Mark Billingham - Lazybones

A smell at work, the odour of something very raw, lurking some, where deep within the medley of sweat and institutional food… Nine of them gathered. Waiting like embarrassed guests at a bizarre party, strangers to each other. That dreadful hiatus between arriving, and anything actually happening…

Finally, Hendricks drew back the white sheet and asked the equally white PC to confirm it was the same body he'd seen earlier. The constable looked as though the only thing he could confirm was rising rapidly up from his stomach. He swallowed hard.

'Yes,' he said, 'it is.'

And they were away…

Holland had moved across to the bar to get a round in and Thorne took his place next to Andy Stone. Karim leaned across, eager to involve Thorne in the game. Before he had a chance to speak, Thorne angled his body away, turned into the corner, towards Stone.

'Idiotic, bloody game,' Stone said. Thorne had only just got there, but Stone sounded like he was three or four drinks ahead of him. 'If it's shag or die, you'd shag anybody, wouldn't you? So what's the point?'

Thorne swallowed a mouthful of lager and leaned a little closer to Stone. 'I need to have a quick word about what happened when we picked Gribbin up.'

If Stone had been on the way to being drunk, he sobered up very quickly. 'I was protecting the kid. I didn't know what he was going to do.'

'Which is exactly what the DCI is going to say. Still, Fm here to tell you, off the record, that you overstepped the mark. That nobody wants to see it happen again, OK?' Stone stared forward, said nothing.

'Andy…?' Thorne took another drink. Half the pint had gone already.

'Nobody's very fond of blokes like Gribbin, but you were over the top.'

'There's just so bloody many of them. I don't understand how there can be so many of them walking about.'

'Listen…'

Stone turned. He spoke low and fast as if imparting dangerous information. I've got a mate on the Child Protection Team over at Barnes. He told me about this time they were after a child-killer up in Scotland. This bloke had already killed three kids, they had a description, and some woman claimed she'd spotted him on a beach one bank holiday, right? So they appealed for people to come forward with their holiday snaps, see if anybody might have got a picture of this fucker accidentally…'

Thorne nodded. He remembered the case. He had no idea what Stone wanted to tell him.

'So, they get hundreds of films handed in. They develop them all and go through the pictures. Thousands of them.' Stone picked up his glass, stared into it for a moment. 'The woman couldn't pick out the man she'd seen, but the police identified thirty known child-sex offenders. In one fucking weekend, on one beach. Thirty…'

Stone drained his glass. 'Right. Toilet, I think…'

Thorne watched Stone go, and drained his. He decided to leave the Corsa in the car park at Becke House. It was easy enough to get the tube home…

The rest of the evening passed quickly and easily. Thorne had some success with a couple of his dad's jokes; Holland argued with Sophie on the phone, pulling faces for the lads, doing his best to laugh it off; nobody could choose between Vanessa Feltz and Esther Rantzen; Holland spoke to Sophie again, then turned his phone off; Thorne bet Hendricks ten pounds that Spurs were going to finish above Arsenal the following season; Hendricks had one Guinness too many and told Holland that several of his gay friends fancied him… Stone grabbed Thorne's arm as they were all stepping out into the clear, warm night. Saying their goodbyes.

'Something else my mate told me. They arrested this one bloke who had all these pictures of kids off the Internet, you know? Downloaded them on to his computer, hundreds of them. He said that he was searching through all these pictures, looking at them all, at their faces, hoping that one day he might find the pictures of himself…'

Thorne tried gently to pull away. Stone was squeezing his arm tightly.

'That's rubbish, isn't it?' Stone said. 'That's bollocks. That's an excuse, don't you think? That's not really true, is it, sir…?'

Thorne stepped through the front door into the communal hall he shared with the couple in the flat upstairs. The breath he let out was long and noisy. He picked up the post, sorted the bills from the pizza delivery menus, fumbled for his flat key.

As soon as the door was open he knew. He could feel the breeze where there should be none. The scent of something carried on it… He moved quickly into his own, small hallway. The cat was rubbing itself against his shin. He put down his bag, dropped the letters on to the table next to the phone and stepped around the corner into the living room.

He stared at the space where the video had been. Looked up at the dusty shelf he'd never bothered to paint, on which his sound system had sat. The leads were gone, which meant they'd obviously been in the place for a while. The ones who were in a hurry just ripped the spaghetti out of the back, left it still plugged in. He reached to pick up the few scattered paperbacks that had previously been held upright by his BOSE speakers. Clearly, whoever now had his speakers wasn't a great reader. They had taken every single CD…

Fuckers would hand over his entire collection for a day's worth of smack.

Thorne walked through to the kitchen, stared at the small window they'd climbed through. The window he'd left open. In a hurry two nights earlier, throwing his stuff for the wedding together and not locking up properly because he was rushing across to calm his fucking stupid father down…

Aside from the obvious gaps, the place seemed pretty much as he'd left it. He guessed that there would be a suitcase or two missing from the wardrobe in the bedroom. Away out of the front door, casual as you like, as if they were taking something very heavy on their holidays. The smell hit him the second he opened the bedroom door, and Thorne had a pretty good idea where it was coming from. He moved his hand to cover his mouth, needing to unclench the fist as he did so. His first thought when he threw back the duvet was that it must have taken a good deal of skill to have done the job so accurately, smack in the centre of the bed.

Thorne backed quickly out of the room, his guts bubbling. Elvis yowled at his feet; hungry, or keen to deny responsibility for the turd on the bed, one or the other. Thorne wondered if it was too late to ring his father and shout at him for a while.

He looked at his watch. It was ten past twelve… He'd just turned forty-three.

All through Sunday, every time he was beginning to enjoy himself he'd remembered the bloody message and become prickly, irritated. It had been there on his answering machine, waiting for him when he'd got back from Slough on Saturday night. He'd ignored it, collapsed exhausted into bed and played it back first thing the next morning. It was exactly what he did not need. It was spoiling things.

He needed to deal with it.

As he moved around his flat, dressing himself, he remembered the look on Welch's face when he'd walked into the hotel room. The face was the very best thing. Remfry's had been the same. It was the look that passes across the face of someone who thinks that they are about to get one thing, and then realises that they are in for an altogether different sort of experience.

He wondered if they saw that expression on the faces of the women they raped.

He didn't know the details of their particular offences, he didn't care. Rape was rape was rape. He did know that most attacks did not involve dark alleys and deserted bus stops. He knew that most rapists were known to their victims. Were trusted by them. Friends, colleagues, husbands… They would have seen that terrible realisation on the faces of the women they attacked. The horror and surprise. The very last thing they were expecting.