Mark Billingham - Buried

Porter opened the notebook she was carrying and began to leaf through the pages, looking for the bullet points she was keen to go over. ‘Thorne’s not the easiest bloke to suss out, is he?’

Kitson smiled. ‘There isn’t nearly enough time…’

‘You should be glad I never throw anything away,’ Roper said. ‘And that my wife knows where everything is.’ He opened up the green folder and took out a piece of paper. ‘I called her after we spoke on the phone and she copied these out of an old desk diary. It was the quickest way I could think of to get them. The only way, come to think of it.’

Thorne took the piece of paper and looked at the list of names:

DI C. Roper.

Mr P. Lardner.

Mrs K. Bristow.

Ms M. Stringer.

Mr N. Warren.

Roper shifted his chair closer to Thorne’s, studied the list over his shoulder, pointing at each name in turn.

‘I was just a DI back then with the CID at Crystal Palace; thought this would be a good thing to do, career-wise.’ He shook his head at the stupidity of a slightly younger self. ‘Never realised what a pain in the arse it was going to turn out to be, sitting round a table with half of bloody Bromley Borough Council once a month. Pete Lardner is the only one I’ve seen since, as a matter of fact. He was with the Probation Office, and I know he’s still there, so it shouldn’t be hard to get hold of him. ‘Mrs Bristow. Scottish woman. Kathleen, Katharine, something like that. She was the social worker, and you’d work that out straight away. Liked to meddle and called it “caring”. You know the sort, right? She tried to run the whole thing, and, to be honest, the rest of us were happy to let her. She was knocking on a bit, as I remember, so she might well have retired. Ms M. Stringer was from the local education authority.’

Thorne looked up, amused by the DCI’s emphasis on the ‘Ms’, but also a little puzzled.

‘There were four or five different schools within a few miles of where Freestone had been housed,’ Roper explained. ‘It was obviously a cause for concern.’ He glanced back at the list. ‘Warren was the drugs awareness bloke from the health authority. Freestone had developed something of a problem in prison and was attending a methadone clinic. Actually, I think Warren and Lardner had worked together before, but the rest of us didn’t know one another from Adam.’ He pointed again to the last name on the list, then leaned back and shifted his chair away again. ‘Looked like he’d taken a few drugs himself, as far as I can remember.’

Thorne folded the paper and tucked it away. ‘Thanks for this.’

‘No problem, but I really do have to wind this up now.’

‘Are there any minutes of the meetings?’

‘Well if there are, I couldn’t begin to tell you where they are now. God knows who kept them. The woman from social services would be my guess…’

Thorne wasn’t hugely shocked, but it was more than enough to show on his face.

‘We were the trial run for all this, remember?’ Roper looked like he could remember perfectly well, and wasn’t too thrilled about the fact. ‘Now, it’s structured. Now, the meetings are properly chaired and records are kept documenting every decision and responsibility for whatever tasks have been agreed. It’s all properly buttoned up, with each agency cooperating with the relevant authority, sharing their information and so on. Back then, we were making it up as we went along. Now, there are “jigsaw teams” – local public protection units in each borough – so it’s covered from both sides. There are “exclusion zones” and “action plans”, and any factors that put public safety at risk are identified early on and addressed. All we could do was react to whatever happened.’ He leaned forward, placed the flat of his hand against the coffee pot. ‘Basically, we were guinea pigs.’

Thorne said nothing, and stood up, thinking that, despite the points Callum Roper had made, his final plea for mitigation had been a bit rich. It was definitely a bit bloody late. Some might have said that Grant Freestone was as much of a guinea pig as any member of that panel.

The woman he’d killed certainly was.

‘I’ll walk you to the lift…’ Roper said.

In the lobby, waiting for the glass lift with the posh speaking voice to glide up, Roper seemed keen to end their meeting on something of a lighter note. Thorne didn’t see the need, but listened politely enough.

‘You remember Space Patrol? ’ Roper asked.

‘Sorry.’

‘It was a kids’ show in the early sixties. A science-fiction thing, with crappy puppets. Made Thunderbirds look high-tech.’

Thorne said he couldn’t remember the show; that he’d only have been a couple of years old at the time.

‘Anyway, back then, this building was pretty futuristic for its time, so they used a shot of it in the programme.’ Roper raised his arms. ‘This place was the original Space Patrol headquarters.’

Thorne couldn’t think of anything to say. Puppets, science fiction, the Metropolitan Police. There were at least half a dozen different punchlines.

He’d switched off his phone before going in to see Roper. Once he was outside, he checked for messages and found two new ones. Porter’s didn’t seem to be about very much, while Phil Hendricks had rung to say that everything he’d suggested at the briefing – the way that Allen and Tickell had died – had been more or less confirmed by the postmortems. Thorne called Hendricks back first, got an answering machine. ‘What do you want, a bloody gold star? Seriously, Phil, it was a privilege to watch you doing some excellent mime work this morning, and I’d love to pat you on the back personally, but fuck knows when. Give us a call later, if you fancy a natter…’

Then he called Porter.

‘ Touching base?’

‘It’s just an expression,’ she said. ‘Calm down.’

‘It’s a stupid expression. Unless you’re an American teenager and you haven’t told anyone.’

‘I was wondering what you were up to, that’s all.’

‘Well, I’ve stopped sulking. You probably noticed that I’d been sulking since the raid at Bow. But I’ve stopped now.’

‘I didn’t notice anything. I just thought that was what you were normally like.’

‘If you’re still keen, we could touch base after lunch.’

She ignored the dig so completely that he started to wonder if he’d really pissed her off.

‘Where?’

‘Have you got a pen?’ Thorne waited, smiled at a uniform eyeing him with suspicion from the Empress’s front entrance. ‘Right, see if you can track down someone called Peter Lardner at the Probation Service. I’m not sure which borough. If you can, fix up an appointment for this afternoon and give me a call back.’

He could see a greasy spoon on the far side of the road and began walking towards it like a man in a trance. Coffee and Hobnobs had simply not been enough. It was gone midday, and right about then Thorne decided that a full English breakfast sounded like the perfect lunch.

It was madness, this dividing of himself.

He’d spoken and spoken, and been spoken to in this meeting and that. And all the time, while he was smiling or looking suitably serious, while he was getting on with normal things, he was thinking about the boy.

Thinking about what he’d done, and what he was going to do.

What he was doing was, literally, madness; a textbook example of it. But wasn’t it a different type of insanity that had caused the problem in the first place? Wasn’t that called madness by some people? In some languages it was, certainly, and with good reason. He’d been as mad as a March hare in that way, in the good way, for years now; long before he’d been driven to any of this.