Buried

by Mark Billingham

  He turned the torch on himself, rested his chin on the lens and thought for a while. ‘OK, maybe I’ve overestimated how much of it you’ve actually taken in. It’s a heck of a lot, I know. A lot to… absorb. Before I go, maybe I’ll just run through some of it again. I’ll try to make it simpler for you this time. Is that a good idea, do you think?

  ‘Luke…?’

  The joking had stopped the moment Caulfield had spotted the broken window. They’d already spent ten minutes knocking before Fothergill had scaled the side gate and they’d walked round to the rear of the house.

  He’d called it in while Caulfield had gone back to the car for gloves, torch and their telescopic batons.

  ‘Maybe we should just wait,’ Fothergill said.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Dean.’

  Caulfield pushed her hand through and reached round until she could release the catch on the lock. Before she had a chance to open the door, a cat bolted past her and flung itself through a cat-flap and inside.

  ‘Jesus…’

  She stepped into a darkened kitchen and shouted into the house. Fothergill shouted louder. Then they stood still and waited. If there was anyone in the house who shouldn’t have been there, chances were that they’d hear some kind of movement, even if it was someone trying to conceal themself. Caulfield felt for a light switch, found it, and the two of them moved further into the room. There were dishes stacked neatly on a draining board. The cat roamed around near an empty bowl on the floor and rubbed its head against cupboard doors.

  Caulfield bent down. ‘Shush, it’s OK.’

  ‘You talking to me or the cat?’ Fothergill managed the smile, but his voice was higher than normal.

  They walked out of the kitchen and into a narrow hallway with the front door at the far end. Streetlight filtered through small stained-glass panels, and stairs rose up from one side. There were two doors off to the right. They opened one each, turned on the lights in a small sitting room and a dining room.

  ‘Dean?’

  Fothergill put his head round the door and followed Caulfield’s gaze. The dining table had been set for breakfast: an empty glass, spoon and napkin; a bowl already filled with cereal and covered in cling film.

  ‘Come on…’

  There were watercolours on the wall running up the stairs, and framed certificates, and photographs on a small table at the top, arranged around a large basket filled with pot pourri. Somewhere among the scents of vanilla and orange, though, there was a faint odour of something else. Something sharp and sad.

  They turned on more lights, looked into a bathroom and a spare bedroom, then walked slowly towards the closed door of the only room that was left.

  ‘Have you ever seen a body, Dean?’ Caulfield asked.

  ‘Come on, she might be anywhere. She might have gone away without telling anyone-’

  ‘Dean?’

  Fothergill shook his head. Took off his hat and held a sleeve to his forehead.

  ‘It’s fine, OK? Just stay calm, and don’t touch anything.’

  The smell was stronger when they opened the door. Each could taste it on the breath they sucked in before Caulfield turned on the light.

  ‘Oh, fuck…’

  She’d kicked the duvet on to the floor, and her nightdress had ridden up above her pale, hairless calves. One arm was thrown out to the side, hanging over the edge of the bed, while the other was tight against her side, a handful of the sheet clutched between thin fingers.

  A lamp had been knocked from the bedside table. A paperback romance lay next to it on the carpet.

  ‘OK, Dean?’

  Fothergill had turned away and was looking across to where more photographs were arranged on a dressing table. The same woman was posing in many of them: a young girl’s hair gathered up in a black beehive; changing style and colour as the photos did; turning grey finally, and growing thin as the woman began to fade and shrink. Fothergill guessed the face was the same that lay twisted beneath the pillow a few feet away from him.

  The cat had followed them upstairs. Caulfield reached down as it moved past her, but she was too late to stop it jumping on to the mattress, where it immediately began kneading at the dead woman’s leg and purring loudly.

  ‘Shit…’

  Fothergill turned back to the woman on the bed. His face was the same colour as the stained white sheet beneath her.

  ‘My mother was in a residential place for her last couple of months,’ he said. ‘It smelled like this.’ He reached out a hand towards the bedstead, stopped, and nodded understanding when Caulfield repeated her warning not to touch. ‘It smells like my mum’s room.’

  There had been a woman Thorne had slept with once, the year before, but he was still trying, for all manner of reasons, to forget that particular episode. Aside from her, Hendricks and the occasional plumber, he reckoned it had been quite long enough since he’d stood waiting for someone to come out of his bathroom.

  He was sore, having strained his back fifteen minutes earlier, trying to assemble the sofa-bed. Porter had laughed when he’d sworn and cried out, then got up to lend a hand when she’d seen how much pain he was in.

  ‘You should get that seen to,’ she’d said. ‘At least find out what’s wrong.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Have you got health insurance?’

  ‘No, but there’s some money. From the sale of my dad’s house, you know?’ The money he’d not known what to do with; that he’d hated. He’d given some to Aunt Eileen, and a couple of hundred to Victor, but even after he’d handed the taxman his chunk, there was still plenty left. Maybe, a year on, he should spend it on something. Find some use for it that the old man would have approved of.

  ‘Shame you didn’t bugger up your back at work,’ Porter had said. They’d lifted the metal bar beneath the cushions, pulled out the mattress and folded down the legs. ‘Then the Job would have to cough up for it.’

  She’d been close enough for Thorne to smell the beer on her. The one drink that had become a couple each.

  They’d sat around and bitched about people at work, about the job in general. They’d given thumbnail sketches of parents and past relationships. Thorne had told her about the previous day, when he’d been thinking about bad marriages, and Maggie and Tony Mullen had sprung to mind. He’d been shocked that, for the first time he could remember, his own marriage hadn’t been the first one he’d thought of.

  Porter told him that was probably a good sign.

  Now, standing outside the bathroom, he realised that he’d said far more about almost everything than she had. That – aside from the facts that she was funny and good at her job, and that he fancied the arse off her – he didn’t know a great deal about Louise Porter.

  Thorne could hear her through the cheap, thin door, making an odd humming noise as she brushed her teeth, and he decided he knew enough.

  When she came out of the bathroom, she was carrying her own clothes in a bundle under one arm and wearing nothing but knickers under one of Thorne’s T-shirts. She moved past him, reddening slightly, and began laying her blouse and skirt on the chair nearest the sofa-bed. ‘I’ll buy you a new toothbrush.’

  ‘I should worry about explaining to people at work why you’re wearing the same clothes two days running.’

  ‘They’re used to it,’ she said. ‘I’m such a slag.’

  Thorne laughed, then coughed, then winced at the pain. Porter walked across and, without saying anything, began to untuck Thorne’s shirt at the back.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  She placed the flat of her hand against his back, low down, just above his belt, and began to rub. ‘There?’

  ‘Close enough,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Is that helping?’

  ‘Oh yes…’

  Then the phone rang.

  He turned round and she removed her hand, and the look between them quickly became serious, with the phone demanding to be answered and both knowing very well it was unlikely to be a soci
al call.

  It was Holland. ‘I think you’d better get out of bed,’ he said.

  ‘We haven’t had the chance to get in yet.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  Thorne could have kicked himself. ‘Get on with it, Dave.’

  ‘Shepherd’s Bush CID have got a body we should take a look at. I’ll give you the address.’

  Thorne looked around for a piece of paper. Porter appeared next to him with a notepad and pen, then walked back to the bed and began pulling on her skirt.

  ‘I’m listening…’

  ‘Remember that message I left for Kathleen Bristow?’ Holland said. ‘Well, somebody finally got back to me.’

  PART THREE. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

  SUNDAY

  LUKE

  There’d been a kid, when Luke was a few years younger, who’d picked on him at school. He’d stolen things – a fountain pen, a watch – handed out punches to the shoulder and kicks to the ankle, and threatened to do a lot worse if Luke told anyone. Luke hadn’t been the only one this boy had targeted. He’d watched the bully with others sometimes, and saw the same technique as had been used on him. The boy would smile, be nice, make out that he wanted to be friends, before dishing out the painful stuff. As though the pretend gentleness made the twisting and slapping that came afterwards more enjoyable for him.

  Luke hadn’t told anyone, had suffered until the boy had left the school, but he’d learned to recognise the smile that came before the pain, and he saw it with the man in the cellar. It sounded silly. It was obvious really, with what was going on, but there was something wrong with the man. Something out of control, lost, which made Luke feel as though the man himself didn’t have much idea what he was going to do next.

  The friendlier the man was – the more freedom he gave Luke, the more he told Luke how much he thought of him – the more frightening he became. And the more determined Luke became to try to help himself.

  It was hard, trying to make himself concentrate on doing something when all he wanted to do was curl up and lie still, sleep until it was over. He’d spent hours since the man had last left, reciting poems in his head, lyrics to songs… anything to avoid having to think about what the man had told him; what he’d kept on telling him. It was poisonous shit, he knew that; like the lies that bully at school had once told him in a soft voice. The man was enjoying coming down with his torch and his filth. Spewing it out and messing with his head. Weakening him.

  So Luke filled his head with as much other stuff as he could, trying to squeeze out the man’s lies.

  And he focused hard on the sting from a dozen cuts and bruises. He drove a fingernail across the graze on his knuckles until that pain became more important than the deep, dull ache that the man’s words had left spreading through his body.

  He climbed to his feet, feeling the pieces of discarded gaffer tape around him as his hands moved across the dirt floor. He tried to concentrate on the map of the cellar he had created in his mind: the low corners; the damp crannies and musty alcoves; the shelves thick with dirt; tins of paint, bags of cement and picture frames…

  If the man was still in the house, he would probably be down to see him again before too long. With more stories to tell… or worse.

  Luke stared into the thick, gritty darkness and made a decision.

  He needed a weapon.

  EIGHTEEN

  There was never a good time, of course. But when it came to working with a body, working on a body, the early hours of the morning were probably the least bad. During the day, a murder scene felt blatant and unashamed. There was something about the way daylight fell across a body that served to reinforce the brutality of the act; to hammer home the shocking truth that such things happened while the rest of the world went about its business. Walked around, shopped, sat bored at tills or desks, while others a few feet away bled, bloated and stiffened.

  At night, Thorne could do what needed to be done and could extract a little comfort from the fact that he was performing a necessary, if ugly, public service by cleaning up the mess before dawn. In a bad mood he might consider such a night’s labours as akin to shovelling shit uphill. But tonight, standing over the body of an old woman while her neighbours slept, he felt like he was doing his bit to maintain a little of the bliss that ignorance afforded.

  He’d already exchanged a few words with Hendricks as they’d climbed into the plastic full-body suits. It was a runof-the-mill conversation, such as anyone might have before getting down to work:

  ‘How’re you doing?’

  ‘Good. Didn’t you get my note?’

  ‘Yeah, but you’d probably say that anyway.’

  ‘No, really. I saw Brendan.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘Well, there was no screaming, and I didn’t try to smash his face in, so pretty good, I think…’

  Now, forty minutes or so into it, the dialogue had taken on a more businesslike tone. The talk was of lividity and core body temperature; of traumatic asphyxia and cadaveric spasm. As Hendricks dictated a few notes into a small digital recorder, Thorne watched the team of scene-ofcrime officers move around Kathleen Bristow’s small bedroom. As always, seeing them work, he felt something nagging at him; irritating, like a rough seam scratching his skin inside the plastic suit. He had come to realise over the years that it was envy: of their certainty; of the scientific boundaries which he imagined must give them the kind of reassurance he had rarely felt himself.

  Theirs would be the evidence for the likes of him to label and box up and get to court. Without it, the best he had to offer was guesswork and speculation.

  ‘So, when are we talking, Phil?’

  Hendricks took one of the woman’s dead hands in his own. The flesh was mottled, bluish against the cream of his surgical glove. ‘Rigor’s just starting to fade, so I think we’re talking a little over twenty-four hours. The early hours of yesterday morning, probably. Maybe late the night before.’

  The night before they’d nicked Grant Freestone.

  But Freestone couldn’t be the killer, could he? They’d already established that he hadn’t kidnapped anyone, and it would have been too much of a coincidence for Kathleen Bristow’s death not to be connected to the abduction of Luke Mullen.

  ‘I reckon he broke a rib or two as well,’ Hendricks said. ‘Pressing down on top of her. Kneeling on her chest, maybe.’

  When Hendricks reached forward to push a finger inside Kathleen Bristow’s mouth, to rub a cotton bud across the tears inside her lip, Thorne turned away. He walked out of the room, and downstairs. A SOCO he knew well was working in the dining room, moving methodically around the small table on top of which sat a telephone and answering machine. It was from here that a DI from the on-call Murder Team had phoned Dave Holland, having listened to the message he’d left for Kathleen Bristow. As Thorne headed towards the back door, he exchanged a joke with the officer, but he was thinking of how the old woman’s face had seemed to collapse when Hendricks had removed her false teeth.

  Outside, Thorne pushed back the hood of the plastic suit, walked over to where Dave Holland, similarly attired, was leaning against the wall next to the kitchen window. A generator hummed at the front of the house and a powerful arc light brightened the half of the garden nearest the kitchen door.

  Holland took two quick drags of a cigarette, held it up to show Thorne, raised his eyes towards the top floor of the house. ‘All this seems a good enough reason to give in and have one, you know? But then you feel guilty for enjoying it.’

  In direct contrast to most people, Holland had taken up smoking after his child was born. He’d smoked secretly, at work, until his girlfriend had found out and gone ballistic, since when he’d done his best to knock it on the head. But, like he said, there were times when it seemed reasonable to weaken.

  ‘Doesn’t Sophie smell it on you?’

  Holland nodded. ‘But she understands that nine times out of ten, there’s a bloody good reason, so she doesn’t usually give
me a hard time.’

  Thorne pushed himself away from the wall and strolled to the rear of the garden. Holland followed him into the shadow, beyond the arc light’s reach. They sat on a small, ornamental bench.

  ‘You reckon our kidnapper did this?’ Holland asked.

  ‘If he didn’t, I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on. Not that I’ve got much of an idea anyway.’

  ‘Maybe we’re getting close to him.’

  Thorne looked back towards the house, stared at the SOCOs inside, moving back and forth past the bedroom window. ‘It’s hard to feel too excited about that,’ he said, ‘right at this minute.’ He stretched his feet out in front of him. The grass smelled as though it had been mown only a day or two before. It looked grey against the white of the plastic overshoes.

  ‘I haven’t seen DI Porter for a while,’ Holland said.

  ‘And…?’

  ‘Nothing. I just wondered where she was.’

  ‘Right. She was talking to the photographer, last time I saw her.’ Thorne leaned forward, looked at Holland, daring him to give anything away.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t even think about smirking,’ Thorne said. ‘Just shut up and finish your fag…’

  ‘I was only asking.’

  ‘Or I’ll call your girlfriend and tell her you’re back on twenty a day.’

  Holland did as he was told, and they sat in silence for a few minutes. The smoke drifted away from them towards the light, disappearing at its edge, where moths and midges danced in and out of the beam. When he’d finished, Holland stubbed out his fag-end on the bottom of the bench and stood up. ‘Best get back in there,’ he said. ‘I reckon they’ll be bringing her out in a minute.’

  This was the other advantage of working a murder scene at this hour: save for the occasional insomniac dog-walker or crazed jogger, Kathleen Bristow could leave her home for the last time without an audience. During the day, there would be no shortage of gawpers, standing silently, shifting from foot to foot, formulating the story they would tell later around the dinner table or in the pub. Whenever Thorne listened to traffic updates on the motorway, he wondered why the announcer didn’t just tell the truth; why they didn’t come clean and say that the tailback was the result of drivers slowing down to get a good look at the accident.