Buried-6 (46 page)

‘Oh,
can
we?

‘Plus any little extras that come up: out-of-date tax discs, that sort of thing . . .’

‘Very generous of you.’

‘
Bloody
generous, if you ask me.’

Porter raised her eyebrows.

‘If Lardner had been at that flat in Catford and your lot had col ared him, I bet you’d be claiming the bloody set.’

‘Fair point.’

‘Too right it is,’ Thorne said. ‘Now shut your face.’

She smiled, the pissed kind of smile that spread a little slower, and wider. ‘So . . . You charging into that cottage then, not bothering to let me, or anybody else, know . . .’

‘Hardly “charging”.’

‘How would
you
describe it, then?’

‘There wasn’t time to cal . I didn’t know how close you were . . .’

‘You didn’t bother to find out.’

‘I took a decision, same as you did when you went into the flat.’

‘I didn’t go in on my
own
!’

‘Look, she was terrified about a firearms unit going in there, after what happened in Bow. I was just . . .’ Thorne puffed out his cheeks, gave up. He knew she had him.

‘Maybe you were getting your own back for being left in the van when we went into Al en’s place?’

Thorne looked shocked. ‘You real y think I’m that bloody petty, do you?’

‘It crossed my mind.’

‘You’re right, obviously. I’m
very
petty.’ He leaned across. ‘Vindictive. Vengeful. I’m a nasty piece of work . . .’

They kissed again. Longer, the second time.

‘Sorry about the smel ,’ Thorne said. ‘They only had that soap, you know? The medicated shit. Little green slivers.’ Thorne had showered at the hospital.

‘It’s
five
murders,’ Porter said. ‘You said “four”.’

He nodded.

Picture glass. Thin, easily snapped
. . .

Peter Lardner had died in an ambulance which had taken twenty-five minutes to reach the cottage.

‘One more reason not to live in the countryside,’ Thorne had said.

Porter reached down, felt for the lager can on the floor. ‘So what about Luke?’

Thorne could not shift the picture of the boy’s face when they’d final y unwrapped the tape. Red from the adhesive, and wet with tears and sweat, but stil that crazed expression around his eyes.

Crazed
, just like words scrawled in rage on the wal behind a poster.

‘He’s alive, which I suppose is the main thing. But he won’t be able to wake up tomorrow and just get on with it, wil he? That’s going to be who he is now. Getting over that kind of thing’s al about support, and there’s not much of a family for him to go back to.’ He clocked Porter’s expression. ‘
What?
’

‘I meant what about the case against him?’

Thorne shrugged, picked up his own can. ‘Fuck knows. They’l have to charge him . . .’

They each took a drink. Thorne asked Porter if she was hungry, and she told him that she wished she’d eaten something before they’d started celebrating. Thorne got up and went into the kitchen to make them both toast.

They talked easily about nothing through the open door, letting the dirt settle. Like they’d been out al night dancing, or at a party.

Like nobody had bled to death.

Thorne turned from monitoring the gril when he heard Porter get up and watched her walking across the room towards the stereo. He told her to put on some music, apologised for the absence of any Shania Twain. He checked on the toast, flipped over the slices of bread on the gril -pan, then felt her fingers against his shoulder.

She was leaning into him as he turned round, one hand on his face and the other fumbling with the buttons on his shirt.

‘We’l leave the toast then, shal we?’ Thorne said.

Her tongue tasted sweet and boozy in his mouth. He bent his knees to press his groin against hers, and they staggered away from the cooker, lips pressed back hard against gums and teeth banging together.

She leaned back against the kitchen table and he went with her. Then he felt the pul and the pop, and the dizzying rush of pain, slicing deep from thigh to ankle.

He waited until they’d broken the kiss before he cried out.

THE DAMAGE

THIRTY

Thorne lay perfectly stil in the tight, white tunnel and tried to listen to Johnny Cash.

The music was faint in his headphones, and al but drowned out by the noise of the MRI scanner that was slowly putting together a picture of his spine. Of the state of it. The sound, like a pneumatic dril , made it seem as if he were listening to some radical, techno remix of the Man in Black, but it was stil better than the alternative. They’d told him he could choose one of their CDs for the twenty minutes or so he’d be inside the chamber, but Thorne had decided to take no chances and brought
The Man Comes Around
along with him. Good job he had. Even the little he could hear was preferable to some of the shit on the laminated list he’d found waiting for him in the changing room.

Jamie Cul um, Katie Melua, Norah bloody Jones.

He lay, quite stil as he’d been instructed. Straining to hear. His hand around the rubber panic button he’d been told to squeeze if he felt uncomfortable or alarmed for any reason. If he wanted to stop the procedure.

The rhythm of the machine, the repetitive clatter, like a buzz that had been slowed, began to fade. The noise relaxed him. He started to drift and reflect, savoured the luxury of the time, the
space
inside his head. Like slipping between pristine sheets after too long in a bed that was stained and stinking.

Six days since the end of it. The end of
part
of it, at any rate.

Everything now would be in the hands of judges and lawyers. Al Thorne and the rest of them could do from hereon was present those people with the material, and hope they made decent decisions.

They’d already made a couple of very brave ones.

Luke Mul en had been charged with the murder of Peter Lardner, though there was good reason to believe that when it eventual y came to trial, the jury would not convict. Thorne was happy to take the stand as a defence witness, and believed that the extenuating circumstances which would probably see Luke Mul en acquitted – along with the fact of Tony Mul en’s former position – probably accounted for why the magistrate had decided to release the boy into his father’s custody. There were strict conditions, of course: Luke would need to report to a police station at regular intervals. He would not be going back to school.

It had been an equal y brave decision to remand Maggie Mul en for trial in Hol oway Prison.

Although, in the end, the magistrate had been left with little choice. The charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice, relating to the death of Sarah Hanley, certainly warranted bail, and a surety of fifty thousand pounds was set. However, once Tony Mul en – the only person in a position to act as guarantor – had refused point-blank to do so, prison had been the court’s only option.

Thorne remembered Mul en’s face in the sitting room as his wife had made her confession, and guessed that
his
decision to see her jailed had probably been easier to make than the magistrate’s.

What had Thorne said to Porter that night?

Not much of a family for him to go back to
. . .

And unbidden, as Thorne remained motionless, different voices started to make themselves heard. Drifting in from nowhere and demanding attention.

A series of remarks and suggestions that began to curl around or lie across one another; to tease and il uminate.

Insisting . . .

I’ve always thought the sexual element of the attack was more important.

Listen, I accept all the evidence about abusers having been abused themselves.

Maybe it wasn’t Luke he was calling.

We already looked at the parents.

Until one single, big idea crowded out al the others, and the noise in Thorne’s head was louder, harder to ignore, than that coming from the machine.

And what Lardner had said. The
last
thing he’d said:

Why don’t you tell the inspector all about it? Why you can’t bear to let him touch you
. . .

Thorne pul ed off the headphones and began to squeeze the rubber button.

Jane Freestone had stood up and wandered away when she’d seen him coming. Thorne watched her walk to the fence, spit and light a cigarette. Then he sat down next to her brother on the bench.

The same one Grant Freestone had been sitting on when Thorne and Porter had nicked him a week earlier.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Freestone said.

‘Calm down.’

‘I’m here with my sister, al right?’

Freestone had been released from custody in Lewisham on the same day that Maggie Mul en was charged. Now, aside from the compulsory rehab clinic, and weekly visit to sign the Sex Offenders Register, his life was more or less his own again. Though Thorne would soon inform those who needed to know just how often that life seemed to involve sitting in a local park, on the bench nearest to the children’s playground.

‘You shouldn’t be so arsey,’ Thorne said. ‘If it wasn’t for some of us, you’d be on remand for Sarah Hanley by now. Watching your back in Belmarsh or Brixton.’

‘
Thanks
. But let’s not forget you’re the fuckers who nicked me in the first place.’

It was a fair point.

‘Al worked out, though,’ Thorne said.

There was a breeze, but it was a warm afternoon. Thorne took off his jacket and laid it across his knees. Petals of cherry blossom drifted gently along the path, and an ice-cream wrapper clung to the side of the litter bin next to the bench.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard,’ Freestone said. ‘That woman, I mean: Tony Mul en’s missus. And her boyfriend.’

‘Did you ever meet her? Back then, when she was Margaret Stringer?’

‘I only ever real y had dealings with the social worker, Miss Bristow.’ He turned to Thorne. ‘I was upset to hear about her. She was al right. Bloke that kil ed her deserved everything he got, if you ask me.’

Thorne shifted his position slightly, and again, until the pain had subsided. ‘So it was a surprise, then, when you found out what real y happened to Sarah Hanley?’

‘Big one, yeah.’

‘Surprised to hear that it was Tony Mul en’s wife, and not Tony Mul en himself, right?’

‘
Sorry?
’

‘I’m guessing you thought that Mul en had set you up for it. I’m not saying you thought he did it himself, but maybe he was happy enough to put you in the frame for it. He would have been wel chuffed to get you out of the way. That’s what you thought, isn’t it?’

Freestone shrugged, worried at his goatee.

‘There’s no good reason not to tel me, Grant. Mul en’s in no position to do you any damage now. Or to do you any
favours
.’

This was where Thorne found himself, the series of jumps he’d made. A sequence of bleak possibilities that pointed into the dark, lit the blackest corner of it . . .

If the nature of Adrian Farrel ’s crime had been, at some level, a reaction to his own abuse, might he have suffered that abuse at home?

If the cal s from the Farrel house to the Mul en house had been from father to father, rather than son to son, what would they have had to discuss?

And what was Maggie Mul en so afraid that Peter Lardner would reveal? Or had
already
revealed, whispering home truths in the dusty dark of that cel ar.

Thorne might never know for sure if he’d got there by the correct route, but he felt like he was in the right place. Felt fairly certain that in not mentioning Grant Freestone, it was more than just his wife’s affair that Tony Mul en had been trying to cover up.

Only Freestone could tel him for sure.

‘You don’t look like someone who fancies kids to me,’ Thorne said.

Freestone turned, his lips whitening across his teeth.

‘You
don’t
. That’s just a fact. I’ve no more idea what someone who’s into kids looks like than anybody else.’ He nodded towards two old men, deep in conversation a couple of benches along, then at a younger man jogging towards them alongside a young woman. ‘
They
don’t look like paedophiles . . .
He
doesn’t.’ Thorne pointed at a skinny man, looking the other way while his dog defecated on the grass verge. ‘Now, see,
he
does, and what’s the betting I’m way off the mark?’

‘What am I supposed to say?’

‘Most of us have no real . . . sense of it; that’s my point. We can’t recognise someone who has these drives, or desires. We can’t pick up the signals, the signs, presuming there
are
any.’ He straightened his leg, pushed back his shoulders. ‘But I wonder if you can?’

Freestone said nothing.

‘You didn’t threaten Tony Mul en with violence,’ Thorne said. ‘You didn’t make promises to get him, or members of his family. You threatened to
expose
him. You knew what he was.’

They waited, watched as the joggers passed.

‘It wasn’t like I could just
tell
,’ Freestone said. ‘Any more than you could. That’s bol ocks.’

‘So what was it like?’

‘I’d met him before, hadn’t I? Sunday afternoon barbecue round at a . . . third party’s place. We talked about stuff, a few of us; there was an exchange of material later, upstairs.

Nothing too heavy. But
he
definitely knew a lot of the people. He knew where al the best websites were . . . not that there were too many back then. I never realised he was a copper, obviously, but he was hardly likely to broadcast the fact, was he?’

‘Not real y.’

‘He nearly shat himself when he walked into that interview room and saw me looking back at him.’

‘So you made threats?’

‘Didn’t do me any fucking good, did it? Mul en said I could say what I liked. Told me he’d just claim he’d been working undercover off his own bat, getting in with a known paedophile ring, gathering evidence, whatever.’

‘He would have had a hard time pul ing that off.’