Buried Read online

What do you mean ‘how long’?

  Though he worked at a desk that Donald Trump might have killed for, Roper had chosen to lead Thorne to the other end of his office, where four oatmeal-coloured armchairs sat around a low, glass table. Roper pushed aside a green file, watched as a young woman with lipstick on her teeth laid down a tray of coffee, and biscuits wrapped in cellophane. ‘You know what coppers are like,’ he said. ‘This place’ll be a shit-hole inside a month.’

  Thorne smiled and nodded, but seriously doubted it. He’d taken in the man as quickly as the surroundings and decided that Roper was probably the type who liked to keep everything tidy. He was tall, and looked pretty fit for a man Thorne put in his early to mid-fifties, with hair that had been subtly coloured, and cut every bit as nicely as his dark blue suit. Not a man to let things slip, if he could help it.

  When he’d said ‘new’, Roper had been talking about he and his team, just as much as the facilities they occupied. The Special Enquiries team was an offshoot of what had once been the Fraud Squad, part of the SO unit that had become SCD6. Those on its roster had been brought together to tackle any case where the victim – or perpetrator – was deemed to be in the public eye. The SE team handled cases involving corrupt MPs, blackmailed TV personalities, drug-fucked pop stars and royalty behaving badly. It was widely thought of as a prestigious gig, and Callum Roper, for one, looked as though he thoroughly enjoyed being part of it.

  The ‘Sexy Enquiries Team’, Holland had called it once.

  Thorne had pointed out that he and Holland spent their days dragging bloated bodies from dirty rivers, or trying to ID corpses so badly burned that they looked like Coco Krispies with legs. In comparison, issuing parking tickets sounded sexy . . .

  ‘You’ll have spoken to Graham Hoolihan then?’ Roper had already helped himself to a biscuit and asked the question with his mouth full, like he’d suddenly remembered it.

  ‘That’s right.’ Thorne was more than a little thrown, but hoped it didn’t show. He tried to work backwards, to work out how Roper had made the connection to Freestone so quickly.

  Roper leaned forward for his coffee and provided the answer before Thorne had had a chance to figure it out. ‘I made a couple of calls. Found out you were thinking that your kidnapper might have previously made threats against Mr Mullen.’

  Thorne made a mental note not to drop Trevor Jesmond’s name into any more conversations.

  ‘I can’t remember the details,’ Roper said, ‘but I do recall Mullen’s name somewhere in the original MAPPA case notes. Part of the probation report, I think. Grant Freestone issued threats against Mullen back when he was originally nicked, didn’t he?’

  Thorne told Roper as much as he knew; told him what Carol Chamberlain had witnessed in the courtroom. ‘Did you know Tony Mullen?’ he asked.

  Roper shook his head. ‘Not that it would have made any difference if I had. Any threats Freestone might have made against anyone, anything he’d done before, wasn’t really relevant to what we were doing on the MAPPA panel. Our job was to monitor the way he lived his life after he was released. The slate was clean, you see?’

  ‘Not entirely, no. How can what he’d done before not be relevant?’

  ‘Well, of course, we knew what Freestone was capable of. I mean, that’s why the panel was put together in the first place. I just meant that, generally, our brief was to look forward rather than back. In terms of any threat he might have made against someone, yes . . . obviously, if he’d been spotted hanging around outside their house, we would have taken some action. Informed whoever we’d needed to.’

  It was relaxed. It was coffee and biscuits and comfy-chairs casual. But Thorne could hear the tension and defensiveness in everything Roper said. The same way that a Parisian would always hear Thorne’s London accent, however fluently he might speak French.

  And Thorne had a fair idea why.

  ‘What part do you think the MAPPA panel played in what happened to Sarah Hanley?’

  Roper licked his lips, put down his cup. ‘What does that have to do with your kidnapping?’

  Thorne didn’t even try to answer.

  ‘Look, there were two decisions made. With hindsight, which we all know is a bloody wonderful thing, one of them was wrong.’

  ‘The decision to tell Grant Freestone that you’d informed his girlfriend about his history?’

  ‘That we were going to inform her,’ Roper said. ‘We never got the chance, did we? Freestone was informed of the panel’s decision, but before Miss Hanley could be told anything, Freestone had stormed round there and killed her.’

  Having ignored the cardboard croissants that had been passed around before the briefing, Thorne was suddenly starting to feel the absence of breakfast. He reached for a biscuit.

  ‘Why did anyone think it was necessary to warn him?’

  ‘He wasn’t warned.’ Roper sighed. ‘It was our policy to keep the offender – the “client”, or whatever he would be called now – abreast of significant developments. Clearly, that involved him being made aware of who had been told about his criminal record. The landlord he rented the flat from knew. So Freestone was told that he knew. Some people believed that it was his right.’

  ‘Some people?’

  Roper stared hard at Thorne. It was as though he was about to insist on a little respect and deference to rank; to point out that a ‘sir’ would not have gone amiss, irrespective of whether he was a high-ranking police officer. In the end, he seemed to decide that to ask for it might have appeared needy, more than anything else. ‘It’s a question of emphasis,’ he said. ‘If you were to ask those involved with MAPPA now, whether the arrangements were there to protect the public or to rehabilitate the offender, chances are you wouldn’t get a straight answer. The party line is that one is very much dependent on the other, that each is part of the overall strategy.’

  ‘But not back then, right?’

  ‘There was a certain . . . conflict between points of view. To some, it was all about a commitment to the victim, about the protection of future victims. Others had a more sympathetic attitude to the offender. Believed that once a sentence had been served the offender should be given every opportunity to rejoin the community; that they should perhaps be given the benefit of the doubt, rather than suspected at every turn.’ Roper leaned back in his chair, folded his arms. ‘Those people believed we could play some small part in helping Grant Freestone to do something decent. Others were just waiting for him to fuck up again.’ He held up a hand at Thorne, then lowered it to his trouser-leg, where it gently smoothed out the material. ‘And let’s be clear. Which side of the argument I was on is definitely not relevant to your investigation, Inspector.’

  It was as bleak a way of separating those who thought the glass was half full from those who believed it was half empty as Thorne had ever heard. ‘How did you work these . . . conflicts out?’

  Roper’s eyes flicked away from Thorne’s face as he answered. ‘We made compromises.’

  ‘Who made them? Who took the decisions?’

  ‘They were discussed.’

  ‘Were they voted on?’

  ‘There was nothing that formal. The opinions of certain departments carried more weight than others, perhaps. Look, I can’t remember exactly who was responsible for which decision, or when, and I honestly can’t see that it’s of any interest now.’

  ‘No, probably not.’ Bearing in mind what had happened to Sarah Hanley, Thorne guessed that there was comfort to be gained from a fading memory.

  From where he was sitting, Thorne could see a Met helicopter slowly circling a mile or so away; the same height from the ground as he was, perhaps even a little lower. He knew that any pictures it was taking were being fed live to Central 3000, and suddenly he had an image of the chopper’s movements being dictated from long distance, as if it were a toy being flown by remote control. He imagined a commander’s thumb whitening against a joystick, sending the helicopter round and round.

 
Roper turned to look. ‘You been up in one?’

  Thorne shook his head. It was right up there with bungee jumping or scrubbing a corpse.

  ‘I went out in one the other day. It’s a hell of a view.’

  ‘Everything looks better from a distance,’ Thorne said.

  Roper turned back round to look at him, then down at his watch. ‘I don’t have much longer, I’m afraid . . .’

  ‘What do you think about Grant Freestone as a kidnapper?’

  ‘I’m not even convinced he’s a murderer,’ Roper said.

  Thorne had not yet had a chance to look over the case notes, but he could see Roper’s point. It was hard to put ‘throwing someone through a coffee table’ down as a deliberately murderous act. ‘You think it was an accident?’

  ‘It’s possible. I’m certainly not convinced he meant to kill her, which was the way some people were thinking at the time, but there were signs of a struggle. His prints were all over the show.’

  ‘Who discovered the body?’

  ‘A neighbour was on the school’s contact list. When Hanley didn’t arrive at pick-up time, the neighbour was called. She collected the kids, then went round to drop them off at home. She had a key, and the eldest child opened the door.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Accident or not, Freestone left the woman to die. I think manslaughter would have been the very least he would have been looking at, and with his record I can’t see that he’d have come out again in a hurry. That’s why he ran.’

  The idea came at Thorne like a brick through plate glass. If Freestone had made threats against Tony Mullen before he’d gone to prison, wouldn’t Mullen have been uncomfortable about his being released? With cause to fear for his safety, or for that of his family, it would certainly have suited him to have the slimy little sod well out of the way. Was it possible that Mullen could have had Grant Freestone fitted up?

  Other thoughts, other considerations . . .

  Mullen resigned from the force the same year that Grant Freestone disappeared.

  If the motive for the kidnapping of Luke Mullen was based on a grudge against his old man, Grant Freestone might well have had a better reason than anyone thought for holding one.

  It was Roper who brought Thorne down to earth with a bump.

  ‘As far as kidnapping anyone goes, I really can’t see it,’ he said. ‘If Freestone’s been happily staying out of our way all this time, why would he suddenly make himself visible again? If it is because this kid’s father put him away all those years ago or whatever, why risk being caught for something as stupid as revenge?’

  Thorne had to agree that it was a bloody good point.

  Louise Porter picked up the photograph, stared at the faces of the three boys, and lost herself for a moment or two.

  In terms of its layout, the Area West Murder Squad HQ was a very different set-up from the one she was used to back at Scotland Yard. The Major Incident Room, on the third floor of Becke House, was an open-plan goldfish bowl, with smaller offices dotted along the corridor that curled around one side of it. It was into one of those occupied by Team 3 personnel that Porter had wandered looking for Yvonne Kitson.

  An hour or so short of lunchtime, she felt as though she’d already put in a full day’s work. Since arriving at Becke House, everyone had been going flat out; and though it was early days, and operationally a little ad hoc, things seemed to be rubbing along smoothly enough. In terms of the two units working together, both DCIs had been insistent on going in at the deep end. This was evident in the pairings that had been sent after the two men whose names had yet to be crossed off the original ‘grudge’ list: Holland had been teamed up with a Kidnap Unit DC to pay a call on a career armed robber turned mature student named Harry Cotterill; while Stone and Heeney were trying to track down a second-division pimp and occasional arsonist called Philip Quinn. The latter was a former snout, who Mullen had put away when he had outlived his usefulness and who had, at the time, been resentful enough to try to burn down Mullen’s house.

  While these four – and Tom Thorne – were on the street working the grudge angle, Porter and others were office bound, letting fingers do the walking at computer keyboards while a dead woman pointed the way.

  One look at Amanda Tickell’s wasted body – the skin like wax-paper where it wasn’t covered in blood – had told Phil Hendricks that she was an addict, and he’d called twenty minutes into the post-mortem to confirm it, giving Porter and the others a direction in which to start moving. The rest of the morning had been spent making connections: talking to rehab centres and borough drug squads; chasing up her family and friends to try and shake loose the name of a dealer or fellow users; anyone who might give them a lead from Tickell to Conrad Allen, and from there to the possibility of a third party with whom, or at whose instruction, the pair had taken a major step up, and kidnapped Luke Mullen.

  The possibility . . .

  Without forensic evidence to the contrary, the idea that Luke Mullen had killed his kidnappers was still floating about, although Porter hadn’t spoken to many who were completely convinced, or convinced enough to climb off the fence, at any rate. She, for one, was in little doubt that Allen and Tickell had been involved with someone else; that, for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, this person had murdered them and was now holding Luke Mullen themself.

  It was senseless, but the only explanation that made any sense. Porter wondered why she’d even bothered to hedge her bets when she’d been talking to Tom Thorne outside the Yard a few hours before.

  She was still holding the photograph when she looked up and saw Yvonne Kitson in the doorway. She muttered an apology as she put the frame back on the desk. ‘Nice kids.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Kitson said.

  Porter smiled and glanced back at the picture as she carried a chair across; painted faces and gaps where milk teeth had once been. ‘I just came in so we could catch up, really.’

  Kitson pointed back towards the corridor as she sat down. ‘Sorry, I was just in with the DCI. As a matter of fact, I won’t be around for a couple of hours this afternoon.’

  ‘Hot date?’

  ‘Not as such.’

  Kitson hadn’t said much to Porter that wasn’t work-related since they’d met for the first time at that morning’s briefing. But she’d taken a look, in the way that any female copper might size up another. Or any female. Short and dark, Porter was the exact opposite of Kitson herself, and, although she was not conventionally pretty, she had a figure it was hard not to resent a little. Kitson generally didn’t mind her own body, she just tended to see it in one of two very different ways: ‘vivacious’ when she liked herself; ‘mumsy’ when she didn’t.

  She saw Porter glance around the office. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ Kitson said. ‘You must be green with envy.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘The disabled toilet’s bigger.’

  Porter nodded towards the room’s second desk, back to back with Kitson’s and piled high with folders and box files, as though it were being used as storage space. ‘You normally share with Thorne, don’t you?’

  ‘Normally, but everything’s been a bit up in the air for a while. He’ll probably be wanting it back now.’

  ‘I can’t imagine his side of the room being quite so homely, somehow,’ Porter said. ‘Photos of his kids or whatever.’

  Kitson punched at her keyboard. ‘Not even if he had any. Maybe the odd picture of Johnny Cash or Glenn Hoddle.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Johnny Cash?’

  ‘Sometimes I think he just likes to be perverse.’

  Porter opened the notebook she was carrying and began to leaf through the pages, looking for the bullet points she was keen to go over. ‘Thorne’s not the easiest bloke to suss out, is he?’

  Kitson smiled. ‘There isn’t nearly enough time . . .’

  ‘You should be glad I never throw anything away,’ Roper said. ‘And that my wife knows where everything is.’ He opened
up the green folder and took out a piece of paper. ‘I called her after we spoke on the phone and she copied these out of an old desk diary. It was the quickest way I could think of to get them. The only way, come to think of it.’

  Thorne took the piece of paper and looked at the list of names:

  DI C. Roper.

  Mr P. Lardner.

  Mrs K. Bristow.

  Ms M. Stringer.

  Mr N. Warren.

  Roper shifted his chair closer to Thorne’s, studied the list over his shoulder, pointing at each name in turn.

  ‘I was just a DI back then with the CID at Crystal Palace; thought this would be a good thing to do, career-wise.’ He shook his head at the stupidity of a slightly younger self. ‘Never realised what a pain in the arse it was going to turn out to be, sitting round a table with half of bloody Bromley Borough Council once a month. Pete Lardner is the only one I’ve seen since, as a matter of fact. He was with the Probation Office, and I know he’s still there, so it shouldn’t be hard to get hold of him. ‘Mrs Bristow. Scottish woman. Kathleen, Katharine, something like that. She was the social worker, and you’d work that out straight away. Liked to meddle and called it “caring”. You know the sort, right? She tried to run the whole thing, and, to be honest, the rest of us were happy to let her. She was knocking on a bit, as I remember, so she might well have retired. Ms M. Stringer was from the local education authority.’

  Thorne looked up, amused by the DCI’s emphasis on the ‘Ms’, but also a little puzzled.

  ‘There were four or five different schools within a few miles of where Freestone had been housed,’ Roper explained. ‘It was obviously a cause for concern.’ He glanced back at the list. ‘Warren was the drugs awareness bloke from the health authority. Freestone had developed something of a problem in prison and was attending a methadone clinic. Actually, I think Warren and Lardner had worked together before, but the rest of us didn’t know one another from Adam.’ He pointed again to the last name on the list, then leaned back and shifted his chair away again. ‘Looked like he’d taken a few drugs himself, as far as I can remember.’