Mark Billingham: Lazybones

'That was fortunate for you,' Thorne said.

'We all need a bit of luck now and again,' Eve said. 'Some of us more than others…'

Thorne lifted his face from the carpet, feeling fibres and tiny pieces of grit sticking to the dried blood on his chin. He took the weight on his forehead and looked back through the gap underneath his arm. Jameson was delving into the rucksack he'd placed on the end of the bed. Eve stood by his side, her eyes never leaving Thorne.

'We should get this done,' she said.

Thorne saw a flash of blue as Jameson pulled out the length of washing line, then one of black, which he presumed was the hood. He felt the fear that was the creature in his chest grow heavier. He closed his eyes and saw it climbing, using the slats of his ribcage like a ladder, heaving itself upwards lit-de by little.

As was so often the way, it was the last part of the journey that was proving the most frustrating. It had taken ages to get across the Holloway Road at the Nag's Head and up to Tufnell Park. Now the ridiculous number of traffic lights and pedestrian crossings on the Kentish Town Road was providing a last-minute annoyance. Holland thought about calling again. He decided that even if Thorne was off the phone or had turned the mobile back on, he was more or less there now anyway, so there wasn't much point… Holland drove down the inside lane, swerving back out right when he came up against a bus and deftly cutting up a black cab in the process. At the next set of lights the taxi came up his inside and the driver wound down his window to give him an earful. Holland held up his warrant card, told the fat cabbie to luck off and watched, smiling, as he did.

When the lights changed, Holland swung into Prince of Wales Road. Thorne's street was the third on the right. He indicated and slowed to a stop, glancing down at the photos while he was waiting for a break in the traffic.

When one finally came, he turned, wondering if they'd even allow Thorne to be there when they made the arrests.

'It is the most fantastic story though,' Jameson said. 'Maybe I should write it, change all the names of course, to protect the innocent…'

'Whoever they are,' Thorne said.

'It would be in three parts. Three acts, if you like, same as any classic screenplay…'

'You live and learn.'

'Not for much longer.'

The black thing inside Thorne climbed another rib…

'For the first part we have to go back in time. Flared trousers and shit hair and a piece of scum who probably has both. A man drags a woman into a storeroom and rapes her.'

'Your mother…'

Thorne felt the vibrations as feet moved quickly across the carpet towards him, then the pain of a heel pressing down on to the side of his face. 'Let him tell it,' Eve said.

'The rapist, thanks largely to the police, is found not guilty. The woman suffers a breakdown. Her husband goes mad.' Jameson emptied the facts from his mouth like he was spitting out dirt. 'He kills her and then himself and their bodies are discovered by their two young children who are subsequently taken into foster care. It's a dramatic start, don't you reckon?'

'That's why I'm here, isn't it?' Thorne said. The shoe came back down across the side of his face and ear. Jameson said something he couldn't make out and the foot was lifted. Thorne turned his head and saw Eve moving back across the room towards her brother. '"Thanks largely to the police", that's what you said. So, I have to die because of the way some fuckwit handled a rape case nearly thirty years ago.' He received no answer. 'Yes? Is that about right?'

'There's no point bleating about life being unfair,' Eve said. 'We're the 'last people you'll get any sympathy from there…'

'I understand why. I just want to know why me?' 'Because you answered the phone.'

And Thorne saw that it really was that simple. The message left by the killer on Eve Bloom's answering machine had always bothered him, and finally he understood why. It had been 'left' so that Eve had an excuse to call the hotel – a call to a murder scene that would be answered by a police officer. The wreaths had been ordered after the subsequent killings purely to make it look like part of a pattern.

They had selected their rapists with care. Their final victim, Thorne himself, had been chosen completely at random. He remembered what he'd said to Eve, what she'd said to him, twenty minutes earlier in bed:

'It could easily have been somebody else who answered that phone…'

' Then it could very easily have been somebody else who was here now.'

He could still see the look on her face as she'd said it. He imagined the look on his father's, as he received the news of Thorne's death.

'I've got a great title as well,' Jameson said. 'For this sordid little horror story. What do you think of "Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire"'?

'We know about Roger Noble…'

'Oh you do?' For the first time, though Jameson did not raise his voice, Thorne could hear emotion behind it, white-hot and lethal.

'You might know what he did, but you can't know how it felt.'

'Bad enough so that you had to leave.'

'Well done…'

'To protect your sister…'

'Noble didn't want to hurt me,' Eve said. 'He wanted to hurt my baby.'

'He made you pregnant?'

Jameson laughed. 'We're back to ignorance. We should have a little bell to ring, or a buzzer, for when you get it wrong or say something stupid. Noble liked boys. The baby was mine.'

'Ours,' Eve said. 'So we left when they tried to make me get rid of it.'

Thorne realised that it had been shame he'd heard in Irene Noble's voice when she'd stared into her M amp; S coffee and talked about 'behavioural' problems. It had probably been her idea to move in the first place, to get the abortion performed in a different area, to avoid the scandal…

'What happened to the child?' Thorne asked.

Jameson answered matter-of-factly. 'We lost it. Who knows, when all this is over, we might try again.'

For perhaps half a minute, nobody spoke. Thorne lay in agony, a breeze from somewhere passing across his bare skin. The feeling had gone from his hands, and the thumping of his heart was lifting his chest clear off the carpet.

When all this is over…

He imagined the look that was passing between the two people who planned to kill him. He pictured something tender, an expression of the love between a man and a woman, who talked about having a baby together once he had been raped and strangled to death. Thorne moaned in pain as he twisted his head across to the other side. 'I'm guessing that the final part of this story involves the murders,' he said. 'Remfry and Welch and Dodd and Southern. Me as the symbolic climax. It's the middle bit that's still a mystery, after you disappeared. What happened between Franklin and the men in prison?

Why did you start killing again?'

'Lightning struck twice,' Eve said.

Then the doorbell rang…

Thorne tensed and raised his head, but their speed, their commitment, was overpowering. In a heartbeat they were on him, a knife pressed into each side of his throat, cutting off the breath he'd need before he had a chance to cry out…

Hedricks picked up almost immediately.

'Listen,' Holland said, 'I'm outside DI Thorne's place and I can't get any reply, but his phone's engaged…'

'He probably left it off the hook, while he's busy giving Eliza Doolittle a good seeing to.'

Holland felt ice at his neck. 'Sorry?'

'He had a hot date with his sexy florist. I'm not surprised he doesn't want to answer the door…'

'Oh, Jesus…'

'What is it?'

Holland told Hendricks about the pictures, about Mark and Sarah Foley. Hendricks announced that he was coming straight over. The panic Holland heard in the pathologist's voice stemmed the rising tide of it he felt in himself.