Buried

‘I could have such a good time using a blade on you.’ The man with the glasses was inches from Farrell’s face. Farrell could smell the chewing gum on his breath. ‘Not quick, either. There are halal butchers in our family. You understand what that is?’

‘He knows how to bleed an animal properly.’

‘And you still wouldn’t have paid for what you did to Amin… nowhere near. For what you did before you killed him.’

Farrell heard himself say, ‘please’. Felt the heat that was rising inside him spread out and bubble across every inch of his skin.

The driver, a big man, heaved himself further round in his seat. ‘OK, let’s calm down. Nobody’s using knives on anyone.’ He pointed a finger at Farrell. ‘You’re going to prison, don’t be in any doubt about that. That’s how you’re going to pay for Amin. With years and years of stale air, and shitting where you eat. Of worrying what might happen every time an Asian face stares at you in the canteen or across the exercise yard. You clear about that?’

Farrell nodded. Ahead of him, through the rain-streaked windscreen, he could see a small crowd of people two hundred yards away, milling around outside the cinema.

‘But there is a choice you have to make: you can go to prison, or you can go to prison after you’ve had the shit kicked out of you.’ He looked to the men on either side of Farrell, then back to the teenager. ‘Because I will let them beat you. In fact, I will probably help them beat you. So there you go… It’s not really much of a choice, if you ask me.’

Hearing the tremor in his voice as he started to speak only made it worse for Farrell. The fear was growing fat inside him, feeding on itself. ‘What do you want?’

‘There were others with you,’ the driver said. ‘Two others, the night you killed my nephew. They could have stopped you but they chose to stand by and watch. The police will probably catch them eventually, but even if they do, those two bastards won’t get what they deserve. If they get clever lawyers, maybe even clever Asian lawyers, to go down well with the jury, they won’t be sent to prison for murder. They may get a few years, but it’s not enough.’

‘They’re as guilty as you are,’ the man with the glasses said.

‘Fucking worse than you, man.’

The driver waved his hand until there was quiet. ‘We want to see them before they’re arrested, that’s all. If the law won’t deal with them properly, then we’ll sort things out ourselves. So, obviously, we need to know who they are.’ He stared at Farrell, brought a thumb to his mouth and chewed at a nail. ‘You can say nothing, that’s up to you, but why the hell would you want to take a beating for them? You get prison and a good kicking, and what do they get? That seems stupid to me. What thanks do you get for protecting these fuckers?’

‘If you’re stupid, whatever happens to you tonight can happen again, many times, once you’re in prison.’ The man with the floppy hair took off his glasses. He untucked his T-shirt and wiped the lenses. ‘We can get to you in there. If we want you hurt, we can make it happen, any time we like.’

‘Tell us their names,’ the driver said, ‘we drop you off near a police station and that’s it.’

Farrell wanted to be sick. And to shit, and to cry. If he told them what they wanted, how did he know that they wouldn’t hurt him anyway? He knew that if he asked the question, the beating would probably begin.

‘Two names. Say them quickly and it’s finished.’

Farrell closed his eyes and shook his head. For a wild, unthinking second or two he wanted them to hurt him. He wanted it over and done with, and being beaten seemed better than waiting.

Than not knowing…

‘I won’t allow any weapons,’ the driver said. ‘And it will be over quickly enough. But if you make the wrong choice, and it comes down to it, you need to understand that violence is never precise. It’s hard to keep things… reined in. You must know better than anyone what damage can be done with a kick or two, right?’

‘Amin tried to protect his head and it didn’t help.’

‘And there was only one person doing the kicking.’

‘Swings and roundabouts, though.’ The driver stuck the key back in the ignition, turned it some of the way. ‘If things get out of hand, I mean. If you end up damaged in some way and in a unit that’s designed for prisoners with special needs, it’ll probably be harder for us to get to you later on.’

‘Tell us their names. Last chance.’

Farrell’s mouth felt dead and scorched inside. He prised open his lips and panted, gulped and choked as he tried to dry swallow.

‘Silly,’ the driver said. ‘Very silly.’ He swung himself around again and started the car.

Farrell screamed over the radio and, once the music had been turned down, he started to gabble, breathless, in a whisper that struggled not to become a sob. He said the names over and over until they ran into one another and became meaningless; babbling until he felt hands on his face, closing his mouth, and voices telling him to shush.

Telling him that he was still scum, still a prick and still a murderer. But at least he was not a completely stupid one.

Porter knew that she should knock it on the head. There was little point in ploughing on when she was so tired that she might well be overlooking stuff anyway. But she really wanted to get it done.

There were hundreds of files, each containing sometimes dozens of reports and assessments. There was clearly no need to read all of them, or even the majority, but it had quickly become apparent that even skimming through Kathleen Bristow’s records wasn’t going to be a five-minute job.

Client files had been organised alphabetically, and while searching under ‘F’ for Freestone, Porter had found herself reading case notes that she knew were of no real interest. She supposed that even though these were ex-clients of a dead woman, there were still issues of confidentiality. But that didn’t stop her. She was fascinated, and, on occasion, appalled. Francis Bristow had been right when he’d said that his sister had worked with more than a few ‘headcases’.

The documents relating to Grant Freestone put a little unpleasant meat on the bones of what she knew already, but there was nothing that seemed significant. There were transcripts of interviews conducted in prison, and statements from a number of healthcare professionals who’d treated him during his sentence, but there was nothing in the file relating to the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements that came into force after he was released.

Porter was alone in the house. She’d brought a radio upstairs from the kitchen and tuned it to Magic FM. When the songs had become a little too soporific, she’d retuned it to Radio 1, nodding her head in time to the music as she’d hauled out batch after batch of brown and green suspension files.

She hummed along with a dance track she recognised and wondered if Thorne had managed to get away yet. Earlier, on the phone, when he’d asked her what she would be doing, it had sounded like more than just a casual work enquiry, but she’d decided not to push it. She sensed he wasn’t completely relaxed about what had nearly happened, but in that respect he was probably just an average bloke: happy enough to get into her pants but not very comfortable talking about it, or, God forbid, what might happen afterwards.

Porter finally found the MAPPA stuff in the section of files that was organised by year. There were half a dozen well-stuffed folders relating to Grant Freestone’s 2001 panel. She squatted down and sorted them into piles: ‘Risk Management’; ‘Domestic Arrangements’; ‘Community Sex-Offender Treatment Programme’; ‘Drugs & Alcohol’. She picked up the folder marked ‘Minutes’ and took out a sheaf of papers held together with a bulldog clip. Kathleen Bristow had been as meticulous as always, and the documents, most of which were handwritten, had been filed in strict chronological order. Porter flicked through to the last sheet: the minutes of the meeting that had taken place on 29 March 2001.