Lazybones by Mark Billingham Read Free Book Online Page A

Information System. That’s got everything—locations, offense details, home address, release date.” She looked up and across at Thorne. “But you’d still need to type a name in.”
    â€œWho has access to that?” Holland asked. “Do you?”
    â€œNo…”
    â€œThe governor? Police liaison officer?”
    She smiled, shook her head firmly. “It’s headquarters-based only. The system’s pretty well restricted, for obvious reasons…”
    Thanks and good-byes 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 all around him. Beyond the walls of the deputy governor’s office. Above, below, and to all 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 mentally left a trail of bread crumbs behind him. He always needed to be sure of the quickest way out.
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    For most of the drive back down the M1, Holland 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.
    Holland 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 tell him. To explain that real country music was fuck all to do with lost dogs and rhinestones. It had been a long night of pool and Guinness, and Phil Hendricks—with whichever boyfriend happened to be around at the time—heckling mercilessly. Thorne had tried to convey to Holland the beauty of George Jones’s voice, the wickedness in Merle Haggard’s, and the awesome rumble of Cash, the dark daddy of them all. A few pints in, he was telling anybody who would listen that Hank Williams was a tortured geniuswho 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 recall every detail, but he did remember that Holland’s eyes had begun to glaze over long before then…
    â€œFuck,” Holland said. “It costs twenty-five grand a year to look after one prisoner. Does that sound like a lot to you?”
    Thorne didn’t really 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…
    â€œI don’t think they’re spending that on carpets and caviar, somehow,” Thorne said.
    â€œNo, but still…”
    It was roasting in the car. The Mondeo was far too old 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 fixed twice already. He opened a window but shut it after half a minute, the breeze not worth the noise.
    Holland looked up from his pamphlet again. “Do you think they should have luxuries in there? You know, TVs in their cells and whatever? PlayStations, some of them have got…”
    Thorne turned the sound down a little and glanced up at the sign as the Mondeo roared past it. They were approaching the Milton Keynes turnoff. Still fifty miles from London.
    Thorne realized, as he had many times before, that for all the time he spent putting people behind bars, he gave precious little thought to what happened when they got there. When he did think about it, weigh all the arguments up, he supposed that, all things considered, a loss of freedom was as bad as it could get. Above and beyond that, he wasn’t sure exactly where he stood.
    He feathered the brake, dropped down to just under seventy, and drifted across to the inside lane. They were in no great hurry…
    Thorne