Mark Billingham - Buried

But Freestone couldn’t be the killer, could he? They’d already established that he hadn’t kidnapped anyone, and it would have been too much of a coincidence for Kathleen Bristow’s death not to be connected to the abduction of Luke Mullen.

‘I reckon he broke a rib or two as well,’ Hendricks said. ‘Pressing down on top of her. Kneeling on her chest, maybe.’

When Hendricks reached forward to push a finger inside Kathleen Bristow’s mouth, to rub a cotton bud across the tears inside her lip, Thorne turned away. He walked out of the room, and downstairs. A SOCO he knew well was working in the dining room, moving methodically around the small table on top of which sat a telephone and answering machine. It was from here that a DI from the on-call Murder Team had phoned Dave Holland, having listened to the message he’d left for Kathleen Bristow. As Thorne headed towards the back door, he exchanged a joke with the officer, but he was thinking of how the old woman’s face had seemed to collapse when Hendricks had removed her false teeth.

Outside, Thorne pushed back the hood of the plastic suit, walked over to where Dave Holland, similarly attired, was leaning against the wall next to the kitchen window. A generator hummed at the front of the house and a powerful arc light brightened the half of the garden nearest the kitchen door.

Holland took two quick drags of a cigarette, held it up to show Thorne, raised his eyes towards the top floor of the house. ‘All this seems a good enough reason to give in and have one, you know? But then you feel guilty for enjoying it.’

In direct contrast to most people, Holland had taken up smoking after his child was born. He’d smoked secretly, at work, until his girlfriend had found out and gone ballistic, since when he’d done his best to knock it on the head. But, like he said, there were times when it seemed reasonable to weaken.

‘Doesn’t Sophie smell it on you?’

Holland nodded. ‘But she understands that nine times out of ten, there’s a bloody good reason, so she doesn’t usually give me a hard time.’

Thorne pushed himself away from the wall and strolled to the rear of the garden. Holland followed him into the shadow, beyond the arc light’s reach. They sat on a small, ornamental bench.

‘You reckon our kidnapper did this?’ Holland asked.

‘If he didn’t, I haven’t got a fucking clue what’s going on. Not that I’ve got much of an idea anyway.’

‘Maybe we’re getting close to him.’

Thorne looked back towards the house, stared at the SOCOs inside, moving back and forth past the bedroom window. ‘It’s hard to feel too excited about that,’ he said, ‘right at this minute.’ He stretched his feet out in front of him. The grass smelled as though it had been mown only a day or two before. It looked grey against the white of the plastic overshoes.

‘I haven’t seen DI Porter for a while,’ Holland said.

‘And…?’

‘Nothing. I just wondered where she was.’

‘Right. She was talking to the photographer, last time I saw her.’ Thorne leaned forward, looked at Holland, daring him to give anything away.

‘ What?’

‘Don’t even think about smirking,’ Thorne said. ‘Just shut up and finish your fag…’

‘I was only asking.’

‘Or I’ll call your girlfriend and tell her you’re back on twenty a day.’

Holland did as he was told, and they sat in silence for a few minutes. The smoke drifted away from them towards the light, disappearing at its edge, where moths and midges danced in and out of the beam. When he’d finished, Holland stubbed out his fag-end on the bottom of the bench and stood up. ‘Best get back in there,’ he said. ‘I reckon they’ll be bringing her out in a minute.’

This was the other advantage of working a murder scene at this hour: save for the occasional insomniac dog-walker or crazed jogger, Kathleen Bristow could leave her home for the last time without an audience. During the day, there would be no shortage of gawpers, standing silently, shifting from foot to foot, formulating the story they would tell later around the dinner table or in the pub. Whenever Thorne listened to traffic updates on the motorway, he wondered why the announcer didn’t just tell the truth; why they didn’t come clean and say that the tailback was the result of drivers slowing down to get a good look at the accident.

He raised his head at the rustle of plastic trouser-legs moving against each other and shifted across to let Porter sit down.

‘Holland giving you a hard time?’ she asked.

‘He knows better.’

Thorne thought Porter probably had more to say about what had nearly gone on at his flat, but he made it obvious that he wasn’t too keen to get into it. He couldn’t help but wonder how he’d feel about discussing it if anything had actually happened.

‘I spoke to Hendricks,’ she said. ‘So I suppose we should at least ask Freestone where he was on Friday night.’

‘Can’t see the point.’

‘Well, how about because we haven’t got anyone else even resembling a suspect?’

Thorne shrugged. ‘We can ask.’

‘A tenner says he was with his sister anyway, right?’

‘Probably. But whether Freestone’s got an alibi or not, this is the same man that killed Allen and Tickell. Has to be. The same man who’s holding Luke.’

A light came on in an upstairs window of the house next door. Looking across, Thorne saw that there were downstairs lights burning on the other side, too. So much for the absence of an audience. In London, he supposed, there was usually someone watching. There would probably be a house-to-house later that morning, and they could only hope that someone had been equally watchful twenty-four hours earlier.

‘OK, seeing as who is pretty much a non-starter, any bright ideas about why?’

Bright ideas? More like guesswork and speculation…

‘Did you look in the spare room?’ Thorne asked.

He had noticed the three battered, metal filing cabinets in the second bedroom and remembered something Callum Roper had said about who was most likely to have kept any records of the MAPPA meetings back in 2001. He ran the idea that had begun to form in his mind past Porter.

Her response suggested that, as pieces of speculation went, it wasn’t the most outlandish she’d ever heard. ‘You think she was killed because of something she knew?’

‘Or something she had. Perhaps without even knowing she had it. It’s just a thought…’

‘The problem is that without us knowing what was in those filing cabinets, I don’t see how we’re going to work out what might have been taken.’

‘I had a quick look in one of them. There’s a ton of stuff in there, going back years. We can go through it all later, when scene of crime’s finished. If there’s nothing there about Freestone, or the MAPPA project in 2001, I think we should try and find out if there ever was.’

‘We’ll need to get back on to whichever social services department she was working for then.’ Porter winced, like she’d just remembered what day it was. ‘Won’t have a lot of luck on a Sunday, mind.’

‘I wouldn’t bank on them having copies of these records themselves,’ Thorne said. ‘Not if what Roper said is true. But they might know what Bristow took with her when she retired, or at least confirm that she kept her own records.’ Even as Thorne said it, the idea was starting to sound vague and flabby; time-consuming at the very least. Though they now had three murders to investigate, there was still a missing boy whose safety, whose quick recovery was, theoretically, their prime concern.

A boy who, theoretically, was still alive.