Buried-6 (12 page)

‘It must have been one hel of a row, then, don’t you think? If the kid’s stil bearing a grudge while he’s being held hostage. While he’s being tied up and drugged.’ Thorne moved across and settled in against the freezer next to Porter. She shuffled along to give him room. ‘Anyway, I talked to Luke’s sister, and she’s positive the row wasn’t that serious.’

‘I think you’re reading too much into it.’

Thorne shrugged, acknowledging the possibility.

‘Like you say, the boy’s in trouble. So you’re probably right – he’s not likely to be thinking about whether he’s fal en out with his dad – but it’s perfectly natural for him to be thinking more about his mum, isn’t it? He’s only a kid.’

‘Maybe. He’s obviously trying to be brave for his mum because he doesn’t want her to worry. But shouldn’t there have been
something
, some message, for his dad? Everyone keeps banging on about how close they are.’

‘He didn’t mention his sister, either.’

That was a good point. Porter had a disconcerting habit of making them. ‘It feels strange, that’s al ,’ Thorne said.

‘Maybe he didn’t have a lot of choice about what he said.’

This was something Thorne hadn’t considered. ‘Are you saying it was scripted? You think he was told what to say? It certainly didn’t feel like that.’

‘Just thinking aloud,’ Porter said.

They stopped at the sound of footsteps on the other side of the door. They listened, heard the fridge door swing open, and Thorne waited for whoever was helping them-self to leave before he spoke in a whisper. ‘Let’s
keep
thinking,’ he said.

Porter’s mobile began ringing as they stepped out of the utility room; just when Tony Mul en walked into the kitchen. Mul en stared, his face giving nothing away, while, for reasons he couldn’t immediately fathom, Thorne felt himself redden.

Mul en nodded towards the phone in Porter’s hand. ‘I think you’d better get that,’ he said.

Porter answered, said nothing for a few seconds, but Thorne could see that whatever she was hearing was important. He glanced across at Mul en and could see that he knew it, too.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘When?’

Thorne stared until he’d made eye contact, and saw nothing but concentration.

‘I’l get back as soon as I can.’

Mul en stepped forward, asking the question calmly as soon as she’d ended the cal . ‘Have they found him?’

‘Mr Mul en . . .’ Porter glanced at Thorne, then hesitated further when she saw Mul en’s wife appear at her husband’s shoulder. ‘I’m sure you understand—’

Maggie Mul en clutched at her husband’s sleeve, asked him what had happened. He didn’t take his eyes off Porter, and when he spoke his voice was no longer quite so calm. ‘And I’m sure
you
understand. So let’s hear it.’

Porter took a second or two, then spoke quickly. ‘It’s good news,’ she said. ‘Apparently the people holding Luke aren’t as clever as we thought they were.’ Her eyes flicked to the screen on her phone, as if searching for more information, before she dropped the handset back into her pocket. ‘We got a good set of prints off the videotape.’

‘You’ve got a match?’ Mul en said.

Porter nodded. ‘We’ve got a name, yes.’ She turned to Thorne. ‘And we’re working on an address.’

Investigating a murder rarely al owed those involved much of a private life, but the hours devoted to a kidnap case were even more brutal. For those few he’d been given to get his head down, Thorne was offered a room at a smal hotel in Victoria where the Met had a permanent block booking, but he decided to make the trip back to Kentish Town instead. The travel ing would cut down his free time between shifts, but he wasn’t sleeping much anyway. He preferred lying awake at home to wearing out the thin carpet of an anonymous hotel room; to dunking teabags on strings, listening as the city coughed itself awake, and worrying about the fact that he hadn’t fed the cat.

Perhaps if it had been a slightly
nicer
hotel . . .

He arrived home just after midnight, stil early enough to cal Phil Hendricks. Five minutes into their conversation and the last can of Sainsbury’s lager, he was starting to relax. To enjoy tel ing his friend about the celebrated criminal history of a man named Conrad Al en.

‘So he waves this plastic Magnum around . . .’

‘I presume we’re talking handgun here as opposed to ice-cream . . .’

‘I’m not listening,’ Thorne said. ‘He waves it around, comes on like a hard case or whatever, thinks that’s an end to it. But, unfortunately for Conrad, the other bloke’s a little bit pissed off. He gets straight back in his car, dials 999, and fifteen minutes later an armed response unit’s squealing up and Dirty Harry’s face down on the Mile End Road, trying to convince some very pumped-up coppers that he was only having a laugh.’

‘So how come he never got done for it?’

‘Ask the CPS, mate. He was charged, but when it came to taking it any further, I suppose they just decided it wasn’t worth the effort. But, luckily for us, he was fingerprinted and this was back in 2002 before they changed the law, so the prints never got destroyed after the charge was dropped.’

‘What, and the sil y bastard just forgot you had them?’

‘Forgot that, forgot to wear gloves when he was handling the videotape . . .’

‘Not the sharpest knife in the cutlery drawer.’

‘I don’t think this is his usual line of work, you know?’ Thorne thought about another tape he’d seen a few hours before, back at Central 3000. ‘Some of the boys on the Flying Squad are fairly sure Al en’s the bloke who turned over half a dozen petrol stations and off-licences in Hackney and Dalston last year. Him, another gun that’s probably plastic, and a woman, pretending to be a hostage. A lot of shouting and shit acting.’

‘Sounds like an episode of
EastEnders
,’ Hendricks said.

‘It’s a jump from that to kidnapping kids, though, don’t you reckon?’

The tape of in-store CCTV footage had been biked over to the Yard from Finchley. As he’d watched, Thorne had struggled to equate its images with those on the tape that had been sent to the Mul en family. The picture of the big man in the ski-mask – the violence in his movements and language – failed to gel with that of the figure who’d walked towards Luke Mul en with a syringe. That action was equal y violent, every bit as brutal, in its own way, but Thorne simply couldn’t see Conrad Al en moving so easily on to something so clinical.

Something so
quietly
vicious.

Instead, he’d found himself watching the woman: staring at the screen as she screamed and begged for her life, pleading first with the robber and then with each terrified cashier and shop assistant to hand over the money before she was kil ed. If the man with the gun to her head
was
Conrad Al en, then the chances were that she was the woman who’d charmed a sixteen-year-old boy into her car. She might not be the greatest actress in the world, but Thorne had little trouble believing what she might be capable of. It was easier to imagine her as the driving force, as the one who’d come up with a way to make a lot more money than could be grabbed from the average til . Why she’d targeted Luke Mul en was a total y different matter . . .

Thorne became aware of what sounded suspiciously like chuckling on the line. ‘Is this the
EastEnders
crack? Are you laughing at your own jokes again, Hendricks?’

‘One of us has to.’

‘Good. I was hoping this would cheer you up a bit. I presume you do stil need cheering up. You’ve not real y given much away.’

Back when Thorne had first cal ed, Hendricks had sounded reluctant to say a great deal about the Brendan situation. Now, as then, he seemed keen to talk about almost anything else. Just a grunt or two. A muted ‘y’know’ before a grinding change of subject.

‘How’s the back holding up?’

Thorne rubbed his calf. ‘If anything, it’s my bloody leg more than my back.’

‘I’ve told you, it sounds like you’ve herniated the disc. You real y need to get it sorted.’

‘Not a lot of time at the minute.’

‘It’s a phantom pain in the leg, you know that, don’t you? Where the disc’s pressing on the sciatic nerve. Your brain’s being told your leg hurts, but there’s nothing real y wrong with it.’

‘Hang on . . .’ Thorne took a fast mouthful of lager. As time wore on, it was final y starting to taste of something. ‘I thought it was the brain that did the tel ing.’

‘Some parts of the body shout a bit louder than others,’ Hendricks said. ‘And of course, there’s one or two with minds of their own.’

The cat wandered in from the kitchen, grumbled and was ignored.

Thorne sat there, thinking that although the ‘part’ Hendricks was talking about –
Thorne’s
part at any rate – had been fairly subdued for a while, it had started speaking up for itself rather more than usual in the last couple of days.

AMANDA

She was happy enough about it herself, but she knew Conrad would be utterly thril ed that things were final y moving. That it would al be sorted very soon. He was in the bedroom talking to the boy, but she’d tel him as soon as he came out. They’d need to get themselves together, get ready to make a move.

The spoonful she’d been cooking up when the phone had started to ring would balance her out a little . . .

She’d screened the cal , just as she’d been doing ever since they’d got back to the flat on Friday after the pick-up. Al part of keeping their heads down, quiet as mice, and it was mostly people phoning up trying to sel shit, anyway. They’d given the kid enough stuff to knock out a horse as soon as they’d had the chance: the minute she’d driven far enough away from the school, pul ed over and let Conrad in. Then they’d waited until it was dark and carried him inside, wrapped in the cheap picnic blanket they’d bought from Halford’s and stashed in the boot. They’d made sure there was lots of food and booze in, so there was no need to go out, no need to talk to anybody. Al they’d had to do was sit and wait it out, and now they were on the last leg.

She’d screened the cal . . . then, as soon as she’d recognised the voice, she’d grabbed at the phone, picked up and listened.

She was relieved, and pleased, that it looked like working out, looked like nobody was going to get hurt. She’d always insisted on that, even when they were pul ing the hold-up thing. Nobody should get badly hurt if it could be avoided. She thought that this side of her, the side that wanted everyone to come out of a situation OK, said something good about her character. Something to be proud of. After al , with everything she’d been through, the shitty stuff she’d had to deal with when she was a girl, it would have been understandable if she’d turned into a vicious, vindictive cow; if she’d wanted others to feel pain just to make herself feel better. She knew people like that, and she despised them. No, she just wanted to have a good time and get enough of whatever she needed; to forget about al the bad stuff. And, while she was doing that, she was always happier when no one else was suffering. Not through any fault of hers, anyway. There’d been the odd idiot who hadn’t played along, of course; there were always accidents. And there was that dealer she’d asked Conrad to sort out, but lowlife like him didn’t count and deserved everything they got.

When bad things happened to bad people, she thought, there wasn’t a whole lot to get upset about.

The boy, Luke, wasn’t a bad person, and he didn’t deserve any of what was happening to him, she was aware of that. He was just the means to make the money; he was their fake gun. She thanked God that, al being wel , he would come out of it in one piece, none the worse.

Conrad had not been so certain, had said, ‘Yes, but don’t forget what he might go through later on. Don’t forget about what could happen
mentally
’.

She’d turned, inched her body away from his, and pointed out that she was hardly likely to forget that.

Now, she was feeling a lot mel ower, more forgiving. She sensed that she was starting to rol and relax, wondered if maybe she should tie the boy’s hands again as things were going to start happening soon. Get him ready to go. Then, from nowhere, as the drug took her down, she began to imagine herself and Luke meeting up in ten years or so. They would run into each other at some trendy party or club and it would al be real y nice. He’d be relaxed and pleased to see her. He’d be keen to tel her that it was al right, that, as it happened, he’d had a bit of a crush on her back then in that flat, and that a few sweaty nightmares were a smal price to pay for a whole lot of perspective. She’d tel whoever she was with that Luke and her were old friends, and it would be cool as they shared a slow dance . . .

She was only dimly aware of Conrad coming into the room as she drifted away, Luke’s arms around her neck, and his voice in her ear, thanking her for passing on her gift to him, for giving him a skin that little bit thicker than other people’s.

THURSDAY

SEVEN

Half-past stupid in the morning, his third day into it, and the sun had struggled up just a little later than Tom Thorne . . .

Its overnight absence had slowed things down, had seriously reduced the rate at which much-needed information could efficiently be gathered. It didn’t matter how important your case was, how many bodies had been discovered, how imminent the threat to life and limb, who had been kidnapped. The simple fact was that most people, most
civilians
, at any rate, tended to knock off at five o’clock. Obtaining crucial intel igence outside office hours was always difficult. Gaining vital access to any secure or private database – at a local authority housing association, the DSS, Barclay’s Bank or Virgin Mobile – was pretty much a lottery for as long as the M25 remained empty. It was often a question of tracking down a contact number for the person unlucky enough to be manning a twenty-four-hour emergency desk. Or the name of the
really
poor bastard who was going to get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.

Finding an address for their main suspect had taken the Kidnap Unit four hours, and had come down in the end to Conrad Al en’s love of cars.

Via M-CRAC, the remote-access search facility, officers had been able to access the CRIMINT system at Mile End and pul up al the details of Al en’s original arrest in 2002.