Lazy Bones (36 page)

'It was certainly handy,' Thorne said.

'They did go missing, didn't they? I'm just thinking out loud...' Thorne shook his head. 'Noble was responsible for them going, which is why he never reported it, but I don't think it was worse than that. If he kil ed them, who the hel are we looking for?'

'What are we going to do?' Hol and asked. 'Shouldn't we report it? That fucker could have abused loads of other kids.'

'There's no point. He's long dead. He can't hurt any more kiOs now.'

'What about her? Do you think she knew?'

Thorne thought about what Irene Noble had said. About praying the kids were out of harm's way. He shook his head. If she had known, she could surely not have said that and kept a straight face.

In the Grafton Arms, spitting distance from his flat, Thorne shared several pints and half a dozen games of pool with Phil Hendricks. The beer seemed to have little effect, and he lost five games out of the six.

'I'm not enjoying thrashing you as much as I normal y would,' Hendricks said. 'You're so obviously preoccupied with al this other shit.' Thorne, leaning back against the bar, said nothing.

He watched as Hendricks potted the last couple of stripes before putting the black down without any difficulty. 'What about if we start putting money on it? That might focus your thoughts a bit more...'

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'Let's leave it,' Thorne said. 'I'l finish this pint, and I'm off home...' Hendricks took his Guinness from the top of the cigarette machine and walked across to join Thorne at the bar. 'I stil don't real y see it,' he gaid. 'How could they not know? How could they not know something...?'

Thorne shook his head, his glass at his lips. Among other things, they had been talking about Irene Noble and Sheila Franklin. About two women of more or less the same age, married to men who they loved dearly, and who, now that they were widows, they remembered with tenderness and affection. Two men whose memories lived on, fondly preserved as precious things. Two men beloved...

One a rapist and the other a child molester.

Thorne swal owed. 'Maybe it's an age thing. You know, a different generation.'

'That's crap,' Hendricks said. 'What about my mum and dad?' Thorne had met them once, they ran a guest house in Salford. 'My old man couldn't so much as fart without my mum knowing about it...' Thorne nodded. It was g fair point. 'Same with mine...' 'She knew what he was thinking, never mind doing.'

Hendricks reached into the top pocket of his denim jacket, took a Silk Cut from a packet of ten. Thorne was irritated, in the way that only an ex-smoker could be. Irritated by the fact that his friend could smoke one or two, then put the pack away for a week or more, until he fancied another one as a bit of a treat. Smoke, and enjoy it, and not need another one. A packet of ten, for crying out loud...

'Are they going to be told?' Hendricks asked. 'Those women? Is someone going to break the bad news about their dead hubbies?'

'No point yet. If we get a result they'l find out soon enough...' Hendricks nodded and lit his cigarette. The curls of blue smoke drifted across to where a man and a woman were now playing pool. It hung in the light above the table.

'Maybe we only think we know what was going on with our parents,' Thorne said. 'Maybe we only know as much or as little as they did.'

3O4

'I suppose...

'There's an old country song cal ed "Behind Closed Doors"'...

'Bloody hel , here we go...'

'It's true though, isn't it? So much family stuff is mythology. Shit that just gets handed down, and you never know for sure what real y happened and what's made up. Nobody ever thinks to sit you down and pass it on. The truth of it. Before you know it, your history becomes hearsay.' Thorne took a drink. He knew that at some point, he should have talked to his father. Found out more about his parents,

and their parents. He knew that there wasn't much point now... 'Fuck me,' Hendricks said. 'Al that's in one song?' 'You are such an arsehole...'

They stepped away from the bar to make room for a group of lads, finished their drinks standing by the door.

'Where does al this leave you with Mark Foley?' Hendricks said.

'He's stil our prime suspect.'

'Whoever he might be...' 'i

'Right, and wherever. But he's not making my life very easy.'

'He'l slip up. We'l nail him when he does...'

'I'm not talking about catching him.' Thorne was finding it hard to think about his murderer without picturing him as a fifteen-year-old child. He saw a boy protecting his sister, spiriting her away from a place where one, or perhaps both, of them was being abused. 'I'm stil trying to decide exactly what he is.' Thorne turned to look at Hendricks. 'This whole thing's al arse-about-face, d'you know that, Phil? Mark Foley or Noble or whoever the fuck he is now is a kil er and he's a victim.'

Hendricks shrugged. 'So?'

'So, there's a part of him that part of me doesn't real y want to catch...'

Thorne walked Hendricks back towards the tube. Hendricks asked Thorne about Eve, joked when he heard about their hot date on 305

Saturday, and moaned about his own eventful but ultimately bleak love-life.

Thorne wasn't paying an awful lot of attention. He was tired, imag inilg himself floating gently down on to his hil side, the bracken waving a welcome as he drew nearer to it. Jane Foley was suddenly there beside him, drifting to earth, and though he could not see her face clearly, he imagined the pain etched across it, for herself and for her children.

Thorne knew that when he and Jane Foley hit the ground, their bodies would travel right through the bracken and beyond. He knew that the hil side would col apse beneath their weight and that they would sink down, deep through earth and water and the rotten wood of old coffins. Down through powdery bone and further, into the blackness where there was no sound and the soil was packed tight around them.

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TWENTY-FOUR

The telephone voice was even more pronounced on Irene Noble's answering-machine message. Hol and waited for the beep, then spol. 'This is Detective Constable Hol and from the Serious Crime Group Yesterday, when myself and DI Thorne interviewed you, we forgot to ask about photographs of the children. We'd appreciate it if you might be able to lend us some pictures, which we wil of course return whenever we finish with them. So, if you could get back to me as soon as possible on any of those numbers on the card we left you, I'd be very grateful. Many thanks...'

Hol and put down the phone and looked up. From behind his desk

on the other side of the office, Andy Stone was staring across at him. 'Photos of the Foley children?' Stone said.

'The DCI's stil keen on getting them on the computer, ageing them up.'

Stone shook his head. 'Waste of time. Never looks anything like the kids when they eventual y turn up.'

'If she's got photos from just before the children ran away, they'l be fifteen and thirteen. They can't have changed too much.'

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'You'd be amazed, mate. Have you never bumped into someone you haven't seen for a few years and not recognised them? That's after a few years...'

'Hol and thought about it and admitted that he had. He also knew, from the twin murder case he'd worked on with Thorne the year before, that if people wanted to change the way they looked, it wasn't actual y that hard. Stil , he reckoned that if the technology was there, there was no harm in using it.

Stone remained unconvinced. 'It's a pretty basic software program which digital y ages the photographs. At the end of the day, it's al guesswork and a lot of assumptions. How can you know if someone's hair's going to fal out, or if they're going to put on loads of weight or whatever?'

'I've seen some that looked pretty close,' Hol and said.

Stone shrugged, went back to what he was doing. 'Do we know she's got any photos at al ?' he said, without 10)king up.

'Not for certain, no. Be a bit strange if she didn't, though. She was very fond of them...' �

'You going to get somebody to go and pick them up?' Stone asked. 'Or shoot over there yourself?.'

'Hadn't real y thought about it. I'l see what she says when she gets

back to me, see when's a good time. You want to come along?'

'No . . .'

'She's single, but probably a bit old, even for you...'

'I'l give that one a miss, I think.'

'Suit yourself.' Hol and noted down the time he'd made the cal . Wednesday the 7th, 10.40 a.m. He'd give Irene Noble until the end of the day and cal again. When Stone next started to speak, Hol and looked across. Stone was leaning back in his chair, staring into space through narrowed eyes.

' Very fond of them? I think you're being a bit bloody generous...'

'I think she was more than very fond of them,' Hol and said. 'But yes, she was also naive. Cal it stupid, if you like...'

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Stone snapped his gaze towards Hol and. 'If love is blind, she must have been fucking besotted...'

Whoever thought that computers would do away with paperwork was sadly mistaken. There was as much paper piled up on desks as there ever had been. The only difference was that now, most of it was printed out by computer...

Thorne sat and read through the stories of four murders.

Those same scraps of information that clogged his brain had also been recorded somewhere on paper. On laser-printed sheets of A4, on faded and curling reams of fax paper, on Post-It notes and pre-printed memo sheets torn from a pad. The entire case was laid out like this before him. Ream after dog-eared ream, piled in stubby blocks of yel ow and white and buff. Banded by elastic or bound with laminate sheets or stapled and stuffed into cardboard folders...

Thorne went over every piece of paper, of the jigsaw. Looking for the answer he knew to be there. Sifting through the shit, like a squaw)zing gul flapping around a vast dump. Black, beady eye searching for that morsel of interest .....

Hearing the trace of that Yorkshire accent in Carol Chamberlain's

voice. The good sense in every flat vowel of it.

'If it's anywhere, it's in the details.'

Opposite him, Yvonne Kitson sat typing, her face al but obscured by a paper mountain range of her own. She was stil working on the Foley/Noble search, sorting through tens of thousands of addresses and car registrations and NI numbers, as wel as dealing with, col ecting and col ating, the information that was stil coming in on the Southern kil ing.

Thorne looked across at her. He toyed with lobbing a bal of paper over to get her attention. He flicked briefly through the piles on his desk, looking for something he could screw up, then thought better of it...

'Apart from anything else,' Thorne said, 'murderers aren't doing the rainforests a whole lot of good.'

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Kitson looked up and across at him. 'Sorry?'

He picked up a sheaf of post-mortem reports and waved them. She nodded her understanding.

'How's it going, Yvonne?'

'We won't have any more luck finding him as Noble than we did as

Foley. He was only Mark Noble for five minutes, anyway...' 'Which he'd have hated. That man's name...'

'Too bloody right. If I was him I'd've changed my name, or at least stopped using that one, as soon as I got the hel out of there.'

Thorne could find nothing in what Kitson had said to argue with. He'd have gone to Brigstocke straight away, suggested they concentrate their resources somewhere else. But he didn't have the faintest idea where...

'Let's just plough through it,' he said.

The whole adoption/abuse/runaway lead was shaping up to be another one of those which came to nothing horribly quickly. It was hard enough trying to work out what might have happened to someone who'd run away fron home six months before. To piece together the theoretical movements of a pair of teenagers who'd vanished from a house in Romford nearly twenty years earlier, was almost certainly impossible.

They had little choice but to try, and while Hol and, Stone and the rest of the team did what they could, Thorne was going back over everything they already had. Sure that they already had enough.

By lunchtime, he'd found nothing, and felt as though he'd read about every murder that had ever taken place. He'd watched the hands of the pathologist rooting about in every chest cavity and down into the cold, wet depths of every gut. He'd listened to the less than helpful words of everybody who'd so much as stood at the same bus stop as one of the victims.

He'd had a bel y ful ...

'What's on your sarnies today, then?'

Kitson shook her head without looking up from her computer

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screen. 'Didn't have time today. The kids were playing up, and everything got a bit...' The rest of the sentence hung there until Thorne spoke.

'You can't keep al the bal s in the air al the time, Yvonne. You're al owed to drop one occasional y, you know.' Kitson glanced up, gave him a thin smile. 'Is everything al right, Yvonne?'

'Has somebody said something?' It came a little too quickly.

'No. You've just seemed a bit.., out of it.'

Kitson's smile thickened, until she looked, to Thorne, much more like herself. Much more the type he could lob a bal of paper at.

'I'm just tired,' she said.

This next kil ing had to be the last one, at least for a while. It made a pretty picture, and it also made bloody good sense. Afterwards, the police investigation was bound to be stepped up, and the risk of getting caught, just statistical y, would increase. '

If he were to be caught, to be tried for his crimes, the next kil ing would be a very bad one to get done for. He would certainly be cruCified with little argument. Now, though, with just the others under his belt, it would be something of a different matter. Standing trial for the murders of Remfry and Welch and Southern, he would fancy his chances...

If the papers were excited at the manhunt, they would be wetting themselves at a court case. The tabloids would back him, he was sure of it. He could probably even persuade one or other of the red-tops to stump up for his defence, pay to hire a top lawyer. He had decided already that should it ever come to it, he would speak in his own defence, would stand up and tel them exactly what he'd done and why. He was pretty confident that only a very brave judge would put him away for too long after that.