Lazybones Read Online Free PDF Page B

closing time, or fiddled his expenses, or stood between a knife and the body it was intended for.
    Or told a mother that her only son had been sodomized and strangled to death in a grotty hotel room.
    â€œIt wasn’t a game,” Thorne said.
    Brigstocke looked at Hendricks and Kitson. He sighed. “I’ll take your expressions of thinly disguised scorn as agreement with DI Thorne, then, shall I?” He pushed his glasses up his nose with the crook of his first finger, then ran the hand through the thick black hair of which he was so proud. The quiff was less pronounced than usual, there was some gray creeping in. He could cut a vaguely absurd figure, but Thorne knew that when Brigstocke lost it, he was as hard a man as he had ever worked with.
    Thorne, Brigstocke, Kitson, Hendricks the civilian. These four, together with Holland and Stone, were the core of Team 3 at the Serious Crime Group (West). This was the group that made the decisions, formulated policy, and guided the investigations with—and even on occasion without —the approval of those higher up.
    Team 3 had been up and running a good while, handling the ordinary cases but specializing—though that was not a word Thorne would have used—in cases that were anything but ordinary…
    â€œSo,” Brigstocke said, “we’ve got everybody out chasing down all the likely relatives of Remfry’s victims. Still favorite with everybody?”
    Nods around the table.
    â€œA long way from odds-on, though,” Thorne said. There were things that bothered him, that didn’t quite mesh with the vengeful relative scenario. He couldn’t picture an anger carried around for that many years fermenting into something lethal, corrosive, then manifesting itself in the way it had in that hotel room. There was something almost stage-managed about what he had seen on that filthy mattress. Posed, Hendricks had said.
    And he was still troubled by the early morning call to the florist…
    Thorne thought there was something odd about the message. He couldn’t believe that it was simple carelessness, so the only conclusion was that the killer must have wanted the police to hear his voice on that answering machine. It was as if he were introducing himself.
    â€œWhat came up at the briefing,” Kitson said, “the stuff about Remfry turning queer inside? Worth looking into…?”
    Thorne glanced toward Hendricks. A gay man who was choosing to ignore the word Kitson had used, or else genuinely didn’t give a fuck.
    â€œYeah,” Thorne said. “Whatever he might or might not have got up to when he was inside, he was definitely straight before he went in. Don’t forget that he raped three women…”
    â€œRape’s not about sex, it’s about power,” Kitson said.
    Yvonne Kitson, together with DC Andy Stone, had come into the team to replace an officer Thorne had lost, in circumstances he tried every day to forget. Of all the murderers he’d put away, Thorne was happy to remember that the man responsible was serving three life sentences in Belmarsh Prison.
    Thorne looked at Phil Hendricks. “Never mind Remfry, can we be certain the killer ’s gay?”
    Hendricks didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely not. Like Yvonne says, the rape’s got nothing to do with sex, anyway. Maybe the killer wants us to think he’s gay. He may well be, of course, but we have to consider other possibilities…”
    â€œWhether it was a gay thing or not,” Kitson said, “he could still have been set up by someone he did time with, someone with a major grudge…”
    Brigstocke cleared his throat, at some level finding this all a bit embarrassing. “But the buggery…?”
    Hendricks snorted. “Buggery?” He dropped his Manchester accent and adopted the posh bluster of the gentleman’s club. “Buggery!!”
    Brigstocke reddened. “Sodomy,