Buried

‘Would you like to scream? Go on, it’s fine, if you want to. Nobody’s going to hear. That’s why I took the tape off. Honestly, I can understand if you want to. Do you want to smash something? Do you want to kick my head in? Do you just want me to fuck off?’

He said nothing for a few minutes, then he raised the torch again and held its beam on the boy. ‘You should really think about screaming, you know. It might be healthy if you did. Get it out.’

He turned the torch on himself, rested his chin on the lens and thought for a while. ‘OK, maybe I’ve overestimated how much of it you’ve actually taken in. It’s a heck of a lot, I know. A lot to… absorb. Before I go, maybe I’ll just run through some of it again. I’ll try to make it simpler for you this time. Is that a good idea, do you think?

‘Luke…?’

The joking had stopped the moment Caulfield had spotted the broken window. They’d already spent ten minutes knocking before Fothergill had scaled the side gate and they’d walked round to the rear of the house.

He’d called it in while Caulfield had gone back to the car for gloves, torch and their telescopic batons.

‘Maybe we should just wait,’ Fothergill said.

‘For fuck’s sake, Dean.’

Caulfield pushed her hand through and reached round until she could release the catch on the lock. Before she had a chance to open the door, a cat bolted past her and flung itself through a cat-flap and inside.

‘Jesus…’

She stepped into a darkened kitchen and shouted into the house. Fothergill shouted louder. Then they stood still and waited. If there was anyone in the house who shouldn’t have been there, chances were that they’d hear some kind of movement, even if it was someone trying to conceal themself. Caulfield felt for a light switch, found it, and the two of them moved further into the room. There were dishes stacked neatly on a draining board. The cat roamed around near an empty bowl on the floor and rubbed its head against cupboard doors.

Caulfield bent down. ‘Shush, it’s OK.’

‘You talking to me or the cat?’ Fothergill managed the smile, but his voice was higher than normal.

They walked out of the kitchen and into a narrow hallway with the front door at the far end. Streetlight filtered through small stained-glass panels, and stairs rose up from one side. There were two doors off to the right. They opened one each, turned on the lights in a small sitting room and a dining room.

‘Dean?’

Fothergill put his head round the door and followed Caulfield’s gaze. The dining table had been set for breakfast: an empty glass, spoon and napkin; a bowl already filled with cereal and covered in cling film.

‘Come on…’

There were watercolours on the wall ru

They turned on more lights, looked into a bathroom and a spare bedroom, then walked slowly towards the closed door of the only room that was left.

‘Have you ever seen a body, Dean?’ Caulfield asked.

‘Come on, she might be anywhere. She might have gone away without telling anyone-’

‘Dean?’

Fothergill shook his head. Took off his hat and held a sleeve to his forehead.

‘It’s fine, OK? Just stay calm, and don’t touch anything.’

The smell was stronger when they opened the door. Each could taste it on the breath they sucked in before Caulfield turned on the light.

‘Oh, fuck…’

She’d kicked the duvet on to the floor, and her nightdress had ridden up above her pale, hairless calves. One arm was thrown out to the side, hanging over the edge of the bed, while the other was tight against her side, a handful of the sheet clutched between thin fingers.

A lamp had been knocked from the bedside table. A paperback romance lay next to it on the carpet.

‘OK, Dean?’

Fothergill had turned away and was looking across to where more photographs were arranged on a dressing table. The same woman was posing in many of them: a young girl’s hair gathered up in a black beehive; changing style and colour as the photos did; turning grey finally, and growing thin as the woman began to fade and shrink. Fothergill guessed the face was the same that lay twisted beneath the pillow a few feet away from him.

The cat had followed them upstairs. Caulfield reached down as it moved past her, but she was too late to stop it jumping on to the mattress, where it immediately began kneading at the dead woman’s leg and purring loudly.

‘Shit…’

Fothergill turned back to the woman on the bed. His face was the same colour as the stained white sheet beneath her.

‘My mother was in a residential place for her last couple of months,’ he said. ‘It smelled like this.’ He reached out a hand towards the bedstead, stopped, and nodded understanding when Caulfield repeated her warning not to touch. ‘It smells like my mum’s room.’

There had been a woman Thorne had slept with once, the year before, but he was still trying, for all ma

He was sore, having strained his back fifteen minutes earlier, trying to assemble the sofa-bed. Porter had laughed when he’d sworn and cried out, then got up to lend a hand when she’d seen how much pain he was in.

‘You should get that seen to,’ she’d said. ‘At least find out what’s wrong.’

‘I will.’

‘Have you got health insurance?’

‘No, but there’s some money. From the sale of my dad’s house, you know?’ The money he’d not known what to do with; that he’d hated. He’d given some to Aunt Eileen, and a couple of hundred to Victor, but even after he’d handed the taxman his chunk, there was still plenty left. Maybe, a year on, he should spend it on something. Find some use for it that the old man would have approved of.

‘Shame you didn’t bugger up your back at work,’ Porter had said. They’d lifted the metal bar beneath the cushions, pulled out the mattress and folded down the legs. ‘Then the Job would have to cough up for it.’

She’d been close enough for Thorne to smell the beer on her. The one drink that had become a couple each.

They’d sat around and bitched about people at work, about the job in general. They’d given thumbnail sketches of parents and past relationships. Thorne had told her about the previous day, when he’d been thinking about bad marriages, and Maggie and Tony Mullen had sprung to mind. He’d been shocked that, for the first time he could remember, his own marriage hadn’t been the first one he’d thought of.

Porter told him that was probably a good sign.

Now, standing outside the bathroom, he realised that he’d said far more about almost everything than she had. That – aside from the facts that she was fu

Thorne could hear her through the cheap, thin door, making an odd humming noise as she brushed her teeth, and he decided he knew enough.

When she came out of the bathroom, she was carrying her own clothes in a bundle under one arm and wearing nothing but knickers under one of Thorne’s T-shirts. She moved past him, reddening slightly, and began laying her blouse and skirt on the chair nearest the sofa-bed. ‘I’ll buy you a new toothbrush.’

‘I should worry about explaining to people at work why you’re wearing the same clothes two days ru

‘They’re used to it,’ she said. ‘I’m such a slag.’

Thorne laughed, then coughed, then winced at the pain. Porter walked across and, without saying anything, began to untuck Thorne’s shirt at the back.