Buried

by Buried (epub)

  He tensed. A heartbeat away. Lardner had not been afraid to use the knife before.

  Thorne knew he would be lucky to come away unscathed.

  He had no idea what Lardner’s response would be to an attack. Would he lay down his weapon and throw in the towel? Or would he take a child’s life as easily as he’d taken that of an old woman? Whatever his appearance, however beaten and confused he seemed, the unpredictability of the man opposite made him as dangerous as any gangland enforcer or flat-eyed psychopath Thorne had ever faced.

  A few years earlier, in a similar position, he’d frozen while a man had held a knife to the neck of a female officer. He had done it by the book, afraid that heroics would cost the officer her life.

  Then he’d watched her die anyway.

  The boy himself had become completely still and silent. His eyes had closed. Then the words of Luke’s mother – calling his name, asking him repeatedly if he was all right – seemed to snap Lardner back into the moment.

  ‘He’s fine, really,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve become good mates, haven’t we, Luke?’

  The boy opened his eyes.

  ‘We’ve had some good old chats down there, I reckon.’

  ‘No . . .’

  Thorne saw the spasm of panic around Maggie Mullen’s eyes.

  ‘Talked about all sorts.’

  ‘Like what?’

  A shrug. ‘Family, you know. The important things in life . . .’

  ‘Don’t.’

  Luke Mullen moaned, a long, desperate ‘no . . .’ from behind the tape.

  ‘I wasn’t planning on bringing any of it up here,’ Lardner said, ‘but now that you mention it . . .’

  It was no more than a couple of paces, but Thorne knew Lardner could have the knife at Luke’s throat before he reached him.

  ‘What did you tell my son?’

  ‘Want me to repeat it? Even police officers can be shocked, you know. But he looks up to it.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Should I tell him what the pair of us got up to in bed? Or how about why you started having an affair with me in the first place?’

  If she rushed towards her son, if she could distract Lardner for just a second, he’d have a chance. There was just no way to let her know what to do.

  ‘Luke, listen to me. I don’t know what he’s been telling you.’

  ‘We’d better not pretend it was my looks.’

  ‘He’s sick. You know that, darling, don’t you? You know he’s sick.’

  Thorne would need to go for the left hand, for the knife. Maybe if Luke was quick and moved away at the same time, Lardner could be caught off balance . . .

  ‘Driven into my arms,’ Lardner said. ‘I think that’s a fair description.’

  ‘Twisted. What he’s been saying.’

  ‘Certainly driven out of her husband’s.’

  ‘Please look at me, Luke.’

  ‘I think we all know each other pretty well by now. A home truth or two can’t hurt, can it?’

  ‘Luke. Please!’

  There would be no perfect moment. He just needed to pick one . . .

  ‘Why don’t you tell the inspector all about it?’ Lardner’s mouth was firm, grim, but there was gentleness in his eyes. ‘Why you can’t bear to let him touch you . . .’

  The sound was unearthly, as the howl of rage and horror vibrated against the gaffer tape. Luke lurched towards his mother, and, as he was hauled back, he let his momentum carry him fast and hard into Lardner, taking the two of them down on to the sofa.

  Thorne saw what was happening too late.

  Saw the hand that the boy had kept pressed against his leg come up high. Saw the light catch something in his fist. Heard the sigh as the flesh was pierced, and the snap.

  Then everything was happening at double speed. Crowded with screams and coloured red.

  Thorne found himself at Lardner’s feet, staring at the broken shard that Luke had dropped. Its edge was bloodied, and the gaffer tape, wrapped around one end as a makeshift handle, was slick with sweat.

  Picture-glass, it looked like. Thin, easily snapped.

  He looked up for the piece he knew was embedded in Peter Lardner’s neck, saw that it was already lost beneath a bubbling spring of scarlet.

  Maggie Mullen was on her knees, whispering, one arm wrapped tight around Lardner’s neck, both of them slick with blood. Her other arm was reaching desperately for Luke, the hand flapping, trying to grab the son who stood a few feet away, still screaming as though it were a language he had just mastered. The boy’s eyes were saucers, wild with horror and exhilaration.

  And with something else Thorne could not name, something more shocking than all the blood that flowed into the cracks between the chipped and flaking boards.

  MONDAY

  TWENTY-NINE

  They’d had wine and a glass of whisky each before getting back to Thorne’s flat. A fair amount of lager since. And their first kiss.

  It was a little after six in the morning, and getting light outside.

  They lounged, laughing on the sofa, arms and legs moving against each other, and bed clearly on the cards at some point, once a different sort of excitement had burned itself out.

  ‘I wonder if Hignett and Brigstocke have started arguing about credit yet?’ Porter said. ‘Worked out how this is going to get divvied up.’

  Thorne was grinning like an idiot, same as Porter, but he pulled a mock-thoughtful face. ‘Well, we get the three murders, obviously. Four, if you count Sarah Hanley. Your lot can have the kidnap. How’s that?’

  ‘Oh, can we?

  ‘Plus any little extras that come up: out-of-date tax discs, that sort of thing . . .’

  ‘Very generous of you.’

  ‘Bloody generous, if you ask me.’

  Porter raised her eyebrows.

  ‘If Lardner had been at that flat in Catford and your lot had collared him, I bet you’d be claiming the bloody set.’

  ‘Fair point.’

  ‘Too right it is,’ Thorne said. ‘Now shut your face.’

  She smiled, the pissed kind of smile that spread a little slower, and wider. ‘So . . . You charging into that cottage then, not bothering to let me, or anybody else, know . . .’

  ‘Hardly “charging”.’

  ‘How would you describe it, then?’

  ‘There wasn’t time to call. I didn’t know how close you were . . .’

  ‘You didn’t bother to find out.’

  ‘I took a decision, same as you did when you went into the flat.’

  ‘I didn’t go in on my own!’

  ‘Look, she was terrified about a firearms unit going in there, after what happened in Bow. I was just . . .’ Thorne puffed out his cheeks, gave up. He knew she had him.

  ‘Maybe you were getting your own back for being left in the van when we went into Allen’s place?’

  Thorne looked shocked. ‘You really think I’m that bloody petty, do you?’

  ‘It crossed my mind.’

  ‘You’re right, obviously. I’m very petty.’ He leaned across. ‘Vindictive. Vengeful. I’m a nasty piece of work . . .’

  They kissed again. Longer, the second time.

  ‘Sorry about the smell,’ Thorne said. ‘They only had that soap, you know? The medicated shit. Little green slivers.’ Thorne had showered at the hospital.

  ‘It’s five murders,’ Porter said. ‘You said “four”.’

  He nodded.

  Picture glass. Thin, easily snapped . . .

  Peter Lardner had died in an ambulance which had taken twenty-five minutes to reach the cottage.

  ‘One more reason not to live in the countryside,’ Thorne had said.

  Porter reached down, felt for the lager can on the floor. ‘So what about Luke?’

  Thorne could not shift the picture of the boy’s face when they’d finally unwrapped the tape. Red from the adhesive, and wet with tears and sweat, but still that crazed expression around his eyes.

 
Crazed, just like words scrawled in rage on the wall behind a poster.

  ‘He’s alive, which I suppose is the main thing. But he won’t be able to wake up tomorrow and just get on with it, will he? That’s going to be who he is now. Getting over that kind of thing’s all about support, and there’s not much of a family for him to go back to.’ He clocked Porter’s expression. ‘What?’

  ‘I meant what about the case against him?’

  Thorne shrugged, picked up his own can. ‘Fuck knows. They’ll have to charge him . . .’

  They each took a drink. Thorne asked Porter if she was hungry, and she told him that she wished she’d eaten something before they’d started celebrating. Thorne got up and went into the kitchen to make them both toast.

  They talked easily about nothing through the open door, letting the dirt settle. Like they’d been out all night dancing, or at a party.

  Like nobody had bled to death.

  Thorne turned from monitoring the grill when he heard Porter get up and watched her walking across the room towards the stereo. He told her to put on some music, apologised for the absence of any Shania Twain. He checked on the toast, flipped over the slices of bread on the grill-pan, then felt her fingers against his shoulder.

  She was leaning into him as he turned round, one hand on his face and the other fumbling with the buttons on his shirt.

  ‘We’ll leave the toast then, shall we?’ Thorne said.

  Her tongue tasted sweet and boozy in his mouth. He bent his knees to press his groin against hers, and they staggered away from the cooker, lips pressed back hard against gums and teeth banging together.

  She leaned back against the kitchen table and he went with her. Then he felt the pull and the pop, and the dizzying rush of pain, slicing deep from thigh to ankle.

  He waited until they’d broken the kiss before he cried out.

  PART FOUR

  A PICTURE OF

  THE DAMAGE

  THIRTY

  Thorne lay perfectly still in the tight, white tunnel and tried to listen to Johnny Cash.

  The music was faint in his headphones, and all but drowned out by the noise of the MRI scanner that was slowly putting together a picture of his spine. Of the state of it. The sound, like a pneumatic drill, made it seem as if he were listening to some radical, techno remix of the Man in Black, but it was still better than the alternative. They’d told him he could choose one of their CDs for the twenty minutes or so he’d be inside the chamber, but Thorne had decided to take no chances and brought The Man Comes Around along with him. Good job he had. Even the little he could hear was preferable to some of the shit on the laminated list he’d found waiting for him in the changing room.

  Jamie Cullum, Katie Melua, Norah bloody Jones.

  He lay, quite still as he’d been instructed. Straining to hear. His hand around the rubber panic button he’d been told to squeeze if he felt uncomfortable or alarmed for any reason. If he wanted to stop the procedure.

  The rhythm of the machine, the repetitive clatter, like a buzz that had been slowed, began to fade. The noise relaxed him. He started to drift and reflect, savoured the luxury of the time, the space inside his head. Like slipping between pristine sheets after too long in a bed that was stained and stinking.

  Six days since the end of it. The end of part of it, at any rate.

  Everything now would be in the hands of judges and lawyers. All Thorne and the rest of them could do from hereon was present those people with the material, and hope they made decent decisions.

  They’d already made a couple of very brave ones.

  Luke Mullen had been charged with the murder of Peter Lardner, though there was good reason to believe that when it eventually came to trial, the jury would not convict. Thorne was happy to take the stand as a defence witness, and believed that the extenuating circumstances which would probably see Luke Mullen acquitted – along with the fact of Tony Mullen’s former position – probably accounted for why the magistrate had decided to release the boy into his father’s custody. There were strict conditions, of course: Luke would need to report to a police station at regular intervals. He would not be going back to school.

  It had been an equally brave decision to remand Maggie Mullen for trial in Holloway Prison.

  Although, in the end, the magistrate had been left with little choice. The charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice, relating to the death of Sarah Hanley, certainly warranted bail, and a surety of fifty thousand pounds was set. However, once Tony Mullen – the only person in a position to act as guarantor – had refused point-blank to do so, prison had been the court’s only option.

  Thorne remembered Mullen’s face in the sitting room as his wife had made her confession, and guessed that his decision to see her jailed had probably been easier to make than the magistrate’s.

  What had Thorne said to Porter that night?

  Not much of a family for him to go back to . . .

  And unbidden, as Thorne remained motionless, different voices started to make themselves heard. Drifting in from nowhere and demanding attention.

  A series of remarks and suggestions that began to curl around or lie across one another; to tease and illuminate.

  Insisting . . .

  I’ve always thought the sexual element of the attack was more important.

  Listen, I accept all the evidence about abusers having been abused themselves.

  Maybe it wasn’t Luke he was calling.

  We already looked at the parents.

  Until one single, big idea crowded out all the others, and the noise in Thorne’s head was louder, harder to ignore, than that coming from the machine.

  And what Lardner had said. The last thing he’d said:

  Why don’t you tell the inspector all about it? Why you can’t bear to let him touch you . . .

  Thorne pulled off the headphones and began to squeeze the rubber button.

  Jane Freestone had stood up and wandered away when she’d seen him coming. Thorne watched her walk to the fence, spit and light a cigarette. Then he sat down next to her brother on the bench.

  The same one Grant Freestone had been sitting on when Thorne and Porter had nicked him a week earlier.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Freestone said.

  ‘Calm down.’

  ‘I’m here with my sister, all right?’

  Freestone had been released from custody in Lewisham on the same day that Maggie Mullen was charged. Now, aside from the compulsory rehab clinic, and weekly visit to sign the Sex Offenders Register, his life was more or less his own again. Though Thorne would soon inform those who needed to know just how often that life seemed to involve sitting in a local park, on the bench nearest to the children’s playground.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so arsey,’ Thorne said. ‘If it wasn’t for some of us, you’d be on remand for Sarah Hanley by now. Watching your back in Belmarsh or Brixton.’

  ‘Thanks. But let’s not forget you’re the fuckers who nicked me in the first place.’

  It was a fair point.

  ‘All worked out, though,’ Thorne said.

  There was a breeze, but it was a warm afternoon. Thorne took off his jacket and laid it across his knees. Petals of cherry blossom drifted gently along the path, and an ice-cream wrapper clung to the side of the litter bin next to the bench.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard,’ Freestone said. ‘That woman, I mean: Tony Mullen’s missus. And her boyfriend.’

  ‘Did you ever meet her? Back then, when she was Margaret Stringer?’

  ‘I only ever really had dealings with the social worker, Miss Bristow.’ He turned to Thorne. ‘I was upset to hear about her. She was all right. Bloke that killed her deserved everything he got, if you ask me.’

  Thorne shifted his position slightly, and again, until the pain had subsided. ‘So it was a surprise, then, when you found out what really happened to Sarah Hanley?’

  ‘Big one, yeah.’

  ‘Surprised to hear t
hat it was Tony Mullen’s wife, and not Tony Mullen himself, right?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m guessing you thought that Mullen had set you up for it. I’m not saying you thought he did it himself, but maybe he was happy enough to put you in the frame for it. He would have been well chuffed to get you out of the way. That’s what you thought, isn’t it?’

  Freestone shrugged, worried at his goatee.

  ‘There’s no good reason not to tell me, Grant. Mullen’s in no position to do you any damage now. Or to do you any favours.’

  This was where Thorne found himself, the series of jumps he’d made. A sequence of bleak possibilities that pointed into the dark, lit the blackest corner of it . . .

  If the nature of Adrian Farrell’s crime had been, at some level, a reaction to his own abuse, might he have suffered that abuse at home?

  If the calls from the Farrell house to the Mullen house had been from father to father, rather than son to son, what would they have had to discuss?

  And what was Maggie Mullen so afraid that Peter Lardner would reveal? Or had already revealed, whispering home truths in the dusty dark of that cellar.

  Thorne might never know for sure if he’d got there by the correct route, but he felt like he was in the right place. Felt fairly certain that in not mentioning Grant Freestone, it was more than just his wife’s affair that Tony Mullen had been trying to cover up.

  Only Freestone could tell him for sure.

  ‘You don’t look like someone who fancies kids to me,’ Thorne said.

  Freestone turned, his lips whitening across his teeth.

  ‘You don’t. That’s just a fact. I’ve no more idea what someone who’s into kids looks like than anybody else.’ He nodded towards two old men, deep in conversation a couple of benches along, then at a younger man jogging towards them alongside a young woman. ‘They don’t look like paedophiles . . . He doesn’t.’ Thorne pointed at a skinny man, looking the other way while his dog defecated on the grass verge. ‘Now, see, he does, and what’s the betting I’m way off the mark?’

  ‘What am I supposed to say?’