‘It’s not a big deal,’ Mullen said.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘It was an affair, that’s all. People have them. You’ll just have to forgive us for trying to keep some tiny part of our fucked-up lives private.’
But Thorne was in no mood to forgive anyone. He’d listened with a growing sense of disbelief and anger as Tony Mullen had explained why he’d taken the decision not to mention Grant Freestone. How they’d jointly decided that there would be little point in revealing the affair that his wife had had while serving as an officer of the local education authority on Freestone’s MAPPA panel in 2001.
‘You lied because of this?’ Thorne said. ‘We’re trying to find your son and you lie because of a bit of screwing around? Whose embarrassment were you trying to save? Your wife’s or your own?’
‘Both,’ Mullen said. ‘Either. Does it really fucking matter?’
‘You messed us around-’
‘Does any of it matter?’ Mullen looked ready to scream, with frustration, exhaustion, rage. ‘Christ, my wife made a mistake years ago. One mistake…’
Mullen was sitting on the sofa, facing the fireplace and the TV. Thorne and Maggie Mullen were opposite each other in the armchairs to either side. Thorne stared at the woman across the Chinese rug, her feet curled underneath her, same as he’d seen her daughter do. She was still, and had spoken barely a word since Thorne had entered the room.
He was unable to tell if she wore a stunned expression or a defiant one.
‘So who did you make this mistake with, then?’
She shook her head slowly, as if she were being asked to submit to something unspeakable.
Mullen groaned. ‘Does it matter?’
‘No more secrets,’ Thorne said.
So Maggie Mullen named the man with whom she’d had her affair. Thorne thought about it for a moment. He could see why it would have upset Tony Mullen so much.
‘You’re obviously enjoying this, Thorne,’ Mullen said. ‘Enjoying our… discomfort.’
‘You think you can claw back one single bloody inch of the moral high ground?’ Thorne asked.
Mullen said nothing, looked across at his wife.
‘You should feel uncomfortable. Jesus. You’re ex-Job, for crying out loud, and your son is missing. You withheld information.’
‘Irrelevant information.’
‘You sure?’
‘Considering everything that’s going on, do you really think that who my wife slept with five years ago is remotely important?’
‘That depends,’ Thorne said. ‘Does “everything” include another member of the MAPPA panel being murdered this morning?’ He looked from one to the other. It was clear from Tony Mullen’s expression that he hadn’t known. That, despite his connections, this development in the case hadn’t been relayed to him five minutes after it had happened. ‘Someone broke into Kathleen Bristow’s house and killed her, and nobody’s going to convince me that it wasn’t the same person who took your son, so…’
Maggie Mullen began to cry.
‘I wonder if you still think the fact that your wife was on that panel is unimportant. If it’s irrelevant.’
Mullen stood up, held out his arms towards his wife, but she didn’t move. She sat and wept and looked anywhere but at Thorne or her husband, until Mullen moved across to her. He gathered her up and pulled her back with him on to the sofa, pressing her head to his chest until she had to break free to suck in a breath.
‘I don’t understand how you could have been on that panel in the first place,’ Thorne said. ‘Wasn’t there a conflict of interest, with your husband having put Freestone behind bars in the first place?’
Mullen looked at his wife. She was in no fit state to answer. ‘She didn’t know,’ he said. ‘Not to start with at least. We didn’t discuss cases and she’d never even heard of Grant Freestone until she joined that panel.’
‘So what happened? “Not to start with”, you said.’
‘She saw my name on Freestone’s probation report, the stuff about the threats he’d made, so then she told me and we discussed it. She talked about resigning, but there was really no need. What had happened in the past was of no concern to Maggie and the others on that panel, so there was no conflict.’
‘Of course not. Still, it must have been handy to have someone who could keep a close eye on Freestone for you. Someone who had a nice professional reason to know exactly what he was doing.’
Mullen shook his head. ‘You’re talking crap. My wife just did her job.’
‘Right, and plenty of overtime, by the sound of it.’
It was a cheap shot, and it got the reaction it deserved. Mullen sat up straight, clutched his wife’s hand and spoke quietly, each word clearly intended to be definitive; weighted with loathing for both subject and listener.
‘This man was someone Maggie worked with closely, only because she believed in doing things properly. She trusted everyone on that panel, had every reason to think they had the same dedication to the work that she had.’
Next to him, Maggie Mullen sat, stiff and shaking, the tears coming more slowly now. Her face reacted to the jolt of each sob, and twisted as her husband spoke, as though in distaste, in horror at this woman he was discussing that she did not recognise.
‘Men like him can mistake a close working relationship for affection. They look for it, desperate, and search for any way to exploit it, to turn it into something sordid it was never intended to be. They’re leeches. That’s what he was.’
Next to him, Maggie Mullen spoke her husband’s name quietly. It sounded like a plea to stop.
‘He was needy,’ Mullen said, ‘terminally needy, and he twisted my wife’s sympathy into something different. He took advantage of her.’
Maggie Mullen was shaking her head, insistent now, her words spoken and repeated in tandem with the movement. ‘That’s not what happened. That’s not what happened…’
‘Calm down, love-’
‘Don’t be so fucking stupid,’ she shouted. She turned to Thorne, focused, spoke quietly. ‘He’s got Luke.’
Thorne felt the prickle at the nape of his neck, a buzz that began to build and creep…
‘Who’s got Luke?’
She said his name again. The name of the man with whom she’d had the affair.
Mullen took hold of her other hand and put his face close to hers. ‘Sorry, love, I don’t-’
She screamed the name into his face, scored it in spittle across his cheek and into his eyes.
‘He took Luke,’ she said. ‘He got those people, that couple, to take him as a warning. To convince me, I suppose. The affair didn’t finish when I told you it did. I tried to end it, but he wouldn’t let me.’ Mullen tried to say something, but she continued over the top of him, quickly, as though, if she stopped, she might fall to pieces. ‘We carried on, but I was dying every time I looked at Luke or Juliet. I was dying with the guilt. So, a few months ago, I decided I was going to end it and I told him that this time I wasn’t going to change my mind.’ She paused, remembering. ‘He took it badly…’
Thorne was out of his seat. He couldn’t keep the astonishment and the disgust from his voice. ‘So he kidnapped your son?’
‘I was stupid,’ she said, clutching at her husband. ‘I was so stupid to do it when I did. He’d just lost his mother and he was in pieces, and I thought it would be a good time, you know… to tell him, because he would have other things on his mind. But he went completely off the rails.’
Thorne stared, thinking, You’re telling me. He waited for the rest.
‘And, God help me, I mentioned Sarah Hanley.’
‘What?’
‘We never talked about what happened. It was just like a film we’d seen or something. But I wanted him to accept that it was over and leave me alone, and I said something about how terrible it would be if anyone ever found out. It was just something I said, because I was desperate and I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t trying
to threaten him.’
‘What was it that happened?’ Thorne asked.
Mullen just gasped out his wife’s name.
‘I was there when Sarah Hanley died,’ she said.
Tony Mullen got slowly to his feet and, as both of his wife’s hands were in his, she rose with him. Their fingers twisted, whitened, and the tension grew in their arms until they were pushing at each other, standing in front of the sofa, straining and searching for some leverage, a low moan somewhere in the throat of one of them…
Thorne was out of his chair, fearing violence, but the moment passed and Mullen dropped back on to the sofa as if he’d been gutted. Thorne stared at the two of them. Took a few deep breaths as a hundred questions careered through his mind.
Knowing that he could wait for the answers, he took out his phone and began to dial.
Maggie Mullen saw what was happening. She stepped towards him and reached out a hand. ‘Please, not like last time,’ she said. ‘Don’t go in there like you did at that flat. Don’t charge in there with guns. I don’t know how he’ll react. I’ve no idea what he’ll do.’
Thorne nodded and raised the phone. ‘I need a home address.’
She gave it to him without a second thought. ‘Please,’ she said again. ‘Luke’s unharmed… so far. He’s fine. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid, that you won’t go in there with guns…’
The number Thorne was calling began to ring. He looked at Tony Mullen and followed the man’s wide eyes to those of the woman who was pawing at his sleeve. ‘How do you know Luke’s unharmed?’
Her eyes left his. ‘I’ve spoken to him.’
Mullen’s voice was hoarse. ‘You’ve spoken to Luke?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not to Luke. I haven’t spoken to Luke.’
Porter answered her phone.
She’d just started driving back from Kathleen Bristow’s house in Shepherd’s Bush. She pulled over to take down details as soon as Thorne had her attention and began to take her through it. He gave her an address in Catford, the other side of the city from him, and still a good distance south-east of where Porter was.
‘How soon do you think you can get a team there?’ He asked.
‘They’ll be there before I am,’ Porter said. ‘Almost certainly.’
Thorne passed on Maggie Mullen’s concerns: her belief that the kidnapper’s reaction to an armed entry was highly unpredictable; her plea for them to be cautious.
Porter sounded dubious. ‘I can’t make any promises,’ she said.
When Thorne hung up, he told her Porter had assured him that she’d do her best.
He didn’t feel bad about lying to her.
TWENTY-FIVE
You think about the kids.
First and last, in that sort of situation, in that sort of state; when you can’t decide if it’s anger or agony that’s all but doubling you up, and making it so hard for you to spit the words across the room. First and last, you think about them…
‘Why the hell, why the fuck, didn’t you tell me this earlier?’
‘It wasn’t the right time. It seemed best to wait.’
‘Best?’ She took a step towards the man and woman standing on the far side of her living room.
‘I think you should try to calm down,’ the man said.
‘What do you expect me to do?’ she said. ‘I’d really be interested to know.’
‘I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your decision…’
‘You think I’ve got a choice?’
The other woman spoke gently. ‘We need to sit down and talk about the best way forward-’
‘Christ Almighty. You just march in here and tell me this. Casually, like it’s just something you forgot to mention. You walk in here and tell me all this… shit!’
‘Sarah-’
‘I don’t know you. I don’t even fucking know you…’
For a few seconds there was just the ticking, and the distant traffic, and the noise bleeding in from a radio in the kitchen…
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re what?’ Sarah Hanley smiled, then laughed. She gathered the material of her dress between her fingers as her fists clenched at her sides. ‘I need to get to the school.’
‘The kids’ll be fine,’ the man said. He looked at the woman who was with him and she nodded her head in complete agreement. ‘Honestly, love. Absolutely fine.’
‘… that’s when she came at him,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘When she came at both of us, scratching and spitting and swearing her head off. He only raised his hands to protect his face, because she was out of control. He didn’t mean to push her.’
‘She was thinking of her children,’ Thorne said.
‘So were we. That’s why we were there, why the decision was made to tell her about Grant Freestone’s past.’
‘And it never occurred to anyone that she might not take the news very calmly?’
Maggie Mullen had slunk back to the armchair. Her arms were wrapped around each other at the waist as she spoke. From the sofa, her husband watched, ashen-faced, as though all but the smallest breath he needed to stay alive had been punched out of him.
‘We were trained to have these conversations,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘We tried to be sensitive. Everything just… got out of hand.’
‘What happened afterwards?’
‘We panicked. There was such a lot of blood. We didn’t know what the hell to do, and in the end we just decided to leave.’ She looked at Thorne. ‘I can’t remember whose idea it was, really I can’t, but it was all such a mess. It was just a stupid accident.’
‘An accident for which you knew Grant Freestone would probably get blamed.’
‘We never thought about that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t anyway, I swear. When he did get blamed, we talked about it, but we didn’t know what to do for the best. It was too late to come forward by then, to try and explain.’
Thorne moved slowly around to the back of her chair. ‘Was she still alive when you left?’ he asked.
Maggie Mullen lowered her head, shook it.
Thorne stared down at hair that had gone unwashed for days. Only she and the man she’d been with in Sarah Hanley’s house that day knew if she was telling the truth. ‘You know that her children discovered the body, don’t you?’
‘Yes…’
Tony Mullen’s hands were trembling in his lap. He swallowed hard, then muttered, ‘Christ…’
‘So, you just walked out,’ Thorne said.
She nodded, but kept her eyes down. ‘Yes, we walked out, and we hoped nobody had seen us.’ She looked up. ‘And nobody had. We went to Kathleen Bristow, who’d assigned us the job of making the visit, and told her that we’d had to cancel it, that we’d never gone. We made up some story about me being poorly. Then, when the body was discovered, it all got forgotten anyway, and it looked like we were safe.’
‘Is that why he killed Bristow?’ Thorne asked. ‘Did she keep a record of the fact that you were due to have visited Sarah Hanley?’
‘I suppose so. She certainly knew that he and I were involved with each other. She caught us together in a pub once after one of the meetings. Maybe her knowing that was enough to scare him.’
‘But why now?’
She shifted in her chair, let her head fall back and talked to the ceiling. ‘I don’t know what’s in his mind. I can’t pretend to know why he’s done any of this.’
‘Maybe you should have asked him,’ Mullen said. ‘During one of your cosy little chats on the phone.’
‘Please, Tony…’
‘I can’t believe that you knew he had Luke, but you said nothing. He had our son and you said nothing.’
Thorne looked at what was left of Mullen, and despite everything he’d felt about him until this point, he was overwhelmed by sympathy for the man. He’d lied by omission, thinking only that he was covering up simple adultery, unaware that there was so much more at stake.
‘At the beginning I thought he was just tryin
g to frighten me, you know? Because I’d told him we were finished, and I’d talked about the Sarah Hanley business. He knew this woman from somewhere, paid her to take Luke from the school, and I thought it would just be for a day or something, that he was just making sure I got the message.’
Thorne knew then that he’d been right about the video; about how strange it was that nothing had been addressed to Luke’s father. The boy had been told what to say. The words had been aimed solely at his mother because the message was meant for her and no one else.
‘What did he say?’ Mullen asked. ‘After he’d taken Luke, what did he say when you spoke to him?’
She looked as though this was the hardest answer she’d had to provide so far. ‘He said he was doing it because he loved me so much.’
‘Sweet Jesus!’
‘It’s what he believes. He’s not well.’
‘Why didn’t you sort this out straight away?’ Mullen was reddening, breathing noisily. ‘Why didn’t you agree to everything, anything, whatever he wanted, so that he’d let Luke go? You saw that video, you saw what they were doing to Luke.’
‘He said he didn’t want to make it easy. He promised not to hurt him, told me that the drugs weren’t doing him any harm. He told me he wanted to be sure I knew how serious he was.’
‘Serious?’ Thorne said.
‘Then, after the first few days, there was nothing I could do. I was terrified because everything had escalated.’
Mullen bucked in his seat, punching at the chair around him, swinging at nothing. ‘He killed people. He started fucking killing people.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ she shouted. ‘I knew that he’d lost control, that I couldn’t predict what he was going to do or how he was going to react. He said he wouldn’t hurt Luke, but I didn’t know what would happen if I told the police.’ She glanced at the telephone. ‘I still don’t. All I could do was keep talking to him, make sure that Luke was still all right.’ Her hand rose to her head, closed around a clump of hair and began to pull. ‘I fucked it all up, I know I did, but it went so completely mad that I didn’t know what to do.’ She looked wildly from her husband to Thorne and back again. ‘I was thinking of Luke all the time. But…’
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