Mark Billingham - Lazybones

No such luck the evening before. There was a dose of summer flu going around and the place was short-staffed. She'd had to do the whole of main reception herself and was just thinking she might finely be able to get away when she'd been roped into lending a hand up in the Conference Room, laying the table for a Saturday-morning business breakfast the following day.

She'd wheeled the trolley laden with cutlery and table linen into the lift and pressed the button for the top floor. Just as the doors were closing, a couple had stepped in. She was attractive, wearing a smart skirt and silk blouse. He was very attractive, and dressed a little more casually. On the first floor, the woman got out. They hadn't been a couple after all. As the doors closed, the man turned to her and smiled. Feeling herself redden, Fiona looked down and began to count the knives and forks.

The bell rang as the lift reached the top floor and she straightened her wheels, nudged them towards the door. The man took a step forward to hold the door for her. He gave her another smile as she pushed the trolley out, the cutlery clattering noisily as she moved past him.

A few feet up the corridor, she'd turned and looked at him, a little confused that he hadn't stepped out of the lift himself. Just as the doors began to shut, the man in the leather biker's jacket had caught her 'looking at him. He turned his palms upwards and shook his head at his own stupidity.

'Miles away. Missed my floor…'

There were times when investigations seemed shrouded in darkness.

When the light, no matter the season or time of day, seemed to have faded away in those rooms where a case was worked, where progress in catching a killer was discussed and evaluated. For those groping around in the dark, there was always the frustrating feeling that if someone could just point a torch in the right direction, something important would be revealed. Then the shadows would shorten and slip away, but nobody knew where to shine the light. The day was getting off to a slow start, but Brigstocke seemed in no mood to crack the whip. It was fine with Thorne. He sensed that an extra ten minutes or so spent sitting around together, talking about nothing much for a while before they got down to it, might do everybody some good.

Might shorten a few shadows…

They sat on and around three different desks in the Incident Room. The coffees and teas were being eked out. Magazines and papers were being flicked through, space stared into, clocks glanced at.

'Anybody have a decent Friday night?' Thorne said. Nobody seemed awfully keen on answering one way or the other. Thorne laughed. 'Fuck me, what a bunch of party animals!' He turned to look at Stone. 'Come on, Andy, you're young and single…'

Stone looked up, but only for a second. 'Too knackered…'

Holland laughed. 'You big girl…'

'You won't be laughing once your missus sprogs,' Brigstocke said.

'Right.' Kitson walked across to the recently installed water cooler.

'You should be making the most of your Friday nights, Dave. Soon be a thing of the past…'

Holland grunted, turned his attention back to the sports page of the Daily Mirror. Thorne craned his head to look at the headline. The latest on a story that Spurs were about to sign some temperamental Italian midfielder.

'What about the rest of the weekend, then?' Thorne threw the question open to any of them. 'Any plans?'

The reaction – a lot of non-committal shrugging – was much the same as before. Thorne began to think that his own social life, such as it was, looked pretty bloody exciting by comparison. Mind you, it had picked up a lot lately…

'Sundays in the Brigstocke household are sacred and unchanging.'

The DCI picked up his briefcase, moved away in the direction of his office. 'Dog-walking, laundry, the bloodbath of Sunday lunch with one set of parents or another. Oh, and a trip to the garden centre, or maybe B amp; Q if I'm really lucky…'

Thorne laughed, looking around, sharing it. He thought about e last Sunday he'd spent. Something' Brigstocke had said sparked another memory and Thorne turned to watch Yvonne Kitson heading back across the room, drinking from a paper cone filled with cold water.

'Did you get my message last Sunday?' She swallowed, looked at him blankly. 'I called. Late morning, I think…'

Kitson dropped the empty cone into a wastepaper basket. 'Any particular reason?'

'Well, if there was, I'm buggered if I can remember it,' Thorne said. Kitson looked at him for a second or two, her face showing nothing.

'I didn't get the message.'

Thorne shrugged. 'Doesn't matter.' He nodded towards where Brigstocke had been just a minute before. 'I'd thought it would be a good time to catch you, you know? Reckoned you'd be another one with a family routine on a Sunday.'

Kitson moved past him, picked up the magazine she'd been reading and dropped it into her bag. She took a step towards the toilets, then turned to Thorne, nodding as though she'd just remembered something.

'I was at the gym…'

The Incident Room was coming to life, starting to fill with noise and movement. Holland walked across it, evidently catching the tail-end of Thorne and Kitson's conversation.

'You should get together with Stoney,' he said. 'He's well into weights and all that.' Holland looked over to where Andy Stone was sitting on the edge of a desk, chatting to a trainee detective. 'He might be a lanky streak of piss, but he looks like a light-heavyweight with his shirt off…'

Kitson looked at Thorne and raised her eyebrows. Her face was open and relaxed again. Her tone, when she spoke to Holland, was matey and suggestive. 'Easy, tiger,' she said. Holland started to say something else, but Thorne was already moving away from them. He knew that by the end of the day the heat and the frustrations of the case would combine to leave him as tightly wound as the E-string on a pedal-steel guitar. He wanted to get into his office, call Eve and organise something that would help lessen that tension just a little.

'Christ, you sound even more harassed than I am…'

'I told you, Saturdays are the busiest day.'

'Keith's mum still no better, then?'

'Sorry?'

'Keith not around to help out?'

'Oh. No…'

Thorne looked up as Kitson walked in and moved across to her desk. Her look told him that she knew exactly who he was talking to. Thorne lowered his voice…

'Fancy going to see a film tonight?'

'Yeah, why not. There's a copy of Time Out in the flat, I'll see what's on…

From nowhere, and for no immediately obvious reason, the case burst its way into their conversation. Into Thorne's head. The image that would not focus. The thought that would not reveal itself. Something he'd read and something he hadn't…

At the sound of Eve's voice, the phantom thought vanished as suddenly as it had arrived. 'Tom?'

'Yeah… that's fine. Maybe we could do a bit of shopping tomorrow.'

There was a pause. 'Anywhere in particular?'

Thorne dropped the volume even further, cupped his hand around the mouthpiece.

'The bed shop…'

Eve laughed, and when she spoke again, her voice was lowered. Thorne guessed from the noise that she had a shop full of customers.

'Thank fuck for that,' she said.

'I'm pleased you're pleased,' Thorne said.

'Yes, well, it's about bloody time. I'd decided I wasn't going to mention it again. I didn't want to sound desperate.' I, Thorne glanced up. Kitson was hunched over some paperwork.

'Listen, I had a long look at myself in the mirror this morning. I'd say "desperate" is a pretty good word for it…'

Fiona only had a couple of rooms left.

The girls usually worked to a set pattern in terms of floors, corridors and so on, but the order in which individual rooms were cleaned varied from day to day. Rooms with a DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the door would obviously get done later than those with used breakfast trays left outside, while some rooms would get knocked on to a later shift. There were two rooms at the end of her corridor on the first floor that still needed doing. She looked at her watch. It was twenty to ten…