Lazy Bones by Mark Billingham Read Free Book Online Page A

possible.'
    'The week before last, in the kitchens, a prisoner had his ear cut off with the lid from a tin of peaches. That was an argument Over a game of table-tennis, I think.' She smiled, sexy and very cold. 'Anything's possible.'
    41
    Thorne stood and walked away from Lenahan's desk towards the door. 'Let's presume that the man we're looking for is not an ex-con. The obvious question is how he got the information. How did he find Remfry? How could he find out where a convicted rapist was serving his sentence and when he was going to get released, in enough time to set al this up?'
    Lenahan swivel ed in her chair to face the computer screen on the corner of her desk. She hit a button on the keyboard. 'He would have had to have got it from a database somewhere.'
    She continued typing, watching the screen. 'This is a LIDS computer. Local Inmate Data System, which has everything on the prisoners in here. I can send stuff down the wire to other prisons if I need to, but I wouldn't have thought this would be enough...'
    Thorne looked at the nearer of the two landscapes..The dark, thick swirls of the paint on the canvas. He thought it might be somewhere in the Lake District. 'What about national records?'
    'I S. The Inmate Information System. That's got everything - locations, offence details, home address, release date.' She looked up and across at Thorne. 'But you'd stil need to type a name in.' 'Who has access to that?' Hol and asked. 'Do you?' 'No . . .'
    'The Governor? Police liaison officer?'
    She smiled, shook her head firmly. 'It's headquarters-based only. The system's pretty wel restricted, for obvious reasons...'
    Thanks and goodbyes were brisk and Thorne would have had it no other way. Though he hadn't so much as glimpsed a blue prison sweatshirt the whole time they'd been there, he was aware of the prisoners al around him. Beyond the wal s of the Deputy Governor's office. Above, below and to al sides. A distant echo, a heaviness, the heat given off by over six hundred men, there thanks to the likes of him.
    Whenever he entered a prison, moved around its green, or mustard or dirty-cream corridors, Thorne mental y left a trail of 42
    breadcrumbs behind him. He always needed to be sure of the quickest way out.
    For most of the drive back down the M 1, Hol and had his nose buried in a pamphlet he'd picked up on his way out of the prison. Thorne preferred his own form of research.
    He eased Johnny Cash at San Quentin into the cassette player.
    Hol and looked up as 'Wanted Man' kicked in. He listened for a few seconds, shook his head and went back to his facts and figures.
    Thorne had tried, once, to tel him. To explain that real country music was luck al to do with lost dogs and rhinestones. It had been a long night of pool and Guinness, and Phil Hendricks -
    with whiclever boyfriend happened to be around at the time - heckling mercilessly. Thorne had tried to convey to Hol and the beauty of George Jones's voice, the wickedness in Merle Haggard's and the awesome rumble of Cash, the dark daddy of them al . A few pints in, he was tel ing anybody who would listen that Hank Wil iams;was a tortured genius who was undoubtedly the Kurt Cobain of his day and he may even have begun to sing 'Your Cheating Heart' around closing time. He couldn't recal every detail, but he did remember that Hol and's eyes had begun to glaze over long before then...
    'Fuck,' Hol and said. 'It costs twenty-five grand a year to look after one prisoner. Does that sound like a lot to you?'
    Thorne didn't real y know. It was twice what a lot of people earned in a year, but once you took into account the salaries of prison staff and the maintenance of the buildings...
    'I don't think they're spending that on carpets and caviar, somehow,' Thorne said.
    'No, but stil ...'
    It was roasting in the car. The Mondeo was far too oId to have air con, but Thorne was very pissed off at being completely unable to coax anything but warm air from a heating system he'd had