Buried-6 (10 page)

Hol and, if he was honest, had been as neither boy himself. At secondary school in Kingston twenty years before, he’d slogged it out somewhere between the two extremes. Head down; unhappily anonymous.

The four boys were already starting to amble away, but Kenny Parsons walked quickly after them, moved ahead and halted their progress. ‘Hang on, lads, we haven’t finished.’

‘Haven’t we?’ the boy with the earring asked.

‘One of your friends is missing.’

‘I barely know him.’ One of the others laughed. The boy with the earring shot him a look, shut him up instantly.

‘So you’re not in the same class?’

‘Correct. We’re not.’

‘Same year?’

‘Also correct. I don’t see how any of this is real y helping, though, do you?’ He was already on the move again, hitching his bag across his shoulder and walking towards the main road.

Hol and watched the boy and his friends depart. Something familiar about the boy’s face, too; something important. Thinking about the way he’d spoken to Parsons; the way he’d looked at a police officer.

A
black
police officer . . .

‘Cheeky little fucker,’ Parsons said.

It was a jolt, like the gut-lurch you feel driving over a humpback bridge, when Hol and final y dragged the picture into focus. The cross dangling from the ear. A face he’d seen before.

‘I thought these posh kids had better manners than that.’

Hol and nodded, knowing that this was exactly the point; that, if he was right, ‘cheeky’ was not the half of it.

The boy with the earring could afford to be sure of himself. It went with the uniform and the accent, for sure, but it also went with the fact that people made judgements about character on the strength of how you looked and sounded. Most people believed what such things had always told them.

Hol and col ared the next kid who passed and pointed towards the boy with the spiky hair. He asked the question and was given a name. Then he watched the boy cal ed Adrian Farrel turn to look at them and walk slowly backwards down the drive, the blond hair stil visible as he was absorbed, uniform by uniform, into the exodus of blue and grey.

The boy could wel afford to be confident, because appearances were just that. And police officers, just like everybody else, made stupid assumptions.

Thorne, though usual y more likely to brood than complain, was not beyond a decent moan every so often; and Carol Chamberlain, if she was in the right mood, could be a good listener.

He grumbled into the phone about his back, about being shifted to the Kidnap Unit, about the fact that his only real avenue of investigation was rapidly turning into a cul-de-sac.

Carol Chamberlain was not in the right mood. ‘You should go and see someone,’ she said.

‘What, like a psychiatrist?’

‘That as wel , but I’m talking about your back. Shut up about it and go and see a doctor.’

After the chat with Jesmond, Thorne had walked back to Becke House and run the two newest names on the list through CRIMINT. Bil y Campbel was reported to be attending a drug and alcohol rehab centre in Scotland. Wayne Barber had final y got round to using that screwdriver and was serving life with a twenty-five-year tariff in Wakefield Prison. That left only Mul en’s original two, and Jesmond had made it clear he thought they were both a waste of time.

Thorne had started to feel like he was wading through treacle. He’d grabbed a sandwich from the canteen and walked back up to the Major Incident Room. Wondered whom he could possibly cal up and complain to while he ate his lunch.

He’d known ex-DCI Carol Chamberlain for a couple of years. She’d been brought out of retirement in her early fifties and recruited for the Area Major Review Unit, a smal team comprising previously retired officers, put together to take a fresh look at cold cases. They were known – not always affectionately – as the Crinkly Squad.

Chamberlain was anything but crinkly.

Thorne had always known that she could be spiky, that she was not a woman to get on the wrong side of, but the year before he’d seen a blackness seep and spil from her; a slick of poisonous rage every bit the equal of anything bubbling and slopping inside himself, which had threatened to envelop them both. Once its acrid shadow had lifted, there had been enough light for them both to see clearly, to get what was needed, but there had been a price to pay. If it hadn’t been for those few terrible minutes of madness – never spoken of since –they would not have found the man responsible for setting fire to a young girl. And, though Chamberlain would never know it, Thorne’s father might stil be alive.

She was a friend, but like most people whom Tom Thorne respected, she frightened him a little.

‘Maybe I should cal back later,’ Thorne said. ‘Obviously you’re busy worming the cat or doing a crossword or something.’

‘Cheeky bastard. Just because I don’t want to listen to you whingeing.’

‘I cal ed because
occasionally
you have some decent advice.’

‘Right, and because I know Tony Mul en.’

‘
Sorry?
’ Thorne put down his sandwich.

‘Didn’t you know that?’

‘If I had, I would have cal ed you straight away. How long have you known him?’

‘I worked with him in CID at Golders Green, twelve or thirteen years ago, something like that. He’d’ve been a DS then, probably, or maybe he was about to be made up. He was being bumped up to chief inspector round about the time I retired, I think.’

Thorne grabbed a scrap of paper, began to scribble notes. ‘So?’

‘So . . . he was decent enough, I suppose. Straight, as far as I could tel , but that doesn’t mean a great deal. I’ve got a lot of people wrong one way or another over the years.’

‘What about these two names then? Cotteril and Quinn.’ Thorne could hear classical music in the background. Chamberlain’s husband, Jack, was a keen listener.

‘I know it’s not what you want to hear, but I think Jesmond might be right. I can’t see either of those two as kidnappers.’ She paused. ‘I don’t suppose anybody mentioned Grant Freestone, did they?’

‘Should they have?’ Thorne wrote down the name.

‘Wel , not
everyone
maybe, but I’m surprised his name hasn’t come up at al .’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Freestone sexual y assaulted a number of kids, 1993 or ’94, round there. Boys and girls, I don’t think he was fussy. He kept them in a garage behind his flat.’

Kept them
. . .

Thorne tried to blink away the image of a bag coming down over a boy’s face.

‘I was only on it briefly,’ Chamberlain said. ‘But Tony Mul en was very much involved, might even have been the arresting officer. It was common knowledge that things got nasty, that Freestone was making threats more or less from the moment he was nicked until he got sent down.’

‘Threats against Mul en?’

‘He might wel have threatened others, but it’s Mul en I remember. I was in court one of the days and I can stil see the look Freestone gave him: not aggressive exactly, but . . . Wel , I can stil remember it, so . . .’

‘Thanks, Carol. I’l check it out.’

She said nothing for a second or two, then the music was turned down. ‘Let me do it.’

Slowly, Thorne underlined Grant Freestone’s name. ‘I thought, you know, there were cats to worm.’

‘I’m ignoring you. Seriously, Tom, why don’t you let me do some asking around and get back to you?’

Thorne could hear the change in Chamberlain’s voice immediately. The work she did for AMRU was irregular, and frustrating more often than not. He knew how much she relished feeling useful; how keen she was to get her teeth into something, into
anything
. He also knew that she stil had a broad network of contacts and that she was bloody good at what she did. She might come up with a damn sight more than could be gleaned from any computer search.

‘Also, Jack’s had a dodgy back for years,’ she said. ‘He’s got some fantastic stuff he rubs on at night. I can bring it next time I see you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘So you’ve had a double result.’

Thorne thought about the video, the man with the syringe. He wondered if this could possibly be the same man whose face Carol Chamberlain stil remembered from a courtroom a dozen years earlier. A man who’d taken children before.

With one hand, he reached for his discarded sandwich. The other put pen back to paper and began to scrawl.

Drew box after box after box around the man’s name.

CONRAD

He’d come to realise a long time ago that nearly everything came down to fish and ponds. To how big a fish you were and the size of the pond you swam around in. That and time, of course. He’d decided that time was a very weird thing to get your head round.

Obviously, he’d never read that book about it by the bloke in the wheelchair; the one who spoke through some machine he’d invented and sounded like a Dalek. He wouldn’t have understood it if he had, he knew that much, but he was pretty bloody sure that it would have been interesting. Time never ceased to amaze him, the way it messed you around. How you always got back from somewhere quicker than you got there. How the first week of your summer holiday seemed to last for ages and then the second week flew by and was al over before your skin had started peeling. How time dragged on and on when you were waiting for something to happen.

It didn’t seem like five minutes since Amanda had danced across and stuck her tits out at him. Since she’d been happy to let him get his end away for a few Bacardi Breezers and the promise of a favour. Five minutes . . . six months . . . whatever . . . and now they were shooting a kid ful of drugs and sitting and waiting for something to happen.

To be honest, he’d been happier doing what they’d done before. It was easy – in and out – and if anyone got hurt it was only because they real y asked for it. People who were stupid enough to get al heroic – with money that belonged to fucking Esso or whoever – deserved a kicking, as far as he was concerned. This was different, though. There was no guts in it, nothing to make you feel like you’d earned what you’d made. It felt shameful, like something only a pussy or a wanker would do. It was a weakling’s crime.

Maybe he’d feel different when the two of them were sitting somewhere warm, spending the money. Maybe then he could forget how they’d come by it. He hoped so, anyway.

Amanda was in the kitchen. Cheese on toast, probably; baked beans or something. She kept tel ing him that they’d splash out on somewhere flashy, go to a place with a doorman and photographers outside when the money came through. He’d asked when that was likely to be; told her that he was getting fed up sitting around with his thumb up his arse. That he wanted it finished. She’d told him that it wouldn’t be much longer. That it would be over and done with soon enough, one way or another. He’d thought that sounded a bit fucking ominous.

He’d looked across at the boy then, slumped in a corner of the bedroom, and thought that it sounded very fucking scary . . .

That had been a while ago. Hours and hours. Days, even. Time dragging its feet like some poor bastard who knows he’s got a beating coming.

He knew it was al his own fault. That he’d had the chance to say ‘no’ early on, to say that it was a stupid idea. He couldn’t lay al this at Amanda’s door; but stil , he hated it.

Waiting and not knowing.

And feeling like a very smal fish.

SIX

There were posters covering almost every inch of the pale green Anaglypta: the Spurs team of 1975, with Steve Perryman in front holding the bal ; a futuristic Roger Dean landscape; the female tennis player walking away from camera scratching at a bare buttock. In the corner of the room, a music centre sat on a shelf supported by house-bricks, Bowie and Deep Purple gatefolds spread out across its Perspex lid and leaning against its speakers. Books and piles of magazines were strewn across an old dining table, carried up from downstairs to be used as a desk:
Melody Maker
,
New Musical Express
,
Shoot!
,
Jaws
,
Chariots of the Gods
, a couple of tattered Sven Hassel paperbacks. A Jil y Johnson calendar and a Woolworth’s dartboard on the wal next to the window . . .

Thorne blinked and looked again at these newer wal s. Smooth and orchid pale.

There were reproductions of ancient maps, architectural blueprints with elaborate French cal igraphy, posters for exhibitions at the V & A and Tate Modern. Some had been mounted in simple clip-frames while others were stuck to the wal with Blu-Tack. Standing in the centre of a very different bedroom from the one that had once been his own, Thorne decided that what Parsons had said the day before was about right: Luke Mul en was hardly a typical sixteen-year-old.

He walked across to the metal and glass workstation, surprised to see an Arsenal diary on top of the papers stacked to one side. He reached for it, curious, and somewhat relieved that the boy – though clearly misguided in his choice of team – had at least one passion with which Thorne was able to identify. He flicked through the first few pages, saw immediately that it was no more than a homework diary.

There was a rectangular patch of dust on the glass, where Luke’s laptop had sat. The tech boys were stil working on the hard drive, digging around for anything that might have been wel hidden by anyone who knew what they were doing. But from what they’d been able to establish thus far, there was no significant email correspondence, nothing on any computerised diary to suggest that Luke had been planning to go anywhere. He hadn’t spent time in chat rooms, and it didn’t appear that he’d struck up a recent relationship with anyone online.

Little more had been gleaned from the details of his mobile-phone activity. The phone itself had been in Luke’s possession when he’d gone missing, so it had not been possible to check his contacts list, but records of cal s and text messages provided by the phone company had yet to reveal anything that looked important. Luke had cal ed his sister more than anybody else.