Buried

by Mark Billingham

  Luke Mullen was alive.

  Lardner turned his head towards the door and shouted, ‘Come on now, son, I told you I want to see this rope stay taut. You stay where you are, and come up here when I’m good and ready.’

  Maggie Mullen leaned forward in her chair. Her fists were tight around the material of her sweater, pulling at it, wrenching. ‘For pity’s sake, Peter…’

  ‘You need to shush… really,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve talked about this.’ He sounded tired but relaxed. He looked back to Thorne and rolled his eyes, as though another man would understand how exasperating all this nagging was.

  Thorne nodded gently, tried to smile.

  Lardner raised the hand that held the knife, rubbed it across the top of his head. The few wisps of dark hair were all over the place and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. ‘Silly,’ Lardner said. ‘All so bloody silly.’

  A board moaned beneath Thorne’s feet as he shifted his weight, and he saw Lardner’s eyes fly to him, target him, in a second.

  Not relaxed at all…

  ‘You should sit.’ Lardner nodded towards a low pine trunk next to the fireplace.

  Thorne moved back until his calves met the edge of the box and dropped down slowly. He looked around, like someone who might be considering renting the place. The ceiling was Artexed: stiff spikes and whorls like hardened icing. A small landscape in a lacquered frame; a wooden barometer; a row of hardback books without jackets on shelves to one side of the front door. In the hearth, an arrangement of dried flowers poking from a stone vase, thick with dust.

  ‘Why are we here?’ Thorne said.

  Lardner looked a little confused. ‘I don’t remember inviting anybody.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Why any of this?’

  ‘Well it’s a fair question. Because it is all senseless, all of it, but I’m not really the right person to ask.’ He drew a foot of the rope towards him and twisted it around his wrist. ‘I don’t want to sound childish, really I don’t, but I’m not the one who started this.’

  ‘Oh Jesus, Peter.’ There was suddenly anger in Maggie Mullen’s voice. ‘You can’t lay any of this madness at my door. All I wanted to do was get out of a relationship. I didn’t do anything wrong.’

  It was as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘She made a mistake. And everything went haywire from that point, I suppose. I couldn’t believe she was trying to hurt me as much as she had. I convinced myself she didn’t know what she was doing…’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did know.’

  ‘Losing a parent isn’t easy, we all know that. You can understand how hard it is.’ He looked at Thorne, wanting a response. ‘Yes?’

  Thorne nodded.

  Lardner’s tone was chatty again, conversational. ‘So to do what she did when I was still suffering the loss of my mother was… an error. That’s what I’m going to call it. And, yes, I was desperate, I don’t mind admitting that to you. I don’t think that means I’m weak or less of a man or whatever. I didn’t want to lose her, I still don’t want to lose her, so I clung on for dear life. Which was when she started talking about the Sarah Hanley business, dredged all that up and made stupid suggestions, and I decided something needed to be done.’

  ‘I just wanted to get out,’ Maggie Mullen shouted. ‘I was the one who was desperate.’

  Thorne looked at the rope. At the knife. It felt as though the skin was tightening across every inch of his body.

  Lardner continued to address Thorne; to ignore the woman who, for one reason or another, had caused so much to happen. ‘I should really have taken the boy myself,’ he said. ‘But it was difficult, with work and what have you. It cost me every penny I had to pay those two, I can tell you that. Maybe if I’d sold this place after Mum died, but that was never going to happen.’

  Thorne knew most of it, but he was still curious. They’d thought Neil Warren’s professional relationship to Amanda Tickell was the link to Grant Freestone. But now Thorne remembered what Callum Roper had said about Warren and Lardner knowing each other. ‘Did Neil Warren introduce you to the woman?’

  Lardner smiled. ‘Neil’s very conscientious,’ he said. ‘He has regular get-togethers for some of his old clients, even though most of them have long since gone back on the smack or the coke or the booze. He gives them a few nibbles, talks about God, that sort of thing. All very jolly…’

  The rope was frayed and dirty, an old tow rope, by the look of it. Thorne tried hard not to think of the boy on the other end. Of the state he might be in.

  ‘I met Amanda and her boyfriend at one of Neil’s parties,’ Lardner said. ‘And when I was working out how best to snatch the boy, I knew she had it in her. She was always desperate for money.’

  The knife swung slowly back and forth, its handle gripped between Lardner’s thumb and index finger. It looked as though it came from the same set as the one he’d used to kill Allen and Tickell.

  ‘Why did anyone have to die?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘I shan’t say that it seemed like a good idea at the time, as that would be flippant. In fact, it seemed like a very bad idea. I’ve no wish to be disrespectful, and I’m very sorry about Kathleen, but same as with the other two, there wasn’t a great deal else I could do.’ For the first time in a few minutes he looked across at Maggie Mullen. ‘Mags was telling me what I needed to do…’

  Maggie Mullen was almost out of her chair. ‘What?’

  ‘There were hints,’ Lardner said. ‘We talked on the phone, talked in secret… and when she told me about what the police were doing, about Freestone and so on…’

  ‘I wanted you to finish it, to know it was pointless-’

  ‘I knew she was really telling me that I needed to take steps to protect myself.’

  ‘No!’

  The wash of a warm smile. ‘That’s when I knew her feelings for me were still as strong as they’d ever been.’

  ‘You’re fucking mental, Peter.’ She’d known it before, obviously. But here, seeing it acted out in front of her, the shock and the sadness were evident on Maggie Mullen’s face. ‘You’ve completely lost it…’

  Lardner looked at Thorne, shrugged and smiled. Then wound in another foot or so of the rope.

  There was a thump from the cellar: a shoe against a wooden stair.

  ‘Let the boy go,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ll stay.’

  Lardner looked at him.

  ‘We’ll both stay. But you could just let Luke walk out of here.’

  Another tug, and more rope dancing in. Another thump from behind the door, and a voice; indistinguishable, but clearly that of someone in pain.

  An equally agonised sound broke from Maggie Mullen. She spluttered, ‘please’ and ‘don’t’, then her head dropped forward until her knees muffled her voice, and the terrible sound of her begging became something grunted, animalistic.

  Lardner stared at the woman he claimed to love, as though something else, something he didn’t understand, was responsible for her pain.

  She lifted her head, held her breath and searched for some compassion in his face.

  Thorne didn’t look away from Lardner. He wondered how much of his attention was really focused on the woman. Then he glanced down at the knife in the man’s left hand. Was Lardner left-handed? He thought about making a move but did nothing.

  ‘Right… come on.’

  As soon as Lardner stood and began hauling in the rope, all three were on their feet: Lardner dragging the rope towards himself with one hand, twisting the arm quickly, coiling the rope between elbow and fist, while the other hand continued to point the kitchen knife; Thorne and Maggie Mullen staring – hopeful, terrified – at the small, brown door.

  The silence between the bumps and cracks of feet on the stairs felt like hands over Thorne’s ears, and his skin continued to shrink; to feel as though it were constricting across his bones. He imagined pressure building on the muscle and the creamy layers of fat as they were squeezed; the blood rushing, searching for the easiest way
to burst through the flesh that stretched and thinned. For one strange, disconnected moment he thought he felt it gathering, about to gush from the small wound in his hand, and he pressed the palm hard against the side of his leg.

  The rope was high off the ground now, and taut.

  The noise on the stairs grew louder…

  Maggie Mullen’s hands were steepled in front of her face. They had flattened, been pressed tight across her mouth, by the time the door to the cellar was shouldered open, crashed back against the wall, and her son stumbled into the room.

  She screamed when she saw that his face had gone.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry about that,’ Lardner said. ‘But he got a bit excited when I told him you were coming. Got very noisy.’ He pointed the knife at Maggie Mullen when she took a step towards her son, then twisted the blade to point out his handiwork. ‘I did it in a bit of a hurry, but I made sure he could breathe, obviously…’

  The black gaffer tape had been wrapped clumsily, round and round Luke Mullen’s face, and in such haste that what remained on the roll hung down, knocking awkwardly against the boy’s shoulder as he moved; against the rope that had been looped around his neck and now stretched tightly to where Lardner stood next to the sofa.

  Luke stood, swaying on the spot.

  Brick-dust streaked his hair, and the navy-blue Butler’s Hall blazer was torn at the pocket and ghost-grey with dirt. One hand stayed stiff against his side while the other clutched at the rope around his neck. Thorne could see that the backs of his hands were almost black with filth, and bloodied.

  The boy strained instinctively towards his mother, his neck pulling forward against the rope, moaning, growling, when Lardner dragged him back. The word had sounded sung almost, from behind the tape. It was impossible to make out clearly, but easy enough to guess at.

  Two syllables, definitely.

  ‘Mummy…’

  Maggie Mullen tried to say her son’s name but lost it in the sob. She mouthed it as she moved across to Thorne, reached out a hand and took a handful of his leather jacket at the elbow.

  Thorne remained still. Whatever she had done, or been responsible for, it had become impossible not to feel something for this woman. Seeing what she was seeing; watching the misery carve itself deeper into her face.

  Luke swayed and shouted again.

  His nose looked obscenely pink and fleshy through a gap in the thick mask of tape. The crooked line of gaffer stopped below his eyes, which had been blinking furiously, widening since he’d stepped from the dark of the cellar into the living room.

  Lardner hauled the boy closer to him, more brutally this time.

  He pointed with the knife again, first to Luke’s face, then to the cellar door. ‘It’s stupid, really,’ he said. ‘There’s a perfectly good light down there, but the bulb needs replacing. Actually, it went just before Mum died and she asked me to change it for her. I said I would, but you know how you never get round to doing these things. So…’ He saw something in Thorne’s face. ‘Now you think there’s some kind of Norman Bates thing going on, and I’m trying to keep everything the way it was, don’t you?’ He smiled. ‘I haven’t got my mother stashed upstairs, you know.’ He reached out a foot towards the sofa, flicked it against the edge of the dustsheet. ‘These things are purely practical, I promise you…’

  ‘I lost my father a year ago,’ Thorne said. ‘Almost exactly a year.’

  Relief flooded into Lardner’s face. ‘So you know.’

  ‘I know it’s hard. But nobody else has to pay for it.’

  ‘She’s not paying for that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘You can’t treat people the way she did. Not the people who love you.’

  ‘She ended it because she felt guilty,’ Thorne said. ‘She was thinking about her family.’

  Lardner found this funny. ‘She never thought about them before.’

  Next to him, Thorne felt Maggie Mullen’s grip on his arm tighten. She spoke softly to Luke, told him that it was going to be all right. That it would soon be over.

  Luke nodded, then staggered as he was pulled to one side. He took a step and regained his balance, his hand scrabbling where the rope was biting into his throat.

  ‘Whatever else happens,’ Lardner said, ‘she’ll be thinking about them a damn sight more from now on.’

  Thorne looked at the distance between himself and Lardner.

  No more than eight feet. At the end of the rope, Luke was another five or six away, to Lardner’s right.

  ‘It sounds to me like it was just about shitty timing,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s all. Probably nobody’s fault…’

  Lardner held the knife out hard in front of him. His arm was tense, shaking with the effort and the intent, but his tone when he spoke was tender, regretful.

  ‘I’ve thought of little else but her for five years, and it was instant, you know? Well, it was with me, at any rate. Maybe what happened with Sarah Hanley bound us together, made what we already had stronger.’ He turned the grip of the knife slowly in his fist. ‘She tried to end it once, back when her husband found out, but I knew she was only doing what he wanted. So I didn’t know she meant it this time, either. I didn’t know how serious she was… serious enough to do it when she did. I didn’t know she could be so completely fucking heartless.’

  Maggie Mullen’s eyes stayed on her son, but she shook her head.

  ‘And I didn’t know how hard it was going to hit me. You don’t, do you, even if you see these things coming? And I didn’t see either of them coming. Mags or Mum. They were like car crashes, both of them right out of the blue. You kid yourself that you’ve walked away unscathed, but there’s a delayed reaction.

  ‘It was like everything was happening to someone else, and all I could do was watch this other person’s life slide away, out of control. Even while I was contemplating terrible things – even while I was doing them – I couldn’t get hold of anything… I couldn’t reach it. There was no way to pull back.’

  The knife turned faster in his fist as his speech slowed. ‘Everything just gets away from you. Can you understand that? Your grip, your respect for yourself, for other people’s lives. Everything. Changing a bloody light bulb…’

  His lips were still moving, just a little, and he stared along the blade of the knife as if he were trying to work out what it was for. Suddenly, he looked lost.

  Thorne was the only person in the room not crying. He looked at Lardner and willed away any hint of compassion.

  He focused on the boy.

  Thought of Kathleen Bristow’s body. Her stained nightdress. Her sparrow’s legs, twisted…

  ‘Let Luke go,’ he said.

  Lardner shook his head. Thorne could not be sure if it was a refusal or the gesture of a man who was unsure, distracted. There were no more than a couple of paces between them…

  He tensed. A heartbeat away. Lardner had not been afraid to use the knife before.

  Thorne knew he would be lucky to come away unscathed.

  He had no idea what Lardner’s response would be to an attack. Would he lay down his weapon and throw in the towel? Or would he take a child’s life as easily as he’d taken that of an old woman? Whatever his appearance, however beaten and confused he seemed, the unpredictability of the man opposite made him as dangerous as any gangland enforcer or flat-eyed psychopath Thorne had ever faced.

  A few years earlier, in a similar position, he’d frozen while a man had held a knife to the neck of a female officer. He had done it by the book, afraid that heroics would cost the officer her life.

  Then he’d watched her die anyway.

  The boy himself had become completely still and silent. His eyes had closed. Then the words of Luke’s mother – calling his name, asking him repeatedly if he was all right – seemed to snap Lardner back into the moment.

  ‘He’s fine, really,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve become good mates, haven’t we, Luke?’

  The b
oy opened his eyes.

  ‘We’ve had some good old chats down there, I reckon.’

  ‘No…’

  Thorne saw the spasm of panic around Maggie Mullen’s eyes.

  ‘Talked about all sorts.’

  ‘Like what?’

  A shrug. ‘Family, you know. The important things in life…’

  ‘Don’t.’

  Luke Mullen moaned, a long, desperate ‘no…’ from behind the tape.

  ‘I wasn’t planning on bringing any of it up here,’ Lardner said, ‘but now that you mention it…’

  It was no more than a couple of paces, but Thorne knew Lardner could have the knife at Luke’s throat before he reached him.

  ‘What did you tell my son?’

  ‘Want me to repeat it? Even police officers can be shocked, you know. But he looks up to it.’

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘Should I tell him what the pair of us got up to in bed? Or how about why you started having an affair with me in the first place?’

  If she rushed towards her son, if she could distract Lardner for just a second, he’d have a chance. There was just no way to let her know what to do.

  ‘Luke, listen to me. I don’t know what he’s been telling you.’

  ‘We’d better not pretend it was my looks.’

  ‘He’s sick. You know that, darling, don’t you? You know he’s sick.’

  Thorne would need to go for the left hand, for the knife. Maybe if Luke was quick and moved away at the same time, Lardner could be caught off balance…

  ‘Driven into my arms,’ Lardner said. ‘I think that’s a fair description.’

  ‘Twisted. What he’s been saying.’

  ‘Certainly driven out of her husband’s.’

  ‘Please look at me, Luke.’

  ‘I think we all know each other pretty well by now. A home truth or two can’t hurt, can it?’

  ‘Luke. Please!’

  There would be no perfect moment. He just needed to pick one…

  ‘Why don’t you tell the inspector all about it?’ Lardner’s mouth was firm, grim, but there was gentleness in his eyes. ‘Why you can’t bear to let him touch you…’