Mark Billingham - Buried

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.

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 intelligence 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 Allen’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 pull up all the details of Allen’s original arrest in 2002. Running the number plate of his car through the national computer revealed that the vehicle had been sold the year before. The student who’d bought it – and who was still awake, honing his PlayStation skills – remembered Conrad Allen; remembered him describing in great detail the type of car he’d be buying next. An hour later, the owner of a small dealership in Wood Green was being asked to get up, get dressed and accompany the police to his less than organised office, where he grudgingly waded through a pile of less-than-kosher sales receipts. The dealer was naturally keen to help and go back to bed and, when prompted by a picture, he vaguely remembered Allen and the ‘fit-looking blonde bird’ who had been with him when he’d strolled on to the car lot. His memory of the car itself was better: he was able to give virtually every detail of the diamond-white Ford Scorpio 2.9i, its 24-valve Cosworth V6 engine and, rather more importantly, the address he’d delivered it to, after he’d banked the £1,200 in cash.

The dealer knew nothing about any Passat, black, blue or otherwise, so the team decided that the car seen near the school was probably the girlfriend’s. Or maybe Conrad had decided that his boy-racer days were over, and had traded in the Scorpio for something a little more sedate.

Once the information had been obtained, Porter’s team had shifted into top gear pretty bloody quickly. The first step was the establishment of an observation post. In the early hours – grateful for the cover of darkness as far as this part of the operation went – a dedicated Intel Unit had mounted one small camera on a lamp-post opposite an estate agent’s just off the Bow Road, and another at the back of the building to monitor what looked like a rear entrance/exit. These immediately began feeding live pictures back to Central 3000, as well as to a mobile tech team which was cutting up and broadcasting the images from inside a fully equipped van two streets away. A dozen or more officers from the Kidnap Unit were scattered around the area: in empty buildings and unmarked cars and on the street; waiting alongside a Special Events team, a hostage negotiator, paramedics and a group from SO19, the Firearms Unit.

All waiting for word of one sort or another.

By the time he managed to slip into a nearby sandwich bar for an early lunch, Thorne had been stuck for the best part of four hours in a car with the same SO7 officer who’d bored his arse off the evening before…

He carried the tray over to the table; pushed a mug of coffee and a plate across to the woman sitting opposite him.

‘What do I owe you?’ she asked.

Thorne took the top slice from a bacon and egg sandwich and reached for the ketchup. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve come up with first.’

He’d been surprised when Carol Chamberlain had rung up first thing, asking if they could meet. When she wasn’t at the Yard working an AMRU case, it was all but impossible to prise her away from her husband and her home in Worthing, which Thorne took great delight in calling Euthanasia-on-Sea. She’d explained that after she and Thorne had spoken the day before, she’d spent the whole afternoon making calls and then caught the evening train up. She’d told him that she’d had dinner with one old friend and stayed overnight with another.

‘Old friends?’ Thorne had asked on the phone.

‘A DCI I worked with on the Murder Squad for a few years, and a DS who retired same time as me. Both good blokes. Both useful.’

Thorne watched Chamberlain bite into a roll with rather more delicacy than he’d displayed himself. He was impressed by how quickly she’d got to work after they’d spoken. ‘You don’t waste any time,’ he said.

‘I didn’t think we had any time.’

Thorne brought her up to speed, told her about the surveillance operation on Conrad Allen’s flat. With the possibility of a child’s life at stake, he knew that she was right to think that time was not on their side, yet, that morning, every minute spent sitting and waiting for something to happen had seemed to warp and stretch until urgency had turned to inertia. The silence from radios had become deafening, and staring at the drawn curtains of the flat above that estate agent’s had been like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

‘So, go on then,’ Thorne said.

Chamberlain wiped crumbs from her fingers. ‘I was right,’ she said. ‘Somebody should definitely have mentioned Grant Freestone.’

‘Because of the threat he made to Mullen?’

‘Because of that… and because he’s still wanted for murder.’

Thorne just looked, and waited for her to carry on. He could see that she was enjoying the moment of drama, that she relished the telling.

‘In 1995 Freestone got ten years for child-sex offences. He served just over half his time, was paroled in 2000 and became one of the first ex-cons to be dealt with by a MAPPA panel.’

Thorne nodded. Though he had never been directly involved, he was well aware of the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements. The scheme had been established as ‘a statutory framework for inter-agency co-operation in assessing the most dangerous ex-offenders’. It was designed for those individuals who posed a serious threat to the public, ‘to manage and monitor their reintroduction into the community’.

To keep a watchful eye on the bogeyman.

‘Sounds like he was an ideal candidate,’ Thorne said.

‘He was, but I’m not so sure about the people who were supposed to be watching him. I don’t know exactly how it all happened, but it’s a wonder the scheme wasn’t shut down there and then.’

‘Teething troubles?’

‘Ever so slightly. Freestone was given a flat in Crystal Palace, which is why Bromley Borough Council helped put this MAPPA panel together. Then he got involved with a woman called Sarah Hanley a few months after his release; a single mother with two young kids.’

‘Ah. That would be a problem.’

‘It would have been if a slightly bigger problem hadn’t come along. In April 2001, Grant Freestone chucked her through a glass coffee table.’