Mark Billingham - Buried

‘It was all going to come out anyway,’ she said. ‘What had happened, I mean. I thought if I could make him understand that, he would let me have Luke back.’

‘You thought wrong.’ Thorne was forcing the accelerator to the floor, squeezing the wheel. ‘He killed her, same as he killed Conrad Allen and Amanda Tickell. It sounds to me like those three deaths are down to you.’

‘Please…’

‘Three more deaths.’

She turned away. Leaned her forehead against the window.

‘Whatever you thought you were doing, you were just pushing all the buttons.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘I hope Luke’s alive, that he hasn’t been hurt; more than anything, I hope that. But if he isn’t…’

She moaned, her head sliding against the glass.

‘It’s probably no more than you deserve.’

Thorne drove on, past signs for Welham Green and Hatfield, past the turn-off to St Albans that he’d taken so many times when his father was alive.

The water on the road was like a long, lonely shush beneath them.

Without turning, Maggie Mullen said, ‘She was dead when we left. Sarah. She’d lost such a lot of blood.’

Thorne thought she sounded pathetic. He felt numb, cold, without anything even close to sympathy. Knowing what might be waiting for him when they arrived at their destination, he thought it was probably the best way to be. ‘Right. And you watched her die.’

They turned off the A1 just past Welwyn Garden City. That much she could remember. But from there on it was hit and hope. There were some fragmented memories of the village they were looking for – a large house on its outskirts, a church – but no more than that.

Within five minutes, it was a different world.

The overhead lighting had gone, and even the catseyes disappeared at the end of the slip road, which quickly narrowed as A route became B, with high hedges on both sides and barely room enough for one vehicle to pass another.

Thorne drove as quickly as he was able, full beam cutting through the black, which twisted away ahead of him.

They moved slowly through a village called Codicote: Tudor houses, pubs, a village green; Maggie Mullen searching desperately for some clue that they might be in the right place. Thorne sped out the other side, past the sign that thanked him for driving carefully, back into the dark necklace of lanes that strung these villages together, a mile or two apart.

He swore and dipped the headlights as another car came around a corner, braking too hard and wrestling the Mercedes into the verge. He tried to look at the other driver as the car went past, but he could see nothing. Back on full beam, the lights caught yellow eyes, low in the undergrowth, and something flashing across the road fifty yards ahead of them.

‘All these roads look the bloody same,’ Maggie Mullen said.

They drove through Kimpton and Peter’s Green. Stopped and turned the car round when they got within a mile of Luton airport and a sign told them they were entering Bedfordshire. Heading north again, they passed through Whitwell, crossed over the River Maran and entered the village of St Paul’s Walden.

‘ Stop …’

Thorne jumped on the pedal and put out his arm as Maggie Mullen shot forward in her seat. ‘What?’

‘That’s the big house.’ She nodded towards a pair of wrought-iron gates. The outline of a grand mansion was just visible in the distance. ‘We visited it once. Something to do with the Queen Mother. Keep going…’

At the other end of the High Street she told Thorne to stop again. Pointed to a church. A spike rising up from a turreted tower, vivid against the night sky.

‘You can see that tower from the cottage,’ she said. ‘Across the fields.’

‘There are fields everywhere,’ Thorne said. ‘Which direction?’

She looked around, unsure.

Thorne picked one.

Driving out of the village, they both started when Maggie Mullen’s phone rang. She looked at the display. The phone was shaking in her hand.

‘It’s him…’

She said, ‘yes’ a lot; told the caller that she was nearly there and that she just wanted to talk. She asked how Luke was, begged the man on the other end of the phone not to hurt him.

‘What did he want?’ Thorne asked when she’d hung up.

‘He wanted to know where I was. If I was close.’

‘You said, Yes I am; it’s fine. What was that?’

‘He was worried,’ she said. ‘Told me that if I was driving, he hoped I was hands-free.’

Thorne accelerated into the countryside again and smiled grimly. ‘He knows you’re not alone…’

Five minutes later he turned on to a narrow track. It was overgrown and pitted with puddles. The car rattled across a cattle-grid, then followed the track down and to the right, until its lights picked out the house a few hundred yards away.

‘That’s it…’

It wasn’t what Thorne had expected. Not a cottage in any usual sense of the word. It wasn’t particularly small, and didn’t even look that old. But it was certainly isolated. Not exactly chocolate-box, but in the ideal position for some purposes.

Thorne slowed to a crawl as he approached. There were lights on in two rooms downstairs, at the front.

‘What are we going to do?’ Maggie Mullen asked.

‘Well, you are going to knock on the door. Go and say hello to your boyfriend.’

‘What about you?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Thorne said. He stopped the car, climbed out and moved away without shutting the door. From the shadows fifty feet from the house, he watched Maggie Mullen go to the front door. Saw it open and watched her walk inside, slow and stiff.

Then he moved quickly towards the back of the building.

He was in virtual darkness almost immediately. He pushed slowly through a low wooden gate whose top edge felt damp, rotten beneath his fingers. It opened into a knot of bramble. Stepping across, there was coarse, wet grass around his knees. As his eyes adjusted, Thorne could just make out the wall – higher in some places than others – that separated the garden from the fields beyond.

He kept close to the side of the house, moving away from it only when he needed to step around a long metal trough and what looked like an old butler sink full of earth and stones. He caught his hand on something as he edged along the wall, sucked in air fast, and wiped away the thickening beads of blood on his damp trouser-leg.

At the back of the cottage was a rusted table and chairs. An arrangement of bird tables. A rotary washing line that barely protruded above four feet of couch grass and thistle below it.

Thorne pressed his face against the window of a small extension. He could make out plates and pans on a drainer, the digital display on a microwave oven. There was a sliver of light at floor level from somewhere inside the house.

The back door was open.

He thought about Porter waiting for his call. About the phone sitting on the front seat of the car…

In the second or two between feeling the handle give and pushing, he considered all those times when he’d faced a similar decision. When he’d been torn between doing the sensible thing or saying, ‘Fuck it.’ When, on almost every occasion, he’d made the wrong choice.

He pushed.

And he stepped into the dark kitchen. Moved quickly to the door beneath which the light was coming. And listened. Though he could not hear voices, there was something about the quality of the silence from the other side of the door that told him there were people in the next room.

He waited.

Five seconds… ten.

Then a voice he’d heard before: ‘For heaven’s sake, stop pissing about and come in.’

Thorne did as he’d been invited, slowly. His pace slowed even further once he saw what was waiting for him. One step at a time, though his mind was racing, processing the visual information, asking questions.