Lazybones (27 page)

“Just after the Nobles adopted them,” Thorne said.

“Right.” Brigstocke got up, walked around his desk. “And around the time they moved away from Colchester.”

Holland stuck his notebook away and leaned back against a chair. “Now it gets even better. Mrs. Noble reckons that there was an official investigation at the time. The children were reported as missing, she says. The police spent weeks looking for them…”

“You've checked?” Brigstocke asked.

“It's rubbish. I went back to 1983, just in case she was getting the dates confused, and there's bugger all. No records of any search, no records of missing persons reports. There was nothing national, nothing local. It never happened…”

“What impression did you get when you spoke to her?” Thorne asked.

“She sounded like she meant it. She was upset…”

“Turning it on, d'you reckon?”

“No, I don't think so. Sounded genuine enough…”

“Where's the husband?”

“Roger Noble died in 1990. Heart attack…”

Thorne thought about this for a second or two, then turned to Brigstocke. “Well, I reckon we'd better have a word with
her,
then.” Brigstocke nodded. “Where is she, Dave?”

“She lives in Romford, but she's coming into town tomorrow. Likes to do her shopping in the West End, she says…”

Thorne pulled a face. “Oh,
does
she…?”

“I've arranged to meet her at ten-thirty.”

Brigstocke took off his glasses, pulled a crumpled tissue from his trouser pocket, and wiped the sweat from the frames. “Well done, Dave. You'd better go over all this with DS Karim as soon as you can. He'll need to reassign, issue fresh actions…”

“Sir…” Holland opened the door and stepped out.

“Yvonne, can you get across this as well? We might have a bit more luck finding Mark Foley and his sister, now we know that they changed their names…”

Kitson, who had said nothing, nodded and took a step toward the door.

“This is looking good, you know?” Brigstocke said. “Be great to give the detective chief superintendent some positive news…”

Thorne couldn't help himself. “Tell him I thought he looked smashing on the telly the other night…”

Brigstocke smiled in spite of himself. “Right, a pint later to celebrate?”

“Fuck all to celebrate,” Thorne said. “I'll be there anyway, though…”

“Yvonne?”

Kitson shook her head. “Too much to do.” She turned and stepped through the door, barking back at Brig
stocke as she walked away toward the Incident Room, “Got to change a million and one data searches from ‘Foley' to ‘Noble'…”

Brigstocke looked over at Thorne. “What's got up
her
arse?”

“Don't ask me…”

“Maybe you should have a word…”

Thorne's mobile rang. He glanced at the screen and saw who was calling. He told Brigstocke he'd check back with him later and stepped out into the corridor, pulling the door closed behind him.

“Are we still on for Saturday?” Eve said.

“I hope so.”

“Right. Dinner somewhere and back to your place.”

“Sounds good. Fuck, you know what I still haven't done?”

“Who cares? You've got a sofa, haven't you?”

 

He had work to do, professionally and for his other, more personal project. Not that he considered the killing to be personal, not in terms of the self.

No, not really, and not to
him
anyway.

What he did to those animals in those hotel rooms wasn't actually about him, or for him. He'd always denied that, when it had come up, and he would continue to deny it. He was happy to do it, more than happy to put the line around their necks and pull, but if it had only been about him, it wouldn't be happening.

He was just a weapon…

Strangely, he felt that he put more of himself into his day job. More of him had passed into what he did, by the time he'd finished working on something, than it had watching any of those fuckers plead, then die. True, paying the mortgage meant being responsible to people, and what he did, even when he did it well, was rarely of any
benefit to him personally, but he always felt part of it afterward. The work usually had his fingerprints on it somewhere.

He laughed at that and carried on working. His job was hotting up suddenly: stuff was coming in and he was really earning his money. He had less time now to get the other things organized, but actually there was very little that had to be done, and certainly no need to panic. It was all pretty much sorted.

Bar a few
t
's to cross and the odd
i
to dot, the final killing had been arranged.

Thorne looked unconvinced. “I've never interviewed anybody in the same place I buy my pants.”

“There's a first time for everything,” Holland said.

They carried the coffees across to where Irene Noble was sitting waiting for them, flanked already—though the place had been open only half an hour or so—by large Marks & Spencer shopping bags. The café was a relatively new addition to the large store on Oxford Street, wedged into a corner of the ladies' clothing section and half-filled with shoppers who'd obviously made as early a start as Irene Noble.

As Thorne squeezed behind the table next to Holland, he glanced around at the dozen or so women getting their breath, ready to start again. Scattered around were one or two bored-looking men, grateful for the chance to sit down and not be asked their opinion for a few minutes.

Irene Noble took a small plastic container of sweeteners from her bag. She pressed the top, dropped a tiny tablet into her latte, and raised her eyebrows at Dave Holland. “They probably think I'm your mother,” she said.

She was pretty well preserved for a woman who had to be sixty or so, though Thorne thought that she was trying a bit too hard. The hair was a little too blond and brittle, the fire-engine-red lipstick applied a touch too
thickly. To Thorne, it seemed that this stage was probably the one that came right before giving up altogether. Before mentioning your age to strangers, and always wearing an overcoat, and not giving a damn anymore…

“Tell us about Mark and Sarah, Mrs. Noble.”

She thought for a moment, smiling briefly before taking a sip of coffee. “Roger used to joke about it and say that we lost them in the move. You know, like a tea chest going missing.” She saw the reaction on Thorne's face and shook her head. “It wasn't a nasty joke, it was affectionate. That was just his way. Something to make me laugh if I was crying, you understand? I did a lot of crying after it happened…”

“This was just after you adopted the children?” Holland said.

“The beginning of 1984. We'd had them four years or so by then. We had a few problems, 'course we did, but then things got on an even keel.”

It was clear to Thorne that her voice was affected somewhat. A “telephone” voice. Thorne remembered that his mother had used to do the same thing. Airs and graces for the benefit of doctors, teachers, policemen…

“There were problems before, weren't there?” Holland said. “With the previous sets of foster parents.”

“Right, and they gave up on the children straightaway. It was only Roger and I who stuck with it. We knew that it was just something we had to get through. They were very disturbed children and, God only knows, they had every right to be.”

“What sort of problems?” Thorne said.

She paused for a few seconds before answering. “Behavioral problems. Adjusting, you know? Roger and I thought we'd got it under control. Obviously we were wrong.” She reached for a teaspoon and stared down
into her coffee cup as she stirred. “Behavioral.” She said the word again, as if it were a medical term. Thorne glanced sideways at Holland, who gave him a small shrug in return.

“So you decided to adopt them?” Holland asked. Mrs. Noble nodded. “How did the kids feel about that?”

She looked at Holland as though he'd asked a very silly question. “They'd lost their real parents and been let down by every set of foster parents they'd had since. They were delighted that we were going to be a real family, and so were we. Roger and I had always wanted children. We might have missed out on nappies with those two, but we had plenty of sleepless nights, I can tell you…”

“I can believe it,” Thorne said.

“And plenty after they disappeared. Plenty…”

“How did they disappear?”

She pushed her cup to one side, laid one liver-spotted hand across the other. “We moved on the Saturday morning and it was the usual chaos, you know? Boxes everywhere and removal men sliding about because there was snow on the ground. We told the kids they could sort their own stuff out, so they just got on with it. Shut themselves away upstairs…”

“Fighting over who was going to get the biggest room, I suppose?”

She looked quickly up at Thorne. “No. We'd sorted out their bedrooms early on, before we moved…”

“What happened?” Thorne said.

“They needed to have their own space, you understand?”

“What happened, Mrs. Noble?”

“Nobody heard them go, nobody saw a thing. They crept out like ghosts…”

“When did anybody find out they'd gone?”

“We were all over the place, you can imagine, trying
to get everything together. Trying to find the tea bags and the bloody kettle or what have you.” She began to pick at a fingernail. “It was around dinnertime, I think. Can't remember exactly. It was after dark…”

“So what did you think?”

“We didn't really think anything at first. They always went out a lot. They were very independent, always off somewhere together. Mark always looked after Sarah, though. He always took care of his sister.”

Thorne glanced sideways at Holland. “When were the police called?” Holland asked.

“The next morning. Obviously we knew there was something wrong when they hadn't come back. When their beds hadn't been slept in…”

Thorne leaned forward. He took one of the fancy Italian biscuits that came with the coffee and broke it in half, asking the question casually. “Who called the police?”

There was no hesitation. “Roger. Well, actually, he went down to the station himself. He thought things might get handled faster if he went there personally, and he was right. He said they got straight on it. Two of them came to the house while I was out searching in the park and round the local streets.”

“Roger told you they came round?”

She nodded. “They had a look in the kids' bedrooms, you know? Asked all the normal questions. Took some photos away with them…”

Thorne looked at Holland. A reminder about getting photos of Mark and Sarah for Brigstocke's digital aging plan. Holland picked up on it, nodded, and made a note. Thorne popped the rest of the biscuit into his mouth, chewed for a few seconds before speaking again.

“Did the police presume the children had run away right from the start?”

“Well, that was the problem, wasn't it? Everything was in boxes, all over the show. It was hard to work out straightaway if they'd taken anything with them…”

“Eventually, though,” Thorne said. “That was what they must have thought.”

“Yes, after a day or two I worked out which clothes were missing. There was some money gone as well, but it took me a while to realize. I thought maybe I'd mislaid it somewhere in all the moving. Once the police knew about the children, about what they'd been through, Roger said they started treating it as a runaway thing more than anything else…”

“What did they do?”

“Very thorough, they were. Up and down the country. Appeals for information, searches at all the stations, that sort of thing. Roger got updates from them all the time. They were taking it very seriously, Roger said, for the first week or two, anyway.”

“Roger said…”

“That's right. He went down and nagged them every day. Twice a day, sometimes, demanding to know what they were doing.”

“For the first week or two, you said. After that…?”

“Well, they told Roger, a chief inspector actually, told Roger that he was sure the children were safe. They were certain that if, you know, any harm
had
come to Mark or Sarah, they would have found out. I suppose they meant found a body…”

Thorne saw that the skin below Irene Noble's fingernail had torn and begun to bleed slightly where she'd been picking at it. He watched as she pressed a napkin to her tongue and dabbed at the pinpricks of blood. When she spoke again, it struck him that the telephone voice had gone, and that the Essex accent was coming through strongly. Whether she was unable to keep it up for long
or had simply ceased bothering, it was impossible to tell.

“Never having had any of my own,” she said, “I can't say for sure if I felt anything less because Mark and Sarah weren't mine, weren't my flesh and blood. D'you understand what I'm getting at?” Thorne nodded. “After the police told Roger they thought the children were safe, it wasn't so bad, you know? We weren't so scared. We just missed them. We got used to missing them eventually…”

“Did you ever see a police officer?” Thorne said. “In all the time they were looking for Mark and Sarah, did you yourself ever speak to a police officer?”

Thorne had been expecting a pause, perhaps a paling, but instead he got a smile. After a few seconds it wilted a little, and she seemed suddenly sad. Then, as she spoke, her face filled with an affectionate remembrance…

“Roger wanted to shield me from any of it. He did everything, handled it all. Perhaps it was his way of dealing with what had happened, throwing himself into it like he did, taking the responsibility, but I knew he was trying to protect me. He dealt with all the official side of things. The strain of it, of everything that happened, and that school business on top of it, drove my husband to an early grave.”

Thorne blinked, took a breath or two. A suspicion, a
sense,
began to distill into something more potent. “What school business was that?” he asked.

“Roger worked over at St. Joseph's. It was the school where Mark and Sarah would have gone.” She said it casually, like the children had done no more than fail an entrance exam. “It was just part-time, casual work, but he did all the bits and pieces that needed doing around the place. One day this man comes round, one of the parents, hammering on the door. Says his son's been involved in some kind of incident and mentioned Roger's name. Utter rubbish, of course, the man was on some
thing, I think, but it really upset Roger. This lunatic wouldn't leave it and went to the headmaster. The school was keen to keep it low-key, which was right,
obviously,
since it was so stupid, but Roger wanted to do the right thing. He left quietly in the end, rather than upset the children. That was typical of him. It was scandalous, disgraceful that anybody could even
suggest
…There were always kids round here after school and on the holidays. Always kids in our house…”

“Roger liked children…”

She looked up, her face softening, grateful for Thorne's insight. For his understanding. “That's right. He would never have admitted it, but I think, deep down, he was always trying to make up for not having Mark and Sarah anymore. Being around other kids had been his own way of coping with what happened. Later on, after that unpleasantness, everything started to get on top of him. His heart just packed up in the end…”

“What was
your
way of coping, Irene?” Thorne said.

“I just prayed the kids were safe,” she said. “That wherever Mark and Sarah went after they left us, they were out of harm's way…”

It was that sentence which stayed with Thorne, which he thought about as they struggled out of the West End through traffic, inching around Marble Arch, car and passengers overheating more than slightly.

“It was very convenient for Roger Noble,” Holland said. “The kids going missing when they were between schools. They vanish from all education records…”

“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 killed them, who the hell are we looking for?”

“What are we going to do?” Holland 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 kids 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 surely could 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 normally would,” Hendricks said. “You're so obviously preoccupied with all this other shit.” Thorne, leaning back against the bar, said nothing. He watched as Hendricks potted the last couple of balls 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…”

“Let's leave it,” Thorne said. “I'll 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 still don't really see it,” he said. “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 whom they loved dearly, and whom, 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 swallowed. “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 guesthouse in Salford. “My old man couldn't so much as fart without my mum knowing about it…”