Buried-6 (7 page)

It’s the moment when power shifts.

The tosser with the bat has obviously fancied it right up to that moment, because the bat gives him the edge, and he probably isn’t afraid to use it either. It’s made him braver than he’s got any right to be. But then he sees the gun, and he shits himself.

He
shits
himself. Or he might just as wel have done, judging by the look on his face as he walks away. As he puts down the bat, and puts up his hands, and says, ‘Al right, mate, no harm done.’

Of course, the gun was only a replica and, real or not, maybe it was the gun that was getting the respect rather than him, but stil . It didn’t matter. The feeling as he climbed back into his car was amazing, like nothing he’d known before, and it had stayed with him. Singing in his blood as he tore past the buses and ripped through the puddles, right up until the moment when everything had gone very tits up twenty minutes later . . .

Across the room, the boy was awake beneath the hood. He could tel by the position of him, by the way his head turned and his face pressed against the material.

‘You hungry?’

They’d had a long discussion about whether to use a gag and Amanda had decided against it in the end. It was maybe a bit over the top. Anyway, the kid was drugged up most of the time and, even when he wasn’t, they’d be on him like a rash if he tried screaming.

‘You want something to eat?’

The boy said nothing, even though he could. Just ignored the question. He chose to keep quiet for some reason, like he was protesting or something; like he was playing a game with them.

Trying to be clever.

WEDNESDAY

FOUR

His father had taken to coming by in the early hours of the morning.

Since the back problems, Thorne had been waking anywhere from 5 a.m. onwards. He’d lie there in the dark, in the only comfortable position he’d been able to find – his knees up to his chest – and think about his old man. Occasional y, he’d manage to drift back to sleep again, and then their encounters would be stranger,
richer
, as, in that hour or two before he would need to get up, he invariably dreamed.

In the dreams, Jim Thorne would appear as he had been in the final stages of the Alzheimer’s; in the six months or so before the fire that had kil ed him. It was typical of his father, Thorne thought, to be so perverse, so bloody-minded. Why couldn’t he have moved through the dreams as a younger man? Or a man whose mind was at least firing on the right cylinders? Instead, his father came to him bel igerent and foul-mouthed, stumbling through their conversations, distracted, furious and lost.

Helpless . . .

Often, the old man would do nothing but sit on the edge of Thorne’s bed, eager to ask questions. This was how it had been towards the end. The disregard for social niceties had gone hand in hand with an obsession for trivia, lists and quizzes.

‘Name ten World War Two fighter planes. Which are the three biggest lakes in the world? That’s freshwater lakes.’

Since passing on, he’d introduced the element of multiple choice.

‘Was the cause of the fire that kil ed me: (A) accidental or (B) started deliberately?’

Often this would be fol owed by a question Thorne found a little easier to answer: ‘Whose fault was it: (A) yours or (B) yours?’

This was usual y when Thorne would wake, and for a while the question would stay with him. The feelings it stirred were unmistakable, yet hard to name or pin down. Not quite shame, but a shade of it. Like the relationship which ‘coming down with something’ has to the il ness itself; to the symptoms that wil eventual y appear. He would move robotical y through the rituals of the morning – ablutions, breakfast, getting dressed – until the memory of the dream began to dissolve. Feeling the water sizzle against his skin as he shaved, and the cereal turning to charcoal in his mouth.

He’d put Phil Hendricks into a minicab late the previous night. As always, the sofa-bed had been on offer, but Hendricks had wanted to get home. The big talk about cruising for someone to take his boyfriend’s place had not lasted long. The beer had washed away the pretence of acceptance, and by the end of a long evening he was tearful again, and desperate to return to the flat in case Brendan had decided to come back.

In his kitchen, Thorne ate toast and marmalade standing up, listening to Greater London Radio and waiting for the early morning dose of painkil ers to kick in.

It was five weeks until the first anniversary of his father’s death.

Outside, it had started to rain gently, and on GLR the host was trying to get a word in as some woman ranted about the disgusting state of the capital’s rail network.

He decided that he would cal his Auntie Eileen – his father’s younger sister – and Victor, the old man’s best friend. Maybe they could al get together on the day. Have a drink or something.

His was not, had never been, a close family, and it was al so terribly British, this cleaving together after a loss. Yet, while he saw it for the gesture that in many ways it was, he stil craved it; he needed the chance to measure his grief against that of others. He wanted to be with people who could talk to him without feeling like they were walking on eggshel s.

On the radio, a man was saying that the previous cal er had been rude and overbearing, but that she’d been right about how crap the railways were.

Thorne wondered how the Mul ens were doing. To lose someone but not know for sure if they were real y gone was arguably the worst kind of loss, and they certainly seemed to be cleaving together. It was odd, he thought, that a word could have such opposite definitions: to cling together, and to split violently apart.

He was scooping food into a bowl for Elvis when the phone rang, and though the codeine hadn’t quite taken effect, Porter’s cal was enough to make him forget the pain pulsing down his leg and into his foot.

They could now be certain that Luke Mul en had been kidnapped. Whoever was holding him had final y decided to get in touch.

At Central 3000, chairs had been hastily put out and a screen set up in a corner beneath the red flag. Officers from other departments cut their conversation, stood stil or just worked in silence, as the team from the Kidnap Unit gathered round and watched the video that had come through the Mul ens’ front door first thing that morning.

When it had finished, Porter rewound the tape without a word and they watched it through again.

‘Obviously the original’s gone to the FSS,’ she said when they’d finished. ‘They’l fast-track it, along with the envelope it came in.’

The Forensic Science Service handled enquiries from al forty-three police forces in England and Wales, testing firearms and fibres, running toxicology screens, minutely analysing blood, drug or tissue samples. Their labs in Victoria would normal y take a week or more to turn round comprehensive fingerprint or DNA results. A fast-track request could reduce that time significantly: with luck, they would hear back within a day, on the prints at least.

‘Not that I can see us getting a great deal,’ Porter said. She gestured towards the screen. The image was frozen at the point where, seen from behind with his face hidden from view, a man carrying a bag in one hand and a syringe in the other is moving purposeful y towards Luke Mul en. ‘It looks very much like they know what they’re doing.’

‘What do we think’s in the syringe?’ Hol and asked.

A DS in front of him – a tal Scotsman with a mul et – turned around. ‘Rohypnol maybe, or diazepam. Any benzodiazepine, real y.’

‘How’s he get hold of that kind of stuff?’

‘With a computer and a credit card. It’s pretty bloody simple these days. They shut down a site a couple of weeks ago that was sel ing a vial of ketamine and a couple of syringes in a smart leather case. Knocking them out at £19.99 as “date-rape kits”.’

‘Doesn’t he need to know what he’s doing, though? If he’s going to keep the kid sedated al the time?’

Thorne listened to the exchange, but kept his eyes fixed on the television screen; on the frozen, flickering image of the boy and the man who was holding him. There was terror in the boy’s eyes. It had been there throughout, of course, albeit partial y hidden by the brave face he’d been putting on for his parents. But the mask had fal en quickly away when the man began walking towards him with the needle.

The Scottish officer shook his head. ‘You can also find out how to do it on the Net. Plenty of teach-yourself guides out there. What size doses to use or whatever.’

‘Or you learn from experience,’ Thorne said.

There was a sizeable pause after that.

Then the ACTIONS were outlined and al ocated. There was little of substance to work on other than the partial number plate of the blue or black car, and talking to a few more witnesses who’d seen Luke getting into it.

Porter waited until most of her team had been given tasks and those few who hadn’t were clearing away chairs or paperwork before she talked to Thorne and Hol and about their roles. ‘I’m going back to the school this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which of you is better at talking to teenage boys . . .’

Hol and was the first to speak up, aware of a good, long look from Thorne as he answered. ‘Yeah, I’l tag along.’

‘Tom?’

‘I thought I might have a word with one or two people Tony Mul en used to work with,’ Thorne said. ‘Show them the list. See if their memory’s any better than his.’

At the end of the previous day, Mul en had handed over the list of al those who might have held a grudge against him.

‘He
has
got quite a lot to think about,’ Porter said.

Thorne could see she had a point, but he was not completely convinced. ‘That’s exactly why I thought it might be more . . . comprehensive, I suppose. If my son was taken and there was no obvious reason why, I’d be sticking down the name of anyone who’d so much as looked at me funny.’

Mul en had come up with just five names. Five men who might,
at one time
, have had cause to wish or do him harm. Each had been run through the CRIMINT database within minutes, and once those traced to Australia, HMP Parkhurst and Kensal Green cemetery had been eliminated, they were down to two.

Porter was pul ing papers from her desktop, bits and pieces from a drawer and sweeping them into her handbag. ‘I’m going over to the house for an hour or two first. I’l probably head straight to the school from there. You never know, he’s had a bit more time to think, he might have come up with another name or two overnight.’

She picked up her mobile phone and clipped it to her belt, then dropped a second handset into her handbag. The Airwave had been rol ed out across the force over the previous year and a half, one handset issued to every officer. It was certainly an ingenious piece of kit: a phone
and
a radio, with a range that, for the first time, would al ow the user to talk to a fel ow officer anywhere in the UK at the touch of a button. Stil , in spite of a blizzard of memos, some officers preferred to stick with their own phones. These were less flashy perhaps, but they were general y smal er, lighter and, most importantly,
didn’t
have GPS capability built in. Mysteriously, a large number of these state-of-the-art Airwave handsets were getting lost, or left at home by officers who were none too keen on Control-room staff knowing exactly where they were at al times.

Thorne was interested to note that, as far as he could see, Porter’s Airwave had not been switched on when she’d dropped it into her bag.

The team’s DCI, a quietly spoken Geordie who needed to lose a few pounds, appeared at Porter’s shoulder, brandishing a sheaf of papers and tel ing her that he needed five minutes with her before she disappeared. Though Barry Hignett had met Thorne and Hol and briefly first thing, he took the chance to welcome them again, explaining that there was bugger-al room for niceties on the teeth of a case such as this one.

Hignett walked Porter to a nearby desk and spread out the papers in front of her. Hol and watched for a minute, then turned around, his back to them, and spoke low to Thorne: ‘Did you want to go to the school?’

Thorne looked at him as though he were speaking Chinese. ‘What?’

‘With Porter, I mean.’ He lowered his voice further stil . ‘Only I thought you looked a bit pissed off before, when I said that I’d go.’

‘Don’t be so bloody sil y,’ Thorne said.

When Porter had finished with Hignett, she arranged to meet Hol and later at the school. Then Thorne took the stairs with her down to ground level.

‘
They’re being fairly nice to me
.’ Thorne said it quietly, nodding as an officer he’d spoken to once or twice moved past him, coming up. ‘That’s what Luke said on the tape.’ It had been a dramatic moment when the figure with the syringe had emerged from behind the camera. The picture had remained unsteady, the camera clearly handheld rather than mounted on a tripod. Whatever Luke had said or not said, that was when it had become clear that he was being held by more than one person. That they were looking at a conspiracy to kidnap.

‘Two of them, d’you reckon? Or more?’

‘If it’s just two, I’d put money on the other one being the woman Luke was seen with.’

‘Is that common? A man and a woman working as a team?’

‘I’ve come across it a few times,’ Porter said. ‘For obvious reasons, the woman’s most often the one involved in the abduction itself. The trust figure.’

‘Right.’

For obvious reasons
.

Thorne wondered why, in the light of so many highprofile cases, those reasons remained obvious, but clearly they did. Hindley was always more hated than Brady. Maxine Carr, despite being found not guilty of even
knowing
that her boyfriend had murdered two young girls, was, if anything, the more vilified of the two.

‘A couple of the kids reckoned they’d spotted them together before, didn’t they?’ Thorne said. ‘Luke and this woman. She obviously took her time to get close to him.’

‘It paid off,’ Porter said. ‘Talking of which, there’s stil no sign of a ransom demand. No talk of
anyone
getting paid off.’