Mark Billingham - Lazybones

It quickly became clear that the tic, which Thorne guessed to be Tourette's syndrome, was in three parts. First the man would raise his eyebrows theatrically and his chin would jerk up. A second later the entire head would be wrenched round to the side, and finally, the jaws would snap noisily together, the teeth clacking like castanets. Thorne watched guilty and mesmerised as this three-part pattern repeated itself over and over, and he found himself assigning a word, a sound effect, to each, distinct spasm. The eyebrows, the wrench of the neck, the snap of the jaws. Three movements that in rapid succession seemed to display surprise, interest and then ultimately, a bitter disappointment. Movements which sounded to Thorne like 'Ooh! Whay-hay! Clack!'

Oh really? Sounds interesting! Ah, fuck it…

After a minute or two the man seemed to be bringing the seizure under control and Thorne finally dragged his own head around and his eyes away. The young couple in the left-hand carriage had got off and had been replaced by a pair who were a good deal older and less tactile. The woman caught Thorne's eye and dropped her gaze to the carriage floor like a piece of litter.

When Thorne turned back and looked to his right, the man who was holding on to the rail was now still, and staring straight at him. Thorne leaned back until he felt his head, big and wobbly as a baby's, hit the window. The glass was cool against his scalp. He closed his eyes.

He was only a couple of stations away from where he'd need to change at Camden. He could afford to spend just a minute or two drifting, wide awake and counting the stops, and floating towards his hillside…

Almost as soon as Thorne had completed the thought, he was asleep.

He had plenty of stuff to do, a few more images to download from the camera and print, but he thought he deserved a quick break. Ten or fifteen minutes messing about on the Net wouldn't hurt and then he'd get back to business. Put all the pictures together and stick them in the post… He enjoyed working at the computer, now that he felt like he'd mastered it. He'd needed to learn, so he'd learned. In just a couple of years he'd gone from being a novice to being more than comfortable with pretty much any machine.

He opened the bookmark, drummed his finger against the mouse as he waited for the page to appear…

Once you became skilled at something, it was easy to enjoy it. Like the work he did on those fuckers" with the knife and the washing line. He was certainly enjoying that. It was funny, he thought, that the word 'skilled' had 'kill' sitting right there in the middle of it. He'd first found the site when he was looking for inspiration, for help with the photos of Jane. Now he just popped back every now and then to keep abreast of it all. Just to see…

It had been a strange week, all in all. By rights he should have been doing other stuff, but he'd been forced to tweak the schedule, to rearrange things a bit in view of the hiccough with Dodd. That's all it had been. It was easily fixed.

There were several new links from the site since the last time he'd been here. One or two were begging to be checked out. He pointed and clicked, held his breath…

He was itching to get back to the serious work. In part from anything else there was the challenge of a change in routine. Now that the prisons had been warned, there couldn't be any more letters.

Jesus..,

The woman's head was shaved and she had been hog-tied. A chain ran from a ring in her collar down to the leather strap between her ankles. The buckled harness snaked across her face like a spider's web, her mouth at its centre, filled by a large, red ball-gag…

It was a shame. If he was going to use more pictures, this was just the sort of thing he might have gone for, but now it was academic, With Remfry and Welch it had been a lovely, long, slow tease. With the next one things would have to be simple and direct. A bit more 'in your face'. He hoped it would be as much fun as wooing.

'I was wondering how much it would cost to send a bouquet of flowers…'

'Well, we charge five pounds fifty for delivery, and the bouquets start at thirty pounds.'

'Christ, I don't want to spend that much. I haven't even snogged her yet…'

Eve laughed. 'Are you sure there's snogging on the cards?'

'Definitely,' Thorne said. 'She's well up for it…'

'Shit, I've got a customer. Better go…'

'Listen, I'm sorry about cancelling last night. I couldn't…'

'It's fine. Hold that thought, all right? The snogging, I mean. I'll see you later.'

'Yeah… I can't say what time, though.'

'Call me when you're about to leave. We can just grab a quick drink or something…'

'Right…'

'Seriously, if you are ever tempted, flowers wouldn't guarantee a snog. Chocolates, on the other hand, will get you just about anything…'

She hung up.

Smiling, Thorne reached inside the bodysuit, dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. He took a long swig from a bottle of mineral water and turned, to find himself confronted by a family of backpackers. Mum, Dad and two blonde children were all sporting rucksacks of decreasing size, and staring at him expectantly from the other side of the cordon. Thorne stared back at them until eventually, having decided that nothing much was going to happen, they wandered away. Six hours earlier, when there had been something they might have been able to tell their friends back home about, the onlookers had been a little harder to dissuade. With the nightclubs emptying and the streets buzzing, a sizeable crowd had quickly gathered and gawped from behind the lines of police tape. A hundred yards back towards Wardour Street one way and Regent Street the other, they had stood and watched excitedly. The drunks heckled and the tourists took pictures, as the body of Charles Dodd was carried out.

Once the body had been loaded up and taken away, the cordon had been relaxed a little. Now there was just a square of blue tape running from the narrow doorway leading up to Dodd's studio, around to the furthest side of the fishmonger's shop next door. Fluttering ever so gently…

'What's going on in there, mate?'

Thorne looked up at a small, skinny individual with birdshit highlights and an improbable amount of jewellery, nodding at him from behind the tape. The man, who was wearing satin tracksuit bottoms and a sleeveless camouflage vest, took three drags of a cigarette in quick succession then flicked it into the gutter.

'It's a raid,' Thorne said. 'Fashion Police. I'd be on my way, if I were you…

The man bounced twice on the balls of his feet, grimaced and jogged away. On the other side of the narrow street, a girl in a tiny leather skirt and crop top was leaning against the kiosk of a peep show, eating a bacon sandwich. She grinned over at Thorne, having clearly heard the exchange. Thorne smiled back at her. It was a little after nine in the morning but evidently not too early to try and get something going inside the shorts of the passing male trade. Already warm enough for the tables of a pavement cafe to be filled with customers downing cappuccino and scoffing pastries. Pretending they were somewhere more exotic.

Thorne watched them. Wishing he was somewhere else. Thinking of things that would put anybody off their breakfast… When they'd battered down the door early the previous evening, Thorne had known exactly what they would find. The smell, thick against his face-mask, would have told him anyway, but as he'd climbed the narrow staircase, Thorne had been very well aware of what was waiting for him at the top. He'd already seen the pictures. The real thing, several long, hot days after the event, was a whole lot worse.

The body had been strung up. The washing line had been tied in a makeshift noose around Dodd's neck and thrown over one of the lighting bars above the studio floor. It was tied off around the foot of the bed, the weight of the body lifting one end of the bed twelve inches off the ground. The pictures, taken while Dodd was still alive, had shown the spasms, the desperate clawing at the neck and kicking of the legs. Several days dead, the corpse hung, stiff and still. It was only the rumble of the tube trains passing beneath them on the Bakerloo Line, that caused the slightest tremor, that made the body start to swing just a little…