Buried-6 (8 page)

‘Maybe that’l be on the next tape.’ But as they came out into the lobby on the ground floor, and moved towards the revolving doors, Thorne was stil thinking about the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’. Imagining a woman getting close to her victim; smiling and touching and always attentive. Thinking that trust was nurtured, like bodies and minds; that it was abused at the same time that they were. He remembered the smile that faltered a little as the boy on the screen had done his best to crack jokes. He remembered the emptiness in the stare. He wondered if Luke Mul en would ever trust anyone again.

The drizzle hadn’t stopped al morning, but there were stil plenty of people mil ing around outside the entrance. A couple sat eating sandwiches, perched on adjacent concrete stumps. Rows of these bol ards, instal ed to deter car-bombers, had sprung up outside most of the city’s public buildings, and Thorne often wondered if cement companies might be secretly funding some of the terrorist groups. He shared the theory with Porter and they paused for a minute, enjoying the joke; Thorne, on his way towards the tube station at St James’s Park and Porter headed for the Yard’s underground garage.

‘How much does it bother you?’ Thorne asked. ‘That nobody’s asking the Mul ens for any money. That nobody’s asking for
anything
.’

‘These cases are never predictable, I’ve learned that much. But yeah, it’s bloody odd.’

‘They’ve had Luke four days already.’

‘Four days, five nights. Mind you, we were worried that they hadn’t got in touch, and then they did.’

Thorne began to do up the buttons on his leather jacket. ‘Something bothers me,’ he said. ‘Something on the tape.’

‘What?’

‘I wish I could tel you. Something’s not right, though; something that he said, or maybe just the way he said it.’

‘It’l come to you.’

‘Maybe.’

‘It’s old age, mate. That’s Alzheimer’s kicking in.’

Thorne dug down deep for a smile.

‘I’l catch up with you later on at Arkley,’ she said. ‘See how they’re doing, OK?’

‘Right.’ He took a step backwards, half turned, on his way. ‘What do you make of Mul en?’

‘I think he needs to remember he’s not a copper any more.’

Thorne fastened the top button of his jacket and stuffed his hands into the pockets. Thinking about memory, perfect and fucked-up. Thinking that his memories of the time before he was a copper were getting pushed for space; shunted aside by less pleasant recol ections. ‘You ever thought about getting out early?’ he asked.

‘Now and again. What about you?’

‘There’s times I think about it a fair bit.’

‘What sort of times?’ Porter asked.

‘When I’m awake . . .’

Tony Mul en reached into the fridge for the wine bottle, pul ed the glass across the counter-top and poured himself a decent measure. He moved over to where his daughter was making herself a sandwich. Stroked the back of her head as he drank.

Neither had spoken since he’d come into the kitchen a few minutes before, and they continued to stand, each busy in their own way, sharing the space in silence until Juliet Mul en picked up her plate and walked out.

He listened to his daughter’s footsteps on the stairs, to the creak and click of her bedroom door, and to the music which escaped in the few seconds between those final two sounds. He strained to hear the murmur of Maggie’s voice, and, though he could hear nothing, he knew very wel that in some room or other of the house his wife would be deep in conversation. She’d been keeping the landline clear for obvious reasons, but somewhere she’d be sitting or lying down with the mobile pressed to her ear; talking it out and talking it through to her family, her friends, anyone wil ing to listen and pretend they understood what was happening.

He’d spoken when he’d had to. He’d given the necessary information when it had been required of him, but aside from that, he’d said next to nothing. That had always been the way between them if ever there was trouble, if ever the family unit had been threatened in any way. He’d always be the one to go into himself, bottle things up; the one to turn the problem every which way without saying a word while others did the screaming and shouting. Luke was like that, too: never one to get hysterical. Maggie was usual y the one that wore her heart on her sleeve and it was never easy to tel what was going on inside Juliet’s head.

It wasn’t very inclusive or touchy-feely, he knew that. It was old fashioned and out of step. He guessed that in some ways it might have been better if they’d al sat around and opened up, if they’d
shared
, but it wasn’t the way he or his family operated, and you couldn’t help the way you were.

He moved his fingers back and forth across the smooth, cold surface of the counter-top and thought about DI Tom Thorne. The cheeky bastard had given him a hard time the day before, badgered him, even though only one person in that room had made DCI, and only one was ever likely to. He was grateful to Jesmond for laying on the extra men, but Thorne was one he’d have to watch. That type of copper – the ‘bul in a china shop’ type – didn’t solve cases like this one. His son would be freed by doing what was simple and sound, and not by refusing to accept what you’d been told and banging on about how many names were on a fucking list.

Mul en emptied his glass and thought about the name he
hadn’t
written down. He told himself that it was unimportant; that it was acceptable within the scheme of things; that he’d done it for the right reason. A sil y reason perhaps, but one worth the very smal est of lies.

He would have loved to forget the man to whom that name belonged, but it would never slip his mind. It was a name with unhappy connotations, after al . But it was a name – and this was al that real y counted – that he knew damn wel had
nothing
to do with his son’s disappearance. With who was holding Luke, or where, or what they wanted. So why did it matter, and what harm could come from leaving one name out of it?

He listened for a minute or two more, then moved back to the fridge.

What harm?

AMANDA

It was a bag. Just a plastic bag, that had done al the damage; was stil doing it if assorted shrinks and social workers knew what they were talking about.

Probably one of those real y cheap, stripy ones that you picked up at late-night supermarkets and shitty corner shops. The driver of the second car had never gone so far as to describe the bag in court, but that was how she always imagined it. Fluttering across the street and up on to the windscreen, held there by the wind, blinding the driver for that crucial second or two and causing him to swerve. A shapeless piece of jetsam that made him drive into the silver Mercedes coming the other way. That floated up like smoke at the impact, and sent her daddy through the glass.

Cheap and insubstantial. Virtual y weightless. Something so terrible coming from nothing . . .

The boy was dosed-up now and out of it, and Conrad was getting a bit of sleep in the next room. It was the middle of the day, but both their body clocks had gone haywire. The curtains were closed al the time; it could have been morning, noon or night. It didn’t real y matter one way or the other. It was boring, that was al . They just had to stay where they were for as long as the whole thing took; until they knew what was happening next.

When she dwel ed on what had happened to her father, which was often, she never real y thought about the other driver: unsighted and screaming behind the wheel; giving his evidence in a neck-brace; limping away down the steps outside the court while her mother shouted after him. She thought instead – and she knew how irrational it was – about the person who had sold the plastic bag. About the person who had fil ed it with fruit, or fish, or fuck-al worth talking about, and about al the hands the bag had passed through before it was final y tossed into the gutter. She thought about the people who would never know the part they had played in her father’s death. She imagined al their faces. She gave each one a life, and a family to fil it. And in her darkest moments, of which there were many, she’d take a member of that family away, and watch the life she’d made for someone fal apart.

She walked across to the portable CD player in the corner of the bedroom, turned the music up just a little to drown out the boy’s breathing. She took what she needed from her handbag and sat back down on the floor.

They’d argued again about the usual thing, Conrad doing that low, disappointed voice he saved up for the drug conversations. He told her that she needed to keep a clear head.

She pointed out that it was precisely because the situation they were in was so stressful that she needed the lift. He got angrier then, reminded her that she
always
needed it, and she told him that the last thing she needed was for him to be so self-righteous, and that she’d sort herself out afterwards, when they had the money.

Nodding her head to the music, she tipped out the powder; measured and scraped and cut. She rol ed up the note and stared at the lines, at the flyaway grains that dotted the tabletop around their edges. Insubstantial. Virtual y weightless.

Something so wonderful coming from nothing.

FIVE

Fifteen minutes from the Mul en house, in the largely affluent suburb of Stanmore, Butler’s Hal School had occupied its hundred-plus acres of lush parkland for a little under a century.

Hol and read a potted history of the place, flicking through the school’s lavish prospectus as he waited in a car at the end of a mile-long driveway. Of its 250-plus pupils – most of whom were fed in from a nearby prep school in the same foundation – almost a third were boarders. Of the total number, around 40 per cent were girls, first admitted as sixth-formers in the early eighties, then into the main body of the school ten years after that.

Kenny Parsons, who had gone in search of a toilet fifteen minutes earlier, knocked on the window. Hol and looked up, wound down the window.

‘It’s a fair bet that if you can afford to send your kids here, you can afford to cough up a decent ransom,’ Parsons said. ‘These kids might as wel have targets on their backs.’

‘Wouldn’t be al owed,’ Hol and said, lifting the brochure. ‘There’s a very strict uniform code.’

Parsons looked back towards the school. ‘There’s a very strict
everything
code.’

Hol and got out of the car, tossed the brochure on to the back seat. He and Parsons began walking towards the school building. ‘“Falsehood dishonours me”,’ he said.

‘Come again?’

‘That’s the translation from the Latin, apparently. “Lies shame me”, or whatever. The school motto.’

Parsons nodded, vacant. ‘The lower sixth should be out in a minute,’ he said.

The end of the school day was staggered, with pupils from upper and lower years coming out at twenty-minute intervals. Porter and three col eagues, working in teams of two, were already elsewhere on the school premises, talking to children from the fourth and fifth forms in the presence of teachers or parents. As Hol and and Parsons moved towards the school’s main exit, they joined another pair of SO7 officers, fal ing in behind them as they walked across the car park, cutting through the massed ranks of silver or black people carriers: Porsche Cayennes, Volvos and BMW X5s. One of the officers, a skinny Essex boy with bad skin, put his face close to the tinted window of a Lexus as he passed, tried to see inside. ‘What do these people
do?
’ he said.

Hol and, Parsons and the others stopped in the school quad, loitering outside a pair of vast wooden doors, which slammed open as the first of the students began to emerge. Like al those officers working on site, the four were smartly, though informal y, dressed: khakis and casual jackets; suits over polo shirts. They could easily have been teachers, or even, in one or two cases, students out of uniform.

Parsons was clearly stil thinking about his col eague’s question as he watched the first wave of pupils emerge, and spoke above their chatter. ‘Wel , I don’t think many of them are coppers. And I can’t see any of their kids becoming coppers, either.’

‘They do have scholarship places,’ Hol and said. ‘Not everyone’s dad’s an oil bil ionaire or a footbal er, you know.’

‘That’s a fair point,’ the Essex boy said. ‘Take Mul en for a kick-off. Unless he was seriously bent, I can’t see how he’d be rol ing in it.’

Parsons said something about a DCI’s pension, about Mul en making seriously good money as a security consultant, but Hol and had stopped listening. He was watching two girls, aged fifteen or so, heads together, whispering. He was thinking about Chloe. Deciding that, even though it was a long way off, he wouldn’t argue if there was so much as a chance of her getting into a place like this. That he
would
argue until his last breath with the idea of her ever becoming a copper.

Officers had travel ed to Butler’s Hal late on the Monday – the first day the unit had become involved – and taken more statements the day after that, but it was understandable that Barry Hignett was keen to speak to everyone who might have anything to add. Understandable in that, until the people holding Luke Mul en decided to let the police or his parents know exactly what they
wanted
, there was little else that could useful y be done.

Pupils had been spoken to in school. They were told that Luke Mul en was stil missing and that there would be police officers waiting to talk to them if they felt they had anything useful to report. The headmaster had been at pains to remind them that neglecting to do so would be as good as falsehood, and every bit as dishonourable. They were urged to pass on any information they had, however trivial it might seem, about the Friday afternoon when Luke had been driven away.

The Essex boy and his partner paired off, taking up a position at the other end of the quad, but neither they nor Hol and and Parsons were exactly swamped by the rush of eager young informants.

Those few pupils Hol and and Parsons did speak to al told just about the same story. It became clear that over the previous few days the school jungle drums had been working overtime and that it would not be easy to sort out the fact from the hearsay.