbl and turned, listening. 'I think you were right. I think Dodd was kil ed because of what he could tel us. And because he was threatening to.'

'Dodd tried to blackmail the kil er?'

Thorne folded his arms. 'Only the daft twat didn't know he was a

Miler, did he? I can't prove any of it, obviously...'

'It sounds feasible,' Hol and said.

'Dodd was lying, of course he was. That crap about the kil er keeping his crash helmet on, about not having any records. I should have fucking pul ed him on it...'

'You weren't to know.'

'Yes, I was. If wankers like Dodd are breathing, they're lying. He didn't know who we were after, or why, but that didn't matter. If he thought I was chasing someone who hadn't paid their TV licence, he'd have lied through hig back teeth, as long as he could see a way to make money out of it.'

They watched as a middle-aged man handed over his money at the peep-show kiosk and hurried inside. The girl caught Thorne's eye, put her thumb to the tips of her fingers and made a wanking gesture. Thorne didn't know whether she was indicating what the man would be doing or what she thought of him. Or what she thought of them...

Hol and cleared his throat and took a drink. 'So, after you come round and show him the photo of Jane Foley, he contacts the Miler...'

Thorne stepped away from the window, turned and looked up towards the second floor where the studio was. 'I've been through the place and there's no sign of an address book or anything like that anywhere...'

'Maybe the Miler took it,' Hol and said.

'He might have done.' Thorne put his hand up to shield his eyes

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from the sun. 'Let's go over every inch again, anyway. If there's a scrap of paper with an address or phone number on it, I want it found.'

'What about phone records?'

Thorne nodded, pleased that Hol and was thinking so fast, was so close behind him. 'I've got Andy Stone on to it. I want everything, landline and mobile, if Dodd had one. Every cal he made since the day I was here...'

'He might have just gone round, if he had an address...'

'In which case we're stuffed.' Thorne reached across for the water bottle. He took a swig, held the now tepid water in his mouth for a while before swal owing. 'We're stil none the wiser as to how the kil er hooked up with Dodd in the first place. People like Dodd don't advertise. It's word of mouth, it's contacts...'

'We've already spoken to everybody we could find,' Hol and said. 'Anybody who's ever taken so much as a snap of their wife's tits in that studio has made a statement.' :

'So talk to them again. And find me some you haven't spoken to.at al .' Hol and groaned, let his head drop back against the glass. 'Just get on it, Dave,' Thorne said. 'Yvonne can work up a new list. I'l catch up with you later.'

While Hol and climbed out of his bodysuit, Thorne watched as two young media types stood up from their table at the care opposite and shook hands. They were dressed casual y in shorts and trainers, but their top-of-the-range mobiles and designer sunglasses gave them away. An advertising campaign agreed maybe, or a TV project given the green light.

He wondered if they knew that only a few hundred yards away, in an attic room over a coffee shop on Frith Street, John Logie-Baird had given the first-ever public demonstration of television nearly eighty years before.

Thorne opened the door, took a second or two before heading back inside...

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Christ, a commercial break would be nice. A catchable made-for TV Miler would be even nicer. He might just as wel have been a TV cop. For the umpteenth time that morning, Thorne watched a passerby dock him, the bodysuit, the police tape.., and look around eagerly for the camera.

After the post-mortem at Westminster Mortuary, they walked over to a smal Italian place near the Abbey. Talked about murder over pizzas and Peroni.

'I think Dodd was beaten until he was more or less unconscious,' Hendricks said. 'Then the Miler tied the line around his neck, tossed it over the lighting bar and hauled him up.' Thorne nodded, took a swig of beer. 'Would have taken a fair bit of strength...'

'So we know he's not a nine-stone weakling. What else?' 'He's a nasty fucker...' 'We knew that already.'

Hendricks poured more chil i oil over what he had left of an American Hot. 'Dodd wakes up pretty bloody quickly when he works out what's going on but it's far too sodding late by then.

The Miler ties

the line off, picks up his camera and starts taMng pictures.'

'How long?' Thorne asked.

'He'd have blacked out in a couple of minutes.' Hendricks speared a sliced of pepperoni, popped it into his mouth. 'Death through cerebral hypoxia pretty quickly afterwards...'

Thorne thought about it. Dodd had been a sleazy piece of shit, but he hadn't deserved that. Dancing at the end of a line, like something in the shop next door. Tearing at the flesh of his own neck. Staring through half-closed eyes at the maniac responsible, calmly snapping away, trying to capture his best side...

'When they talk about Milers like this, they use words like "organ ised" and "disorganised",' Thorne said. 'Two basic categories. The ones who plan careful y, who fol ow an almost ritualised pattern of kil ing, of cleaning up after themselves. And those who just act on

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instinct, who don't have as much control over what they're

'So where does this nutter fit in?'

Thorne put down his knife and fork. There was half a pizza left but he'd had enough. 'That's what I was thinking. Part of him is organised. The letters to the men in prison. Dodd needs to be got rid of, so he gets rid of him. The washing line, the lack of forensics, the photos he sent to me...

'He's getting off on that, definitely...'

'Why beat the bloke half to death though? Dodd's face looked like cheap mince. Why not just smash him across the back of the head then string him up?' A waitress was hovering, trying not to earwig. Thorne held up his plate. She took it gingerly and moved quickly away. 'At some level, they're always angry, you know? I haven't met a kil er yet who wasn't pissed off somewhere about something.' Thorne downed the last of his beer. He swal owed, seeing the bodies of Welch and Remfry, the mess that had been made of their necks. Of their inside.