Buried

Then he moved quickly towards the back of the building.

He was in virtual darkness almost immediately. He pushed slowly through a low wooden gate whose top edge felt damp, rotten beneath his fingers. It opened into a knot of bramble. Stepping across, there was coarse, wet grass around his knees. As his eyes adjusted, Thorne could just make out the wall – higher in some places than others – that separated the garden from the fields beyond.

He kept close to the side of the house, moving away from it only when he needed to step around a long metal trough and what looked like an old butler sink full of earth and stones. He caught his hand on something as he edged along the wall, sucked in air fast, and wiped away the thickening beads of blood on his damp trouser-leg.

At the back of the cottage was a rusted table and chairs. An arrangement of bird tables. A rotary washing line that barely protruded above four feet of couch grass and thistle below it.

Thorne pressed his face against the window of a small extension. He could make out plates and pans on a drainer, the digital display on a microwave oven. There was a sliver of light at floor level from somewhere inside the house.

The back door was open.

He thought about Porter waiting for his call. About the phone sitting on the front seat of the car…

In the second or two between feeling the handle give and pushing, he considered all those times when he’d faced a similar decision. When he’d been torn between doing the sensible thing or saying, ‘Fuck it.’ When, on almost every occasion, he’d made the wrong choice.

He pushed.

And he stepped into the dark kitchen. Moved quickly to the door beneath which the light was coming. And listened. Though he could not hear voices, there was something about the quality of the silence from the other side of the door that told him there were people in the next room.

He waited.

Five seconds… ten.

Then a voice he’d heard before: ‘For heaven’s sake, stop pissing about and come in.’

Thorne did as he’d been invited, slowly. His pace slowed even further once he saw what was waiting for him. One step at a time, though his mind was racing, processing the visual information, asking questions.

Where’s the boy?

Man, woman, rope, knife…

Where’s the fucking boy?

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘I knew she was lying.’

‘Peter…’

‘About coming on her own.’ Lardner nudged his glasses with a knuckle. ‘I could hear it in her voice, clear as a bell.’ Laughing. ‘I mean, I’ve heard her lying often enough, haven’t I? Stretched out next to me, naked, telling her old man she’s tied up in a meeting…’

The buzzing in Thorne’s head had faded enough for him to formulate a response. ‘She’s lied to a lot of people,’ he said. He glanced towards a dustsheet-covered armchair in which Maggie Mullen sat directly ahead of him, beneath a small window. She didn’t return Thorne’s look. Her eyes moved back and forth every few seconds between Lardner and the brown panelled door a few feet away.

Lardner was sitting on the floor against a covered sofa that had been on Thorne’s right as he’d entered the small living room. He was wearing jeans and a rust-coloured shirt, and his legs were drawn up to his chest. His hands dangled between his knees, a carving knife held loosely in one of them. The other clutched the end of a rope which ran away from him, straight and taut, disappearing around the edge of a door beneath the stairs.

Cellar. Had to be.

Thorne asked the question even though he’d known the answer a second after stepping in from the kitchen: ‘Where’s the boy?’

There was a noise from somewhere beneath them. The rope shifted against the white painted floorboards.

Luke Mullen was alive.

Lardner turned his head towards the door and shouted, ‘Come on now, son, I told you I want to see this rope stay taut. You stay where you are, and come up here when I’m good and ready.’

Maggie Mullen leaned forward in her chair. Her fists were tight around the material of her sweater, pulling at it, wrenching. ‘For pity’s sake, Peter…’

‘You need to shush… really,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve talked about this.’ He sounded tired but relaxed. He looked back to Thorne and rolled his eyes, as though another man would understand how exasperating all this nagging was.

Thorne nodded gently, tried to smile.

Lardner raised the hand that held the knife, rubbed it across the top of his head. The few wisps of dark hair were all over the place and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. ‘Silly,’ Lardner said. ‘All so bloody silly.’

A board moaned beneath Thorne’s feet as he shifted his weight, and he saw Lardner’s eyes fly to him, target him, in a second.

Not relaxed at all…

‘You should sit.’ Lardner nodded towards a low pine trunk next to the fireplace.

Thorne moved back until his calves met the edge of the box and dropped down slowly. He looked around, like someone who might be considering renting the place. The ceiling was Artexed: stiff spikes and whorls like hardened icing. A small landscape in a lacquered frame; a wooden barometer; a row of hardback books without jackets on shelves to one side of the front door. In the hearth, an arrangement of dried flowers poking from a stone vase, thick with dust.

‘Why are we here?’ Thorne said.

Lardner looked a little confused. ‘I don’t remember inviting anybody.’

‘You know what I mean. Why any of this?’

‘Well it’s a fair question. Because it is all senseless, all of it, but I’m not really the right person to ask.’ He drew a foot of the rope towards him and twisted it around his wrist. ‘I don’t want to sound childish, really I don’t, but I’m not the one who started this.’

‘Oh Jesus, Peter.’ There was suddenly anger in Maggie Mullen’s voice. ‘You can’t lay any of this madness at my door. All I wanted to do was get out of a relationship. I didn’t do anything wrong.’

It was as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘She made a mistake. And everything went haywire from that point, I suppose. I couldn’t believe she was trying to hurt me as much as she had. I convinced myself she didn’t know what she was doing…’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did know.’

‘Losing a parent isn’t easy, we all know that. You can understand how hard it is.’ He looked at Thorne, wanting a response. ‘Yes?’

Thorne nodded.

Lardner’s tone was chatty again, conversational. ‘So to do what she did when I was still suffering the loss of my mother was… an error. That’s what I’m going to call it. And, yes, I was desperate, I don’t mind admitting that to you. I don’t think that means I’m weak or less of a man or whatever. I didn’t want to lose her, I still don’t want to lose her, so I clung on for dear life. Which was when she started talking about the Sarah Hanley business, dredged all that up and made stupid suggestions, and I decided something needed to be done.’

‘I just wanted to get out,’ Maggie Mullen shouted. ‘I was the one who was desperate.’

Thorne looked at the rope. At the knife. It felt as though the skin was tightening across every inch of his body.

Lardner continued to address Thorne; to ignore the woman who, for one reason or another, had caused so much to happen. ‘I should really have taken the boy myself,’ he said. ‘But it was difficult, with work and what have you. It cost me every pe

Thorne knew most of it, but he was still curious. They’d thought Neil Warren’s professional relationship to Amanda Tickell was the link to Grant Freestone. But now Thorne remembered what Callum Roper had said about Warren and Lardner knowing each other. ‘Did Neil Warren introduce you to the woman?’

Lardner smiled. ‘Neil’s very conscientious,’ he said. ‘He has regular get-togethers for some of his old clients, even though most of them have long since gone back on the smack or the coke or the booze. He gives them a few nibbles, talks about God, that sort of thing. All very jolly…’