Lazybones by Mark Billingham Page B

more than entries in a uniquely disturbing reference library. A resource to be accessed, in the hope that a past horror might shed light on a present one.
    Not this time.
    Holland had actually pulled the files on two cold murder cases: a young man, thirty or so, found in the boot of a car in 2002. Raped and choked to death with an unidentified ligature. A man in his sixties, attacked in a multistory car park and strangled with washing line in 1996.
    Thorne had agreed both with Holland’s initial assessment and his final conclusion. Both files had been worth a closer look. Both had been put back.
    Once he’d stuffed the report away in his briefcase, Thorne went over and stood by the open window. Forten minutes or so he’d stared across at the house where the party was, trying and failing to identify a song from its annoyingly familiar bass line. Trying and failing to stop thinking about bodies years dead and a body as yet unburied and the photograph he’d given Dennis Bethell…
    Then he’d called his father.
    After he’d hung up, twenty frustrating minutes later, Thorne stood, holding the phone, and tried to imaginethe synapses in his father’s brain misfiring, the thoughts exploding in a shower of tangential sparks…
    The cascade of color blackened. It became the dark hood that covered the head of a naked woman and masked the terror on the face of a pale, stiffening corpse. Life choked off and arse exposed and a thin line of brown blood on rusty bedsprings.
    Thorne took off what few clothes he still had on, walked through to the bedroom, and dropped down onto the mattress. He lay there in the semidarkness, staring up at the outline of the lampshade that had cost a pound from IKEA, realizing that it was cheap because it was also nasty.
    The bed felt as if it were full of grit.
    He could feel the dreadful, delicate weight of the case upon him. Like the dark tickle of something unwanted crawling across his body. The sharp, spindly legs of it picking their way across the sheen of sweat on his chest.
    Thorne closed his eyes, remembering a moment of calm and contentment on a bracken-covered hillside.
    Except that he was unsure it was a memory. If it had ever happened, the details had slipped away over time. Perhaps it was the memory of a dream he’d once had, or a fantasy of some sort. Maybe it was a scene from a long-forgotten film or TV show he’d once watched and into which he’d projected himself…
    Wherever it came from, two others were always there with him, lying on the hillside among the bracken. A man and a woman, or perhaps a girl and a boy. Their ages were as unclear as their relationship to him or each other, but all three of them were happy. Where they actually were never seemed to matter. The geography of the place was changeable. Sometimes he was sure there was a river down below them. At other times it was a road, the hum of insects becoming the distant drone of traffic.
    The only constants were the bracken and the presence of the pair lying just a few feet away, the ground beneath and the sky above the three of them…
    It seemed as if they’d eaten something, a picnic maybe. Thorne felt full, lying there, his arms spread out wide, six inches off the ground, moving lazily back and forth through the bracken. He had a smile on his face and his stomach still jumped and fluttered with the final bursts of laughter. He could never be sure who or what had caused them all to laugh such a lot. He could never be sure of much beyond the fine, unfamiliar feeling that surged through him as he remembered. As he imagined. As he lay on that hillside.
    Blurred as the edges of Thorne’s reality on that hillside were—the whys and whens and whos so indistinct as to be virtually nonexistent—it still seemed, at moments such as these, ankle-deep in madness and butchery, a pretty good place to be.
    With the first fat raindrops beginning to fall outside, he pressed his