Buried

TWENTY-FOUR

‘Did it not occur to you for one minute that this was going to come out?’ Thorne spoke to them, and looked at them, as if they were children. ‘How could you think we wouldn’t find out about this?’

‘It’s not a big deal,’ Mullen said.

‘Isn’t it?’

‘It was an affair, that’s all. People have them. You’ll just have to forgive us for trying to keep some tiny part of our fucked-up lives private.’

But Thorne was in no mood to forgive anyone. He’d listened with a growing sense of disbelief and anger as Tony Mullen had explained why he’d taken the decision not to mention Grant Freestone. How they’d jointly decided that there would be little point in revealing the affair that his wife had had while serving as an officer of the local education authority on Freestone’s MAPPA panel in 2001.

‘You lied because of this?’ Thorne said. ‘We’re trying to find your son and you lie because of a bit of screwing around? Whose embarrassment were you trying to save? Your wife’s or your own?’

‘Both,’ Mullen said. ‘Either. Does it really fucking matter?’

‘You messed us around-’

‘Does any of it matter?’ Mullen looked ready to scream, with frustration, exhaustion, rage. ‘Christ, my wife made a mistake years ago. One mistake…’

Mullen was sitting on the sofa, facing the fireplace and the TV. Thorne and Maggie Mullen were opposite each other in the armchairs to either side. Thorne stared at the woman across the Chinese rug, her feet curled underneath her, same as he’d seen her daughter do. She was still, and had spoken barely a word since Thorne had entered the room.

He was unable to tell if she wore a stu

‘So who did you make this mistake with, then?’

She shook her head slowly, as if she were being asked to submit to something unspeakable.

Mullen groaned. ‘Does it matter?’

‘No more secrets,’ Thorne said.

So Maggie Mullen named the man with whom she’d had her affair. Thorne thought about it for a moment. He could see why it would have upset Tony Mullen so much.

‘You’re obviously enjoying this, Thorne,’ Mullen said. ‘Enjoying our… discomfort.’

‘You think you can claw back one single bloody inch of the moral high ground?’ Thorne asked.

Mullen said nothing, looked across at his wife.

‘You should feel uncomfortable. Jesus. You’re ex-Job, for crying out loud, and your son is missing. You withheld information.’

‘Irrelevant information.’

‘You sure?’

‘Considering everything that’s going on, do you really think that who my wife slept with five years ago is remotely important?’

‘That depends,’ Thorne said. ‘Does “everything” include another member of the MAPPA panel being murdered this morning?’ He looked from one to the other. It was clear from Tony Mullen’s expression that he hadn’t known. That, despite his co

Maggie Mullen began to cry.

‘I wonder if you still think the fact that your wife was on that panel is unimportant. If it’s irrelevant.’

Mullen stood up, held out his arms towards his wife, but she didn’t move. She sat and wept and looked anywhere but at Thorne or her husband, until Mullen moved across to her. He gathered her up and pulled her back with him on to the sofa, pressing her head to his chest until she had to break free to suck in a breath.

‘I don’t understand how you could have been on that panel in the first place,’ Thorne said. ‘Wasn’t there a conflict of interest, with your husband having put Freestone behind bars in the first place?’

Mullen looked at his wife. She was in no fit state to answer. ‘She didn’t know,’ he said. ‘Not to start with at least. We didn’t discuss cases and she’d never even heard of Grant Freestone until she joined that panel.’

‘So what happened? “Not to start with”, you said.’

‘She saw my name on Freestone’s probation report, the stuff about the threats he’d made, so then she told me and we discussed it. She talked about resigning, but there was really no need. What had happened in the past was of no concern to Maggie and the others on that panel, so there was no conflict.’

‘Of course not. Still, it must have been handy to have someone who could keep a close eye on Freestone for you. Someone who had a nice professional reason to know exactly what he was doing.’

Mullen shook his head. ‘You’re talking crap. My wife just did her job.’

‘Right, and plenty of overtime, by the sound of it.’

It was a cheap shot, and it got the reaction it deserved. Mullen sat up straight, clutched his wife’s hand and spoke quietly, each word clearly intended to be definitive; weighted with loathing for both subject and listener.

‘This man was someone Maggie worked with closely, only because she believed in doing things properly. She trusted everyone on that panel, had every reason to think they had the same dedication to the work that she had.’

Next to him, Maggie Mullen sat, stiff and shaking, the tears coming more slowly now. Her face reacted to the jolt of each sob, and twisted as her husband spoke, as though in distaste, in horror at this woman he was discussing that she did not recognise.

‘Men like him can mistake a close working relationship for affection. They look for it, desperate, and search for any way to exploit it, to turn it into something sordid it was never intended to be. They’re leeches. That’s what he was.’

Next to him, Maggie Mullen spoke her husband’s name quietly. It sounded like a plea to stop.

‘He was needy,’ Mullen said, ‘terminally needy, and he twisted my wife’s sympathy into something different. He took advantage of her.’

Maggie Mullen was shaking her head, insistent now, her words spoken and repeated in tandem with the movement. ‘That’s not what happened. That’s not what happened…’

‘Calm down, love-’

‘Don’t be so fucking stupid,’ she shouted. She turned to Thorne, focused, spoke quietly. ‘He’s got Luke.’

Thorne felt the prickle at the nape of his neck, a buzz that began to build and creep…

‘Who’s got Luke?’

She said his name again. The name of the man with whom she’d had the affair.

Mullen took hold of her other hand and put his face close to hers. ‘Sorry, love, I don’t-’

She screamed the name into his face, scored it in spittle across his cheek and into his eyes.

‘He took Luke,’ she said. ‘He got those people, that couple, to take him as a warning. To convince me, I suppose. The affair didn’t finish when I told you it did. I tried to end it, but he wouldn’t let me.’ Mullen tried to say something, but she continued over the top of him, quickly, as though, if she stopped, she might fall to pieces. ‘We carried on, but I was dying every time I looked at Luke or Juliet. I was dying with the guilt. So, a few months ago, I decided I was going to end it and I told him that this time I wasn’t going to change my mind.’ She paused, remembering. ‘He took it badly…’

Thorne was out of his seat. He couldn’t keep the astonishment and the disgust from his voice. ‘So he kidnapped your son?’

‘I was stupid,’ she said, clutching at her husband. ‘I was so stupid to do it when I did. He’d just lost his mother and he was in pieces, and I thought it would be a good time, you know… to tell him, because he would have other things on his mind. But he went completely off the rails.’

Thorne stared, thinking, You’re telling me. He waited for the rest.

‘And, God help me, I mentioned Sarah Hanley.’

‘What?’

‘We never talked about what happened. It was just like a film we’d seen or something. But I wanted him to accept that it was over and leave me alone, and I said something about how terrible it would be if anyone ever found out. It was just something I said, because I was desperate and I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t trying to threaten him.’