Mark Billingham - Lazybones

It was down to something else to6, of course… Thorne had called it laziness. A fear of things going further. A reluctance to move a relationship along. Could it really have been something else altogether? Some indefinable instinct for self preservation? Whatever it was, Thorne was grateful for it. He hoped, God forbid it should ever be needed, that he would recognise it next time around…

Thorne ended the call with Kitson and turned Nixon back up. He'd given Lambchop another chance, and was pleased that he had. Their sound, somehow lush and stripped down at the same time, was hypnotic. He listened to the singer's strange whisperings, and thought about the trial. He thought about wounds opening and scars healing, about others whose lives had been nudged, or knocked or smashed forever out of kilter…

Sheila Franklin and Irene Noble and Peter Foley…

Denise Hollins, who'd lived with one murderer and shared her bed with another. Thorne had stayed in touch with her, but their conversations were rarely easy. She could not even start to put together the intricate jigsaw of her shattered life, when so many of the tiny pieces had yet to be found.

Dave Holland, father of a three-day-old baby. Thorne was sure he would do his best to make the history of his own, brand-new family a simple one…

Thorne's exit was coming up and he tried to focus on some of the more mundane elements of the court case.

He indicated and moved across to the inside lane, thinking about shaving off the beard he'd grown to cover the scar, and about getting his suit dry-cleaned. Thinking about reminding Phil Hendricks to take all his earrings out before giving evidence… Thorne's father had the bits of two or three different radios spread out on the table in front of him. Every so often he'd slam a piece down, or swear loudly in frustration. Then he'd look across at Thorne, sitting, n the sofa, and grin like a child who's been caught misbehaving. Thorne was looking at a picture of his father from maybe thirty years before. The majority of the old photo albums were foxed and falling apart; none had been taken out of the sideboard since his mother had died. She had been the photographer, the one who always remembered to take along the Instamatic, who bought the albums from Boots and spent evenings pasting in the pictures… Thorne looked from the photo to the real thing, from the young man to the old. His father looked up at him. Thorne noticed, as he always did, the hair that like his own, was greyer on one side than the other.

'Do you want some tea?' his father said.

Thorne understood the code. 'I'll make you some in a minute…'

He turned a stiff, faded page and stared at a picture of a young couple, their arms around a child of six or seven. The three of them sat, squinting against the sunlight, a deep green sea of bracken rising up behind them.

Thorne smiled at the can of beer in his father's hand, at the expression on his mother's face having talked some hapless passer-by into taking the picture. He stared down at the boy, grinning happily at the camera. The brown eyes round and bright, the shadows yet to fall across his face.

Long before anybody died.

Carol Chamberlain felt twenty years younger. Every thought and sensation was coming that bit quicker, feeling that bit stronger. She felt hungrier, more awake. The night before in bed, she'd leaned across and 'helped herself', for heaven's sake, which had certainly surprised and delighted her old man. Maybe the battered green folder on her lap would prove to be the saving of both of them… Jack was still smiling twelve hours later, as he brought a plate of toast through to her. She blew him a kiss. He took his anorak from the stand in the corner, off to pick up a paper.

Carol had been fifty-two, a DCI for a decade, when the Met's ludicrous policy of compulsory retirement after thirty years had pushed her out of the force. That had been three years ago. It had rankled, for each day of those three years, right up to the moment when that phone call had come out of the blue.

Carol had been amazed, and not a little relieved… She knew how much she had to offer, still had to offer, but she also knew that this chance had come along at the very last moment. If she was being honest, she would have to admit that recently she'd felt her self slowly giving in, throwing in the towel in much the same way that her husband had.

She heard the gate creak shut. Turned to watch Jack walking away up the road. An old man at fifty-seven…

Carol picked up the folder from her knees. Her first cold case. A sticker on the top right-hand corner read 'AMRU'. The Area Major Review Unit was what it said at the top of the notepaper. The Cold Case Team was how they thought of themselves. In the canteen they were just called the Crinkly Squad. They could call her what they sodding-well liked, but she'd do the same bloody good job she'd always done…

The day before at Victoria, when she'd collected the file from the General Registry, she'd noticed straight away that it had been pulled only three weeks earlier by a DC from the Serious Crime Group. That was interesting. She'd scribbled down the officer's name, made a mental note to give him a call and find out what he'd been looking for…

Three years away from it. Three years of reading all those books she'd never got round to, and cooking, and gardening, and catching up with friends she'd lost touch with for perfectly good reasons, and feeling slightly sick when Crimewatch came on. Three years out of it, but the flutter in her stomach was still there. The butterflies that shook the dust from their wings and began to flap around as she opened the folder and started to read.

A man throttled to death in an empty car park, seven years earlier…

A week into his forty-fourth year. The discovery of his burnt-out car being far from the low point, Tom Thorne was already pretty sure that the year was not going to be a vintage one. Seven days since he'd rushed back from a wedding to attend a post-mortem. Seven days during which the only developments on the case had been about as welcome as the turd he'd found waiting for him in his bed.

Welch's movements between his release from prison and the discovery of his body, painstakingly reconstructed, had yielded nothing. Forensically, the photos recovered from the locker in Macpherson House had been a black hole.

A hundred and more interviews with anybody who could feasibly have seen anything, and not a word said that might raise the blood pressure.

The ACTIONS outlined and ticked off on the white board. Allocated and diligently carried out. Contacting the sex offenders who had themselves been diligent about signing the Register at the right time. Tracking down those who were not quite so assiduous, who had perhaps forgotten, or mixed up the days in their diaries, or buggered off to another part of the country and gone underground. Checking and double-checking the statements of everyone from the traumatised receptionist at the Greenwood Hotel to the semi-pickled dosser who had been occupying the bed next to Ian Welch for the few days before he was killed…

This was what 99 per cent of police work really consisted of. It was procedure like this, together with a little bit of luck, that would provide pretty much the best chance, the only chance, of getting a result. And Thorne, of course, hated every tedious minute of it. While he was waiting for that elusive bit of luck to arrive, even his one moment of genuine inspiration was proving to have been useless… Sitting in Russell Brigstocke's office – Monday morning and feeling like it – Thorne listened as he was told just how useless it was. He had thought that the killer's access to the Sex Offenders Register might hold the key to catching him. Detective Chief Superintendent Trevor Jesmond was more than happy to disillusion him…