Thorne was interested to note that, as far as he could see, Porter’s Airwave had not been switched on when she’d dropped it into her bag.
The team’s DCI, a quietly spoken Geordie who needed to lose a few pounds, appeared at Porter’s shoulder, brandishing a sheaf of papers and telling her that he needed five minutes with her before she disappeared. Though Barry Hignett had met Thorne and Holland briefly first thing, he took the chance to welcome them again, explaining that there was bugger-all room for niceties on the teeth of a case such as this one.
Hignett walked Porter to a nearby desk and spread out the papers in front of her. Holland watched for a minute, then turned around, his back to them, and spoke low to Thorne: ‘Did you want to go to the school?’
Thorne looked at him as though he were speaking Chinese. ‘What?’
‘With Porter, I mean.’ He lowered his voice further still. ‘Only I thought you looked a bit pissed off before, when I said that I’d go.’
‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ Thorne said.
When Porter had finished with Hignett, she arranged to meet Holland later at the school. Then Thorne took the stairs with her down to ground level.
‘They’re being fairly nice to me.’ Thorne said it quietly, nodding as an officer he’d spoken to once or twice moved past him, coming up. ‘That’s what Luke said on the tape.’ It had been a dramatic moment when the figure with the syringe had emerged from behind the camera. The picture had remained unsteady, the camera clearly handheld rather than mounted on a tripod. Whatever Luke had said or not said, that was when it had become clear that he was being held by more than one person. That they were looking at a conspiracy to kidnap. ‘Two of them, d’you reckon? Or more?’
‘If it’s just two, I’d put money on the other one being the woman Luke was seen with.’
‘Is that common? A man and a woman working as a team?’
‘I’ve come across it a few times,’ Porter said. ‘For obvious reasons, the woman’s most often the one involved in the abduction itself. The trust figure.’
‘Right.’
For obvious reasons.
Thorne wondered why, in the light of so many highprofile cases, those reasons remained obvious, but clearly they did. Hindley was always more hated than Brady. Maxine Carr, despite being found not guilty of even knowing that her boyfriend had murdered two young girls, was, if anything, the more vilified of the two.
‘A couple of the kids reckoned they’d spotted them together before, didn’t they?’ Thorne said. ‘Luke and this woman. She obviously took her time to get close to him.’
‘It paid off,’ Porter said. ‘Talking of which, there’s still no sign of a ransom demand. No talk of anyone getting paid off.’
‘Maybe that’ll be on the next tape.’ But as they came out into the lobby on the ground floor, and moved towards the revolving doors, Thorne was still thinking about the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’. Imagining a woman getting close to her victim; smiling and touching and always attentive. Thinking that trust was nurtured, like bodies and minds; that it was abused at the same time that they were. He remembered the smile that faltered a little as the boy on the screen had done his best to crack jokes. He remembered the emptiness in the stare. He wondered if Luke Mullen would ever trust anyone again.
The drizzle hadn’t stopped all morning, but there were still plenty of people milling around outside the entrance. A couple sat eating sandwiches, perched on adjacent concrete stumps. Rows of these bollards, installed to deter car-bombers, had sprung up outside most of the city’s public buildings, and Thorne often wondered if cement companies might be secretly funding some of the terrorist groups. He shared the theory with Porter and they paused for a minute, enjoying the joke; Thorne, on his way towards the tube station at St James’s Park and Porter headed for the Yard’s underground garage.
‘How much does it bother you?’ Thorne asked. ‘That nobody’s asking the Mullens for any money. That nobody’s asking for anything.’
‘These cases are never predictable, I’ve learned that much. But yeah, it’s bloody odd.’
‘They’ve had Luke four days already.’
‘Four days, five nights. Mind you, we were worried that they hadn’t got in touch, and then they did.’
Thorne began to do up the buttons on his leather jacket. ‘Something bothers me,’ he said. ‘Something on the tape.’
‘What?’
‘I wish I could tell you. Something’s not right, though; something that he said, or maybe just the way he said it.’
‘It’ll come to you.’
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s old age, mate. That’s Alzheimer’s kicking in.’
Thorne dug down deep for a smile.
‘I’ll catch up with you later on at Arkley,’ she said. ‘See how they’re doing, OK?’
‘Right.’ He took a step backwards, half turned, on his way. ‘What do you make of Mullen?’
‘I think he needs to remember he’s not a copper any more.’
Thorne fastened the top button of his jacket and stuffed his hands into the pockets. Thinking about memory, perfect and fucked-up. Thinking that his memories of the time before he was a copper were getting pushed for space; shunted aside by less pleasant recollections. ‘You ever thought about getting out early?’ he asked.
‘Now and again. What about you?’
‘There’s times I think about it a fair bit.’
‘What sort of times?’ Porter asked.
‘When I’m awake…’
Tony Mullen reached into the fridge for the wine bottle, pulled the glass across the counter-top and poured himself a decent measure. He moved over to where his daughter was making herself a sandwich. Stroked the back of her head as he drank.
Neither had spoken since he’d come into the kitchen a few minutes before, and they continued to stand, each busy in their own way, sharing the space in silence until Juliet Mullen picked up her plate and walked out.
He listened to his daughter’s footsteps on the stairs, to the creak and click of her bedroom door, and to the music which escaped in the few seconds between those final two sounds. He strained to hear the murmur of Maggie’s voice, and, though he could hear nothing, he knew very well that in some room or other of the house his wife would be deep in conversation. She’d been keeping the landline clear for obvious reasons, but somewhere she’d be sitting or lying down with the mobile pressed to her ear; talking it out and talking it through to her family, her friends, anyone willing to listen and pretend they understood what was happening.
He’d spoken when he’d had to. He’d given the necessary information when it had been required of him, but aside from that, he’d said next to nothing. That had always been the way between them if ever there was trouble, if ever the family unit had been threatened in any way. He’d always be the one to go into himself, bottle things up; the one to turn the problem every which way without saying a word while others did the screaming and shouting. Luke was like that, too: never one to get hysterical. Maggie was usually the one that wore her heart on her sleeve and it was never easy to tell what was going on inside Juliet’s head.
It wasn’t very inclusive or touchy-feely, he knew that. It was old fashioned and out of step. He guessed that in some ways it might have been better if they’d all sat around and opened up, if they’d shared, but it wasn’t the way he or his family operated, and you couldn’t help the way you were.
He moved his fingers back and forth across the smooth, cold surface of the counter-top and thought about DI Tom Thorne. The cheeky bastard had given him a hard time the day before, badgered him, even though only one person in that room had made DCI, and only one was ever likely to. He was grateful to Jesmond for laying on the extra men, but Thorne was one he’d have to watch. That type of copper – the ‘bull in a china shop’ type – didn’t solve cases like this one. His son would be freed by doing what was simple and sound, and not by refusing to accept what you’d been told and bang
ing on about how many names were on a fucking list.
Mullen emptied his glass and thought about the name he hadn’t written down. He told himself that it was unimportant; that it was acceptable within the scheme of things; that he’d done it for the right reason. A silly reason perhaps, but one worth the very smallest of lies.
He would have loved to forget the man to whom that name belonged, but it would never slip his mind. It was a name with unhappy connotations, after all. But it was a name – and this was all that really counted – that he knew damn well had nothing to do with his son’s disappearance. With who was holding Luke, or where, or what they wanted. So why did it matter, and what harm could come from leaving one name out of it?
He listened for a minute or two more, then moved back to the fridge.
What harm?
AMANDA
It was a bag. Just a plastic bag, that had done all the damage; was still doing it if assorted shrinks and social workers knew what they were talking about.
Probably one of those really cheap, stripy ones that you picked up at late-night supermarkets and shitty corner shops. The driver of the second car had never gone so far as to describe the bag in court, but that was how she always imagined it. Fluttering across the street and up on to the windscreen, held there by the wind, blinding the driver for that crucial second or two and causing him to swerve. A shapeless piece of jetsam that made him drive into the silver Mercedes coming the other way. That floated up like smoke at the impact, and sent her daddy through the glass.
Cheap and insubstantial. Virtually weightless. Something so terrible coming from nothing…
The boy was dosed-up now and out of it, and Conrad was getting a bit of sleep in the next room. It was the middle of the day, but both their body clocks had gone haywire. The curtains were closed all the time; it could have been morning, noon or night. It didn’t really matter one way or the other. It was boring, that was all. They just had to stay where they were for as long as the whole thing took; until they knew what was happening next.
When she dwelled on what had happened to her father, which was often, she never really thought about the other driver: unsighted and screaming behind the wheel; giving his evidence in a neck-brace; limping away down the steps outside the court while her mother shouted after him. She thought instead – and she knew how irrational it was – about the person who had sold the plastic bag. About the person who had filled it with fruit, or fish, or fuck-all worth talking about, and about all the hands the bag had passed through before it was finally tossed into the gutter. She thought about the people who would never know the part they had played in her father’s death. She imagined all their faces. She gave each one a life, and a family to fill it. And in her darkest moments, of which there were many, she’d take a member of that family away, and watch the life she’d made for someone fall apart.
She walked across to the portable CD player in the corner of the bedroom, turned the music up just a little to drown out the boy’s breathing. She took what she needed from her handbag and sat back down on the floor.
They’d argued again about the usual thing, Conrad doing that low, disappointed voice he saved up for the drug conversations. He told her that she needed to keep a clear head. She pointed out that it was precisely because the situation they were in was so stressful that she needed the lift. He got angrier then, reminded her that she always needed it, and she told him that the last thing she needed was for him to be so self-righteous, and that she’d sort herself out afterwards, when they had the money.
Nodding her head to the music, she tipped out the powder; measured and scraped and cut. She rolled up the note and stared at the lines, at the flyaway grains that dotted the tabletop around their edges. Insubstantial. Virtually weightless.
Something so wonderful coming from nothing.
FIVE
Fifteen minutes from the Mullen house, in the largely affluent suburb of Stanmore, Butler’s Hall School had occupied its hundred-plus acres of lush parkland for a little under a century.
Holland read a potted history of the place, flicking through the school’s lavish prospectus as he waited in a car at the end of a mile-long driveway. Of its 250-plus pupils – most of whom were fed in from a nearby prep school in the same foundation – almost a third were boarders. Of the total number, around 40 per cent were girls, first admitted as sixth-formers in the early eighties, then into the main body of the school ten years after that.
Kenny Parsons, who had gone in search of a toilet fifteen minutes earlier, knocked on the window. Holland looked up, wound down the window.
‘It’s a fair bet that if you can afford to send your kids here, you can afford to cough up a decent ransom,’ Parsons said. ‘These kids might as well have targets on their backs.’
‘Wouldn’t be allowed,’ Holland said, lifting the brochure. ‘There’s a very strict uniform code.’
Parsons looked back towards the school. ‘There’s a very strict everything code.’
Holland got out of the car, tossed the brochure on to the back seat. He and Parsons began walking towards the school building. ‘“Falsehood dishonours me”,’ he said.
‘Come again?’
‘That’s the translation from the Latin, apparently. “Lies shame me”, or whatever. The school motto.’
Parsons nodded, vacant. ‘The lower sixth should be out in a minute,’ he said.
The end of the school day was staggered, with pupils from upper and lower years coming out at twenty-minute intervals. Porter and three colleagues, working in teams of two, were already elsewhere on the school premises, talking to children from the fourth and fifth forms in the presence of teachers or parents. As Holland and Parsons moved towards the school’s main exit, they joined another pair of SO7 officers, falling in behind them as they walked across the car park, cutting through the massed ranks of silver or black people carriers: Porsche Cayennes, Volvos and BMW X5s. One of the officers, a skinny Essex boy with bad skin, put his face close to the tinted window of a Lexus as he passed, tried to see inside. ‘What do these people do?’ he said.
Holland, Parsons and the others stopped in the school quad, loitering outside a pair of vast wooden doors, which slammed open as the first of the students began to emerge. Like all those officers working on site, the four were smartly, though informally, dressed: khakis and casual jackets; suits over polo shirts. They could easily have been teachers, or even, in one or two cases, students out of uniform.
Parsons was clearly still thinking about his colleague’s question as he watched the first wave of pupils emerge, and spoke above their chatter. ‘Well, I don’t think many of them are coppers. And I can’t see any of their kids becoming coppers, either.’
‘They do have scholarship places,’ Holland said. ‘Not everyone’s dad’s an oil billionaire or a footballer, you know.’
‘That’s a fair point,’ the Essex boy said. ‘Take Mullen for a kick-off. Unless he was seriously bent, I can’t see how he’d be rolling in it.’
Parsons said something about a DCI’s pension, about Mullen making seriously good money as a security consultant, but Holland had stopped listening. He was watching two girls, aged fifteen or so, heads together, whispering. He was thinking about Chloe. Deciding that, even though it was a long way off, he wouldn’t argue if there was so much as a chance of her getting into a place like this. That he would argue until his last breath with the idea of her ever becoming a copper.
Officers had travelled to Butler’s Hall late on the Monday – the first day the unit had become involved – and taken more statements the day after that, but it was understandable that Barry Hignett was keen to speak to everyone who might have anything to add. Understandable in that, until the people holding Luke Mullen decided to let the police or his parents know exactly what they wanted, there was little else that could usefully be done.
Pupils had been spoken to in school. They were told that Luke Mullen was still missing and that there would be police officer
s waiting to talk to them if they felt they had anything useful to report. The headmaster had been at pains to remind them that neglecting to do so would be as good as falsehood, and every bit as dishonourable. They were urged to pass on any information they had, however trivial it might seem, about the Friday afternoon when Luke had been driven away.
The Essex boy and his partner paired off, taking up a position at the other end of the quad, but neither they nor Holland and Parsons were exactly swamped by the rush of eager young informants.
Those few pupils Holland and Parsons did speak to all told just about the same story. It became clear that over the previous few days the school jungle drums had been working overtime and that it would not be easy to sort out the fact from the hearsay.
One boy assured Holland that Luke Mullen had run off with a sexy older woman. Several sixth-form girls swore blind that they’d seen Luke and the mystery woman kissing two or three days earlier. One of Luke’s classmates said that he thought Luke had a secret girlfriend; that he’d been dropping hints about going away somewhere with her. Spain, maybe, or France.
Nothing they were told took them any closer to identifying the car. It was still probably a Passat, and more likely dark blue than black, but the partial number plate had now become all but useless, with another dozen different letters and numbers passed on by those who swore they’d seen it drive away with Luke Mullen inside.
The descriptions they were given of the woman were much the same as they already had, though, again, such statements became less credible once it became clear that those giving them had been talking to each other. She was in her late twenties. She was dirty blonde. She was very skinny. ‘Tasty, though,’ one of Luke’s classmates had said. ‘Luke reckoned she was fit. Mind you, he hadn’t got much to compare her to, had he?’
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