Lazybones

TWENTY-FOUR

The telephone voice was even more pronounced on Irene Noble's answering-machine message. Holland waited for the beep, then spoke.

'This is Detective Constable Holland from the Serious Crime Group Yesterday, when myself and DI Thorne interviewed you, we forgot to ask about photographs of the children. We'd appreciate it if you might be able to lend us some pictures, which we will of course return whenever we finish with them. So, if you could get back to me as soon as possible on any of those numbers on the card we left you, I'd be very grateful. Many thanks…'

Holland put down the phone and looked up. From behind his desk on the other side of the office, Andy Stone was staring across at him.

'Photos of the Foley children?' Stone said.

'The DCI's still keen on getting them on the computer, ageing them up.'

Stone shook his head. 'Waste of time. Never looks anything like the kids when they eventually turn up.'

'If she's got photos from just before the children ran away, they'll be fifteen and thirteen. They can't have changed too much.'

'You'd be amazed, mate. Have you never bumped into someone you haven't seen for a few years and not recognised them? That's after a few years…'

'Holland thought about it and admitted that he had. He also knew, from the twin murder case he'd worked on with Thorne the year before, that if people wanted to change the way they looked, it wasn't actually that hard. Still, he reckoned that if the technology was there, there was no harm in using it.

Stone remained unconvinced. 'It's a pretty basic software program which digitally ages the photographs. At the end of the day, it's all guesswork and a lot of assumptions. How can you know if someone's hair's going to fall out, or if they're going to put on loads of weight or whatever?'

'I've seen some that looked pretty close,' Holland said. Stone shrugged, went back to what he was doing. 'Do we know she's got any photos at all?' he said, without 10)king up.

'Not for certain, no. Be a bit strange if she didn't, though. She was very fond of them…'

'You going to get somebody to go and pick them up?' Stone asked.

'Or shoot over there yourself?.'

'Hadn't really thought about it. I'll see what she says when she gets back to me, see when's a good time. You want to come along?'

'No…'

'She's single, but probably a bit old, even for you…'

'I'll give that one a miss, I think.'

'Suit yourself.' Holland noted down the time he'd made the call. Wednesday the 7th, 10.40 a.m. He'd give Irene Noble until the end of the day and call again. When Stone next started to speak, Holland looked across. Stone was leaning back in his chair, staring into space through narrowed eyes.

' Very fond of them? I think you're being a bit bloody generous…'

'I think she was more than very fond of them,' Holland said. 'But yes, she was also naive. Call it stupid, if you like…'

Stone snapped his gaze towards Holland. 'If love is blind, she must have been fucking besotted…'

Whoever thought that computers would do away with paperwork was sadly mistaken. There was as much paper piled up on desks as there ever had been. The only difference was that now, most of it was printed out by computer…

Thorne sat and read through the stories of four murders. Those same scraps of information that clogged his brain had also been recorded somewhere on paper. On laser-printed sheets of A4, on faded and curling reams of fax paper, on Post-It notes and pre-printed memo sheets torn from a pad. The entire case was laid out like this before him. Ream after dog-eared ream, piled in stubby blocks of yellow and white and buff. Banded by elastic or bound with laminate sheets or stapled and stuffed into cardboard folders… Thorne went over every piece of paper, of the jigsaw. Looking for the answer he knew to be there. Sifting through the shit, like a squaw)zing gull flapping around a vast dump. Black, beady eye searching for that morsel of interest….

Hearing the trace of that Yorkshire accent in Carol Chamberlain's voice. The good sense in every flat vowel of it.

'If it's anywhere, it's in the details.'

Opposite him, Yvonne Kitson sat typing, her face all but obscured by a paper mountain range of her own. She was still working on the Foley/Noble search, sorting through tens of thousands of addresses and car registrations and NI numbers, as well as dealing with, collecting and collating, the information that was still coming in on the Southern killing.

Thorne looked across at her. He toyed with lobbing a ball of paper over to get her attention. He flicked briefly through the piles on his desk, looking for something he could screw up, then thought better of it…

'Apart from anything else,' Thorne said, 'murderers aren't doing the rainforests a whole lot of good.'

Kitson looked up and across at him. 'Sorry?'

He picked up a sheaf of post-mortem reports and waved them. She nodded her understanding.

'How's it going, Yvonne?'

'We won't have any more luck finding him as Noble than we did as Foley. He was only Mark Noble for five minutes, anyway…'

'Which he'd have hated. That man's name…'

'Too bloody right. If I was him I'd've changed my name, or at least stopped using that one, as soon as I got the hell out of there.'

Thorne could find nothing in what Kitson had said to argue with. He'd have gone to Brigstocke straight away, suggested they concentrate their resources somewhere else. But he didn't have the faintest idea where…

'Let's just plough through it,' he said.

The whole adoption/abuse/runaway lead was shaping up to be another one of those which came to nothing horribly quickly. It was hard enough trying to work out what might have happened to someone who'd run away from home six months before. To piece together the theoretical movements of a pair of teenagers who'd vanished from a house in Romford nearly twenty years earlier, was almost certainly impossible.

They had little choice but to try, and while Holland, Stone and the rest of the team did what they could, Thorne was going back over everything they already had. Sure that they already had enough. By lunchtime, he'd found nothing, and felt as though he'd read about every murder that had ever taken place. He'd watched the hands of the pathologist rooting about in every chest cavity and down into the cold, wet depths of every gut. He'd listened to the less than helpful words of everybody who'd so much as stood at the same bus stop as one of the victims.

He'd had a belly full…

'What's on your sarnies today, then?'

Kitson shook her head without looking up from her computer screen. 'Didn't have time today. The kids were playing up, and everything got a bit…' The rest of the sentence hung there until Thorne spoke.

'You can't keep all the balls in the air all the time, Yvonne. You're allowed to drop one occasionally, you know.' Kitson glanced up, gave him a thin smile. 'Is everything all right, Yvonne?'

'Has somebody said something?' It came a little too quickly.

'No. You've just seemed a bit.., out of it.'

Kitson's smile thickened, until she looked, to Thorne, much more like herself. Much more the type he could lob a ball of paper at.

'I'm just tired,' she said.

This next killing had to be the last one, at least for a while. It made a pretty picture, and it also made bloody good sense. Afterwards, the police investigation was bound to be stepped up, and the risk of getting caught, just statistically, would increase. '

If he were to be caught, to be tried for his crimes, the next killing would be a very bad one to get done for. He would certainly be crucified with little argument. Now, though, with just the others under his belt, it would be something of a different matter. Standing trial for the murders of Remfry and Welch and Southern, he would fancy his chances…

If the papers were excited at the manhunt, they would be wetting themselves at a court case. The tabloids would back him, he was sure of it. He could probably even persuade one or other of the red-tops to stump up for his defence, pay to hire a top lawyer. He had decided already that should it ever come to it, he would speak in his own defence, would stand up and tell them exactly what he'd done and why. He was pretty confident that only a very brave judge would put him away for too long after that.

There would be an outcry from certain sections for sure, from the misguided and the bleeding hearts. From those who believed he should pay his debt to society, in the same way that those fine, upstanding citizens he'd killed had once done.

That would be all right with him. Let the silly bastards protest. Let them take the words 'perversion' and 'justice', and put them together like they owned them, even though they hadn't got the least fucking idea what either of them could really mean.

Perversion and justice. The degradation and the dashed hope. The hideous comedy that had started everything… It was all a fantasy, of course, unless the police came knocking on his door in the next couple of days. After that, after the final killing, nothing he could say would save him. The loyalties of the gutter press would switch very bloody quickly, along with everybody else's, once the final victim had been discovered.

Rapists were one thing, but this was, after all, very much another. Thorne was in the corner of the Major Incident Room, feeding coins into the coffee machine when Karim approached him.

'Miss Bloom on line three, sir.'

Momentarily confused, Thorne reached for his back pocket, understanding when he found it empty. His mobile was on his desk in the office. Eve would have tried that first and then, having got no reply, would have called the office number…

Thorne crossed to a desk and picked up the phone. He held it to his chest until Karim had wandered far enough away.

'It's me. What's up?'

'Nothing serious. Keith's let me down, so I just need to change the time a bit on Saturday. I told him I was going out and he said that he'd lock up for me. Now he turns round and says that he needs to leave early as well, so I'm a bit stuffed…'

'It doesn't matter. Get over when you can.'

'I know, I just wanted to get to your place early, drop some stuff off before we go out to eat.'

'Sounds interesting…'

'It'll probably be nearer seven now, by the time I've sorted out the shop and put my face on.'

'I can't see myself getting home a lot sooner than that anyway…'

'Sorry to screw our arrangements around, but it's not my fault. Keith's usually pretty reliable. Tom…?'

Eve's voice had faded away. Thorne was no longer listening. Our arrangements… Zoom in close and hold.

The certainty of it came as swiftly, and snapped into place as tightly, as a ligature. Like the blue blur of the line as it whips past the face and down, only becoming clear when it begins to bite, Thorne knew in a second exactly what it was that he'd missed. What had lain shadowed and just out of reach. Now he saw it, brightly lit… Something he'd read and something he hadn't… They'd found all Jane Foley's letters to Remfry, the ones sent to him in prison and the couple that had been sent to his home address after his release. Nothing indicated that there were any letters missing, ad why would there be?

Something had been missing though.

Thorne had read those letters a dozen times, probably more, and nowhere had Jane Foley discussed the plans for her meeting with Douglas Remfry. The rendezvous itself was never talked about specifically. Not the time, or the date. Not even the name of the hotel…

So how the hell had anything been arranged?

Something Thorne could remember reading had been written by Dave Holland. His report on that first visit to collect Remfry's stuff, the day he went round there with Andy Stone and pulled those letters out from under Remfry's bed. Mary Remfry had been keen to stress her son's success with women. She'd made a point of mentioning the women that were sniffing around after Dougie had been released. The women that were calling up…

Remfry, Welch and Southern had not just walked into those hotels thinking they were going to meet Jane Foley. They'd known they were going to meet her.

They'd spoken to her.