Lazy Bones (29 page)

'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 al the details?'

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

'And then you just lost touch?'

'Wel , you do, don't you?'

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

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

'We've traced every Mgrk Foley in the country. Every Sarah Foley or Sarah Whatever ne Foley, and nbne of them remembers wandering into the hal and seeing their father dangling from a tow rope. Nobody recal s popping upstairs to find Mum lying in a pool of blood with her skul caved in. Cal 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 Hol and. 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 al went tits up, Jane and Den were normal, you know? Just a normal couple with two kids and an OK house and al the rest of it. They were a good team, they were doing al right, and I reckon they'd have got over what that arsehole did to Jane. I mean, couples do, don't they, eventual y, and Den would 244

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.

245

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 Fol y had been drinking...

Another Saturday when he hadn't got home until gone ten o'clock. Eve would probably stil have been up, he could have cal ed, 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 wel that when it came to relationships, he was basical y 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. Eventual y, of course, Jan had changed direction herself. Got creative with her creative-writing lecturer...

Al 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 246

the sofa vhich 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 cancel ed 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 aas a part of him, a nasty part he was reluctant to acknowledge, that worried about how interested in Eve he would real y be once he'd got her into bed, but that wasn't real y 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, Whorne 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 pul ed 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 dmvn 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 counsel ing. Had he grown up, the horror turning to hatred and festering inside him? Had he waited twenty years and then kil ed 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 kil ings? 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 247

kil ings of Remfry and Welch, and now of Howard Southern, had always felt significant. More significant than the kil ings themselves. Now, Thorne knew why. If he didn't ful y understand it, he at least understood that it had a history...

And stil 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 stil a sex offender.

Stil a nonce. One for whom very few people, least of al those trying to catch his kil er, seemed to be mourning.

And stil that ambivalence, if Thorne was honest, on his part as wel ...

'Seems to me that whoever kil ed Rein fry did everyone a favour...' .' ' There wil 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 sent!ments, but as someone who'd spent his entire adult life if not always catching kil ers, 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 kil er, love the victim. Thorne would never forget the months he'd spent hunting a man who kil ed women while trying to put them into comas, into a state of living death. Or his last big one: tracking down a pair of kil ers, one a manipulative psychopath, the other who kil ed 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 fol owed her. He dropped his empties into the bin, and for half a minute he stared into the fridge for no particular reason.

248

He walked into the bedroom, gathered up his duvet and pil ow 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 tel , can you?' 'It wasn't hard...'

Denise gave a lascivious grin. 'Wel , that usual y means they aren't interested at al .'

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 nut ters 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 real y.'

'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 real y mentioned it since.' 'Right. Except when he's using it as an excuse?' 'Maybe I'm being paranoid about that...'

249

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

'That'l be Ben,' Denise said. 'He had to stay late, get an edit finished.' Sh� took a hearty mouthful of wine and al 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 hal , 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; al 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 dodrs and steel instruments of an autopsy suite.

Blinding white light, but Thorne knew very wel 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 pil ows, 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 250

shook and shouted, fil ed 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, rol ed 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. Al 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 smel hit him.

He laughed when he looked back at the beds, and saw what the bodie had become. What they had actual y been al 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 stil corporeal and Thorne was ready to embrace her.

She was nearly thirty years dead, and so was her kil er, but that didn't matter.

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

251

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 raled and subsequently battered to death. Whorne was stil 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 ful of surprises. As the oldest recorded town in the country and the capital of Roman Britain, Colchester had more history than most places. Stil , the last thing Thorne expected from a council building in the middle of town was what looked like a smal 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 al the period or faux-period properties in the area had been snapped up by footbal ers and armed robbers a long time ago. The surprise was evidently clear in his face as he and Hol and were 252

greeted by the Service Manager, and shown into a large office with dark oak panel ing al around, and heavy wooden beams crisscrossing an ornate ceiling above.

'This was original y 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, tal 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 al too easy to picture her laughing at a dirty joke in spite of herself, or tipsy at the Christmas party.