Mark Billingham - Buried

‘Right, practicalities,’ Hignett said. He addressed his own officers. ‘Good news for those of you who live a bit further north, shitty for the rest of us, but we’ll be working mainly out of Becke House, up at the Peel Centre.’ That got contrasting reactions, from the two sides of the room. Hignett held up his hands. ‘It makes sense, I’m afraid. They’re geared up for a major murder enquiry and, for what it’s worth, Colindale’s a damn sight closer to the Mullen house. Some of you will still be working from here, but I want to avoid a stupid amount of toing and froing. You can spend half a day getting across town and we haven’t got the time.’ He turned to the area of the room in which Thorne was sitting; sarcastic but conceding a possibility at least. ‘ Luke Mullen may not have the time.’

‘We need to get this going,’ Brigstocke said. ‘That means we share information and pool resources, and I see no good reason why it shouldn’t work out. We can afford to move in a couple of different directions if we choose, because ultimately they’re bound to converge.’

Now it was Brigstocke’s turn to direct a comment, but Thorne saw it coming and looked down before the DCI had the chance to catch his eye. He stared at his shoes through the rest of it.

‘Because we’re all agreed on one thing,’ Brigstocke said: ‘if we can find whoever killed those two up in that flat, one way or another we’ll find Luke Mullen.’

‘Well that was fun,’ Kitson said. Thorne and several others from the Murder Squad contingent had drifted towards the exit. Despite the somewhat fraught nature of the previous half hour, Thorne was in good spirits. He was pleased to see the likes of Kitson and Karim, happy that they would be working together again, albeit on an operation that no one had really thought through properly.

Thorne and Kitson lingered near the lifts.

‘Define “fun”,’ Thorne said.

‘OK. Relative to trapping your tits in a mangle.’ Kitson smirked, but the lightness didn’t remain on her face for long. Thorne thought she looked tired, and even further out of sorts than when he’d run into her at Becke House a few days earlier.

‘How’s this new lead on the Latif murder shaping up?’ He asked.

‘Early days…’

It seemed to Thorne as though she was searching his face for signs that he was convinced, but seeing none.

‘I fucked up,’ she said.

‘How?’

She took a few steps away from the lifts, and Thorne followed her. ‘Ever since Holland came to me with this, I’d been thinking how strange it was that Farrell hadn’t been looked at before. The E-fit that Amin Latif’s friend came up with at the time isn’t exactly a portrait – the hair’s different for a kick-off – but it’s very bloody close, you know? As close as I’ve ever seen. You look at this kid, Tom, and if you’ve got a good picture of that E-fit in your head, there’s no question it’s him.’

‘Right.’ Thorne had seen the picture, of course, but he hadn’t been near to the case. It was one of those that the team had picked up while he was still working on the rough-sleeper murders.

‘So I kept asking myself, “If it’s so bloody obvious, why did no one call up and suggest we should be interested in Adrian Farrell?” That picture was in the Standard , it went out on Crimewatch…’

‘And?’

‘And I checked… Someone did. There were two calls logged in October last year saying that we ought to take a look at him, but we never did. He wasn’t mentioned by name. It was more: “there’s a kid in my son’s class who looks like the picture I saw on the TV” sort of thing. But the school was named, and for some reason the tip was never acted on, the calls were never followed up. They got buried in the file and ignored, and ultimately, that’s down to me.’

‘Hang on, you weren’t the one who ignored them. You never even knew about them.’

‘I’ll find out who did ignore them, but that’s not the point. Whoever it was, they looked at that piece of information and dismissed it, presumably because it sounded like bollocks. Within the general framework of the case, the direction we were moving in, they looked like crank calls.’

‘The obvious route is usually the right one, Yvonne.’

‘Well, it wasn’t this time.’ Kitson had lowered her voice, but now it was growing louder, more strident. ‘We had our heads up our arses, and when a posh public school four or five miles away was mentioned, it was ignored because we thought we were looking in the right place. Because we were far too busy talking to kids at the comprehensives in the shittier parts of Edgware and Burnt Oak. Knocking on every door on the Deansbrook estate, and on the Wallgrove…’

Andy Stone came round the corner and Kitson trailed off. Stone nodded at the two of them, non-committal, and walked away again after a second or two. Thorne thought that Stone wasn’t the greatest copper he’d ever known, but every so often his instincts were spot on.

Kitson spoke quietly again. ‘Now that kid can afford to be a cocky little sod, because he knows he’s got away with it. Because we let him. He can swan around, wearing the same earring he wore on the night he killed Amin Latif, because he thinks he’s bulletproof.’

An officer by the lift kicked the doors, then walked briskly past them towards the stairs, announcing that he couldn’t be bothered to wait, that he was desperate for a fag.

‘I know all about fucking up,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ve done stuff that makes this look trivial.’

That got something to soften around Kitson’s eyes. ‘I’m not arguing,’ she said.

‘There wouldn’t be any point.’

‘I just want to put this right.’

‘Well, that’s the good part. Unlike most of the times I’ve fucked up, it sounds like you’ve got the chance.’

Now that they were out of the more dangerous territory, they returned to the lifts.

‘Bearing in mind how we came across Farrell in the first place, are we chasing up a possible link to this case?’ Kitson pressed the button. ‘We’re sure that he knows Mullen at least.’

Considering the strange turn that the case had taken in the previous twelve hours, Thorne now thought it even less likely that there could be a connection between the kidnapping of Luke Mullen and a six-month-old racially motivated murder. But he also remembered what he’d just said to Kitson about the most obvious route. ‘It can’t hurt to talk to him when you get the chance,’ he said.

The lift arrived and they stepped inside.

‘I certainly plan on getting the chance,’ Kitson said. ‘But he’s not the easiest kid to talk to.’

‘How are your three, anyway?’

The doors slid across as an officer from Serious and Organised slipped quickly inside. Kitson answered Thorne as though she were measuring her own children against others she might recently have met.

‘Fucking gorgeous.’

On the ground floor, Thorne’s phone rang as he moved gingerly through the revolving doors.

‘This is Graham Hoolihan. You left a message…’

Hoolihan was the DCI whose details had been passed on by Carol Chamberlain. He had led the investigation five years earlier into the murder of Sarah Hanley, believed to have been killed by her boyfriend, Grant Freestone. Thorne had left Hoolihan a message the previous afternoon.

‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t know if Carol Chamberlain explained why we’re interested in Grant Freestone…’

She had, but evidently it hadn’t been to Hoolihan’s satisfaction. So Thorne went over it again. Outside Scotland Yard, the pavement was thick with people on their way to work, hurrying towards Parliament Square and Buckingham Gate. Though the rain had as good as gone, there were still one or two umbrellas up, as it looked like it hadn’t gone very far.