Mark Billingham - Buried

Farrell was bent forward in his chair. He mumbled something. His hands were fists, hanging at his sides.

Kitson leaned in, her head low, trying to catch Farrell’s eye. ‘Just the names, Adrian. Get it over with.’

‘You’re not a virgin, are you?’ Another rhetorical question. Thorne cracked on immediately. ‘Christ, I presume you’re not; not at seventeen. You know what sex is supposed to be about, right? Love, in an ideal world, course it is. Lust, more often than not, if we’re being honest. And habit, and booze, and boredom now and again… But what happened to Amin Latif wasn’t any of those things, was it?’

36… 37 … 38…

‘Let’s imagine for a minute that you weren’t there that night, in the rain, at that bus stop. I’ll tell you what happened, what we know happened from Nabeel Khan’s statement and from the other evidence. I’ll tell you, and you tell me if you’ve got any idea at all what it was about. OK? You see, the job’s done, that’s the strange thing. The Paki bastard’s half-dead in the gutter, right, so why don’t the three of them just piss off? Maybe one or two of them are ready to go, but someone else is calling the shots and he’s got other ideas. He really wants to teach the cheeky fucker a lesson. So he drags him back on to the pavement and turns him over on to his belly. He undoes Amin Latif’s belt and pulls down his jeans. Are you following this OK?’

Farrell’s breathing was heavier, wetter…

‘Then he pulls down his own trousers, and pants, and by this time I’m guessing that his two mates have backed right off. They want nothing to do with any of this . Maybe they’re shouting at him to leave it, telling him he’s a fucking perv, but he doesn’t care by this point. He’s not thinking about anything else. He’s got carried away and he’s already getting his tiny little dick out… He’s already dropping down to his knees…’

‘You’re being stupid for no reason…’ Kitson said.

‘Trying to stick it into Amin Latif.’

‘If we pull in Damien Herbert and Michael Nelson, and it turns out to be them, they’re going to think it was down to you anyway.’

12… 13 … 14…

‘But the Paki bastard – which was how he was described during the initial attack – he puts up a fight. At this point, all he’s got are a couple of broken bones. At this point, the shitbag kneeling behind him can walk away and be looking at a lot less than life imprisonment. But he chooses not to. And Amin Latif makes his own choice: he struggles, and refuses to raise his arse up off the pavement; refuses to submit to this animal who’s trying to rape him, who’s trying to prove how much of a man he is. So the animal eventually gives up. He gets back to his feet and takes hold of himself. And, while his mates laugh, he masturbates. And even before he’s finished coming, he’s begun kicking his victim in the side and in the head, and he doesn’t stop until Amin Latif is completely still. Lying in the gutter. Covered in rain and blood and cum…’

When Farrell looked up suddenly, it was clear that he’d been crying for a while without making any sound. The neck of his sweatshirt was already darkened with tears. The sobs exploded from him as he began to curse and thrash in his chair like someone burning. He called them bitches and cunts, and pulled away violently when Wilson reached over and tried to put a hand on his arm.

Neither Kitson nor Thorne could be sure if the hatred was aimed solely at them; for what was happening, for the state they’d reduced him to. The tears that flew off his face as he jerked and spat out his insults certainly pointed to something aimed at least partly at himself, for what he’d done.

For what he was.

Kitson had to raise her voice to terminate the interview.

Farrell was still swearing, hoarse and red-faced, when they sealed up the discs and called the jailer into the room.

It was pleasant enough for people to be enjoying a late afternoon pint outside the Oak, or pottering in the tiny front gardens of the estate next door.

Thorne and Kitson made their way back towards the Peel Centre, in silence for the first couple of minutes. Thorne could see that Kitson was smarting at the continued failure to get the names she was after. He, too, was thinking about the extreme manner in which the interview had ended, but also about the boy’s even stranger reaction to being questioned about the calls to Luke Mullen.

‘Where does all that come from?’ Kitson asked. ‘What he did to Latif. What he tried to do.’

‘You thinking he might have been abused?’

‘I don’t know. You just look for something that makes sense, don’t you?’

‘What about the father?’

‘I didn’t exactly take to him, but I wouldn’t know beyond that.’

They crossed the road, taking out IDs as they approached the security barrier.

‘What you said in the interview, about stuff in your head.’ Kitson looked at him. ‘Were you just making that up?’

‘I suppose so, yeah, for the most part. But none of us are saints, are we?’ He showed his card and walked on. ‘If I see someone with a scar on his face, I think about where he might have got it, and I tell myself he’s probably aggressive, violent. I never see him as a victim. Is that really any different from a woman seeing a young black man coming towards her at night and worrying that he’s going to mug her?’

‘The job makes you see the worst in people,’ Kitson said.

‘It’s still a sort of prejudice though, right?’

They stopped for a few seconds before they walked into Becke House, watched a group of recruits in gym kit kicking a ball around on the sports field. All of them full of piss and vinegar. All up for it.

He caught Porter in her car, on her way back to the Bristow murder scene in Shepherd’s Bush.

‘Hang on, I’m not hands-free…’

Thorne could hear a siren. He guessed that she’d lowered the phone, knowing that to nick a DI for driving without due care and attention would make the average uniformed copper’s afternoon.

‘Right, I’m all yours again.’

He told her about the interview with Adrian Farrell, about the boy’s cagey response when he’d been confronted with the phone records. ‘It was cock and bull,’ Thorne said. ‘I just wish I had a fucking clue what any of it means.’

Porter said something, but the signal broke up and Thorne caught only fragments. He asked her to say it again.

‘Maybe it wasn’t Luke he was calling.’

‘We already looked at the parents-’

‘What if the racist thing runs in the family? Maybe Tony Mullen’s a closet BNP member and Farrell’s old man is calling him up to organise meetings or whatever.’

‘Kitson checked. They hardly know each other.’

‘He might have been calling the sister, of course: Juliet.’

Thorne sat a little straighter at his desk. They hadn’t considered that. ‘OK… but why would he bother lying about it? He’s been cocky as fuck about being accused of murder, even now he must know we’ve got him. Why react like he did in the bin? Why start making shit up, just to avoid us finding out he’s seeing Juliet Mullen?’

‘Because she’s fourteen,’ Porter said. ‘If he’s having sex with her, that’s exactly how he would react. It’s a machismo thing, about respect or whatever. If he gets sent down for the Latif murder, he goes down all guns blazing, doesn’t he? He keeps quiet, he’s a hero to his mates, to the other idiots who think the same way he does. Sleeping with an underage girl doesn’t exactly fit in with that image.’

There was a twisted logic that made as much sense as anything else in the case so far. Thorne told Porter that he’d talk to Juliet Mullen. Porter suggested that he do so in person, so he said that he’d try to get over to the Mullen place later on. Then he asked her what she was going to be doing, if they would see each other.