Lazybones by Mark Billingham Page A

Sergeant Turnbull repeated to the court what she said when questioned about this fact. ‘I couldn’t fight back,’ she said.
    â€œCould not? Or did not want to?
    â€œWe should remember, too, the sergeant’s words when describing the circumstances of the first interview, the first physical examination. This examination was, in his words, ‘worse than useless,’ taking place as it did the morning after the alleged attack and after the so-called victim had showered. Remember his colleague’s words when describing the dress which you have been shown as Exhibit A? ‘Too nice to wear to work.’ I put these things together, ladies and gentlemen, and I come up with an altogether different version of what happened in that stockroom in December of last year…
    â€œCould not that dress have been torn during the frenzied, and consensual, bout of lovemaking to which my client freely admits? Could not the bruising be no more than the marks of excessive passion? Could not that shower have been taken, yes, to wash away the smell of my client, but only so as to hide the truth of her ongoing sexual relationship with him from her husband?
    â€œI have asked you to remember the words of a police officer whose evidence was intended to damn the man I represent here today. Instead, unwittingly, I’m sure, he has done quite the opposite. I have asked you to consider these words and I can see that you are doing just that. I can see fromyour faces, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that these words have caused you, quite rightly, to doubt. If you doubt, as you surely must, the truth of what this woman claims to have happened, then I know that your deliberations in the jury room will be very short.
    â€œThe law, of course, is quite clear about reasonable doubt. I feel sure that this being the case, doubting as you must, you will do the right thing. You will do the just thing. You will do as His Honor must instruct you so to do, and acquit my client…”

FIVE
    Another hot, humid evening. The air outside heavy with the taste of a storm on the way. Tantalizing snippets of conversation from people walking past drifted into the living room through the open windows.
    Thorne had sat eating in T-shirt and shorts, listening to the noise from a party on the other side of the road. He didn’t know what annoyed him more—the raised voices and the cranked-up sound system, or the good time that some people he didn’t know were clearly having.
    His plate licked clean by Elvis, Thorne had opened a can of cheap lager, tuned out the sounds of music and laughter, and spent a couple of hours reading. A summer’s evening absorbed in violent death.
    These were the reports based on searches of CRIMINT—the Criminal Intelligence database—looking for any cases whose parameters might overlap with the Remfry killing…
    Holland and Stone had been thorough. It was largely about trial and error, about narrowing the search down and coming up with hits that might be significant. Key words were entered. Matches were sifted and examined in relation to those from other searches. Rape/murder produced few cases where the victim was male, but the results were still cross-referenced with those that came up when other, more specific key words were punched into the system.
    Sodomy. Strangulation. Ligature. Washing line.
    And up they’d come…
    A series of unsolved murders going back five years. Eight young boys brutally abused and strangled, their bodies dumped in woods, gravel pits, and recreation grounds. A pedophile ring that was too well organized or too well connected. Uncatchable.
    A man attacked in his own home. Tied up with washing line while his home was ransacked, then kicked to death for no good reason. Thorne thought about Darren Ellis, the old couple he’d tied up and robbed…
    A catalog of vicious sexual assaults and murders, many still unsolved. The grim details now little