Mark Billingham - Lazybones

'Tom…'

Thorne stepped quickly forward, put his coffee cup down on Brigstocke's desk and began to pace around the small office. 'It's about what happens afterwards. It's about release dates and addresses. I had thought that maybe there was some connection with the families, but Welch was NFA. His family disowned him and moved away years ago.' He glanced across at Brigstocke as if he were making everything very obvious. Brigstocke nodded, still waiting. 'Release details are fluid, right? Prisoners move around, parole dates change, extra days get tagged on to sentences. The killer has to have access to up-to-date, accurate information…'

'Do I have to phone a friend?' Brigstocke said. 'Or are you going to sodding well tell me? How does he find them?'

Thorne allowed himself the tiniest flicker of a smile. 'The same way we do.'

Behind his glasses Brigstocke blinked twice, slowly. The confusion on his face became something that might have been regret. Or the anticipation of it. 'The Sex Offenders Register.'

Thorne nodded, picked up his coffee. 'Jesus, we need shooting

'cause it took us this long…'

Brigstocke took a deep breath. He began stepping slowly backwards and forwards in the space between the wall and the edge of the desk. Trying to take this vital, but daunting piece of new information on board. Trying to shape it into something he could handle. 'I don't need to say it, do I?' he said, finally.

'What?'

'About this not getting out…'

Thorne looked up, past Brigstocke. The sun was moving behind a cloud but it was still baking in the tiny office. He could feel the sweat gathering in the small of his back. 'You don't need to say it.'

'Not just because it's.., sensitive. Although it is.'

Thorne knew that Brigstocke was right. The whole issue of the Register had been what the tabloids were fond of calling a 'political hot potato' for years. This was just the sort of thing to blow the whole 'naming and shaming' debate wide open again. When he looked back to Brigstocke, the DCI was smiling.

'This might be the way we get him, though, Tom.'

Thorne was counting on it…

Brigstocke came around his desk. 'Right, let's start with the bodies that are informed about an offender's registration requirements. The ones that get fed the notification details as a matter of course.' He started to count them off on his fingers. 'Social services, probation…'

'And us, of course,' Thorne said. 'We'd better not forget the most interesting one, had we, Russell?'

Macpherson House was located in a side street off Camden Parkway. In the course of a century, the building had been a theatre, cinema and bingo hall. Now it was little more than a shell, within which was situated temporary hostel accommodation.

'Fuck me gently,' Stone said. He was craning back his head, staring at the grimy, crumbling ceiling high above him. Holland looked up. There were still traces of gilt on the mouldings. Decorative swirls of plaster leaves trailed across the ceiling and then down towards four ornate columns in each corner of the vast room.

'Must have been amazing…'

There was a week-old copy of the Daily Star on the floor. Stone pushed it aside with his foot. He sniffed at the stale air and pulled a face. 'It's a bloody shame…'

As they walked, Holland took Stone through the simple, ironic history of the place. The theatre that had become a cinema. The cinema done for in the seventies by the more popular entertainment of the bingo hall. The bingo hall itself made redundant thirty years later by the easy availability of scratch cards and the National Lottery.

'From music hall to the Stupid Tax,' Holland said. Stone snorted. 'I take it those six numbers never came up, then?'

'I'm still here, aren't I?'

Their footsteps echoed off the scuffed, stone floors, else were muffled as they walked across the occasional threadbare rug, or curling square of carpet. 'Can't see what's going to replace the Lottery, can you. 7'

Holland shook his head. 'Not as long as there's a call for it.'

They were walking ten yards or so behind Brian, the hostel supervisor, a big man in his fifties with long, grey hair, a large hoop earring and a multicoloured waistcoat. Without turning round, he held out both arms. Taking in the place.

'Always be a call for this, though…'

Now, forty feet below the faded rococo grandeur, the space was taken up with cracked sinks and metal beds. A kitchen and a serving hatch. A pair of small televisions, each attached with a padlock and chain to nearby radiators. Behind the beds, along the walls, stood row upon row of scratched and dented lockers – some without locks, many without doors. All rusting and covered in graffiti.

'Council got them for a song,' Brian said. 'When the swimming pool down the road was knocked down. Same week they got this place off Mecca…'

Holland looked down at the floor as he walked. Shoes under many of the beds, trainers, mostly. The occasional tarry suitcase. Dozens of plastic bags.:

Stone took off his jacket. 'Dossers by and large, is it?'

Brian looked back over his shoulder. Holland thought he looked powerful, like he could handle himself. He probably needed to on occasion. 'All sorts. Long-term homeless, runaways, addicts. The odd ex-con like Welch…'

'Where do they go during the day?' Holland asked. The big man slowed, let Holland and Stone draw level with him.

'Wandering about. Begging. Trying to find somewhere to sleep.' He smiled when Holland looked confused. 'This place is warm and they can get something to eat, but there's not a lot of sleeping goes on. Most of them are scared of getting stuff nicked. Even if they do want a kip, a hundred blokes coughing and shifting around on creaky bedsprings is worse than a neighbour with a drum kit…'

'My ex-girlfriend kept me awake half the night,' Stone said. 'Talking in her sleep, grinding her teeth…'

Brian smiled thinly. 'It's quiet enough in here now, but you won't be able to hear yourself think by dinnertime. They'll start drifting back as soon as it starts to get dark. Be rammed in here by nine o'clock.'

Holland looked at the lines of beds, three and four deep. Imagined it.

Eyes down for a full house.

The supervisor stopped. He tapped on the open door of a locker and immediately began moving away again. 'This was Mr. Welch's. I'll be in the front office if you need anything…'

They both pulled on gloves. While Stone went through the locker, Holland got down on his hands and knees and, for the second time in a little over a fortnight, went rummaging under the bed of a recently murdered rapist.

It took less than two minutes to gather together Welch's worldly goods: a battered green holdall full of clothes which smelled of Oxfam; a plastic bag of dirty pants and socks; a radio spattered with white paint; an electric razor; a couple of tatty paperbacks… At the back of the locker, between the pages of one of the books, the photographs of Jane Foley.

'Here she is,' Stone said, holding one of the pictures up between his fingertips. 'Lovelier than ever.'?

Holland got to his feet, moved across to take a look. 'How many?'

'Half a dozen. Can't see any letters. Must have chucked them…'

Stone slid the photos into an evidence bag, popped it into an inside pocket. Holland shoved everything else into a black bin-liner. When he'd finished he picked the bag up. It wasn't heavy.

'Not a lot, is it?' he said.

Stone pushed the locker door closed and shrugged. 'That's what you get.'

It was nearly midday and starting to get really warm. Holland rubbed the sweat off the back of his neck. He thought about what he guessed was going through Stone's mind. 'Do you not give a shit because Welch was an ex-con?' he said. 'Or because he was an ex-con who was also a rapist? Honestly, I'm interested…'