Lazybones (7 page)

Another hot, humid evening. The air outside heavy with the taste of a storm on the way. Tantalizing snippets of conversation from people walking past drifted into the living room through the open windows.

Thorne had sat eating in T-shirt and shorts, listening to the noise from a party on the other side of the road. He didn't know what annoyed him more—the raised voices and the cranked-up sound system, or the good time that some people he didn't know were clearly having.

His plate licked clean by Elvis, Thorne had opened a can of cheap lager, tuned out the sounds of music and laughter, and spent a couple of hours reading. A summer's evening absorbed in violent death.

These were the reports based on searches of CRIMINT—the Criminal Intelligence database—looking for any cases whose parameters might overlap with the Remfry killing…

Holland and Stone had been thorough. It was largely about trial and error, about narrowing the search down and coming up with hits that might be significant. Key words were entered. Matches were sifted and examined in relation to those from other searches.
Rape/murder
produced few cases where the victim was male, but the results were still cross-referenced with those that came up when other, more specific key words were punched into the system.

Sodomy. Strangulation. Ligature. Washing line.

And up they'd come…

A series of unsolved murders going back five years. Eight young boys brutally abused and strangled, their bodies dumped in woods, gravel pits, and recreation grounds. A pedophile ring that was too well organized or too well connected. Uncatchable.

A man attacked in his own home. Tied up with washing line while his home was ransacked, then kicked to death for no good reason. Thorne thought about Darren Ellis, the old couple he'd tied up and robbed…

A catalog of vicious sexual assaults and murders, many still unsolved. The grim details now little more than entries in a uniquely disturbing reference library. A resource to be accessed, in the hope that a past horror might shed light on a present one.

Not this time.

Holland
had
actually pulled the files on two cold murder cases: a young man, thirty or so, found in the boot of a car in 2002. Raped and choked to death with an unidentified ligature. A man in his sixties, attacked in a multistory car park and strangled with washing line in 1996.

Thorne had agreed both with Holland's initial assessment and his final conclusion. Both files had been worth a closer look. Both had been put back.

Once he'd stuffed the report away in his briefcase, Thorne went over and stood by the open window. Forten minutes or so he'd stared across at the house where the party was, trying and failing to identify a song from its annoyingly familiar bass line. Trying and failing to stop thinking about bodies years dead and a body as yet unburied and the photograph he'd given Dennis Bethell…

Then he'd called his father.

After he'd hung up, twenty frustrating minutes later, Thorne stood, holding the phone, and tried to imagine
the synapses in his father's brain misfiring, the thoughts exploding in a shower of tangential sparks…

The cascade of color blackened. It became the dark hood that covered the head of a naked woman and masked the terror on the face of a pale, stiffening corpse. Life choked off and arse exposed and a thin line of brown blood on rusty bedsprings.

Thorne took off what few clothes he still had on, walked through to the bedroom, and dropped down onto the mattress. He lay there in the semidarkness, staring up at the outline of the lampshade that had cost a pound from IKEA, realizing that it was cheap because it was also nasty.

The bed felt as if it were full of grit.

He could feel the dreadful, delicate weight of the case upon him. Like the dark tickle of something unwanted crawling across his body. The sharp, spindly legs of it picking their way across the sheen of sweat on his chest.

Thorne closed his eyes, remembering a moment of calm and contentment on a bracken-covered hillside.

Except that he was unsure it
was
a memory. If it had ever happened, the details had slipped away over time. Perhaps it was the memory of a dream he'd once had, or a fantasy of some sort. Maybe it was a scene from a long-forgotten film or TV show he'd once watched and into which he'd projected himself…

Wherever it came from, two others were always there with him, lying on the hillside among the bracken. A man and a woman, or perhaps a girl and a boy. Their ages were as unclear as their relationship to him or each other, but all three of them were happy. Where they actually were never seemed to matter. The geography of the place was changeable. Sometimes he was sure there was a river down below them. At other times it was a road, the hum of insects becoming the distant drone of traffic.

The only constants were the bracken and the presence of the pair lying just a few feet away, the ground beneath and the sky above the three of them…

It seemed as if they'd eaten something, a picnic maybe. Thorne felt full, lying there, his arms spread out wide, six inches off the ground, moving lazily back and forth through the bracken. He had a smile on his face and his stomach still jumped and fluttered with the final bursts of laughter. He could never be sure who or what had caused them all to laugh such a lot. He could never be sure of much beyond the fine, unfamiliar feeling that surged through him as he remembered. As he imagined. As he
lay
on that hillside.

Blurred as the edges of Thorne's reality on that hillside were—the whys and whens and whos so indistinct as to be virtually nonexistent—it still seemed, at moments such as these, ankle-deep in madness and butchery, a pretty good place to be.

With the first fat raindrops beginning to fall outside, he pressed his head back into the pillow and imagined the fronds of bracken, feathery against his neck.

As the headlights from passing cars played across the bedroom window, Thorne felt only the sunlight on his face.

June 12, 1976

From Kentish Town, Thorne took every shortcut he knew, cutting through side streets until he reached High-bury Corner and then heading east along the Balls Pond Road toward Hackney.

Thorne took a quick glance at his
A–Z.
The florist's was tucked away somewhere behind Mare Street, a stone's throw from London Fields. This area of parkland stood alone in the midst of one of the most depressed areas in the city. It was once grazed by sheep and prowled by highwaymen. Now up-and-comers who directed videos or worked in advertising sat on benches sipping their skinny lattes or walked their pit bulls across the green, doing their best to look like hard men.

Thorne drove along streets bustling with Saturday morning shoppers. Noisy with the cries of greeting, the shouts of traders in the markets. And every few hundred yards, a look on a face or a hand thrust into a pocket that Thorne recognized as the signs of an altogether different kind of business.

Here, as in a dozen other boroughs, street crime was out of control. Phone jacking was virtually a form of social interaction, and if you walked around with a Walkman, you were a tourist who couldn't read a street map.

These days, the highwaymen prowled in gangs.

So the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom and desire for good press, were targeting areas like Hackney,
piloting schemes that would involve the youth of an area. Thorne had read a report of one such scheme involving a couple of earnest young officers trading in the blue serge for hooded tops, and getting down with the kids in a local community center. One had asked a thirteen-year-old gang member if he could think of ways he might avoid getting into trouble with the police.

The kid had answered without a trace of irony. “Wear a ski mask.”

It was a small place, sitting between a minicab firm and a locksmith's. The shopfront was pleasingly old fashioned; the window display minimalist, the name painted in a green, creeping-ivy design on a plain cream background.

BLOOMS
.

Inside, the shop was lit by candles. There was classical music playing quietly in the background. There wasn't a single flower Thorne recognized…

“Are you looking for something in particular?” A man, thirty or so, with a paperback in his hand, stood behind a small wooden counter.

Thorne moved toward him, smiling. “Do people not buy daffodils anymore? Roses, chrysanthemums…?”

A woman carrying an enormous assortment of flowers stepped through a door at the back of the shop. She looked to be in her midthirties. As soon as she spoke, Thorne recognized the voice—gabbling, confident,
amused.
It was clear that Eve Bloom had recognized him as well.

“Well, we can get that sort of specialized stuff in if you want, Mr. Thorne, but it
will
be very expensive…”

He laughed, sizing her up in a few seconds. Though her hands stayed busy among the stems she was carrying, he could tell that she was doing the same.

She was short, maybe five feet two, with blond hair
held up by a large wooden clip. She wore a brown apron over jeans and a sweatshirt. Her face was dotted with freckles, and the smile revealed a gap between her two front teeth.

Thorne fancied the pants off her on sight.

The man behind the counter had picked up a notepad. “Shall I put in an order, Eve? For the roses and those other things…?”

She put down the arrangement, lifted the apron over her head, smiled gently at him. “No, I don't think so, Keith.” She turned to Thorne. “I thought we could go to this great little tearoom just around the corner. Cream teas to die for. What do you think? We've got the weather for it after all. We can pretend we're in Devon or somewhere…”

As they strolled, she talked virtually constantly. “Keith helps me out on a Saturday morning. He's fantastic with flowers, and the customers are very fond of him. Rest of the week I can manage the place on my own, but Saturday, early, that's when I have to make up most of the wedding arrangements, get ahead on the paperwork, accounts, and what have you. Anyway, screw it! Today, Keith can keep an eye on things for an hour or so while we pig out. He's not a genius, bless him, but he works his socks off for…well, for almost nothing, if I'm honest.”

“What does Keith do the rest of the time?” Thorne said. “When you're not exploiting him.”

Eve smiled and shrugged. “Don't really know, to be honest. I think he has to look after his mother a lot. Maybe she's well-off, because he never seems to be short. He's certainly not working in
my
shop for the money, not on what I can afford to pay him. God, I am
so
gasping for a cup of tea…”

The tearoom was kitsch beyond belief, with check
tablecloths, art deco tea sets, and Bakelite radios dotted around on shelves and window ledges. The cream tea for two arrived almost instantly. Eve poured Earl Grey for herself, ordinary tea for Thorne. She lathered jam and clotted cream onto her scone, grinned across the table.

“Listen, when I'm eating is probably the best chance you'll have to get a word in, so I should take your chance if I were you. I know I talk
way
too much…”

“The man who left the message on your answering machine, has he been in touch with you again?” She looked at him, confused. “Follow-up question,” Thorne explained. “Justify the expenses claim, like you suggested. Bit of a long shot, but it seemed as good a question as any…”

She cleared her throat. “No, Detective Inspector, I'm afraid that I never heard from the man again.”

“Thank you. If you think of anything else you will get in touch, won't you? And I needn't tell you that we'd prefer it if you didn't leave the country…”

She laughed and pushed the last piece of a scone into her mouth. When she'd finished it she looked straight at him, raising a hand to shield her eyes against the sunlight that streamed in through the picture window. “I take it you haven't caught him yet?” Thorne looked back at her, still eating. “Did he kill somebody?”

Thorne swallowed. “I'm sorry, I shouldn't…”

“I'm just putting two and two together, really.” She leaned back in her chair. “I know it's a man, because I've heard his voice, and you told me you were with the Serious Crime Group, so I'm guessing that you're not after this bloke because he hasn't taken his library books back.”

Thorne poured himself another cup of tea. “Yes, he did kill somebody. No, we haven't caught him yet.”

“Are you going to?”

Thorne poured
her
a cup…

“Why me?” she said. “Why did he pick me to order the wreath from?”

“I think he picked a name at random,” Thorne said. They'd found a tattered Yellow Pages in the cupboard beneath the bedside table. It had been covered in fingerprints. Thorne doubted any belonged to the killer. “He just let his fingers do the walking.”

She pulled a face. “I knew I shouldn't have shelled out for that bloody box ad…”

Though she talked twice as much and ten times as quickly as he did, Thorne still talked more, and more easily, in the hour or so that followed than he could remember doing to almost anybody for a long time. To any woman, certainly…

“When's the wedding?” Eve asked as their plates were cleared away.

Thorne was struck then by how much ground they'd covered and how quickly. “A week today. God, I'd rather stick needles in my eyes…”

“Do you not get on with your cousin?”

Thorne smiled at the waitress as she popped the bill down on the table. “I barely know him. Probably wouldn't recognize him if he walked in here. Just family functions, you know…”

“Right. You choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives.”

“Yours as bad as mine, then?”

She brushed a few stray crumbs from the tabletop into her hand, emptied it onto the floor. “Is he the same sort of age as you? Your cousin?”

“No, Eileen's a lot younger than my dad, and she had Trevor pretty late. He's still only early thirties, I think…”

“What are you?”

“How
old,
you mean?” She nodded. Thorne opened his wallet, dropped fifteen pounds on top of the bill. “Forty-two. Forty-three in…fuck, in ten days.”

She clipped up a few stray hairs that had tumbled loose. “I won't say that you don't look it, because that always sounds so false, but looking at you, I'd say that they were forty-three pretty interesting years.”

Thorne nodded. “I'm not going to argue, but just so you know…I don't mind about the sounding-false thing.”

She smiled, put on a pair of small almond-shaped sunglasses. “Forty, then. Late thirties at a push.”

Thorne stood up, pulling his leather jacket from the chair behind him. “I'll settle for that…”

 

Back at the shop they swapped business cards, shook hands, and stood together, a little awkwardly, in the doorway. Thorne looked around. “Maybe I should get a plant or something…”

Eve bent down and picked up what looked like a miniature metal bucket. A cactuslike plant sprouted from a layer of smooth white pebbles. She handed it to him. “Do you like this?”

Thorne was far from sure. “What do I owe you?”

“Nothing. It's an early birthday present.”

He studied it from every angle. “Right. Thanks…”

“It's an aloe vera plant.”

Thorne nodded. Over her shoulder, he could see Keith watching them closely from behind the counter. “So I should be all right for shampoo…”

“There's a gel in the leaves, very good for cuts and scrapes.”

Thorne looked at the fierce-looking spikes growing along the edges of the plant's sword-shaped leaves. “That'll come in handy.”

They stepped out onto the pavement, the slight awk
wardness returning. Thorne noticed a silver scooter parked by the side of the shop—one of the latest Vespas, based on the classic design. He nodded toward it. “Yours?”

She shook her head. “God, no. That's Keith's.” She pointed to the other side of the road. “That's me over there…”

Thorne looked across the road at the grubby white van behind which he'd parked the Mondeo. The name of the shop was painted on its side, in the same creeping-ivy design as was on the shopfront.

“The name certainly fits,” he said.

She laughed. “Right. Like being an undertaker called De'Ath. What else could I do? Flowers are the only thing I can think of that bloom…”

Thorne could think of several other things, but he shook his head, not wanting to say anything that might spoil a nice afternoon. “No, you're right,” he said.

Thinking…

Bruises. Tumors. Bloodstains…

 

For the fourth time in the last hour, Welch was answering the same stupid set of questions.

“Date of birth?”

Maybe the officers just passed the list among themselves. You'd have thought that at least one of them could have come up with something more interesting…

“Mother's maiden name?”

But no. Same tired old teasers designed to catch out the impostor. The process had gone unchanged for many years, but these days they really weren't taking any chances. Not since the incident a couple of months earlier. A couple of Pakistanis in a prison up north had swapped places on release day and the silly bastards had let the wrong one out. Several guards had blown their pensions that day and, once the jungle drums had fin
ished beating, given every con in the country a fucking good laugh…

“Do you have any tattoos?”

“Can I ask the audience?”

“You want to be a smart-arse, Welch, we can start the whole thing over again…”

Welch smiled and answered the questions. He wasn't going to do anything silly at this stage of the game. Each door he walked through, each successfully completed series of questions, each tick on a chart took him one step farther away from the center of the place. One step closer to the final door.

Answering pointless questions and signing his name over and over. Taking receipt of his travel warrant and discharge grant. Taking back his property. The battered wallet, the wristwatch, the ring of yellow metal. Always “yellow metal.” Never “gold” in case the bastards lose it…

Then through another door and on to another guard, and all this one gets to say to him is “good-bye.”

Welch walked away toward the gate. He moved slowly, savoring every step, seconds away from the moment when he would hear the clang of the heavy door behind him and feel the heat of the day on his face.

And look up at a sun the color of yellow metal.

 

For Thorne and Hendricks, a Saturday night in front of the television with beer and a takeaway curry was a regular pleasure. For nine months of the year there was football to watch, to argue about. Tonight, the start of the new season still seven weeks away, they would probably watch a film. Or just sit through whatever was on until, a couple of cans in, they stopped really caring. Maybe they would just put some music on and talk.

It was nearly nine o'clock and the light was only just starting to fade. They walked down Kentish Town
Road, away from the restaurant and back toward Thorne's place. Both wore jeans and a T-shirt, though Thorne's were far and away the baggier and less eye-catching. Hendricks carried a plastic bag, heavy with cans of lager, while Thorne took responsibility for the curry. The Bengal Lancer delivered, but it was a nice evening for a walk and there was the added attraction of a cold pint of Kingfisher while they'd waited, the smell coming from the kitchens sharpening the edges of their appetites.

“Why the rape?” Thorne asked suddenly.

Hendricks nodded. “Right. Good move. Let's get the shoptalk out of the way—you know, the rape and murder stuff—then we can relax and enjoy
Casualty
…”