Read Lazy Bones for Free Online Page B

bed.
    Letters written by a Miler, pretending to be a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Jane Foley.
    Thorne and Hol and had already been taken through the procedure for the sorting of prisoners' mail. The letters - five sackfuls a day on average - would have been taken by two, perhaps three, Operational Support Grade officers to the Censor's room for sorting. The X-ray machine had been done away with by the present Governor, but drug 37
    dogs might be used and each letter would be slit open and searched for il egal enclosures. The OSGs did not read the letters, and providing there was no good reason, they would not usual y be seen by anyone else.
    'A good job of sounding like a woman, you mean?' Thorne asked. He thought the letters were pretty bloody convincing and so did Yvonne Kitson, but other opinions couldn't hurt.
    'Oh yes, but I think he's been much cleverer than that. I've seen one or two letters like this before, genuine letters. You'd be amazed how much mail like this people like Remfry real y get.
    This has that same,
    odd tone to it. It's something slightly crazed...'
    'Something a bit needy,' Hol and suggested.
    Lenahan nodded. 'Right, that's it. She's claiming to be a bit of a catch, a sexy bit of stuff looking for fun...'
    'A sexy married bit of stuff,' Thorne added. The fictitious Jane Foley was conveniently hitched to an equal y fictitious and awful y jealous husband, so Remfry couldn't write back to her.
    Lenahan read a few lin&s of the letter again, nodded. 'Al the suggestive stuff in the letter is bang on, but there's stil a kind of hopelessness. Something sad underneath...'
    'Like she's a bit desperate,' Thorne said. 'A woman who's desperate enough to write these sorts of letters to a convicted rapist.'
    Hol and puffed out his cheeks. 'This is doing my head in. A bloke, pretending to be a woman, pretending to be a different kind of woman...
    Lenahan pushed the letter back across her desk. 'It's subtle, though. Like I said, he's bloody clever.' She didn't need to tel Thorne that. He'd studied every one of 'Jane Foley's' letters. He knew that the man who wrote them was very clever indeed. Clever, calculating and extremely patient.
    Lenahan picked up the photograph. 'And this is the icing on the cake...'
    Thorne was struck by her strange choice of phrase, but said noth
    38
    ing. On the wal behind the desk was the regulation portrait of the Queen, looking rather as if she could smel something unpleasant wafting up from the canteen. To Her Majesty's left were a series of framed aerial views of the prison and, hung next to these very modern images, a pair of large landscapes in oil. Thorne knew next to bugger al about it but they looked pretty old. Lenahan glanced up, fol owed Thorne's gaze.
    'Those have been knocking around the place since it opened in 1853,' she said. 'Used to be gathering dust down in Visits. Then six months ago, we had an inmate in for receiving stolen antiques. He took one look at them and went pale. Worth about twelve thousand each, so they reckon...'
    She smiled and her eyes dropped to the black and white photo in her hand. Thorne's went to the silver picture frame on her desk. From where he was sitting he couldn't see the photo inside, but he imagined a fit-looking husband - army perhaps, or maybe even a copper - and a smiling, olive-skinned child. He looked again at:the woman behind the desk, her dark eyes wide as she stared at the pi.c ture. She was ridiculously young, probably not even thirty. Her black hair was shoulder length. She was tal and large-breasted. It would have been clear to a blind man that the Deputy Governor would figure regularly in the fantasies of the men she locked up every night.
    Thorne glanced across at Hol and and was amused to see him struggling not to blush, as he waited for Tracy Lenahan to finish studying the photograph of 'Jane Foley'. The picture was of a woman kneeling, her head bowed and hooded, the artful lighting concealing much, but revealing