Buried-6 (40 page)

Farrel ’s smile was stil engaging enough, but his eyes were slits. ‘Nothing you’d want to hear,’ he said.

When Kitson had gone, Farrel took a step towards the automatic doors, which opened as he approached. The desk officer suggested that he should wait inside. Pointed out that it was pissing down. Told him he could suit his fucking self when Farrel said he’d rather get wet.

Outside, Farrel stood beneath the overhang and stared out at the road.

It hadn’t been much more than a day, but it felt like a lot longer: like ten years’ worth of change, of major fucking upheaval. And he knew that it hadn’t real y started yet.

His mind and his heart were racing, but he knew he needed to stay calm, that he should breeze back through the door as though nothing had happened. Despite the way he’d played it with the twat on the custody desk, he wanted to get home and see his mum and dad more than anything. He wanted to be back where it was warm and safe, and where he knew that, whatever happened, there was only ever one side they were going to be on.

He stared through the rain. Stil able to recal the taste of it as he and the others had walked towards that bus stop six months before. It had been a little colder than this, maybe, but otherwise exactly the same sort of night . . .

A dark Cavalier drew up and a thickset Asian man climbed out, leaving the engine running.

‘Minicab?’ Farrel shouted.

The man turned back towards the car.

Adrian Farrel pul ed up his hood and jogged after him.

TWENTY-TWO

‘Sunday’s a pretty busy day round here,’ Neil Warren said. ‘It’s changeover day, so it’s always a bit bloody frantic if there are new tenants coming in or anyone going out. Plus I’ve got family business and church stuff, and I organise a smal service here in the house for anyone who’s interested . . .’

‘It’s real y not a problem,’ Hol and said. There was a block of multicoloured Post-its on his desk. He scratched a tick next to Neil Warren’s name.

‘I just wanted to explain why I hadn’t returned your cal sooner.’

‘I understand.’

‘Now, of course, I feel fucking dreadful.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Hol and said.

‘You meet people, they drift into your orbit, and then . . . life moves on, you know? You go in different directions or whatever, and most of the time you never give them another thought. Kathleen Bristow hadn’t crossed my mind in five years until you came round here talking about Grant Freestone, and now she’s dead. And I think I should probably feel more upset than I do . . .’

‘Like you said, you hadn’t thought about her in a long time.’

‘I’l ask people here to remember her in their prayers.’

Hol and looked at his watch: it was five past nine. Once this was done with, he’d see about getting away. Chloe would be in bed, but it would be good to have an hour or so with Sophie before one or both of them flaked out.

‘I take it you don’t think it’s a coincidence,’ Warren said.

‘Sir?’

‘That you start asking people about what happened back then, about Freestone and al that, and someone on the panel gets kil ed.’

‘I think it’s probably unlikely.’

‘Have you spoken to the others?’

‘Most of them, yes.’

Warren said nothing for ten or fifteen seconds. When Hol and heard the click of a lighter, he guessed that Warren had been rol ing a cigarette. There was a long exhalation, another pause. Then Warren said, ‘Did she suffer very much?’

Hol and would normal y have said something pat, something reassuring, at this point. Beyond knowing that Warren was plain-speaking himself, that he didn’t seem enamoured of bul shit, Hol and couldn’t real y say where his answer came from.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think she probably did.’

It was only twenty minutes from Hendon to Arkley. Half a dozen Gram and Emmylou tracks had done wonders for Thorne’s mood, but al their sterling work was undone with one glance at Tony Mul en’s face.

After their last encounter, Thorne hadn’t been anticipating the warmest of welcomes, but there was more to this than a predictable antipathy. There was resignation in the man’s expression, and in his posture as he stood aside to let Thorne in without a word. Tony Mul en looked like a man who was no longer expecting good news.

As a parent, there would always be hope until there was a body to bury, but as an ex-police officer, Thorne knew that Mul en would be painful y aware of how the timescales worked.

How quickly realistic chances became slim ones. How quickly they faded away to nothing.

It was now nine days since Luke had first gone missing; almost five since the video had been sent; seventy-two hours since Luke had been taken a second time, without word of any kind from whoever was holding him.

Thorne could stil see rage in Mul en’s eyes, but there was next to no fight left in him.

‘Whatever you want, I hope it’s quick,’ Mul en said. ‘We’re al tired.’

‘Actual y, I’ve come to have a word with Juliet.’

‘Why?’

Thorne took a second and decided it couldn’t hurt; that it might even build a bridge or two. ‘We’ve been talking to a boy from Butler’s Hal about a completely different case. It’s almost certainly unconnected with this one. With Luke . . .’

‘
Almost
certainly?’

‘We think he’s lying about knowing Luke, for some reason. We know he phoned here on several occasions and we want to make doubly sure it was Luke he was cal ing. I just came to check that he wasn’t cal ing your daughter. I don’t think I’l be more than ten minutes.’

‘What’s this boy’s name?’

Thorne took a little longer this time. ‘Farrel .’

There was no obvious reaction, but Thorne wondered if he’d seen a flicker of something before Mul en turned his head, looked away and spoke to his wife.

Thorne hadn’t noticed Maggie Mul en. She was sitting ten or so feet above them at the top of the stairs, on a smal landing before further flights curved up to the second and third floors. She was wearing dark tracksuit bottoms and a brown sweater. Her hair was tied back, much of it the same grey as her face, and as the cigarette ash that Thorne presumed fil ed the saucer between her feet.

‘You’d better give Jules a cal ,’ Mul en said.

His wife stared, as though she hadn’t heard him, then glanced at Thorne. He smiled and nodded. Both gestures were smal and both felt slightly patronising even as he made them; as though he were reassuring someone very old or very sick.

‘Has she done something wrong?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ Thorne said. ‘It’l just be a couple of questions.’

Mul en stepped past Thorne, leaned against the banister at the foot of the stairs. ‘Just give her a shout, wil you, love?’

Maggie Mul en picked up the saucer and got to her feet. She brushed a few stray ashes from her lap, turned and walked up and out of sight towards Juliet’s room. After half a minute, Thorne heard the faintest of knocks, then a muffled exchange, one voice raised above the other. He heard a door shut and the tread of four feet moving down the stairs.

As he waited in the hal , Thorne studied the family photographs on a table by the front door, then looked at the wal paper instead when he became uncomfortable. Next to him, he heard Mul en’s head bump gently against the wal as he let his head drop back; heard him say, ‘fuck’ quietly, to no one in particular.

Farrel presumed that the cab firm had been given the address by the custody sergeant when the car had been booked. The driver certainly seemed to know where he was going. The miserable bastard said nothing as they drove, but that suited Farrel wel enough. He didn’t want to chat. He wanted to close his eyes and gather his thoughts.

He leaned his head against the window and listened to the rain slapping on the roof and to the squeak of the wipers. It stank of oil in the back, and one of those pine air-fresheners shaped like a tree. Piece of shit probably didn’t even have insurance; the Asians always tried to avoid paying anything if they thought they could get away with it. It was like the joke a few of them had about the Asian kids at school. They used to say that their dads were the ones who owned chains of newsagents’, and posh curry houses, but stil went to the headmaster’s office to try and haggle over the fees . . .

When the car pul ed over, Farrel thought that he must have nodded off and slept through most of the journey. It seemed like only five minutes since they’d driven away from the station.

A door opened on either side of him. When they’d closed again, he was sitting between two Asian men.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ But even as he was asking the question, the answer was settling in his stomach and starting to boil.

They didn’t speak to him.

They didn’t look at him, or at each other.

The driver flicked his indicator up and eased slowly into the stream of traffic. He turned on the radio, tuned it into a bhangra station. Moved ahead nice and steadily.

Farrel was stil pretty certain that the police had bailed him just so they could watch him for a while; see if he got in touch with either of the others. Wedged tight between the men on either side, he wasn’t able to turn round ful y, but he craned his neck as much as he could, desperately hoping that he might be proved right and see a panda behind them. But al he saw was rain, anonymous headlights, and, when he turned round again, the eyes of the driver in the rear-view mirror. They were cold and flat, and yel owed for a second as the Cavalier passed below a street light.

The digital clock on the chrome range read 21.14. Juliet Mul en sat perched on the black, granite worktop with a can of Diet Coke. Her Converse Al stars bounced gently against the cupboard beneath.

‘He’s the twatty sixth-former with the spiky hair, right?’

‘That’s a good description,’ Thorne said.

‘Fancies himself.’

‘Not a friend of yours, then?’

‘No . . .’

Thorne sat at the kitchen table. Fresh coffee had been made and he’d helped himself. ‘He’s a good-looking boy, though, to be serious. Wouldn’t you say? I bet some of the girls in your year like him, don’t they?’

‘Maybe some of the sad ones.’

‘But not you?’

She threw him a look drenched in pity. Thorne was convinced. He knew precisely the reaction he’d get were he to ask Juliet Mul en if she’d ever spoken to Adrian Farrel on the phone. ‘What about your brother?’

‘What about him?’

‘Is he a friend of Farrel ?’

She took a swig from her can, swal owed the belch. ‘I don’t know al his friends – not that he’s got too many, to be honest – but I seriously doubt it.’

‘Why?’

‘Like I said, Farrel ’s a wanker. He’s a poser and Luke’s real y good at seeing through al that shit. If someone like Farrel was being matey with Luke, it would probably just be so he could take the piss. Or because he wanted something.’

‘Any idea what that might be?’

‘Not a clue. Help with homework, maybe?’

Thorne nodded. It was the first thing she’d thought of, the most obvious explanation. It was the first thing Farrel himself had thought of, too, when he’d been groping for a lie to explain the phone cal s.

Juliet squashed the empty can, dropped down from the worktop and opened a cupboard where there was a recycling bin. ‘Is this to do with what’s happened to Luke?’

‘I don’t think so. I’m not sure . . .’

‘Do you think Luke’s stil alive?’

Thorne looked up at the girl. Her image was designed to project a generalised angst and tension, frustration and despair at nothing in particular. In that moment, though, brightly lit and brutal, there was only a pudgy-faced child whose breathing was suddenly ragged above the low hum of the fridge. Thorne could see beyond the dark make-up and the bitten nails to the consuming pain beneath.

And he could see that lying would not ease it.

‘I’m not sure about that, either.’

Juliet nodded, like she appreciated the honesty. ‘I am,’ she said.

TWENTY-THREE

‘Amin Latif was my nephew,’ the driver said. He nodded towards the men in the back seat. ‘And these are my sons: Amin’s cousins.’

Final y the men on either side of Farrel looked at him. One had a goatee and wore a leather jacket. The other was clean-shaven, with smal , round glasses and hair that flopped down across his forehead. Neither of them looked like hard men, Farrel thought. But they both looked hard
enough
, and intense, like they had something burning in
their
bel ies, too.

‘You look like you’re going to shit yourself,’ the one with the goatee said.

Farrel had spent the ten minutes since they’d climbed in next to him imagining the worst. He’d pictured the car pul ing off the road, driving on to some deserted industrial estate. He knew for certain that the men would be carrying knives.

‘How does it feel?’ the one with the glasses asked.

In fact, the driver had steered the Cavalier into the large car park of an entertainment complex. Farrel thought he recognised the place; that maybe he’d been bowling here one night or gone to the pictures. The car had eventual y stopped in a far corner behind a Pizza Hut, away from any other vehicles. Out of the light.

‘I could have such a good time using a blade on you.’ The man with the glasses was inches from Farrel ’s face. Farrel could smel the chewing gum on his breath. ‘Not quick, either.

There are halal butchers in our family. You understand what that is?’

‘He knows how to bleed an animal properly.’

‘And you stil wouldn’t have paid for what you did to Amin . . . nowhere near. For what you did before you kil ed him.’

Farrel heard himself say, ‘please’. Felt the heat that was rising inside him spread out and bubble across every inch of his skin.

The driver, a big man, heaved himself further round in his seat. ‘OK, let’s calm down. Nobody’s using knives on anyone.’ He pointed a finger at Farrel . ‘You’re going to prison, don’t be in any doubt about that.
That’s
how you’re going to pay for Amin. With years and years of stale air, and shitting where you eat. Of worrying what might happen every time an Asian face stares at you in the canteen or across the exercise yard. You clear about that?’