Buried

Watching as final touches were put to the video parade, she wondered if the boy sitting downstairs in a cell was quite so confident now.

‘We’re about there,’ Wilmot said.

Kitson opened the door, exchanged a few words with an officer on duty outside, and half a minute later Nabeel Khan was shown into the room.

He looked a little better than the last time Kitson had seen him, but that was hardly saying much. The bruises had healed, but she knew she was not looking at the teenager she imagined him to have once been. Before he and his friend Amin had stood waiting too long for a bus one night, six months before.

He took off his coat and nodded nervously in her direction. ‘How you doing, miss?’

Kitson could talk to him now. For obvious reasons, until this point, she had not been allowed any contact with the witness. To ensure that any evidence he might provide could not be seen as tainted, officers unco

‘I’m pretty good, Nabeel,’ she said. There was no need to ask how he was.

She talked to him as he took a seat next to Wilmot; told him that the whole thing would only take a couple of minutes, that it was all very simple and that he needn’t worry. He seemed relaxed enough. He told her that he was much happier doing it this way, on the computer; that he was relieved he wouldn’t have to stand in full view of anyone. He laughed when Kitson tried to tell him that wouldn’t have happened; said he’d seen it on TV and knew all about the two-way mirrors and stuff…

Then Wilmot took over, began the official preamble, and Kitson could do little but sit back and watch.

Each short clip had the same basic shape. The subject sat in front of a white background, looking straight at camera, until a short bleep signalled that they were to look to their right. Five seconds later another bleep indicated that they should turn the other way. Finally, they turned back to the camera and stared at it until the clip ended. Then the next one began.

The expressions ranged from vacant to insolent. Though instructed to keep their faces as blank as possible, the subjects looked variously bored, fascinated or disgusted. Some looked contented, presumably because they’d just picked up eighty quid for a few minutes of their time, when they’d only popped into the station to produce valid car insurance or explain where their girlfriend had got her black eye and split lip. They were all between sixteen and twenty-one. All were blond, though the length of hair and its style varied, from flat-top to floppy. None of the young men wore earrings, the subject in the seventh clip having been instructed to remove a gold cross on account of the fact that it might be said to draw unfair attention to him.

When the montage had finished and the screen went blank, Wilmot asked the witness if he wanted to see the footage a second time.

The witness shook his head.

Wilmot then asked the important questions, as he had to, but Kitson didn’t need to hear the answers. The face of the witness had remained more expressionless than many on the video, but Kitson had heard the noise begin towards the end of the sequence.

At around the minute and a half mark.

It continued now as Wilmot tried to elicit a response: the banging of bone against metal as Nabeel Khan’s leg shook uncontrollably beneath the table.

‘It’s this business with the kids I don’t get,’ Porter said. ‘How could Jane Freestone have let her brother come near her kids?’

‘She may not have known back then. Not for sure, anyway.’

‘She knows now though, right? And she’s still happy enough to send them out to the park with Uncle Grant.’

‘Apparently.’

‘You stick by your family. I understand that. We’ve both seen people doing it, standing by relatives who’ve done some of the sickest fucking things. A lot of the time, however misguided they are, part of me even thinks that’s honourable, you know?’

Thorne knew. He’d watched people eaten away from the inside by what those closest to them had done, while refusing to turn away. Insisting, despite everything, on being the only ones not to.

‘But only up to a point, don’t you reckon?’

‘Children, you mean?’

‘Right. It’s got to be a different story when it comes to your kids. No matter how much you might love your brother or your father or your husband, you put the kids first and last, surely to God?’

‘Maybe she genuinely thinks he’s i

Porter was not convinced. ‘I think Freestone’s open enough now about what he did, isn’t he? About what his preferences are. We’re talking about his nephews here; kids whose trust he’s already got, for heaven’s sake.’

‘I know…’

‘What if there were other kids?’ She said it like the ignorance was unforgivable. ‘We don’t know what he’s been doing for the last five years.’

‘Keeping his head down, I should think.’

‘It’s not his head I’m worried about.’ She paused before asking the question, as if Thorne’s answer was important to her. ‘Do you think people like Freestone can change what they are?’

‘Bloody hell,’ Thorne said. ‘Do we really need to get into this?’

‘We’re just talking.’

‘Like you said, it’s a preference, and whatever they might be, most of us are stuck with them.’ He hesitated, feeling awkward, searching for a way to articulate it. ‘I suppose… I’m not convinced that you could make me start fancying blokes, however much therapy you gave me.’

‘Right. And listen, I accept all the evidence about abusers having been abused themselves. It’s just-’

‘I know…’

‘I’ve been putting myself in her shoes, in Jane’s shoes, and I couldn’t do it. It’s hypothetical, obviously, but I think I would have had to cut myself off from him. Me and the kids. I mean, Jesus, if you’ve got some of your own, you know what the parents of the kids he hurt have gone through, don’t you? You’ve got that to live with as well.’

‘I suppose so,’ Thorne said.

She shook her head. Disgusted, adamant. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted him to come out of prison.’

They were sitting in one of the large CID offices on the third floor. Cut off from their own incident room back at Becke House, this was about the only place they could talk with any degree of privacy; to discuss progress, or the lack of it. To take a few minutes.

But they were still interrupted. Officers from various station squads moved in and out of the room at regular intervals, and the conversation was friendly enough. This was unusual, as ordinarily there was resentment between those who worked at Colindale full time and those, like Porter and Thorne, who were using it as little more than a facilities house. It was petty, territorial stuff: our interview room, our custody suite, our tea and biscuits. But, thus far, there had been only genuine enquiries as to how things were going, and both Thorne and Porter had been wished good luck on numerous occasions.

Word went round a station when there was a major case on the premises. It changed the mood of the place.

It was clear from many of the comments, passed openly or whispered too loudly in corners, that Grant Freestone’s record – the crimes for which he had been convicted in the mid-nineties – was colouring opinion; preying on the minds of others just as much as it was on Louise Porter’s. This certainly explained all those messages of good luck…

Thorne drank his tea and watched Porter work her way through a can of Diet Coke and her second packet of crisps. On the far wall, a large whiteboard was covered in names, pictures and numbered bullet points. Lines and arrows, up and across in red marker pen, linked a face to a blown-up section of the A-Z, a registration number to the photograph of a woman who had been severely beaten. Porter stared at the familiar map of an enquiry; the blood and beating heart of a case they knew nothing about. But Thorne knew that her mind was racing; was full of doubts and questions about their own case. Its fluttering, irregular heartbeat.