Buried

Porter thought too, but said she couldn’t think of one, so they drove on in silence listening to ‘Men with Broken Hearts’, which Williams had proudly described as the ‘awfulest, morbidest song you ever heard in your life’.

Thorne slowed a little as they approached the flat. Drew Porter’s attention to shops and local landmarks; to pubs of interest. On Kentish Town Road he took care to point out the Bengal Lancer. ‘Best Indian restaurant in London,’ he said. ‘You like Indian food?’

Porter nodded. ‘I’m not sure they’ll deliver to Pimlico, though.’

‘I could take you.’ Thorne glanced across, his eyes meeting Porter’s for half a second on their way to the far-side wing-mirror. ‘They’d look after us,’ he said.

When they reached the flat, Thorne walked quickly inside, keeping a few feet ahead of Porter and tidying as he went. In the hall, he nudged discarded shoes towards the skirting board with the outside of his foot, straightened the rug, hung up a jacket that had been tossed across the back of a chair. Porter moved past him as he stopped to add the day’s post to the pile on the table. When he caught up with her in the living room, she was leaning down to make a fuss of the cat, pretending not to look at the note that had been left on the sofa.

Thorne picked up the scrap of paper and read:

Don’t worry, I was talking shit last night. I’d had a drink, and I was tired.

Feeling much better now.

I’ve eaten the last of your bread. Sorry…

‘Who’s your friend?’ Porter asked.

‘It’s all right. It’s a bloke.’

Porter raised an eyebrow. ‘Now, that is even more interesting than the whole country music thing.’

‘It’s Phil Hendricks.’

‘Right.’ She stretched the word out. Left just enough of a pause. ‘Hendricks is gay, isn’t he?’

Thorne smirked, enjoying the wind-up, relishing the attention. He nodded towards the sofa. Elvis was curling up, making herself comfortable again. ‘That’s the sofa-bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it out later.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

He couldn’t help but mirror her grin. ‘Why do I feel like I’m suddenly in a remake of Carry on Constable? Isn’t this where you tell me that anything I say will be taken down, and I say, “knickers”?’

She laughed. ‘Is there anything to drink?’

Thorne tried to look stern. ‘Seven hours until we’re on again, remember. And rested.’

‘One won’t hurt.’ She sat down on the sofa. ‘Can’t Roger Couldn’t-give-a-toss go and get us a drink?’

Roger walked into the kitchen and squatted down in front of the fridge. He stared at its meagre contents, then realised that, as far as this woman he’d brought back to his flat went, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, or where things were heading, but he was loving every minute of it. He shouted back into the living room: ‘Not much choice, I’m afraid. It’s cheap lager or cheap lager.’

‘Either’s fine,’ Porter said.

The 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift could be good news or bad news, depending on how hard you fancied working; and, more importantly, what night of the week it was. Early in the week, it could be fairly quiet. But round Shepherd’s Bush, Acton, Hammersmith – anywhere come to that – things tended to get a bit livelier once people smelled the weekend coming.

PC Dean Fothergill knew that now and again, when there were just the two of you, out and about in a panda, you could hide if you felt like it. For a while, anyway. You could try to stretch your hour’s meal break into a couple if you’d not got enough sleep during the day. It was getting harder with the Airwaves, of course, but even if the powers that be knew where you were, they couldn’t see you. Not yet, at least. So some of the lads had already figured out that as long as you kept moving, you’d look busy enough. Café to kebab shop to side street; half an hour with the paper in one place and a fag break somewhere else. Only on a slow night, obviously.

On a Saturday night, there was always something happening.

At a quarter past one in the morning, Fothergill and WPC Pauline Caulfield were up near TV Centre when they took the call.

‘Some bloke’s phoned through from Glasgow, says his sister was meant to have come up this afternoon and she never got there. She’s sixty-odd, she lives alone, he can’t get hold of her on the phone, didn’t ring until now because he didn’t want to worry us, blah, blah, blah. Go and check on her when you’ve got a minute, will you, Dean? I know you and Pauline are sitting around reading the paper.’

‘We were dealing with that ruck outside White City tube, actually, Skip.’

‘I believe you; thousands wouldn’t. I’ll send everything through on the MDT.’

As soon as the details started to come up on the screen of the car’s mobile data terminal, Caulfield swung the Astra round.

They took it steady towards Shepherd’s Bush.

Fothergill shook his head. ‘I bet you a fiver she forgot she was even meant to go to Glasgow,’ he said.

‘You’re a good listener,’ he said.

He raised the torch and trained the beam across the cellar, then lowered it when the boy squinted and turned his face away. ‘I know that you’re scared, so you’d probably listen to anything, but I can tell when people are really hearing what you’ve got to say and when they’re not. I get a lot of that at work, and it can really wear you down. People just sitting there and letting what you say wash over them and not taking anything in. And it’s harder for you, I can see that. Of course it is. It can’t be easy listening to what I’m telling you. Just sitting there and hearing these hideous things and saying nothing.

‘Do you want to say something? You can, you know…

‘I know you maybe need time to take some of this stuff in, that’s only natural. I’ll leave you for a while to do that, but I want you to understand something first. I wouldn’t be telling you any of this if I didn’t think you could take it in. OK? If I didn’t think you were old enough and bright enough. I know all about how clever you are, all about it. So I thought about everything carefully, and decided that you would definitely be able to process this information. Make sense of it. Not that you can make sense of all of it, because there are parts – I know you know which parts I’m talking about – that are so beyond what you and I, what ordinary people, perceive as normal that sense doesn’t really come into it.

‘Is that fair? Just nod if you agree with what I’m saying… Good.

‘As long as you don’t think I’m getting any pleasure out of this, that’s all. You know I’m not trying to torture you with it, right? I mean, what possible reason could I have to do that? I’ve hurt you enough already; I’m well aware of that. Everything you went through before, in the flat, I mean. I suppose I just want you to understand that the motivation for telling you all this is… decent.

‘Because you should know these things. Because not knowing would be so much worse. Because at some point you’ll come to terms with it and be far better off in the long run. Do you see?

‘Knowing what the ones you love are capable of is a terrible burden sometimes. But ignorance is a damn sight worse.’

He raised himself on his haunches when he heard the sniffing and crept a little closer to the corner in which the boy was curled. ‘Don’t cry, please. I really wasn’t trying to make you cry. I’m sorry. I’ll wait until you’re a bit calmer. I’ll go now, shall I?’

He moved back again. Waited. ‘You’ll forgive some of it, I’m sure. Not me, probably, and certainly not for all this. But some of it: those things, the less terrible things, we did for the right reasons. I know you won’t be able to see that now, that right now you just want to lash out and scream or whatever. But they were the best reasons, I swear to you.