Lazy Bones (19 page)

Thorne heard a sniff and turned to find Sam Karim at his shoulder.

'How's the head?'

Thorne glanced at him. 'What?'

'After last night. I feel like shit warmed up...'

'I'm fine,' Thorne said.

Samir Karim was a large, gregarious Indian with a shock of thick

silver hair and a broad London accent that was delivered at a hundred miles per hour. He planted half of his sizeable backside on to the edge of a desk. 'Fuck al off those tapes, by the way...'

'Which tapes?' , 'CCTV tapes from the Greenwood.'

Thorne shrugged, unsurprised.

'Couple of possibles,' arim said. 'But only from the back. The cameras only real y cover the bar add the area around the desk and the lifts. You can walk in and go straight up the stairs without being seen

at al , if you know where the cameras are...'

'He knew where they were,' Thorne said.

They stared at the board together for a moment or two. 'That's the difference between our team and al the others, isn't it?' Karim said.

'They have a victim. We have a list...'

There's a moment in film and TV shows, a particular shot, a

clich to signify that moment when the penny drops. For real people this means remembering where they've left their car keys, or the title of a song that's been annoying them. For the screen copper, it's usual y a darker revelation. The instant that provides the break in the case. Then, when that pure and bril iant comprehension dawns, the camera zooms towards the face of the hero, crashing in quickly or

sometimes creeping slowly up on them. Either way, it goes in close and it stays there, showing the light of realisation growing in the eyes...

Thorne was not an actor. There was no nod of steely determination, no enigmatic stare. He stood holding his coffee cup, his mouth gaping, like a half-wit.

A list...

The certainty hit him like a cricket bal . He felt a bead of sweat surface momentarily from every pore in his body before retreating again. Tingling; hot, then cold.

'Feeling OK, Tom?' Karim asked.

Zoom in close and hold...

Thorne didn't feel the hot coffee splashing across his wrist as he marched across the room, up the corridor and into Brigstocke's office.

Brigstocke looked up, saw the expression on Thorne's face, put down his pen.

'What...?'

'I know how he finds them,' Thorne said. 'How he finds out where

the rapists are...'

'How?'

'This could al be very simple. Our man might work for the prison service, or hang about in pubs around Pentonvil e and the Scrubs, hoping to get matey with prison officers, but I doubt it.

At the end of the day, finding out where rapists are banged up isn't that hard. Families, court records ... he could just go to newspaper archives and sift through the local rags if he felt like it...'

'Tom...'

Thorne stepped quickly forward, put his coffee cup down on Brigstocke's desk and began to pace around the smal office. 'It's about what happens afterwards. It's about release dates and addresses. I had thought that maybe there was some connection with the families, but Welch was NFA. His family disowned him and moved away years ago.' He glanced across at Brigstocke as if he were making everything

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very obvious. Brigstocke nodded, stil waiting. 'Release details are fluid, right? Prisoners move around, parole dates change, extra days get tagged on to sentences. The kil er has to have access to up-to-date, accurate information...'

'Do I have to phone a friend?' Brigstocke said. 'Or are you going to sodding wel tel me? How does he find them?'

Thorne al owed himself the tiniest flicker of a smile. 'The same way we do.'

Behind his glasses Brigstocke blinked twice, slowly. The confusion on his face became something that might have been regret. Or the anticipation of it. 'The Sex Offenders Register.'

Thorne nodded, picked up his coffee. 'Jesus, we need shooting 'cause it took us this long...'

Brigstocke took a deep breath. He began stepping slowly backwards and forwards in the space between the wal and the edge of the desk. Trying to take this vital, but daunting piece of new information on board. Trying to shape it into something he could handle. 'I don't need

to say it, do I?' he said, final y.

'What?'

'About this not getting out...'

Thorne looked up, past Brigstocke. The sun was moving behind a cloud but it was stil baking in the tiny office. He could feel the sweat gathering in the smal of his back. 'You don't need to say it.'

'Not just because it's.., sensitive. Although it is.'

Thorne knew that Brigstocke was right. The whole issue of the Register had been what the tabloids were fond of cal ing a 'political hot potato' for years. This was just the sort of thing to blow the whole 'naming and shaming' debate wide open again. When he looked back to Brigstocke, the DCI was smiling.

'This might be the way we get him, though, Tom.'

Thorne was counting on it... Brigstocke came around his desk. 'Right, let's start with the bodies that are informed about an offender's registration requirements. The 156

ones that get fed the notification details as a matter of course.' He started to count them off on his fingers. 'Social services, probation...'

'And us, of course,' Thorne said. 'We'd better not forget the most interesting one, had we, Russel ?'

Macpherson House was located in a side street off Camden Parkway. In the course of a century, the building had been a theatre, cinema and bingo hal . Now it was little more than a shel , within which was situated temporary hostel accommodation.

'Fuck me gently,' Stone said. He was craning back his head, staring at the grimy, crumbling ceiling high above him.

Hol and looked up. There were stil traces of gilt on the mouldings. Decorative swirls of plaster leaves trailed across the ceiling and then down towards four ornate columns in each corner of the vast room. 'Must have been amazing...'

There was a week-old copy of the Daily Star on the floor. Stone pushed it aside with his foot. He sniffed at the stale air and pul ed a face. 'It's a bloody shame...'

As they walked, Hol and took Stone through the simple, ironic history of the place. The theatre that had become a cinema. The cinema done for in the seventies by the more popular entertainment of the bingo hal . The bingo hal itself made redundant thirty years later by

the easy availability of scratchcards and the National Lottery. 'From music hal to the Stupid Tax,' Hol and said.

Stone snorted. 'I take it those six numbers never came up, then?' 'I'm stil here, aren't I?'

Their footsteps echoed off the scuffed, stone floors, else were muffled as they walked across the occasional threadbare rug, or curling square of carpet. 'Can't see what's going to replace the Lottery, can you.7'

Hol and shook his head. 'Not as long as there's a cal for it.'

They were walking ten yards or so behind Brian, the hostel supervisor, a big man in his fifties with long, grey hair, a large hoop earring 157

and a multicoloured waistcoat. Without turning round, he held out both arms. Taking in the place.

'Always be alcal for this, though...'

Now, forty feet below the faded rococo grandeur, the space was taken up with cracked sinks and metal beds. A kitchen and a serving hatch. A pair of smal televisions, each attached with a padlock and chain to nearby radiators. Behind the beds, along the wal s, stood row upon row of scratched and dented lockers - some without locks, many without doors. Al rusting and covered in graffiti.

'Council got them for a song,' Brian said. 'When the swimming pool down the road was knocked down. Same week they got this place off Mecca...'

Hol and looked down at the floor as he walked. Shoes under many of the beds, trainers, mostly. The occasional tarry suitcase. Dozens of plastic bags. : Stone took off his jacket. 'Dossers by and large, is it?'

Brian looked back over his shoulder. Hol and thought he looked powerful, like he could handle himself. He probably needed to on occasion. 'Al sorts. Long-term homeless, runaways, addicts. The odd ex-con like Welch...'

'Where do they go during the day?' Hol and asked.

The big man slowed, let Hol and and Stone draw level with him. 'Wandering about. Begging. Trying to find somewhere to sleep.' He smiled when Hol and looked confused. 'This place is warm and they can get something to eat, but there's not a lot of sleeping goes on. Most of them are scared of getting stuff nicked. Even if they do want a kip, a hundred blokes coughing and shifting around on creaky bedsprings is worse than a neighbour with a drum kit...'

'My ex-girlfriend kept me awake half the night,' Stone said. 'Talking in her sleep, grinding her teeth...'

Brian smiled thinly. 'It's quiet enough in here now, but you won't be able to hear yourself think by dinnertime. They'l start drifting back as soon as it starts to get dark. Be rammed in here by nine o'clock.'

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Hol and looked at the lines of beds, three and four deep. Imagined

it.

Eyes down for a ful house.

The supervisor stopped. He tapped on the open door of a locker

and immediately began moving away again. 'This was Mr Welch's. I'l be in the front office if you need anything...'

They both pul ed on gloves. While Stone went through the locker, Hol and got down on his hands and knees and, for the second time in a little over a fortnight, went rummaging under the bed of a recently murdered rapist.

It took less than two minutes to gather together Welch's worldly goods: a battered green holdal ful of clothes which smel ed of Oxfam; a plastic bag of dirty pants and socks; a radio spattered with white paint; an electric razor; a couple of tatty paperbacks...

At the back of the locker, between the pages of one of the books, the photographs of Jane Foley.

'Here she is,' Stone said, holding one of the pictures up between his

fingertips. 'Lovelier than ever.' ? Hol and got to his feet, moved across to take a look. 'How many?' 'Half a dozen. Can't see any letters. Must have chucked them...' Stone slid the photos into an evidence bag, popped it into an inside pocket. Hol and shoved everything else into a black bin-liner. When he'd finished he picked the bag up. It wasn't heavy.

'Not a lot, is it?' he said.

Stone pushed the locker door closed and shrugged. 'That's what you get.'

It was nearly midday and starting to get real y warm. Hol and rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck. He thought about what he guessed was going through Stone's mind. 'Do you not give a shit because Wdch was an ex-con?' he said. 'Or because he was an ex-con who was also a rapist? Honestly, I'm interested...'

Stone thought about it. Hol and bounced the bin-bag against his knees.

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'I suppose I'd give a bit more of a shit if he'd been a forger,' Stone said. 'Less if he'd murdered half a dozen schoolgirls...'

Hol and looked at the expression on Stone's face. He couldn't help but'laugh as they began to move away, back towards the entrance. 'I don't believe it. You've actual y got a fucking sliding scale...'

They walked up Parkway towards the pay and display bay where Stone had parked the Cougar. At regular intervals, rubbish bags like the one Hol and was carrying were piled high on the pavement. After Madame Tussaud's, Camden's Sunday market was now the second most popular tourist attraction in the city, and cleaning up after it was becoming a little like painting the Forth Bridge.

'So, what is it now? Couple of months til the baby?' Stone asked. Hol and swung the bin-bag from one hand to the other. 'Ten weeks.' 'Sophie must be the size of a house...'

Hol and smiled, turned to look into the window of a Japanese restaurant. The plates of plastic sushi, red and yel ow and pink. He promised himself that one of these days he'd try some.

They turned left and Stone unlo'cked the car with a remote. 'So? Excited then?'

'Yeah, she's very excited.'

Stone opened the car door. Looked at Hol and across the roof. 'I meant you...'

'Get your arse up. Right up in the air, that's it. Now, let your fingers do the walking...'

Charlie Dodd was making himself useful. The place had been hired out for a web-cam session and he'd thrown in his services, gratis. He was cheerful y relaying on-screen instructions to the bored-looking girl on the bed when the phone rang.

'Just do some moaning for a minute, sweetheart...'

His hand was slippery against the receiver as he mumbled a greeting and waited.

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'I got your message...'

Dodd recognised the voice straight away. Without looking round he used his hand to indicate to the girl on the bed that she should carry on, then brought it to his mouth and took out the cigarette.

'I was wondering when I was going to hear back from you.'

'I've had a busy weekend.'

Dodd reached for a plastic cup, flicked fag-ash into the inch of cold tea at the bottom. 'Anything interesting?'

For a few seconds there was nothing but the crackle of static. 'You said something about doing me a favour.'

'Done you a favour, mate,' Dodd said. 'Already did it. A big favour.' 'Go on...'

Dodd thought that the man on the other end of the phone sounded relaxed. He was probably putting it on, of course, trying to sound cool because he could guess what was coming.

Because he knew he might have to part with some money and wanted to be in control in case there was haggling to do. It was a pretty convincing act though. Sounded like he knew what Dodd was going tp say...

'The police were here with one of the photos you did. A photo of the girl with the hood on.' Dodd waited for a reaction. Didn't get it. 'I got asked a lot of questions...'

'And did you tel any lies, Mr Dodd?'

Dodd pinched the cigarette between thumb and forefinger, took a final drag. 'A couple of little white ones, yeah. And one dirty, big fucker.' He dropped the nub-end into the plastic cup, turned and watched the girl on the bed. 'I told them I never saw your face. Said you never took the crash helmet off...'