Buried

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Something else you can fit him up for?’

  ‘You think your brother was fitted up for Sarah Hanley’s murder?’ Porter asked.

  Freestone shook her head, smirked like Thorne and Porter were as thick as pig-shit. She was somewhere in her early thirties, tall and large-breasted, with dark hair scraped back from her face and tied up. Thorne might almost have found her sexy in a hard-faced, brittle kind of way. If she were wearing a different dressing-gown perhaps, and he hadn’t been laid in twenty years.

  ‘Are you saying that a police officer, or officers, made your brother the prime suspect because they couldn’t find anyone else?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything.’

  ‘Or that they were responsible for the murder in the first place?’

  She took a crumpled tissue from her dressing-gown pocket, used one corner to dab at the inside of a nostril. ‘There was the odd copper who wouldn’t have been too gutted if Grant got sent down again.’ She stuffed the tissue back. ‘Put it that way.’

  Thorne resisted looking across at Porter and sensed that she was doing likewise. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy naming this “odd copper”,’ he said.

  She didn’t.

  Thorne and Porter were standing, but when they’d first come into the living room Freestone had dropped into an armchair and turned towards the large, flat-screen TV in one corner. She’d switched it on, then muted the volume, and spent much of the conversation staring at the screen.

  ‘Why did he run, Jane, if he didn’t kill Sarah?’

  It was an obscure cable channel. Every time Thorne looked, someone was being shown around a house.

  ‘Because he knew he was in the frame, and he didn’t want to go back to prison, did he? Even though this was an unrelated offence, they had him marked down inside as someone who messes with kids.’

  ‘Marked down?’ Thorne said. ‘Nobody planted those children in his garage.’

  Freestone ignored the dig, studied the TV as though she could read lips.

  ‘Don’t you think he would have been better off staying put,’ Porter said, ‘if he really didn’t do it?’

  ‘Stop fucking saying, “if”.’ She turned suddenly, looking about ready to punch someone’s lights out. ‘Grant was with me when his girlfriend was killed. We were in the park with my kids.’ She pointed back towards the corridor. ‘Go and fucking-well ask them.’

  The woman could easily make such an invitation, knowing it would never be accepted. Her eldest child was eight years old. Whatever they might say if asked now, neither he nor his little brother could be trusted to remember what had happened back when neither of them had been old enough to say much of anything.

  Porter held up a hand, left a beat before trying again. ‘Wouldn’t he have been better off trying to prove he was innocent?’

  The look Freestone gave Porter before she turned back to the TV made it clear that now she knew they were both stupid.

  ‘Does Grant think he was stitched up?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Have a guess.’

  ‘Is that what he said at the time? Did you see him before he disappeared?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him in five years.’

  ‘Nobody’s suggesting that he’s hiding under the bed, but the two of you must have been in touch, surely?’

  ‘Must we?’

  Thorne took a couple of steps towards the armchair. ‘He’s phoned you, written you letters, something. Is it what he still thinks?’

  Freestone pushed herself up, waited for Thorne to move out of the way so she could get past. ‘I’m going for a piss. Give you two a chance to have a good old nosy while I’m gone.’ She pointed to a door. ‘My bed’s through there, in case you do want to check underneath…’

  As soon as she had left, as soon as they’d heard the lock slide across on the bathroom door, Thorne and Porter did as Freestone had suggested. They moved quickly, and in virtual silence around the room, drew each other’s attention to items of interest with a nod or a whisper. There were photographs on a low, glass table to the side of the TV: Jane Freestone and a man Thorne recognised as her brother, wearing smiles they’d been holding for a few seconds too long; a holiday snap of a well-built man with ginger hair and moustache sitting on a balcony in shirt and shorts, posing with his pint; Freestone’s kids in a playground, running towards the camera. Porter looked at the magazines on a box below the window: Heat, Auto Trader, Nuts. Thorne flicked quickly through the utility bills, fastened together with a bulldog clip next to the midi-system. He looked for any overseas numbers on the BT calls list and noted that the Sky subscription was for the complete films and sports package. He moved away to study the spines on the row of CDs when he heard the toilet flush.

  When Freestone returned, she walked straight back to the armchair and sank into it as though there were nobody else in the room.

  Porter nodded towards the photograph of the man with the beer. ‘Is that the kids’ dad?’

  The laugh was short and bitter. ‘He is now. Makes a damn sight better job of it than the real one ever did, that’s for sure.’

  Thorne wandered across and leaned down to look at the photo again. ‘He lives here, does he?’

  ‘Most of the time.’ She sucked her teeth, answered like it was the question she’d been expecting. ‘Which is why we’ve got Sky Sports and so many heavy-metal CDs.’ She looked at Thorne, her eyes wide with mock concern. ‘In case you were wondering.’

  Thorne was wondering how many times this woman had had police officers in her house. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Arsenal are away at Manchester United,’ she said. ‘Him and his mates went up on the train last night.’

  Thorne looked closer and recognised the Gunners crest on the man’s polo shirt.

  ‘You going to get married?’ Porter asked.

  ‘What’s the point? It’s good for fuck-all, except making it slightly easier for the CSA to catch up with them when they leave.’

  In his head, Thorne fashioned a smartarse remark about how nice it was to see romance alive and well. He kept it to himself, thought instead about how vulnerable a marriage was; about those less-than-sturdy emotions with their in-built expiry dates. A marriage could survive if love became something else – companionship, perhaps – but if hate got its foot in the door, there would only ever be one outcome.

  He thought about Maggie and Tony Mullen.

  Hate did not appear overnight. It seeded itself. It sprouted and climbed from within the dark, damp subtleties of blame and guilt. Thorne could conceive of no better condition for such a twisted flowering than the loss of a child.

  Thorne’s eyes shifted back to Jane Freestone.

  She was staring like she’d walked him in on the bottom of her shoe. ‘What exactly is this “entirely different matter” you were talking about, then?’ She was turning her head before she’d finished the question, her attention stolen by the sound of a child crying along the corridor.

  ‘Bollocks,’ she said.

  Porter joined her as she reached the door. ‘Can I use the toilet?’

  ‘Why don’t you just make yourself some fucking breakfast?’ Freestone said, walking out ahead of her.

  Left alone in the room, Thorne sat down on the sofa, deciding that as he got older and more experienced, he was becoming worse at reading people; at getting so much as an idea of what they were thinking. He could be close enough to see his own reflection in someone’s eyes and still not be able to tell if they were sincere or running rings around him. There were days when he’d have the Pope down as a serial killer and Jeffrey Archer as an honest man…

  He looked at the TV, saw more people being shown around more beautifully designed interiors. With the sound down, he tried to work out if the people liked the houses or not just from the expressions on their faces.

  ‘I’d have to say Grant Freestone could be capable of almost anything.’

  Holland, Heeney and Warren were alone again in the kitchen. Danny, the boy who had been so
upset, had gone back into the living room to apologise to the rest of the group for his stinking thinking; to get back ‘on the programme’. Warren had told him he should think a little more about what he wanted. That he should count himself lucky he wouldn’t be spending the rest of the day with a bog seat for a necklace.

  ‘I’d better qualify that,’ Warren added. ‘If he’s still doing drugs, he’d be capable of anything.’

  ‘You think he might be?’ Holland asked.

  ‘Who knows? He had a problem when he came out of prison, and I doubt it had completely gone away by the time his girlfriend was killed.’

  It was an interesting choice of phrase. ‘So maybe he was high when he attacked her?’

  ‘I’m not going to speculate about that. Can’t see the point. Make no mistake, though, even if Grant had been close to getting clean, that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s going to dirty you right back up again.’

  Holland remembered when Warren himself had started taking drugs. Could guilt about Sarah Hanley’s death have been the trigger for his addiction? ‘You think?’ he said.

  It didn’t receive much of a reaction, but enough to let Holland see the question had hit home. Warren turned to the sink and began to wash up the dirty mugs. ‘You asked me if I thought Freestone was capable of kidnapping someone and I’m trying to be straight with you. If you get fucked up enough, you’ll do whatever you have to.’

  Holland nodded, waited for him to continue. He wondered, in this instance, if ‘whatever’ might include murder.

  ‘There’s a point you reach when you don’t think about what you’re doing. You think you’re being clever when in fact you’re doing something really fucking stupid. You’re just focused on getting the money to buy what you need.’

  Warren had been told no more than he needed to know. When Holland had begun talking about a kidnapping, the counsellor had made the natural assumption about the motive. He didn’t know that, for all his speculation about what a junkie might do if he was desperate enough, the person holding Luke Mullen had yet to make any ransom demand. Why was still as much of a mystery as who, but it was starting to look like money had bugger-all to do with it.

  All the same, the drug angle was interesting in at least one respect. ‘Does the name Conrad Allen mean anything, Neil?’

  Warren turned from the sink. Shook his head.

  ‘What about Amanda Tickell?’

  ‘Who?’ Warren reached for a tea-towel, spoke again before Holland had finished repeating the name. ‘I’m sorry, but there’s really no point to this. I don’t think you’re asking if I play bridge with any of these people, and I can’t discuss anyone who I may or may not know professionally.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ It was the first thing Heeney had said for a long while.

  ‘Talking of which, I should get myself into the living room and make sure nothing kicks off.’ He took a step away from the sink, the shift in his position leaving the sun shining straight into Holland’s face. The cat was back on the window sill.

  Holland narrowed his eyes against the glare. ‘Is Freestone clever enough for this? I mean, I’m taking on board everything you’ve said: the desperation or whatever. But is he actually smart enough to pull off something like this?’

  Warren thought about that one. ‘Well, there’s smart enough to get into Mensa, and there’s smart enough not to get caught. They’re very different things.’

  ‘He might be both, of course.’

  ‘He’s no more than averagely bright in any conventional sense, but he’s developed a few useful tricks. It’s not so much clever as cunning.’

  ‘Streetwise.’

  ‘More than that,’ Warren said. ‘He knows how to get by, but to do the things he’s done you also need to fool people for a while. What put him in prison in the first place, what he is… You don’t get away with that for long unless you can convince the rest of the world you’re something you’re not. You learn to pretend, and you get so good at it that it becomes second nature. Once you throw an addiction into that mix, something you need to keep secret from those around you, you end up being someone who spends most of their life hiding who they really are.’ He chewed at a nail, tore, and ground it between his teeth. ‘Yeah… I think he’s smart enough.’

  Holland wasn’t any more convinced than anyone else that Grant Freestone was their man, but he’d been given a job to do. He reckoned that as far as Neil Warren went, he’d about done it. He glanced at the wall, saw that it was someone called Eric’s turn to cook dinner that evening and that Andrew was down to clean the bathroom. He looked at the poem below the calendar. It was still mawkish – and Holland was strictly a wedding, funeral and Lottery man when it came to God – but he couldn’t help but hope that, wherever Luke Mullen was, he was leaving a single set of footprints.

  They were still waiting for Porter.

  The child who had been so upset – Thorne didn’t know if it was Billy, or even if Billy was the elder – was now lying quietly in the armchair with his head on his mother’s chest. The boy’s face was expressionless as much as peaceful, but his eyes were wide, and fixed on the man standing by the window. If Thorne were letting his imagination run loose, he might have thought that the child had been taught to be suspicious of policemen nice and early. Or perhaps it was just men…

  Freestone stroked her child’s head. ‘I don’t appreciate your coming in here, using this place as a shit-house.’

  Thorne glanced at the door. ‘I’m sure she’ll be out in a minute.’

  ‘Your lot always does though, one way or another. Maybe she’d like to wipe her skinny arse on the curtains. Or some of my kids’ clothes.’

  ‘Now you’re just being stupid,’ Thorne said.

  ‘It’s about respect.’

  Along the corridor, the toilet flushed.

  ‘It’s about you messing us around in the past: talking shit and lying to save your brother.’

  ‘I didn’t lie.’

  ‘Who do you think took those kids, Jane? Did they tie each other up?’

  ‘I didn’t lie about Sarah Hanley. We were in the park.’ She moved beneath her son, shifting his head from one side of her chest to the other. ‘It was the last time he saw my kids.’

  When Porter walked briskly into the room, there was a look on her face Thorne couldn’t read. But something was different. She spoke to the back of Freestone’s head. ‘We should probably get out of your way,’ she said.

  ‘Nobody’s arguing.’

  ‘Sorry we disturbed your Saturday.’

  ‘I still don’t know what the fuck you wanted.’

  Thorne looked at Porter, trying to work out what she was doing. He caught her eye for a second, but it told him nothing.

  ‘Look, I’ll be honest with you,’ Porter said. ‘You probably wanted us to be here about as much as we did, but the visit was actioned, so here we are. Because we do what we’re told. Some idiot of a DCI with a tiny dick and an even smaller imagination thought this would be a good idea. Picked your brother’s name out of thin air, as far as I can make out.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ Freestone said. ‘This is something to do with kids, right?’

  ‘It’s sod all to do with anything, if you ask me,’ Porter said. ‘It’s about coppers making decisions based purely on what comes up on a computer screen, and all of us getting the shitty end of the stick. It’s a waste of time, pure and simple.’

  ‘If this is an apology, it’s nice to hear. But you can still stick it.’

  ‘I’ll pass that on to our DCI.’ Porter looked at Thorne, who did what he thought she would want, and smiled conspiratorially. ‘Listen, just treat this as if it’s the routine visit that Hoolihan’s lot never got round to, OK?’

  ‘Makes no bloody difference.’

  ‘So, for the record Miss Freestone, just so I can tick a box to say I asked, have you seen your brother since the last time you were interviewed by the police?’

  She closed her eyes, ru
bbed her child’s back. ‘I wish I had. More than anything, I wish I had. I’ve got no fucking idea if Grant’s alive or dead.’

  Thorne and Porter drove away without saying a word. At the end of the street, Thorne took a left, cut up a motorbike and pulled hard into a bus stop.

  Porter just looked at him, enjoying it.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’ Thorne asked. ‘I’ve no bloody idea what I was playing along with in there. What the fuck was all this “we’re sorry for wasting your time” shit? “DCIs with tiny dicks…”’

  ‘I wanted her to think she had nothing to worry about. That she wouldn’t be seeing us again. I don’t want her warning her brother.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s a fucking liar. A good one.’

  ‘Was this something in the bathroom? Don’t tell me there was a floater in there with Grant Freestone’s name on it?’

  ‘I found stubble,’ she said.

  Thorne tried and failed not to sound patronising. ‘Right. That’ll be her boyfriend’s…’

  ‘Dark stubble. She’d gone in and done her best to clean up, but I found it under the rim.’

  ‘Why can’t it be hers?’

  Porter shook her head.

  ‘She’s got dark hair. Women shave their legs, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Porter said. ‘But not in the sink.’

  Thorne stared ahead through the windscreen, taking in what Porter was saying, considering the implications. ‘Christ, do you think he was in there?’

  ‘No. I sneaked out of the toilet and checked all the bedrooms.’

  ‘He may not have stayed there last night, or for any number of nights. That stubble might have been there for a while.’

  Porter acknowledged the very real possibility, but there were others she found far more attractive. ‘Or we might have just missed him. He could have gone out early for milk, to get a paper…’

  ‘We were there almost an hour,’ Thorne said. ‘There are shops in the next street.’