Buried

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Beautifully put,’ Thorne said. ‘And I’m not arguing.’

  Porter rose to her feet. ‘Are you sure, Guv?’ But she was already reaching for her bag.

  ‘I’ll need you back here in seven… and rested. So I don’t really want to see anyone getting nightcaps at the Oak.’

  Thorne put on his leather jacket. ‘See anyone? You planning to go over there later then?’

  ‘I’m planning to get home, eventually.’ Brigstocke dropped into the seat that Porter had vacated. ‘Not that there’s much point.’

  ‘When did you last see your kids?’ Porter asked.

  Brigstocke stared up at her in mock amazement. ‘I’ve got kids?’

  In the lobby, Thorne nodded to the uniform behind the screen, who nodded sheepishly in return and went back to being stumped by the Sun’s crossword.

  ‘How are you getting home?’ he asked Porter.

  ‘I should just make the last train from Colindale,’ she said. ‘Be there in an hour, with a bit of luck. Cab, otherwise.’

  Thorne realised he still didn’t know where Porter lived. ‘Where have you got to get back to?’

  ‘Pimlico.’

  ‘I’ll drop you at the tube.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Thorne waited until they were street-side of the automatic door. ‘Listen, I’ve got a sofa bed. You’re more than welcome…’

  ‘Right.’

  They were walking towards the car. Thorne didn’t want to turn and stare, and in the shadow between street lamps it was impossible to see at a glance how Porter was reacting. ‘I’m just thinking, you know, it’s an hour back to your place and I’m only in Kentish Town, so it might make sense. Like I say, it’s just a thought, but you’d probably get an hour or so’s more sleep.’

  Though Thorne couldn’t see her face clearly, there was no mistaking the mischief in Porter’s voice. ‘Another hour in bed sounds good.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘OK…’

  ‘Like I say, I’m only twenty minutes away. And, if you ask me, you’d be lucky to make Pimlico in an hour. So I reckon at least an extra hour’s sleep.’

  ‘You’re not exactly making it sound like a lot of fun,’ she said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Maggie had always been the one to handle difficult questions. She had been the one who had dropped whatever she was doing when the homework emergencies had arisen. When Luke and Juliet had been younger, of course, her husband had simply not been around much, but even after he’d retired that sort of thing had come down to her. It wasn’t about him not being clever enough. In most ways that seemed to matter, he was a lot brighter than she was, but aside from the maths – which Tony had always had an aptitude for – the responsibility for coming up with the right answer had usually rested with her. She knew the reigns of each Tudor monarch, could list symbols and atomic numbers for most chemical elements, and had drawn and labelled U- and V-shaped river valleys on two separate occasions.

  She answered the other questions as well; the trickier sort. The ‘Where do we come from?’ and ‘What happens when we die?’ and ‘Why do boys and girls have different parts?’ questions.

  But Maggie Mullen had never been asked such a difficult question before: ‘Is Luke going to be all right, Mum?’

  She wasn’t sure what destroyed her the most: not knowing the answer or not being able to do what she imagined most other people would do in the same situation, and lie about it to protect her daughter.

  ‘I don’t know, pigeon.’

  It wasn’t as though Maggie had any problem with lies in general. She told them when they needed telling. But she knew that Juliet would resent any clumsy effort to treat her like a child; to shield her from the painful reality of what was happening. It was hard, though, sometimes, knowing the right way to behave. Juliet was fourteen going on twenty-one, in the same way that she’d been nine going on fourteen. She’d been advising Maggie on how to dress, and what to eat, and which of her friends were worth a damn, for years, so there seemed little point in treating her as anything other than an adult now.

  When the situation was so hideously grown up…

  And yet, there was something in Juliet’s eyes, and around her plump, wet bottom lip, that made Maggie think of a doll her daughter used to cling to; that made her want to hold on to Juliet and squeeze for all she was worth. There was something that told Maggie how much Juliet needed to be held.

  ‘Where’s Dad, Mum?’

  ‘He went out, pigeon. I don’t know when he’ll be back.’

  Or perhaps Maggie was the one who needed to be held; who looked for comfort while giving it to her daughter when she couldn’t find it elsewhere. She hated herself for the sudden, malicious thought; for judging him. She knew it was unwarranted, implying a lack of concern for her that should have been forgivable, considering.

  She could see in every half look, in every glimpse of him moving across a doorway, how crushed he was. How shrunken. If he was focusing every ounce of love he had inside him to wherever Luke might be, then he could hardly be blamed for that, could he?

  And whatever else he was, whatever could be held against him if you were taking stock… Jesus Christ Almighty, she was hardly one to talk.

  ‘Mum, if Luke is dead-’

  ‘Juliet! ’

  ‘Please, Mum, listen. I’ve been thinking about this. If he is, we’ll only lose the least important part of him. There’s so much of Luke that’s still here in the house. Can’t you feel it?’

  ‘He’s alive, love…’

  ‘It’s fine, honestly. I’m not being Goddy or anything – you know I can’t be doing with any of that – but I really believe this. And it really helps. It’ll be sad, of course it will, and we’ll always miss him, and things will remind us that he was here. Like when we eat certain meals he loved or he couldn’t stand, or we hear a piece of music or whatever, but we’ll always have the important stuff. That won’t go anywhere, I promise.’

  In the days since Luke had been taken, Maggie had mastered the art of crying without making a sound. All she had to do was turn her head away, walk to the window, lift a newspaper. And though the tears came, the racking sobs and the gasps for breath were held inside, clutched tight behind her breastbone.

  She did it because it wasn’t necessary for anyone else to see. Because it wouldn’t help.

  Now, she wept in secret to be strong for the daughter who was trying to be strong for her. She listened to Juliet’s words while tears that her daughter couldn’t see ran under her chin and slipped below the collar of her nightdress. Lying on the sofa, her daughter’s long legs stretched out across her own, watching something or other on TV, and thinking about her boy’s smell and the way his hair was at the back of his neck. About the hole that had opened up at the centre of her, red and raw as a butcher’s window.

  Finding no comfort at all in the knowledge that Juliet was just about old enough, and independent enough, to cope with losing a brother and a mother.

  The thought of leaving her was almost unbearable. But if anything had happened to Luke, the thought of not rushing to catch up with her firstborn was worse.

  There was next to no traffic as they drove south towards Kentish Town, the empty roads being the only plus side to the stupidly early mornings and shitty late nights.

  ‘Have you got any music?’ Porter asked.

  Thorne reached towards the button, began searching through the six CDs that were stored on the multi-changer he’d mounted in the BMW’s boot.

  ‘Any of that twangy-guitar country shit?’

  Thorne looked over, in little doubt as to who she’d been talking to. He matched her smug grin with a couldn’t-careless one of his own. ‘Holland’s a dead man. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I like some country stuff, actually: Garth Brooks, Shania Twain…’

  Thorne grimaced, then tried to find one CD in particular. ‘Right, since you took the piss, I’m not going to make things easy for you.’

&nb
sp; ‘It wasn’t Holland, by the way,’ Porter said.

  ‘So who was it?’

  The music started: a delicate, plaintive guitar picked out below the mournful breaths of an accordion. Then the voice…

  ‘What’s this?’ Porter asked after a minute or so.

  ‘Hank Williams. Sort of…’

  Porter looked confused, pained even. ‘Is he not going to sing?’

  As he got up to sixty between speed cameras, Thorne explained that Williams had made a series of records throughout his career under a pseudonym. As ‘Luke The Drifter’, he’d written and recorded a number of ‘narrations’ – spoken-word pieces over a simple musical background. Some were straightforward talking blues, but others sounded closer to prayers or spoken hymns. These moralistic recitations – deemed far too uncommercial for the jukeboxes and radio shows that were the great man’s bread and butter – were bleak but compassionate, a long way from the hard-drinking renegade that country music fans had come to worship.

  ‘It’s bloody depressing,’ Porter said.

  ‘Serves you right.’ Thorne put his foot down, made it safely through an amber light and swung left towards Belsize Park. ‘Be nice to have an alter ego, though,’ he said. ‘Don’t you reckon? Some other side of your personality that nobody knew was really you. That you could blame shit on and send along to do the stuff you didn’t fancy.’

  Porter agreed it sounded like a nice idea. ‘What would yours be?’ she asked.

  Thorne considered it for a minute, then smiled. ‘It’d be great to tell Trevor Jesmond he was giving the wrong man a bollocking. “Sorry, sir, I think you’re confusing me with Kevin the Fuck-up. Or perhaps you mean Roger the Couldn’t-give-a-toss.” What about you?’

  Porter thought too, but said she couldn’t think of one, so they drove on in silence listening to ‘Men with Broken Hearts’, which Williams had proudly described as the ‘awfulest, morbidest song you ever heard in your life’.

  Thorne slowed a little as they approached the flat. Drew Porter’s attention to shops and local landmarks; to pubs of interest. On Kentish Town Road he took care to point out the Bengal Lancer. ‘Best Indian restaurant in London,’ he said. ‘You like Indian food?’

  Porter nodded. ‘I’m not sure they’ll deliver to Pimlico, though.’

  ‘I could take you.’ Thorne glanced across, his eyes meeting Porter’s for half a second on their way to the far-side wing-mirror. ‘They’d look after us,’ he said.

  When they reached the flat, Thorne walked quickly inside, keeping a few feet ahead of Porter and tidying as he went. In the hall, he nudged discarded shoes towards the skirting board with the outside of his foot, straightened the rug, hung up a jacket that had been tossed across the back of a chair. Porter moved past him as he stopped to add the day’s post to the pile on the table. When he caught up with her in the living room, she was leaning down to make a fuss of the cat, pretending not to look at the note that had been left on the sofa.

  Thorne picked up the scrap of paper and read:

  Don’t worry, I was talking shit last night. I’d had a drink, and I was tired.

  Feeling much better now.

  I’ve eaten the last of your bread. Sorry…

  ‘Who’s your friend?’ Porter asked.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s a bloke.’

  Porter raised an eyebrow. ‘Now, that is even more interesting than the whole country music thing.’

  ‘It’s Phil Hendricks.’

  ‘Right.’ She stretched the word out. Left just enough of a pause. ‘Hendricks is gay, isn’t he?’

  Thorne smirked, enjoying the wind-up, relishing the attention. He nodded towards the sofa. Elvis was curling up, making herself comfortable again. ‘That’s the sofa-bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it out later.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  He couldn’t help but mirror her grin. ‘Why do I feel like I’m suddenly in a remake of Carry on Constable? Isn’t this where you tell me that anything I say will be taken down, and I say, “knickers”?’

  She laughed. ‘Is there anything to drink?’

  Thorne tried to look stern. ‘Seven hours until we’re on again, remember. And rested.’

  ‘One won’t hurt.’ She sat down on the sofa. ‘Can’t Roger Couldn’t-give-a-toss go and get us a drink?’

  Roger walked into the kitchen and squatted down in front of the fridge. He stared at its meagre contents, then realised that, as far as this woman he’d brought back to his flat went, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, or where things were heading, but he was loving every minute of it. He shouted back into the living room: ‘Not much choice, I’m afraid. It’s cheap lager or cheap lager.’

  ‘Either’s fine,’ Porter said.

  The 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift could be good news or bad news, depending on how hard you fancied working; and, more importantly, what night of the week it was. Early in the week, it could be fairly quiet. But round Shepherd’s Bush, Acton, Hammersmith – anywhere come to that – things tended to get a bit livelier once people smelled the weekend coming.

  PC Dean Fothergill knew that now and again, when there were just the two of you, out and about in a panda, you could hide if you felt like it. For a while, anyway. You could try to stretch your hour’s meal break into a couple if you’d not got enough sleep during the day. It was getting harder with the Airwaves, of course, but even if the powers that be knew where you were, they couldn’t see you. Not yet, at least. So some of the lads had already figured out that as long as you kept moving, you’d look busy enough. Café to kebab shop to side street; half an hour with the paper in one place and a fag break somewhere else. Only on a slow night, obviously.

  On a Saturday night, there was always something happening.

  At a quarter past one in the morning, Fothergill and WPC Pauline Caulfield were up near TV Centre when they took the call.

  ‘Some bloke’s phoned through from Glasgow, says his sister was meant to have come up this afternoon and she never got there. She’s sixty-odd, she lives alone, he can’t get hold of her on the phone, didn’t ring until now because he didn’t want to worry us, blah, blah, blah. Go and check on her when you’ve got a minute, will you, Dean? I know you and Pauline are sitting around reading the paper.’

  ‘We were dealing with that ruck outside White City tube, actually, Skip.’

  ‘I believe you; thousands wouldn’t. I’ll send everything through on the MDT.’

  As soon as the details started to come up on the screen of the car’s mobile data terminal, Caulfield swung the Astra round.

  They took it steady towards Shepherd’s Bush.

  Fothergill shook his head. ‘I bet you a fiver she forgot she was even meant to go to Glasgow,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a good listener,’ he said.

  He raised the torch and trained the beam across the cellar, then lowered it when the boy squinted and turned his face away. ‘I know that you’re scared, so you’d probably listen to anything, but I can tell when people are really hearing what you’ve got to say and when they’re not. I get a lot of that at work, and it can really wear you down. People just sitting there and letting what you say wash over them and not taking anything in. And it’s harder for you, I can see that. Of course it is. It can’t be easy listening to what I’m telling you. Just sitting there and hearing these hideous things and saying nothing.

  ‘Do you want to say something? You can, you know…

  ‘I know you maybe need time to take some of this stuff in, that’s only natural. I’ll leave you for a while to do that, but I want you to understand something first. I wouldn’t be telling you any of this if I didn’t think you could take it in. OK? If I didn’t think you were old enough and bright enough. I know all about how clever you are, all about it. So I thought about everything carefully, and decided that you would definitely be able to process this information. Make sense of it. Not that you can make sense of all of it, because there are parts – I know you know which parts I’m
talking about – that are so beyond what you and I, what ordinary people, perceive as normal that sense doesn’t really come into it.

  ‘Is that fair? Just nod if you agree with what I’m saying… Good.

  ‘As long as you don’t think I’m getting any pleasure out of this, that’s all. You know I’m not trying to torture you with it, right? I mean, what possible reason could I have to do that? I’ve hurt you enough already; I’m well aware of that. Everything you went through before, in the flat, I mean. I suppose I just want you to understand that the motivation for telling you all this is… decent.

  ‘Because you should know these things. Because not knowing would be so much worse. Because at some point you’ll come to terms with it and be far better off in the long run. Do you see?

  ‘Knowing what the ones you love are capable of is a terrible burden sometimes. But ignorance is a damn sight worse.’

  He raised himself on his haunches when he heard the sniffing and crept a little closer to the corner in which the boy was curled. ‘Don’t cry, please. I really wasn’t trying to make you cry. I’m sorry. I’ll wait until you’re a bit calmer. I’ll go now, shall I?’

  He moved back again. Waited. ‘You’ll forgive some of it, I’m sure. Not me, probably, and certainly not for all this. But some of it: those things, the less terrible things, we did for the right reasons. I know you won’t be able to see that now, that right now you just want to lash out and scream or whatever. But they were the best reasons, I swear to you.

  ‘Would you like to scream? Go on, it’s fine, if you want to. Nobody’s going to hear. That’s why I took the tape off. Honestly, I can understand if you want to. Do you want to smash something? Do you want to kick my head in? Do you just want me to fuck off?’

  He said nothing for a few minutes, then he raised the torch again and held its beam on the boy. ‘You should really think about screaming, you know. It might be healthy if you did. Get it out.’