Mark Billingham: Lazybones

Holland shrugged. Let his head drop back to his computer screen.

'Oh, you know…'

Kitson took a step away from the desk. She opened her hand above a wastepaper bin and sprinkled the pieces of dirty tissue into it.

Holland watched her go, thinking, 'Actually, you probably don't.' He thought wrong.

Thorne stuck his head round the door of the Incident Room, tried not to gag on a breath of late-afternoon hot air and fermenting aftershave. He waved to Yvonne Kitson. She clocked him and walked quickly across.

'Get everyone together at the far end,' Thorne said. 'Briefing in fifteen minutes.'

Without waiting for a response, Thorne turned and moved away, back up the corridor towards his office…

Sensing that Jesmond was probably right. Knowing that he was right about the Register, but that even if the killer was a social worker or a probation officer or a copper, they were going to have to get him some other way.

He threw his jacket across the desk, dropped down into the chair. There was a small pile of mail he hadn't dealt with. He began to sort through it… If he was a copper?

Thorne would not have bet on it. In all his years he'd known plenty of bad apples, worked with his fair share of shitbags, but never a Killer. It was an interesting idea, a seductive one even, but beyond being convenient in TV shows, it was not much use to him. He dropped a bunch of envelopes into the bin, those that obviously contained circulars or dreary internal memos going in unopened. He always saved the interesting-looking ones until last… There were still aspects of the case that bothered him, that he'd flag up at the briefing. The bedding that had been removed for a kickoff. And the other thing. The thought he couldn't articulate, couldn't shape and snap up.

Something he'd read and something he hadn't… It pretty much amounted to less than fuck all. Not a decent lead, not a bit of luck. He could only hope that some bright spark came up with something useful at the briefing.

When the photographs tumbled out of the white envelope, it took Thorne a few seconds to understand what he was looking at. Then he saw it. Then his heart lurched inside him and began to gallop. As an athlete's heart rate recovers more and more quickly as his fitness increases, so Thorne reacted less and less, physically at least, to images like those that would soon be scattered across his desk. The thumping in his chest was already slowing when he reached into a drawer, took out a pair of scissors and snipped away the elastic band that held the bundle of pictures together. The breaths were coming more easily as he used the tip of a pencil to separate them. By the time he'd decided that he wanted a closer look, remembered where he could find the gloves he needed, his heartbeat was stow and steady again.

There was no longer any visible movement, no judder of the flesh where his shirt stuck damp against his chest… Thorne stood, moved of into the corridor and turned towards the Incident Room. As he walked, he felt amazingly calm and clearheaded. Coming to shocking conclusions and making trivial decisions. The killer was even more cold-blooded than he had imagined…

He was supposed to be seeing Eve later on. Obviously, he would have to call and cancel. Perhaps she would be free tomorrow… Into the Incident Room, and Kitson was moving across from the right of him, eager to talk about something. He held up a hand, waved her away. The box stood, a little incongruously, on a filing cabinet in the far corner of the room, exactly where he'd remembered seeing it. He pulled out the plastic gloves, like snatching tissues from a cardboard dispenser, revealing the transparent fingers of the next pair. Holland was behind him, saying something he didn't catch as he turned to walk back…

The briefing, whenever they had it, would certainly be a bit more lively. Whatever Jesmond thought about the route the investigation was taking, it had definitely become heavy going. Those photos, what was in them, would get it started again.

Jump leads.

Not a bit of luck, exactly, but fuck it, close enough… Thorne walked into his office and straight across to his desk. He knew even as he was doing it, even as he pulled on the gloves and delicately picked up a photo by its edge, that he was probably wasting his time. He had to go through the motions, of course, but the gloves were almost certainly unnecessary. Though he knew the surface of a photograph was as good as any at holding a fingerprint, he also knew that the man who had taken it was extremely cautious. Aside from the prints of postal workers and prison officers, or the hair and dead skin of the victims themselves, they'd got nothing from any of the photos or letters thus far. This was, after all, a killer who removed the bedding from his murder scenes.

Still, everybody made mistakes now and again.

Thorne flicked quickly through the photos. The close-ups of the battered and bloodied face, those thin lips thickened, then burst. Te movement in the full-length pictures captured in a sickening blur. Pictures taken, unbelievably, while the victim was still alive. Thrashing… He pushed aside the interior shots and lowered his head, checking to see if the killer had made one mistake in particular. He stared closely at the photo that had been very deliberately placed on the top of the pile. The first picture he had been intended to see. The window of the shop next door…

A killer's little joke.

Thorne was dimly aware of the figures of Holland and Kitson, watching him from the doorway as he squinted at the picture. Hoping to see a distorted image that would probably be worse than useless, but would show him that he was dealing with fallible flesh and blood. Searching in vain for a reflection of the cameraman in a tiny, black mirror. Looking for the killer's face in the eye of a dead fish.

He was pretty sure he'd picked a good one.

The list had to be looked at carefully. He couldn't just print off a copy and stick a pin in. Not that there was that much time to look at it when he had the chance, but he was getting better at selecting the likely candidates quickly. With the previous two he'd chosen a couple of decent-looking ones and gone through the details more carefully later, when he could take his time. He'd done the same thing with this one, rejecting a couple of names for various practical reasons – location, domestic set-up and so on – and coming up with a winner.

Christ, though, there were plenty to choose from. The serious cases, the ones he was interested in, would be on the Register indefinitely, and those that did eventually come off the list, after five, or seven or ten years, had been replaced a hundredfold by the time their names were removed. It was a growth industry…

This one would shape up very nicely, by the look of it. He lived alone in a nice, quiet street. Friends were an unknown quantity as yet, but it didn't look like there was any family around. It might even be possible to avoid using a hotel altogether…

He was ambivalent about that. Doing it in a house or flat would be simpler, but there was an unpredictability that made him uncomfortable. It would be tricky to get inside in advance and look at the layout of the place. He couldn't count on the place being as forensically friendly as the average hotel room. An unexpected visit from a neighbour couldn't be prevented with a 'Do Not Disturb' sign on the door.

He hadn't had the choice with Remfry or Welch, but using hotels had worked out well so far and he was somewhat reluctant to change a winning formula. Hotels did mean a lot more possible witnesses and a security system to get around but that wasn't too much of a problem. He'd learned that people saw fuck all when they weren't really looking, and cameras saw even less if you knew how to avoid them.