Buried

by Buried (epub)

  ‘Hang about, Tom. I don’t want a crowd of us going in there behind the guns.’

  ‘Are you joking?’

  Porter wiped a fleck of Thorne’s spittle from her lip. ‘Look, Heeney’s staying put as well, so don’t get stupid about it.’

  ‘Who’s making these decisions?’

  ‘You’re only supposed to be helping out, remember. I haven’t got time for this. Get back in the van and stay by the radio.’

  Thorne watched her and Parsons sprint towards the Bow Road and climbed back into the van. Heeney was sitting again and looked at his feet as Thorne moved past him to take up Porter’s place next to the monitors. The big DS mumbled something about Porter being ‘on the rag’. Thorne turned away and tuned him out. He sat on one of the chairs, leaned closer and stared at the small screen, at the fixed and flickering picture of a black, metal fire-escape.

  With only one door to get through, as opposed to a pair of them coming at the property from the front, the rear entrance was favourite. More importantly, when firearms were being deployed, keeping the action well away from the street was always desirable.

  Thorne didn’t blink.

  For twenty, twenty-five seconds, the image was constant, then suddenly it filled with movement as a dozen or more figures began crowding in. Moving into the picture from the back and sides of a scrubby, unloved garden; over and along the line of a crumbling wall towards the bottom of the steps.

  Then a flurry of hand signals, and up; speed less important than stealth.

  The team gathered around the door, and Thorne picked out what details he could, imagining those that were too indistinct to make out: the butt of an MP5 carbine; the MET POLICE logo on a chest thick with body armour; the dead geraniums in a plastic window-box . . .

  In the van, a few murmured instructions came over the speaker.

  Thorne could make out Porter and Parsons, and several heads he thought he recognised. He watched two figures move into the picture and knew – though he couldn’t see it – that they would be fixing the rubberised teeth of a hydraulic jack to either side of the door frame. These were members of the Special Events team – the Ghostbusters – a civilian unit on call to any branch of the Met that needed to gain rapid entry to premises but wanted something rather more subtle than a ram or a size-nine boot.

  The SE boys stepped away from the door, trailed the cables back to a small generator and signalled that they were set.

  They looked towards Porter for the nod.

  Got it straight away.

  There was no sound from the monitor, but Thorne had worked with similar forced-entry equipment before. He imagined the sharp hiss of compressed air and the slap of the cables jumping against the metal floor. The crack as the frame was shunted wide, leaving the door with nowhere to go but in and down, forced hard to the floor by the feet of the SO19 officers who streamed across it into Conrad Allen’s flat.

  In a matter of seconds the shot was empty again, a flat shadow beyond the doorway, while its chaotic soundtrack was broadcast from half a dozen radios, exploding like bursts of gunfire from the speaker. Bouncing between the metal walls of the van: a collision and a curse; an order given to get out of the way; and an instruction to anyone on the premises to make themselves fucking visible very fucking quickly. A cacophany of grunts and shouts:

  ‘Kitchen clear!’

  ‘Armed police!’

  ‘First bedroom and corridor clear.’

  Thorne winced at each distorted spatter of voices and volley of breath, focused through every crackle of static. He pictured the officers running, freezing, pressing themselves against walls; sweeping the space through rifle-sights, moving sharply aside as other figures passed through shadows, barrelled in and out of rooms.

  ‘Clear!’

  ‘Clear and secure!’

  Heeney muttered at Thorne’s shoulder: ‘The place is empty.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Thorne said.

  A shout then, audible above the others. Just one word. Just the crucial word.

  ‘Body.’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘We’ve got a body.’

  Thorne stands up, crouches, pushes his hands against the roof. He strains to hear more, to hear anything through the hiss, through elastic seconds of dead air.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In here.’

  ‘Where the fuck’s “here”?’

  ‘Back bedroom.’

  And Thorne can see it when he closes his eyes. He’s seen it before, or close enough: the sole of a training shoe, a mop of dark hair, a great deal of blood.

  ‘Jesus,’ Heeney whispers behind him, but Thorne is already moving towards the doors, putting a shoulder against them, and tearing across the road in the same direction Porter had gone just a few minutes before.

  Pain blooming in his back and chest as he runs, and more pictures he could do without: fingers and thumbs, grubby on the barrel of a syringe; the tremble around Juliet Mullen’s mouth.

  A pair of armed response vehicles, three squad cars and an ambulance are already parked up on the track that runs along the back of the building, and the garden is thick with the Job by the time Thorne drops on to the other side of the low wall. Body armour is laid down, sweaty on the grass; stepped across by scene-of-crime officers, scrambling into full-body suits and hurrying towards the fire escape. There is conversation and clatter as a constant stream of Met personnel shuttle up and down the metal staircase. A necklace of cigarette smoke curling past them towards a clear sky, and Holland at the bottom, turning to Thorne, his arms raised, asking:

  What the fuck’s going on?

  ‘Tom . . .’

  Thorne spun round and saw Porter moving towards him across the grass. Breathless and none too polite, he asked Holland’s unspoken question for him, then asked another before she’d had a chance to answer the first.

  ‘What about Luke?’

  Porter shook her head.

  ‘Alive? Dead? What?’

  ‘We’ve got two bodies up there,’ Porter said. ‘Almost certainly those of Conrad Allen and his girlfriend. Both look like they’ve had their throats cut; to start with, at any rate. There’s a knife.’

  ‘So where’s the boy?’ Thorne asked.

  In a hurry, or sick of being barked at, Porter turned and started to walk back towards the cluster of vehicles. She answered without bothering to look round. ‘Right now it’s impossible to say, and I can’t see any point in speculating. I do know we’ve got a pair of dead kidnappers and a hostage who’s nowhere to be found.’

  PART TWO

  ALL ABOUT

  CONTROL

  FRIDAY

  LUKE

  Before, when he’d woken up, when he’d come out of it, it had been horribly slow. Like surfacing through water thick as glass. Seeing what was on the other side, but without the strength to kick hard and reach it quickly. But this time, when everything had happened, it was as though he were conscious in a second, and as soon as he’d opened his eyes he’d been alert and alive to every sound and sensation.

  He’d felt his blood jumping.

  He’d heard the shouting immediately; the grunting and the noise of things smashing in the next room. They were arguing. He’d heard them fighting before, a couple of times, but this sounded really serious, and he guessed it was what had woken him so suddenly. Something inside his brain, some weird survival instinct that never switched itself off, had roused him, was telling him that this might be his chance.

  As usual, when he’d first opened his eyes, he’d had no idea whether it was day or night. The curtains had been drawn tight across. But for almost the first time he’d been alone, with his hands untied, so after a minute or two he’d got up from the mattress on the floor, crept over and pulled the curtains back an inch or two. It was dark outside, but in the tower blocks opposite he could see lights in some of the windows and the flickering of TV sets. He’d guessed that it was probably early evening.

  Trying not to breathe, he’d
stood very still in the middle of the room, listening to the screaming from down the corridor.

  He’d mentally mapped out the whole place during those first few trips to the bathroom. It wasn’t a complicated layout and he’d always been good at picturing stuff, at laying out diagrams on his computer and seeing how things connected. He’d known, standing there in the dark, that were he to take a left turn out of the room he was in, he would need to get through two doors before he was on the street. He knew that because he’d tried to run through one of them on the first day, which was when they’d started giving him the injections more often. Turning right would have been a better bet, but he knew that he would have had to go past their room, would have had to risk being seen, and he knew that there would still be a locked door between him and the back way out. He was fairly certain there was a way down through the kitchen: an old-fashioned fire escape like his nan used to have. He’d been almost completely out of it, but he could remember seeing the metal steps, hearing the man’s feet ringing against them as they’d carried him in.

  How many days ago was that?

  Half a dozen times after he’d been woken, he’d decided that he’d have the best chance if he tried to get away right then, while they were distracted. If he went for it and tried to sneak past while they were still shouting and chucking stuff at each other. Half a dozen times he’d chickened out and told himself he was a shitty little coward. Shivering in the dark and pissing in his pants, afraid to make a run for it.

  Then the shouting had stopped and he’d felt his feet carrying him from the room and turning to the right. The map in his head was bright and pulsing, and he was a glowing dot moving slowly along a dark line as he inched along the corridor, as he pressed himself against the wall and tried to move with no noise. And perhaps he wasn’t quite as awake or alert as he’d thought, because things suddenly seemed to blur and shift when he glanced through the open doorway to the bedroom. When he saw Conrad and Amanda.

  When he noticed the knife, and bent to pick it up.

  Everything was very fucked-up and fuzzy from there on: from whenever the hell it was, to whenever the hell this was; from those incredible moments of light and colour to this newest, numbest darkness.

  Memory came in beats and shocking flashes.

  Explosions of clarity, like that moment in the horror film when the power goes out and the stupid girl lights a match and sees the face of the slasher: the door as he ran at it, and his heart like a hammer; the klaxon of his breath; a woman’s face at the window of a house moving quickly past him.

  And the warm, wet memory of so much blood.

  EIGHT

  Thorne stood in his dressing-gown, drinking tea and staring out at the garden as it grew lighter. His eye had been caught by a beer can he’d forgotten to bring in from the other night; then he’d seen the movement at the end of the garden and stayed to watch.

  The fox was worrying at something, digging at it in the corner behind one of Thorne’s recently purchased pots. Thorne wondered whether it might be a squirrel or a baby bird, then decided it was more likely to be an old burger carton or a discarded piece of KFC. Without turning round he called softly for Elvis, and relaxed a little when he felt the wetness of the cat’s rheumy eye against his ankle.

  Motionless, he stood with both hands wrapped around his mug, and tried not to think about what Russell Brigstocke might say, what he would be unable to resist saying, when Thorne saw him in an hour or so’s time. He tried to think about the boy and not the bodies, but he was unable to separate the two. They’d have results on the knife and the blood by now, and perhaps the bizarre idea that some had begun to whisper the night before at the crime scene would have solidified into a genuine theory. Thorne was more comfortable with a very different notion, but his own idea was equally strange. And equally hard to explain.

  A car alarm began to scream somewhere at the front of the house and Thorne watched the fox look up and freeze. He saw drops run along the animal’s flank, the fur darkened and plastered to its bones by the drizzle. After a few seconds it turned back, unconcerned, to its meal.

  Typical Londoner, Thorne thought.

  He took a sip of tea, but it was almost cold, so he rinsed out the mug and wandered through to the bedroom to get dressed.

  He ran into Brigstocke near the door of Central 3000, standing behind him in a short queue for the drinks machine. The chat was asinine enough: how it made the crappy old kettle at Becke House look a bit shit; how Spurs still needed someone who could put the ball in the net. Then, when Brigstocke had got his drink, he turned and leaned against the machine, spoke as Thorne stepped forward to stab at the buttons.

  ‘Well, you’ve got those bodies you wanted.’

  There it was . . .

  Thorne could say nothing, could do nothing but acknowledge the point with a look he hoped did not come across as sheepish.

  They walked slowly towards the far side of the room, where two very pissed-off civilian staff were laying out many more chairs than Thorne had seen last time, when the team had gathered to watch the videotape of Luke Mullen.

  ‘How’s this going to work?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘I think that’s what we’re all here to try and work out.’

  ‘Why here, though? Why not Becke House?’

  ‘We tossed a coin.’ Brigstocke blew across the top of his coffee. ‘I lost.’

  Thorne laughed, then realised he was the only one. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’

  ‘The Kidnap Unit gets home advantage, and I get to make the speech.’

  ‘Well, it’s nice to see that this is all being handled so professionally.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ Brigstocke said. ‘None of us has handled anything quite like this before.’

  ‘We’ve had FSS working their arses off overnight, and none of the blood found at the crime scene belongs to Luke Mullen. But we do know he was there. His fingerprints were all over the smaller of the two bedrooms, which is where he appears to have been held, and where we’re ninety-nine per cent certain the videotape was shot. Luke Mullen’s fingerprints have also been found on the knife which was used to kill Conrad Allen and his girlfriend, who, from the statement given by the car dealer in Wood Green, and from identification found on the premises, we believe to be one Amanda Tickell. Miss Tickell’s mother is due at the mortuary any time now to identify the body formally.’

  Brigstocke moved a pace or two to the left and right of centre as he spoke, his voice rather than his body language holding the attention of the fifty-odd men and women in front of him. Though the thick specs and the quiffy hair often lent the DCI a vaguely comic aspect, he could recite the phone book and no one listening would shuffle their feet. Toss of a coin or no, he commanded the attention far better than his opposite number at SO7. Thorne guessed this was why Barry Hignett was doing the listening, standing off to one side and trying to look like he endorsed everything that was being said.

  Brigstocke gestured towards a black-clad figure in the front row. ‘Doctor Hendricks is going to say a quick word about how the murders appear to have been carried out.’

  Phil Hendricks stood up while Brigstocke stepped further across to stand next to Barry Hignett. Now there was movement, and a murmur or two, and a good deal of coughing as the changeover took place. Thorne took the opportunity to stretch his legs out, groaned quietly as the pain moved up and down in a wave from thigh to ankle. He was sitting in the same row as Holland, Kitson and Stone, while Porter, Parsons and the rest of the Kidnap crew were a couple of rows in front. Thorne read nothing into it beyond the usual demarcation of territory, the polite, run-of-the-mill ‘fuck you’.

  It was not quite seven o’clock in the morning, and, bar a nutcase or two, the rest of the huge room was empty beneath its coloured flags.

  ‘“Appear” is the right word,’ Hendricks said. ‘The postmortems aren’t due to be carried out until later on this morning, so this is based on a cursory examination of the bodies, their position
s at the crime scene, the blood spatter, the depth of the wounds and so on.’

  Hendricks looked straight at Thorne, but no one could have guessed they were friends. Thorne had seen the professional side of his friend kick in on cue too many times to be surprised by it, but he still admired Hendricks’ ability – especially given the hour – to turn it on like a tap. He was clear and concise, a real bonus when dealing with the average copper, and though he always looked the same, he even managed to soften those flat, Mancunian vowels when the situation demanded it.

  ‘I’m guessing that although Allen may not have died first,’ Hendricks said, ‘he was the first to be attacked. He was taken by surprise, his killer probably coming at him from behind and reaching round to slash his throat.’ Hendricks raised his arms to demonstrate, his right hand slicing through the air viciously. ‘He might have taken a good few minutes to bleed to death, but from the moment he was attacked, he was out of the game. He’d’ve gone down and stayed there.’

  ‘How tall would the attacker have been?’ Hignett asked.

  ‘I can’t be exact . . .’

  ‘Be inexact.’

  ‘From the angle at which the blade passed through the windpipe, I’d say he’d be about the same size as Allen. Around six feet.’

  Hignett looked towards his team.

  ‘Luke is five feet ten,’ Porter said.

  Hendricks glanced towards Brigstocke, got the nod to carry on. ‘The woman died from a very different series of stab wounds,’ he said. ‘There are defence cuts on her arms and a far more haphazard pattern to the half a dozen or more wounds around her neck and chest. I’d say she was overpowered. I think she saw what happened to Allen, put up a fight and was just not strong enough.’ He looked to where Hignett was standing, anticipating the next question. ‘She wasn’t a weakling; not for your average junkie, at any rate. There was decent muscle definition . . .’

  ‘Luke Mullen does a lot of sport at school,’ Hignett said. ‘I think we can assume he would be strong enough to overpower a woman, knife or no knife.’