Buried-6 (24 page)

‘Yeah.’ Warren turned and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘That was a decent-sized slap in the face.’

‘That was when you decided to quit?’

‘No, not even then.’ He laughed gently at the ridiculousness of it al . ‘But that was when the family
made
me quit.’

‘Like an “intervention” sort of thing?’

‘Wel , a British version of one. My sister cut me dead and my brother beat the shit out of me.’

Hol and could not help but be impressed by the man’s openness, by his apparent honesty. He certainly seemed to be someone who’d given up hiding anything a long time ago. ‘So, when was that?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been clean almost exactly two years, which is just about as long as I was on drugs.’

Hol and did the maths and got an interesting result. ‘So you started taking drugs when you were working on the MAPPA project.’

‘I started taking cocaine seriously in 2001.’

‘Around the time the panel was disbanded?’

Warren nipped a strand of tobacco from his tongue. ‘Somewhere around there, probably. I could check, but I don’t think “Took first line of charlie” appears anywhere in that year’s diary—’

He was cut off by a burst of shouting from the next room, which grew suddenly louder as a door was thrown open. A few seconds later, a skinny teenage boy, who could not have been much older than Luke Mul en, stormed into the kitchen, gesturing wildly and cursing at the top of his voice.

The cat fled from the window ledge.

‘Cunt Andrew grassed me to the group, fucking told everyone I’d been talking about gear . . . about gear I’d taken like I loved it. Fucker wasn’t even there . . . cunt, saying shit to make himself popular with you lot. I swear, you better take al the fucking knives out of this fucking kitchen, Neil, I’m tel ing you that . . .’

Warren led the boy to the smal kitchen table. He sat him beneath a poster that said, ‘THIS IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL ’, and talked to him as though Hol and and Heeney weren’t there.

He spoke gently enough at first, until the boy grew calmer, then gradual y his tone became firmer. He said that he understood how annoying it was to be grassed up, but that Andrew had done the right thing. Talking about drugs in a positive way was against al the rules; to talk about them as if they were something to be missed or mourned was not the way to move forward.

‘It’s stinking thinking, Danny, you know that. Stinking thinking . . .’

The phrase rang a bel inside Hol and’s head. They were buzzwords, with the dreadful whiff of an American self-help course. But it struck a chord. Hol and made a mental note to tel Thorne, who he was sure would find it funny.

Stinking thinking.

Without it, the two of them would be out of a job.

It wasn’t panic but simple surprise that passed across Jane Freestone’s face when she opened the door. Saw that it wasn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses who were ringing her bel at nine-thirty on a Saturday morning.

‘I thought you lot had given up,’ she said. ‘Worked out you were wasting your time, started bothering someone else once a fucking year.’

It was the turn of those waving the warrant cards to look surprised, while Jane Freestone’s features settled quickly into a resentful sneer. It seemed to Thorne that the Sarah Hanley case, certainly as far as Grant Freestone’s involvement was concerned, had gone from cold to deep frozen. After a terse exchange on the doorstep, he and Porter were grudgingly ushered inside.

They walked down a narrow corridor with framed prints of sunsets and snowscapes on the wal s. A sign saying, ‘Bil y’s Room’ was Sel otaped to a closed door. From behind it, Thorne could hear a television and the sound of toys being thrown around. He smel ed last night’s Chinese takeaway as they passed the kitchen.

Within a few minutes of standing in Jane Freestone’s flat – a two-bedroom maisonette on an estate in Brentford – Thorne’s journey to work was starting to seem like a fond and far-distant memory. He’d left earlier than he needed to; slipped out of the flat without waking Hendricks and taken the longer route in through Highgate and Hampstead. The roads had been almost empty. Coming down towards Golders Green past the Heath, the sky ahead of him had been cloudless, and drowned with pink.

He’d thought, even then, that it would probably be as good as the day was ever likely to get.

The view from the window, below the M4 to the trading estate beyond, was only marginal y bleaker than the one to be had inside, and the tenant’s mood was more unpleasant than either. Thorne had pissed off some bad people in his time, but it had been a while since he’d felt quite so hated. The woman rarely raised her voice, but the tone was unmistakable; there was poison in every word, spat, spun or whispered. She told them she hadn’t got long because she needed to get her kids dressed. They asked her what she’d meant when she’d answered the door, and she explained that there had been no annual visit the previous year; so she hadn’t had to talk to ‘one of you fuckers’ for eighteen months. Porter explained that she and Thorne were fuckers of a different sort; that Grant’s name had come up in connection with an entirely different matter.

‘Something else you can fit him up for?’

‘You think your brother was fitted up for Sarah Hanley’s murder?’ Porter asked.

Freestone shook her head, smirked like Thorne and Porter were as thick as pig-shit. She was somewhere in her early thirties, tal and large-breasted, with dark hair scraped back from her face and tied up. Thorne might almost have found her sexy in a hard-faced, brittle kind of way. If she were wearing a different dressing-gown perhaps, and he hadn’t been laid in twenty years.

‘Are you saying that a police officer, or officers, made your brother the prime suspect because they couldn’t find anyone else?’

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘Or that
they
were responsible for the murder in the first place?’

She took a crumpled tissue from her dressing-gown pocket, used one corner to dab at the inside of a nostril. ‘There was the odd copper who wouldn’t have been too gutted if Grant got sent down again.’ She stuffed the tissue back. ‘Put it that way.’

Thorne resisted looking across at Porter and sensed that she was doing likewise. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy naming this “odd copper”,’ he said.

She didn’t.

Thorne and Porter were standing, but when they’d first come into the living room Freestone had dropped into an armchair and turned towards the large, flat-screen TV in one corner.

She’d switched it on, then muted the volume, and spent much of the conversation staring at the screen.

‘Why did he run, Jane, if he didn’t kil Sarah?’

It was an obscure cable channel. Every time Thorne looked, someone was being shown around a house.

‘Because he knew he was in the frame, and he didn’t want to go back to prison, did he? Even though this was an unrelated offence, they had him marked down inside as someone who messes with kids.’

‘
Marked down?
’ Thorne said. ‘Nobody planted those children in his garage.’

Freestone ignored the dig, studied the TV as though she could read lips.

‘Don’t you think he would have been better off staying put,’ Porter said, ‘if he real y didn’t do it?’

‘Stop fucking saying, “
if”
.’ She turned suddenly, looking about ready to punch someone’s lights out. ‘Grant was with me when his girlfriend was kil ed. We were in the park with my kids.’ She pointed back towards the corridor. ‘Go and fucking-wel ask them.’

The woman could easily make such an invitation, knowing it would never be accepted. Her eldest child was eight years old. Whatever they might say if asked now, neither he nor his little brother could be trusted to remember what had happened back when neither of them had been old enough to say much of anything.

Porter held up a hand, left a beat before trying again. ‘Wouldn’t he have been better off trying to prove he was innocent?’

The look Freestone gave Porter before she turned back to the TV made it clear that now she
knew
they were both stupid.

‘Does Grant think he was stitched up?’ Thorne asked.

‘Have a guess.’

‘Is that what he said at the time? Did you see him before he disappeared?’

‘I haven’t seen him in five years.’

‘Nobody’s suggesting that he’s hiding under the bed, but the two of you must have been in touch, surely?’

‘Must we?’

Thorne took a couple of steps towards the armchair. ‘He’s phoned you, written you letters, something. Is it what he stil thinks?’

Freestone pushed herself up, waited for Thorne to move out of the way so she could get past. ‘I’m going for a piss. Give you two a chance to have a good old nosy while I’m gone.’

She pointed to a door. ‘My bed’s through there, in case you
do
want to check underneath . . .’

As soon as she had left, as soon as they’d heard the lock slide across on the bathroom door, Thorne and Porter did as Freestone had suggested. They moved quickly, and in virtual silence around the room, drew each other’s attention to items of interest with a nod or a whisper. There were photographs on a low, glass table to the side of the TV: Jane Freestone and a man Thorne recognised as her brother, wearing smiles they’d been holding for a few seconds too long; a holiday snap of a wel -built man with ginger hair and moustache sitting on a balcony in shirt and shorts, posing with his pint; Freestone’s kids in a playground, running towards the camera. Porter looked at the magazines on a box below the window:
Heat
,
Auto
Trader
,
Nuts
. Thorne flicked quickly through the utility bil s, fastened together with a bul dog clip next to the midi-system. He looked for any overseas numbers on the BT cal s list and noted that the Sky subscription was for the complete films and sports package. He moved away to study the spines on the row of CDs when he heard the toilet flush.

When Freestone returned, she walked straight back to the armchair and sank into it as though there were nobody else in the room.

Porter nodded towards the photograph of the man with the beer. ‘Is that the kids’ dad?’

The laugh was short and bitter. ‘He is now. Makes a damn sight better job of it than the real one ever did, that’s for sure.’

Thorne wandered across and leaned down to look at the photo again. ‘He lives here, does he?’

‘Most of the time.’ She sucked her teeth, answered like it was the question she’d been expecting. ‘Which is why we’ve got Sky Sports and so many heavy-metal CDs.’ She looked at Thorne, her eyes wide with mock concern. ‘In case you were wondering.’

Thorne was wondering how many times this woman had had police officers in her house. ‘Where is he?’

‘Arsenal are away at Manchester United,’ she said. ‘Him and his mates went up on the train last night.’

Thorne looked closer and recognised the Gunners crest on the man’s polo shirt.

‘You going to get married?’ Porter asked.

‘What’s the point? It’s good for fuck-al , except making it slightly easier for the CSA to catch up with them when they leave.’

In his head, Thorne fashioned a smartarse remark about how nice it was to see romance alive and wel . He kept it to himself, thought instead about how vulnerable a marriage was; about those less-than-sturdy emotions with their in-built expiry dates. A marriage could survive if love became something else – companionship, perhaps – but if hate got its foot in the door, there would only ever be one outcome.

He thought about Maggie and Tony Mul en.

Hate did not appear overnight. It seeded itself. It sprouted and climbed from within the dark, damp subtleties of blame and guilt. Thorne could conceive of no better condition for such a twisted flowering than the loss of a child.

Thorne’s eyes shifted back to Jane Freestone.

She was staring like she’d walked him in on the bottom of her shoe. ‘What exactly is this “entirely different matter” you were talking about, then?’ She was turning her head before she’d finished the question, her attention stolen by the sound of a child crying along the corridor.

‘Bol ocks,’ she said.

Porter joined her as she reached the door. ‘Can I use the toilet?’

‘Why don’t you just make yourself some fucking breakfast?’ Freestone said, walking out ahead of her.

Left alone in the room, Thorne sat down on the sofa, deciding that as he got older and more experienced, he was becoming worse at reading people; at getting so much as an
idea
of what they were thinking. He could be close enough to see his own reflection in someone’s eyes and stil not be able to tel if they were sincere or running rings around him. There were days when he’d have the Pope down as a serial kil er and Jeffrey Archer as an honest man . . .

He looked at the TV, saw more people being shown around more beautiful y designed interiors. With the sound down, he tried to work out if the people liked the houses or not just from the expressions on their faces.

‘I’d have to say Grant Freestone could be capable of almost anything.’

Hol and, Heeney and Warren were alone again in the kitchen. Danny, the boy who had been so upset, had gone back into the living room to apologise to the rest of the group for his stinking thinking; to get back ‘on the programme’. Warren had told him he should think a little more about what he wanted. That he should count himself lucky he wouldn’t be spending the rest of the day with a bog seat for a necklace.

‘I’d better qualify that,’ Warren added. ‘If he’s stil doing drugs, he’d be capable of anything.’

‘You think he might be?’ Hol and asked.

‘Who knows? He had a problem when he came out of prison, and I doubt it had completely gone away by the time his girlfriend was kil ed.’

It was an interesting choice of phrase. ‘So maybe he was high when he attacked her?’

‘I’m not going to speculate about that. Can’t see the point. Make no mistake, though, even if Grant had been close to getting clean, that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s going to dirty you right back up again.’

Hol and remembered when Warren himself had started taking drugs. Could guilt about Sarah Hanley’s death have been the trigger for
his
addiction? ‘You think?’ he said.