Buried

by Buried (epub)

  ‘Hang on. Are we sure this was Adrian Farrell making the calls? Maybe Mrs Farrell and Luke Mullen’s mum both work on the PTA committee or something.’

  Kitson shook her head. ‘I checked with his mother, and the parents hardly know each other. A few words over coffee at a school concert, nods at the school gates, no more than that.’

  ‘OK . . .’

  Thorne’s mind, dulled by fatigue and hunger, tossed around possibilities like a tumble dryer on its last legs. Could Luke Mullen’s kidnapping be connected with Farrell, or some of Farrell’s friends? Was he taken because of something he knew about them? If that were the case, why was the video sent to Luke’s parents? And what the hell could any of it have to do with the murder of Kathleen Bristow?

  ‘These are not quick calls either, Tom,’ Kitson said. ‘Ten, fifteen minutes.’

  ‘What does Farrell say?’

  ‘I haven’t gone at him with any of this yet. I wondered if you fancied coming into the bin with me and having a bash yourself.’

  Thorne grunted a yes as ideas continued to tumble and tangle.

  ‘One more thing.’ Kitson said it as though it were an afterthought, an irrelevance. ‘When you’re talking to Farrell, if you could squeeze out the names of the other two who helped him kill Amin Latif, there’s half a shandy in it for you.’

  They enjoyed the moment, and sat there, and took a minute. Rubbing at sore feet and cradling paper cups of tea, like any other pair of workers on a break. Catching their breaths.

  Thorne sensed that it might be their last chance to do so for a while. There had been times, on previous cases, when it had felt as if he were on a collision course with whoever he was trying to catch. As though the speed had increased until in the end it had just been a question of where the crash was going to happen.

  This case felt different.

  There was the same inevitability, like something rising from the guts into the mouth, the same sense that the end was coming. But it wasn’t a question of getting closer, or even of something gaining on them.

  Thorne simply felt like they were running out of time.

  He hadn’t meant to hurt the boy.

  That didn’t excuse the fact that he had; that he’d known his words were like slaps, like punches. But he genuinely hadn’t wanted to. Everything was more complicated than that, of course; and more simple. It was someone else he wanted to hurt. Someone who would see how much a child they loved had suffered and would feel that pain a thousandfold.

  That would make them see sense, wouldn’t it? Would make them look at things a little differently.

  It had been such a straightforward idea, but from the moment he’d started to put it into pracice he’d felt it going away from him. Now he honestly didn’t know if things were going to work out as they’d been supposed to. It had all got out of control. He was out of control.

  But at least he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognise what was happening. He was still aware. He’d seen it too many times himself: car accidents on two legs who had ruined lives – their own and those of everyone around them; fuck-ups and hard-luck merchants whose tears were real enough, whose anguish could suck the air out of a room, but who couldn’t seem to grasp that it was not an excuse.

  I didn’t mean to hurt anyone . . .

  He knew very well that he’d done terrible things. That good intentions counted for nothing with blood on his hands and the noise from the cellar. And that, although he had no idea how, it would end.

  There were bells ringing across the field.

  He sat and thought about engineering some sort of resolution himself. If he just opened the door and stood back, things would sort themselves out quickly enough. The boy would run towards the sound of the bells, towards a place where there was a phone, and it would all be over.

  But that was hypothetical nonsense, because too much had happened now for everything to finish as simply as that. The slate could no longer be wiped clean. But it felt good to know that he wouldn’t be the only one paying the price.

  When the bells finally stopped, he could hear the sobbing again. Coming up through the floor: a stutter, a desperate beat; rising every few breaths to something cracked and sore.

  He closed his eyes, tried to forget how stupid he’d been, until he could almost believe that what he heard was only the sound of water and rust, and the pipes expanding.

  LUKE

  The religious stuff was sort of taken for granted at Butler’s Hall. It wasn’t a church school, as such, but there were hymns in assembly every day, and, even though it wasn’t forced down your throat in RE lessons, the presumption was that anyone whose parents had not stated otherwise was C of E.

  He knew that the chaplain would have made speeches. Something about lost sheep, most likely. That teachers would have lined up on stage and bowed their heads, and that prayers would have been said for him every morning.

  Now he’d started saying them himself.

  He’d been filling his head with all manner of rubbish, trying to force out the stuff he couldn’t bear to have in there. Thinking about whatever else he could while the man was talking to him; and later, when it had finished and the man had gone. Sequences of streets and underground stations; rules of games he’d played with Juliet when they were younger; the names of his old soft toys . . . Anything.

  Now God had elbowed His way in there as well.

  Neither his mum nor his dad was big on church, save for the odd nativity play or whatever, and Juliet seemed actively drawn to Satanism, if anything. But he’d always liked the basic idea of it, of what it stood for. It was hard to argue that love and compassion were bad ideas. And some of the stuff in the Bible stood up OK, as long as you took it as nothing more than a cracking story.

  He’d seen a programme on TV once, about why bad things happened to good people; about a bloke who did tons of work for charity then got some horrible disease, and a couple who went to church every five minutes and whose daughter had disappeared. They all said that suffering was part of being a Christian, and that everything they were going through was just a test of their faith. He’d watched it, thinking that they probably had to say something like that. He’d decided that if he believed in God, and was ever tested to the same extent, that he’d fail miserably.

  But he didn’t believe, not really. And anyway, he knew what he was going through was nobody’s fault but that of the man on the other side of the cellar door. So a prayer couldn’t hurt, could it?

  He guessed that the school chaplain might have something to say about praying at the same time as harbouring such violent thoughts; while clutching the carefully prepared means to put those thoughts into practice, if need be. But he also remembered that some of the stories he’d read in the Old Testament made Grand Theft Auto look tame. He knew that God had no problem with blood and thunderbolts, and striking down those who deserved it.

  Thinking about it, perhaps the most appropriate thing he could ask God for was to be given the chance.

  So he prayed for a while, because he knew that’s what people did as a last resort. Then he wiped away the tears and the snot. Went back to the distraction of memories and mental gymnastics.

  The names of every child in his class, alphabetically, forwards and backwards. Planets and moons. Stars and satellites. His toys.

  A dinosaur. A Bugs Bunny. A brown bear named Grizzle . . .

  TWENTY

  She made it a rule never to look at the faces.

  It wasn’t about the pain. Porter was used to seeing the rifts and fissures that pain could gouge across a face; she worked with it most days. But there was hope in those faces, too: that the nightmare would soon be over, that she or someone like her would do a good job and bring their loved ones home again. There were times, if that hope were misplaced, when it was terrible to see, but nothing was as dreadful as its absence.

  When it came to identifying a body, the hope was often there right until the very last second. Hope that there had been
a terrible mistake; that the police had got it wrong; that their wife/husband/child was still alive somewhere. On occasions, of course, when there was a genuine element of doubt as to identity, it was her job to look. But not once, even then, had she ever seen that hope rewarded. She’d watched it die and seen it buried in a blink; gone before the breath had been fully caught.

  So Louise Porter didn’t look any more. She dropped her eyes for that moment when hope was extinguished.

  Afterwards, she sat with them on a brown plastic bench near the mortuary entrance. Francis Bristow and his wife had caught the early train from Glasgow. Clutching tight to overnight bags, they looked like bemused tourists who’d taken a wrong turn.

  ‘Have you got anywhere to stay?’ Porter asked. ‘Any other family?’

  Joan Bristow was sitting on the far end. She looked to her husband, who was seated in the middle, then leaned forward slightly to look along at Porter. ‘We didn’t really know what we’d be doing. How long we’d be here, or anything.’

  ‘I’ll see if we can get something sorted out for you,’ Porter said.

  ‘We didn’t know, you see . . .’

  The woman had a smart woollen coat folded across her knees. Next to her, Kathleen Bristow’s brother sat stiff-backed, staring straight ahead, as if studying every bump and crack in the primrose-yellow walls. He wore polished brogues and a jacket and tie. His hair was thick, creamcoloured, and his eyes were the same blue as his wife’s, wide and watery behind his glasses. He was probably in his early seventies, a few years older than his sister, but it was impossible for Porter to say if there was any family resemblance. She hadn’t had a good look at the photographs in the bedroom and she could not compare any living face with the one she’d seen on Kathleen Bristow.

  The old man spoke suddenly, as if he’d been able to follow Porter’s thoughts. ‘I don’t understand why there was all that bruising across her nose,’ he said. ‘All black, like someone had hit her.’ The voice was quiet, and the Glaswegian accent strong, so Porter had to listen hard. He began to wave a finger in front of his face, pointing towards it. ‘And there was something else going on here . . . something not right with her mouth.’

  The couple had been told how Kathleen Bristow had died and had been warned before the identification that her face was marked. Porter hesitated, unwilling for a variety of reasons to explain to Francis Bristow exactly what had been done to his sister’s face during her murder.

  Joan Bristow’s accent was less pronounced than her husband’s. ‘They can’t tell us that kind of thing, Frank.’ She squeezed his hand and looked at Porter. ‘Am I not right, love?’

  Porter nodded, grateful for the escape route, and stared at the finger, which still circled slowly in front of the man’s face. ‘What I was saying about family? We called you first because you were the one who reported her missing. We’re presuming there were no children . . .’

  ‘No children,’ Bristow said.

  The words were then spoken a third time by his wife. She shook her head and talked softly, as if this were another, smaller tragedy. ‘Kath was never married, you see? She lived with a “friend” for many years.’ She looked at Porter, in case the understated inverted commas she’d put around the word ‘friend’ had not been obvious enough.

  Porter had understood perfectly well. ‘Right, well, maybe we can get those details from you later, if you’d like us to inform this friend of hers.’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve got them, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘Kath kept herself to herself,’ the old man added. ‘She was very private about things.’ He picked at something on his lapel, remembering. ‘She’d come home once a year or so; or maybe we’d get the train down here for the weekend.’

  ‘It’s hard when you live so far away,’ Porter said.

  ‘Right enough. But still, there were things we didn’t really talk about, you know?’

  ‘Shush, don’t think about all that now, love.’

  ‘Bloody stupid, when you stop and think about it.’

  ‘Spent all her time at work getting involved in other people’s lives and kept her own very quiet, you see?’ Joan Bristow leaned close to her husband, trying hard to elicit something like a smile, concern for him bleeding through the powder and thick foundation.

  They sat and watched a woman with an electric floor-polisher; listened to the vague buzz of a one-way phone conversation, and, incongruously, to gales of laughter coming from a room down the corridor. Porter opened her mouth, desperate to say something and disguise the noise, but Joan beat her to it.

  ‘Was it one of those nutters, then?’ she asked. There was a pained expression on her face, and pity in her voice. ‘One of them as gets released from somewhere when they’re still poorly. You read about that sort of thing all the time.’

  ‘It’s too early to say.’

  ‘Kath dealt with her fair share of headcases over the years. Could it have been one of them, d’you think?’

  Genuinely, Porter had no idea. Whoever had murdered Kathleen Bristow and the others was certainly a headcase, as far as she was concerned, though others would determine later whether he was suffering from an ‘abnormality of mind’. She found the procedures for deciding such things bizarre to say the least. A solicitor had once tried to explain the rules for establishing mental competence by telling her that if a man threw a baby on to a fire believing it to be a log then he was insane and could not be criminally responsible. This, according to the law, would not be the case if he threw the baby on to the fire knowing it was a baby. Porter had found this preposterous, and had said so. To her mind, the man who knew the baby was a baby was more insane; was obviously as mad as a box of frogs. The solicitor had merely smiled, as though that was exactly what made the whole issue so complex . . . and so fascinating.

  She remembered what the probation officer, Peter Lardner, had said about intent. If that were a grey area, then diminished responsibility came in a thousand different shades.

  ‘You’ve still got to ask why, though, haven’t you?’ Bristow said.

  ‘What’s the point, love? It’s bad luck, that’s all it is.’

  The old man shook his head. His voice was suddenly thin, and falling away. ‘Whether he’s a nutter or no, you still want to know what was going on inside his head.’ He rubbed a hand across his chin, rasping against the silvery stubble. ‘What made him choose our Kathleen.’

  Porter didn’t look at their faces when they saw the body, and she didn’t make speeches. She said no more than she had to. She told Francis Bristow that, as things stood, they were all wrestling with that question, but she would do her very best for them, and keep them informed.

  She also made a promise to herself; the sort of promise the likes of Tom Thorne made, broke and lived with.

  Getting Luke Mullen back remained her first priority, of course. When there was still a life to be saved, that was a given. But however the kidnap investigation turned out, she would do whatever she could to give the man sitting next to her a definitive answer. She would tell him exactly why his sister had died, and she would find that out from the man responsible.

  Porter was just about to start making noises about needing to get on and making sure that someone would be along to take care of them when she felt the hand slip into hers. When she looked, Francis Bristow was staring straight ahead again, blinking away the tears.

  She followed his gaze, and all three of them sat and looked at the woman with the floor-polisher for a while.

  ‘DC Holland?’

  ‘Speaking . . .’

  ‘DCI Roper at Special Enquiries. You left a message.’

  Holland put down the sandwich, ‘That’s right,’ took a swig from a bottle of water to clear his mouth out. ‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, sir.’

  ‘I’ve only got five minutes.’

  ‘We just wanted to let you know that the body of Kathleen Bristow was discovered in the early hours of this morning.’

  Th
e pause might just have been the time it took Roper to recall the name. Holland couldn’t know for sure.

  ‘Poor woman,’ Roper said, finally. ‘Christ . . .’

  ‘She was murdered, sir.’

  Another pause. This one definitely for effect. ‘Well, I hardly thought you’d be calling to let me know that she’d popped off peacefully in front of The Antiques Roadshow.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘How was she killed?’

  ‘Someone broke in and suffocated her.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘It looks like she held on to a lot of records,’ Holland said. ‘Filing cabinets full of stuff from her old cases and what have you.’ Holland took another small bite of his sandwich while he was waiting for a response. He could hear classical music playing softly from another room.

  ‘So you think this is connected to your kidnap, do you? To Grant Freestone? To Sarah Hanley, maybe?’

  ‘We’re keeping an open mind at the moment.’

  ‘And you just called to keep me informed, did you?’

  ‘Sir . . .?’

  With the music in the background, it was like being put on hold.

  ‘Not even going to tell me to make sure my doors and windows are locked?’

  ‘I would’ve presumed you’d do that anyway, sir,’ Holland said.

  ‘Present for you . . .’ Thorne dropped the plastic bag on to the table in front of Adrian Farrell.

  ‘Your twenty-four’s up in a little over ninety minutes,’ Wilson said.

  Kitson glanced up at the clock. ‘At four thirty-eight.’

  Farrell looked weary, suspicious. He reached forward and dragged the bag towards him as Thorne and Kitson took their seats.

  ‘As it happens, I’ve already spoken to my superintendent,’ Kitson said. ‘Assured him I’m carrying out my duties in regard to this case diligently and expeditiously . . .’

  The solicitor made a winding gesture with his finger, urging her to get on with it.