Buried-6 (15 page)

‘So what do we think?’

‘It’s been forty-five minutes since we went into the old woman’s flat.’

‘Longer,’ Porter said.

Two other officers were sharing the space with Porter and Thorne. Kenny Parsons sat in one of two folding canvas chairs, with the other taken by a fat DS named Heeney – a gobby Midlander with a lazy eye and an attitude to match. Porter looked less than delighted at being harassed by either of them. She brought the radio handset to her mouth. ‘How are we doing, Bob?’

There was a pause.

‘I’m sure he’l let you know,’ Thorne said.

Porter gave him a look like he wasn’t helping a hel of a lot, either.

Then, from the speaker, with a hint of annoyance: ‘Stil nothing.’

‘You’ve checked the equipment?’

‘Twice. The equipment’s fine.’

‘Sorry . . .’

It had been a stupid question. The microphones were about as high tech as they could ask for, and she knew that the technical operator had done his homework. They’d established that the flat was rented, had guessed correctly that the firm below it would have handled the letting and had gone in bright and early to acquire a diagram of the layout. A kitchen-diner, two smal bedrooms and a bathroom, al leading off the single corridor. The listening equipment that had been set up in the premises next door would be more than adequate: nowhere in a flat that size would be out of range.

‘Someone’s going to have to make a decision here,’ Heeney said. His accent turned ‘make’ into ‘mek’; turned his opinion into complaint.

Thorne sat with his back to the van’s doors and stared across at Porter, perched on the wheel-arch directly behind the driver’s seat. She looked right back at him and raised an eyebrow. He thought she might be asking what he thought, but he couldn’t be sure, and he was even less sure how she’d react if he told her. So he said nothing; failing to offer any opinion, because he didn’t want to risk a row in front of the others. And because he didn’t real y have one to offer.

There were far too many questions that needed to be answered, boxes to be ticked, with no option to pass.

Were Conrad Al en and his girlfriend in the flat?

Was that where they were holding Luke Mul en?

Had they graduated from plastic guns to real ones, and how were they likely to react if a team of armed police officers smashed through their front door?

‘If I had final say, I’d go in,’ Porter said.

Thorne pul ed up one knee, then the other, but he was unable to find any position that wasn’t painful. ‘Would you want it?’

‘The final say? Probably not.’

‘Good cal , I reckon. With great power comes great responsibility.’

‘I didn’t have you down as a philosopher.’

‘It’s from
Spiderman
,’ Thorne said.

She lifted the handset. ‘I need an opinion, Bob.’

From the speaker: ‘There’s nothing moving in there.’

‘Fuck!’

‘Sorry, but there it is.’

‘Maybe the kid’s drugged and they’re both asleep.’

‘What don’t you understand?
Nothing’s
moving. I can hear a clock ticking, and I can tel you which room it’s in, if you want. I’ve got water moving through the radiators, and the rattle of pipes expanding, but I don’t hear anyone snoring or turning over in bed. These mikes can pick up the sound of
breathing
, and I can’t hear any.’

There was a snap of static, and another voice cut in: ‘This is DCI Hignett.’

‘Sir . . .’

‘It’s time to go in, Louise.’

It was suddenly as though the Transit had been wired up to the National Grid. Everyone jumped, looked hard at one another, and Thorne crouched straight back down by the doors as Porter gave al units the order to move in.

Thorne threw open the doors and jumped down on to the road. He felt Porter’s hand on his shoulder; felt it dig in, and pul him back.

‘Hang about, Tom. I don’t want a crowd of us going in there behind the guns.’

‘Are you joking?’

Porter wiped a fleck of Thorne’s spittle from her lip. ‘Look, Heeney’s staying put as wel , so don’t get stupid about it.’

‘Who’s making these decisions?’

‘You’re only supposed to be helping out, remember. I haven’t got time for this. Get back in the van and stay by the radio.’

Thorne watched her and Parsons sprint towards the Bow Road and climbed back into the van. Heeney was sitting again and looked at his feet as Thorne moved past him to take up Porter’s place next to the monitors. The big DS mumbled something about Porter being ‘on the rag’. Thorne turned away and tuned him out. He sat on one of the chairs, leaned closer and stared at the smal screen, at the fixed and flickering picture of a black, metal fire-escape.

With only one door to get through, as opposed to a pair of them coming at the property from the front, the rear entrance was favourite. More importantly, when firearms were being deployed, keeping the action wel away from the street was always desirable.

Thorne didn’t blink.

For twenty, twenty-five seconds, the image was constant, then suddenly it fil ed with movement as a dozen or more figures began crowding in. Moving into the picture from the back and sides of a scrubby, unloved garden; over and along the line of a crumbling wal towards the bottom of the steps.

Then a flurry of hand signals, and
up
; speed less important than stealth.

The team gathered around the door, and Thorne picked out what details he could, imagining those that were too indistinct to make out: the butt of an MP5 carbine; the MET

POLICE logo on a chest thick with body armour; the dead geraniums in a plastic window-box . . .

In the van, a few murmured instructions came over the speaker.

Thorne could make out Porter and Parsons, and several heads he thought he recognised. He watched two figures move into the picture and knew – though he couldn’t see it – that they would be fixing the rubberised teeth of a hydraulic jack to either side of the door frame. These were members of the Special Events team – the Ghostbusters – a civilian unit on cal to any branch of the Met that needed to gain rapid entry to premises but wanted something rather more subtle than a ram or a size-nine boot.

The SE boys stepped away from the door, trailed the cables back to a smal generator and signal ed that they were set.

They looked towards Porter for the nod.

Got it straight away.

There was no sound from the monitor, but Thorne had worked with similar forced-entry equipment before. He imagined the sharp hiss of compressed air and the slap of the cables jumping against the metal floor. The crack as the frame was shunted wide, leaving the door with nowhere to go but in and down, forced hard to the floor by the feet of the SO19 officers who streamed across it into Conrad Al en’s flat.

In a matter of seconds the shot was empty again, a flat shadow beyond the doorway, while its chaotic soundtrack was broadcast from half a dozen radios, exploding like bursts of gunfire from the speaker. Bouncing between the metal wal s of the van: a col ision and a curse; an order given to get out of the way; and an instruction to anyone on the premises to make themselves fucking visible very fucking quickly. A cacophany of grunts and shouts:

‘Kitchen clear!’

‘Armed police!’

‘First bedroom and corridor clear.’

Thorne winced at each distorted spatter of voices and vol ey of breath, focused through every crackle of static. He pictured the officers running, freezing, pressing themselves against wal s; sweeping the space through rifle-sights, moving sharply aside as other figures passed through shadows, barrel ed in and out of rooms.

‘Clear!’

‘Clear and secure!’

Heeney muttered at Thorne’s shoulder: ‘The place is empty.’

‘Shut up,’ Thorne said.

A shout then, audible above the others. Just one word. Just the
crucial
word.

‘Body.’

‘Say again?’

‘We’ve got a body.’

Thorne stands up, crouches, pushes his hands against the roof. He strains to hear more, to hear
anything
through the hiss, through elastic seconds of dead air.

‘Where?’

‘In here.’

‘Where the fuck’s “here”?’

‘Back bedroom.’

And Thorne can see it when he closes his eyes. He’s seen it before, or close enough: the sole of a training shoe, a mop of dark hair, a great deal of blood.

‘Jesus,’ Heeney whispers behind him, but Thorne is already moving towards the doors, putting a shoulder against them, and tearing across the road in the same direction Porter had gone just a few minutes before.

Pain blooming in his back and chest as he runs, and more pictures he could do without: fingers and thumbs, grubby on the barrel of a syringe; the tremble around Juliet Mul en’s mouth.

A pair of armed response vehicles, three squad cars and an ambulance are already parked up on the track that runs along the back of the building, and the garden is thick with the Job by the time Thorne drops on to the other side of the low wal . Body armour is laid down, sweaty on the grass; stepped across by scene-of-crime officers, scrambling into ful -body suits and hurrying towards the fire escape. There is conversation and clatter as a constant stream of Met personnel shuttle up and down the metal staircase. A necklace of cigarette smoke curling past them towards a clear sky, and Hol and at the bottom, turning to Thorne, his arms raised, asking:
What the fuck’s going on?

‘Tom . . .’

Thorne spun round and saw Porter moving towards him across the grass. Breathless and none too polite, he asked Hol and’s unspoken question for him, then asked another before she’d had a chance to answer the first.

‘What about Luke?’

Porter shook her head.

‘Alive? Dead?
What?
’

‘We’ve got
two
bodies up there,’ Porter said. ‘Almost certainly those of Conrad Al en and his girlfriend. Both look like they’ve had their throats cut; to
start
with, at any rate. There’s a knife.’

‘So where’s the boy?’ Thorne asked.

In a hurry, or sick of being barked at, Porter turned and started to walk back towards the cluster of vehicles. She answered without bothering to look round. ‘Right now it’s impossible to say, and I can’t see any point in speculating. I
do
know we’ve got a pair of dead kidnappers and a hostage who’s nowhere to be found.’

CONTROL

FRIDAY

LUKE

Before, when he’d woken up, when he’d come out of it, it had been horribly slow. Like surfacing through water thick as glass. Seeing what was on the other side, but without the strength to kick hard and reach it quickly. But this time, when everything had happened, it was as though he were conscious in a second, and as soon as he’d opened his eyes he’d been alert and alive to every sound and sensation.

He’d felt his blood jumping.

He’d heard the shouting immediately; the grunting and the noise of things smashing in the next room. They were arguing. He’d heard them fighting before, a couple of times, but this sounded real y serious, and he guessed it was what had woken him so suddenly. Something inside his brain, some weird survival instinct that never switched itself off, had roused him, was tel ing him that this might be his chance.

As usual, when he’d first opened his eyes, he’d had no idea whether it was day or night. The curtains had been drawn tight across. But for almost the first time he’d been alone, with his hands untied, so after a minute or two he’d got up from the mattress on the floor, crept over and pul ed the curtains back an inch or two. It was dark outside, but in the tower blocks opposite he could see lights in some of the windows and the flickering of TV sets. He’d guessed that it was probably early evening.

Trying not to breathe, he’d stood very stil in the middle of the room, listening to the screaming from down the corridor.

He’d mental y mapped out the whole place during those first few trips to the bathroom. It wasn’t a complicated layout and he’d always been good at picturing stuff, at laying out diagrams on his computer and seeing how things connected. He’d known, standing there in the dark, that were he to take a left turn out of the room he was in, he would need to get through two doors before he was on the street. He knew that because he’d tried to run through one of them on the first day, which was when they’d started giving him the injections more often. Turning right would have been a better bet, but he knew that he would have had to go past their room, would have had to risk being seen, and he knew that there would stil be a locked door between him and the back way out. He was fairly certain there was a way down through the kitchen: an old-fashioned fire escape like his nan used to have. He’d been almost completely out of it, but he could remember seeing the metal steps, hearing the man’s feet ringing against them as they’d carried him in.

How many days ago was that?

Half a dozen times after he’d been woken, he’d decided that he’d have the best chance if he tried to get away right then, while they were distracted. If he went for it and tried to sneak past while they were stil shouting and chucking stuff at each other. Half a dozen times he’d chickened out and told himself he was a shitty little coward. Shivering in the dark and pissing in his pants, afraid to make a run for it.

Then the shouting had stopped and he’d felt his feet carrying him from the room and turning to the right. The map in his head was bright and pulsing, and he was a glowing dot moving slowly along a dark line as he inched along the corridor, as he pressed himself against the wal and tried to move with no noise. And perhaps he wasn’t quite as awake or alert as he’d thought, because things suddenly seemed to blur and shift when he glanced through the open doorway to the bedroom. When he saw Conrad and Amanda.

When he noticed the knife, and bent to pick it up.

Everything was very fucked-up and fuzzy from there on: from whenever the hel it was, to whenever the hel
this
was; from those incredible moments of light and colour to this newest, numbest darkness.