Buried

by Buried (epub)

  They quickly completed the short conversation they’d begun wordlessly in Brigstocke’s office half an hour earlier. Thorne told Holland what Hignett’s objections had been and thanked him for his timely interruption. Holland said he was only too pleased to help, that it was another one up for the Murder Squad team, not that anyone was keeping score.

  They never talked about the earlier incident, the one with the empty wine bottle, quite so easily.

  ‘God told this bloke to get off the coke then, did he?’

  ‘Apparently,’ Holland said. ‘Says a prayer instead of doing a line.’

  ‘Knackering your knees certainly beats losing your septum.’

  Holland lengthened his stride to avoid a spatter of dogshit. ‘If Warren did know Tickell, should we be looking at him, too?’

  ‘Can’t see any point,’ Thorne said. ‘Why on earth would he want to kidnap Luke Mullen? Unless God told him to do it, of course.’

  Though there was no option but to walk all the way around, Colindale station was clearly visible – its three storeys broken up into units of brown and white – across the quarter-mile of bleak scrub that separated it from the Peel Centre. The station had been designed along the lines of an airfield observation tower, standing as it did on the site of the old Hendon aerodrome, and next door to the RAF museum. Signs along the edge of the land proclaimed it to be ‘dangerous’. Thorne guessed that this was to do with the state of some of the disused buildings, but liked to imagine that it was something more sinister. He pictured London’s criminal fraternity throwing a hell of a party when it was announced that one of the city’s largest police facilities had been sited on top of a toxic-waste dump . . .

  ‘What about those two women on the MAPPA panel?’ Holland said. ‘Kathleen Bristow and Margaret Stringer. Do you need me to talk to them as well?’

  ‘Only if you’ve really got sod-all else to do. Now we’ve got Freestone, we can get it from the horse’s mouth. Whatever the hell there is to get.’

  ‘Fair enough, but Porter told me you were banging on about being tidy.’

  ‘Did she? What else did she say?’

  ‘Nothing. It just came up, that’s all . . .’

  Further along, sight of the station was cut off by newly erected fencing. A sign on the gate announced the imminent building of ‘luxury studios and apartments’. Having seen similar developments spring up in recent years, Thorne wasn’t putting money on the view from his office window being significantly improved.

  They turned right at the traffic island, where daffodils fought gamely for space with crisp packets and fast-food containers. For no good reason that they could fathom, two young women stood on the edge of the island, watching the cars move around it. Holland suggested that they were trainee WPCs failing a road traffic exam. Thorne wondered if they might be extremely misguided tourists who thought it was a small park.

  ‘Kenny Parsons was telling me a few stories about Porter,’ Holland said.

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘She’s quite a character.’

  Thorne stared casually up at the British Airways hoarding above them, and fought off the temptation to pump Holland mercilessly for everything he knew. The last thing he wanted was for anybody to think he gave a toss. ‘I’m not that interested in gossip,’ he said. ‘I don’t really think we’ve got time for it on a job like this, do you, Dave?’

  Holland said nothing, just turned towards the road, but Thorne could see the trace of a smile and guessed that Holland hadn’t been fooled for a second. He wondered if there was some kind of course you could take to make yourself less transparent when it mattered. He glanced back at the huge picture of a plane, shining above an ocean, and thought about going on holiday alone.

  ‘I probably will follow up on Bristow and Stringer,’ Holland said. ‘When I get a minute. Just because I’ve already started.’

  ‘I thought it was Andy Stone who couldn’t resist chasing women.’

  Holland smiled broadly this time, and continued: ‘I’ve made a couple of calls and left messages. Waiting to hear back from Bristow and I’m still trying to get a current address for Margaret Stringer.’

  ‘Can’t you get it out of the education authority?’

  As usual, traffic was heavy both ways. They had to raise their voices above the noise of cars and heavy police vehicles heading towards the tube station, or north to join up with the A1.

  ‘The last one that Bromley Education Authority had for her was years out of date.’

  ‘Typical,’ Thorne said. ‘I bet their council tax bills go out on time though.’

  ‘No, she isn’t working for them any more. She must have moved house after she left.’

  ‘Which was when?’

  ‘April 2001. And Kathleen Bristow retired just after that.’

  Thorne remembered Roper suggesting that Bristow would have been around retirement age, but it was still striking. It was starting to look as if the lives of all those involved on Grant Freestone’s MAPPA panel had been changed in some way by what happened to Sarah Hanley: Bristow and Stringer had both left their jobs; Neil Warren had picked up a needle; Roper and Lardner certainly appeared to have issues.

  Guilt and blame again. Poisonous and magical.

  It seemed as though no one involved – however indirectly – with the death of a young mother in 2001 had come away unscathed. Thorne walked on, into Colindale station, to talk to the man accused of her murder. He had no idea how or why, and he still couldn’t see Grant Freestone as a kidnapper, but he couldn’t help but wonder if Sarah Hanley’s killing was still fucking people’s lives up five years on.

  The interview was suspended before anyone grew too comfortable.

  Freestone’s legal representative had stood up two minutes in, insisted that proceedings be brought to a halt and demanded to talk to Thorne and Porter outside.

  ‘Why the hell are you talking about a kidnap?’

  ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ Thorne said. ‘Because we are talking about a kidnap, we can’t say too much.’

  ‘That’s bollocks. Don’t forget who you’re talking to.’

  Thorne wasn’t likely to.

  Danny Donovan, like a lot of the legal reps working for solicitors’ firms and sent along in similar situations to this one, was an ex-copper. Thrown off the force fifteen years earlier for drink-driving, what he lacked in legal qualifications – which were not strictly necessary for the job – he more than made up for in working nous and know-how. He knew the system. He knew the difference between a loophole and a liberty. He knew his way round a police station, and most important of all, he knew the tricks that the likes of Tom Thorne played, because he’d played them all himself. This alone made characters like him unpopular with those still on the Job, but Donovan did himself no favours. When he wasn’t aggressively reminding people that he’d been there and done that, he was prone to playing the old pals act: calling officers by their first names and swanning into one or other of the CID offices to put the kettle on.

  He was fifty-something, and fucked. More than a few reckoned that his life as a ‘legal’ was about sticking two fingers up at the people who’d chucked him out on his ear. Thorne had thought this was a pretty harsh judgement, but he was ready to change his mind. What with Tony Mullen calling up to bad-mouth him to senior officers, Thorne had just about had a bellyful of bolshie ex-coppers.

  ‘My client was arrested for murder,’ Donovan said. ‘Of which, as we have already established, he claims to be completely innocent.’

  ‘Wouldn’t expect otherwise.’

  ‘“Murder”. That’s what it says on the arrest sheet; that’s what it says on the disclosure papers; and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s what you’re going to be questioning him about.’

  Thorne knew Donovan very well, but Porter had not had the displeasure. ‘I’m sure you understand what DI Thorne is getting at,’ she said. ‘We think that the murder for which your client has been charged, might be connected with a
current case. A highly sensitive case.’

  ‘Not my problem.’ Donovan sniffed and bowed a finger across his nostrils. His hair seemed to have yellowed rather than greyed, and keyed in rather nicely with his light brown suit and sunbed tan.

  ‘It’s just a few questions.’

  ‘It’s a few too many. I conferred with my client on the basis of what I was presented with and now you’re throwing stuff at us for which we’re completely unprepared.’

  ‘Come on, you know the game,’ Thorne said. ‘Sometimes “unprepared” is exactly the way they’re supposed to be, right?’

  The old pals act could work both ways.

  Or not at all: ‘Not from where I’m sitting,’ Donovan said. ‘Not when I haven’t been given an indication of any evidence whatsoever.’

  Porter tried to sound reluctant, as though Donovan were succeeding in dragging the disclosure from her. ‘Look, there’s a strong possibility that Freestone may have known the woman who was one of our kidnappers. They may have consulted the same drugs counsellor at the same time.’

  ‘A strong possibility . . . may have.’ Donovan looked as though he couldn’t decide whether to shout or piss himself. ‘I’ll tell you what you do have, and that’s bugger-all. You must think I’m a mug.’

  ‘We also have a sixteen-year-old boy,’ Thorne said. ‘Actually, someone else has him, and we’re trying awfully fucking hard to get him back. We could do with a break, Danny.’

  ‘His dad’s ex-Job, too,’ Porter said. ‘He’s going out of his mind. Well, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you . . .’

  Thorne knew that Donovan had two kids. He considered going down that road, but decided against laying it on too thick. For a second or two, it looked as though they might have got away with it; as though a simple, no-frills appeal to sentiment might have given them some leverage. But then, what Thorne had taken to be an expression of empathy – compassion, even – became something horribly like a smirk.

  ‘Sorry. Unless you can come up with more than this very quickly, you know damn well what I’ll have to advise my client to do.’

  ‘Surprise me,’ Thorne said.

  ‘In his own interest, I’ll tell him not to say a single word.’ Donovan turned, walked back into the interview room and shut the door behind him.

  A single word was all Thorne spoke, loudly, at the closed door. It wasn’t a word he used very often outside a football ground, and he wasn’t even sure that the man it was intended for heard it. But at that moment, it seemed like the only word that would do.

  LUKE

  It was like being buried.

  The smell of damp and dirt, and the floor above him.

  It was dark, as always. Heavy, like the particles in the air would be big and black if you could see them. But he felt sure that it was daytime. If he listened hard enough, he could hear the hum of distant traffic. A motorway, maybe. And when the man had been down before, he’d brought breakfast stuff – tea and toast – and a lot more light had spilled in when he’d opened the door at the top of the stairs.

  The man had done what he’d promised to do, and because Luke had not shouted when he hadn’t had the tape around his face, the man had left the rope off his wrists as well. Now he could really explore.

  His fingers dug into every crack and hole in the rough walls, his knuckles tearing on stone and nails, splinters slipping into his palms as he moved his hands through the cobwebs and across the ceiling above him. He felt along the shelves caked in grit and dust, and over the bags and sticky tins and picture frames. He added layer after layer of detail to the picture inside his head. He knew where everything was, and he could walk quickly from one side of the room to the other, his hands down by his sides until the very last second.

  He thought it was a good sign that the rope and the tape had gone; that the man was starting to like him or something. If the man carried on being nice, and didn’t say any more mad, horrible stuff, maybe he could ask him about sending another message. Maybe the man would let him say what he wanted, not like he’d had to do with Conrad and Amanda.

  They were the ones who’d taken him, yes. But they’d not said any stupid, sick shit. They’d been OK with him most of the time, before they’d died.

  He tried hard not to think about Conrad and Amanda, because every time he did, he saw them lying in the bedroom, with the blood underneath like the bright red lining of a jacket. Then he would get a lot more scared, because it was obvious that the man had killed them, and he started to believe that the man was going to hurt him, too, no matter how nice he was pretending to be.

  Scared. Like that moron of a rugby coach had said he was for pulling out of a tackle; and like his dad had said he was for not sticking up for himself when the rugby coach had given him a hard time about it. Like Juliet said he was for not standing up to his dad a bit more . . .

  The man was still in the house.

  Dropping things . . .

  He heard them, whatever they were, falling to the floor somewhere above him. He began to cry. He just couldn’t stop himself. He tried to be rational, to tell himself that the man was just moving stuff around, but he heard the noise as the objects hit the floorboards and he wept, as he imagined dirt being shovelled on top of him. He pushed himself up from the floor and began walking fast from one side of the cellar to the other. Gathering speed, bouncing off the walls and wailing.

  Rattling around in the dark.

  Like a stillborn baby in a big man’s coffin.

  FOURTEEN

  It was a contest, there was no getting away from it. Two of them on each side of the table, it was always going to be confrontational, no matter how touchy-feely you tried to make it; no matter how many beanbag sessions you sat through at seminars.

  Thorne and Porter one side, up for it. Donovan looking ready for a scrap on the other, and Grant Freestone the only one in the room who seemed as though he didn’t have much idea why any of them were there at all.

  Like he still couldn’t believe what had happened.

  Thorne announced the time that the interview was recommencing, the location and the names of all those present in the room. He asked Freestone if he had been given something to eat; if he was feeling fit and well enough to be interviewed. Then he waited.

  ‘You can answer that,’ he said, eventually.

  This was practicality and caution, rather than concern. The last thing they wanted was for Donovan to claim later that his client had been feeling sick or disoriented; that anything he might have said was unreliable, due to his not getting an aspirin or feeling weak through lack of a bacon sandwich.

  ‘Are you feeling OK, Grant?’

  Donovan smiled. He knew how little Thorne cared.

  Thorne smiled back. ‘For the benefit of the audio tape, Mr Freestone is nodding.’

  It had been a very small nod; economical, like all his gestures. Freestone was a big man, thickset, but graceful and fine-featured. He was the right side of forty, with very pale skin, shoulder-length dark hair tied back, and a neatly trimmed goatee. Thorne said later that he looked like someone who should be discussing fringe theatre on Channel Four, while Porter said he reminded her in a very disturbing way of an ex-boyfriend.

  They went over the facts of the arrest, of the custody record to this point, and of the death of Sarah Janine Hanley, whose body had been discovered by her neighbour and her own two children on 7 April 2001.

  ‘Did you know Sarah Hanley?’

  ‘Did you visit Sarah Hanley on April 7th, 2001?’

  ‘When was the last time you saw Sarah Hanley alive?’

  For fifteen minutes, Thorne and Porter asked questions, and for fifteen minutes Grant Freestone studied the table, as if the scars and scratches on its metal surface were the lines on some treasure map. There were long periods of silence, save for the occasional heavy sigh, or the hack of Donovan clearing his throat.

  The accusatory approach was clearly going to get nothing other than a Trappist response, but questions about
Freestone’s alibi didn’t fare much better.

  ‘Your sister claims that you were in the park with her children when Miss Hanley was killed. Much as you were this morning, ironically.’

  ‘Is that true, Grant?’

  ‘Which park was it?’

  ‘Come on, Grant. If you were there, why did nobody else see you?’

  Donovan sat up straight in his chair suddenly and spoke as if he’d just woken up. Thorne couldn’t be entirely sure that he hadn’t.

  ‘Lovely as it is to sit and listen to the pair of you, this is getting vaguely silly now.’ He tapped the face of his watch. ‘It might seem like time is standing still in here, but your clock’s running . . .’

  Thorne glanced up at the digital display above the door. Freestone had been booked in at just before half past ten in the morning. They were already three hours into their twenty-four.

  ‘Thanks for the reminder, Mr Donovan,’ Porter said.

  ‘Pleasure.’

  Sarcasm thinned Porter’s lips a little when she smiled. ‘And they say if you want to know the time, ask a policeman.’

  ‘Why don’t you talk to me, Grant?’ Thorne said.

  Thorne listened politely while Donovan told him he was wasting his time. Freestone looked up at him with an expression that said much the same thing. Thorne leaned in nice and close.

  ‘Why don’t you talk to me about the kidnap of Luke Mullen?’

  Neither Thorne nor Porter had been given the chance to mention Luke Mullen’s name during the first, truncated interview. Now that someone had, though, the reaction was obvious. Freestone’s chin sagged momentarily, before his features reset themselves, tighter than before. Something came to life in his eyes. Though he might just have been opening his mouth and closing it again, it looked to Thorne like the man sitting across from him had said the first part of the surname to himself before he could think about it.

  ‘That name obviously means something to you.’