Mark Billingham - Buried

‘How does that work?’ Holland asked. ‘You share duties with the other counsellor?’

‘It’s one on, one off.’

‘Meaning?’

Warren slid the ashtray to within Heeney’s reach. ‘One of us is always here overnight and we each do a week at a time. I’m on days at the minute, so I get to sleep in my own bed.’

Holland looked at the Post-its stuck to the fridge door, the printed rota that had been laminated and pinned to one of the cupboards. ‘It’s how I imagine students live,’ he said. ‘Notes telling their flatmates to do the washing up and to keep their hands off the new pot of yoghurt. Like The Young Ones or something…’

‘It’s quite a lot like that,’ Warren said, ‘only with more violence and a lot less shagging.’

Heeney suddenly looked rather more interested. ‘Why’s that then?’

‘It’s single sex, for a start; not that that makes a lot of difference, of course. But residents are not really allowed to have any sort of relationship while they’re here. Dependency isn’t something we try to encourage, you see?’

‘How long are they here for?’ Heeney asked.

‘Anything up to eighteen months.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Depends if they stick it, if a council flat becomes available, whatever.’

‘I bet there’s a lot of porn knocking about…’

Warren smiled as he took a long drag, but it was at the policeman, rather than with him.

Through the kitchen window Holland could see a long, narrow garden. There was a shed at the far end, a table and chairs. The grass badly needed cutting, and when a large magpie dropped, screeching into it from a fence-post, the bird all but disappeared from view.

‘Why did you give up?’ Holland asked. He glanced towards the calendar and the words beneath. ‘What made you choose?’

‘I wanted to stop from the day I started,’ Warren said. ‘Actually, make that I knew that I should stop. I was a drugs counsellor who was also a drug addict, so I knew exactly how much I was fucking myself up. But you don’t stop until there’s nothing else you can do. Until some part of your body packs in or something terminal happens in your life.’ Outside, a cat with long, matted fur jumped up on to the window sill. Warren leaned across and gently tapped on the window with a fingernail; watched as the cat rubbed itself against the glass. ‘There’s rarely a specific moment, to be honest,’ he said. ‘But if you want one, it was probably when my mum died, and my brother and sister wouldn’t let me be alone with her body in case I nicked the jewellery off it.’

Holland noticed that even Heeney had the good grace to look at his shoes for a moment or two.

‘Yeah.’ Warren turned and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘That was a decent-sized slap in the face.’

‘That was when you decided to quit?’

‘No, not even then.’ He laughed gently at the ridiculousness of it all. ‘But that was when the family made me quit.’

‘Like an “intervention” sort of thing?’

‘Well, a British version of one. My sister cut me dead and my brother beat the shit out of me.’

Holland could not help but be impressed by the man’s openness, by his apparent honesty. He certainly seemed to be someone who’d given up hiding anything a long time ago. ‘So, when was that?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been clean almost exactly two years, which is just about as long as I was on drugs.’

Holland did the maths and got an interesting result. ‘So you started taking drugs when you were working on the MAPPA project.’

‘I started taking cocaine seriously in 2001.’

‘Around the time the panel was disbanded?’

Warren nipped a strand of tobacco from his tongue. ‘Somewhere around there, probably. I could check, but I don’t think “Took first line of charlie” appears anywhere in that year’s diary-’

He was cut off by a burst of shouting from the next room, which grew suddenly louder as a door was thrown open. A few seconds later, a skinny teenage boy, who could not have been much older than Luke Mullen, stormed into the kitchen, gesturing wildly and cursing at the top of his voice.

The cat fled from the window ledge.

‘Cunt Andrew grassed me to the group, fucking told everyone I’d been talking about gear… about gear I’d taken like I loved it. Fucker wasn’t even there… cunt, saying shit to make himself popular with you lot. I swear, you better take all the fucking knives out of this fucking kitchen, Neil, I’m telling you that…’

Warren led the boy to the small kitchen table. He sat him beneath a poster that said, ‘THIS IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL’, and talked to him as though Holland and Heeney weren’t there. He spoke gently enough at first, until the boy grew calmer, then gradually his tone became firmer. He said that he understood how annoying it was to be grassed up, but that Andrew had done the right thing. Talking about drugs in a positive way was against all the rules; to talk about them as if they were something to be missed or mourned was not the way to move forward.

‘It’s stinking thinking, Danny, you know that. Stinking thinking…’

The phrase rang a bell inside Holland’s head. They were buzzwords, with the dreadful whiff of an American self-help course. But it struck a chord. Holland made a mental note to tell Thorne, who he was sure would find it funny.

Stinking thinking.

Without it, the two of them would be out of a job.

It wasn’t panic but simple surprise that passed across Jane Freestone’s face when she opened the door. Saw that it wasn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses who were ringing her bell at nine-thirty on a Saturday morning.

‘I thought you lot had given up,’ she said. ‘Worked out you were wasting your time, started bothering someone else once a fucking year.’

It was the turn of those waving the warrant cards to look surprised, while Jane Freestone’s features settled quickly into a resentful sneer. It seemed to Thorne that the Sarah Hanley case, certainly as far as Grant Freestone’s involvement was concerned, had gone from cold to deep frozen. After a terse exchange on the doorstep, he and Porter were grudgingly ushered inside.

They walked down a narrow corridor with framed prints of sunsets and snowscapes on the walls. A sign saying, ‘Billy’s Room’ was Sellotaped to a closed door. From behind it, Thorne could hear a television and the sound of toys being thrown around. He smelled last night’s Chinese takeaway as they passed the kitchen.

Within a few minutes of standing in Jane Freestone’s flat – a two-bedroom maisonette on an estate in Brentford – Thorne’s journey to work was starting to seem like a fond and far-distant memory. He’d left earlier than he needed to; slipped out of the flat without waking Hendricks and taken the longer route in through Highgate and Hampstead. The roads had been almost empty. Coming down towards Golders Green past the Heath, the sky ahead of him had been cloudless, and drowned with pink.

He’d thought, even then, that it would probably be as good as the day was ever likely to get.

The view from the window, below the M4 to the trading estate beyond, was only marginally bleaker than the one to be had inside, and the tenant’s mood was more unpleasant than either. Thorne had pissed off some bad people in his time, but it had been a while since he’d felt quite so hated. The woman rarely raised her voice, but the tone was unmistakable; there was poison in every word, spat, spun or whispered. She told them she hadn’t got long because she needed to get her kids dressed. They asked her what she’d meant when she’d answered the door, and she explained that there had been no annual visit the previous year; so she hadn’t had to talk to ‘one of you fuckers’ for eighteen months. Porter explained that she and Thorne were fuckers of a different sort; that Grant’s name had come up in connection with an entirely different matter.