Mark Billingham - Buried

For Thorne, it hadn’t been a tricky decision.

‘Yeah, I suppose it’s fair enough,’ Porter said. ‘If it was one of my kids, I’d be shooting up smack by now.’

‘How many have you got?’

Porter shook her head. ‘Oh, I haven’t. I was just saying…’

Holland stopped on his way to the bar, already a little ahead of them. They turned down his offer of a drink, happy to take things a bit slower, and to avoid getting involved in big rounds. Holland was sitting at an adjacent table, trading sick jokes with Sam Karim and Andy Stone. Heeney, Parsons, and some others sat a few feet away, on the other side of the fruit machine. Despite the operational insistence on cooperation, the Kidnap and Murder teams were keeping themselves to themselves now that they were off the clock.

‘We should try and give the Mullens a wide berth tomorrow,’ Thorne suggested. ‘Once he sees the paper, he’ll go fucking ballistic.’

‘I’m happy to stay well clear of that.’ Porter took a drink. ‘Kenny Parsons will be back there first thing, so we’ll get the highlights from him later.’

‘Mullen will be straight on the phone to Jesmond, or somebody else he used to play golf with and then your bloke’s going to get it in the neck.’

‘Hignett’s got some support on this.’

‘Fine. Let the brass fight it out. We’ll make ourselves scarce.’

Despite what Thorne had told Tony and Maggie Mullen a few hours before, the possibility that Luke Mullen was not being held against his will but had gone into hiding after killing his kidnappers was yet to be fully disregarded. Owing to the somewhat unusual turn that the case had taken, a decision had been taken partially to lift the press embargo and run a story the following day about Luke’s disappearance.

It would not be front page.

It would not be scary stuff about children vanishing.

It would be a small story, about a teenage boy who’d gone missing after school, with a photo and an appeal to anyone with information as to his whereabouts to come forward. With an appeal to the boy himself, should he be reading the story, to do the same.

‘You can’t really blame Hignett.’

‘Can I still think he’s an arsehole?’

‘He’s just covering his bases,’ Porter said. ‘It’s a straightforward appeal for witnesses; plus there’s a message for the kid if he’s just hiding out somewhere, afraid to come home. Until we get evidence confirming that someone’s taken him, Hignett’s shit scared about ignoring the other possibility. It could seriously bite him in the bollocks if it turns out to be what happened.’

‘It isn’t what happened.’

‘ We can afford to be that sure. The DCI has to be more cautious, consider the unlikely scenarios as well. He’s safe that way.’

‘Safe, until the kidnapper sees tomorrow’s paper and sends us a few of Luke Mullen’s fingers wrapped up in it.’

Porter stared at him, her open mouth eventually creasing into a grin as she snorted in comic derision. Thorne was unable to maintain the over-earnest expression and laughed along with her. They drank, worked their way through four packets of crisps between them, and Thorne realised that Porter was probably right. As far as the newspaper coverage went, what Hignett was doing made political sense; and besides, apart from backing out of one dead end after another, there wasn’t a fat lot else they could do.

Harry Cotterill had been on his way back from a booze cruise, his Transit stuffed with cheap Belgian lager, when Conrad Allen and Amanda Tickell were being carved up. No one had yet managed to track down Philip Quinn, but his girlfriend swore blind he was somewhere in Newcastle. She’d been pissed off enough with him to tell the police exactly how many different laws he was breaking while he was up there, giving her story, and his alibi, the depressing ring of truth.

As far as the murder victims went, nothing the team had discovered was helping a great deal. They’d put together a sketchy outline of Amanda Tickell’s life: well-heeled parents; a car accident that killed her father when she was a child; adolescent rebellion spiralling out of control and into addiction. With what they already knew about Conrad Allen, a clear enough picture had developed of a third-division Bonnie and Clyde, but nothing pointed towards any figure for whom they might have been working. They’d spoken to a few likely dealers, working on the theory that Allen and Tickell had got into the kidnapping business to pay off a drug debt. From there, a more elaborate theory had emerged, in which the drug dealer, aware of what was happening, had seen a way to take all the money for himself and had muscled in by killing Allen and Tickell and taking Luke. But where was the ransom demand?

It was only the second-stupidest idea that anyone had come up with, and there was no point getting too stressed about ‘what the brass were thinking’. Some coppers were just genetically programmed to hedge their bets, men like Hignett and Jesmond with fence-friendly arse-cracks who never left their Airwaves in a drawer.

‘I need to say sorry to you,’ Porter said.

‘For what?’

‘For playing silly buggers when we went into Allen’s flat. Cutting you out of that was nobody’s decision but mine. It was just about territory, and I was a complete tosser about it. So, sorry.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And you had every right to sulk.’

‘I should have kept it up for longer.’

‘ And I wanted to say sorry for that comment the other day. For making that stupid joke about Alzheimer’s.’

Thorne had to think back for a second or two. ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not a problem.’ He meant it, but, all the same, he wondered who Porter had been speaking to. He glanced towards the table where Holland, Karim and Stone were sitting.

‘It’s about a year, isn’t it?’

‘Just coming up.’

‘It was a fire, someone said.’

Thorne took a mouthful of Guinness, licked froth from his top lip. ‘A fire, yeah.’

‘I lost my mum a couple of years ago. So…’

‘Right.’

‘I read somewhere it takes seven years to get over losing a parent. Seven years, like the itch. I don’t know how they worked that out.’

‘They probably didn’t. It’s just a number.’

Porter said she was sure he was right, then nodded towards him, asked where he’d got the scar.

Thorne instinctively traced a finger along the straight line that ran across his chin, paler than the flesh around it and stubble free. ‘Shark-bite,’ he said. The way things were shaping up, he was sure she’d find out soon enough.

Porter rubbed her own chin back and forth against the edge of her glass. She seemed happy enough with the only answer she looked like getting.

‘I’m going to fetch another half,’ Thorne said. He pushed back his chair. ‘Do you want another of those?’

Porter handed him the glass.

On his way across, Thorne caught a glimpse of his father, propping up the bar at a family wedding a year or two before. Holding court, full of it, pissing himself laughing. Telling anyone too polite to walk away that the best thing about losing your marbles was that you could keep forgetting to buy anybody else a drink.

Thorne blinked slowly, and thought about what Porter had said. It sounded like a very long time to be stuck with the old bugger.

He ordered the drinks and moved along the bar to speak to Yvonne Kitson. She looked a lot happier than the last time he’d seen her, but then a few large glasses of wine could do that to people. ‘How did it go?’ he asked.

‘I’d rather not get too far into it,’ she said. She held a ten-pound note between her fingers and fluttered it in front of her face as though she were hot. ‘But I’m hoping for some good news.’