Mark Billingham - Buried

Porter, though, seemed energised by Thorne’s idea. While Thorne himself could only hope that he didn’t look as bad as he felt, her face showed no sign of the fact that she was approaching what must have been twenty-four hours without sleep.

‘Maybe it’s Freestone’s connection to this MAPPA business that’s important,’ she suggested. ‘Not the threats he made before he went to prison.’

Three murders…

‘Well, something’s seriously important to someone,’ Thorne said.

‘What about Luke?’

There was guesswork and there was speculation. And there were some things that just became horribly obvious. ‘He’ll kill Luke if he has to,’ Thorne said.

Porter nodded, like Thorne had confirmed what she already knew. She lifted her feet on to the bench, wrapped her arms around her knees, and said, ‘I’ve only ever lost two.’

For a minute or more, Thorne searched for something to say, but before anything suitable could come to him Porter had chased away the need for reassurance and was getting to her feet.

‘We need to get a fucking shift on,’ she said. ‘Maybe coming at it from this new angle might help.’

‘Maybe.’ Thorne hauled himself upright, hoping that her optimism would prove justified. There was no doubt that the map of the case was being freshly laid out on memos and whiteboards; was redrawing itself in Thorne’s head. But as lines snaked in new directions and intersected for the first time with others, one name – whatever else was happening – kept drifting towards an area where it should not, by rights, belong. It kept floating away from that part of the map reserved for victims and witnesses and heading towards an altogether murkier, unlabelled zone.

Tony Mullen.

A wave from just inside the kitchen door indicated that the body of Kathleen Bristow was being brought out. Porter started walking back towards the house, with Thorne a few paces behind her.

The joking always stopped at this point, for a few minutes at least, until the mortuary vehicle had driven away. Then the bagging and the scraping, and the banter, could resume; with the volume cranked up a notch or two.

Once the body had gone, the murder scene could let out the breath it had been holding.

Thorne watched as the stretcher was lifted over the step at the back door and into the garden. Holland came out after it, then Hendricks, who began to clamber out of his plastic suit in readiness for following the body to the mortuary. The stretcher was taken through the gate, the arc light illuminating its path along the side of the house towards the road.

Thorne walked back into the house, thinking that cigarette smoke wasn’t the worst thing you could go home stinking of.

Custody reviews took place six and fifteen hours into the twenty-four. Thirty minutes earlier, at 8 a.m., Kitson and Brigstocke had reviewed the ongoing custody of Adrian Farrell for the second time. Now, she was cheerfully passing on the news to the prisoner himself: that should matters not proceed to her satisfaction, she and her DCI would be going to the superintendent to seek a six-hour extension.

Smartarse, the solicitor – who preferred the name Wilson – was less than impressed. ‘And this is on the basis of a video parade, is it?’

‘A positive identification from an eyewitness who says he watched Mr Farrell and two others murder Amin Latif on October 17th, last year. Sorry… I should say, “murder Mr Latif after seriously sexually assaulting him”, if we’re being accurate. Although, that said, I think the murder will probably be enough, don’t you?’

Wilson began scribbling something, then casually slid his forearm across the top of his notepad, like a schoolboy protecting his answers.

Kitson watched him write, thinking that it might just as well have been a shopping list, for all the help it was going to be to his client. Next to her, Andy Stone did up the buttons on his jacket. Stone was just there to make up the numbers, and seemed happy enough with his role.

‘You warm enough, Adrian?’ he asked.

The interview room was cold, which was probably a good thing, as someone brought in overnight after a knife attack outside a bar had thrown up in the corner. Heating would almost certainly have made the stench of stale puke and disinfectant unbearable.

Judging by the expression on Adrian Farrell’s face, the smell was bad enough as it was.

He looked very different out of uniform; away from school and everything that went with it. He wore jeans, and a red hooded top with ‘NEW YORK’ emblazoned across the chest. The blond hair was messy, but had certainly not been styled that way, and the face it framed showed every sign of having spent a night as uncomfortable as those in the cells were supposed to be. He was trying to look bored and mildly irritated, but lack of sleep was obviously affecting his ability to keep up the act. Where previously she had caught only glimpses, Kitson was starting to get a better look at the fear, and at the dark, quiet anger which settled across his features, like scum on the surface of still water.

‘I know what’ll cheer you up,’ she said. ‘A bit of a history quiz.’

A laminated list of prisoner’s rights had been fixed to the desk. Farrell was picking at an edge of it. He looked up, shrugged. ‘Fine.’

‘History’s your favourite, isn’t it?’

‘I said fine.’

‘Good on dates? What about February 28th, 1953?’

Farrell tapped a finger against his lips. ‘Battle of Hastings?’

‘Why don’t we ask the audience?’ Kitson said. ‘Mr Wilson?’

Wilson did a little more scribbling. ‘I doubt you’ll get any kind of extension if you waste the time you’ve got playing silly games.’

‘It was the day that Francis Crick and James Watson worked out the structure of DNA.’ Kitson slowly drew a figure of eight on the desktop in front of her. ‘The double helix.’

Farrell looked as though he found this genuinely funny. ‘I won’t forget it now,’ he said.

‘I bet you won’t. We should have a preliminary result by the end of the day, and I know it’s going to be a match.’

This time, Kitson was talking about the result of tests carried out on an authorised DNA sample, taken the previous day at the station. Farrell had refused to give permission for this, so Kitson – as she had every right to do in the case of a non-intimate sample – had taken it without consent. As several strands of hair were removed by the attending medical officer, with Stone and another DC providing the necessary restraint, Kitson had seen flashes of an anger a lot less quiet than the one she sensed, simmering inside Adrian Farrell now.

She stared across the table, turning up the heat. ‘And you know it’s going to be a match, too, don’t you?’

‘I know all sorts of things.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘I know that you can’t decide how best to talk to me so as to get what you want. I know that you’re either patronising me or pretending that you think I’m really clever and really mature, but all the time you’re steering a clumsy course between the two you’re just sitting there hating my guts.’ He cocked his head towards Stone. ‘And I know that he just wants to climb across this table and get his hands on me.’

Stone returned the stare, like he wasn’t about to argue.

Kitson caught the look, like a poker player spotting a tell. The puff of the cheeks from Wilson told her he was resigned to the fact that whichever way he’d advised Farrell to behave, the boy thought he knew better. That the fat fee he was doubtless being paid by his client’s parents would be earned without a great deal of effort. Kitson turned back to Farrell, convinced that his solicitor was already thinking about future, fatter fees. Those that might be earned appealing against a guilty verdict.