Buried-6 (11 page)

Thorne stared at the dust, at the shape of it, marking the absence of something, and found himself holding his breath. He imagined a young, alert mind racing, and fighting hard as the drug took hold, as eyelids dropped and thoughts slipped into the wet. Sopping and inky-black . . .

He pul ed down the sleeve of his jacket, gripped it between fingers and palm and leaned down to wipe away the marks from the glass.

‘You won’t find him in here.’

Thorne turned to see Juliet Mul en standing in the doorway of her brother’s room. He slapped the grey dust marks from his sleeve. ‘Actual y, I’ve found quite a lot of him,’ he said.

The girl rol ed her eyes and walked past him into the room, clearly unimpressed, and unwil ing to discuss anything as tedious as an abstract concept. She leaned back against a wal and slid slowly down it until she was sitting on the grey carpet. ‘So . . . ?’

Thorne looked around, then back at Juliet. ‘Wel , Luke was certainly tidy.’

‘Nothing gets past you, does it?’

‘I
am
a detective.’

‘Can you prove that?’

‘I’ve taken exams.’

‘They must have lowered the pass rate.’

She wasn’t smiling, but Thorne sensed that behind the studied air of boredom and irritation, it was a struggle not to; that she was enjoying the banter. Her hair was long, the same charcoal as the make-up around her eyes and the hooded top she wore over baggy jeans. Skateboarder chic, Thorne thought it might be cal ed. Or grunge, or something. He thought about asking her, then decided it wasn’t such a great idea.

‘What was on the video?’ she said suddenly.

It took Thorne a moment to work out what she was talking about; a moment before deciding he would not answer.

‘Mum and Dad watched it this morning, before they cal ed Porter. Just the once, I think, but it was enough. Obviously they wouldn’t let me see it. And they didn’t want to talk about it afterwards, so . . .’

‘So?’

‘So . . . I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.’

Thorne watched her draw her knees up, shrinking into the corner of the room. He couldn’t help but be reminded of the previous evening with Phil Hendricks. Now, as then, he could see the pain and the longing beneath the pose; the anguish, raw behind the flippant remark. It couldn’t hurt to tel her.

‘It was Luke. Just Luke on the tape.’

She nodded quickly, as though something she already knew had been confirmed. It was a mature gesture, self-possessed, but in the next instant a tremor in the soft flesh around her mouth turned her back into a child again. ‘What did he say? Did he say anything?’

‘Juliet, I can’t—’

‘They were crying after they’d watched it, the pair of them. They pretended they weren’t, which was a bit bloody pointless, if you ask me. I mean, I knew what it was, you know? I didn’t think they were watching porno at nine o’clock in the morning.’

‘They didn’t want you to get upset,’ Thorne said.

‘Right, that’s bril iant. So now al I can think about is what
might
have been on the tape. What whoever’s got Luke
might
have been doing to him. How much pain he
might
have been in.’

‘He’s doing OK. Honestly.’

‘Define “OK”.’

Thorne took a deep breath.

‘“OK” as in having a whale of a time?’ She began plucking at the pile of the carpet. ‘Or “OK” as in stil breathing?’

It was as tough a question as had been thrown at Thorne in a long time. ‘Nobody’s hurting him.’

Her head dropped to her knees. When she heaved it up again fifteen or twenty seconds later, the eyeliner was beginning to run. ‘He’s got a year and a bit on me, but sometimes it’s like I’m the older sister.’ Her eyes roamed from one part of the room to another, like she was searching to prove her point. ‘I have to look after him in loads of ways. You know what I mean?’

Thorne stepped across and sat down on the edge of the bed. The duvet was dark blue and neatly squared away. He guessed that Luke had probably made the bed himself before leaving for school on Friday. ‘Yeah, I think I do,’ he said.

She sniffed. ‘Pain in the fucking arse . . .’

The silence that fol owed was probably more uncomfortable for the girl than it was for Thorne. It was less than half a minute before she pul ed herself to her feet. ‘Right . . .’ Like she had a lot to be getting on with.

Thorne stood, too. He cocked his head towards the doorway, towards the rest of the house. ‘It’s good that you’re al so . . . close. At a time like this, you know?’

Juliet Mul en nodded, pushed her hair back behind her ears.

‘What did they argue about?’ Thorne walked back to the workstation and looked at the photograph pinned to a corkboard above it: Luke on his father’s shoulders, eyes wide behind orange swimming goggles; the pair of them grinning like idiots and the sun bouncing off the blue water around them. ‘Luke and your dad, last Friday morning.’

‘Stupid stuff about school.’

‘Work stuff?’

‘About Luke not making the rugby team or something. It wasn’t a big deal.’

‘Your dad seems to think it was.’

‘That’s just because of what’s happened. Because he’s feeling guilty. Because the last time he saw Luke, the two of them were shouting at each other.’ She took a pace towards the bed and leaned down to smooth out the duvet where Thorne had been sitting. ‘Luke was already feeling bad about it by the time we got to school. He told me he was going to say

“sorry” when he got home, that it was al his fault for being cheeky or whatever.’

‘Was it?’ Thorne asked.

‘I can’t even remember. It was just bloody sil y because those two never argue, you know? They’re real y close. It’s that whole father–son thing?’ It sounded like a question at the end, as though she were making sure Thorne knew what she meant.

‘Right.’

‘See you later.’

Thorne watched her leave. He knew exactly what she’d meant and, more importantly, he now also knew what had bothered him about the video.

What it was that Luke had said . . . or hadn’t said.

He stopped on his way out, seeing that the corner of a poster near the door had come unstuck, and when he reached across to press it back in place, he noticed the writing beneath. He peered at the words, at the smal , neat letters written in black ink on the wal paper. A stark and secret litany of frustration, impatience or rage.

Fuck off

Fuck off

Fuck off!

From the school, Hol and had gone straight back to Central 3000 and found himself a desk out of the way. He needed ten or fifteen minutes to gather his thoughts, to get into the Police National Computer system and to go over the relevant material. It was only when he’d done both, when he was as certain as he could be that he had something worth shouting about, that he cal ed Becke House and spoke to Yvonne Kitson.

‘How’s your kidnap going, Dave?’

‘Fine.’

‘Missing us?’

‘Listen, Guv, I need to talk to you about the Amin Latif murder.’

It was a little over six months since the eighteen-year-old Asian, an engineering student at a local sixth-form col ege, had been beaten to death by three white youths at a bus stop in Edgware. It had been, for al the obvious reasons, a high-profile investigation, but despite the media coverage, an extensive enquiry and even a witness who had provided a detailed description of the main attacker, the case had quickly gone cold.

Cold, but stil tender. Stil embarrassing.

Russel Brigstocke had been the nominal senior investigating officer, but, day to day, Yvonne Kitson had run things. To al intents and purposes, it had been her case, and – at least as far as she was concerned – her failure. She’d known from the moment she’d first looked at the boy’s body – at a bloodied hand, knuckles down in a puddle across double yel ow lines

– that his death would stay with her, irrespective of whether she caught those responsible. Hate crimes tended to do that. And the Amin Latif murder was about as hateful as they came.

Hol and had her attention immediately.

He told her that he’d seen a seventeen-year-old,
spoken
to a seventeen-year-old, whose resemblance to her chief murder suspect was simply too close to be ignored. As he described the boy he and Parsons had interviewed an hour or two earlier, he stared at the picture which he’d cal ed up and printed out from the PNC. The E-fit had been based on the description given by a friend of Amin Latif, a fel ow student who had been present at the time of the attack but had escaped with a few broken bones and six months of nightmares. The picture wasn’t identical to the image in his mind’s eye: the blond hair was lank and lay flat against the head, much as it would have done on a night in October when it had been pissing down with rain. But below the hairline, everything else was spot on.

The face was Adrian Farrel ’s.

‘Shit . . . shit!’ The exclamation of surprise had quickly been fol owed by a far harsher one. By annoyance aimed at no one but herself. ‘
Butler’s Hall?
’

‘I know. Who’d’ve thought?’

‘
We
should,’ Kitson snapped. ‘We fucking-wel should have thought.’

Butler’s Hal was several miles from the street where Amin Latif had died, but it was certainly close enough; wel within the thick red circle that had been drawn on the map in the Major Incident Room. Wel within the scheme of things. There would probably have been ‘Can You Help?’ posters near by, and perhaps a number of its pupils lived at addresses that were canvassed during the house-to-house enquiries. Of course, it would have been impossible to question every student at every school and col ege in the area, but plenty had been, and Yvonne Kitson would not have bet on too many of them being pupils at Butler’s Hal .

Assumptions, by their very nature, went unspoken. And racist thugs did not go to public school.

‘What was he like, Dave? I don’t mean physical y . . .’

‘Arrogant, aggressive. Ful of himself.’

‘You sure you weren’t just seeing that? Projecting it? Are you positive you weren’t making this boy’s behaviour fit because of what you thought?’

‘It wasn’t until afterwards that I thought
anything
,’ Hol and said. ‘I was watching the little fucker walk away from us, and when he turned round I knew he was the kid in the picture. The kid with the earring.’

Kitson said nothing for a few moments. Hol and could hear her slurping her coffee, swal owing,
deciding
. There was a flutter of panic as he realised that, in the past, he’d watched her, Brigstocke and others judging similar pronouncements of certainty from Tom Thorne. He’d also seen the fal out later, when such certainty had proved to be horribly misguided.

‘Fair enough,’ Kitson said.

Hol and let out the breath he’d been unconciously holding. ‘What should we do?’

‘
You’re
stil working on a kidnap, as far as I know, but
I
want to have a look at him.’

‘You going to bring him in?’

‘I want to see him first, just to double-check you’re right to be so worked up about it.’

Hol and had been afraid that talking to Kitson, or anybody else, might shake his conviction a little, but it had done the opposite. As he ran through each detail of the conversation with Adrian Farrel , as he described the look the boy had given Kenny Parsons, he could feel his certainty settling into determination. And now that her initial anger had worn off, he could hear the exhilaration in Kitson’s voice too.

And she had every right to be excited.

Finding a murderer was one thing of course, and convicting him was quite another, but what had made this particular kil ing so uniquely barbaric was also what gave them their best chance of doing just that.

Before he’d been kicked to death, Amin Latif had been the victim of a serious sexual assault. Semen samples had been taken from his body, had given up the gift of their DNA.

Now, on a frozen slide in an FSS lab in Victoria, curled the double helix that might identify a kil er; the sequence of letters on every rung of its elegantly twisting ladder just waiting for a match.

Downstairs, it felt like a bad wake after a good funeral; there was a sense of that sort of
desperation
.

In many of the rooms, bright against the darkness that was descending outside, a decent enough effort was being made to generate a degree of conversation and activity; of ordinariness. To keep at bay the tide of gloom that threatened to rush through the house at any moment, as if a black and swol en river were about to burst its banks.

There were perhaps a dozen people in the Mul ens’ home, split fairly evenly between family and friends on the one hand, and police officers on the other. Thorne spoke through a cloud of cigarette smoke to Maggie Mul en and to a DS with a big mouth who drivel ed on about a ‘gang snatch in Harlesden that had gone monumental y tits up’. He had to spend five minutes talking footbal with Tony Mul en’s brother, and fuck-al with the second family liaison officer, before he final y got the chance to speak privately to Louise Porter. He’d col ared her as soon as he’d arrived back at the house and passed on what Carol Chamberlain had told him about Grant Freestone. That was half an hour ago, before he’d wandered upstairs and run into Juliet Mul en.

As soon as he saw the opportunity, he ushered Porter into a good-sized utility room that ran off the kitchen.

She grinned. ‘This is al a bit sudden . . .’

‘I know what was wrong with the video,’ Thorne said. ‘What was bothering me.’

Porter leaned back against a large chest freezer and waited to be told.

‘It’s al to his mum.’

‘What is?’

‘Everything Luke says on the tape is aimed at his mum. He says nothing at al to his dad. I’ve got a transcript in my bag and I checked. Have a look if you like—’

‘I believe you. Go on . . .’

‘
Try not to worry, Mum
.
Nothing to get yourself worked up about, Mum
.
You know the stuff I mean, Mum
. Everything’s for her. It’s like Mul en’s being cut out.’

Porter thought about it. Behind him, Thorne could hear the boiler clicking and then the rush as the pilot ignited the gas. ‘Maybe Luke was punishing his father,’ Porter said. ‘For the argument they’d had.’