Mark Billingham - Buried

Thorne smiled and nodded, but seriously doubted it. He’d taken in the man as quickly as the surroundings and decided that Roper was probably the type who liked to keep everything tidy. He was tall, and looked pretty fit for a man Thorne put in his early to mid-fifties, with hair that had been subtly coloured, and cut every bit as nicely as his dark blue suit. Not a man to let things slip, if he could help it.

When he’d said ‘new’, Roper had been talking about he and his team, just as much as the facilities they occupied. The Special Enquiries team was an offshoot of what had once been the Fraud Squad, part of the SO unit that had become SCD6. Those on its roster had been brought together to tackle any case where the victim – or perpetrator – was deemed to be in the public eye. The SE team handled cases involving corrupt MPs, blackmailed TV personalities, drug-fucked pop stars and royalty behaving badly. It was widely thought of as a prestigious gig, and Callum Roper, for one, looked as though he thoroughly enjoyed being part of it.

The ‘ Sexy Enquiries Team’, Holland had called it once.

Thorne had pointed out that he and Holland spent their days dragging bloated bodies from dirty rivers, or trying to ID corpses so badly burned that they looked like Coco Krispies with legs. In comparison, issuing parking tickets sounded sexy…

‘You’ll have spoken to Graham Hoolihan then?’ Roper had already helped himself to a biscuit and asked the question with his mouth full, like he’d suddenly remembered it.

‘That’s right.’ Thorne was more than a little thrown, but hoped it didn’t show. He tried to work backwards, to work out how Roper had made the connection to Freestone so quickly.

Roper leaned forward for his coffee and provided the answer before Thorne had had a chance to figure it out. ‘I made a couple of calls. Found out you were thinking that your kidnapper might have previously made threats against Mr Mullen.’

Thorne made a mental note not to drop Trevor Jesmond’s name into any more conversations.

‘I can’t remember the details,’ Roper said, ‘but I do recall Mullen’s name somewhere in the original MAPPA case notes. Part of the probation report, I think. Grant Freestone issued threats against Mullen back when he was originally nicked, didn’t he?’

Thorne told Roper as much as he knew; told him what Carol Chamberlain had witnessed in the courtroom. ‘Did you know Tony Mullen?’ he asked.

Roper shook his head. ‘Not that it would have made any difference if I had. Any threats Freestone might have made against anyone, anything he’d done before, wasn’t really relevant to what we were doing on the MAPPA panel. Our job was to monitor the way he lived his life after he was released. The slate was clean, you see?’

‘Not entirely, no. How can what he’d done before not be relevant?’

‘Well, of course, we knew what Freestone was capable of. I mean, that’s why the panel was put together in the first place. I just meant that, generally, our brief was to look forward rather than back. In terms of any threat he might have made against someone, yes… obviously, if he’d been spotted hanging around outside their house, we would have taken some action. Informed whoever we’d needed to.’

It was relaxed. It was coffee and biscuits and comfy-chairs casual. But Thorne could hear the tension and defensiveness in everything Roper said. The same way that a Parisian would always hear Thorne’s London accent, however fluently he might speak French.

And Thorne had a fair idea why.

‘What part do you think the MAPPA panel played in what happened to Sarah Hanley?’

Roper licked his lips, put down his cup. ‘What does that have to do with your kidnapping?’

Thorne didn’t even try to answer.

‘Look, there were two decisions made. With hindsight, which we all know is a bloody wonderful thing, one of them was wrong.’

‘The decision to tell Grant Freestone that you’d informed his girlfriend about his history?’

‘That we were going to inform her,’ Roper said. ‘We never got the chance, did we? Freestone was informed of the panel’s decision, but before Miss Hanley could be told anything, Freestone had stormed round there and killed her.’

Having ignored the cardboard croissants that had been passed around before the briefing, Thorne was suddenly starting to feel the absence of breakfast. He reached for a biscuit.

‘Why did anyone think it was necessary to warn him?’

‘He wasn’t warned .’ Roper sighed. ‘It was our policy to keep the offender – the “client”, or whatever he would be called now – abreast of significant developments. Clearly, that involved him being made aware of who had been told about his criminal record. The landlord he rented the flat from knew. So Freestone was told that he knew. Some people believed that it was his right.’

‘Some people?’

Roper stared hard at Thorne. It was as though he was about to insist on a little respect and deference to rank; to point out that a ‘sir’ would not have gone amiss, irrespective of whether he was a high-ranking police officer. In the end, he seemed to decide that to ask for it might have appeared needy, more than anything else. ‘It’s a question of emphasis,’ he said. ‘If you were to ask those involved with MAPPA now, whether the arrangements were there to protect the public or to rehabilitate the offender, chances are you wouldn’t get a straight answer. The party line is that one is very much dependent on the other, that each is part of the overall strategy.’

‘But not back then, right?’

‘There was a certain… conflict between points of view. To some, it was all about a commitment to the victim, about the protection of future victims. Others had a more sympathetic attitude to the offender. Believed that once a sentence had been served the offender should be given every opportunity to rejoin the community; that they should perhaps be given the benefit of the doubt, rather than suspected at every turn.’ Roper leaned back in his chair, folded his arms. ‘Those people believed we could play some small part in helping Grant Freestone to do something decent. Others were just waiting for him to fuck up again.’ He held up a hand at Thorne, then lowered it to his trouser-leg, where it gently smoothed out the material. ‘And let’s be clear. Which side of the argument I was on is definitely not relevant to your investigation, Inspector.’

It was as bleak a way of separating those who thought the glass was half full from those who believed it was half empty as Thorne had ever heard. ‘How did you work these… conflicts out?’

Roper’s eyes flicked away from Thorne’s face as he answered. ‘We made compromises.’

‘Who made them? Who took the decisions?’

‘They were discussed.’

‘Were they voted on?’

‘There was nothing that formal. The opinions of certain departments carried more weight than others, perhaps. Look, I can’t remember exactly who was responsible for which decision, or when, and I honestly can’t see that it’s of any interest now.’

‘No, probably not.’ Bearing in mind what had happened to Sarah Hanley, Thorne guessed that there was comfort to be gained from a fading memory.

From where he was sitting, Thorne could see a Met helicopter slowly circling a mile or so away; the same height from the ground as he was, perhaps even a little lower. He knew that any pictures it was taking were being fed live to Central 3000, and suddenly he had an image of the chopper’s movements being dictated from long distance, as if it were a toy being flown by remote control. He imagined a commander’s thumb whitening against a joystick, sending the helicopter round and round.