Buried

whatever, that made people take you seriously; that made them back off, try to smile, and say, ‘All right, mate, whatever you want.’ He’d wanted to make someone react like that ever since his balls had dropped, and he could still remember when it had happened for the first time. It was a few years ago now, but he could remember every single detail of it. It was like watching a film that he was starring in.

A poxy red Fiesta.

The spiky-haired ponce behind the wheel had cut in front of him at the lights, swerved across into his lane instead of turning right like he should have done. Then, to top it off, the arsehole had given him the finger when he’d leaned on his horn, as he’d every bloody right to do!

So he’s chased the fucker. He’s right up his arse, doing fifty and sixty through Dalston and Hackney, all the way to Bow. There’s big puddles on the streets and precious little traffic around that time of the morning; just night buses and the odd dodgy minicab getting out of the way seriously fast.

The Fiesta pulls up hard and sharp somewhere round the back of Victoria Park, and the bloke gets out and starts waving a baseball bat around. Shaking his head and pointing a finger. Shouting his mouth off as he walks towards the car.

The next bit’s in slow motion and the sound’s really pumped up loud. He can feel his heart going mental underneath his Puffa, but it’s excitement, not fear, and when he gets out of the car he gets the look he’s been dreaming about for so long.

It’s the moment when power shifts.

The tosser with the bat has obviously fancied it right up to that moment, because the bat gives him the edge, and he probably isn’t afraid to use it either. It’s made him braver than he’s got any right to be. But then he sees the gun, and he shits himself.

He shits himself. Or he might just as well have done, judging by the look on his face as he walks away. As he puts down the bat, and puts up his hands, and says, ‘All right, mate, no harm done.’

Of course, the gun was only a replica and, real or not, maybe it was the gun that was getting the respect rather than him, but still. It didn’t matter. The feeling as he climbed back into his car was amazing, like nothing he’d known before, and it had stayed with him. Singing in his blood as he tore past the buses and ripped through the puddles, right up until the moment when everything had gone very tits up twenty minutes later…

Across the room, the boy was awake beneath the hood. He could tell by the position of him, by the way his head turned and his face pressed against the material.

‘You hungry?’

They’d had a long discussion about whether to use a gag and Amanda had decided against it in the end. It was maybe a bit over the top. Anyway, the kid was drugged up most of the time and, even when he wasn’t, they’d be on him like a rash if he tried screaming.

‘You want something to eat?’

The boy said nothing, even though he could. Just ignored the question. He chose to keep quiet for some reason, like he was protesting or something; like he was playing a game with them.

Trying to be clever.

WEDNESDAY FOUR

His father had taken to coming by in the early hours of the morning.

Since the back problems, Thorne had been waking anywhere from 5 a.m. onwards. He’d lie there in the dark, in the only comfortable position he’d been able to find – his knees up to his chest – and think about his old man. Occasionally, he’d manage to drift back to sleep again, and then their encounters would be stranger, richer, as, in that hour or two before he would need to get up, he invariably dreamed.

In the dreams, Jim Thorne would appear as he had been in the final stages of the Alzheimer’s; in the six months or so before the fire that had killed him. It was typical of his father, Thorne thought, to be so perverse, so bloody-minded. Why couldn’t he have moved through the dreams as a younger man? Or a man whose mind was at least firing on the right cylinders? Instead, his father came to him belligerent and foul-mouthed, stumbling through their conversations, distracted, furious and lost.

Helpless…

Often, the old man would do nothing but sit on the edge of Thorne’s bed, eager to ask questions. This was how it had been towards the end. The disregard for social niceties had gone hand in hand with an obsession for trivia, lists and quizzes.

‘Name ten World War Two fighter planes. Which are the three biggest lakes in the world? That’s freshwater lakes.’

Since passing on, he’d introduced the element of multiple choice.

‘Was the cause of the fire that killed me: (A) accidental or (B) started deliberately?’

Often this would be followed by a question Thorne found a little easier to answer: ‘Whose fault was it: (A) yours or (B) yours?’

This was usually when Thorne would wake, and for a while the question would stay with him. The feelings it stirred were unmistakable, yet hard to name or pin down. Not quite shame, but a shade of it. Like the relationship which ‘coming down with something’ has to the illness itself; to the symptoms that will eventually appear. He would move robotically through the rituals of the morning – ablutions, breakfast, getting dressed – until the memory of the dream began to dissolve. Feeling the water sizzle against his skin as he shaved, and the cereal turning to charcoal in his mouth.

He’d put Phil Hendricks into a minicab late the previous night. As always, the sofa-bed had been on offer, but Hendricks had wanted to get home. The big talk about cruising for someone to take his boyfriend’s place had not lasted long. The beer had washed away the pretence of acceptance, and by the end of a long evening he was tearful again, and desperate to return to the flat in case Brendan had decided to come back.

In his kitchen, Thorne ate toast and marmalade standing up, listening to Greater London Radio and waiting for the early morning dose of painkillers to kick in.

It was five weeks until the first anniversary of his father’s death.

Outside, it had started to rain gently, and on GLR the host was trying to get a word in as some woman ranted about the disgusting state of the capital’s rail network.

He decided that he would call his Auntie Eileen – his father’s younger sister – and Victor, the old man’s best friend. Maybe they could all get together on the day. Have a drink or something.

His was not, had never been, a close family, and it was all so terribly British, this cleaving together after a loss. Yet, while he saw it for the gesture that in many ways it was, he still craved it; he needed the chance to measure his grief against that of others. He wanted to be with people who could talk to him without feeling like they were walking on eggshells.

On the radio, a man was saying that the previous caller had been rude and overbearing, but that she’d been right about how crap the railways were.

Thorne wondered how the Mullens were doing. To lose someone but not know for sure if they were really gone was arguably the worst kind of loss, and they certainly seemed to be cleaving together. It was odd, he thought, that a word could have such opposite definitions: to cling together, and to split violently apart.

He was scooping food into a bowl for Elvis when the phone rang, and though the codeine hadn’t quite taken effect, Porter’s call was enough to make him forget the pain pulsing down his leg and into his foot.

They could now be certain that Luke Mullen had been kidnapped. Whoever was holding him had finally decided to get in touch.

At Central 3000, chairs had been hastily put out and a screen set up in a corner beneath the red flag. Officers from other departments cut their conversation, stood still or just worked in silence, as the team from the Kidnap Unit gathered round and watched the video that had come through the Mullens’ front door first thing that