Mark Billingham - Buried

‘Why the hell, why the fuck , didn’t you tell me this earlier?’

‘It wasn’t the right time. It seemed best to wait.’

‘Best?’ She took a step towards the man and woman standing on the far side of her living room.

‘I think you should try to calm down,’ the man said.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ she said. ‘I’d really be interested to know.’

‘I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your decision…’

‘You think I’ve got a choice?’

The other woman spoke gently. ‘We need to sit down and talk about the best way forward-’

‘Christ Almighty. You just march in here and tell me this. Casually, like it’s just something you forgot to mention. You walk in here and tell me all this… shit!’

‘Sarah-’

‘I don’t know you. I don’t even fucking know you…’

For a few seconds there was just the ticking, and the distant traffic, and the noise bleeding in from a radio in the kitchen…

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re what? ’ Sarah Hanley smiled, then laughed. She gathered the material of her dress between her fingers as her fists clenched at her sides. ‘I need to get to the school.’

‘The kids’ll be fine,’ the man said. He looked at the woman who was with him and she nodded her head in complete agreement. ‘Honestly, love. Absolutely fine.’

‘… that’s when she came at him,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘When she came at both of us, scratching and spitting and swearing her head off. He only raised his hands to protect his face, because she was out of control. He didn’t mean to push her.’

‘She was thinking of her children,’ Thorne said.

‘So were we . That’s why we were there, why the decision was made to tell her about Grant Freestone’s past.’

‘And it never occurred to anyone that she might not take the news very calmly?’

Maggie Mullen had slunk back to the armchair. Her arms were wrapped around each other at the waist as she spoke. From the sofa, her husband watched, ashen-faced, as though all but the smallest breath he needed to stay alive had been punched out of him.

‘We were trained to have these conversations,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘We tried to be sensitive. Everything just… got out of hand.’

‘What happened afterwards?’

‘We panicked. There was such a lot of blood. We didn’t know what the hell to do, and in the end we just decided to leave.’ She looked at Thorne. ‘I can’t remember whose idea it was, really I can’t, but it was all such a mess. It was just a stupid accident.’

‘An accident for which you knew Grant Freestone would probably get blamed.’

‘We never thought about that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t anyway, I swear. When he did get blamed, we talked about it, but we didn’t know what to do for the best. It was too late to come forward by then, to try and explain.’

Thorne moved slowly around to the back of her chair. ‘Was she still alive when you left?’ he asked.

Maggie Mullen lowered her head, shook it.

Thorne stared down at hair that had gone unwashed for days. Only she and the man she’d been with in Sarah Hanley’s house that day knew if she was telling the truth. ‘You know that her children discovered the body, don’t you?’

‘Yes…’

Tony Mullen’s hands were trembling in his lap. He swallowed hard, then muttered, ‘ Christ…’

‘So, you just walked out,’ Thorne said.

She nodded, but kept her eyes down. ‘Yes, we walked out, and we hoped nobody had seen us.’ She looked up. ‘And nobody had. We went to Kathleen Bristow, who’d assigned us the job of making the visit, and told her that we’d had to cancel it, that we’d never gone. We made up some story about me being poorly. Then, when the body was discovered, it all got forgotten anyway, and it looked like we were safe.’

‘Is that why he killed Bristow?’ Thorne asked. ‘Did she keep a record of the fact that you were due to have visited Sarah Hanley?’

‘I suppose so. She certainly knew that he and I were involved with each other. She caught us together in a pub once after one of the meetings. Maybe her knowing that was enough to scare him.’

‘But why now?’

She shifted in her chair, let her head fall back and talked to the ceiling. ‘I don’t know what’s in his mind. I can’t pretend to know why he’s done any of this.’

‘Maybe you should have asked him,’ Mullen said. ‘During one of your cosy little chats on the phone.’

‘Please, Tony…’

‘I can’t believe that you knew he had Luke, but you said nothing. He had our son and you said nothing.’

Thorne looked at what was left of Mullen, and despite everything he’d felt about him until this point, he was overwhelmed by sympathy for the man. He’d lied by omission, thinking only that he was covering up simple adultery, unaware that there was so much more at stake.

‘At the beginning I thought he was just trying to frighten me, you know? Because I’d told him we were finished, and I’d talked about the Sarah Hanley business. He knew this woman from somewhere, paid her to take Luke from the school, and I thought it would just be for a day or something, that he was just making sure I got the message.’

Thorne knew then that he’d been right about the video; about how strange it was that nothing had been addressed to Luke’s father. The boy had been told what to say. The words had been aimed solely at his mother because the message was meant for her and no one else.

‘What did he say?’ Mullen asked. ‘After he’d taken Luke, what did he say when you spoke to him?’

She looked as though this was the hardest answer she’d had to provide so far. ‘He said he was doing it because he loved me so much.’

‘ Sweet Jesus!’

‘It’s what he believes. He’s not well.’

‘Why didn’t you sort this out straight away?’ Mullen was reddening, breathing noisily. ‘Why didn’t you agree to everything, anything, whatever he wanted , so that he’d let Luke go? You saw that video, you saw what they were doing to Luke.’

‘He said he didn’t want to make it easy. He promised not to hurt him, told me that the drugs weren’t doing him any harm. He told me he wanted to be sure I knew how serious he was.’

‘ Serious? ’ Thorne said.

‘Then, after the first few days, there was nothing I could do. I was terrified because everything had escalated.’

Mullen bucked in his seat, punching at the chair around him, swinging at nothing. ‘He killed people. He started fucking killing people.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ she shouted. ‘I knew that he’d lost control, that I couldn’t predict what he was going to do or how he was going to react. He said he wouldn’t hurt Luke, but I didn’t know what would happen if I told the police.’ She glanced at the telephone. ‘I still don’t. All I could do was keep talking to him, make sure that Luke was still all right.’ Her hand rose to her head, closed around a clump of hair and began to pull. ‘I fucked it all up, I know I did, but it went so completely mad that I didn’t know what to do.’ She looked wildly from her husband to Thorne and back again. ‘I was thinking of Luke all the time. But…’

Thorne nodded. He did not want to listen to any more. There were no more tears left, but Maggie Mullen’s face looked as though it were made of cracked plaster. He remembered the words she’d used when she’d described what had happened on the day Sarah Hanley died. ‘Everything just got out of hand,’ he said.

An hour or more passed as slowly as any Thorne could remember. The minutes crawled by on their bellies, each through the glistening, greasy trail of the one before, as he watched Tony and Maggie Mullen damage themselves and each other. Screams that sliced and flayed. Accusations swung like bludgeons, and the silences burning away the flesh from the little that was left between them.