the fridge for no particular reason.
He walked into the bedroom, gathered up his duvet and pillow from the bottom of the wardrobe.
Thorne despised rapists. He also despised murderers. To go into which he despised more or less was not going to help anybody. Eve and Denise had done for the best part of a bottle of red wine each. The laughter had been getting louder, and the language a good deal more earthy ever since the pizzas had been finished and the second bottle of red opened…
'Fuck him if he's not interested,' Denise said. Eve swirled the wine around in her glass, stared through it. 'That's the thing though. He is interested, definitely.'
'Oh, you can tell, can you?'
'It wasn't hard…'
Denise gave a lascivious grin. 'Well, that usually means they aren't interested at all.'
Eve almost spat her wine across the table. When she'd finished laughing, she stood and began gathering up the pizza boxes. 'I don't know what he's up to. I'm not sure he knows what he's up to…'
Denise reached over, grabbed a last piece of cold pizza crust before the box got taken away. 'Maybe he's a schizo, like some of these nutters he tries to catch.'
'Maybe…'
'Does he talk about his work much? About the cases he's working on?'
Eve was folding the pizza boxes in half, crushing them down into the bin. She shrugged. 'Not really.'
'Oh come on, he must say something, surely?'
'We got into it a couple of weeks ago, this weird murder case.' Eve stepped across to the sink and began washing her hands. 'We ended up sort of arguing about it and he hasn't really mentioned it since.'
'Right. Except when he's using it as an excuse?'
'Maybe I'm being paranoid about that…'
Denise poured what was left in the bottle into her glass. She held the empty bottle aloft triumphantly. The bell rang.
'That'll be Ben,' Denise said. 'He had to stay late, get an edit finished.'
She took a hearty mouthful of wine and all but skipped from the room. Eve listened to her flatmate's feet as they hammered down the stairs. She heard the squeal when the door was opened, the low moans as Ben stepped in and they embraced on the doorstep… She made a quick decision to get off to bed before Ben came up. She would read for a while and try not to think too much about Tom Thorne, about whether he might ring the next day. She moved out into the hall, shouting down the stairs to Denise and Ben as she opened her bedroom door.
'I'm going to turn in, I think. See you in the morning…'
The last thing she wanted to watch was those two; all over each other.
The sun was streaming in through two vast windows at the far end of the narrow room, and yet 'the light was somehow cold, as if it were bouncing off the refrigerated doors and steel instruments of an autopsy suite.
Blinding white light, but Thorne knew very well that it was the middle of the night.
He wore pyjamas, with his brown leather jacket over the top. He moved quickly around the room, his steps jaunty, bouncing in time to a tune he could hear but not quite place.
The three beds were equidistant from one another, lined up precisely. The metal bedsteads made them look a little like hospital cots, but they were bigger, more comfortable. They were identical, each with thick pillows, a clean white cotton sheet and a body. Thorne moved to the end of the first bed, wrapped his hands around the metal rail, and peered down at Douglas Remfry. The arse poking into the air, the face buried in the sheet. He began to shake the bed, rattling the frame, shouting over the noise of it. He shook and shook and shouted, filled with contempt for who this man had once been, for what he had done.
'Come on then, up you get, you idle bastard. There's women out there begging for it. Up and at 'em…'
And, as the body shook on the bed, the skin began to slip off, until it lay on the sheet, gathered about the bare bones like dirty tights, rolled down around a pair of ankles.
Thorne laughed and pointed at what remained, at the rapist's skin and skeleton, sloughed away and contorted. 'For heaven's sake, Lazybones, are you ever going to get up out of that bed?'
He trotted across to the second bed, shook the flesh from Ian Welch's bones. All the time taking the piss. Feeling nothing for these dead men. For these lumps…
At Howard Southern's bed, Thorne paused and watched as the bed began to vibrate, something passing noisily beneath the floor. A shadow arced across the vast windows and Thorne looked up. He watched the movement, back and forth, until the smell hit him. He laughed when he looked back at the beds, and saw what the body had become. What they had actually been all the time. Thorne could only presume that each had been expertly shat down on to the centre of their beds, by the body dangling at the end of a rope, high above them. As soon as Thorne awoke, the dream began to slide away from him, the images sucked back into the darkness, until only the feelings remained. Scorn and anger and shame.
It was a little after two-thirty in the morning. When even the feelings had faded, there were only thoughts of the woman whose defilement and death long before had, it seemed, caused everything. Now she moved through his case as surely as if she were still corporeal and Thorne was ready to embrace her. She was nearly thirty years dead, and so was her killer, but that didn't matter.
In Jane Foley, Thorne had finally got a victim he could care about.
NINETEEN
It was Monday morning. Seven weeks to the day since the body of Douglas Remfry had been found. More than twenty-five years since Jane Foley had been raped and subsequently battered to death. Thorne was still trying to work out the connection between the two murders. He hoped that the woman sitting opposite him might be able to help…
Despite its somewhat dodgy reputation, and the tired old jokes about the IQs and sexual habits of its womenfolk, Essex was full of surprises. As the oldest recorded town in the country and the capital of Roman Britain, Colchester had more history than most places. Still, the last thing Thorne expected from a council building in the middle of town was what looked like a small stately home in its own grounds.
The area office for the Adoption and Fostering Service was somewhat run-down, admittedly, but amazing nonetheless. Thorne had thought that all the period or faux-period properties in the area had been snapped up by footballers and armed robbers a long time ago. The surprise was evidently clear in his face as he and Holland were greeted by the Service Manager, and shown into a large office with dark oak paneling all around, and heavy wooden beams crisscrossing an ornate ceiling above.
'This was originally the coach-house. I know it looks nice, but trust me, it's a bastard to work in…' Joanne Lesser was a light-skinned black woman in her mid-thirties, tall and – so Thorne thought – a little on the thin side. Her hair was straight and lacquered, the brows heavy, framing a face that was severe until it broke into a smile. Then, it was all too easy to picture her laughing at a dirty joke in spite of herself, or tipsy at the Christmas party.
'The place is falling to pieces, basically,' she said. 'We can only put so much weight on the floors, the filing cabinets have to go against certain walls and nothing's level. You can find your chair rolling from one side of the office to the other, if you're not careful…'
Thorne and Holland smiled politely, unsure as to whether or not she'd finished. After a few seconds, she shrugged and raised an eyebrow to indicate that she was waiting for them.,
The only sound in the room came from a noisy, metal fan which looked like it might have been an antique itself. At the other end of the desk, an entire army of gonks, action figures and soft toys was lined up across the top edge of a grimy, beige computer.
'You spoke to DCI Brigstocke on the phone,' Thorne said. He raised his voice a little to make himself clearly heard above the fan.
'Mark and Sarah Foley?'
Lesser reached for a piece of paper on her desk and studied it.
'1976,' Holland added, trying to move things along.
