Lazybones (26 page)

 

An hour later, as they hovered outside, saying good-byes, Eve took Thorne's arm and spun him around. “I don't think tonight's a good idea.”

“Did you have a word with Denise?” He looked across to where Eve's flatmate was kissing Holland on both cheeks. Behind them, Jameson stood waiting, hands thrust into his pockets. Denise caught Thorne's eye and gave him an odd smile…

“Not that I'm exactly in any fit state,” Eve said. “I'd already had a bottle of red wine before you propositioned me…”

Thorne grinned. “Trust me, the drunker you are, the better it'll seem.”

“What about next weekend? We could check into a nice hotel on the coast for a couple of nights.” She
looked up at him and nodded slowly. It must have been clear from his expression. “Right, I know…”

“Sorry. Until this case is over, I can't commit to anything like…Shit, a whole weekend away…it just isn't going to happen.”

“It was a stupid idea…”

“It was a
great
idea. Let's go out one night next week. Saturday, or before…”

“Next Saturday's good.”

“Right…” They took a few steps along the pavement, away from the bar. “Come on, it's still not too late. I'll swing for a really nice hotel, honestly. West End somewhere, full English breakfast…”

She put her hands around his neck and pulled him toward her. She whispered it in his ear before she kissed him softly on the cheek. “Saturday…”

As they separated, Thorne glanced across at the others standing by the bar entrance, and saw a look of something like disgust pass across Ben Jameson's face. Turning, Thorne saw that Jameson was watching Keith come hurrying toward the group, cradling a plastic bag.

Unable to hear quite what was said, Thorne watched as Keith delved into the bag and handed Denise something wrapped in red paper. Denise tore the package open and seemed delighted with what looked like a small, decorative box. She threw her arms around Keith's neck, then turned to show the present to Holland and Jameson.

Keith turned, red-faced, and looked across at where Eve was still standing, hand in hand with Thorne. She waved and started to walk toward him. Holland sauntered the other way, toward Thorne, smiling at Eve as they passed. He seemed a little startled when Thorne dropped a hand onto his shoulder.

“I'll run you home, Dave.”

Holland looked confused. He glanced over his shoulder, watched Eve join her friends. “It's fine, really, I can get a cab…”

“There's no need.”

 

Thorne drove down Whitechapel Road, heading south toward Tower Bridge. He took it slowly, still getting used to the steering and the clutch but also enjoying it, wanting the journey to last. They were listening to Merle Haggard as they moved slowly into the one-way system around Aldgate.

“What was going on back there, then?” Holland said.

“Keith works in Eve's shop sometimes. I think he's a bit—”

“No, I mean bringing me along on your night out, like a spare prick at a wedding.”

Thorne checked the rearview mirror. “I wanted to show you the car.” He didn't believe it himself, any more than when he'd told Eve the same thing earlier.

“Things all right with you and Eve?”

Thorne hesitated. Discussions like this one was shaping up to be weren't common between them, and where it might be going was impossible to predict. If Holland hadn't had a few too many, he'd probably be saying nothing. Even socially, the difference in their ranks was rarely forgotten. The unspoken acceptance of the need to keep a certain distance was usually knocking about somewhere, moderating.

Tonight, they were just two friends driving back from a bar, and Thorne decided to go with it.

“I've been fucking her around to be honest, Dave.”

“What?”

“No, not like that. We haven't even…”

“Oh…”

“It's a long story, but basically she thinks I'm messing
her around, and I am. One minute I'm up for it, the next I'm relieved when it isn't happening.”

For ten seconds or so before he spoke, Holland appeared to think about what Thorne had said. “What's all that about, then?”

“I don't know…”

The truth was that Thorne
didn't
know, and if
he
was confused, then he could only wonder at what the hell might have been going through Eve's mind. The whole relationship felt somehow teenage. The ups and downs, the mixed messages…

There was nothing teenage, nothing confusing, about the short film that began to run suddenly in Thorne's head. He watched himself and Eve in the lift that carried them up toward their nice hotel room. They were all over each other, their mouths hungrily exploring necks and shoulders and their hands probing the areas beneath buckles and straps.

Thorne gripped the wheel tighter, hearing the gulps for breath that came when the kissing stopped, and the moans when it began again. The bell as the lift door opened, and the rustle of Eve's legs moving beneath her skirt as they all but ran toward their room.

He saw himself push the card into the door, watched as the two of them stepped through and fumbled, giggling, for the light switch.

There was a body on their bed. Prostrate and bleeding. The blue necklace, cheap and dreadful, biting deep into the neck…

Thorne hit the brakes hard, squealing to a stop at a red light. Holland held his hand out, braced himself against the dashboard.

“Sorry,” Thorne said. “Still getting the measure of it…”

They said nothing for a while, until the Tower of Lon
don loomed, spotlit ahead of them, and they moved slowly past it onto the bridge.

Thorne nudged Holland's arm and nodded upriver. “It's fucking great, isn't it?”

He loved crossing the Thames at night, never tiring of the spectacular views up and down the black river after dark. South to north across Waterloo Bridge was his favorite—to the left, the London Eye, and the dome of St. Paul's away in the City to the east—but crossing virtually any bridge, in any direction, at this time was usually enough to lift Thorne's spirits. Tonight, Butler's Wharf squatted to their left, while down below to the right of them, HMS
Belfast
seemed set in sullied amber, the river around it colored by the lights that ran along each bank.

Foul and fucked up and shitty as the place could be, it was a journey like this that Thorne would urge on anyone thinking about moving out of London…

“What about you and Sophie?” Thorne said. “All geared up for it?”

Holland turned, smiling, but looking like he might throw up. “I'm shitting myself, if you really want to know.”

“Fair enough, it's a scary business. I've not had one, but—”

“It's not just the baby. It's what the baby's going to mean.”

“Workwise, you mean?”

“It just feels like I'm being swept along, you know? Like I'm not in control of what I'm doing anymore.” Thorne shook his head, opened his mouth to say something, but Holland plowed on, growing louder and more animated as he spoke. “Sophie says it's up to me what happens afterward, but she's going to stay at home with the baby and I'll be the only one earning…”

“She'd rather you were doing something else?”

“Yeah, but she was like that
before
she was pregnant. I mean, she'd be delighted if I got out of the job, no question, but there's no pressure. I'm worried that
I
might be the one to start thinking I should find something else. Something a bit better paid, you know?”

“Something safer?”

Holland turned and looked at Thorne hard. “Right.” He turned away again, stared out of the window at the flaking billboards and car showrooms on the New Kent Road, moving past at almost exactly thirty miles per hour.

“I'm worried that I'll resent the baby,” Holland said. His head fell sideways against the window. “For the choices it might force me to make…”

Thorne said nothing. He pressed a button on the sound system's control panel, searching through the CD until he found the track he was looking for. When the song began, he nudged up the volume. “You should listen to this,” he said.

“What is it?”

“It's called ‘Mama Tried.' It's about a man in prison…”

“That's what they're all about, isn't it?”

“It's really about growing up and accepting responsibility. It's about making the right choices…”

For a minute, Holland listened, or pretended to. By then they were coming up to the roundabout at the Elephant & Castle, his street just a little way beyond it. He shook his head suddenly and laughed.

“Growing up?
I'm
not the one with the midlife-crisis car…”

 

Thorne was starving by the time he got in. He stuck three pieces of bread under the grill while the video was
rewinding. He'd managed to go the whole day without hearing the result of the match and was looking forward to watching it.

Half an hour into a fairly dull game, and Thorne was wondering why he'd made the effort…

It had been more than a decade since Tottenhan Hotspur had been involved in a Charity Shield, but Thorne and his father had been to the last few. They'd seen the goalless draw against Arsenal in '91, and the consecutive games in '81 and '82, after Cup Final wins on the bounce.

The first big game he'd ever gone to had been the Charity Shield in 1967. The trip to Wembley, an extra seventh-birthday present after Spurs had beaten Chelsea 2–1 and won the FA Cup. Thorne could still remember the roar, and his amazement at the sight of all that green, as his old man had led him up the steps toward their seats. He always loved that first sight of the grass, all the years they went to matches together after that, emerging into the noise and the light as they climbed up into the stand at White Hart Lane.

He wondered if his father had watched today's game. He'd doubtless have an opinion on it if he had.

Thorne made the call, and listened to twenty minutes of jokes without punch lines.

Carol Chamberlain put down the newspaper when Thorne came back to the table with the coffees.

“It's not great,” she said.

Thorne glanced at the latest lurid headline, spooned the froth from his coffee. “It's not my problem.”

Despite the best efforts of Trevor Jesmond and those above him, the media had got hold of the story a fortnight or so earlier, after the Southern killing. It hadn't quite been the tabloid frenzy that Brigstocke had predicted, but it was pretty basic stuff. One paper had printed pictures of zippered rapist masks with red crosses through them, underneath the headline
THREE DOWN.
Another had gathered testimony from half a dozen rape victims and run it alongside quotes like “Give This Man a Medal” and “The Only Good Rapist Is a Dead One”…

Monday morning's batch of stories involved complaints from those campaigning for the rights and integration of ex-prisoners. There were demands that more be done to catch the killer, accusations that the Met was dragging its feet. Only the night before, Thorne had watched a heated debate on
London Live
between representatives of rape-crisis organizations, their counterparts from prisoners'-rights pressure groups, and senior police officers. The assistant commissioner, flanked by a scary female commander and a sweating Trevor Jesmond, had
reminded one lobby that the murder victims had themselves been raped, while assuring the other that everything possible was being done.

Thorne had turned the program off around the time Jesmond began to look like a rabbit caught in the headlights, blathering about two wrongs not making a right…

“Your superiors might decide to
make
it your problem,” Chamberlain said.

Thorne smiled. “Is that what you used to do?”

“Of course. I did ‘Passing the Buck' seminars at Hendon…”

They were sitting at a table in the shade, outside the small vegetarian café in the middle of Highgate Woods. It was all a bit organic and right-on for Thorne's taste, but Carol had wanted to eat outside somewhere and it had seemed as good a place as any.

The fancy bread was hideously overpriced, but it was all on expenses…

Carol Chamberlain's cold case had been taken away from her as soon as it had become hot again. She'd had no choice in the matter and was already working hard on something else. Still, Thorne knew how much they owed her and considered it the least he could do to keep her up to speed. More than that, he actually enjoyed their discussions, finding Chamberlain to be an incredibly useful sounding board. They'd met up or talked on the phone a few times now, since she'd first barged into his office. They gossiped and bitched and bounced ideas around…

“At least they haven't made the connection with the Foley killing,” she said. “They don't know about Mark and Sarah yet…”

Thorne reached across for the paper and flipped it over. He scanned the football stories on the back page. “It's only a matter of time.”

“It could be good, of course.”

“How?”

“It might be the way to find them.”

“Or frighten them away for good…”

Once coffee was finished and pudding decided against, Chamberlain stood and began piling up their plates. “Let's take the long way back to the cars.” She rubbed her stomach. “Walk some of this off…”

 

“She was asking for you, Dave…”

Having fetched him from his office and pointed to the woman in question, Karim left Holland in the doorway of the Incident Room. Stone appeared silently at Holland's shoulder, and they stared across at where Joanne Lesser sat in a chair by the window.

“Mmm,” Stone groaned. “Soul food…”

Holland nodded, turned to him. “Racist
and
sexist in two words. That's bloody good going even for you, Andy…”

“Fuck off.”

“Christ, you're on good form, mate…”

“Seriously, she's very tasty, though. You're a lucky bastard.” Holland looked at him. “Well, she's obviously up for it. First she's on the phone, now she's come in to see you personally…”

Holland led the way across the Incident Room, Lesser standing eagerly as he and Stone approached. He was sure that what Stone had been suggesting was only in his own, sexually skewed imagination. Still, for more than just the obvious reasons, he hoped that Joanne Lesser had something important to say.

Five minutes later, they sat, the three points of a small triangle, in Holland and Stone's office. Plastic cups of tea on the edges of desks…

“The dates have been bothering me,” Lesser said.

“The dates of the foster placements?” Holland began sheafing through the notes on his lap.

“It's slightly different now, but back then we'd have ceased to monitor a placement once the child had turned sixteen. From then on, they were no longer deemed to be the responsibility of social services…”

“Right.” Holland was still searching.

“I double-checked the information on the index cards—you know, the information that I sent to you—and it doesn't quite make sense.”

“What doesn't?” Stone said.

“The last recorded monitoring date was February 1984. That would have been a home visit, most probably. At least a phone call…”

Holland had found the page he was looking for. He ran his finger down the list, stopped at the date Lesser had mentioned. “Mr. and Mrs. Noble.” The Nobles should have been back from their holidays by now. He'd left a message, but they hadn't got back to him…

Lesser leaned forward on her chair, looking from Stone to Holland as she spoke. “I checked the children's dates of birth, just to be on the safe side, but there's still a problem.”

Holland looked at the dates. He turned the page, looking for something else, and when he'd found it, he saw the anomaly. “They weren't old enough,” he said.

Lesser nodded, the blush beginning around her throat. Holland could almost have blushed himself. This was something he should have seen,
would
have seen if he'd been giving it the proper attention. He'd been half-arsed, hadn't considered it important enough. He should have let Stone give him a hand when it had been offered. Now Stone was the one sitting there, probably enjoying every minute of it, as simple,
evident
facts were spelled out for Holland by a member of the public…

“Nineteen eighty-four?” Stone said. “So, the kids would have been…”

“Fifteen and thirteen,” Lesser said. “Mark was almost sixteen, fair enough. If it had just been him I wouldn't have been concerned, but the little girl was nowhere near old enough for monitoring to stop. You can see why I thought it might be important…”

“What are the reasons you might stop monitoring a case?” Holland said.

“There's only two that I can think of. If a family moves away it would be handed over to a different area, or even a completely different county.”

“I reckon that's it,” Holland said. He began turning pages again until he found the current address for the Nobles. “Romford far enough?”

Lesser nodded. “Doesn't come under us.”

“Does it say how long they've been living there, though?” Stone asked.

“No, I'll have to check. Last record in any local school is 1984, so there's every chance that's when they moved.” He turned back to Lesser. “What's the other reason, Joanne? You said one reason was moving…”

“Adoption.” Holland and Stone both looked back at her blankly. “Again, things are a bit more rigorous now, but then, once the adoption order had been signed, that was it. Not our responsibility anymore.”

“I get the feeling you've already checked this…”

She shrugged. “I know someone in Adoption, so I gave her a ring. Their records are a bit more organized than ours. Have you got a pen?”

Holland couldn't help smiling. He stretched across and grabbed a pen from his desk. “Go ahead…”

“Irene and Roger Noble formally adopted Mark and Sarah Foley on February twelfth, 1984. They may well have moved shortly after that, but that was certainly the last contact the children had with Essex social services…”

Holland scribbled down the information. From everything they knew, it seemed that it was the last contact Mark and Sarah Foley had had with anybody.

 

They walked slowly around the edge of the cricket field toward the children's playground; moving along the path of shadow cast by a line of overhanging oaks and birches. Deep into the school holidays, there were plenty of people around. The temperature was starting to drop as the sky clouded over, but here and there were glimpses of a dark blue, like bruises fading on puffy flesh.

“Mark Foley still sounds like a good bet to me.”

“Yeah, I think so, too,” Thorne said. “Just wish I could cash it in.”

“It'll happen. He can't stay hidden forever.”

“I've still got a problem with motive, though.”

Chamberlain threw Thorne a look of theatrical surprise. “I thought you were the type who didn't care about
why
…”

“Ultimately, it's not my job, is it? But if it's going to help me catch him…”

“Go on…”

“I can see the motive for killing Alan Franklin…”

“It's about as good as it gets. Franklin caused everything, might just as well have killed his parents. Took him long enough to get revenge, though.”

“I think I can understand the waiting,” Thorne said.

Chamberlain grinned. “Maybe he's just lazy.”

Thorne thought he was pretty well qualified to give an opinion on that one. “I don't think so…”

They came slowly to a halt.

“He was growing up,” Thorne said. “Letting his body grow strong, letting the hatred grow stronger. Then he waits until Franklin's old, until he feels safe, before he puts an end to it in that car park.”

“Only that isn't an end to it…”

“No, it isn't. It should have been, though, shouldn't it? Mark settles it, gets clean away with it, gets on with his life.”

“Whatever
that
is…”

“So why the hell does he pop up again now? Why these others? Why kill Remfry, Welch, and Southern?”

“Maybe he enjoys it.”

“I'm damn sure he's enjoying it
now,
but that's not why he started. Not why he started again, I mean. Something else happened…”

“The rape element is crucial, though, you've always said that. Maybe he was raped himself.”

“Maybe.” Thorne felt like they were going over old ground. They'd considered this back when they thought the killer might have been an ex-prisoner, looking to settle an old score. It was possible, certainly, but it felt stale to him, and unhelpful.

Chamberlain jumped at a sudden, sharp
crack
from behind them. Half a dozen boys were messing about in the cricket nets, and for a minute or two, the pair of them stood and watched. When she finally spoke, Chamberlain had to lean in close to make herself heard over the noise the kids were making.

“Something I remember from a poem at school,” she said. Thorne kept his eye on the action, inclining his head toward her to listen. ‘Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies…'”

“What's that from?” Thorne asked as they began walking again.

“One of those anthologies we had to read. I don't know…”

As they reached their cars, parked on the main road, Chamberlain stopped and put a hand on Thorne's arm. “It's good, knocking ideas around like this, Tom, it's
useful. But don't forget that if the answer's there, if it's
anywhere,
it's in the details. It's in the facts that make up the pattern of a case.”

Thorne nodded, opening the door of the BMW. He knew that there were answers. He knew, too, that he already had them somewhere, misfiled and, thus far, irretrievable. Lost among the tens of thousands of facts, relevant or otherwise, to the case. The ever-expanding headful of shit that he carried around with him all the time: names and places and dates and snippets of statements; words and numbers and small gestures; access codes and times of death; the look on a relative's face; the scuff mark on a hotel guest's shoe; the weight of a dead man's liver…

Thorne knew that the answer was buried in there somewhere and it bothered him. Something else bothered him and he thought twice before mentioning it.

“What you were saying about patterns…”

“What?”

“The second and third victims. He changed the pattern of killing between Welch and Southern.”

“Of course he did. Because he presumed that once you'd connected the killings, you'd contact the prisons and warn them. He had to do the next one differently.”

“What if he
knew,
rather than presumed?” Thorne said. “What if he knew because he's close to the investigation? We always talked about him having access of some kind. Then other stuff came along and the idea got blurred. What if I was wrong to dismiss the idea that the killer's one of us…?”

 

When Thorne got back to Becke House, he was directed straight to Brigstocke's office. Holland was telling Brigstocke and Kitson about what Joanne Lesser had said, and his subsequent phone conversation with Mrs. Irene
Noble. Thorne made Holland backpedal, asked him to go over Lesser's visit again until he was up to speed.

“It's interesting that the dates of the adoption and the move look to be so close together,” Brigstocke said.

“It gets a lot more interesting. When I finally got hold of Irene Noble, told her I wanted to talk about Mark and Sarah Foley, the first thing she did was to ask me if we'd found them.”

Thorne looked across at Brigstocke. “How would she know we were looking?”

“No, sir, that's not what she meant,” Holland said. He flipped over a page in his notebook, read from it. “‘Have you finally found them?' That's what she actually said. She's talking about twenty years ago.” Holland looked up and across at Thorne. “She claims that the kids disappeared back in 1984…”