Thorne nodded. He did not want to listen to any more. There were no more tears left, but Maggie Mullen’s face looked as though it were made of cracked plaster. He remembered the words she’d used when she’d described what had happened on the day Sarah Hanley died. ‘Everything just got out of hand,’ he said.
An hour or more passed as slowly as any Thorne could remember. The minutes crawled by on their bellies, each through the glistening, greasy trail of the one before, as he watched Tony and Maggie Mullen damage themselves and each other. Screams that sliced and flayed. Accusations swung like bludgeons, and the silences burning away the flesh from the little that was left between them.
Drawn from the top of the house by the noise, Juliet had appeared in the doorway. Demanding to know what was happening, and understandably reluctant to go upstairs again, she had begun a shouting match with her mother that was just starting to get nasty when Thorne’s mobile rang. Tony Mullen moved quickly to manhandle his daughter from the room as Thorne took the call.
When it was over, Thorne turned back to them. He raised a hand quickly, a gesture to reassure them that the news was not the worst they could have been expecting. ‘Nobody there,’ he said. ‘They went in five minutes ago and the flat’s empty.’
Mullen’s expression was one Thorne had seen several times since he’d first got involved with the case: relief that washed briefly across a mask of panic, then unthinkable fury.
Maggie Mullen was breathing heavily. ‘They went in there very quickly. How could they be sure it was safe?’
‘They decided that they couldn’t afford to wait,’ Thorne said. ‘Going in fast is always iffy, but waiting might have been riskier, and it certainly didn’t help last time. There was an armed response vehicle close by and they took the chance.’
‘You said there’d be no guns.’ She pointed a shaking finger, spat out the words. ‘You promised.’
‘No,’ Mullen said, cold. ‘No, he fucking didn’t.’
‘Is there anywhere else?’ Thorne asked. ‘Anywhere else he might have taken him?’
Thorne could see that as soon as the idea presented itself to her, she knew it was the right one.
‘His mother’s house. She had a cottage somewhere near Luton, in the middle of bloody nowhere.’ She couldn’t look at her husband. ‘I went there once.’
‘Call him,’ Thorne said.
She closed her eyes and clamped a hand across her mouth, which muffled the end of her refusal.
‘Call him…’
It took a few minutes before Mullen and Thorne saw her walk across to her bag, take out her phone. Watched her gather herself, and dial.
Then speak to the man who had kidnapped her son.
She told him that she needed to talk; that she knew it was late but that she was coming to see him. She insisted. She said she knew where he was and swore that she would be coming alone.
She pressed back fresh tears and took a deep breath before she asked how Luke was.
Then she hung up.
Nodded…
Mullen was face to face with Thorne before he had completed a step. ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Just try and fucking stop me.’
Thorne looked into Mullen’s eyes and knew that if he did, and it got physical, he would be in serious trouble. ‘It’s really not a good idea,’ he said, brandishing his mobile. ‘Don’t make me get a uniform over here.’
Mullen took a few seconds, but finally stepped away. When Thorne asked where his car keys were, Mullen handed them over. Looking at him, Thorne suddenly remembered what Hendricks had told him about seeing the child on the bed that was really a mortuary slab. Thorne saw a man who knew that his son’s life was in somebody else’s hands; and that his own pride and stupidity might have helped put it there.
He led Maggie Mullen to the front door and opened it. She walked out without looking back and moved towards the car. Thorne turned to see Juliet Mullen sitting halfway up the stairs and her father climbing towards her.
‘It’ll be all right, sir,’ Thorne said.
TWENTY-SIX
Thorne drove, glancing down every now and again at the road atlas open in his lap. At the square of countryside between Luton and Stevenage that Maggie Mullen had identified as their destination. Swallowing up the tarmac in Tony Mullen’s Mercedes, the A1 almost empty as it neared eleven o’clock, it wouldn’t take much more than another twenty minutes to get there.
If they could find it.
He spoke to Porter again as he pushed the car north. Telling her where he was heading, talking her through his likeliest route. Porter sounded tense, knowing she could do little but take her team in the same direction and wait for more specific instructions.
‘Goes without saying that you keep me up to speed, right?’
‘So why say it, then?’
‘Tom-’
‘You’ll know where as soon as I know,’ Thorne said. ‘If I know…’
Another glance down, once he’d hung up, and one more at the woman in the passenger seat. They’d barely spoken since they’d left the house in Arkley. Maggie Mullen had spent most of the time staring hard out of the window, not wanting to risk making any kind of contact until she had to, unwilling, or afraid, to catch Thorne’s eye. To engage.
They drove on in silence, save for the low hum of the big engine and the hiss of the tyres against a still slick road, though the rain had stopped. It would have been wrong, of course, horribly inappropriate, but just for a second or two Thorne had considered reaching for the stereo, as the atmosphere in the car grew more uncomfortable with every minute and every mile.
He wondered what Tony Mullen’s taste in music might be. The trivial nature of the thought was a welcome relief from the darker ones that sloshed around in his brain. The blackness spreading, discolouring the contents. He thought about Tony Mullen waiting back at the house. Had he got on the phone to Jesmond or any of his other friends in high places yet? What on earth would he have said to them if he had?
Thorne touched 110 in the outside lane. Hoped the Hertfordshire traffic boys were a long way away.
‘You think I should have spoken up?’ she said suddenly.
Thorne focused on the tail-lights ahead of him. ‘Fuck, yes.’
‘I was trying to protect Luke.’
‘You’re well aware how ridiculous that sounds, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘That’s obvious…’
‘I knew he wouldn’t hurt him.’
‘You still sure?’
She hesitated.
‘And are you sure that keeping all this to yourself had nothing to do with Sarah Hanley? With the fact that you’d be in just as much trouble as he was if it came out?’
Her answer wasn’t quick in coming. ‘He said we’d both go to prison for it.’
‘Right. Turned your stupid threat back on you, didn’t he?’
She closed her eyes. ‘Yes.’
Thorne grunted, satisfied. ‘You didn’t want to go to prison…’
‘He asked me what it felt like, being without my son,’ she said. There was an edge to her voice, and a hardness in her expression when Thorne glanced across. ‘He asked me how I thought I’d feel if I lost both of them. If I spent however many years it might be inside, while they grew up without me.’ She straightened out the seat belt across her chest. ‘No, I didn’t want to go to prison.’
‘It’s no excuse,’ Thorne said. ‘You said yourself that you didn’t know what was going on in this man’s head. That you were scared, that he was out of control.’
‘I talked to him,’ she said. ‘I tried to keep him calm, to reassure him, if you like, but it was all for Luke…’
The thought struck Thorne with such force that Maggie Mullen slid away from him, inching towards the passenger door when he turned and looked at her again. ‘What did you tell him about the case?’
The silence was answer enough.
‘You told him that we had the fingerprints, didn’t you? That we got Conrad Allen’s prints off the videotape. That we were close to an address.’
‘I thought he’d stop it if he knew the police were coming. I wanted him to give up.’
‘What about Kathleen Bristow?’ Thorne was asking himself as much as he was asking her, working through the chronology in his head, putting the pieces in the correct order. Had Kathleen Bristow died before or after her killer had been interviewed? ‘He knew we were coming to see him, didn’t he? You told him we were asking about Grant Freestone, that we’d be talking to members of the panel…’
‘It was all going to come out anyway,’ she said. ‘What had happened, I mean. I thought if I could make him understand that, he would let me have Luke back.’
‘You thought wrong.’ Thorne was forcing the accelerator to the floor, squeezing the wheel. ‘He killed her, same as he killed Conrad Allen and Amanda Tickell. It sounds to me like those three deaths are down to you.’
‘Please…’
‘Three more deaths.’
She turned away. Leaned her forehead against the window.
‘Whatever you thought you were doing, you were just pushing all the buttons.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘I hope Luke’s alive, that he hasn’t been hurt; more than anything, I hope that. But if he isn’t…’
She moaned, her head sliding against the glass.
‘It’s probably no more than you deserve.’
Thorne drove on, past signs for Welham Green and Hatfield, past the turn-off to St Albans that he’d taken so many times when his father was alive.
The water on the road was like a long, lonely shush beneath them.
Without turning, Maggie Mullen said, ‘She was dead when we left. Sarah. She’d lost such a lot of blood.’
Thorne thought she sounded pathetic. He felt numb, cold, without anything even close to sympathy. Knowing what might be waiting for him when they arrived at their destination, he thought it was probably the best way to be. ‘Right. And you watched her die.’
They turned off the A1 just past Welwyn Garden City. That much she could remember. But from there on it was hit and hope. There were some fragmented memories of the village they were looking for – a large house on its outskirts, a church – but no more than that.
Within five minutes, it was a different world.
The overhead lighting had gone, and even the catseyes disappeared at the end of the slip road, which quickly narrowed as A route became B, with high hedges on both sides and barely room enough for one vehicle to pass another.
Thorne drove as quickly as he was able, full beam cutting through the black, which twisted away ahead of him.
They moved slowly through a village called Codicote: Tudor houses, pubs, a village green; Maggie Mullen searching desperately for some clue that they might be in the right place. Thorne sped out the other side, past the sign that thanked him for driving carefully, back into the dark necklace of lanes that strung these villages together, a mile or two apart.
He swore and dipped the headlights as another car came around a corner, braking too hard and wrestling the Mercedes into the verge. He tried to look at the other driver as the car went past, but he could see nothing. Back on full beam, the lights caught yellow eyes, low in the undergrowth, and something flashing across the road fifty yards ahead of them.
‘All these roads look the bloody same,’ Maggie Mullen said.
They drove through Kimpton and Peter’s Green. Stopped and turned the car round when they got within a mile of Luton airport and a sign told them they were entering Bedfordshire. Heading north again, they passed through Whitwell, crossed over the River Maran and entered the village of St Paul’s Walden.
‘Stop…’
Thorne jumped on the pedal and put out his arm as Maggie Mullen shot forward in her seat. ‘What?’
‘That’s the big house.’ She nodded towards a pair of wrought-iron gates. The outline of a grand mansion was just visible in the distance. ‘We visited it once. Something to do with the Queen Mother. Keep going…’
At the other end of the High Street she told Thorne to stop again. Pointed to a church. A spike rising up from a turreted tower, vivid against the night sky.
‘You can see that tower from the cottage,’ she said. ‘Across the fields.’
‘There are fields everywhere,’ Thorne said. ‘Which direction?’
She looked around, unsure.
Thorne picked one.
Driving out of the village, they both started when Maggie Mullen’s phone rang. She looked at the display. The phone was shaking in her hand.
‘It’s him…’
She said, ‘yes’ a lot; told the caller that she was nearly there and that she just wanted to talk. She asked how Luke was, begged the man on the other end of the phone not to hurt him.
‘What did he want?’ Thorne asked when she’d hung up.
‘He wanted to know where I was. If I was close.’
‘You said, Yes I am; it’s fine. What was that?’
‘He was worried,’ she said. ‘Told me that if I was driving, he hoped I was hands-free.’
Thorne accelerated into the countryside again and smiled grimly. ‘He knows you’re not alone…’
Five minutes later he turned on to a narrow track. It was overgrown and pitted with puddles. The car rattled across a cattle-grid, then followed the track down and to the right, until its lights picked out the house a few hundred yards away.
‘That’s it…’
It wasn’t what Thorne had expected. Not a cottage in any usual sense of the word. It wasn’t particularly small, and didn’t even look that old. But it was certainly isolated. Not exactly chocolate-box, but in the ideal position for some purposes.
Thorne slowed to a crawl as he approached. There were lights on in two rooms downstairs, at the front.
‘What are we going to do?’ Maggie Mullen asked.
‘Well, you are going to knock on the door. Go and say hello to your boyfriend.’
‘What about you?’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Thorne said. He stopped the car, climbed out and moved away without shutting the door. From the shadows fifty feet from the house, he watched Maggie Mullen go to the front door. Saw it open and watched her walk inside, slow and stiff.
Then he moved quickly towards the back of the building.
He was in virtual darkness almost immediately. He pushed slowly through a low wooden gate whose top edge felt damp, rotten beneath his fingers. It opened into a knot of bramble. Stepping across, there was coarse, wet grass around his knees. As his eyes adjusted, Thorne could just make out the wall – higher in some places than others – that separated the garden from the fields beyond.
He kept close to the side of the house, moving away from it only when he needed to step around a long metal trough and what looked like an old butler sink full of earth and stones. He caught his hand on something as he edged along the wall, sucked in air fast, and wiped away the thickening beads of blood on his damp trouser-leg.
At the back of the cottage was a rusted table and chairs. An arrangement of bird tables. A rotary washing line that barely protruded above four feet of couch grass and thistle below it.
Thorne pressed his face against the window of a small extension. He could make out plates and pans on a drainer, the digital display on a microwave oven. There was a sliver of light at floor level from somewhere inside the house.
The back door was open.
He thought about Porter waiting for his call. About the phone sitting on the front seat of the car…
In the second or two between feeling the handle give and pushing, he considered all those times when he’d faced a similar decision. When he’d been torn between doing the sensible thing or saying, ‘Fuck it.’ When, on almost every occasion, he’d made the wrong choice.
He pushed.
And he stepped into the dark kitchen. Moved quickly to th
e door beneath which the light was coming. And listened. Though he could not hear voices, there was something about the quality of the silence from the other side of the door that told him there were people in the next room.
He waited.
Five seconds… ten.
Then a voice he’d heard before: ‘For heaven’s sake, stop pissing about and come in.’
Thorne did as he’d been invited, slowly. His pace slowed even further once he saw what was waiting for him. One step at a time, though his mind was racing, processing the visual information, asking questions.
Where’s the boy?
Man, woman, rope, knife…
Where’s the fucking boy?
TWENTY-SEVEN
‘I knew she was lying.’
‘Peter…’
‘About coming on her own.’ Lardner nudged his glasses with a knuckle. ‘I could hear it in her voice, clear as a bell.’ Laughing. ‘I mean, I’ve heard her lying often enough, haven’t I? Stretched out next to me, naked, telling her old man she’s tied up in a meeting…’
The buzzing in Thorne’s head had faded enough for him to formulate a response. ‘She’s lied to a lot of people,’ he said. He glanced towards a dustsheet-covered armchair in which Maggie Mullen sat directly ahead of him, beneath a small window. She didn’t return Thorne’s look. Her eyes moved back and forth every few seconds between Lardner and the brown panelled door a few feet away.
Lardner was sitting on the floor against a covered sofa that had been on Thorne’s right as he’d entered the small living room. He was wearing jeans and a rust-coloured shirt, and his legs were drawn up to his chest. His hands dangled between his knees, a carving knife held loosely in one of them. The other clutched the end of a rope which ran away from him, straight and taut, disappearing around the edge of a door beneath the stairs.
Cellar. Had to be.
Thorne asked the question even though he’d known the answer a second after stepping in from the kitchen: ‘Where’s the boy?’
There was a noise from somewhere beneath them. The rope shifted against the white painted floorboards.
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