Lazybones (3 page)

“He never missed out where birds was concerned,” Remfry's mother said. “Even after he came out, they was still sniffing round. Calling him up. You listening to me?”

Holland half turned, half nodded, and, as if on cue, pulled out a decent-size stash of porn magazines from beneath the single bed.

“See?” Mary Remfry pointed at the magazines. “You won't find any men in
them.
” She sounded as proud as if Holland were dusting off a degree certificate or a Nobel Prize nomination. As it was, he squatted by the bed, flicking through the pile of yellowing
Razzle
s,
Escort
s, and
Fiesta
s, feeling his face flush, turning away from the proud mother in the doorway. The magazines all dated from the mid to late eighties, well before Dougie began his days at Her Majesty's pleasure, banged up with six hundred and fifty other men.

Holland pushed the dirty mags to one side, reached back under the bed, and pulled out a brown plastic bag, folded over on itself several times. He let the bag drop open and a bundle of envelopes, bound with a thick elastic band, fell on to the carpet.

As soon as he saw the address, neatly typed on the topmost envelope, Holland felt a tingle of excitement. Just a small one. What he was looking at would probably mean nothing, but it was almost certainly more significant than fifteen-year-old socks and ancient stroke mags.

“Andy…!”

Mary Remfry wrapped her cardigan a little tighter around herself and took a step into the room. “What have you got there?”

Holland could hear Stone's feet on the stairs. He slipped off the elastic band, reached inside the first envelope, and pulled out the letter.

 

“So we can definitely rule out autoerotic asphyxiation, then?” DCI Russell Brigstocke, a little embarrassed, looked around the table at Thorne, at Phil Hendricks, at DI Yvonne Kitson.

“Well, I'm not sure we can rule
anything
out,” Thorne said. “But I think the ‘auto' bit implies that you do it yourself.”

“You know what I mean, smart-arse…”

“Nothing erotic went on in that room,” Hendricks said.

Brigstocke nodded. “No chance it was an extreme sex game that went wrong?” Thorne smirked. Brigstocke caught the look. “What?” Thorne said nothing. “Look, I'm just asking the questions…”

“Asking the questions that Jesmond told you to ask,” Thorne said. He made no secret of his opinion that their detective chief superintendent had sprung fully formed from some course that turned out politically astute, organizationally capable drones. Acceptable faces with a neat line in facile questions, a good grasp of economic realities, and, as it happened, an aversion to anybody called Thorne.

“They're questions that need answering,” Brigstocke said. “Could it have been some sort of sex game?”

Thorne found it hard to believe that the likes of Trevor Jesmond had ever done the things that he, Brigstocke, or any other copper did, day in and day out. It was unimaginable that he had ever broken up a fistfight at closing time, or fiddled his expenses, or stood between a knife and the body it was intended for.

Or told a mother that her only son had been sodomized and strangled to death in a grotty hotel room.

“It wasn't a game,” Thorne said.

Brigstocke looked at Hendricks and Kitson. He sighed. “I'll take your expressions of thinly disguised scorn as agreement with DI Thorne, then, shall I?” He pushed his glasses up his nose with the crook of his first finger, then ran the hand through the thick black hair of which he was so proud. The quiff was less pronounced than usual, there was some gray creeping in. He could cut a vaguely absurd figure, but Thorne knew that when Brigstocke lost it, he was as hard a man as he had ever worked with.

Thorne, Brigstocke, Kitson, Hendricks the civilian. These four, together with Holland and Stone, were the core of Team 3 at the Serious Crime Group (West). This was the group that made the decisions, formulated policy, and guided the investigations with—and even on occasion
without
—the approval of those higher up.

Team 3 had been up and running a good while, handling the ordinary cases but specializing—though that was not a word Thorne would have used—in cases that were anything but ordinary…

“So,” Brigstocke said, “we've got everybody out chasing down all the likely relatives of Remfry's victims. Still favorite with everybody?”

Nods around the table.

“A long way from odds-on, though,” Thorne said. There were things that bothered him, that didn't quite mesh with the vengeful relative scenario. He couldn't picture an anger carried around for that many years fermenting into something lethal, corrosive, then manifesting itself in the way it had in that hotel room. There was something almost stage-managed about what he had seen on that filthy mattress.
Posed,
Hendricks had said.

And he was still troubled by the early morning call to the florist…

Thorne thought there was something odd about the message. He couldn't believe that it was simple carelessness, so the only conclusion was that the killer must have
wanted
the police to hear his voice on that answering machine. It was as if he were introducing himself.

“What came up at the briefing,” Kitson said, “the stuff about Remfry turning queer inside? Worth looking into…?”

Thorne glanced toward Hendricks. A gay man who was choosing to ignore the word Kitson had used, or else genuinely didn't give a fuck.

“Yeah,” Thorne said. “Whatever he might or might not have got up to when he was inside, he was definitely straight before he went in. Don't forget that he raped three women…”

“Rape's not about sex, it's about power,” Kitson said.

Yvonne Kitson, together with DC Andy Stone, had come into the team to replace an officer Thorne had lost, in circumstances he tried every day to forget. Of all the murderers he'd put away, Thorne was happy to remember that the man responsible was serving three life sentences in Belmarsh Prison.

Thorne looked at Phil Hendricks. “Never mind Remfry, can we be certain the
killer
's gay?”

Hendricks didn't hesitate. “Absolutely not. Like Yvonne says, the rape's got nothing to do with sex, anyway. Maybe the killer wants us to
think
he's gay. He may well be, of course, but we have to consider other possibilities…”

“Whether it was a gay thing or not,” Kitson said, “he could still have been set up by someone he did time with, someone with a major grudge…”

Brigstocke cleared his throat, at some level finding this all a bit embarrassing. “But the buggery…?”

Hendricks snorted. “Buggery?” He dropped his Manchester accent and adopted the posh bluster of the gentleman's club. “Buggery!!”

Brigstocke reddened. “Sodomy, then. Anal intercourse, whatever. How could you do that if you weren't homosexual?”

Hendricks shrugged. “Close your eyes and think of Claudia Schiffer…?”

“Kylie Minogue for me,” Thorne said.

Kitson shook her head, smiling. “Dirty old man.”

Brigstocke was unconvinced. He stared hard at Thorne. “Seriously, though, Tom. This might be important. Could
you?
”

“It would depend how much I wanted to kill somebody,” Thorne said.

There was a silence around the table for a while. Thorne decided to break it before it became too serious. “Remfry went to that hotel willingly. He booked the room himself. He knew, or thought he knew, what he was getting into.”

“And whatever it was,” Hendricks added, “it looks as though he went along with it for a while.”

“Right,” Kitson said. She turned the photocopied pages of Hendricks's postmortem report. “No defense wounds, no tissue underneath the fingernails…”

The phone on the desk rang. Thorne was nearest.

“DI Thorne. Yes, Dave…”

The others watched for a few seconds as Thorne listened. Brigstocke hissed at Kitson. “Why the fuck did Remfry go to that hotel?”

Thorne nodded, grunted, took the top off a pen with his teeth. He took it out of his mouth, put it back on the pen. He smiled, told Holland to get his arse in gear, and ended the call.

Then he answered Brigstocke's question.

December 4, 1975

Later, when they talked about it, both Thorne and Holland admitted to fancying the deputy governor of Derby Prison. What neither of them
quite
got around to admitting was that, attractive as she undoubtedly was, they actually fancied her more
because
she was a prison governor.

They didn't really go into it all that much…

“He's certainly made a very good job of it.” Tracy Lenahan put down the letter, actually a photocopy of one of twenty-odd letters written to Douglas Remfry during his last three months inside, plus a couple to his home address after he'd been released. The letters that Holland had found under Remfry's bed.

Letters written by a killer, pretending to be a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Jane Foley.

Thorne and Holland had already been taken through the procedure for the sorting of prisoners' mail. The letters—five sackfuls a day on average—would have been taken by two, perhaps three, operational-support-grade officers to the censor's room for sorting. The X-ray machine had been done away with by the present governor, but drug dogs might be used and each letter would be slit open and searched for illegal enclosures. The OSGs did not
read
the letters, and providing there was no good reason, they would not usually be seen by anyone else.

“A good job of sounding like a woman, you mean?”

Thorne asked. He thought the letters were pretty bloody convincing and so did Yvonne Kitson, but other opinions couldn't hurt.

“Oh yes, but I think he's been much cleverer than that. I've seen one or two letters like this before, genuine letters. You'd be amazed how much mail like this people like Remfry really get. This has that same odd tone to it. It's something slightly crazed…”

“Something a bit needy,” Holland suggested.

Lenahan nodded. “Right, that's it. She's claiming to be a bit of a catch, a sexy bit of stuff looking for fun…”

“A sexy
married
bit of stuff,” Thorne added. The fictitious Jane Foley was conveniently hitched to an equally fictitious and awfully jealous husband, so Remfry couldn't write back to her.

Lenahan read a few lines of the letter again, nodded. “All the suggestive stuff in the letter is bang on, but there's still a kind of hopelessness. Something sad underneath…”

“Like she's a bit desperate,” Thorne said. “A woman who's desperate enough to write these sorts of letters to a convicted rapist.”

Holland puffed out his cheeks. “This is doing my head in. A bloke, pretending to be a woman, pretending to be a different kind of woman…”

Lenahan pushed the letter back across her desk. “It's subtle, though. Like I said, he's bloody clever.” She didn't need to tell Thorne that. He'd studied every one of “Jane Foley's” letters. He knew that the man who wrote them was very clever indeed. Clever, calculating, and extremely patient.

Lenahan picked up the photograph. “And this is the icing on the cake…”

Thorne was struck by her strange choice of phrase but said nothing. On the wall behind the desk was the regu
lation portrait of the Queen, looking rather as if she could smell something unpleasant wafting up from the canteen. To Her Majesty's left were a series of framed aerial views of the prison and, hung next to these very modern images, a pair of large landscapes in oil. Thorne knew next to bugger all about it but they looked pretty old. Lenahan glanced up, followed Thorne's gaze.

“Those have been knocking around the place since it opened in 1853,” she said. “Used to be gathering dust down in Visits. Then six months ago, we had an inmate in for receiving stolen antiques. He took one look at them and went pale. Worth about twelve thousand each, so they reckon…”

She smiled and her eyes dropped to the black-and-white photo in her hand. Thorne's went to the silver picture frame on her desk. From where he was sitting he couldn't see the photo inside, but he imagined a fit-looking husband—army perhaps, or maybe even a copper—and a smiling, olive-skinned child. He looked again at the woman behind the desk, her dark eyes wide as she stared at the picture. She was ridiculously young, probably not even thirty. Her black hair was shoulder length. She was tall and large-breasted. It would have been clear to a blind man that the deputy governor would figure regularly in the fantasies of the men she locked up every night.

Thorne glanced across at Holland and was amused to see him struggling not to blush as he waited for Tracy Lenahan to finish studying the photograph of “Jane Foley.” The picture was of a woman kneeling, her head bowed and hooded, the artful lighting concealing much, but revealing tantalizing glimpses of the full breasts, the neatly trimmed thatch of pubic hair. Of the leather belt around the wrists.

Holland had earlier expressed surprise that the photos
had not been confiscated, especially as Remfry was a sex offender. Surely this kind of image was risky on “Fraggle Rock”—the term used by many police officers for the Vulnerable Prisoners wing. Lenahan, bridling slightly at the slang, had explained what she called the Page Three rule. Stuff like this was discretionary. Obviously images of kids were not allowed on the VP wing, but if it was harmless—the sort of thing you might see on Page Three of the
Sun
—then the OSGs would have a look, pass the odd comment, and put it back in the envelope.

“Jesus,” Holland had said. “Page Three must be going seriously fucking arty…”

Lenahan put the picture down, scraped at the edge of it with a long red fingernail.

“This is clever, too. It's the ideal image to have chosen. Just what would be needed to hook an offender like Remfry, to tease him with the promise of something. This is a rapist's wet dream. Wherever your killer got it from, it's perfect.” She swallowed, cleared her throat. “Remfry was a man who got off on submission…”

Thorne and Holland exchanged a glance. They hadn't told Tracy Lenahan, but they were pretty sure the picture wasn't one the killer had just gone out and bought. The naked woman was wearing a hood identical to the one that Phil Hendricks had taken off Douglas Remfry's body…

“There's half a dozen similar pictures,” Thorne said. “They were sent with the most recent letters. They start to get more revealing the closer the letters get to his release date.”

Lenahan nodded. “Increasing the excitement…”

“By the time he got out, he must have been gagging for it,” Holland said.

She picked up the photograph again in her left hand and reached for the letter with her right. She brandished
them both. “Your killer is sensitive to the way this kind of woman might think,
and
to what will best stimulate the man she's writing to.”

Thorne said nothing. He was thinking that she sounded bizarrely impressed.

“Sensitive, like a gay man maybe,” Holland said.

Thorne shrugged noncommittally. They were back to that. He had to agree it was possible, but he was growing irritated at the way the investigation was fixing on what they presumed the killer's sexuality to be. Yes, the violent sodomizing of the victim was clearly significant. The rapist had been raped and Thorne was sure that this would prove to be crucial in finding out why he'd been murdered. Thorne was
less
sure that who the killer chose to sleep with was as important.

Holland slid forward in his chair, looked at Tracy Lenahan. “This is an angle we obviously have to consider—that Remfry was killed by someone he'd known in prison. Someone with whom he'd possibly had a non-consensual sexual relationship…”

Lenahan looked back at him, waiting for the question, not appearing terribly keen to do Holland any favors.

“Is that possible, do you think? Could Remfry have sexually assaulted another prisoner? Could he have been sexually assaulted himself?”

The deputy governor leaned back, something dark passing momentarily across her face. It vanished as she clasped her hands together and shook her head. Thorne thought that the laugh she produced sounded a little forced.

“I think you've been watching too many films set in American prisons, Detective Constable. There're some very nasty pieces of work in here, don't get me wrong, but very few of them are called Bubba, and if you're looking for bitches or puppies, you should look in a dogs' home. Prisoners form relationships, of course they
do, but as far as I know, nobody's going to get gangbanged if they drop the soap in the shower.”

Thorne couldn't help but smile. Holland smiled, too, but Thorne could see the skin tighten around his mouth and the reddening just above his collar. “As far as you know?” Holland said. “Meaning that it's possible.”

“The week before last, in the kitchens, a prisoner had his ear cut off with the lid from a tin of peaches. That was an argument over a game of table tennis, I think.” She smiled, sexy and very cold. “Anything's possible.”

Thorne stood and walked away from Lenahan's desk toward the door. “Let's presume that the man we're looking for is
not
an ex-con. The obvious question is how he got the information. How did he find Remfry? How could he find out where a convicted rapist was serving his sentence and when he was going to get released, in enough time to set all this up?”

Lenahan swiveled in her chair to face the computer screen on the corner of her desk. She hit a button on the keyboard. “He would have had to have got it from a database somewhere.” She continued typing, watching the screen. “This is a LIDS computer. Local Inmate Data System, which has everything on the prisoners in here. I can send stuff down the wire to other prisons if I need to, but I wouldn't have thought this would be enough…”

Thorne looked at the nearer of the two landscapes. The dark, thick swirls of the paint on the canvas. He thought it might be somewhere in the Lake District. “What about national records?”

“IIS. The Inmate Information System. That's got everything—locations, offense details, home address, release date.” She looked up and across at Thorne. “But you'd still need to type a name in.”

“Who has access to that?” Holland asked. “Do you?”

“No…”

“The governor? Police liaison officer?”

She smiled, shook her head firmly. “It's headquarters-based only. The system's pretty well restricted, for obvious reasons…”

Thanks and good-byes were brisk and Thorne would have had it no other way. Though he hadn't so much as glimpsed a blue prison sweatshirt the whole time they'd been there, he was aware of the prisoners all around him. Beyond the walls of the deputy governor's office. Above, below, and to all sides. A distant echo, a heaviness, the
heat
given off by over six hundred men, there thanks to the likes of him.

Whenever he entered a prison, moved around its green, or mustard or dirty cream corridors, Thorne mentally left a trail of bread crumbs behind him. He always needed to be sure of the quickest way out.

 

For most of the drive back down the M1, Holland had his nose buried in a pamphlet he'd picked up on his way out of the prison. Thorne preferred his own form of research.

He eased
Johnny Cash at San Quentin
into the cassette player.

Holland looked up as “Wanted Man” kicked in. He listened for a few seconds, shook his head, and went back to his facts and figures.

Thorne had tried,
once,
to tell him. To explain that
real
country music was fuck all to do with lost dogs and rhinestones. It had been a long night of pool and Guinness, and Phil Hendricks—with whichever boyfriend happened to be around at the time—heckling mercilessly. Thorne had tried to convey to Holland the beauty of George Jones's voice, the wickedness in Merle Haggard's, and the awesome rumble of Cash, the dark daddy of them all. A few pints in, he was telling anybody who would listen that Hank Williams was a tortured genius
who was undoubtedly the Kurt Cobain of his day and he may even have begun to sing “Your Cheating Heart” around closing time. He couldn't recall every detail, but he
did
remember that Holland's eyes had begun to glaze over long before then…

“Fuck,” Holland said. “It costs twenty-five grand a year to look after one prisoner. Does that sound like a lot to you?”

Thorne didn't really know. It was twice what a lot of people earned in a year, but once you took into account the salaries of prison staff and the maintenance of the buildings…

“I don't think they're spending that on carpets and caviar, somehow,” Thorne said.

“No, but still…”

It was roasting in the car. The Mondeo was far too old to have air con, but Thorne was very pissed off at being completely unable to coax anything but warm air from a heating system he'd had fixed twice already. He opened a window but shut it after half a minute, the breeze not worth the noise.

Holland looked up from his pamphlet again. “Do you think they should have luxuries in there? You know, TVs in their cells and whatever? PlayStations, some of them have got…”

Thorne turned the sound down a little and glanced up at the sign as the Mondeo roared past it. They were approaching the Milton Keynes turnoff. Still fifty miles from London.

Thorne realized, as he had many times before, that for all the time he spent putting people behind bars, he gave precious little thought to what happened when they got there. When he
did
think about it, weigh all the arguments up, he supposed that, all things considered, a loss of freedom was as bad as it could get. Above and beyond
that,
he wasn't sure exactly where he stood.

He feathered the brake, dropped down to just under seventy, and drifted across to the inside lane. They were in no great hurry…

Thorne knew, as much as he knew anything, that murderers, sex offenders, those who would harm children, had to be removed. He also knew that
putting these people away
was more than just a piece of argot. It was actually what they did. What
he
did. Once these offenders were…elsewhere, the debate as to where punishment ended and rehabilitation began was for others to have. He felt instinctively that prison should never become…the phrase
holiday camps
popped into his head. He chided himself for beginning to sound like a right-wing nutcase. Fuck it, a few TVs was neither here nor there. Let them watch the football or join in with game shows if that was what they wanted…