Lazy Bones (16 page)

He pul ed out the one photo of Jane that he'd brought with him. God, she looked gorgeous. He dreamed that perhaps she would bring the hood with her, maybe even the handcuffs. He'd secretly brought the picture along in the hope that they could try to recreate it.

He'd spent such a long time imagining what she looked like underneath the hood, or with her face lifted up out of the shadow and now, when he was about to see her, the truth was that he didn't care. He

126

knew what her body was like, that she would surrender it to him, al ow him to take it. Besides, when it came to it, he'd always been a firm believer in not looking at the mantelpiece when you were poking the fire.

Welch let out a long, slow breath. Looked at his watch. He stroked himself through his trousers, unsure that he'd be able to contain himself if she didn't get a bloody shift on...

Somebody knocked at the door. Three times. Softly.

On the way back to the bar, his father out of harm's way, Thorne had been col ared by his Auntie Eileen who asked if he was having a good time, and would he mind having a quick word with one of her nephews who was thinking of joining the police force? Thorne thought that he'd rather wash a corpse and said that yes, of course he would, and pushed his way back towards where he hoped his drink would stil be waiting...

He downed a third of the pint in one and as it went down, he watched as hard glances were exchanged on the other side of the b. Some cousin or other and the bride's mate, looking like they fancied it. Thorne decided that even if they started punching seven shades of shit out of each other right there and then, he wasn't going to raise a finger.

He realised that he was wrong about this stuff only happening at family weddings. With the possible exception of the disco, you could get it al at family funerals as wel . The key word was family, that first syl able stretched out and said with a metaphorical jab of the finger, if you were a character on EastEnders, or a mockney TV celebrity, or from a particular part of South-east London.

Thorne looked across. He guessed that the trouble would kick off a little later. In the car park, maybe.

It was events like these, he thought, births, marriages and deaths, that saw the undercurrents rise to the surface and become unstable. Bubbling up and swirling in eddies of beer and Bacardi. Sentimentality, aggression, envy, suspicion, avarice.

127

History. The ties that bind, twisted...

This was the stuff that was reserved for those closest to us, that was hidden away from strangers, even when that was exactly what most of your family were.

Thorne saw a lad, sixteen or seventeen, walking across the bar towards him. This was probably the nephew in search of careers advice. On second thoughts, Thorne was in just the mood to give him some...

He might start with a few statistics. Such as the number of murders committed by persons unknown to the victim, and how tiny they were compared to those committed by persons to whom the victim was actual y relawd. He would tel the boy that when it came to families, to the tensions within them and the acts carried out in their name, he should never, ever be surprised. He would tel the stupitt, eager young sod that families were dangerous.

That they were capable of anything.

When the man had come through the door, Welch could see straight away that he was in trouble.

There was a look on the man's face that Welch recognised, that he'd spent years in prison trying to avoid. It was the look he'd seen often on the faces of ordinary, honest-to-goodness murderers and armed robbers. The same look of contempt, of threat, that Caldicott must have seen down in that laundry room before they flash-fried his face...

Welch thought that perhaps he should have struggled more, but there was little he could do. The man was far stronger than he was. The years inside had toughened him up mental y but his body had gone soft and flabby. Too much time reading and not nearly enough in the gym...

Welch spent his last moments thinking that pain was so much worse when you were unable to fight it, when you could not protest its presence...

128

The scream in his throat was stopped by whatever had been thrown around his neck and pressed back into a strangled, bubbling hiss. His body, too, could do nothing. It drew itself instinctively from the agony, but each jerk away from the tearing, from the stabbing, just tightened the grip of the line that was crushing the breath out of him.

Welch pushed his head down towards the carpet, feeling the line bite further into his neck, his teeth deeper into his tongue. He strained against the hands that dragged his neck back, contorting himself, his body foetal in the seconds before death.

I'm dying like a baby, Welch thought, his eyes wide but seeing nothing inside the hood, a softer, blacker darkness beginning final y to come over him...

Thorne had just put his father to bed. He was walking across the corridor to his own room when the phone rang. He let it ring until he was inside the room.

'You're up late...'

'Great, isn't it?' Eve said. 'Lie-in tomorrow. So, how was the wedding?'

'Perfect. Dul speeches, shit food and a fight.' 'What about the actual wedding...?' 'Oh that? Yeah, that was OK...'

She laughed. Thorne sat on the bed, wedged the phone between shoulder and chin and started to take his shoes off. 'Listen, I'm real y sorry about last night...'

'Don't be sil y. How's your dad?'

'You know, annoying. Mind you, he was annoying before ...' Thorne thought he could hear the sound of traffic at the other end of the line. He guessed Eve was out somewhere, but thought better of asking where. 'Seriously though, sorry about rushing off. Did the food get eaten?'

'Don't worry, it wil ...'

'Sorry...'

129

'It's fine, there would have been tons left anyway. I'd made loads and Denise eats sod al , so I wouldn't worry about it.'

Thorne began to unbutton his shirt. 'Say thanks to her and Ben for

the entertainment, by the way...'

'Good, wasn't it? I think I broke it up too early though. Another minute, and I'm sure we'd have seen a glass of wine thrown in someone's face...'

'Next time.'

She yawned loudly. 'God, sorry...'

'I'l let you get to bed,' he said. He was imagining her in the back of

a cab, pul ing up outside her flat

'Sleep wel , Tom.'

Thorne lay back down on his bed. 'Listen, you know that scale of

one to ten? Can I move up to an eight...?'

Whorne's phone rang again eight hours later. Its insistent chirrup pul ed him up from the depths of a deep sleep. Dragged him from a dream where he was tryin to stop a man bleeding to death. Each time he put his finger over a hole, another would appear, as if he were Chaplin trying to plug a leak. Just when it seemed he had al the wounds covered, the blood began to spurt from a number of holes in him...

'You'd better get back, sir,' Hol and said.

'Tel me...'

'The kil er's ordered another wreath...'

130

27 NOVEMBER, 1996

Stooping to pick up the car keys he'd dropped, Alan Franklin winced in pain. A fortnight shy of retirement, and his body, like a precision alarm clock, was tel ing him that it was just the right time. The back pain and the talk of retirement cottages abroad had begun on almost exactly the same day...

He straightened up, his noisy exhalation echoing around the almost deserted car park. They'd probably talk about it again tonight, the two of them, over a bottle of wine. Sheila was leaning towards France while he fancied Spain. Either way, they would be off. There was nothing to keep them, after al . The three children he'd had with Emily were grown up and producing kids of their own. He'd miss the grandchildren, of course he would, ut

it wasn't like he and Sheila were going to be far away. They had no real ties. ? . He fumbled for the key to the Rover, pushed it towards the lock.

Sheila would probably get her way in the end of course, she usual y did. It had to be said that more often than not she was right. She'd been right this morning, tel ing him that it was going to freeze, that he needed to wrap up

warm.

He turned the key, popped up the central locking.

As he reached for the door handle, something passed in front of his eyes with a swish and bit back, hard into his neck, pul ing him off his feet... .

He hit the floor before his briefcase did, before he had a chance to cry out, one leg broken and bent behind, the other straight out in front of him, hands flying to his throat, fingers wedging themselves between line and neck.

Hands scrabbled at his own, tearing at his fingers, pul ing them away. A fist crashed into the side of his head and as he rocked with the impact, he felt his fingers, numb and running with blood, slipping from beneath the line. And hot breath on the back of his neck...

133

He watched his leg shooting out, the foot kicking desperately against the Rover's dirty, grey hubcap.

He remembered suddenly the face of the woman underneath him. Smelt hirnselJ; the aftershave he used to love. Felt again that strength in his arms.

He saw her legs kicking out against the boxes piled high on either side of the stockroom. Heard the dul thud of her stockinged feet on the cardboard. He felt the movement beneath him die down and then stop, saw her eyes close tight.

It seemed to be getting dark very quickly. Perhaps the lights in the car park were on some sort of timer. Fading to save electricity. He could just make out his foot, the heel of his brogue stil crashing into the hubcap, again and again. Cracking the cheap plastic.

Then, just black and the rushing of his blood, and the sound of his heartbeat which thumped inside his eyebal s as the line tightened.

He saw his wife, smiling at him from the garden, and the woman beneath him trying to turn her head away, and his wife, and then the woman, and final y the woman where his wife should have been, tel ing him how cold it was going to get.

Laughing, and reminding him not to forget his scarf...

134

TEN

Carol Chamberlain had always been an early riser, but by the time her husband shuffled, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen at a little after seven o'clock, she'd already been up a couple of hours. He flicked on the kettle, nodded to himself. He'd known very wel she would have trouble sleeping after the phone cal .

It had come the evening before, in the ad break between Stars in their Eyes and Blind Date. As soon as the cal er had identified himself, begun to tel her what he wanted, Carol had understood the quizzical look on Jack's face when he'd handed her the receiver.

She'd listened to everything that the Commander had to say. From the audible exasperation in his voice it was clear that she'd asked a lot more questions than he'd been expecting.

After fifteen minutes she had agreed to think about what she'd been asked.

The new team had been set up, she was told, to utilise some of the resources that had been - how had he put it? - wasted in previous years. The basic idea was that highly capable ex-officers could bring years of valuable experience to bear on re-examining old, dead cases. Would be able to cast a fresh eye across them...

135

For most of the time since she'd hung up, since they'd gone back to watching Saturday-night TV, Carol had been in two minds. She was certainly a 'wasted resource', but much as she was happy, no, desperate, to do something, she had also heard something dubious in the voice of the unspeakably young Commander. She knew immediately that he and many others would be picturing hordes of aged ex-coppers shuffling in from Eastbourne, on sticks and Zimmer frames, waving dog-eared warrant cards and shouting: 'I can stil cut it. I'm eighty two, you know...'

Jack put a mug of tea down in front of her. He spoke softly. 'You're

going to do it, aren't you, love?'

She looked up at him. Her smile was nervous, but stil wider than it

had been in a while.

'I can stil cut it,' she said.

While Thorne had been racing back from Have, shagging the hired Corsa up three different motorways, Brigstocke had made the scene at the Greemvood Hotel secure. By the time Thorne arrived, it was nearly three hours since the body hey would later identify as Ian Welch had been discovered, and more than twelve since he'd been kil ed. There was little else for Thorne to do but stare at him for a while.

'Wel , it's a slightly nicer hotel anyway,' Hendricks said.

Hol and nodded. 'They even sent us up some coffee...'

'There's a CCTV set-up in the lobby as wel ,' Brigstocke said. 'It's

pretty basic, I think, but you never knmv.'

It was a classic businessman's hotel. Trouser presses, Teasmades and bog-standard soap in the bathroom. The simple, clean room couldn't have been more different from the pit they'd stood in three weeks earlier. Save of course for the one, gruesome feature they had in common.

As with the murder scene in Paddington, the bed had been stripped

and the bedding taken away. The clothes lay scattered but the body

itself had been precisely positioned. Dead centre with head towards the

136

wal , belt around the wrists, white hands bloodless. The hood, the line around the neck, the dried, red-brown trails snaking down the thighs like gravy stains...

This one looked a little older than Remfry. Late forties maybe. Brigstocke gave Thorne what little they had. Thorne took the information in, standing by the window, one eye on the fields beyond the main road. They were two minutes from the motorway, fifty yards from a major roundabout, but on this Sunday morning, Thorne could hear nothing but birdsong and the rustle of a bodybag.

This time the kil er had ordered his floral tribute personal y. The order had been placed with a twenty-four-hour florist at just after eight-thirty the evening before and paid for with the victim's debit

card. Thanks to that, they already had a name for the dead man... 'He didn't fancy leaving a message this time,' Brigstocke said. Thorne shrugged. Either the kil er had learned from his mistake or had done what he needed to do in leaving his voice on Eve Bloom's machine.