Buried

‘I don’t think we’ve got them, to tell you the truth.’

‘Kath kept herself to herself,’ the old man added. ‘She was very private about things.’ He picked at something on his lapel, remembering. ‘She’d come home once a year or so; or maybe we’d get the train down here for the weekend.’

‘It’s hard when you live so far away,’ Porter said.

‘Right enough. But still, there were things we didn’t really talk about, you know?’

‘Shush, don’t think about all that now, love.’

‘Bloody stupid, when you stop and think about it.’

‘Spent all her time at work getting involved in other people’s lives and kept her own very quiet, you see?’ Joan Bristow leaned close to her husband, trying hard to elicit something like a smile, concern for him bleeding through the powder and thick foundation.

They sat and watched a woman with an electric floor-polisher; listened to the vague buzz of a one-way phone conversation, and, incongruously, to gales of laughter coming from a room down the corridor. Porter opened her mouth, desperate to say something and disguise the noise, but Joan beat her to it.

‘Was it one of those nutters, then?’ she asked. There was a pained expression on her face, and pity in her voice. ‘One of them as gets released from somewhere when they’re still poorly. You read about that sort of thing all the time.’

‘It’s too early to say.’

‘Kath dealt with her fair share of headcases over the years. Could it have been one of them, d’you think?’

Genuinely, Porter had no idea. Whoever had murdered Kathleen Bristow and the others was certainly a headcase, as far as she was concerned, though others would determine later whether he was suffering from an ‘abnormality of mind’. She found the procedures for deciding such things bizarre to say the least. A solicitor had once tried to explain the rules for establishing mental competence by telling her that if a man threw a baby on to a fire believing it to be a log then he was insane and could not be criminally responsible. This, according to the law, would not be the case if he threw the baby on to the fire knowing it was a baby. Porter had found this preposterous, and had said so. To her mind, the man who knew the baby was a baby was more insane; was obviously as mad as a box of frogs. The solicitor had merely smiled, as though that was exactly what made the whole issue so complex… and so fascinating.

She remembered what the probation officer, Peter Lardner, had said about intent. If that were a grey area, then diminished responsibility came in a thousand different shades.

‘You’ve still got to ask why, though, haven’t you?’ Bristow said.

‘What’s the point, love? It’s bad luck, that’s all it is.’

The old man shook his head. His voice was suddenly thin, and falling away. ‘Whether he’s a nutter or no, you still want to know what was going on inside his head.’ He rubbed a hand across his chin, rasping against the silvery stubble. ‘What made him choose our Kathleen.’

Porter didn’t look at their faces when they saw the body, and she didn’t make speeches. She said no more than she had to. She told Francis Bristow that, as things stood, they were all wrestling with that question, but she would do her very best for them, and keep them informed.

She also made a promise to herself; the sort of promise the likes of Tom Thorne made, broke and lived with.

Getting Luke Mullen back remained her first priority, of course. When there was still a life to be saved, that was a given. But however the kidnap investigation turned out, she would do whatever she could to give the man sitting next to her a definitive answer. She would tell him exactly why his sister had died, and she would find that out from the man responsible.

Porter was just about to start making noises about needing to get on and making sure that someone would be along to take care of them when she felt the hand slip into hers. When she looked, Francis Bristow was staring straight ahead again, blinking away the tears.

She followed his gaze, and all three of them sat and looked at the woman with the floor-polisher for a while.

‘DC Holland?’

‘Speaking…’

‘DCI Roper at Special Enquiries. You left a message.’

Holland put down the sandwich, ‘That’s right,’ took a swig from a bottle of water to clear his mouth out. ‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly, sir.’

‘I’ve only got five minutes.’

‘We just wanted to let you know that the body of Kathleen Bristow was discovered in the early hours of this morning.’

The pause might just have been the time it took Roper to recall the name. Holland couldn’t know for sure.

‘Poor woman,’ Roper said, finally. ‘Christ…’

‘She was murdered, sir.’

Another pause. This one definitely for effect. ‘Well, I hardly thought you’d be calling to let me know that she’d popped off peacefully in front of The Antiques Roadshow.’

‘Right.’

‘How was she killed?’

‘Someone broke in and suffocated her.’

‘Nice.’

‘It looks like she held on to a lot of records,’ Holland said. ‘Filing cabinets full of stuff from her old cases and what have you.’ Holland took another small bite of his sandwich while he was waiting for a response. He could hear classical music playing softly from another room.

‘So you think this is co

‘We’re keeping an open mind at the moment.’

‘And you just called to keep me informed, did you?’

‘Sir…?’

With the music in the background, it was like being put on hold.

‘Not even going to tell me to make sure my doors and windows are locked?’

‘I would’ve presumed you’d do that anyway, sir,’ Holland said.

‘Present for you…’ Thorne dropped the plastic bag on to the table in front of Adrian Farrell.

‘Your twenty-four’s up in a little over ninety minutes,’ Wilson said.

Kitson glanced up at the clock. ‘At four thirty-eight.’

Farrell looked weary, suspicious. He reached forward and dragged the bag towards him as Thorne and Kitson took their seats.

‘As it happens, I’ve already spoken to my superintendent,’ Kitson said. ‘Assured him I’m carrying out my duties in regard to this case diligently and expeditiously…’

The solicitor made a winding gesture with his finger, urging her to get on with it.

‘Basically, I’ve got a six-hour extension.’ She smiled at Farrell. ‘He’s here until twenty to eleven, if I fancy it.’

Farrell’s face darkened as he pulled out the contents of the bag.

‘Don’t say we never do anything for you,’ Thorne said.

The boy pushed Thorne’s ‘present’ back across the table. ‘You’re hysterical.’

Thorne picked up one of the cheap, black plimsolls and examined it. Each had had a Nike-style tick drawn on the side in Tippex. ‘Suit yourself.’ He put the shoes back in the bag.

The interview room was one that had recently been upgraded to CD-ROM. Kitson unwrapped and loaded the fresh discs, made the speech and began the recording.

Thorne didn’t waste any more time. ‘How well do you know Luke Mullen?’ he asked.

Farrell appeared to be genuinely confused. ‘The kid who disappeared?’

‘You told officers that you barely knew him when they spoke to you at your school.’

‘So what are you asking me again for?’

‘Well, let’s just say that as you haven’t been entirely honest with us about other matters, we’re thinking that you may have been full of shit about this as well.’

Farrell was chewing gum. He held it between his top and bottom teeth, pushed at it with his tongue.

‘This is relevant to your murder enquiry, is it?’ Wilson looked at Kitson. ‘I certainly hope so.’

‘Perhaps you know him a little better than you told us you did,’ Thorne said.