Mark Billingham - Lazybones

'Don't be silly. How's your dad?'

'You know, annoying. Mind you, he was annoying before…'

Thorne thought he could hear the sound of traffic at the other end of the line. He guessed Eve was out somewhere, but thought better of asking where. 'Seriously though, sorry about rushing off. Did the food get eaten?'

'Don't worry, it will…'

'Sorry…'

'It's fine, there would have been tons left anyway. I'd made loads and Denise eats sod all, so I wouldn't worry about it.'

Thorne began to unbutton his shirt. 'Say thanks to her and Ben for the entertainment, by the way…'

'Good, wasn't it? I think I broke it up too early though. Another minute, and I'm sure we'd have seen a glass of wine thrown in someone's face…'

'Next time.'

She yawned loudly. 'God, sorry…'

'I'll let you get to bed,' he said. He was imagining her in the back of a cab, pulling up outside her flat

'Sleep well, Tom.'

Thorne lay back down on his bed. 'Listen, you know that scale of one to ten? Can I move up to an eight…?'

Thorne's phone rang again eight hours later. Its insistent chirrup pulled him up from the depths of a deep sleep. Dragged him from a dream where he was tryin to stop a man bleeding to death. Each time he put his finger over a hole, another would appear, as if he were Chaplin trying to plug a leak. Just when it seemed he had all the wounds covered, the blood began to spurt from a number of holes in him…

'You'd better get back, sir,' Holland said.

'Tell me…'

'The killer's ordered another wreath…'

27 NOVEMBER, 1996

Stooping to pick up the car keys he'd dropped, Alan Franklin winced in pain. A fortnight shy of retirement, and his body, like a precision alarm clock, was telling him that it was just the right time. The back pain and the talk of retirement cottages abroad had begun on almost exactly the same day…

He straightened up, his noisy exhalation echoing around the almost deserted car park. They'd probably talk about it again tonight, the two of them, over a bottle of wine. Sheila was leaning towards France while he fancied Spain. Either way, they would be off. There was nothing to keep them, after all. The three children he'd had with Emily were grown up and producing kids of their own. He'd miss the grandchildren, of course he would, but it wasn't like he and Sheila were going to be far away. They had no real ties.?. He fumbled for the key to the Rover, pushed it towards the lock. Sheila would probably get her way in the end of course, she usually did. It had to be said that more often than not she was right. She'd been right this morning, telling him that it was going to freeze, that he needed to wrap up warm.

He turned the key, popped up the central locking. As he reached for the door handle, something passed in front of his eyes with a swish and bit back, hard into his neck, pulling him off his feet… He hit the floor before his briefcase did, before he had a chance to cry out, one leg broken and bent behind, the other straight out in front of him, hands flying to his throat, fingers wedging themselves between line and neck. Hands scrabbled at his own, tearing at his fingers, pulling them away. A fist crashed into the side of his head and as he rocked with the impact, he felt his fingers, numb and running with blood, slipping from beneath the line. And hot breath on the back of his neck…

He watched his leg shooting out, the foot kicking desperately against the Rover's dirty, grey hubcap.

He remembered suddenly the face of the woman underneath him. Smelt himself; the aftershave he used to love. Felt again that strength in his arms. He saw her legs kicking out against the boxes piled high on either side of the stockroom. Heard the dull thud of her stockinged feet on the cardboard. He felt the movement beneath him die down and then stop, saw her eyes close tight.

It seemed to be getting dark very quickly. Perhaps the lights in the car park were on some sort of timer. Fading to save electricity. He could just make out his foot, the heel of his brogue still crashing into the hubcap, again and again. Cracking the cheap plastic.

Then, just black and the rushing of his blood, and the sound of his heartbeat which thumped inside his eyeballs as the line tightened. He saw his wife, smiling at him from the garden, and the woman beneath him trying to turn her head away, and his wife, and then the woman, and finally the woman where his wife should have been, telling him how cold it was going to get.

Laughing, and reminding him not to forget his scarf.

Carol Chamberlain had always been an early riser, but by the time her husband shuffled, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen at a little after seven o'clock, she'd already been up a couple of hours. He flicked on the kettle, nodded to himself. He'd known very well she would have trouble sleeping after the phone call.

It had come the evening before, in the ad break between Stars in their Eyes and Blind Date. As soon as the caller had identified himself, begun to tell her what he wanted, Carol had understood the quizzical look on Jack's face when he'd handed her the receiver. She'd listened to everything that the Commander had to say. From the audible exasperation in his voice it was clear that she'd asked a lot more questions than he'd been expecting. After fifteen minutes she had agreed to think about what she'd been asked. The new team had been set up, she was told, to utilise some of the resources that had been – how had he put it? – wasted in previous years. The basic idea was that highly capable ex-officers could bring years of valuable experience to bear on re-examining old, dead cases. Would be able to cast a fresh eye across them.

For most of the time since she'd hung up, since they'd gone back to watching Saturday-night TV, Carol had been in two minds. She was certainly a 'wasted resource', but much as she was happy, no, desperate, to do something, she had also heard something dubious in the voice of the unspeakably young Commander. She knew immediately that he and many others would be picturing hordes of aged ex-coppers shuffling in from Eastbourne, on sticks and Zimmer frames, waving dog-eared warrant cards and shouting: 'I can still cut it. I'm eighty two, you know…'

Jack put a mug of tea down in front of her. He spoke softly. 'You're going to do it, aren't you, love?'

She looked up at him. Her smile was nervous, but still wider than it had been in a while.

'I can still cut it,' she said.

While Thorne had been racing back from Have, shagging the hired Corsa up three different motorways, Brigstocke had made the scene at the Greenwood Hotel secure. By the time Thorne arrived, it was nearly three hours since the body hey would later identify as Ian Welch had been discovered, and more than twelve since he'd been killed. There was little else for Thorne to do but stare at him for a while.

'Well, it's a slightly nicer hotel anyway,' Hendricks said. Holland nodded. 'They even sent us up some coffee…'

'There's a CCTV set-up in the lobby as well,' Brigstocke said. 'It's pretty basic, I think, but you never know.'

It was a classic businessman's hotel. Trouser presses, Teas mades and bog-standard soap in the bathroom. The simple, clean room couldn't have been more different from the pit they'd stood in three weeks earlier. Save of course for the one, gruesome feature they had in common. As with the murder scene in Paddington, the bed had been stripped and the bedding taken away. The clothes lay scattered but the body itself had been precisely positioned. Dead centre with head towards the wall, belt around the wrists, white hands bloodless. The hood, the line around the neck, the dried, red-brown trails snaking down the thighs like gravy stains…