Mark Billingham - Lazybones

Then, at the end, watching it. Sensing something struggle to escape, and finally float free, up and away from the body that twirls slowly at the end of a frayed and oily rope.

It was as grim a story of broken bodies and bruised lives as Tom Thorne had ever heard…

A week since Carol Chamberlain had sat in Thorne's office had blown everything wide open. Holland was at the wheel of a car-pool Laguna as they drove into Essex, heading towards Braintree. The two men were comfortable enough with each other to let silences fall between them, but today's was particularly heavy. Thorne could only hope that what was in Holland's head was a sight less dark than what was in his own.

As grim a story…

Jane Foley was raped by Alan Franklin. Thorne was convinced of it, though if it had not been proved then, there was very little chance that the truth would emerge over twenty-five years on. What nobody doubted, then or now, were the bizarre and brutal actions taken by her husband, Dennis. What he had done to Jane, and then to himself, on the afternoon of 10 August, 1976.

Thorne would probably never know for certain exactly what had gone on in that house, what had passed between those two people and led to those last, intimate moments of horror. Thorne did know that he would spend a good deal of time imagining those moments: the terror of Jane Foley as her husband draws near to her; the guilt and the anguish and the fear of a man who has just committed murder; the blood not yet dry on his hands, the tow rope slippy with it as he fashions a makeshift noose.

Worst of all, the incomprehension of the two children, finding the bodies of their parents…

Thorne started slightly as Holland smacked his palms against the wheel. He opened his eyes to see that they'd run into a line of slow moving traffic. Ever since they'd come off the M 11 it had been snarled up. Mid-morning on a Saturday and no good reason for the jam, but it was there all the same.

'Shit,' Holland said. It was the first word either of them had spoken in nearly an hour.

If Thorne was going to spend time thinking about what had happened between Jane and Dennis Foley, he was also going to be dwelling on something equally as painful. Something that, God help him, might have been responsible for horrors all of its own. Thorne had fucked up. He had fucked up as badly as he could remember and, for him, that was saying something… Carol Chamberlain had presumed that the officers working on the Franklin murder in 1996 had also fucked up. It looked as if they'd failed to check Franklin's name against the General Registry at Victoria, which would have revealed his part in the Jane Foley rape case twenty years before that.

In fact, it was a matter of record that those officers had phoned the General Registry. What was not a matter of record, what would have to remain conjecture, was that the brain-dead pen-pusher on the other end of the phone – a man long-since retired and, Thorne hoped, long since dead – had missed Franklin's name. One eye on his crossword as the other had simply skipped past it. It had been a costly mistake. But Thorne's had been costlier.

Unlike the officers in 1996, Thorne had not checked. Jane Foley's name had never been run past the General Registry, had never been put through the system. Strictly speaking, it had not been Thorne's job to do it, but that didn't matter. As far as Thorne was concerned, he carried the can. He never made sure, and even if he had thought of it, it would not have struck him as important.

Why would they need to check out the name of a woman who didn't really exist? Jane Foley was the made-up name of a made-up person, wasn't it? Jane Foley was a fantasy… Thorne knew very well that if they.., he… anyone had checked, made one simple phone call after they'd found Remfry's letters, that Ian Welch might still be alive. As might Howard Anthony Southern… The traffic had begun to move again. Holland yanked the gearstick down, took the car up into second. 'I wouldn't mind, but there's never a decent bloody pile-up at the end of it…'

The body of the third victim had been discovered, in a hotel in Roehampton, at around the same time as the woman from the Crinkey Squad had walked into Thorne's office and dropped her very welcome bombshell. She had still been there when the call came through and Thorne had invited her along to the murder scene. It had seemed the very least he could do.

In that hotel room, with SOCO's and pathologists and an honest-to goodness body, Thorne had thought that, even standing in the background as she was, Carol Chamberlain had looked as happy as a kid in a sweet factory…

In the days that followed, the investigation had begun to move forward in two distinct directions. While the latest victim was being processed, and the change in the pattern of the killings was being looked at, Thorne and those closest to him had begun to work on a new front. They would be chasing the major new lead that Carol Chamberlain had given them.

Holland steered the car into an ordinary-looking road lined with drab sixties houses, and spindly trees which didn't help a great deal.

They'd managed to snaffle one of the few team vehicles with air conditioning and the street felt like a sauna as they stepped out of the car. They pulled on their jackets, grimacing. As they walked towards Peter Foley's house, Thorne thought about leads. Why on earth did they talk about 'chasing' them? He wondered if it was because, no matter how inanimate they were, or how quick you thought you might be, some had a nasty habit of getting away from you.

Dennis Foley's younger brother, the only surviving relative of either Dennis or Jane they had yet been able to trace, was not the most gracious of hosts.

Thorne and Holland sat perched on the edge of stained velour armchairs, sweating inside jackets they had not been encouraged to take off. Opposite them on a matching sofa, Peter Foley sprawled in baggy shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt, open to the waist. He clutched a can of cold lager which, when he wasn't drinking from it, he rolled back and forth across his skinny chest.

'You were, what, eleven years younger than Dennis?' Holland said. Foley swallowed a mouthful of beer. 'Right, I was the mistake.'

'So when it happened you'd have still been a student?'

He shook his head. 'Nope. Least you could do is get your facts right. I was twenty-two in seventy-six. I'd left college the year before…' His accent was pure Essex, the voice high, and a little wheezy.

'And you were doing what?' Thorne asked.

'I was doing fuck all. Bumming around, being a punk. I did a bit of roadying for The Clash at one point…'

Thorne had been a punk as well, though he was six years younger than Foley, who was pushing fifty. The man sitting opposite him certainly didn't look like he listened to 'White Riot' much any more. He was skinny, though his arms were well muscled; worked on, Thorne guessed, to better display the Gothic tattoos. His graying hair was tied back in a ponytail and the wispy beard teased into a point. From the look of him, and the copies of Kerrang! tossed under the coffee table, Thorne figured that Peter Foley was something of an ageing heavy metal fan.

'What do you think happened to Jane?' Thorne said. Foley lifted himself up, pulled a pack of Marlboros from his shorts pocket and sank back down again. 'What? You mean when Den…?'

'Before that. With Franklin.'

'Fucker raped her, didn't he.' It wasn't a question. He lit his cigarette.

'He'd have gone down for it as well if it wasn't for you fucking lot…'

Holland bridled a little, opened his mouth, but Thorne cut across him. 'What do you mean, Mr. Foley?' Thorne knew exactly what Foley meant and he knew that he was right. The force, back then, was not exactly famed for the sensitivity with which it treated rape victims.