Buried

‘Hello,’ he said.

She placed the flat of her hand against his back, low down, just above his belt, and began to rub. ‘There?’

‘Close enough,’ Thorne said.

‘Is that helping?’

‘Oh yes…’

Then the phone rang.

He turned round and she removed her hand, and the look between them quickly became serious, with the phone demanding to be answered and both knowing very well it was unlikely to be a social call.

It was Holland. ‘I think you’d better get out of bed,’ he said.

‘We haven’t had the chance to get in yet.’

‘Sorry?’

Thorne could have kicked himself. ‘Get on with it, Dave.’

‘Shepherd’s Bush CID have got a body we should take a look at. I’ll give you the address.’

Thorne looked around for a piece of paper. Porter appeared next to him with a notepad and pen, then walked back to the bed and began pulling on her skirt.

‘I’m listening…’

‘Remember that message I left for Kathleen Bristow?’ Holland said. ‘Well, somebody finally got back to me.’

PART THREE. WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

SUNDAY

LUKE

There’d been a kid, when Luke was a few years younger, who’d picked on him at school. He’d stolen things – a fountain pen, a watch – handed out punches to the shoulder and kicks to the ankle, and threatened to do a lot worse if Luke told anyone. Luke hadn’t been the only one this boy had targeted. He’d watched the bully with others sometimes, and saw the same technique as had been used on him. The boy would smile, be nice, make out that he wanted to be friends, before dishing out the painful stuff. As though the pretend gentleness made the twisting and slapping that came afterwards more enjoyable for him.

Luke hadn’t told anyone, had suffered until the boy had left the school, but he’d learned to recognise the smile that came before the pain, and he saw it with the man in the cellar. It sounded silly. It was obvious really, with what was going on, but there was something wrong with the man. Something out of control, lost, which made Luke feel as though the man himself didn’t have much idea what he was going to do next.

The friendlier the man was – the more freedom he gave Luke, the more he told Luke how much he thought of him – the more frightening he became. And the more determined Luke became to try to help himself.

It was hard, trying to make himself concentrate on doing something when all he wanted to do was curl up and lie still, sleep until it was over. He’d spent hours since the man had last left, reciting poems in his head, lyrics to songs… anything to avoid having to think about what the man had told him; what he’d kept on telling him. It was poisonous shit, he knew that; like the lies that bully at school had once told him in a soft voice. The man was enjoying coming down with his torch and his filth. Spewing it out and messing with his head. Weakening him.

So Luke filled his head with as much other stuff as he could, trying to squeeze out the man’s lies.

And he focused hard on the sting from a dozen cuts and bruises. He drove a fingernail across the graze on his knuckles until that pain became more important than the deep, dull ache that the man’s words had left spreading through his body.

He climbed to his feet, feeling the pieces of discarded gaffer tape around him as his hands moved across the dirt floor. He tried to concentrate on the map of the cellar he had created in his mind: the low corners; the damp cra

If the man was still in the house, he would probably be down to see him again before too long. With more stories to tell… or worse.

Luke stared into the thick, gritty darkness and made a decision.

He needed a weapon.

EIGHTEEN

There was never a good time, of course. But when it came to working with a body, working on a body, the early hours of the morning were probably the least bad. During the day, a murder scene felt blatant and unashamed. There was something about the way daylight fell across a body that served to reinforce the brutality of the act; to hammer home the shocking truth that such things happened while the rest of the world went about its business. Walked around, shopped, sat bored at tills or desks, while others a few feet away bled, bloated and stiffened.

At night, Thorne could do what needed to be done and could extract a little comfort from the fact that he was performing a necessary, if ugly, public service by cleaning up the mess before dawn. In a bad mood he might consider such a night’s labours as akin to shovelling shit uphill. But tonight, standing over the body of an old woman while her neighbours slept, he felt like he was doing his bit to maintain a little of the bliss that ignorance afforded.

He’d already exchanged a few words with Hendricks as they’d climbed into the plastic full-body suits. It was a runof-the-mill conversation, such as anyone might have before getting down to work:

‘How’re you doing?’

‘Good. Didn’t you get my note?’

‘Yeah, but you’d probably say that anyway.’

‘No, really. I saw Brendan.’

‘How was that?’

‘Well, there was no screaming, and I didn’t try to smash his face in, so pretty good, I think…’

Now, forty minutes or so into it, the dialogue had taken on a more businesslike tone. The talk was of lividity and core body temperature; of traumatic asphyxia and cadaveric spasm. As Hendricks dictated a few notes into a small digital recorder, Thorne watched the team of scene-ofcrime officers move around Kathleen Bristow’s small bedroom. As always, seeing them work, he felt something nagging at him; irritating, like a rough seam scratching his skin inside the plastic suit. He had come to realise over the years that it was envy: of their certainty; of the scientific boundaries which he imagined must give them the kind of reassurance he had rarely felt himself.

Theirs would be the evidence for the likes of him to label and box up and get to court. Without it, the best he had to offer was guesswork and speculation.

‘So, when are we talking, Phil?’

Hendricks took one of the woman’s dead hands in his own. The flesh was mottled, bluish against the cream of his surgical glove. ‘Rigor’s just starting to fade, so I think we’re talking a little over twenty-four hours. The early hours of yesterday morning, probably. Maybe late the night before.’

The night before they’d nicked Grant Freestone.

But Freestone couldn’t be the killer, could he? They’d already established that he hadn’t kidnapped anyone, and it would have been too much of a coincidence for Kathleen Bristow’s death not to be co

‘I reckon he broke a rib or two as well,’ Hendricks said. ‘Pressing down on top of her. Kneeling on her chest, maybe.’

When Hendricks reached forward to push a finger inside Kathleen Bristow’s mouth, to rub a cotton bud across the tears inside her lip, Thorne turned away. He walked out of the room, and downstairs. A SOCO he knew well was working in the dining room, moving methodically around the small table on top of which sat a telephone and answering machine. It was from here that a DI from the on-call Murder Team had phoned Dave Holland, having listened to the message he’d left for Kathleen Bristow. As Thorne headed towards the back door, he exchanged a joke with the officer, but he was thinking of how the old woman’s face had seemed to collapse when Hendricks had removed her false teeth.

Outside, Thorne pushed back the hood of the plastic suit, walked over to where Dave Holland, similarly attired, was leaning against the wall next to the kitchen window. A generator hummed at the front of the house and a powerful arc light brightened the half of the garden nearest the kitchen door.