Mark Billingham - Buried

Thorne grunted a yes as ideas continued to tumble and tangle.

‘One more thing.’ Kitson said it as though it were an afterthought, an irrelevance. ‘When you’re talking to Farrell, if you could squeeze out the names of the other two who helped him kill Amin Latif, there’s half a shandy in it for you.’

They enjoyed the moment, and sat there, and took a minute. Rubbing at sore feet and cradling paper cups of tea, like any other pair of workers on a break. Catching their breaths.

Thorne sensed that it might be their last chance to do so for a while. There had been times, on previous cases, when it had felt as if he were on a collision course with whoever he was trying to catch. As though the speed had increased until in the end it had just been a question of where the crash was going to happen.

This case felt different.

There was the same inevitability, like something rising from the guts into the mouth, the same sense that the end was coming. But it wasn’t a question of getting closer, or even of something gaining on them.

Thorne simply felt like they were running out of time.

He hadn’t meant to hurt the boy.

That didn’t excuse the fact that he had; that he’d known his words were like slaps, like punches. But he genuinely hadn’t wanted to. Everything was more complicated than that, of course; and more simple. It was someone else he wanted to hurt. Someone who would see how much a child they loved had suffered and would feel that pain a thousandfold.

That would make them see sense, wouldn’t it? Would make them look at things a little differently.

It had been such a straightforward idea, but from the moment he’d started to put it into pracice he’d felt it going away from him. Now he honestly didn’t know if things were going to work out as they’d been supposed to. It had all got out of control. He was out of control.

But at least he wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognise what was happening. He was still aware. He’d seen it too many times himself: car accidents on two legs who had ruined lives – their own and those of everyone around them; fuck-ups and hard-luck merchants whose tears were real enough, whose anguish could suck the air out of a room, but who couldn’t seem to grasp that it was not an excuse.

I didn’t mean to hurt anyone…

He knew very well that he’d done terrible things. That good intentions counted for nothing with blood on his hands and the noise from the cellar. And that, although he had no idea how, it would end.

There were bells ringing across the field.

He sat and thought about engineering some sort of resolution himself. If he just opened the door and stood back, things would sort themselves out quickly enough. The boy would run towards the sound of the bells, towards a place where there was a phone, and it would all be over.

But that was hypothetical nonsense, because too much had happened now for everything to finish as simply as that. The slate could no longer be wiped clean. But it felt good to know that he wouldn’t be the only one paying the price.

When the bells finally stopped, he could hear the sobbing again. Coming up through the floor: a stutter, a desperate beat; rising every few breaths to something cracked and sore.

He closed his eyes, tried to forget how stupid he’d been, until he could almost believe that what he heard was only the sound of water and rust, and the pipes expanding.

The religious stuff was sort of taken for granted at Butler’s Hall. It wasn’t a church school, as such, but there were hymns in assembly every day, and, even though it wasn’t forced down your throat in RE lessons, the presumption was that anyone whose parents had not stated otherwise was C of E.

He knew that the chaplain would have made speeches. Something about lost sheep, most likely. That teachers would have lined up on stage and bowed their heads, and that prayers would have been said for him every morning.

Now he’d started saying them himself.

He’d been filling his head with all manner of rubbish, trying to force out the stuff he couldn’t bear to have in there. Thinking about whatever else he could while the man was talking to him; and later, when it had finished and the man had gone. Sequences of streets and underground stations; rules of games he’d played with Juliet when they were younger; the names of his old soft toys… Anything.

Now God had elbowed His way in there as well.

Neither his mum nor his dad was big on church, save for the odd nativity play or whatever, and Juliet seemed actively drawn to Satanism, if anything. But he’d always liked the basic idea of it, of what it stood for. It was hard to argue that love and compassion were bad ideas. And some of the stuff in the Bible stood up OK, as long as you took it as nothing more than a cracking story.

He’d seen a programme on TV once, about why bad things happened to good people; about a bloke who did tons of work for charity then got some horrible disease, and a couple who went to church every five minutes and whose daughter had disappeared. They all said that suffering was part of being a Christian, and that everything they were going through was just a test of their faith. He’d watched it, thinking that they probably had to say something like that. He’d decided that if he believed in God, and was ever tested to the same extent, that he’d fail miserably.

But he didn’t believe, not really. And anyway, he knew what he was going through was nobody’s fault but that of the man on the other side of the cellar door. So a prayer couldn’t hurt, could it?

He guessed that the school chaplain might have something to say about praying at the same time as harbouring such violent thoughts; while clutching the carefully prepared means to put those thoughts into practice, if need be. But he also remembered that some of the stories he’d read in the Old Testament made Grand Theft Auto look tame. He knew that God had no problem with blood and thunderbolts, and striking down those who deserved it.

Thinking about it, perhaps the most appropriate thing he could ask God for was to be given the chance.

So he prayed for a while, because he knew that’s what people did as a last resort. Then he wiped away the tears and the snot. Went back to the distraction of memories and mental gymnastics.

The names of every child in his class, alphabetically, forwards and backwards. Planets and moons. Stars and satellites. His toys.

A dinosaur. A Bugs Bunny. A brown bear named Grizzle…

She made it a rule never to look at the faces.

It wasn’t about the pain. Porter was used to seeing the rifts and fissures that pain could gouge across a face; she worked with it most days. But there was hope in those faces, too: that the nightmare would soon be over, that she or someone like her would do a good job and bring their loved ones home again. There were times, if that hope were misplaced, when it was terrible to see, but nothing was as dreadful as its absence.

When it came to identifying a body, the hope was often there right until the very last second. Hope that there had been a terrible mistake; that the police had got it wrong; that their wife/husband/child was still alive somewhere. On occasions, of course, when there was a genuine element of doubt as to identity, it was her job to look. But not once, even then, had she ever seen that hope rewarded. She’d watched it die and seen it buried in a blink; gone before the breath had been fully caught.

So Louise Porter didn’t look any more. She dropped her eyes for that moment when hope was extinguished.

Afterwards, she sat with them on a brown plastic bench near the mortuary entrance. Francis Bristow and his wife had caught the early train from Glasgow. Clutching tight to overnight bags, they looked like bemused tourists who’d taken a wrong turn.