Lazybones by Mark Billingham Read Free Book Online Page B

knew, as much as he knew anything, that murderers, sex offenders, those who would harm children, had to be removed. He also knew that putting these people away was more than just a piece of argot. It was actually what they did. What he did. Once these offenders were…elsewhere, the debate as to where punishment ended and rehabilitation began was for others to have. He felt instinctively that prison should never become…the phrase holiday camps popped into his head. He chided himself for beginning to sound like a right-wing nutcase. Fuck it, a few TVs was neither here nor there. Let them watch the football or join in with game shows if that was what they wanted…
    Sadly, by the time Thorne had formulated his answer to the question, Holland had moved on to something else.
    â€œBloody hell.” Holland looked up from the pamphlet. “Sixty percent of goal nets in the English league are made by prisoners. I hope they’ve made the ones at White Hart Lane strong enough, the abuse Spurs get from other teams…”
    â€œRight…”
    â€œHere’s another one. Prison farms produce twenty million pints of milk every year. That’s fucking amazing…”
    Thorne was no longer listening. He was hearing nothing but the rush of the road under the wheels and thinking about the photograph. He pictured the hooded woman, the make-believe Jane Foley, feeling a stirring in his groin at the image in his head of her shadowy nakedness.
    Wherever he got it from …
    Suddenly Thorne knew where he might go to find the answer, at least any answer there was to be found. Thewoman in that photo might not be Jane Foley, but she had to be somebody, and Thorne knew just the person to come up with a name.
    When he started to listen again, Holland was in the middle of another question.
    â€œâ€¦as bad as this? Do you think prisons are any better than they were back in…?” He pointed toward the cassette player.
    â€œNineteen sixty-nine,” Thorne said. Johnny Cash was singing the song he’d written about San Quentin itself. Singing about hating every inch of the place they were all stood in. The prisoners whooping and cheering at every complaint, at each pugnacious insult, at every plea to raze the prison to the ground.
    â€œSo?” Holland waved his pamphlet. “Are prisons any better now than they were then, do you think? Than they were thirty-odd years ago?”
    Thorne pictured the face of a man in Belmarsh Prison, and something inside hardened very quickly.
    â€œI fucking hope not.”
    Â 
    At a little after six o’clock, Eve Bloom double-locked the shop, walked half a dozen paces to a bright red front door, and was home.
    It was handy renting the flat above her shop. It wasn’t expensive, but she’d have paid a good deal more for the pleasure of being able to tumble out of bed at the last possible minute, the coffee steaming in her own mug next to the till as she opened up. Every last second in bed was precious when you had to spend as many mornings as she did, up and dressed at half past stupid. Walking around the flower market at New Covent Garden, ordering stock, chatting with wholesalers, while every other person she could think of was still dead to the world.
    She liked this time of year. The few precious weeks of summer, when she wasn’t forced to choose betweenworking in scarf and gloves or punishing her stock with central heating. She liked closing up when it was still light. It made the early starts less painful, gave that couple of hours between the end of the day and the start of the evening a scent of excitement, a tang of real possibility.
    She closed the door behind her and climbed the stripped wooden stairs up to the flat. Denise had wielded the sander and done the whole place in a weekend, while Eve had taken responsibility for the decorating. Most domestic chores got split fairly equally between them, and though there were the sulks, the