Lazy Bones (27 page)

She'd wheeled the trol ey laden with cutlery and table linen into the lift and pressed the button for the top floor. Just as the doors were closing, a couple had stepped in. She was attractive, wearing a smart skirt and silk blouse. He was very attractive, and dressed a little more casual y.

On the first floor, the woman got out. They hadn't been a couple after al . As the doors closed, the man turned to her and smiled. Feeling herself redden, Fiona looked down and began to count the knives and forks.

The belI rang as the lift reached the top floor and she straightened her wheels, nudged them towards the door. The man took a step forward to hold the door for her. He gave her another smile as she pushed the trol ey out, the cutlery clattering noisily as she moved past him.

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A fev feet up the corridor, she'd turned and looked at him, a little confused that he hadn't stepped out of the lift himself. Just as the doors began to shut, the man in the leather biker's jacket had caught her 'looking at him. He turned his palms upwards and shook his head at his own stupidity.

'Miles away. Missed my floor...'

There were times when investigations seemed shrouded in darkness. When the light, no matter the season or time of day, seemed to have faded away in those rooms where a case was worked, where progress in catching a kil er was discussed and evaluated. For those groping around in the dark, there was always the frustrating feeling that if someone could just point a torch in the right direction, something important would be revealed. Then the shadows woultt shorten and slip away, but nobody knew where to shine the 1.ight.

The day was getting off to a slow start, but Brigstocke seemed in no mood to crack the whip. It was fine with Thorne. He sensed that an extra ten minutes or so spent sitting around together, talking about nothing much for a while before they got down to it, might do everybody some good.

Might shorten a few shadows...

They sat on and around three different desks in the Incident Room. The coffees and teas were being eked out. Magazines and papers were being flicked through, space stared into, clocks glanced at.

'Anybody have a decent Friday night?' Thorne said. Nobody seemed awful y keen on answering one way or the other. Thorne laughed. 'Fuck me, what a bunch of party animals!' He turned to look at Stone. 'Come on, Andy, you're young and single...'

Stone looked up, but only for a second. 'Too knackered...' Hol and laughed. 'You big girl...'

'You won't be laughing once your missus sprogs,' Brigstocke said.

'Right.' Kitson walked across to the recently instal ed water cooler.

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'You should be making the most of your Friday nights, Dave. Soon be a thing of the past...'

Hol and grunted, turned his attention back to the sports page of the Daily Mirror. Thorne craned his head to look at the headline. The latest on a story that Spurs were about to sign some temperamental Italian midfielder.

'What about the rest of the weekend, then?' Thorne threw the question open to any of them. 'Any plans?'

The reaction - a lot of non-committal shrugging - was much the same as before. Thorne began to think that his own social life, such as it was, looked pretty bloody exciting by comparison. Mind you, it had picked up a lot lately...

'Sundays in the Brigstocke household are sacred and unchanging.' The DCI picked up his briefcase, moved away in the direction of his office. 'Dog-walking, laundry, the bloodbath of Sunday lunch with one set of parents or another. Oh, and a trip to the garden centre, or maybe B & Q if I'm real y lucky...'

Thorne laughed, looking around, sharing it. He thought about e last Sunday he'd spent. Something' Brigstocke had said sparked another memory and Thorne turned to watch Yvonne Kitson heading back across the room, drinking from a paper cone fil ed with cold water.

'Did you get my message last Sunday?' She swal owed, looked at him blankly. 'I cal ed. Late morning, I think...'

Kitson dropped the empty cone into a wastepaper basket. 'Any particular reason?' 'Wel , if there was, I'm buggered if I can remember it,' Thorne said. Kitson looked at him for a second or two, her face showing nothing. 'I didn't get the message.'

Thorne shrugged. 'Doesn't matter.' He nodded towards where Brigstocke had been just a minute before. 'I'd thought it would be a good time to catch you, you know? Reckoned you'd be another one with a family routine on a Sunday.'

Kitson moved past him, picked up the magazine she'd been reading

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and dropped it into her bag. She took a step towards the toilets, then turned to Thorne, nodding as though she'd just remembered something. 'I was at the gym...'

The Incident Room was coming to life, starting to fil with noise and movement. Hol and walked across it, evidently catching the tail-end of Thorne and Kitson's conversation.

'You should get together with Stoney,' he said. 'He's wel into weights and al that.' Hol and looked over to where Andy Stone was sitting on the edge of a desk, chatting to a trainee detective. 'He might be a lanky streak of piss, but he looks like a light-heavyweight with his shirt off...'

Kitson looked at Thorne and raised her eyebrows. Her face was open and relaxed again. Her tone, when she spoke to Hol and, was matey and suggestive. 'Easy, tiger,' she said.

Hol and started to say something else, but Thorne was already moving away from them. He knew that by the erd of the day the heat and the frustrations of the case would combine to leave him as tightly wound as the E-string on a ledal-steel guitar. He wanted to get into his office, cal Eve and organise somethirig that would help lessen that tension just a little.

'Christ, you sound even more harassed than I am...' 'I told you, Saturdays are the busiest day.' 'Keith's mum stil no better, then?' 'Sorry?'

'Keith not around to help out?'

'Oh. No ...'

Thorne looked up as Kitson walked in and moved across to her desk. Her look told him that she knew exactly who he was talking to. Thorne lowered his voice...

'Fancy going to see a film tonight?'

'Yeah, why not. There's a copy of Time Out in the flat, I'l see what's

on...

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From nowhere, and for no immediately obvious reason, the case burst its way into their conversation. Into Thorne's head. The image that would not focus. The thought that would not reveal itself. Something he'd read and something he hadn't...

At the sound of Eve's voice, the phantom thought vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. 'Tom?'

'Yeah ... that's fine. Maybe we could do a bit of shopping tomorrow.'

There was a pause. 'Anywhere in particular?'

Thorne dropped the volume even further, cupped his hand around the mouthpiece.

'The bed shop...'

Eve laughed, and when she spoke again, her voice was lowered. Thorne guessed from the noise that she had a shop ful of customers. 'Thank fuck for that,' she said.

'I'm pleased you're pleased,' Thorne said.

'Yes, wel , it's about bloody time. I'd decided I wasn't going to mention it again. I didn't want to sound desperate.' I, Thorne glanced up. Kitson was hunched over some paperwork. 'Listen, I had a long look at myself in the mirror this morning. I'd say "desperate" is a pretty good word for it...'

Fiona only had a couple of rooms left.

The girls usual y worked to a set pattern in terms of floors, corridors and so on, but the order in which individual rooms were cleaned varied from day to day. Rooms with a I)O NOT

DSq'tm, sign hung on the door would obviously get done later than those with used breakfast trays left outside, while some rooms would get knocked on to a later shift.

There were two rooms at the end of her corridor on the first floor that stil needed doing. She looked at her watch. It was twenty to ten...

Fiona grabbed a bucket crammed with sponges, sprays and bottles, nudging the Hoover towards the bedroom door with her foot. She 227

knocked on the door and counted to five, thinking about eggs and bacon and bed. It was the same most mornings. By this time, by the end of this corridor, she would be thinking about home, a late break fas and a few more gorgeous hours wrapped up in her duvet.

Twenty minutes. She might get both rooms done before the end of her shift if she was lucky, though it would obviously depend on what sort of state they were in.

She reached down for the pass-key card hanging from a curly, plastic chain around her waist...

There was a tune going through her head. The song that had woken her on the clock-radio, a present from her nan when the exams had finished. The song was very old fashioned, just a singer and a guitar, but the tune had stayed with her al morning.

She eased the card into the lock and slid it out again. The light below the handle turned green. She pushed down and leaned against the door...

From the corner of her eye, she saw someone coming towards her along the corridor. It looked like one of the snotty old cows that ran housekeeping. She couldn't be sure' because the woman's face was al but hidden behind an enormous arrangement of lilies.

Turning sideways, she eased open the door with her hip. The Hoover was kicked across the threshold, left to hold the door ajar while she turned back to the trol ey to grab her other bits and pieces...

Two months later, Fiona would be offered her chance, her place on the drama course in Manchester, but she would not take it up. Not that September, at any rate. She would get her two Bs and a C but it would not mean a great deal to her. Two months later, her mother would remove the slip of paper from the envelope and read out the results and try to sound excited, but her daughter would stil not be hearing very much. The scream that had torn through her body eight weeks earlier would stil be echoing in her head and drowning out pretty much everything.

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The sound of a scream and a picture of herself, of a young girl stepping through a doorway and turning. Faced with a peculiar kind of filth. Stains that she could never hope to remove with the bleaches and the waxes and the cloths which spil from a bucket, tumbling noisily to the bedroom floor.

It wasn't much past ten yet, but Thorne was already starting to wonder what the lunchtime special at the Royal Oak might be, when the middle-aged woman walked into his office.

'I'm looking for DC Hol and,' she said.

She'd marched in without knocking, so Thorne wasn't keen from the kick-off, but he tried to be as nice as he could. The woman was short and dumpy, probably pushing sixty. She reminded him a bit of his Auntie Eileen, and he suddenly had a good idea who she

was.

'Oh, right, are you Dave's...?'

The woman cut him off and, as she spoke, she dragged a chair from behind Kitson's desk, plonked it in front of Thorne's and sat self down.

'No, I'm not. I'm Carol Chamberlain. Ex-DCI Chamberlain from AMRU...'

Thorne reached for a pen and paper to take notes, thinking, Fucteing Crintely Squad, al I need. He leaned across the desk and proffered a hand. 'DI Thorne...'

Ignoring the hand, Carol Chamberlain opened her briefcase and began to rummage inside. 'Right. You'l do even better. I only asked for Hol and' - she pul ed out a battered green folder covered in yel ow Post-It notes, held it up - 'because his was the name.., attached to this.' Emphasising the last word, she dropped the folder down on to Thorne's desk.

Thorne glanced at the file and held up his hands. He tried his best to sound pleasant as he spoke. 'Listen, is there any chance we can do this another time? We're up to our elbows in a very big case and...'

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'I know exactly what case you're up to your elbows in,' she said. 'Which is why we should real y do it now.'

Thorne stared at her. There was a steel in this woman's voice that suggested it would not be worth his while to argue. With a sigh, he pul ed the folder across the desk, began to leaf through it.

'Five weeks ago, DC Hol and pul ed the file on an unsolved murder from 1996.' Aside from the steel, her voice had the acquired refinement that often came with rank, however distant, but Thorne thought he detected the remnants of a Yorkshire accent beneath. 'The victim's name was Alan Franklin. He was kil ed in a car park. Strangled with washing line.'

'I remember,' Thorne said. He flicked a couple of pages over. It was one of the cases Hol and had pul ed off CRIMINT. 'There were a couple of these that we looked at and then dismissed..Nothing suggested that...'

Chamberlain nodded, dropped her eyes to the folder. 'This was

handed to me as a cold case. Myfirst cold case, as it happens...'

'I read about the initiative. It's a good idea.'

'I've been looking at the Franklin murder again...'

'Right...' Thorne stopped, noticing the faintest trace of enjoyment then, another tiny line around her mouth that cracked open for just half a second and was gone. It was enough to prompt a reaction in him, a flutter of something that began, as always, at the nape of his neck...

'Alan Franklin should have been known to us, to those who were investigating his murder back in '96. His name should have come up on a routine check...'

Thorne knew there was no need to ask why. He knew she was about to tel him. He watched, and listened, and felt the tingle grow and spread around his body.

'In May 1976, Franklin stood trial at Colchester Crown Court. He was accused of rape. Accused and acquitted.'

Thorne caught a breath, let it out again slowly. 'Jesus...'

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Like a beam of light in the right direction...

Later, when Thorne and the woman he'd thought was Dave Hol and's mother knew and liked each other better, Carol Chamberlain would confess to him that this was one of those rare moments she'd missed more than anything. The seconds looking at Thorne, just before she revealed the most significant fact of al . When she'd had to fight very hard to stop herself grinning.

'Alan Franklin was accused of raping a woman named Jane Foley...'

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