Lazybones

FIVE

Another hot, humid evening. The air outside heavy with the taste of a storm on the way. Tantalising snippets of conversation from people walking past drifted into the living room through the opgn windows.

Thorne had sat eating in T-shirt and shorts, listening to the noise from a party on the other side of the road. He didn't know what annoyed him more – the raised voices and the cranked-up sound system, or the good time that some people he didn't know were clearly having.

His plate licked clean by Elvis, Thorne had opened a can of cheap lager, tuned out the sounds of music and laughter and spent a couple of hours reading. A summer's evening absorbed in violent death. These were the reports based on searches of CRIMINT – the Criminal Intelligence database – looking for any cases whose parameters might overlap with the Remfry killing…

Holland and Stone had been thorough. It was largely about trial and error, about narrowing the search down and coming up with hits that might be significant. Keywords were entered. Matches were sifted and examined in relation to those from other searches. Rape murder produced few cases where the victim was male, but the results were still cross-referenced with those that came up when other, more specific keywords were punched into the system.

Sodomy. Strangulation. Ligature. Washing line. And up they'd come…

A series of unsolved murders going back five years. Eight young boys brutally abused and strangled, their bodies dumped in woods, gravel pits and recreation grounds. A paedophile ring that was too well organised or too well connected. Uncatchable. A man attacked in his own home. Tied up with washing line while his home was ransacked, then kicked to death for no good reason. Thorne thought about Darren Ellis, the old couple he'd tied up and robbed…

A catalogue of vicious sexual assaults and murders, many still unsolved. The grim details now little more than entries in a uniquely disturbing reference library. A resource to be accessed, in the hope that a past horror might shed light on a present one. Not this time.

Holland had actually pulled the files on two cold murder cases: a young man, thirty or so, found in the boot of a car in 2002. Raped and choked to death with an unidentified ligature. A man in his sixties, attacked in a multi-storey car park and strangled with washing line in 1996.

Thorne had agreed both with Holland's initial assessment and his final conclusion. Both files had been worth a closer look. Both had been put back.

Once he'd stuffed the report away in his briefcase, Thorne went over and stood by the open window. For ten minutes or so he'd stared across at the house where the party was, trying and failing to identify a song from its annoyingly familiar bass-line. Trying and failing to stop thinking about bodies years dead and a body as yet unburied and the photograph he'd given Dennis Bethell…

Then he'd called his father.

After he'd hung up, twenty frustrating minutes later, Thorne stood, holding the phone, and tried to imagine the synapses in his father's brain misfiring, the thoughts exploding in a shower of tangential sparks..

The cascade of colour blackened. It became the dark hood that covered the head of a naked woman and masked the terror on the face of a pale, stiffening corpse. Life choked off and arse exposed and a thin line of brown blood on rusty bedsprings. Thorne took off what few clothes he still had on, walked through to the bedroom and dropped down on to the mattress. He lay there in the semi-darkness, staring up at the outline of the lampshade that had cost a pound from IKEA, realising that it was cheap because it was also nasty. The bed felt as if it were full of grit.

He could feel the dreadful, delicate weight of the case upon him. Like the dark tickle of something unwanted crawling across his body. The sharp, spindly legs of it picking their way across the sheen of sweat on his chest.

Thorne closed his eyes, remembering a moment of calm and contentment on a bracken-covered hillside.

Except that he was unsure it zvas a memory. If it had ever happened, the details had slipped away over time. Perhaps it was the memory of a dream he'd once had, or a fantasy of some sort. Maybe it was a scene from a long-forgotten film or TV show he'd once watched and into which he'd projected himself… Wherever it came from, two others were always there with him, lying on the hillside among the bracken. A man and a woman, or perhaps a girl and a boy. Their ages were as unclear as their relationship to him or each other, but all three of them were happy. Where they actually were never seemed to matter. The geography of the place was changeable. Sometimes he was sure there was a rive down below them. At other times it was a road, the hum of insects becoming the distant drone of traffic.

The only constants were the bracken and the presence of the pair lying just a few feet away, the ground beneath and the sky above the three of them.

I seemed as if they'd eaten something, a picnic maybe. Thorne felt full, lying there, his arms spread out wide, six inches off the ground, moving lazily back and forth through the bracken. He had a smile on his face and his stomach still jumped and fluttered with the final bursts of laughter. He could never be sure who or what had caused them all to laugh such a lot. He could never be sure of much beyond the fine, unfamiliar feeling that surged through him as he remembered. As he imagined. As he lay on that hillside.

Blurred as the edges of Thorne's reality on that hillside were – the whys and whens and whos so indistinct as to be virtually nonexistent – it still seemed, at moments such as these, ankle-deep in madness and butchery, a pretty good place to be. With the first, fat raindrops beginning to fall outside, he pressed his head back into the pillow and imagined the fronds of bracken, feathery against his neck.

As the headlights from passing Cars played across the bedroom window, Thorne felt only the sunlight on his face.

12 JUNE, 1976

They moved through the shopping centre, almost touching, their faces blank, each carrying a bag. A couple walking around the shops together. Seeing them, no one could ever have known.

The enormity of the space between them.

The pain that grew to fill it.

How little time they had left…

They touched things in shops, picked up items to get a closer look, occasionally made the same banal comments they might have made six months before. "We could put that in the kitchen." 'Do you think one of those would look nice in the bedroom?" "That colour really suits you: They walked into a shop which sold ugly ornaments, useless knit; k knacks, like two people in a dream…

Since the day the trial had ended, they had been going through the motions. Shopping, eating, tidying toys away. Sitting on the settee together and watching It's a Knockout and George and Mildred. Getting through the days. The only obvious change being that she hadn't gone back to work. Unlike Franklin. He'd been welcomed back with apologies and open arms.

Out of one shop and into another. They strolled through a department store, taking care, of course, to avoid the cosmetics department. The perfumes, and especially the aftershave. These days, the great smell of Brut was liable to make her throw up all over the place. They were almost perfect, like the victims of bodysnatchers. They were a

'Spot the Difference' competition that was unwinnable. The 'before' and 'after' were, to all intents and purposes, identical, but what was in their heads and their hearts would never be seen, could never be imagined. Least of all by them.

She had retreated into herself and he had become unbearably buoyant.

Around the house their bodies did the normal things, while her silence and his false cheer chased each other from room to room. While the mania and the 'suspicion festered and matured.

It was my fault…

Why didn't she struggle…?

He was looking at picture frames, remembering the face of the jury foreman. A few feet away, she stood, spinning a display of postcards, seeing only stubby fingers reaching into trousers, scrabbling at her crotch. He caught her eye but she looked away before he could smile. The next second, Franklin's wife had stepped from behind a glass display case and was standing in front of her.

He took a step towards them, then stopped as his wife raised a hand, reached towards this woman who had looked down on her, at her, every day from the public gallery. He watched as Franklin's wife ignored the hand that reached out to her, pulled back her head and snapped it forward, releasing a thick gobbet of spittle into his wife's face. There was a gasp from a'woman nearby. Another stepped back, openmouthed, and knocked a glass decantOr crashing to the floor. He stepped in front of his wife then, and guided her gently but firmly towards the exit. As they left she never took her eyes from the woman who had spat at her. She never made a move to wipe the spit away. She didn't speak a word, as she was taken back to a house she would never leave again.