Mark Billingham - Lazybones

Thorne and Holland exchanged a glance. They were catching every red light…

'What about school records?' Lesser said. 'You might have more luck…'

Holland glanced down at his notebook. 'They attended local primary and secondary schools until 1984, after which there's no record of them.'

She considered this. 'Are you sure they're still alive?'

'We're not really sure about anything,' Thorne said. In truth, the idea that Mark and Sarah Foley might be dead was something that had been only briefly considered. It had even been suggested that the suicide of Dennis Foley might have been a second murder made to look like a suicide. That whoever had been responsible might have wanted the children dead too. Half an hour spent looking at the files on the original case, at the post-mortem report on Dennis Foley, had soon put paid to that clever theory.

'This is probably clutching at straws,' Holland said, 'but I don't suppose there's anybody still working here, in your department, who was around back in 1976?'

'Sorry. Staff tend to move around as often as the offices do.'

'A bit like footballers,' Holland said.

'I wish we got paid as much.' Thorne thought the smile she gave Holland was of an altogether different sort from the one she'd given him.

Thorne shifted on his chair. It was enough to drag Holland's eye from Joanne Lesser back to him. Time to go.

'Right, well, thanks…'

'It's a long way back,' she said.

Holland reached for his jacket. 'There shouldn't be too much traffic at this time of the day…'

'No, I meant you're going back a long way. To look for these people, for Mark and Sarah Foley. I mean, what about National Insurance? DVLA? Sorry, I don't want to teach my grandmother to suck eggs, but…'

'It's OK,' Thorne said.

She leaned forward in her chair. 'Why do you want to find them?'

Holland stuffed his notebook away. 'I'm sorry, but we can't really…'

Thorne cut him off. What did it matter? 'They were fostered after their parents died. Their father killed their mother and then himself. The children discovered the bodies.' Lesser's lower jaw sagged a little.

'We think that what happened back then is connected with a series of murders that we're investigating now.'

'A series?' She spoke it like it was a magic word.

'Yes.'

'They're connected to it, you mean? Mark and Sarah Foley?'

Thorne could see a flush developing at the top of her chest. Her voice was suddenly a little higher. She was excited. Thorne stood up and began pulling on his leather jacket. 'Listen, Joanne, we'll be sending someone down to County Hall to start looking for these records. I'm sure you're busy, but we'd be very grateful if you could give him as much help as you can…'

She rolled her chair back and stood too. 'You don't need to send anyone. I'd be happy to do it for you. I mean, yes, I am pretty busy, but I can find the time.' The flush had moved up to the base of her throat. 'I'll probably be quicker on my own, to be honest. You know, without somebody else getting in the way…'

Thorne thought about her offer. It sounded like such a wild-goose chase that he'd probably only be wasting an officer anyway. He nodded. 'Thanks.'

At the door, while Holland took down Lesser's phone number and handed her a card, Thorne stared at the posters on the wall next to the door. One image in particular caught his eye: a girl and a boy, hand in hand, staring straight at the camera, their moist, round eyes begging. They were much younger than Mark and Sarah Foley would have been, no bigger than toddlers, and they were almost certainly actors. Still, their faces held Thorne's attention…

He tensed a little when he felt Lesser's hand on his arm.

'It's funny,' she said, 'to think that people can. just slip through the net like that, isn't it?'

Thorne nodded, thinking that some people were a lot more slippery than others.

Driving back through the town centre, Holland talked about Joanne Lesser. He joked about the sort of woman who looked like she wouldn't say boo to a goose and then went home and lay in the bath, one hand holding some gruesome true-crime book, while the other…

Thorne wasn't paying too much attention. He felt as though someone had poured concrete in through his ears. The thoughts floundered in his head, sticky and dismal, while his face, as always, was easy to read.

'Like she said, we were going a long way back,' Holland said.

'Probably wasting our time. We'll find them somewhere else…'

Thorne grunted. Holland was right, but all the same, he had been counting on something a bit more positive.

Holland made for the motorway, heading out of town along the line of the Roman wall. From here at St Mary's of the Wall, during the English Civil War, a vast Royalist cannon named Humpty Dumpty was said to have fallen, later to be immortalised in the children's nursery rhyme. They passed the ancient entrance to the town, through which Claudius, the invading Emperor, had once ridden into Colchester on the back of an elephant. Thorne found it strange that two thousand years later, whether by accident or design, the far more recent history of ordinary people could be so impenetrable.

'I'm betting Miss Marple back there's already rootling through her dead files,' Holland said. He laughed, and Thorne dredged up something that might have been a smile, if one half of his face had been paralysed. 'What d'you reckon?'

Thorne reckoned that he'd been right about chasing leads. This one had sounded solid, like it wasn't going anywhere. Now it had put on a burst of speed and Thorne felt as if he could do nothing but watch it disappear into the distance.

The slice of white bread in Peter Foley's hand was blackened with dabs of newsprint from his fingers. He looked at his hands. There were still scabs on a couple of the knuckles, and oil beneath his fingernails from where he'd spent the morning tinkering with his motorbike. He used the bread to mop up the last of his gravy, then picked up his mug of tea and leaned back against the red, plastic banquette.

He stared out of the care window and watched the cars drift by. He thought about his family. The dead and the disappeared. Bumming around…

That's what he'd told those fuckers, when they'd asked what he was doing back when it had happened, and it was pretty much all he'd done since as well. Holding down a job, once he'd got back into the swing of things, had become difficult. He'd developed a tendency to take things the wrong way, to react badly to a tasteless comment or a funny look. He couldn't say for sure that what had happened was responsible. He might always have been destined to be a shiftless loser with a tendency towards casual violence, but what the luck, it was comforting to have something to blame.

To have somebody to blame.

He should have moved away from the area. There was always some old dear with an opinion, or a pair of young mums whispering and shielding their children. Always some interfering fucker, willing to tell any woman he got close to all about his happy family. People had good memories. Not as good as his, though…

He remembered the argument he'd had with Den a couple of days before it had happened. He'd wanted to come round, had asked Den why nobody had seen Jane for a while, if everything was all right. Den had lost it and told him to mind his own business, said that he knew very well what was going on. He remembered his brother's face, the trembling around the mouth as he'd accused him of fancying Jane, all but suggesting they'd been screwing behind his back. He remembered the guilt he'd felt, then and afterwards, because he did fancy Jane and always had.

And he remembered the faces of the children, the last time he'd seen them, before that cow from the social services had driven them away. Sarah had been quiet, she'd probably not really understood what was going on, but the boy's face, Marte's face, pressed against the back window of that car, had been streaked with snot and tears.