Buried-6 (44 page)

Within five minutes, it was a different world.

The overhead lighting had gone, and even the catseyes disappeared at the end of the slip road, which quickly narrowed as A route became B, with high hedges on both sides and barely room enough for one vehicle to pass another.

Thorne drove as quickly as he was able, ful beam cutting through the black, which twisted away ahead of him.

They moved slowly through a vil age cal ed Codicote: Tudor houses, pubs, a vil age green; Maggie Mul en searching desperately for some clue that they might be in the right place.

Thorne sped out the other side, past the sign that thanked him for driving careful y, back into the dark necklace of lanes that strung these vil ages together, a mile or two apart.

He swore and dipped the headlights as another car came around a corner, braking too hard and wrestling the Mercedes into the verge. He tried to look at the other driver as the car went past, but he could see nothing. Back on ful beam, the lights caught yel ow eyes, low in the undergrowth, and something flashing across the road fifty yards ahead of them.

‘Al these roads look the bloody same,’ Maggie Mul en said.

They drove through Kimpton and Peter’s Green. Stopped and turned the car round when they got within a mile of Luton airport and a sign told them they were entering Bedfordshire.

Heading north again, they passed through Whitwel , crossed over the River Maran and entered the vil age of St Paul’s Walden.

‘
Stop
. . .’

Thorne jumped on the pedal and put out his arm as Maggie Mul en shot forward in her seat. ‘What?’

‘That’s the big house.’ She nodded towards a pair of wrought-iron gates. The outline of a grand mansion was just visible in the distance. ‘We visited it once. Something to do with the Queen Mother. Keep going . . .’

At the other end of the High Street she told Thorne to stop again. Pointed to a church. A spike rising up from a turreted tower, vivid against the night sky.

‘You can see that tower from the cottage,’ she said. ‘Across the fields.’

‘There are fields everywhere,’ Thorne said. ‘Which direction?’

She looked around, unsure.

Thorne picked one.

Driving out of the vil age, they both started when Maggie Mul en’s phone rang. She looked at the display. The phone was shaking in her hand.

‘It’s him . . .’

She said, ‘yes’ a lot; told the cal er that she was nearly there and that she just wanted to talk. She asked how Luke was, begged the man on the other end of the phone not to hurt him.

‘What did he want?’ Thorne asked when she’d hung up.

‘He wanted to know where I was. If I was close.’

‘You said,
Yes I am; it’s fine.
What was that?’

‘He was worried,’ she said. ‘Told me that if I was driving, he hoped I was hands-free.’

Thorne accelerated into the countryside again and smiled grimly. ‘He knows you’re not alone . . .’

Five minutes later he turned on to a narrow track. It was overgrown and pitted with puddles. The car rattled across a cattle-grid, then fol owed the track down and to the right, until its lights picked out the house a few hundred yards away.

‘That’s it . . .’

It wasn’t what Thorne had expected. Not a cottage in any usual sense of the word. It wasn’t particularly smal , and didn’t even look that old. But it was certainly isolated. Not exactly chocolate-box, but in the ideal position for some purposes.

Thorne slowed to a crawl as he approached. There were lights on in two rooms downstairs, at the front.

‘What are we going to do?’ Maggie Mul en asked.

‘Wel ,
you
are going to knock on the door. Go and say hel o to your boyfriend.’

‘What about you?’

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Thorne said. He stopped the car, climbed out and moved away without shutting the door. From the shadows fifty feet from the house, he watched Maggie Mul en go to the front door. Saw it open and watched her walk inside, slow and stiff.

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 wal – 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 ful of earth and stones.

He caught his hand on something as he edged along the wal , 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 smal 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 cal . 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 al 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 bel .’ Laughing. ‘I mean, I’ve heard her lying often enough, haven’t I?

Stretched out next to me, naked, tel ing 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 Mul en sat directly ahead of him, beneath a smal window. She didn’t return Thorne’s look. Her eyes moved back and forth every few seconds between Lardner and the brown panel ed 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 smal 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.

Cel ar. 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 Mul en 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 Mul en leaned forward in her chair. Her fists were tight around the material of her sweater, pul ing at it, wrenching. ‘For pity’s sake, Peter . . .’

‘You need to shush . . . real y,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve talked about this.’ He sounded tired but relaxed. He looked back to Thorne and rol ed his eyes, as though another man would understand how exasperating al 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 al over the place and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. ‘Sil y,’

Lardner said. ‘Al so bloody sil y.’

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 al . . .

‘
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 smal 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?’

‘Wel it’s a fair question. Because it
is
al senseless, al of it, but I’m not real y 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, real y I don’t, but I’m not the one who started this.’

‘Oh Jesus, Peter.’ There was suddenly anger in Maggie Mul en’s voice. ‘You can’t lay any of this madness at my door. Al 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 al 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 stil suffering the loss of my mother was . . . an
error
. That’s what I’m going to cal 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 stil 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 al that up and made stupid suggestions, and I decided something needed to be done.’

‘I just wanted to get out,’ Maggie Mul en 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 real y have taken the boy myself,’ he said. ‘But it was difficult, with work and what have you. It cost me every penny I had to pay those two, I can tel you that. Maybe if I’d sold this place after Mum died, but that was never going to happen.’

Thorne knew most of it, but he was stil curious. They’d thought Neil Warren’s professional relationship to Amanda Tickel was the link to Grant Freestone. But now Thorne remembered what Cal um 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. Al very jol y . . .’

the coke or the booze. He gives them a few nibbles, talks about God, that sort of thing. Al very jol y . . .’

The rope was frayed and dirty, an old tow rope, by the look of it. Thorne tried hard not to think of the boy on the other end. Of the state he might be in.

‘I met Amanda and her boyfriend at one of Neil’s parties,’ Lardner said. ‘And when I was working out how best to snatch the boy, I knew she had it in her. She was always desperate for money.’

The knife swung slowly back and forth, its handle gripped between Lardner’s thumb and index finger. It looked as though it came from the same set as the one he’d used to kil Al en and Tickel .

‘Why did anyone have to die?’ Thorne asked.

‘I shan’t say that it seemed like a good idea at the time, as that would be flippant. In fact, it seemed like a very
bad
idea. I’ve no wish to be disrespectful, and I’m very sorry about Kathleen, but same as with the other two, there wasn’t a great deal else I could do.’ For the first time in a few minutes he looked across at Maggie Mul en. ‘Mags was tel ing me what I needed to do . . .’

Maggie Mul en was almost out of her chair. ‘
What?
’

‘There were hints,’ Lardner said. ‘We talked on the phone, talked in secret . . . and when she told me about what the police were doing, about Freestone and so on . . .’

‘I wanted you to finish it, to know it was pointless—’

‘I knew she was
really
tel ing me that I needed to take steps to protect myself.’

‘
No!
’

The wash of a warm smile. ‘That’s when I knew her feelings for me were stil as strong as they’d ever been.’

‘You’re fucking
mental
, Peter.’ She’d known it before, obviously. But here, seeing it acted out in front of her, the shock and the sadness were evident on Maggie Mul en’s face.

‘You’ve completely lost it . . .’

Lardner looked at Thorne, shrugged and smiled. Then wound in another foot or so of the rope.