Mark Billingham: Lazybones

The song faded out, and in the gap before the next one started, Holland heard the low murmur of voices. He turned towards the sound as the music began again.

They were in the bedroom. Jameson, and the girl, and… Though he couldn't make out what was being said, relief flooded through him as he recognised one of the voices as Thorne's.

The relief turned into something that tasted bitter in his mouth, as Holland realised that he needed to act quickly, that he would have no idea what to expect on the other side of the bedroom door. He thought about Sophie as he stood, rooted to the spot, looking around the room for something he might use as a weapon.

Thorne felt the pain shoot through his neck and shoulders as Jameson shifted his weight. He watched a hand pass in front of his face. The washing line was looped around the fingers…

'Strange how a man's mind works,' Jameson said. 'Even close to death, they were all far more afraid of what was happening at the back end than the front…'

Thorne winced as Eve's hand pressed down on to the small of his back. He tensed and sucked in a breath at the touch of cold plastic brushing against his thigh.

'On that scale of one to ten,' she said, 'how keen are you now?' Thorne clenched, and drove his pelvis down towards the floor, but he was unable to flatten himself. He felt only the gentle resistance of the pillows that had been placed beneath him, raising his backside just enough, however much he tried to move away… Jameson grabbed a handful of Thorne's hair, lifted up his head.

'Some advice, for what it's worth.' Thorne grunted, shook his head.

'It's best not to fight the line when you feel it round your neck…'

Thorne channeled every last ounce of strength he had left into his neck, driving his head back down towards the floor. He could feel his hair being torn away by the roots… He could feel the thick tip of the phallus pushing at the crack of his buttocks…

He pushed his face towards the carpet, knowing that Jameson just needed enough room, enough space to get the hood on. The line would quickly follow and then it would all be over…

'Take it or leave it,' Jameson said. 'Seriously though, if you let me get on with it and let the line do its job, you'll be unconscious long before she's finished…'

Thorne screamed, and at the same moment, Jameson stopped pulling and smashed Thorne's head forward on to the floor. Thorne lay still, momentarily stunned, for the few seconds that Jameson needed to slip the hood over his head.

Even as he writhed and jerked, Thorne felt a bizarre calm, which grew deeper as the ligature tightened around his neck. He felt the fear inside him shrivel to nothing. He saw faces burst and scatter as flashes of light. He drifted through a black space so thick that he knew it had more to do with death than darkness.

The crash of the door and the shouting are like distant sound-effects which echo and grow suddenly deafening as the pressure around his neck is released…

Thorne sucked air into his lungs and reared up, snarling and snapping his head back into something, feeling it give and soften. The weight fell or was lifted from him, and he pitched forward, rolling over on to his back. He lifted his hands, numbed by the belt, and began scrabbling with dead fingers to remove the hood. A scream, and then a crack, and the piercing squeal of castors as the bed moves at speed across the floor…

He stared up at the ceiling, heard grunts of effort and pain, and the crash of bodies impacting with something solid. Dropping his head to the side, Thorne saw Jameson and Holland in a heap by the wardrobe. He saw the wardrobe door swing slowly open and, in the mirror on the back, he saw Eve coming at him.

Spinning quickly from the reflection to the real thing… With her knife raised, she launched herself, or stumbled or Ell, towards him, and Thorne could do little but turn his face away ad kick up hard at her. As she opened her mouth, grimacing with the effort or with the hatred, Thorne's foot crashed into the underside of her jaw, knocking her head back and sending a thick string of blood arcing high above them both. The last drops were still raining down long moments after she'd fallen to the floor like a side of meat…

Thorne climbed gingerly to his feet and moved slowly across to where Holland was standing, doubled-over and white-faced, panting. Jameson lay moaning on the floor, one arm bent awkwardly behind him and the other stretched towards a knife that he was never going to reach. He looked up, his expression impossible to read through the pulpy red mess that Thorne's head had made of his face. A bottle of wine lay on its side, half rolled beneath the wardrobe. Thorne nudged it out with his foot as Holland began untying the belt around his wrists.

'It was all I could find,' Holland said between gulps of air. 'I think I broke the fucker's arm with it…'

Hands free, Thorne turned and walked back to where Eve was sprawled near the bedroom door. She still had the knife in her hand, but barely noticed as Thorne took it away from her. She was busy scanning the bloodstained carpet for half of her tongue, bitten off as cleanly as her father's had been, when he'd dropped from a banister all those years before.

Thorne sank down to the floor, leaned back against the bed. He felt the pain start to return. In his head, in his arms, everywhere. From the other room he could hear George Jones singing like nothing had happened.

He stared at himself in the mirror on the back of the wardrobe door. Naked and covered in blood, he looked like some kind of ravening savage. He watched himself slowly move a hand to cover his genitals.

'I phoned Hendricks,' Holland said. 'There's back-up on the way.'

Thorne nodded. 'That's good. That's very good, Dave. Pass me my fucking underpants first though, would you…?'

Yvonne Kitson rang him on his way to St Albans.

'Tom, how are you doing?'

'I'm good. What about you?'

'I'm fine. Listen…'

Thorne knew very well that Kitson was far from fine. Her husband had taken the kids after discovering her affair with a senior officer and now her career looked likely to fall apart as comprehensively as her family. It had been her husband who had made the call to her superiors, told them exactly what his wife had been up to, and with whom…

'Listen,' she said, 'I thought you'd like to know straight away. We've got a provisional date for the trial.'

It had been six weeks since the arrests of Eve Bloom and Ben Jameson. Since Thorne had been led from his own flat, a hand on his arm and a blanket around his shoulders, like so many victims he'd watched in the past, shuffling towards police cars and ambulances, saucer-eyed and colourless.

Now they would need to go through it all again. The case was 365 already being put together, but now, with a date set, the pace would really pick up. The documentation had to be disclosed to the Crown Prosecution Service, and the witnesses properly prepared. Everything had to be carefully gathered and shaped, so that professionals could take it into a courtroom and use it to get a conviction. Thorne of course would be spared the donkey work. His moment would come later, in the witness box.

Not that Thorne had ever stopped going through it… In stark contrast to real life, Eve Bloom was always disturbingly honest in the Restorative Justice Conferences Thorne imagined with her daily. Of course, there had never been the slightest interest in him sexually. If she'd wanted to, she could easily have slept with him at her place. What wouldn't have been so easy with a flatmate around was what she and her brother had been planning to do all along. That she hadn't had the opportunity to do it sooner, to get Thorne where she wanted him at his place, was down to a seventeen-year-old smack-head who'd burgled Thorne's flat and, without knowing it, saved his life.