Buried

But that was hypothetical nonsense, because too much had happened now for everything to finish as simply as that. The slate could no longer be wiped clean. But it felt good to know that he wouldn’t be the only one paying the price.

When the bells finally stopped, he could hear the sobbing again. Coming up through the floor: a stutter, a desperate beat; rising every few breaths to something cracked and sore.

He closed his eyes, tried to forget how stupid he’d been, until he could almost believe that what he heard was only the sound of water and rust, and the pipes expanding.

LUKE

The religious stuff was sort of taken for granted at Butler’s Hall. It wasn’t a church school, as such, but there were hymns in assembly every day, and, even though it wasn’t forced down your throat in RE lessons, the presumption was that anyone whose parents had not stated otherwise was C of E.

He knew that the chaplain would have made speeches. Something about lost sheep, most likely. That teachers would have lined up on stage and bowed their heads, and that prayers would have been said for him every morning.

Now he’d started saying them himself.

He’d been filling his head with all ma

Now God had elbowed His way in there as well.

Neither his mum nor his dad was big on church, save for the odd nativity play or whatever, and Juliet seemed actively drawn to Satanism, if anything. But he’d always liked the basic idea of it, of what it stood for. It was hard to argue that love and compassion were bad ideas. And some of the stuff in the Bible stood up OK, as long as you took it as nothing more than a cracking story.

He’d seen a programme on TV once, about why bad things happened to good people; about a bloke who did tons of work for charity then got some horrible disease, and a couple who went to church every five minutes and whose daughter had disappeared. They all said that suffering was part of being a Christian, and that everything they were going through was just a test of their faith. He’d watched it, thinking that they probably had to say something like that. He’d decided that if he believed in God, and was ever tested to the same extent, that he’d fail miserably.

But he didn’t believe, not really. And anyway, he knew what he was going through was nobody’s fault but that of the man on the other side of the cellar door. So a prayer couldn’t hurt, could it?

He guessed that the school chaplain might have something to say about praying at the same time as harbouring such violent thoughts; while clutching the carefully prepared means to put those thoughts into practice, if need be. But he also remembered that some of the stories he’d read in the Old Testament made Grand Theft Auto look tame. He knew that God had no problem with blood and thunderbolts, and striking down those who deserved it.

Thinking about it, perhaps the most appropriate thing he could ask God for was to be given the chance.

So he prayed for a while, because he knew that’s what people did as a last resort. Then he wiped away the tears and the snot. Went back to the distraction of memories and mental gymnastics.

The names of every child in his class, alphabetically, forwards and backwards. Planets and moons. Stars and satellites. His toys.

A dinosaur. A Bugs Bu

TWENTY

She made it a rule never to look at the faces.

It wasn’t about the pain. Porter was used to seeing the rifts and fissures that pain could gouge across a face; she worked with it most days. But there was hope in those faces, too: that the nightmare would soon be over, that she or someone like her would do a good job and bring their loved ones home again. There were times, if that hope were misplaced, when it was terrible to see, but nothing was as dreadful as its absence.

When it came to identifying a body, the hope was often there right until the very last second. Hope that there had been a terrible mistake; that the police had got it wrong; that their wife/husband/child was still alive somewhere. On occasions, of course, when there was a genuine element of doubt as to identity, it was her job to look. But not once, even then, had she ever seen that hope rewarded. She’d watched it die and seen it buried in a blink; gone before the breath had been fully caught.

So Louise Porter didn’t look any more. She dropped her eyes for that moment when hope was extinguished.

Afterwards, she sat with them on a brown plastic bench near the mortuary entrance. Francis Bristow and his wife had caught the early train from Glasgow. Clutching tight to overnight bags, they looked like bemused tourists who’d taken a wrong turn.

‘Have you got anywhere to stay?’ Porter asked. ‘Any other family?’

Joan Bristow was sitting on the far end. She looked to her husband, who was seated in the middle, then leaned forward slightly to look along at Porter. ‘We didn’t really know what we’d be doing. How long we’d be here, or anything.’

‘I’ll see if we can get something sorted out for you,’ Porter said.

‘We didn’t know, you see…’

The woman had a smart woollen coat folded across her knees. Next to her, Kathleen Bristow’s brother sat stiff-backed, staring straight ahead, as if studying every bump and crack in the primrose-yellow walls. He wore polished brogues and a jacket and tie. His hair was thick, creamcoloured, and his eyes were the same blue as his wife’s, wide and watery behind his glasses. He was probably in his early seventies, a few years older than his sister, but it was impossible for Porter to say if there was any family resemblance. She hadn’t had a good look at the photographs in the bedroom and she could not compare any living face with the one she’d seen on Kathleen Bristow.

The old man spoke suddenly, as if he’d been able to follow Porter’s thoughts. ‘I don’t understand why there was all that bruising across her nose,’ he said. ‘All black, like someone had hit her.’ The voice was quiet, and the Glaswegian accent strong, so Porter had to listen hard. He began to wave a finger in front of his face, pointing towards it. ‘And there was something else going on here… something not right with her mouth.’

The couple had been told how Kathleen Bristow had died and had been warned before the identification that her face was marked. Porter hesitated, unwilling for a variety of reasons to explain to Francis Bristow exactly what had been done to his sister’s face during her murder.

Joan Bristow’s accent was less pronounced than her husband’s. ‘They can’t tell us that kind of thing, Frank.’ She squeezed his hand and looked at Porter. ‘Am I not right, love?’

Porter nodded, grateful for the escape route, and stared at the finger, which still circled slowly in front of the man’s face. ‘What I was saying about family? We called you first because you were the one who reported her missing. We’re presuming there were no children…’

‘No children,’ Bristow said.

The words were then spoken a third time by his wife. She shook her head and talked softly, as if this were another, smaller tragedy. ‘Kath was never married, you see? She lived with a “friend” for many years.’ She looked at Porter, in case the understated inverted commas she’d put around the word ‘friend’ had not been obvious enough.

Porter had understood perfectly well. ‘Right, well, maybe we can get those details from you later, if you’d like us to inform this friend of hers.’