Mark Billingham - Buried

‘Something else you can fit him up for?’

‘You think your brother was fitted up for Sarah Hanley’s murder?’ Porter asked.

Freestone shook her head, smirked like Thorne and Porter were as thick as pig-shit. She was somewhere in her early thirties, tall and large-breasted, with dark hair scraped back from her face and tied up. Thorne might almost have found her sexy in a hard-faced, brittle kind of way. If she were wearing a different dressing-gown perhaps, and he hadn’t been laid in twenty years.

‘Are you saying that a police officer, or officers, made your brother the prime suspect because they couldn’t find anyone else?’

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘Or that they were responsible for the murder in the first place?’

She took a crumpled tissue from her dressing-gown pocket, used one corner to dab at the inside of a nostril. ‘There was the odd copper who wouldn’t have been too gutted if Grant got sent down again.’ She stuffed the tissue back. ‘Put it that way.’

Thorne resisted looking across at Porter and sensed that she was doing likewise. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy naming this “odd copper”,’ he said.

She didn’t.

Thorne and Porter were standing, but when they’d first come into the living room Freestone had dropped into an armchair and turned towards the large, flat-screen TV in one corner. She’d switched it on, then muted the volume, and spent much of the conversation staring at the screen.

‘Why did he run, Jane, if he didn’t kill Sarah?’

It was an obscure cable channel. Every time Thorne looked, someone was being shown around a house.

‘Because he knew he was in the frame, and he didn’t want to go back to prison, did he? Even though this was an unrelated offence, they had him marked down inside as someone who messes with kids.’

‘ Marked down? ’ Thorne said. ‘Nobody planted those children in his garage.’

Freestone ignored the dig, studied the TV as though she could read lips.

‘Don’t you think he would have been better off staying put,’ Porter said, ‘if he really didn’t do it?’

‘Stop fucking saying, “ if” .’ She turned suddenly, looking about ready to punch someone’s lights out. ‘Grant was with me when his girlfriend was killed. We were in the park with my kids.’ She pointed back towards the corridor. ‘Go and fucking-well ask them.’

The woman could easily make such an invitation, knowing it would never be accepted. Her eldest child was eight years old. Whatever they might say if asked now, neither he nor his little brother could be trusted to remember what had happened back when neither of them had been old enough to say much of anything.

Porter held up a hand, left a beat before trying again. ‘Wouldn’t he have been better off trying to prove he was innocent?’

The look Freestone gave Porter before she turned back to the TV made it clear that now she knew they were both stupid.

‘Does Grant think he was stitched up?’ Thorne asked.

‘Have a guess.’

‘Is that what he said at the time? Did you see him before he disappeared?’

‘I haven’t seen him in five years.’

‘Nobody’s suggesting that he’s hiding under the bed, but the two of you must have been in touch, surely?’

‘Must we?’

Thorne took a couple of steps towards the armchair. ‘He’s phoned you, written you letters, something. Is it what he still thinks?’

Freestone pushed herself up, waited for Thorne to move out of the way so she could get past. ‘I’m going for a piss. Give you two a chance to have a good old nosy while I’m gone.’ She pointed to a door. ‘My bed’s through there, in case you do want to check underneath…’

As soon as she had left, as soon as they’d heard the lock slide across on the bathroom door, Thorne and Porter did as Freestone had suggested. They moved quickly, and in virtual silence around the room, drew each other’s attention to items of interest with a nod or a whisper. There were photographs on a low, glass table to the side of the TV: Jane Freestone and a man Thorne recognised as her brother, wearing smiles they’d been holding for a few seconds too long; a holiday snap of a well-built man with ginger hair and moustache sitting on a balcony in shirt and shorts, posing with his pint; Freestone’s kids in a playground, running towards the camera. Porter looked at the magazines on a box below the window: Heat , Auto Trader, Nuts . Thorne flicked quickly through the utility bills, fastened together with a bulldog clip next to the midi-system. He looked for any overseas numbers on the BT calls list and noted that the Sky subscription was for the complete films and sports package. He moved away to study the spines on the row of CDs when he heard the toilet flush.

When Freestone returned, she walked straight back to the armchair and sank into it as though there were nobody else in the room.

Porter nodded towards the photograph of the man with the beer. ‘Is that the kids’ dad?’

The laugh was short and bitter. ‘He is now. Makes a damn sight better job of it than the real one ever did, that’s for sure.’

Thorne wandered across and leaned down to look at the photo again. ‘He lives here, does he?’

‘Most of the time.’ She sucked her teeth, answered like it was the question she’d been expecting. ‘Which is why we’ve got Sky Sports and so many heavy-metal CDs.’ She looked at Thorne, her eyes wide with mock concern. ‘In case you were wondering.’

Thorne was wondering how many times this woman had had police officers in her house. ‘Where is he?’

‘Arsenal are away at Manchester United,’ she said. ‘Him and his mates went up on the train last night.’

Thorne looked closer and recognised the Gunners crest on the man’s polo shirt.

‘You going to get married?’ Porter asked.

‘What’s the point? It’s good for fuck-all, except making it slightly easier for the CSA to catch up with them when they leave.’

In his head, Thorne fashioned a smartarse remark about how nice it was to see romance alive and well. He kept it to himself, thought instead about how vulnerable a marriage was; about those less-than-sturdy emotions with their in-built expiry dates. A marriage could survive if love became something else – companionship, perhaps – but if hate got its foot in the door, there would only ever be one outcome.

He thought about Maggie and Tony Mullen.

Hate did not appear overnight. It seeded itself. It sprouted and climbed from within the dark, damp subtleties of blame and guilt. Thorne could conceive of no better condition for such a twisted flowering than the loss of a child.

Thorne’s eyes shifted back to Jane Freestone.

She was staring like she’d walked him in on the bottom of her shoe. ‘What exactly is this “entirely different matter” you were talking about, then?’ She was turning her head before she’d finished the question, her attention stolen by the sound of a child crying along the corridor.

‘Bollocks,’ she said.

Porter joined her as she reached the door. ‘Can I use the toilet?’

‘Why don’t you just make yourself some fucking breakfast?’ Freestone said, walking out ahead of her.

Left alone in the room, Thorne sat down on the sofa, deciding that as he got older and more experienced, he was becoming worse at reading people; at getting so much as an idea of what they were thinking. He could be close enough to see his own reflection in someone’s eyes and still not be able to tell if they were sincere or running rings around him. There were days when he’d have the Pope down as a serial killer and Jeffrey Archer as an honest man…