Buried

by Mark Billingham

  She was only dimly aware of Conrad coming into the room as she drifted away, Luke’s arms around her neck, and his voice in her ear, thanking her for passing on her gift to him, for giving him a skin that little bit thicker than other people’s.

  THURSDAY

  SEVEN

  Half-past stupid in the morning, his third day into it, and the sun had struggled up just a little later than Tom Thorne…

  Its overnight absence had slowed things down, had seriously reduced the rate at which much-needed information could efficiently be gathered. It didn’t matter how important your case was, how many bodies had been discovered, how imminent the threat to life and limb, who had been kidnapped. The simple fact was that most people, most civilians, at any rate, tended to knock off at five o’clock. Obtaining crucial intelligence outside office hours was always difficult. Gaining vital access to any secure or private database – at a local authority housing association, the DSS, Barclay’s Bank or Virgin Mobile – was pretty much a lottery for as long as the M25 remained empty. It was often a question of tracking down a contact number for the person unlucky enough to be manning a twenty-four-hour emergency desk. Or the name of the really poor bastard who was going to get dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.

  Finding an address for their main suspect had taken the Kidnap Unit four hours, and had come down in the end to Conrad Allen’s love of cars.

  Via M-CRAC, the remote-access search facility, officers had been able to access the CRIMINT system at Mile End and pull up all the details of Allen’s original arrest in 2002. Running the number plate of his car through the national computer revealed that the vehicle had been sold the year before. The student who’d bought it – and who was still awake, honing his PlayStation skills – remembered Conrad Allen; remembered him describing in great detail the type of car he’d be buying next. An hour later, the owner of a small dealership in Wood Green was being asked to get up, get dressed and accompany the police to his less than organised office, where he grudgingly waded through a pile of less-than-kosher sales receipts. The dealer was naturally keen to help and go back to bed and, when prompted by a picture, he vaguely remembered Allen and the ‘fit-looking blonde bird’ who had been with him when he’d strolled on to the car lot. His memory of the car itself was better: he was able to give virtually every detail of the diamond-white Ford Scorpio 2.9i, its 24-valve Cosworth V6 engine and, rather more importantly, the address he’d delivered it to, after he’d banked the £1,200 in cash.

  The dealer knew nothing about any Passat, black, blue or otherwise, so the team decided that the car seen near the school was probably the girlfriend’s. Or maybe Conrad had decided that his boy-racer days were over, and had traded in the Scorpio for something a little more sedate.

  Once the information had been obtained, Porter’s team had shifted into top gear pretty bloody quickly. The first step was the establishment of an observation post. In the early hours – grateful for the cover of darkness as far as this part of the operation went – a dedicated Intel Unit had mounted one small camera on a lamp-post opposite an estate agent’s just off the Bow Road, and another at the back of the building to monitor what looked like a rear entrance/exit. These immediately began feeding live pictures back to Central 3000, as well as to a mobile tech team which was cutting up and broadcasting the images from inside a fully equipped van two streets away. A dozen or more officers from the Kidnap Unit were scattered around the area: in empty buildings and unmarked cars and on the street; waiting alongside a Special Events team, a hostage negotiator, paramedics and a group from SO19, the Firearms Unit.

  All waiting for word of one sort or another.

  By the time he managed to slip into a nearby sandwich bar for an early lunch, Thorne had been stuck for the best part of four hours in a car with the same SO7 officer who’d bored his arse off the evening before…

  He carried the tray over to the table; pushed a mug of coffee and a plate across to the woman sitting opposite him.

  ‘What do I owe you?’ she asked.

  Thorne took the top slice from a bacon and egg sandwich and reached for the ketchup. ‘Let’s hear what you’ve come up with first.’

  He’d been surprised when Carol Chamberlain had rung up first thing, asking if they could meet. When she wasn’t at the Yard working an AMRU case, it was all but impossible to prise her away from her husband and her home in Worthing, which Thorne took great delight in calling Euthanasia-on-Sea. She’d explained that after she and Thorne had spoken the day before, she’d spent the whole afternoon making calls and then caught the evening train up. She’d told him that she’d had dinner with one old friend and stayed overnight with another.

  ‘Old friends?’ Thorne had asked on the phone.

  ‘A DCI I worked with on the Murder Squad for a few years, and a DS who retired same time as me. Both good blokes. Both useful.’

  Thorne watched Chamberlain bite into a roll with rather more delicacy than he’d displayed himself. He was impressed by how quickly she’d got to work after they’d spoken. ‘You don’t waste any time,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t think we had any time.’

  Thorne brought her up to speed, told her about the surveillance operation on Conrad Allen’s flat. With the possibility of a child’s life at stake, he knew that she was right to think that time was not on their side, yet, that morning, every minute spent sitting and waiting for something to happen had seemed to warp and stretch until urgency had turned to inertia. The silence from radios had become deafening, and staring at the drawn curtains of the flat above that estate agent’s had been like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

  ‘So, go on then,’ Thorne said.

  Chamberlain wiped crumbs from her fingers. ‘I was right,’ she said. ‘Somebody should definitely have mentioned Grant Freestone.’

  ‘Because of the threat he made to Mullen?’

  ‘Because of that… and because he’s still wanted for murder.’

  Thorne just looked, and waited for her to carry on. He could see that she was enjoying the moment of drama, that she relished the telling.

  ‘In 1995 Freestone got ten years for child-sex offences. He served just over half his time, was paroled in 2000 and became one of the first ex-cons to be dealt with by a MAPPA panel.’

  Thorne nodded. Though he had never been directly involved, he was well aware of the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements. The scheme had been established as ‘a statutory framework for inter-agency co-operation in assessing the most dangerous ex-offenders’. It was designed for those individuals who posed a serious threat to the public, ‘to manage and monitor their reintroduction into the community’.

  To keep a watchful eye on the bogeyman.

  ‘Sounds like he was an ideal candidate,’ Thorne said.

  ‘He was, but I’m not so sure about the people who were supposed to be watching him. I don’t know exactly how it all happened, but it’s a wonder the scheme wasn’t shut down there and then.’

  ‘Teething troubles?’

  ‘Ever so slightly. Freestone was given a flat in Crystal Palace, which is why Bromley Borough Council helped put this MAPPA panel together. Then he got involved with a woman called Sarah Hanley a few months after his release; a single mother with two young kids.’

  ‘Ah. That would be a problem.’

  ‘It would have been if a slightly bigger problem hadn’t come along. In April 2001, Grant Freestone chucked her through a glass coffee table.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘She bled to death, and by the time anybody found her…’

  ‘Freestone was long gone.’

  ‘And still is,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Likely to stay that way, too, I would have thought. He’s certainly the nearest thing to a prime suspect anyone ever came up with, but it’s been so long I don’t think anyone’s looking for him very hard any more, or very often at any rate. He gets circulated once in a while, and the case notes are reviewed annually, but basically it�
�s even colder than most of the shit I get given to try and warm up.’

  A waitress came alongside, gathered up the plates, asked if either of them wanted more tea or coffee. Thorne told Chamberlain he’d need to get back as quickly as he could, and handed over a five-pound note to cover the bill.

  ‘Was Tony Mullen involved with this second case at all?’ he asked. ‘With the Sarah Hanley murder?’

  Chamberlain said that he wasn’t, that she’d spoken to the detective who’d headed that investigation and the subsequent hunt for Grant Freestone; the officer who, theoretically at least, still had the case. But Thorne was only half listening, having realised that he’d asked a redundant question. He knew that Tony Mullen could not have been involved, and he knew why.

  ‘I’ve written down all this bloke’s details,’ Chamberlain said. She slid an envelope across the table. ‘He seemed nice enough, though he was a damn sight more interested in finding out why I was asking than in telling me an awful lot.’

  ‘Par for the course,’ Thorne said.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Aren’t you still a bit touchy about the ones that got away?’

  Chamberlain took a compact from her handbag and flicked it open. ‘The older I get, the touchier I am about everything.’

  ‘Thanks for this.’

  ‘No problem, and I still owe you.’ Her eyes darted momentarily from her mirror. ‘I don’t mean for the tea and a ham roll, either.’

  Thorne picked up the envelope and pushed back his chair. He knew she was talking about the incident a year before, when their questioning of a suspect had got horribly out of hand. He reckoned that each of them owed more than could ever be repaid. ‘I’ll let you know how everything turns out,’ he said.

  Carol Chamberlain nodded and went back to reapplying her lipstick as Thorne turned from the table. As he left, she shouted after him. Apologised for forgetting the stuff for his back, told him that she’d stick some in the post.

  He walked quickly back towards the car. He stopped off at a newsagent’s, bought two cans of Coke and a copy of Uncut without speaking a word. Thinking all the time, as he made his way back to the car, that Chamberlain had been right when she’d said that someone should have mentioned Grant Freestone. Someone… One of the several coppers he’d spoken to, probably. Jesmond, almost certainly. And why hadn’t Tony Mullen said anything?

  His mind focused on Luke Mullen’s father as he walked. On how – Thorne would double-check the month to be sure – he couldn’t have been involved in the 2001 murder case and the hunt for Grant Freestone; the man he’d previously put away for twelve years; the man who had so publicly threatened him.

  Because 2001 was the year that DCI Tony Mullen had resigned from the force.

  The red Skoda was parked just south of the Bow Road, on a side street below the Blackwall Tunnel approach. Thorne was delighted to see that Dave Holland had arrived in his absence, and, ignoring the DS sitting behind the wheel, he climbed into the back seat alongside him.

  The officer in the front seat turned round in a rustle of polyester. ‘Please your fucking selves…’

  Though Thorne had talked to Holland from the Mullen house the evening before, they hadn’t seen each other since Holland’s trip to Butler’s Hall. Sitting in the back of the car, they talked about Adrian Farrell, about Holland’s call to Yvonne Kitson and about whether there might be a connection between Luke’s kidnap and the Latif murder.

  ‘It’s worth thinking about, certainly.’

  ‘Not for too long though, right?’ Holland said.

  Thorne opened one of his cans. ‘I can’t see it to be honest.’

  They sat in silence for five minutes after that. Thorne flicked through his magazine while Holland stared out of the window at a view Thorne had already decided was up there with the most depressing he’d ever seen. That said, he wasn’t certain he could stomach the Taj Mahal for four hours at a stretch.

  ‘It’s fucking lovely round here, isn’t it?’ Holland said eventually.

  ‘If you like concrete.’

  The SO7 man took the chance to jump in, and pointed towards the Bow flyover. The permanently gridlocked slab of granite rose a few hundred yards to the north of them, lifting the A11 above the A12 and carrying traffic across the River Lea, towards Essex and away from the capital. ‘They reckon that’s where the Krays buried Frank Mitchell, you know? Inside one of the supports.’

  ‘Right,’ Thorne said. ‘1966.’ He knew all about what the twins were supposed to have done with ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell, having made the somewhat rash decision to spring him from Dartmoor Prison. Though the Axeman’s final whereabouts remained uncertain, with some claiming that the body had been dumped at sea, it was nevertheless slightly odd that, thirty years after Mitchell’s disappearance, Ronnie Kray’s funeral cortège should have crossed the Bow flyover. It was hardly the most direct route to Chingford cemetery.

  The DS looked a little deflated. ‘How come you’re such an expert?’

  ‘Too much time on his hands,’ Holland explained.

  ‘At least you knew where you were with those guys,’ Thorne said.

  Holland let his head drop back. ‘Nice simple nicknames for a kick-off.’

  ‘Right. Nobody got confused.’

  ‘He’s mad, he’s got an axe. What shall we call him?’

  ‘Er…’

  And as they carried on, they could see the man from the Kidnap Unit clocking them in the rear-view mirror, desperately trying to work out if they were taking the piss.

  At lunchtime, the Butler’s Hall sixth-formers were allowed to leave the premises for one hour. Some took sandwiches into a nearby park, but most wandered towards the modest parade of shops on the Broadway. They browsed in the small branches of Game and HMV, or hung around outside the fish-and-chip/kebab shop, trying their best not to look like kids from a public school; to avoid getting caught doing anything that might reflect badly on the uniform they wore.

  Yvonne Kitson sat in her car at the end of a road opposite the school entrance, watching the kids come out and waiting to get her first look at Adrian Farrell.

  Next to her, DC Andy Stone flicked through the Daily Mirror. ‘I still don’t see why you didn’t get DS Holland to come with you, Guv. To point out this little tosser.’

  ‘Bored, Andy?’

  Stone shook his head without looking up from the paper.

  ‘Dave’s a bit tied up with other things; and, anyway, I don’t want him pointed out. I want to see if I can spot him. Fair enough?’ She moved her thumb back to her mouth, chewed on the nail and stared out of the window.

  Most of the time, it seemed to Kitson that you couldn’t have it all; that if your life outside of work was going well, then the job itself would turn to shit. And vice-bloodyversa. A couple of years before, she’d been a high-flyer and she’d known it; the cases had been high profile, just as she’d been when she’d solved them. Then she’d been stupid enough to get involved with a senior officer, and while he had been forgiven by wife and top brass, she had watched both her career and her family life tumble into freefall. Now things were back on an even keel domestically – her kids were doing well, relations with her ex-husband were civil and she was seeing somebody – but work was another matter. Though she was grafting as hard as ever, the job just seemed to grow more maddening with each failure, each compromise. She’d begun to wonder if it might be down to her; if she’d lost the capacity to be satisfied.

  Stone stopped whistling between his teeth for a few seconds. ‘This is funny,’ he said. ‘They’re dropping hints in here about some “popular daytime TV presenter” who’s having it away with his male researcher. Who d’you reckon that is, then?’

  The Latif enquiry had been as frustrating as any Kitson had known, and every murder case she’d caught since seemed to involve her running headlong into a series of brick walls. The wall she was supposed to be trying to get over that morning had built up around a disturbing rite of initiation into a Tott
enham drugs gang. New members would drive around the streets in a car with no headlights on, and in order to prove they were worthy they would have to fire a gun into the first car that flashed its lights at them. It was brutal in its simplicity, in the casually random way that the unsuspecting victim was selected.

  The first driver unlucky enough to try and be helpful.

  Five days before, having been shot at for no obvious reason, the man behind the wheel of a Toyota Landcruiser had mounted a pavement on the Seven Sisters Road, killing himself and a young woman waiting at a bus stop. One of the city’s newest gang members had moved straight from low-grade crack dealer to double murderer, and though Kitson and the team knew very well which gang was responsible, had spoken to half a dozen young men who knew equally well who had pulled the trigger, nobody was saying anything.

  Sometimes the brick walls had wide smiles, and gold teeth, and enough attitude to make Yvonne Kitson want more than anything to punch them into the middle of next week.

  She badly needed a result. For the way it would feel, far more than for the way it would look. And now, if Dave Holland’s eyesight and instinct weren’t both seriously screwed, she might achieve one.

  Stone turned to the back page of his paper. ‘No real surprise, though,’ he said. ‘I reckon a lot of those TV presenters are batting for the other side, don’t you?’

  Kitson mumbled something that could have been ‘yes’ or ‘no’, every committed part of her brain focusing on the group that was crossing the road, and on her first glimpse of Adrian Farrell. On the fact that she owed Dave Holland a very big drink.

  ‘Is that him?’

  Kitson held up a hand to silence Andy Stone, as though the boy they were talking about were no more than a few feet away; as though his hearing were as well developed as his arrogance. She watched him walk slowly down the main road, every bit as hard to miss as she had been led to believe. He was chatting idly with two other pupils, a boy and a girl. Although he would be off the premises for no more than an hour, Kitson watched as he, along with most of those around him, went through the transformation that Holland had described. She watched as Farrell took off his blazer and tossed it over his shoulder; as he loosened his tie.