Mark Billingham - Buried

Where’s the boy?

Man, woman, rope, knife…

Where’s the fucking boy?

‘I knew she was lying.’

‘Peter…’

‘About coming on her own.’ Lardner nudged his glasses with a knuckle. ‘I could hear it in her voice, clear as a bell.’ Laughing. ‘I mean, I’ve heard her lying often enough, haven’t I? Stretched out next to me, naked, telling her old man she’s tied up in a meeting…’

The buzzing in Thorne’s head had faded enough for him to formulate a response. ‘She’s lied to a lot of people,’ he said. He glanced towards a dustsheet-covered armchair in which Maggie Mullen sat directly ahead of him, beneath a small window. She didn’t return Thorne’s look. Her eyes moved back and forth every few seconds between Lardner and the brown panelled door a few feet away.

Lardner was sitting on the floor against a covered sofa that had been on Thorne’s right as he’d entered the small living room. He was wearing jeans and a rust-coloured shirt, and his legs were drawn up to his chest. His hands dangled between his knees, a carving knife held loosely in one of them. The other clutched the end of a rope which ran away from him, straight and taut, disappearing around the edge of a door beneath the stairs.

Cellar. Had to be.

Thorne asked the question even though he’d known the answer a second after stepping in from the kitchen: ‘Where’s the boy?’

There was a noise from somewhere beneath them. The rope shifted against the white painted floorboards.

Luke Mullen was alive.

Lardner turned his head towards the door and shouted, ‘Come on now, son, I told you I want to see this rope stay taut. You stay where you are, and come up here when I’m good and ready.’

Maggie Mullen leaned forward in her chair. Her fists were tight around the material of her sweater, pulling at it, wrenching. ‘For pity’s sake, Peter…’

‘You need to shush… really,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve talked about this.’ He sounded tired but relaxed. He looked back to Thorne and rolled his eyes, as though another man would understand how exasperating all this nagging was.

Thorne nodded gently, tried to smile.

Lardner raised the hand that held the knife, rubbed it across the top of his head. The few wisps of dark hair were all over the place and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. ‘Silly,’ Lardner said. ‘All so bloody silly.’

A board moaned beneath Thorne’s feet as he shifted his weight, and he saw Lardner’s eyes fly to him, target him, in a second.

Not relaxed at all…

‘ You should sit.’ Lardner nodded towards a low pine trunk next to the fireplace.

Thorne moved back until his calves met the edge of the box and dropped down slowly. He looked around, like someone who might be considering renting the place. The ceiling was Artexed: stiff spikes and whorls like hardened icing. A small landscape in a lacquered frame; a wooden barometer; a row of hardback books without jackets on shelves to one side of the front door. In the hearth, an arrangement of dried flowers poking from a stone vase, thick with dust.

‘Why are we here?’ Thorne said.

Lardner looked a little confused. ‘I don’t remember inviting anybody.’

‘You know what I mean. Why any of this?’

‘Well it’s a fair question. Because it is all senseless, all of it, but I’m not really the right person to ask.’ He drew a foot of the rope towards him and twisted it around his wrist. ‘I don’t want to sound childish, really I don’t, but I’m not the one who started this.’

‘Oh Jesus, Peter.’ There was suddenly anger in Maggie Mullen’s voice. ‘You can’t lay any of this madness at my door. All I wanted to do was get out of a relationship. I didn’t do anything wrong.’

It was as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘She made a mistake. And everything went haywire from that point, I suppose. I couldn’t believe she was trying to hurt me as much as she had. I convinced myself she didn’t know what she was doing…’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did know.’

‘Losing a parent isn’t easy, we all know that. You can understand how hard it is.’ He looked at Thorne, wanting a response. ‘Yes?’

Thorne nodded.

Lardner’s tone was chatty again, conversational. ‘So to do what she did when I was still suffering the loss of my mother was… an error . That’s what I’m going to call it. And, yes, I was desperate, I don’t mind admitting that to you. I don’t think that means I’m weak or less of a man or whatever. I didn’t want to lose her, I still don’t want to lose her, so I clung on for dear life. Which was when she started talking about the Sarah Hanley business, dredged all that up and made stupid suggestions, and I decided something needed to be done.’

‘I just wanted to get out,’ Maggie Mullen shouted. ‘ I was the one who was desperate.’

Thorne looked at the rope. At the knife. It felt as though the skin was tightening across every inch of his body.

Lardner continued to address Thorne; to ignore the woman who, for one reason or another, had caused so much to happen. ‘I should really have taken the boy myself,’ he said. ‘But it was difficult, with work and what have you. It cost me every penny I had to pay those two, I can tell you that. Maybe if I’d sold this place after Mum died, but that was never going to happen.’

Thorne knew most of it, but he was still curious. They’d thought Neil Warren’s professional relationship to Amanda Tickell was the link to Grant Freestone. But now Thorne remembered what Callum Roper had said about Warren and Lardner knowing each other. ‘Did Neil Warren introduce you to the woman?’

Lardner smiled. ‘Neil’s very conscientious,’ he said. ‘He has regular get-togethers for some of his old clients, even though most of them have long since gone back on the smack or the coke or the booze. He gives them a few nibbles, talks about God, that sort of thing. All very jolly…’

The rope was frayed and dirty, an old tow rope, by the look of it. Thorne tried hard not to think of the boy on the other end. Of the state he might be in.

‘I met Amanda and her boyfriend at one of Neil’s parties,’ Lardner said. ‘And when I was working out how best to snatch the boy, I knew she had it in her. She was always desperate for money.’

The knife swung slowly back and forth, its handle gripped between Lardner’s thumb and index finger. It looked as though it came from the same set as the one he’d used to kill Allen and Tickell.

‘Why did anyone have to die?’ Thorne asked.

‘I shan’t say that it seemed like a good idea at the time, as that would be flippant. In fact, it seemed like a very bad idea. I’ve no wish to be disrespectful, and I’m very sorry about Kathleen, but same as with the other two, there wasn’t a great deal else I could do.’ For the first time in a few minutes he looked across at Maggie Mullen. ‘Mags was telling me what I needed to do…’

Maggie Mullen was almost out of her chair. ‘ What? ’

‘There were hints,’ Lardner said. ‘We talked on the phone, talked in secret… and when she told me about what the police were doing, about Freestone and so on…’

‘I wanted you to finish it, to know it was pointless-’

‘I knew she was really telling me that I needed to take steps to protect myself.’

‘ No! ’

The wash of a warm smile. ‘That’s when I knew her feelings for me were still as strong as they’d ever been.’

‘You’re fucking mental, Peter.’ She’d known it before, obviously. But here, seeing it acted out in front of her, the shock and the sadness were evident on Maggie Mullen’s face. ‘You’ve completely lost it…’