Buried

‘About what?’

‘What you said about Luke. About him not being able to get in touch. It’s ridiculous, this idea that he killed anyone.’

‘I’m not sure what I think, if I’m honest.’

Thorne looked surprised, and wasn’t shy about letting her know just how sure he was. ‘It’s bollocks. Somebody’s holding him.’

‘Who?’

Thorne almost smiled. ‘I don’t have all the bloody answers.’

At the north end of Victoria Street the view improved, with the London Eye becoming visible through the grey, and the monstrous Department of Trade and Industry building giving way to the splendour of Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster beyond. It was not much after eight o’clock, and the weather still looked like it could turn at any moment, but there were already plenty of snap-happy visitors being led around on overpriced walking tours by guides waving umbrellas.

‘Why don’t we just keep going up to Embankment?’ Porter said. ‘We can get the Northern Line straight up to Colindale. You can give me the tourist bit round Becke House.’

Thorne stopped, waited for a chance to cross the road. ‘I’m not heading back there just yet. There’s bugger-all else to do, so I’m going to chase up this Freestone thing.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’

‘Talk to someone who knew him.’

Porter stepped back from the kerb as a lorry overtook a car on the inside. ‘Want some company?’

‘Why don’t I give you a shout a bit later?’ Thorne said.

‘OK.’ Porter looked like she had a lot more to say than that.

Thorne saw a gap in the traffic and stepped into it. ‘See where we both are after lunch?’

The rain had come again before he’d reached the other side of the road. He picked up speed as he turned towards the river and made for the tube station, feeling wetter, and more of a miserable shit, with every step.

NINE

If the fixtures and fittings at Central 3000 had made Thorne’s shared cupboard at Becke House feel shabby, DCI Callum Roper’s office on the twelfth floor of the Empress made it seem downright medieval.

Roper had read the look on Thorne’s face as he was shown in. ‘It’s only because we’re new,’ he’d said.

When it had been built in 1961, the Empress State Building – a thirty-storey tower block in Hammersmith – had been impressive enough to be named after a world-famous skyscraper across the Atlantic. Back then, its distinctive triangular footprint had seemed radical and interesting, but forty years on it had been in dire need of the eighty-million-pound refurbishment that had won several major awards and restored much of its former glory. Though not quite as swish as the glass-and-steel Ark just up the road, its fabulous new facilities had proved hugely popular, with almost half of the office space behind the shiny, blue, solar-controlled double glazing being snapped up by the Metropolitan Police Service.

Thorne had stood in the vast atrium, gazed around as his ID card was swiped at the first of three separate security checkpoints. He’d been a little depressed by the fact that a building a year younger than he was had needed such a comprehensive facelift. How long before his own frame and superstructure would be in need of serious attention? He’d taken back his wallet and felt a spasm of pain as he’d reached round to tuck it into his back pocket.

What do you mean ‘how long’?

Though he worked at a desk that Donald Trump might have killed for, Roper had chosen to lead Thorne to the other end of his office, where four oatmeal-coloured armchairs sat around a low, glass table. Roper pushed aside a green file, watched as a young woman with lipstick on her teeth laid down a tray of coffee, and biscuits wrapped in cellophane. ‘You know what coppers are like,’ he said. ‘This place’ll be a shit-hole inside a month.’

Thorne smiled and nodded, but seriously doubted it. He’d taken in the man as quickly as the surroundings and decided that Roper was probably the type who liked to keep everything tidy. He was tall, and looked pretty fit for a man Thorne put in his early to mid-fifties, with hair that had been subtly coloured, and cut every bit as nicely as his dark blue suit. Not a man to let things slip, if he could help it.

When he’d said ‘new’, Roper had been talking about he and his team, just as much as the facilities they occupied. The Special Enquiries team was an offshoot of what had once been the Fraud Squad, part of the SO unit that had become SCD6. Those on its roster had been brought together to tackle any case where the victim – or perpetrator – was deemed to be in the public eye. The SE team handled cases involving corrupt MPs, blackmailed TV personalities, drug-fucked pop stars and royalty behaving badly. It was widely thought of as a prestigious gig, and Callum Roper, for one, looked as though he thoroughly enjoyed being part of it.

The ‘Sexy Enquiries Team’, Holland had called it once.

Thorne had pointed out that he and Holland spent their days dragging bloated bodies from dirty rivers, or trying to ID corpses so badly burned that they looked like Coco Krispies with legs. In comparison, issuing parking tickets sounded sexy…

‘You’ll have spoken to Graham Hoolihan then?’ Roper had already helped himself to a biscuit and asked the question with his mouth full, like he’d suddenly remembered it.

‘That’s right.’ Thorne was more than a little thrown, but hoped it didn’t show. He tried to work backwards, to work out how Roper had made the co

Roper leaned forward for his coffee and provided the answer before Thorne had had a chance to figure it out. ‘I made a couple of calls. Found out you were thinking that your kidnapper might have previously made threats against Mr Mullen.’

Thorne made a mental note not to drop Trevor Jesmond’s name into any more conversations.

‘I can’t remember the details,’ Roper said, ‘but I do recall Mullen’s name somewhere in the original MAPPA case notes. Part of the probation report, I think. Grant Freestone issued threats against Mullen back when he was originally nicked, didn’t he?’

Thorne told Roper as much as he knew; told him what Carol Chamberlain had witnessed in the courtroom. ‘Did you know Tony Mullen?’ he asked.

Roper shook his head. ‘Not that it would have made any difference if I had. Any threats Freestone might have made against anyone, anything he’d done before, wasn’t really relevant to what we were doing on the MAPPA panel. Our job was to monitor the way he lived his life after he was released. The slate was clean, you see?’

‘Not entirely, no. How can what he’d done before not be relevant?’

‘Well, of course, we knew what Freestone was capable of. I mean, that’s why the panel was put together in the first place. I just meant that, generally, our brief was to look forward rather than back. In terms of any threat he might have made against someone, yes… obviously, if he’d been spotted hanging around outside their house, we would have taken some action. Informed whoever we’d needed to.’

It was relaxed. It was coffee and biscuits and comfy-chairs casual. But Thorne could hear the tension and defensiveness in everything Roper said. The same way that a Parisian would always hear Thorne’s London accent, however fluently he might speak French.

And Thorne had a fair idea why.

‘What part do you think the MAPPA panel played in what happened to Sarah Hanley?’

Roper licked his lips, put down his cup. ‘What does that have to do with your kidnapping?’

Thorne didn’t even try to answer.

‘Look, there were two decisions made. With hindsight, which we all know is a bloody wonderful thing, one of them was wrong.’

‘The decision to tell Grant Freestone that you’d informed his girlfriend about his history?’

‘That we were going to inform her,’ Roper said. ‘We never got the chance, did we? Freestone was informed of the panel’s decision, but before Miss Hanley could be told anything, Freestone had stormed round there and killed her.’