Mark Billingham - Buried

‘Nice.’

‘She bled to death, and by the time anybody found her…’

‘Freestone was long gone.’

‘And still is,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Likely to stay that way, too, I would have thought. He’s certainly the nearest thing to a prime suspect anyone ever came up with, but it’s been so long I don’t think anyone’s looking for him very hard any more, or very often at any rate. He gets circulated once in a while, and the case notes are reviewed annually, but basically it’s even colder than most of the shit I get given to try and warm up.’

A waitress came alongside, gathered up the plates, asked if either of them wanted more tea or coffee. Thorne told Chamberlain he’d need to get back as quickly as he could, and handed over a five-pound note to cover the bill.

‘Was Tony Mullen involved with this second case at all?’ he asked. ‘With the Sarah Hanley murder?’

Chamberlain said that he wasn’t, that she’d spoken to the detective who’d headed that investigation and the subsequent hunt for Grant Freestone; the officer who, theoretically at least, still had the case. But Thorne was only half listening, having realised that he’d asked a redundant question. He knew that Tony Mullen could not have been involved, and he knew why.

‘I’ve written down all this bloke’s details,’ Chamberlain said. She slid an envelope across the table. ‘He seemed nice enough, though he was a damn sight more interested in finding out why I was asking than in telling me an awful lot.’

‘Par for the course,’ Thorne said.

‘I suppose.’

‘Aren’t you still a bit touchy about the ones that got away?’

Chamberlain took a compact from her handbag and flicked it open. ‘The older I get, the touchier I am about everything.’

‘Thanks for this.’

‘No problem, and I still owe you.’ Her eyes darted momentarily from her mirror. ‘I don’t mean for the tea and a ham roll, either.’

Thorne picked up the envelope and pushed back his chair. He knew she was talking about the incident a year before, when their questioning of a suspect had got horribly out of hand. He reckoned that each of them owed more than could ever be repaid. ‘I’ll let you know how everything turns out,’ he said.

Carol Chamberlain nodded and went back to reapplying her lipstick as Thorne turned from the table. As he left, she shouted after him. Apologised for forgetting the stuff for his back, told him that she’d stick some in the post.

He walked quickly back towards the car. He stopped off at a newsagent’s, bought two cans of Coke and a copy of Uncut without speaking a word. Thinking all the time, as he made his way back to the car, that Chamberlain had been right when she’d said that someone should have mentioned Grant Freestone. Someone… One of the several coppers he’d spoken to, probably. Jesmond, almost certainly . And why hadn’t Tony Mullen said anything?

His mind focused on Luke Mullen’s father as he walked. On how – Thorne would double-check the month to be sure – he couldn’t have been involved in the 2001 murder case and the hunt for Grant Freestone; the man he’d previously put away for twelve years; the man who had so publicly threatened him.

Because 2001 was the year that DCI Tony Mullen had resigned from the force.

The red Skoda was parked just south of the Bow Road, on a side street below the Blackwall Tunnel approach. Thorne was delighted to see that Dave Holland had arrived in his absence, and, ignoring the DS sitting behind the wheel, he climbed into the back seat alongside him.

The officer in the front seat turned round in a rustle of polyester. ‘Please your fucking selves…’

Though Thorne had talked to Holland from the Mullen house the evening before, they hadn’t seen each other since Holland’s trip to Butler’s Hall. Sitting in the back of the car, they talked about Adrian Farrell, about Holland’s call to Yvonne Kitson and about whether there might be a connection between Luke’s kidnap and the Latif murder.

‘It’s worth thinking about, certainly.’

‘Not for too long though, right?’ Holland said.

Thorne opened one of his cans. ‘I can’t see it to be honest.’

They sat in silence for five minutes after that. Thorne flicked through his magazine while Holland stared out of the window at a view Thorne had already decided was up there with the most depressing he’d ever seen. That said, he wasn’t certain he could stomach the Taj Mahal for four hours at a stretch.

‘It’s fucking lovely round here, isn’t it?’ Holland said eventually.

‘If you like concrete.’

The SO7 man took the chance to jump in, and pointed towards the Bow flyover. The permanently gridlocked slab of granite rose a few hundred yards to the north of them, lifting the A11 above the A12 and carrying traffic across the River Lea, towards Essex and away from the capital. ‘They reckon that’s where the Krays buried Frank Mitchell, you know? Inside one of the supports.’

‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘1966.’ He knew all about what the twins were supposed to have done with ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell, having made the somewhat rash decision to spring him from Dartmoor Prison. Though the Axeman’s final whereabouts remained uncertain, with some claiming that the body had been dumped at sea, it was nevertheless slightly odd that, thirty years after Mitchell’s disappearance, Ronnie Kray’s funeral cortège should have crossed the Bow flyover. It was hardly the most direct route to Chingford cemetery.

The DS looked a little deflated. ‘How come you’re such an expert?’

‘Too much time on his hands,’ Holland explained.

‘At least you knew where you were with those guys,’ Thorne said.

Holland let his head drop back. ‘Nice simple nicknames for a kick-off.’

‘Right. Nobody got confused.’

‘He’s mad, he’s got an axe. What shall we call him?’

‘Er…’

And as they carried on, they could see the man from the Kidnap Unit clocking them in the rear-view mirror, desperately trying to work out if they were taking the piss.

At lunchtime, the Butler’s Hall sixth-formers were allowed to leave the premises for one hour. Some took sandwiches into a nearby park, but most wandered towards the modest parade of shops on the Broadway. They browsed in the small branches of Game and HMV, or hung around outside the fish-and-chip/kebab shop, trying their best not to look like kids from a public school; to avoid getting caught doing anything that might reflect badly on the uniform they wore.

Yvonne Kitson sat in her car at the end of a road opposite the school entrance, watching the kids come out and waiting to get her first look at Adrian Farrell.

Next to her, DC Andy Stone flicked through the Daily Mirror. ‘I still don’t see why you didn’t get DS Holland to come with you, Guv. To point out this little tosser.’

‘Bored, Andy?’

Stone shook his head without looking up from the paper.

‘Dave’s a bit tied up with other things; and, anyway, I don’t want him pointed out. I want to see if I can spot him. Fair enough?’ She moved her thumb back to her mouth, chewed on the nail and stared out of the window.

Most of the time, it seemed to Kitson that you couldn’t have it all; that if your life outside of work was going well, then the job itself would turn to shit. And vice-bloodyversa. A couple of years before, she’d been a high-flyer and she’d known it; the cases had been high profile, just as she’d been when she’d solved them. Then she’d been stupid enough to get involved with a senior officer, and while he had been forgiven by wife and top brass, she had watched both her career and her family life tumble into freefall. Now things were back on an even keel domestically – her kids were doing well, relations with her ex-husband were civil and she was seeing somebody – but work was another matter. Though she was grafting as hard as ever, the job just seemed to grow more maddening with each failure, each compromise. She’d begun to wonder if it might be down to her; if she’d lost the capacity to be satisfied.