Lazybones

'Straight afterwards, you mean? After they found…?'

'Later on. Where did they go?'

'Into care. The police took them away and then the social services got involved. There was some counseling went on, I think. More so for the boy as I remember, he'd have been eight or nine…'

'He was seven. His sister was five.'

'Yeah, that sounds right.'

'So…?'

'So, eventually, they were fostered.'

'I see.'

'Look, there was only Jane's mum and she was already knocking on. No other way, really. I said I'd have the kids, me and my girlfriend, but nobody was very keen. I was only twenty-two…'

'And of course, your brother had just bashed their mother's brains out with a table lamp…'

'I said I'd have them. I wanted to have them…'

'So you stayed in touch with the kids?'

'Course…'

'Did you see much of them?'

'For a while, but they moved around. It wasn't always easy.'

'You've got the names and addresses?'

'Which…?'

'The foster parents'. You said the kids moved around. Were there many?'

'A few.'

'You've got all the details?'

'Not any more. I mean, I did then, yeah. There were Christmas cards, birthdays…'

'And then you just lost touch?'

'Well, you do, don't you?'

'So you'd have no idea at all where Sarah and Mark are living now?'

Foley blinked, laughed humourlessly. 'What, you mean you lot haven't?'

'We've traced every Mark Foley in the country. Every Sarah Foley or Sarah Whatever nee Foley, and none of them remembers wandering into the hall and seeing their father dangling from a tow rope. Nobody recalls popping upstairs to find Mum lying in a pool of blood with her skull caved in. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think that sort of thing would slip your mind.'

Foley shook his head. 'I can't help you, mate. Even if I could, it would go against the bloody grain…'

Thorne looked at Holland. Time to go. As they stood up, Foley swung his legs up on to the sofa, reached down beside it for another can of lager.

'Before everything happened, before it all went tits up, Jane and Den were normal, you know? Just a normal couple with two kids and an OK house and all the rest of it. They were a good team, they were doing all right, and I reckon they'd have got over what that arsehole did to Jane. I mean, couples do, don't they, eventually, and Den would have helped her, because he loved her. But what came after, what happened to them in that trial, and the stuff later on… you don't get over that, ever. And that's down to you.'

Foley was talking about something that had happened a long time ago. He was talking about mistakes that it was too late to put right, and about a police officer long-since retired.

But he was pointing at Thorne.

EIGHTEEN

Thorne enjoyed expensive wine, but rather more often, cheap lager. This particular brand, which had caught his eye in the off-licence, was the same one Peter Folly had been drinking… Another Saturday when he hadn't got home until gone ten o'clock. Eve would probably still have been up, he could have called, but he hadn't bothered. He had only managed to see her once in the last fortnight, and though they'd talked often on the phone, he'd sensed a tension starting to creep in. He was starting to use his workload as an excuse.

Thorne knew very well that when it came to relationships, he was basically bone idle. He'd been that way with the girls he'd copped off with in the fifth form, he'd been that way with his first serious girlfriends and he'd been that way with Jan. Happy to sink into a rut, wary of changing direction. Eventually, of course, Jan had changed direction herself. Got creative with her creative-writing lecturer… All because he was comfortable being stuck in the mud, and now he could feel it going the same way with Eve.

There was the bed thing, for a kick-off. As he lay with his feet up on the sofa which would soon become his bed for another night, he thought about the whole, stupid business of his failure to buy a new mattress. The trip they'd arranged the week before had been cancelled for obvious reasons. He'd joked with Eve about burglars and murderers conspiring to keep them from shagging, but in reality, the delays had been.., convenient. There was a part of him, a nasty part he was reluctant to acknowledge, that worried about how interested in Eve he would really be once he'd got her into bed, but that wasn't really the problem. At the end of the day, he was just plain, bloody lazy… From his brand-new speakers came the mournful tones of Johnny Cash, singing his sublime version of Springsteen's 'Highway Patrolman'. As Cash sang about nothing feeling better than blood on blood, Thorne thought that if any voice could capture the love and agony, the hatred and the joy, of family ties, it was his. It helped if you'd lived it, of course.

On the floor, the cat was yowling, begging to be picked up. Thorne leaned down, put his can on the carpet and pulled her up on to his lap. So often it came down to families…

He thought about Mark and Sarah Foley, whose family was torn apart in front of them, leaving each with no one save the other. A generation down the line and they were nowhere to be found. It could only be because they wanted it that way.

Mark Foley, now a man in his mid-thirties, once a terrified little boy in need of professional counseling. Had he grown up, the horror turning to hatred and festering inside him? Had he waited twenty years and then killed the man who'd raped his mother, the man he held responsible for her death and the suicide of his father? Right now, Mark Foley was as good a suspect as they had, but what had happened since 1996, between Alan Franklin's death and this new spate of killings?

What had sparked off the cultivating and murdering of these completely unconnected rapists…?

Thorne had always known, somehow, that rape was key to the case. Hadn't he tried to explain it to Hendricks? The rape element in the killings of Remfry and Welch, and now of Howard Southern, had always felt significant. More significant than the killings themselves. Now, Thorne knew why. If he didn't fully understand it, he at least understood that it had a history…

And still that ambivalence on the part of so many involved in the investigation. A third victim and another convicted rapist. Older, yes, and a lot longer out of prison, but still a sex offender. Still a nonce. One for whom very few people, least of all those trying to catch his killer, seemed to be mourning.

And still that ambivalence, if Thorne was honest, on his part as well…

'Seems to me that whoever killed Rein fry did everyone a favour…'.'

' There will be people asking whether or not we should be grateful…'

'It's not like he's chopping up old ladies, is it?'

Thorne found it hard to argue with the sentiments, but as someone who'd spent his entire adult life if not always catching killers, then at least believing that what they did was wrong, he had to try and stay out of it.

With some cases it was easy. 'Hate the killer, love the victim. Thorne would never forget the months he'd spent hunting a man who killed women while trying to put them into comas, into a state of living death. Or his last big one: tracking down a pair of killers, one a manipulative psychopath, the other who killed because he was told Then there were the cases where it wasn't quite so clear-cut, where sympathies were not so easily divvied up: the wife, driven to murder an abusive husband; the armed robber, knocked off for grassing on his workmates; the drug-dealer, carved up by a rival… Then there was this case.

When Thorne swung his legs on to the floor and stood up, Elvis jumped off and skulked away, grumbling, towards the kitchen. Thorne followed her. He dropped his empties into the bin, and for half a minute he stared into