Buried

by Buried (epub)

She froze, her arm outstretched. ‘I just wanted to put on the light. I wouldn’t be as frightened if it wasn’t so dark.’

  ‘I like it dark,’ he said.

  Her heart was making the thin material of her nightdress dance against her chest, but she felt amazingly calm; clear-headed enough. There were ideas, pictures, words flying around inside her head like fireworks – rape, scream, weapon, pain – but there was still a strong, focused train of thought.

  This was the way to deal with him. He needed to be engaged. She had to make him care about her.

  ‘I’m sorry if you’re frightened,’ he said, ‘I can’t help that.’

  ‘Don’t be so silly, of course you can.’

  ‘No . . .’

  ‘You could just leave. I wouldn’t tell anyone.’

  She saw him lower his head, as though he were considering what she’d said, feeling guilty about it. She was doing very well, doing what the women who’d been confronted by this man in the past and had not been attacked had done. Those women had spoken afterwards about their appeal to something in him – to his conscience, perhaps – as being the moment when he’d changed his mind and decided to leave them be.

  ‘What would your mother think?’ one old woman had asked him.

  He started to walk around the bed and she felt a surge of panic. He must have seen it in her, or perhaps she made a noise, because he told her to shush.

  ‘I know you don’t want to hurt me,’ she said.

  He moved closer.

  ‘I can tell that you’re caring.’

  ‘Shut up now . . .’

  ‘You’ve made me wet the bed.’ She tried to keep her voice steady, as though she were scolding a child, but trying not to scare them. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ But she was the one who was ashamed, then suddenly angry, and reaching across for the chain that dangled from the bedside lamp.

  He swore when the light came on, started shouting, and in a second he was on her.

  Her fingers dug into his forearms as he tried to reach behind her, but the strength went from them when she saw his face. It took her a second or two to place him. Then confusion took hold, and the fireworks in her head flew faster and hotter, but before she could formulate a ‘what?’ or a ‘why?’ her head was dropping back, and the soft shadow was rushing down at her.

  She spoke his name twice into the pillow, but it was just a silly noise.

  He was woken by the pain in his leg as he shifted across the mattress to make room for his father.

  ‘Move your fat arse, for Christ’s sake,’ Jim Thorne said.

  Thorne put the light on. 4.17 a.m. He reached across for the glass of water, pushed a couple of co-codamols from the blister pack.

  ‘You’re a fucking drug addict!’

  There were two paperbacks next to the bed, both of which had been started several times over. Thorne couldn’t summon the concentration to have another crack. There was a Standard in his bag, and two days’ worth of unopened post on the table by the front door, but he didn’t want to go through the living room and risk waking Hendricks up. So he lay there and tried to get comfortable.

  Thorne’s father had developed a decent line in good advice since his death. There were occasional words of wisdom, flashes of insight; at least once, the information Thorne had needed to catch a killer.

  But it was not a source that anyone would call reliable.

  For whatever reason, the old man was content on this occasion to do nothing but stare up at the ceiling and remind Thorne just how ‘fucking-bastard horrible’ his light fitting was.

  SATURDAY

  LUKE

  He’d never got drunk. On those few occasions he’d tagged along with other boys on trips to the pub, he’d always drawn the line at a couple; stopped well before the one that would tip him over the edge. And however much he’d wanted to, however much he’d thought that he should, he’d always said no when those boys who were into it had slipped into the park for a joint after school. He knew that Juliet had done it. She’d told him that the first time you felt sick, but after that it was great, and you just felt really relaxed and mellow. That sounded good, but he’d never been quite brave enough to try it. To take the risk, knowing what might happen. How his dad felt about drugs.

  He’d always been afraid of losing control.

  But now, sitting against the wall in the dark, he imagined that this was probably what it felt like. To be completely off your head. He imagined that when you were pissed or stoned you got this sensation of being somewhere else, of everything swimming and twisted. Of losing touch.

  The man had been down to see him, to bring him some food and tell him some things. He didn’t know if the man had been in the house all the time, or if he came and went. He hadn’t heard a front door open or close, but, of course, he didn’t know how far away from it he was.

  Luke had no idea if it was late at night or early in the morning. There was a narrow shaft of light coming down through a floorboard at the far end, but he couldn’t tell if it was daylight or coming from a room on the floor above him. Whichever, it didn’t allow him to see much. He was growing used to the darkness, though, and he was starting to map out the room, just like he’d done back in the flat with Conrad and Amanda.

  It had been slow and difficult, feeling his way around, with the rope tying his hands together cutting off the feeling in his fingers.

  He was in a cellar, maybe fifteen feet by twenty. There was a longer bit that narrowed and ran to a wall which sloped suddenly away from his touch and upwards. He was sure this was an old coal chute; he’d seen one before at a friend’s house when they’d gone down to collect a bottle of wine to have with dinner. The walls at his friend’s place had been plastered and painted, but these were rough, just the original brick, and the ceiling was only a few inches above his head. There were some shelves on one side, thick with dust where they weren’t crammed with cans and open boxes of tiles. Beneath were rolls of paper, a heavy bag of hardened cement, what felt like picture frames leaning one against the other. He could smell paint and turpentine; could taste brick dust and damp earth in another corner. He heard something scurrying as he tried to get to sleep.

  When the man had opened the door and stood at the top of the stairs, it had been dark behind him. He’d shone a torch to light his way down. He’d brought a hamburger and fries in a bag, a plastic cup of Coke. He’d crouched, ripped the tape from Luke’s face, then let the torch beam drop to the filthy floor while Luke ate, and while he talked.

  When the man had finished, he’d waited, staring at Luke as though he were expecting a reaction to what he’d said. To the mad, vile shit he’d said about everyone Luke loved. He’d raised the torch up to Luke’s face.

  But Luke had just sat, and wolfed down the food, and hated himself for wanting to cry.

  Afterwards, the man had asked Luke if he thought he needed to put the tape back over his mouth. Luke had shaken his head. The man had told him that there was no point in shouting anyway because nobody would hear him, but that this would be a test. If Luke behaved himself, and didn’t shout, then maybe next time the man would take the rope from around his wrists as well. The man was sure that Luke would pass the test. He’d said that Luke was a good lad, a sensible boy; that he knew what a very good boy he was.

  Luke had nodded. Kept on nodding.

  Now, sitting in the dark, he was trying to work it out. Was the man just talking, or did he really know? Did he know particular stuff about him? He certainly claimed to know the people Luke cared about very well . . .

  He was wide awake; as awake as he could remember being since this whole thing had started. Maybe it was because he hadn’t been drugged again; not since the man had taken him from the flat and put him in the car. Maybe it was because he had slept, though Luke couldn’t say for sure if he had, at least not for any length of time. Perhaps he was just at that stage beyond tiredness, where you started to feel fine again; where you could think clearly about something other tha
n sleep.

  He was thinking about survival.

  He knew that his mother and father would do whatever the man wanted to get him back, but he’d seen enough films and TV shows to know that plans sometimes went wrong. As far as things between him and the man went, it was obvious that the key to getting through it was control. Control would give him his best chance.

  He just didn’t know whether that meant keeping it or losing it.

  TWELVE

  Below the calendar, on the pale yellow kitchen wall, there was some kind of poem or story in old-fashioned copperplate. It was about a man walking along a beach and always seeing two sets of footprints: his and God’s. Except for those dark periods of his life when he was unhappy or struggling with some great problem, when one set of footprints seemed to disappear. In the poem, the man is angry with God for deserting him in his time of greatest need, but God explains that although there was only one set of footprints on the beach, the man was never really alone. That it was at those very darkest of times, when God was carrying him . . .

  Heeney shook his head, nodded towards the large sitting room that was used as a therapy area. ‘I never realised it would be, you know . . . God Squad.’

  Neil Warren finished stirring the last of the three teas and lobbed the spoon into the sink. ‘It isn’t . . . necessarily,’ he said. ‘I am, though.’ He handed Heeney his tea.

  ‘Right,’ Heeney said.

  ‘Most people need to find something that’s more important to them than the drugs or the drink, you know? Something that isn’t going to fuck their lives up in quite the same way. Then they make a choice.’

  ‘Right,’ Heeney said again.

  ‘For me, it came down to God or cocaine.’

  He handed Holland a mug, and Holland took it with a smile, enjoying Heeney’s discomfort just as much as Warren clearly was.

  Nightingale Lodge was a privately run halfway house, owned by an organisation called Pledge. It was a large, double-fronted Victorian place on Battersea Rise, where up to six recovering addicts at a time – those who’d completed eight weeks of rehab but were deemed to be ‘still at risk’ – could readjust to a drug-free way of life while waiting for permanent accommodation. Though Pledge was a registered charity, the residents of Nightingale Lodge paid a decent enough whack to live there, and it seemed likely that someone was making a profit. Neil Warren was one of two full-time counsellors and admitted to being a little unclear as to exactly who was paying his wages. He did know that they were a damn sight higher than those he’d been paid back when he’d worked for the London Borough of Bromley, several years before.

  ‘Getting people off drugs is a boom industry,’ he’d said when Holland had spoken to him on the phone first thing. ‘There’s no shortage of customers.’ The voice was high and light, with a trace of a northern accent. Holland had imagined six foot something of emaciated hippy, in denim, with a ponytail.

  Warren was in his late thirties, short and stocky, with dark hair shaved close to the skull. He wore a plain grey sweatshirt over khaki combats and Timberlands. He looked like he could handle himself.

  ‘Might as well call this an official fag break,’ Warren said. He produced a tobacco tin from his back pocket, took out a lighter and one of several prepared roll-ups. He offered the tin to Heeney, who declined but gratefully took it as a cue to reach for his own pack of Benson & Hedges. Holland shook his head.

  ‘You talk about cocaine or whatever,’ Heeney said, stuffing the cigarette between his lips. ‘I can’t even give these up.’

  Warren lit up. ‘Harder to quit than heroin,’ he said.

  ‘Cheaper, though.’

  ‘Not by much . . .’

  ‘That’s the bloody truth.’

  Holland looked at Heeney, leaning back against the worktop, with his fag and his mug of tea, like he was at home talking bollocks to his wife. It wasn’t often Holland yearned to be working with someone like Andy Stone, but it would have been a joy by comparison. Perhaps it was the Brummie accent. It had seemed as good a reason as any to take against his newest partner almost immediately, and first impressions had proved horribly accurate. They’d quickly settled into a pattern that saw Holland doing most of the work while Heeney stood around, made facile comments, and tried to pick his nose while no one was looking.

  ‘We’ll talk in here,’ Warren said. ‘Some of the residents are having an unsupervised therapy session in the living room.’ Heeney sniffed, and Warren saw it for the expression of disdain that it was. ‘Therapy doesn’t always mean “wanky”.’ The edge in his voice was clear. ‘It’s bloody hard work in here. They have to pull their weight and follow the regime, and if they don’t, they’re out. As it happens, I’m the nice cop. The other counsellor makes anyone who fucks up spend the day with a toilet seat round their neck.’

  ‘How does that work?’ Holland asked. ‘You share duties with the other counsellor?’

  ‘It’s one on, one off.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Warren slid the ashtray to within Heeney’s reach. ‘One of us is always here overnight and we each do a week at a time. I’m on days at the minute, so I get to sleep in my own bed.’

  Holland looked at the Post-its stuck to the fridge door, the printed rota that had been laminated and pinned to one of the cupboards. ‘It’s how I imagine students live,’ he said. ‘Notes telling their flatmates to do the washing up and to keep their hands off the new pot of yoghurt. Like The Young Ones or something . . .’

  ‘It’s quite a lot like that,’ Warren said, ‘only with more violence and a lot less shagging.’

  Heeney suddenly looked rather more interested. ‘Why’s that then?’

  ‘It’s single sex, for a start; not that that makes a lot of difference, of course. But residents are not really allowed to have any sort of relationship while they’re here. Dependency isn’t something we try to encourage, you see?’

  ‘How long are they here for?’ Heeney asked.

  ‘Anything up to eighteen months.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Depends if they stick it, if a council flat becomes available, whatever.’

  ‘I bet there’s a lot of porn knocking about . . .’

  Warren smiled as he took a long drag, but it was at the policeman, rather than with him.

  Through the kitchen window Holland could see a long, narrow garden. There was a shed at the far end, a table and chairs. The grass badly needed cutting, and when a large magpie dropped, screeching into it from a fence-post, the bird all but disappeared from view.

  ‘Why did you give up?’ Holland asked. He glanced towards the calendar and the words beneath. ‘What made you choose?’

  ‘I wanted to stop from the day I started,’ Warren said. ‘Actually, make that I knew that I should stop. I was a drugs counsellor who was also a drug addict, so I knew exactly how much I was fucking myself up. But you don’t stop until there’s nothing else you can do. Until some part of your body packs in or something terminal happens in your life.’ Outside, a cat with long, matted fur jumped up on to the window sill. Warren leaned across and gently tapped on the window with a fingernail; watched as the cat rubbed itself against the glass. ‘There’s rarely a specific moment, to be honest,’ he said. ‘But if you want one, it was probably when my mum died, and my brother and sister wouldn’t let me be alone with her body in case I nicked the jewellery off it.’

  Holland noticed that even Heeney had the good grace to look at his shoes for a moment or two.

  ‘Yeah.’ Warren turned and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘That was a decent-sized slap in the face.’

  ‘That was when you decided to quit?’

  ‘No, not even then.’ He laughed gently at the ridiculousness of it all. ‘But that was when the family made me quit.’

  ‘Like an “intervention” sort of thing?’

  ‘Well, a British version of one. My sister cut me dead and my brother beat the shit out of me.’

  Holland could not help but be im
pressed by the man’s openness, by his apparent honesty. He certainly seemed to be someone who’d given up hiding anything a long time ago. ‘So, when was that?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been clean almost exactly two years, which is just about as long as I was on drugs.’

  Holland did the maths and got an interesting result. ‘So you started taking drugs when you were working on the MAPPA project.’

  ‘I started taking cocaine seriously in 2001.’

  ‘Around the time the panel was disbanded?’

  Warren nipped a strand of tobacco from his tongue. ‘Somewhere around there, probably. I could check, but I don’t think “Took first line of charlie” appears anywhere in that year’s diary—’

  He was cut off by a burst of shouting from the next room, which grew suddenly louder as a door was thrown open. A few seconds later, a skinny teenage boy, who could not have been much older than Luke Mullen, stormed into the kitchen, gesturing wildly and cursing at the top of his voice.

  The cat fled from the window ledge.

  ‘Cunt Andrew grassed me to the group, fucking told everyone I’d been talking about gear . . . about gear I’d taken like I loved it. Fucker wasn’t even there . . . cunt, saying shit to make himself popular with you lot. I swear, you better take all the fucking knives out of this fucking kitchen, Neil, I’m telling you that . . .’

  Warren led the boy to the small kitchen table. He sat him beneath a poster that said, ‘THIS IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL’, and talked to him as though Holland and Heeney weren’t there. He spoke gently enough at first, until the boy grew calmer, then gradually his tone became firmer. He said that he understood how annoying it was to be grassed up, but that Andrew had done the right thing. Talking about drugs in a positive way was against all the rules; to talk about them as if they were something to be missed or mourned was not the way to move forward.

  ‘It’s stinking thinking, Danny, you know that. Stinking thinking . . .’

  The phrase rang a bell inside Holland’s head. They were buzzwords, with the dreadful whiff of an American self-help course. But it struck a chord. Holland made a mental note to tell Thorne, who he was sure would find it funny.