Buried

by Buried (epub)

  Farrell presumed that the cab firm had been given the address by the custody sergeant when the car had been booked. The driver certainly seemed to know where he was going. The miserable bastard said nothing as they drove, but that suited Farrell well enough. He didn’t want to chat. He wanted to close his eyes and gather his thoughts.

  He leaned his head against the window and listened to the rain slapping on the roof and to the squeak of the wipers. It stank of oil in the back, and one of those pine air-fresheners shaped like a tree. Piece of shit probably didn’t even have insurance; the Asians always tried to avoid paying anything if they thought they could get away with it. It was like the joke a few of them had about the Asian kids at school. They used to say that their dads were the ones who owned chains of newsagents’, and posh curry houses, but still went to the headmaster’s office to try and haggle over the fees . . .

  When the car pulled over, Farrell thought that he must have nodded off and slept through most of the journey. It seemed like only five minutes since they’d driven away from the station.

  A door opened on either side of him. When they’d closed again, he was sitting between two Asian men.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ But even as he was asking the question, the answer was settling in his stomach and starting to boil.

  They didn’t speak to him.

  They didn’t look at him, or at each other.

  The driver flicked his indicator up and eased slowly into the stream of traffic. He turned on the radio, tuned it into a bhangra station. Moved ahead nice and steadily.

  Farrell was still pretty certain that the police had bailed him just so they could watch him for a while; see if he got in touch with either of the others. Wedged tight between the men on either side, he wasn’t able to turn round fully, but he craned his neck as much as he could, desperately hoping that he might be proved right and see a panda behind them. But all he saw was rain, anonymous headlights, and, when he turned round again, the eyes of the driver in the rear-view mirror. They were cold and flat, and yellowed for a second as the Cavalier passed below a street light.

  The digital clock on the chrome range read 21.14. Juliet Mullen sat perched on the black, granite worktop with a can of Diet Coke. Her Converse Allstars bounced gently against the cupboard beneath.

  ‘He’s the twatty sixth-former with the spiky hair, right?’

  ‘That’s a good description,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Fancies himself.’

  ‘Not a friend of yours, then?’

  ‘No . . .’

  Thorne sat at the kitchen table. Fresh coffee had been made and he’d helped himself. ‘He’s a good-looking boy, though, to be serious. Wouldn’t you say? I bet some of the girls in your year like him, don’t they?’

  ‘Maybe some of the sad ones.’

  ‘But not you?’

  She threw him a look drenched in pity. Thorne was convinced. He knew precisely the reaction he’d get were he to ask Juliet Mullen if she’d ever spoken to Adrian Farrell on the phone. ‘What about your brother?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Is he a friend of Farrell?’

  She took a swig from her can, swallowed the belch. ‘I don’t know all his friends – not that he’s got too many, to be honest – but I seriously doubt it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Like I said, Farrell’s a wanker. He’s a poser and Luke’s really good at seeing through all that shit. If someone like Farrell was being matey with Luke, it would probably just be so he could take the piss. Or because he wanted something.’

  ‘Any idea what that might be?’

  ‘Not a clue. Help with homework, maybe?’

  Thorne nodded. It was the first thing she’d thought of, the most obvious explanation. It was the first thing Farrell himself had thought of, too, when he’d been groping for a lie to explain the phone calls.

  Juliet squashed the empty can, dropped down from the worktop and opened a cupboard where there was a recycling bin. ‘Is this to do with what’s happened to Luke?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘Do you think Luke’s still alive?’

  Thorne looked up at the girl. Her image was designed to project a generalised angst and tension, frustration and despair at nothing in particular. In that moment, though, brightly lit and brutal, there was only a pudgy-faced child whose breathing was suddenly ragged above the low hum of the fridge. Thorne could see beyond the dark make-up and the bitten nails to the consuming pain beneath.

  And he could see that lying would not ease it.

  ‘I’m not sure about that, either.’

  Juliet nodded, like she appreciated the honesty. ‘I am,’ she said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  ‘Amin Latif was my nephew,’ the driver said. He nodded towards the men in the back seat. ‘And these are my sons: Amin’s cousins.’

  Finally the men on either side of Farrell looked at him. One had a goatee and wore a leather jacket. The other was clean-shaven, with small, round glasses and hair that flopped down across his forehead. Neither of them looked like hard men, Farrell thought. But they both looked hard enough, and intense, like they had something burning in their bellies, too.

  ‘You look like you’re going to shit yourself,’ the one with the goatee said.

  Farrell had spent the ten minutes since they’d climbed in next to him imagining the worst. He’d pictured the car pulling off the road, driving on to some deserted industrial estate. He knew for certain that the men would be carrying knives.

  ‘How does it feel?’ the one with the glasses asked.

  In fact, the driver had steered the Cavalier into the large car park of an entertainment complex. Farrell thought he recognised the place; that maybe he’d been bowling here one night or gone to the pictures. The car had eventually stopped in a far corner behind a Pizza Hut, away from any other vehicles. Out of the light.

  ‘I could have such a good time using a blade on you.’ The man with the glasses was inches from Farrell’s face. Farrell could smell the chewing gum on his breath. ‘Not quick, either. There are halal butchers in our family. You understand what that is?’

  ‘He knows how to bleed an animal properly.’

  ‘And you still wouldn’t have paid for what you did to Amin . . . nowhere near. For what you did before you killed him.’

  Farrell heard himself say, ‘please’. Felt the heat that was rising inside him spread out and bubble across every inch of his skin.

  The driver, a big man, heaved himself further round in his seat. ‘OK, let’s calm down. Nobody’s using knives on anyone.’ He pointed a finger at Farrell. ‘You’re going to prison, don’t be in any doubt about that. That’s how you’re going to pay for Amin. With years and years of stale air, and shitting where you eat. Of worrying what might happen every time an Asian face stares at you in the canteen or across the exercise yard. You clear about that?’

  Farrell nodded. Ahead of him, through the rain-streaked windscreen, he could see a small crowd of people two hundred yards away, milling around outside the cinema.

  ‘But there is a choice you have to make: you can go to prison, or you can go to prison after you’ve had the shit kicked out of you.’ He looked to the men on either side of Farrell, then back to the teenager. ‘Because I will let them beat you. In fact, I will probably help them beat you. So there you go . . . It’s not really much of a choice, if you ask me.’

  Hearing the tremor in his voice as he started to speak only made it worse for Farrell. The fear was growing fat inside him, feeding on itself. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘There were others with you,’ the driver said. ‘Two others, the night you killed my nephew. They could have stopped you but they chose to stand by and watch. The police will probably catch them eventually, but even if they do, those two bastards won’t get what they deserve. If they get clever lawyers, maybe even clever Asian lawyers, to go down well with the jury, they won’t be sent to prison for murder. They
may get a few years, but it’s not enough.’

  ‘They’re as guilty as you are,’ the man with the glasses said.

  ‘Fucking worse than you, man.’

  The driver waved his hand until there was quiet. ‘We want to see them before they’re arrested, that’s all. If the law won’t deal with them properly, then we’ll sort things out ourselves. So, obviously, we need to know who they are.’ He stared at Farrell, brought a thumb to his mouth and chewed at a nail. ‘You can say nothing, that’s up to you, but why the hell would you want to take a beating for them? You get prison and a good kicking, and what do they get? That seems stupid to me. What thanks do you get for protecting these fuckers?’

  ‘If you’re stupid, whatever happens to you tonight can happen again, many times, once you’re in prison.’ The man with the floppy hair took off his glasses. He untucked his T-shirt and wiped the lenses. ‘We can get to you in there. If we want you hurt, we can make it happen, any time we like.’

  ‘Tell us their names,’ the driver said, ‘we drop you off near a police station and that’s it.’

  Farrell wanted to be sick. And to shit, and to cry. If he told them what they wanted, how did he know that they wouldn’t hurt him anyway? He knew that if he asked the question, the beating would probably begin.

  ‘Two names. Say them quickly and it’s finished.’

  Farrell closed his eyes and shook his head. For a wild, unthinking second or two he wanted them to hurt him. He wanted it over and done with, and being beaten seemed better than waiting.

  Than not knowing . . .

  ‘I won’t allow any weapons,’ the driver said. ‘And it will be over quickly enough. But if you make the wrong choice, and it comes down to it, you need to understand that violence is never precise. It’s hard to keep things . . . reined in. You must know better than anyone what damage can be done with a kick or two, right?’

  ‘Amin tried to protect his head and it didn’t help.’

  ‘And there was only one person doing the kicking.’

  ‘Swings and roundabouts, though.’ The driver stuck the key back in the ignition, turned it some of the way. ‘If things get out of hand, I mean. If you end up damaged in some way and in a unit that’s designed for prisoners with special needs, it’ll probably be harder for us to get to you later on.’

  ‘Tell us their names. Last chance.’

  Farrell’s mouth felt dead and scorched inside. He prised open his lips and panted, gulped and choked as he tried to dry swallow.

  ‘Silly,’ the driver said. ‘Very silly.’ He swung himself around again and started the car.

  Farrell screamed over the radio and, once the music had been turned down, he started to gabble, breathless, in a whisper that struggled not to become a sob. He said the names over and over until they ran into one another and became meaningless; babbling until he felt hands on his face, closing his mouth, and voices telling him to shush.

  Telling him that he was still scum, still a prick and still a murderer. But at least he was not a completely stupid one.

  Porter knew that she should knock it on the head. There was little point in ploughing on when she was so tired that she might well be overlooking stuff anyway. But she really wanted to get it done.

  There were hundreds of files, each containing sometimes dozens of reports and assessments. There was clearly no need to read all of them, or even the majority, but it had quickly become apparent that even skimming through Kathleen Bristow’s records wasn’t going to be a five-minute job.

  Client files had been organised alphabetically, and while searching under ‘F’ for Freestone, Porter had found herself reading case notes that she knew were of no real interest. She supposed that even though these were ex-clients of a dead woman, there were still issues of confidentiality. But that didn’t stop her. She was fascinated, and, on occasion, appalled. Francis Bristow had been right when he’d said that his sister had worked with more than a few ‘headcases’.

  The documents relating to Grant Freestone put a little unpleasant meat on the bones of what she knew already, but there was nothing that seemed significant. There were transcripts of interviews conducted in prison, and statements from a number of healthcare professionals who’d treated him during his sentence, but there was nothing in the file relating to the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements that came into force after he was released.

  Porter was alone in the house. She’d brought a radio upstairs from the kitchen and tuned it to Magic FM. When the songs had become a little too soporific, she’d retuned it to Radio 1, nodding her head in time to the music as she’d hauled out batch after batch of brown and green suspension files.

  She hummed along with a dance track she recognised and wondered if Thorne had managed to get away yet. Earlier, on the phone, when he’d asked her what she would be doing, it had sounded like more than just a casual work enquiry, but she’d decided not to push it. She sensed he wasn’t completely relaxed about what had nearly happened, but in that respect he was probably just an average bloke: happy enough to get into her pants but not very comfortable talking about it, or, God forbid, what might happen afterwards.

  Porter finally found the MAPPA stuff in the section of files that was organised by year. There were half a dozen well-stuffed folders relating to Grant Freestone’s 2001 panel. She squatted down and sorted them into piles: ‘Risk Management’; ‘Domestic Arrangements’; ‘Community Sex-Offender Treatment Programme’; ‘Drugs & Alcohol’. She picked up the folder marked ‘Minutes’ and took out a sheaf of papers held together with a bulldog clip. Kathleen Bristow had been as meticulous as always, and the documents, most of which were handwritten, had been filed in strict chronological order. Porter flicked through to the last sheet: the minutes of the meeting that had taken place on 29 March 2001.

  She recognised the names under ‘In Attendance’. There were none listed under ‘Apologies for Absence’ . . .

  Porter stared at the date.

  Sarah Hanley had been killed on 7 April, nine days after the meeting. The panel had met weekly until this point and there was no record in these minutes of the decision to tell Hanley about Freestone’s past; the decision that was widely regarded as the reason she had ended up dead. Porter went through the sheets again, sensing that there should have been one more, checking that she hadn’t missed it.

  Of course, after what had happened, Kathleen Bristow might have decided that the final meeting was one for which she wanted no record.

  It might also have been what her killer had been after.

  Porter made a mental note to check with Roper, Lardner and the others, to confirm that a meeting had taken place on 5 April, two days before Sarah Hanley’s death.

  Energised suddenly, but still as knackered as she’d felt in a long time, Porter sat back against a filing cabinet. She reached for the folder marked ‘Drugs & Alcohol’, thinking that either would be more than welcome.

  Farrell felt a jolt of something like hope when the car drew close to Colindale station. He’d held his breath for most of the journey back, but suddenly started to believe that his ordeal would soon be over.

  The place he’d been so happy to walk out of an hour or so before now seemed like a sanctuary.

  But the driver slowed, crept past the front entrance, then took a sharp left.

  ‘Please,’ Farrell said. ‘Here is OK.’

  The driver ignored him, moving along the side of the station and stopping at a security barrier. He wound down the window, leaned out and punched at some buttons.

  ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  The barrier started to rise.

  Farrell finally thought he saw what was happening. Anger spread and hardened, cracked into a series of low curses, which grew harsher as the Cavalier turned into the backyard and he saw the officers waiting.

  Saw Kitson exchanging nods with the driver as they drew to a halt.

  Samir Karim slammed the car door and pulled on his jacket. He let out a long, slow bre
ath as he walked towards Kitson. She put a hand on his arm and left it there as they exchanged a few words; watching as the two young men in the back seat moved away from the car, and uniformed officers leaned in to drag out Adrian Farrell.

  Farrell struggled and swore as the handcuffs were put on, his body straining towards where Kitson and Karim were huddled, twenty feet away, near the back entrance. ‘You told me you were a cab driver, you fucker. You told me.’

  Karim turned, equally angry, but marshalling it. ‘That’s bollocks. I said nothing. You took one look at me and you presumed I was your driver.’

  ‘Nobody made you get into the car,’ Kitson said. ‘You jumped to conclusions.’

  Just like Thorne had said he would.

  ‘They threatened me.’ Farrell looked from face to face, repeated the accusation, making sure every copper within earshot was under no misconception. ‘They fucking threatened me.’

  Backs were still being patted, hands shaken, as Kitson walked across to the prisoner and stood, waiting for him to stop shouting. After a few moments she gave up and got on with it, spoke the words she had no real need to think about.

  Charged Adrian Farrell with the murder of Amin Latif.

  As she made the speech, she thought about how much persuasion Thorne had needed to employ on her. He’d reminded her about her ‘acquisition’ of Farrell’s DNA; pointed out that, as she’d already taken several steps in an unorthodox direction, it couldn’t really hurt to take a few more. ‘Welcome to the slippery slope,’ he’d said.

  ‘. . . but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on . . .’

  She knew that there would be fallout: questions raised, evidence discounted. Thorne had mentioned Farrell’s solicitor and Trevor Jesmond. He’d offered to open a book on which of them would be the more apoplectic.

  But she didn’t care.

  She looked at Farrell and she knew she’d got him, that, whatever happened, there was more than enough to put him and both his friends away. She pictured the face of Amin Latif’s mother, and decided that she could live with a slap on the wrist.