Mark Billingham - Buried

Lardner looked at Thorne, shrugged and smiled. Then wound in another foot or so of the rope.

There was a thump from the cellar: a shoe against a wooden stair.

‘Let the boy go,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ll stay.’

Lardner looked at him.

‘We’ll both stay. But you could just let Luke walk out of here.’

Another tug, and more rope dancing in. Another thump from behind the door, and a voice; indistinguishable, but clearly that of someone in pain.

An equally agonised sound broke from Maggie Mullen. She spluttered, ‘ please’ and ‘don’t’, then her head dropped forward until her knees muffled her voice, and the terrible sound of her begging became something grunted, animalistic.

Lardner stared at the woman he claimed to love, as though something else, something he didn’t understand, was responsible for her pain.

She lifted her head, held her breath and searched for some compassion in his face.

Thorne didn’t look away from Lardner. He wondered how much of his attention was really focused on the woman. Then he glanced down at the knife in the man’s left hand. Was Lardner left-handed? He thought about making a move but did nothing.

‘Right… come on .’

As soon as Lardner stood and began hauling in the rope, all three were on their feet: Lardner dragging the rope towards himself with one hand, twisting the arm quickly, coiling the rope between elbow and fist, while the other hand continued to point the kitchen knife; Thorne and Maggie Mullen staring – hopeful, terrified – at the small, brown door.

The silence between the bumps and cracks of feet on the stairs felt like hands over Thorne’s ears, and his skin continued to shrink; to feel as though it were constricting across his bones. He imagined pressure building on the muscle and the creamy layers of fat as they were squeezed; the blood rushing, searching for the easiest way to burst through the flesh that stretched and thinned. For one strange, disconnected moment he thought he felt it gathering, about to gush from the small wound in his hand, and he pressed the palm hard against the side of his leg.

The rope was high off the ground now, and taut.

The noise on the stairs grew louder…

Maggie Mullen’s hands were steepled in front of her face. They had flattened, been pressed tight across her mouth, by the time the door to the cellar was shouldered open, crashed back against the wall, and her son stumbled into the room.

She screamed when she saw that his face had gone.

‘Yes, I’m sorry about that,’ Lardner said. ‘But he got a bit excited when I told him you were coming. Got very noisy.’ He pointed the knife at Maggie Mullen when she took a step towards her son, then twisted the blade to point out his handiwork. ‘I did it in a bit of a hurry, but I made sure he could breathe, obviously…’

The black gaffer tape had been wrapped clumsily, round and round Luke Mullen’s face, and in such haste that what remained on the roll hung down, knocking awkwardly against the boy’s shoulder as he moved; against the rope that had been looped around his neck and now stretched tightly to where Lardner stood next to the sofa.

Luke stood, swaying on the spot.

Brick-dust streaked his hair, and the navy-blue Butler’s Hall blazer was torn at the pocket and ghost-grey with dirt. One hand stayed stiff against his side while the other clutched at the rope around his neck. Thorne could see that the backs of his hands were almost black with filth, and bloodied.

The boy strained instinctively towards his mother, his neck pulling forward against the rope, moaning, growling, when Lardner dragged him back. The word had sounded sung almost, from behind the tape. It was impossible to make out clearly, but easy enough to guess at.

Two syllables, definitely.

‘ Mummy …’

Maggie Mullen tried to say her son’s name but lost it in the sob. She mouthed it as she moved across to Thorne, reached out a hand and took a handful of his leather jacket at the elbow.

Thorne remained still. Whatever she had done, or been responsible for, it had become impossible not to feel something for this woman. Seeing what she was seeing; watching the misery carve itself deeper into her face.

Luke swayed and shouted again.

His nose looked obscenely pink and fleshy through a gap in the thick mask of tape. The crooked line of gaffer stopped below his eyes, which had been blinking furiously, widening since he’d stepped from the dark of the cellar into the living room.

Lardner hauled the boy closer to him, more brutally this time.

He pointed with the knife again, first to Luke’s face, then to the cellar door. ‘It’s stupid, really,’ he said. ‘There’s a perfectly good light down there, but the bulb needs replacing. Actually, it went just before Mum died and she asked me to change it for her. I said I would, but you know how you never get round to doing these things. So…’ He saw something in Thorne’s face. ‘Now you think there’s some kind of Norman Bates thing going on, and I’m trying to keep everything the way it was, don’t you?’ He smiled. ‘I haven’t got my mother stashed upstairs, you know.’ He reached out a foot towards the sofa, flicked it against the edge of the dustsheet. ‘These things are purely practical, I promise you…’

‘I lost my father a year ago,’ Thorne said. ‘Almost exactly a year.’

Relief flooded into Lardner’s face. ‘So you know .’

‘I know it’s hard. But nobody else has to pay for it.’

‘She’s not paying for that.’

‘What then?’

‘You can’t treat people the way she did. Not the people who love you.’

‘She ended it because she felt guilty,’ Thorne said. ‘She was thinking about her family.’

Lardner found this funny. ‘She never thought about them before.’

Next to him, Thorne felt Maggie Mullen’s grip on his arm tighten. She spoke softly to Luke, told him that it was going to be all right. That it would soon be over.

Luke nodded, then staggered as he was pulled to one side. He took a step and regained his balance, his hand scrabbling where the rope was biting into his throat.

‘Whatever else happens,’ Lardner said, ‘she’ll be thinking about them a damn sight more from now on.’

Thorne looked at the distance between himself and Lardner.

No more than eight feet. At the end of the rope, Luke was another five or six away, to Lardner’s right.

‘It sounds to me like it was just about shitty timing,’ Thorne said. ‘That’s all. Probably nobody’s fault…’

Lardner held the knife out hard in front of him. His arm was tense, shaking with the effort and the intent, but his tone when he spoke was tender, regretful.

‘I’ve thought of little else but her for five years, and it was instant, you know? Well, it was with me, at any rate. Maybe what happened with Sarah Hanley bound us together, made what we already had stronger.’ He turned the grip of the knife slowly in his fist. ‘She tried to end it once, back when her husband found out, but I knew she was only doing what he wanted. So I didn’t know she meant it this time, either. I didn’t know how serious she was… serious enough to do it when she did. I didn’t know she could be so completely fucking heartless.’

Maggie Mullen’s eyes stayed on her son, but she shook her head.

‘And I didn’t know how hard it was going to hit me. You don’t, do you, even if you see these things coming? And I didn’t see either of them coming. Mags or Mum. They were like car crashes, both of them right out of the blue. You kid yourself that you’ve walked away unscathed, but there’s a delayed reaction.