Mark Billingham - Lazybones

'How many are we looking at?' Holland asked.

Brigstocke picked up a small pack of biscuits, sealed in plastic. He dangled it between two fingers. 'Based on the last set of Home Office stats, probably one serious sex offender is released somewhere in the country every day.' He tore open the packet with his teeth, spat out the plastic, looked at the faces of the other men around the table. 'I know. Frightening, isn't it? Just going back to the start of this year, we're going to be looking for something like a hundred and fifty offenders…'

Stone raised his eyebrows. 'Well, we should know where most of them are, in theory at least. Still might be a shitload of work, though.'

'Yes, it might be,' Brigstocke said.

'Are we going to be able to justify that? I mean, like you said, these aren't exactly innocent victims, are they?'

Brigstocke blinked, opened his mouth to shout. Thorne got in first.

'Not your worry, Andy.'

'I know. I was just saying…'

Thorne raised a hand. 'What we can't justify are bodies…'

They walked out to their cars. Brigstocke drifted away from the others towards his Volvo, took Thorne with him. He glanced towards Andy Stone.

'Have a Word…'

Thorne nodded. 'Well, he was making the same sort Of point you made yourself earlier. Remfry, Welch, doing what they did, being what they are. Some people might well think that…'

Brigstocke pressed the remote, deactivating the car alarm with a squawk. 'I'm not talking about what he said back there. I'm talking about the Gribbin business.'

Thorne had been waiting for this. He had known that Stone's behaviour during the raid was not just going to be forgotten. 'Right…'

'Don't worry, it's not going as far as the Funny Firm. All been put down to protecting the girl. Still, I want you to let him know he overstepped the mark.'

'Fair enough…'

Brigstocke got into the car, started the engine. He began to pull slowly away. 'Call me from the Wexham as soon as Phil's finished…'

Holland loped across the gravel as Thorne walked to the Corsa.

'You up for a drink later?'

'I'm likely to be up for several,' Thorne said. Holland ran a hand along the front wing of the hire-car. 'This is the sort of thing you ought to get.'

'Sort of thing I ought to get when?'

'Come on, your car is fucked. This is nice, though…'

'It's white.., and my car is not fucked…'

'Name one thing that's good about it.'

Thorne opened the Corsa's door, hesitated before getting in. 'What?

Straight off the top of my head?'

Holland laughed, leaned down as Thorne climbed in. 'If this was a woman we were talking about, you'd dump her.'

The electric window slid down. 'You've got a very strange mind, Holland.'

'How's it going with the florist, anyway?'

'Mind your own business.'

There was a rumble as an engine started up. Thorne looked across to see Stone watching them from behind the wheel of his own car, a silver Ford Cougar. He nodded towards it. 'What d'you think of Stone's motor?'

'It's a bit flash,' Holland said.

Thorne could see Stone slapping his palm off the steering wheel.

'Better get a move on. He looks keen to get back.'

Holland took a step away from the car, stopped. 'Did your dad have a good time at the wedding?'

'A good time? Yes. I think so…'

'I meant to tell you…' Stone sounded the horn. 'William Hartnell was the first Doctor Who. I looked it up on the Internet.'

'I'll tell him…'

Thorne turned the key in the ignition, watched as Holland ran across and climbed into Stone's car. He could hear the music being cranked up as the sports car roared past him, and out on to the main road with hardly a look from Andy Stone towards anything that might have been coming.

Thorne looked at his watch and turned the engine off again. Not quite one o'clock yet. The post-mortem wasn't until two and it was no more than a ten-minute drive to the hospital. He sat for a few minutes trying to decide between sleep and a Sunday paper and then he started to hear distant shouting, a cheer, a solitary handclap. The noise recognisable, tantalising. Carrying easily on the warm, afternoon air. It took him twenty minutes to find the game, a quarter of a mile away up the main road in a small park. The season was still a month and a half away, but Sunday footballers cared as little for the calendar as they did for other trivialities like fitness and skill. A team in red and a team in yellow and a dozen or so lunatics watching, living every less than beautiful second of it.

Thorne could not have been more content. He stood on the touchline and lost himself in the game. In a little over an hour he would be watching organs meticulously excised, the flesh expertly sliced and laid aside… For a while, he was happy to watch a team in red and a team in yellow, running and shouting and kicking lumps out of each other. Thorne picked up his pint and turned from the bar. Except for Russell Brigstocke, one of whose kids was unwell, and Yvonne Kitson, most of the senior members of the team had come out. There was an unspoken need to loosen up, to enjoy a night out that they might not have the chance to repeat for a while, now that the case had moved up a gear. Now that there was a second body.

Thorne wasn't planning on staying long. He was wiped out. One drink, maybe two, and then home…

They were gathered around a couple of smallish tables. Holland and Hendricks were sitting at one end with Andy Stone and Sam Karim, a DS who worked as office manager. They were playing Shag or Die, a game that involved choosing between a pair of equally undesirable sexual partners, which had swept through the entire Serious Crime Group in the last few weeks. The choice between Ann Widdecombe and Camilla Parker-Bowles was prompting heated debate. Phil Hendricks was trying to make himself heard, claiming that as a gay man, he should not have to sleep with either of them. His point was eventually accepted as valid and he was given a choice between Jimmy Savile and Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond to mull over…

If the Royal Oak had a theme other than drinking heavily, nobody had ever worked out what it was. Apart from being the nearest pub to Becke House, it had nothing whatsoever to recommend it. The fairly constant presence of police officers may have had something to do with it, but there was rarely anybody drinking in the pub who didn't have a warrant card.

Thorne looked around. Sunday night and the place was all but deserted: a couple at a table near the toilets, staring into their drinks like they'd had a row; the room quiet, save for his team's graphic deliberations and the tinny, musical stings from the unused quiz machine in the corner.

Hardly any more there than had gathered earlier in the Dissecting Room: Phil Hendricks; a trio of mortuary attendants; the exhibits officer; a stills photographer; a video cameraman; the PC who had been first to arrive at the Greenwood Hotel, there to confirm that the body was indeed the same one he had seen on the bed in room 313. And Thorne…

Nine of them, gathered in a cold room plumbed for hoses, with easy-to-clean surfaces and drains in the floor. The smallest murmur or the crunching of peppermints magnified, bouncing off the cracked, cream tiles. A small crowd, waiting for the body of Ian Welch to be uncovered and taken apart.

Thorne had attended hundreds of post-mortems, and though it was a process he had become resigned to, he had found that lately it was a difficult one to leave behind, to shed easily. The visceral onslaught disturbed him now far less than the tiny details, the sensory minutiae which might stay with him for days after each session… Blinking awake in the early hours, as a brain plops gently into a glass jar.

Dabbing at his freshly shaved face, the water spiraling away, its momentary slurp like the sucking of the flesh at the finger that presses into it.