Buried-6 (33 page)

‘Do you
want
to say something? You can, you know . . .

‘I know you maybe need time to take some of this stuff in, that’s only natural. I’l leave you for a while to do that, but I want you to understand something first. I wouldn’t be tel ing you any of this if I didn’t think you could take it in. OK? If I didn’t think you were old enough and bright enough. I know al about how clever you are, al about it. So I thought about everything careful y, and decided that you would definitely be able to process this information. Make sense of it. Not that you can make sense of al of it, because there are parts – I know you know which parts I’m talking about – that are so beyond what you and I, what
ordinary
people, perceive as normal that sense doesn’t real y come into it.

‘Is that fair? Just nod if you agree with what I’m saying . . . Good.

‘As long as you don’t think I’m getting any pleasure out of this, that’s al . You know I’m not trying to torture you with it, right? I mean, what possible reason could I have to do that? I’ve hurt you enough already; I’m wel aware of that. Everything you went through before, in the flat, I mean. I suppose I just want you to understand that the motivation for tel ing you al this is . . .
decent
.

‘Because you should know these things. Because not knowing would be so much worse. Because at some point you’l come to terms with it and be far better off in the long run. Do you see?

‘Knowing what the ones you love are capable of is a terrible burden sometimes. But ignorance is a damn sight worse.’

He raised himself on his haunches when he heard the sniffing and crept a little closer to the corner in which the boy was curled. ‘Don’t cry, please. I real y wasn’t trying to make you cry. I’m sorry. I’l wait until you’re a bit calmer. I’l go now, shal I?’

He moved back again. Waited. ‘You’l forgive some of it, I’m sure. Not me, probably, and certainly not for al
this
. But some of it: those things, the less terrible things, we did for the right reasons. I know you won’t be able to see that now, that right now you just want to lash out and scream or whatever. But they were the best reasons, I swear to you.

‘Would you like to scream? Go on, it’s fine, if you want to. Nobody’s going to hear. That’s why I took the tape off. Honestly, I can understand if you want to. Do you want to smash something? Do you want to kick my head in? Do you just want me to fuck off?’

He said nothing for a few minutes, then he raised the torch again and held its beam on the boy. ‘You should real y think about screaming, you know. It might be healthy if you did. Get it out.’

He turned the torch on himself, rested his chin on the lens and thought for a while. ‘OK, maybe I’ve overestimated how much of it you’ve actual y taken in. It’s a heck of a lot, I know. A lot to . . .
absorb
. Before I go, maybe I’l just run through some of it again. I’l try to make it simpler for you this time. Is that a good idea, do you think?

‘Luke . . . ?’

The joking had stopped the moment Caulfield had spotted the broken window. They’d already spent ten minutes knocking before Fothergil had scaled the side gate and they’d walked round to the rear of the house.

He’d cal ed it in while Caulfield had gone back to the car for gloves, torch and their telescopic batons.

‘Maybe we should just wait,’ Fothergil said.

‘For fuck’s sake, Dean.’

Caulfield pushed her hand through and reached round until she could release the catch on the lock. Before she had a chance to open the door, a cat bolted past her and flung itself through a cat-flap and inside.

‘
Jesus
. . .’

She stepped into a darkened kitchen and shouted into the house. Fothergil shouted louder. Then they stood stil and waited. If there was anyone in the house who shouldn’t have been there, chances were that they’d hear some kind of movement, even if it was someone trying to conceal themself. Caulfield felt for a light switch, found it, and the two of them moved further into the room. There were dishes stacked neatly on a draining board. The cat roamed around near an empty bowl on the floor and rubbed its head against cupboard doors.

Caulfield bent down. ‘Shush, it’s OK.’

‘You talking to me or the cat?’ Fothergil managed the smile, but his voice was higher than normal.

They walked out of the kitchen and into a narrow hal way with the front door at the far end. Streetlight filtered through smal stained-glass panels, and stairs rose up from one side.

There were two doors off to the right. They opened one each, turned on the lights in a smal sitting room and a dining room.

‘Dean?’

Fothergil put his head round the door and fol owed Caulfield’s gaze. The dining table had been set for breakfast: an empty glass, spoon and napkin; a bowl already fil ed with cereal and covered in cling film.

‘Come on . . .’

There were watercolours on the wal running up the stairs, and framed certificates, and photographs on a smal table at the top, arranged around a large basket fil ed with pot pourri.

Somewhere among the scents of vanil a and orange, though, there was a faint odour of something else. Something sharp and sad.

They turned on more lights, looked into a bathroom and a spare bedroom, then walked slowly towards the closed door of the only room that was left.

‘Have you ever seen a body, Dean?’ Caulfield asked.

‘Come on, she might be anywhere. She might have gone away without tel ing anyone—’

‘Dean?’

Fothergil shook his head. Took off his hat and held a sleeve to his forehead.

‘It’s fine, OK? Just stay calm, and don’t touch anything.’

The smel was stronger when they opened the door. Each could taste it on the breath they sucked in before Caulfield turned on the light.

‘Oh, fuck . . .’

She’d kicked the duvet on to the floor, and her nightdress had ridden up above her pale, hairless calves. One arm was thrown out to the side, hanging over the edge of the bed, while the other was tight against her side, a handful of the sheet clutched between thin fingers.

A lamp had been knocked from the bedside table. A paperback romance lay next to it on the carpet.

‘OK, Dean?’

Fothergil had turned away and was looking across to where more photographs were arranged on a dressing table. The same woman was posing in many of them: a young girl’s hair gathered up in a black beehive; changing style and colour as the photos did; turning grey final y, and growing thin as the woman began to fade and shrink. Fothergil guessed the face was the same that lay twisted beneath the pil ow a few feet away from him.

The cat had fol owed them upstairs. Caulfield reached down as it moved past her, but she was too late to stop it jumping on to the mattress, where it immediately began kneading at the dead woman’s leg and purring loudly.

‘Shit . . .’

Fothergil turned back to the woman on the bed. His face was the same colour as the stained white sheet beneath her.

‘My mother was in a residential place for her last couple of months,’ he said. ‘It smel ed like this.’ He reached out a hand towards the bedstead, stopped, and nodded understanding when Caulfield repeated her warning not to touch. ‘It smel s like my mum’s room.’

There had been a woman Thorne had slept with once, the year before, but he was stil trying, for al manner of reasons, to forget that particular episode. Aside from her, Hendricks and the occasional plumber, he reckoned it had been quite long enough since he’d stood waiting for someone to come out of his bathroom.

He was sore, having strained his back fifteen minutes earlier, trying to assemble the sofa-bed. Porter had laughed when he’d sworn and cried out, then got up to lend a hand when she’d seen how much pain he was in.

‘You should get that seen to,’ she’d said. ‘At least find out what’s wrong.’

‘I wil .’

‘Have you got health insurance?’

‘No, but there’s some money. From the sale of my dad’s house, you know?’ The money he’d not known what to do with; that he’d hated. He’d given some to Aunt Eileen, and a couple of hundred to Victor, but even after he’d handed the taxman his chunk, there was stil plenty left. Maybe, a year on, he should spend it on something. Find some use for it that the old man would have approved of.

‘Shame you didn’t bugger up your back at work,’ Porter had said. They’d lifted the metal bar beneath the cushions, pul ed out the mattress and folded down the legs. ‘Then the Job would have to cough up for it.’

She’d been close enough for Thorne to smel the beer on her. The one drink that had become a couple each.

They’d sat around and bitched about people at work, about the job in general. They’d given thumbnail sketches of parents and past relationships. Thorne had told her about the previous day, when he’d been thinking about bad marriages, and Maggie and Tony Mul en had sprung to mind. He’d been shocked that, for the first time he could remember, his own marriage hadn’t been the first one he’d thought of.

Porter told him that was probably a good sign.

Now, standing outside the bathroom, he realised that he’d said far more about almost everything than she had. That – aside from the facts that she was funny and good at her job, and that he fancied the arse off her – he didn’t know a great deal about Louise Porter.

Thorne could hear her through the cheap, thin door, making an odd humming noise as she brushed her teeth, and he decided he knew enough.

When she came out of the bathroom, she was carrying her own clothes in a bundle under one arm and wearing nothing but knickers under one of Thorne’s T-shirts. She moved past him, reddening slightly, and began laying her blouse and skirt on the chair nearest the sofa-bed. ‘I’l buy you a new toothbrush.’

‘I should worry about explaining to people at work why you’re wearing the same clothes two days running.’

‘They’re used to it,’ she said. ‘I’m such a slag.’

Thorne laughed, then coughed, then winced at the pain. Porter walked across and, without saying anything, began to untuck Thorne’s shirt at the back.

‘Hel o,’ he said.

She placed the flat of her hand against his back, low down, just above his belt, and began to rub. ‘There?’

‘Close enough,’ Thorne said.

‘Is that helping?’

‘Oh yes . . .’

Then the phone rang.

He turned round and she removed her hand, and the look between them quickly became serious, with the phone demanding to be answered and both knowing very wel it was unlikely to be a social cal .

It was Hol and. ‘I think you’d better get out of bed,’ he said.

‘We haven’t had the chance to get in yet.’

‘
Sorry?
’

Thorne could have kicked himself. ‘Get on with it, Dave.’

‘Shepherd’s Bush CID have got a body we should take a look at. I’l give you the address.’

Thorne looked around for a piece of paper. Porter appeared next to him with a notepad and pen, then walked back to the bed and began pul ing on her skirt.

‘I’m listening . . .’

‘Remember that message I left for Kathleen Bristow?’ Hol and said. ‘Wel , somebody final y got back to me.’

SUNDAY

LUKE

There’d been a kid, when Luke was a few years younger, who’d picked on him at school. He’d stolen things – a fountain pen, a watch – handed out punches to the shoulder and kicks to the ankle, and threatened to do a lot worse if Luke told anyone. Luke hadn’t been the only one this boy had targeted. He’d watched the bul y with others sometimes, and saw the same technique as had been used on him. The boy would smile, be nice, make out that he wanted to be friends, before dishing out the painful stuff. As though the pretend gentleness made the twisting and slapping that came afterwards more enjoyable for him.

Luke
hadn’t
told anyone, had suffered until the boy had left the school, but he’d learned to recognise the smile that came before the pain, and he saw it with the man in the cel ar. It sounded sil y. It was obvious real y, with what was going on, but there was something wrong with the man. Something out of control, lost, which made Luke feel as though the man himself didn’t have much idea what he was going to do next.

The friendlier the man was – the more freedom he gave Luke, the more he told Luke how much he thought of him – the more frightening he became. And the more determined Luke became to try to help himself.

It was hard, trying to make himself concentrate on
doing
something when al he wanted to do was curl up and lie stil , sleep until it was over. He’d spent hours since the man had last left, reciting poems in his head, lyrics to songs . . . anything to avoid having to think about what the man had told him; what he’d kept on tel ing him. It was poisonous shit, he knew that; like the lies that bul y at school had once told him in a soft voice. The man was enjoying coming down with his torch and his filth. Spewing it out and messing with his head. Weakening him.

So Luke fil ed his head with as much other stuff as he could, trying to squeeze out the man’s lies.

And he focused hard on the sting from a dozen cuts and bruises. He drove a fingernail across the graze on his knuckles until that pain became more important than the deep, dul ache that the man’s words had left spreading through his body.

He climbed to his feet, feeling the pieces of discarded gaffer tape around him as his hands moved across the dirt floor. He tried to concentrate on the map of the cel ar he had created in his mind: the low corners; the damp crannies and musty alcoves; the shelves thick with dirt; tins of paint, bags of cement and picture frames . . .

If the man was stil in the house, he would probably be down to see him again before too long. With more stories to tel . . . or worse.

Luke stared into the thick, gritty darkness and made a decision.

He needed a weapon.

EIGHTEEN

There was never a good time, of course. But when it came to working with a body, working
on
a body, the early hours of the morning were probably the least bad. During the day, a murder scene felt blatant and unashamed. There was something about the way daylight fel across a body that served to reinforce the brutality of the act; to hammer home the shocking truth that such things happened while the rest of the world went about its business. Walked around, shopped, sat bored at til s or desks, while others a few feet away bled, bloated and stiffened.