Mark Billingham - Buried

‘Have you got anywhere to stay?’ Porter asked. ‘Any other family?’

Joan Bristow was sitting on the far end. She looked to her husband, who was seated in the middle, then leaned forward slightly to look along at Porter. ‘We didn’t really know what we’d be doing. How long we’d be here, or anything.’

‘I’ll see if we can get something sorted out for you,’ Porter said.

‘We didn’t know, you see…’

The woman had a smart woollen coat folded across her knees. Next to her, Kathleen Bristow’s brother sat stiff-backed, staring straight ahead, as if studying every bump and crack in the primrose-yellow walls. He wore polished brogues and a jacket and tie. His hair was thick, creamcoloured, and his eyes were the same blue as his wife’s, wide and watery behind his glasses. He was probably in his early seventies, a few years older than his sister, but it was impossible for Porter to say if there was any family resemblance. She hadn’t had a good look at the photographs in the bedroom and she could not compare any living face with the one she’d seen on Kathleen Bristow.

The old man spoke suddenly, as if he’d been able to follow Porter’s thoughts. ‘I don’t understand why there was all that bruising across her nose,’ he said. ‘All black, like someone had hit her.’ The voice was quiet, and the Glaswegian accent strong, so Porter had to listen hard. He began to wave a finger in front of his face, pointing towards it. ‘And there was something else going on here … something not right with her mouth.’

The couple had been told how Kathleen Bristow had died and had been warned before the identification that her face was marked. Porter hesitated, unwilling for a variety of reasons to explain to Francis Bristow exactly what had been done to his sister’s face during her murder.

Joan Bristow’s accent was less pronounced than her husband’s. ‘They can’t tell us that kind of thing, Frank.’ She squeezed his hand and looked at Porter. ‘Am I not right, love?’

Porter nodded, grateful for the escape route, and stared at the finger, which still circled slowly in front of the man’s face. ‘What I was saying about family? We called you first because you were the one who reported her missing. We’re presuming there were no children…’

‘No children,’ Bristow said.

The words were then spoken a third time by his wife. She shook her head and talked softly, as if this were another, smaller tragedy. ‘Kath was never married, you see? She lived with a “friend” for many years.’ She looked at Porter, in case the understated inverted commas she’d put around the word ‘friend’ had not been obvious enough.

Porter had understood perfectly well. ‘Right, well, maybe we can get those details from you later, if you’d like us to inform this friend of hers.’

‘I don’t think we’ve got them, to tell you the truth.’

‘Kath kept herself to herself,’ the old man added. ‘She was very private about things.’ He picked at something on his lapel, remembering. ‘She’d come home once a year or so; or maybe we’d get the train down here for the weekend.’

‘It’s hard when you live so far away,’ Porter said.

‘Right enough. But still, there were things we didn’t really talk about, you know?’

‘Shush, don’t think about all that now, love.’

‘Bloody stupid, when you stop and think about it.’

‘Spent all her time at work getting involved in other people’s lives and kept her own very quiet, you see?’ Joan Bristow leaned close to her husband, trying hard to elicit something like a smile, concern for him bleeding through the powder and thick foundation.

They sat and watched a woman with an electric floor-polisher; listened to the vague buzz of a one-way phone conversation, and, incongruously, to gales of laughter coming from a room down the corridor. Porter opened her mouth, desperate to say something and disguise the noise, but Joan beat her to it.

‘Was it one of those nutters, then?’ she asked. There was a pained expression on her face, and pity in her voice. ‘One of them as gets released from somewhere when they’re still poorly. You read about that sort of thing all the time.’

‘It’s too early to say.’

‘Kath dealt with her fair share of headcases over the years. Could it have been one of them, d’you think?’

Genuinely, Porter had no idea. Whoever had murdered Kathleen Bristow and the others was certainly a headcase, as far as she was concerned, though others would determine later whether he was suffering from an ‘abnormality of mind’. She found the procedures for deciding such things bizarre to say the least. A solicitor had once tried to explain the rules for establishing mental competence by telling her that if a man threw a baby on to a fire believing it to be a log then he was insane and could not be criminally responsible. This, according to the law, would not be the case if he threw the baby on to the fire knowing it was a baby. Porter had found this preposterous, and had said so. To her mind, the man who knew the baby was a baby was more insane; was obviously as mad as a box of frogs. The solicitor had merely smiled, as though that was exactly what made the whole issue so complex… and so fascinating.

She remembered what the probation officer, Peter Lardner, had said about intent. If that were a grey area, then diminished responsibility came in a thousand different shades.

‘You’ve still got to ask why, though, haven’t you?’ Bristow said.

‘What’s the point, love? It’s bad luck, that’s all it is.’

The old man shook his head. His voice was suddenly thin, and falling away. ‘Whether he’s a nutter or no, you still want to know what was going on inside his head.’ He rubbed a hand across his chin, rasping against the silvery stubble. ‘What made him choose our Kathleen.’

Porter didn’t look at their faces when they saw the body, and she didn’t make speeches. She said no more than she had to. She told Francis Bristow that, as things stood, they were all wrestling with that question, but she would do her very best for them, and keep them informed.

She also made a promise to herself; the sort of promise the likes of Tom Thorne made, broke and lived with.

Getting Luke Mullen back remained her first priority, of course. When there was still a life to be saved, that was a given. But however the kidnap investigation turned out, she would do whatever she could to give the man sitting next to her a definitive answer. She would tell him exactly why his sister had died, and she would find that out from the man responsible.

Porter was just about to start making noises about needing to get on and making sure that someone would be along to take care of them when she felt the hand slip into hers. When she looked, Francis Bristow was staring straight ahead again, blinking away the tears.

She followed his gaze, and all three of them sat and looked at the woman with the floor-polisher for a while.

‘DC Holland?’

‘Speaking…’

‘DCI Roper at Special Enquiries. You left a message.’

Holland put down the sandwich, ‘That’s right,’ took a swig from a bottle of water to clear his mouth out. ‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, sir.’

‘I’ve only got five minutes.’

‘We just wanted to let you know that the body of Kathleen Bristow was discovered in the early hours of this morning.’

The pause might just have been the time it took Roper to recall the name. Holland couldn’t know for sure.

‘Poor woman,’ Roper said, finally. ‘Christ…’

‘She was murdered, sir.’

Another pause. This one definitely for effect. ‘Well, I hardly thought you’d be calling to let me know that she’d popped off peacefully in front of The Antiques Roadshow.’