Mark Billingham - Buried

He stared through the rain. Still able to recall the taste of it as he and the others had walked towards that bus stop six months before. It had been a little colder than this, maybe, but otherwise exactly the same sort of night…

A dark Cavalier drew up and a thickset Asian man climbed out, leaving the engine running.

‘Minicab?’ Farrell shouted.

The man turned back towards the car.

Adrian Farrell pulled up his hood and jogged after him.

‘Sunday’s a pretty busy day round here,’ Neil Warren said. ‘It’s changeover day, so it’s always a bit bloody frantic if there are new tenants coming in or anyone going out. Plus I’ve got family business and church stuff, and I organise a small service here in the house for anyone who’s interested…’

‘It’s really not a problem,’ Holland said. There was a block of multicoloured Post-its on his desk. He scratched a tick next to Neil Warren’s name.

‘I just wanted to explain why I hadn’t returned your call sooner.’

‘I understand.’

‘Now, of course, I feel fucking dreadful.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Holland said.

‘You meet people, they drift into your orbit, and then… life moves on, you know? You go in different directions or whatever, and most of the time you never give them another thought. Kathleen Bristow hadn’t crossed my mind in five years until you came round here talking about Grant Freestone, and now she’s dead. And I think I should probably feel more upset than I do…’

‘Like you said, you hadn’t thought about her in a long time.’

‘I’ll ask people here to remember her in their prayers.’

Holland looked at his watch: it was five past nine. Once this was done with, he’d see about getting away. Chloe would be in bed, but it would be good to have an hour or so with Sophie before one or both of them flaked out.

‘I take it you don’t think it’s a coincidence,’ Warren said.

‘Sir?’

‘That you start asking people about what happened back then, about Freestone and all that, and someone on the panel gets killed.’

‘I think it’s probably unlikely.’

‘Have you spoken to the others?’

‘Most of them, yes.’

Warren said nothing for ten or fifteen seconds. When Holland heard the click of a lighter, he guessed that Warren had been rolling a cigarette. There was a long exhalation, another pause. Then Warren said, ‘Did she suffer very much?’

Holland would normally have said something pat, something reassuring, at this point. Beyond knowing that Warren was plain-speaking himself, that he didn’t seem enamoured of bullshit, Holland couldn’t really say where his answer came from.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think she probably did.’

It was only twenty minutes from Hendon to Arkley. Half a dozen Gram and Emmylou tracks had done wonders for Thorne’s mood, but all their sterling work was undone with one glance at Tony Mullen’s face.

After their last encounter, Thorne hadn’t been anticipating the warmest of welcomes, but there was more to this than a predictable antipathy. There was resignation in the man’s expression, and in his posture as he stood aside to let Thorne in without a word. Tony Mullen looked like a man who was no longer expecting good news.

As a parent, there would always be hope until there was a body to bury, but as an ex-police officer, Thorne knew that Mullen would be painfully aware of how the timescales worked. How quickly realistic chances became slim ones. How quickly they faded away to nothing.

It was now nine days since Luke had first gone missing; almost five since the video had been sent; seventy-two hours since Luke had been taken a second time, without word of any kind from whoever was holding him.

Thorne could still see rage in Mullen’s eyes, but there was next to no fight left in him.

‘Whatever you want, I hope it’s quick,’ Mullen said. ‘We’re all tired.’

‘Actually, I’ve come to have a word with Juliet.’

‘Why?’

Thorne took a second and decided it couldn’t hurt; that it might even build a bridge or two. ‘We’ve been talking to a boy from Butler’s Hall about a completely different case. It’s almost certainly unconnected with this one. With Luke…’

‘ Almost certainly?’

‘We think he’s lying about knowing Luke, for some reason. We know he phoned here on several occasions and we want to make doubly sure it was Luke he was calling. I just came to check that he wasn’t calling your daughter. I don’t think I’ll be more than ten minutes.’

‘What’s this boy’s name?’

Thorne took a little longer this time. ‘Farrell.’

There was no obvious reaction, but Thorne wondered if he’d seen a flicker of something before Mullen turned his head, looked away and spoke to his wife.

Thorne hadn’t noticed Maggie Mullen. She was sitting ten or so feet above them at the top of the stairs, on a small landing before further flights curved up to the second and third floors. She was wearing dark tracksuit bottoms and a brown sweater. Her hair was tied back, much of it the same grey as her face, and as the cigarette ash that Thorne presumed filled the saucer between her feet.

‘You’d better give Jules a call,’ Mullen said.

His wife stared, as though she hadn’t heard him, then glanced at Thorne. He smiled and nodded. Both gestures were small and both felt slightly patronising even as he made them; as though he were reassuring someone very old or very sick.

‘Has she done something wrong?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ Thorne said. ‘It’ll just be a couple of questions.’

Mullen stepped past Thorne, leaned against the banister at the foot of the stairs. ‘Just give her a shout, will you, love?’

Maggie Mullen picked up the saucer and got to her feet. She brushed a few stray ashes from her lap, turned and walked up and out of sight towards Juliet’s room. After half a minute, Thorne heard the faintest of knocks, then a muffled exchange, one voice raised above the other. He heard a door shut and the tread of four feet moving down the stairs.

As he waited in the hall, Thorne studied the family photographs on a table by the front door, then looked at the wallpaper instead when he became uncomfortable. Next to him, he heard Mullen’s head bump gently against the wall as he let his head drop back; heard him say, ‘fuck’ quietly, to no one in particular.

Farrell presumed that the cab firm had been given the address by the custody sergeant when the car had been booked. The driver certainly seemed to know where he was going. The miserable bastard said nothing as they drove, but that suited Farrell well enough. He didn’t want to chat. He wanted to close his eyes and gather his thoughts.

He leaned his head against the window and listened to the rain slapping on the roof and to the squeak of the wipers. It stank of oil in the back, and one of those pine air-fresheners shaped like a tree. Piece of shit probably didn’t even have insurance; the Asians always tried to avoid paying anything if they thought they could get away with it. It was like the joke a few of them had about the Asian kids at school. They used to say that their dads were the ones who owned chains of newsagents’, and posh curry houses, but still went to the headmaster’s office to try and haggle over the fees…

When the car pulled over, Farrell thought that he must have nodded off and slept through most of the journey. It seemed like only five minutes since they’d driven away from the station.

A door opened on either side of him. When they’d closed again, he was sitting between two Asian men.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ But even as he was asking the question, the answer was settling in his stomach and starting to boil.