Buried

Warren led the boy to the small kitchen table. He sat him beneath a poster that said, ‘THIS IS NOT A DRESS REHEARSAL’, and talked to him as though Holland and Heeney weren’t there. He spoke gently enough at first, until the boy grew calmer, then gradually his tone became firmer. He said that he understood how annoying it was to be grassed up, but that Andrew had done the right thing. Talking about drugs in a positive way was against all the rules; to talk about them as if they were something to be missed or mourned was not the way to move forward.

‘It’s stinking thinking, Danny, you know that. Stinking thinking…’

The phrase rang a bell inside Holland’s head. They were buzzwords, with the dreadful whiff of an American self-help course. But it struck a chord. Holland made a mental note to tell Thorne, who he was sure would find it funny.

Stinking thinking.

Without it, the two of them would be out of a job.

It wasn’t panic but simple surprise that passed across Jane Freestone’s face when she opened the door. Saw that it wasn’t Jehovah’s Witnesses who were ringing her bell at nine-thirty on a Saturday morning.

‘I thought you lot had given up,’ she said. ‘Worked out you were wasting your time, started bothering someone else once a fucking year.’

It was the turn of those waving the warrant cards to look surprised, while Jane Freestone’s features settled quickly into a resentful sneer. It seemed to Thorne that the Sarah Hanley case, certainly as far as Grant Freestone’s involvement was concerned, had gone from cold to deep frozen. After a terse exchange on the doorstep, he and Porter were grudgingly ushered inside.

They walked down a narrow corridor with framed prints of sunsets and snowscapes on the walls. A sign saying, ‘Billy’s Room’ was Sellotaped to a closed door. From behind it, Thorne could hear a television and the sound of toys being thrown around. He smelled last night’s Chinese takeaway as they passed the kitchen.

Within a few minutes of standing in Jane Freestone’s flat – a two-bedroom maisonette on an estate in Brentford – Thorne’s journey to work was starting to seem like a fond and far-distant memory. He’d left earlier than he needed to; slipped out of the flat without waking Hendricks and taken the longer route in through Highgate and Hampstead. The roads had been almost empty. Coming down towards Golders Green past the Heath, the sky ahead of him had been cloudless, and drowned with pink.

He’d thought, even then, that it would probably be as good as the day was ever likely to get.

The view from the window, below the M4 to the trading estate beyond, was only marginally bleaker than the one to be had inside, and the tenant’s mood was more unpleasant than either. Thorne had pissed off some bad people in his time, but it had been a while since he’d felt quite so hated. The woman rarely raised her voice, but the tone was unmistakable; there was poison in every word, spat, spun or whispered. She told them she hadn’t got long because she needed to get her kids dressed. They asked her what she’d meant when she’d answered the door, and she explained that there had been no annual visit the previous year; so she hadn’t had to talk to ‘one of you fuckers’ for eighteen months. Porter explained that she and Thorne were fuckers of a different sort; that Grant’s name had come up in connection with an entirely different matter.

‘Something else you can fit him up for?’

‘You think your brother was fitted up for Sarah Hanley’s murder?’ Porter asked.

Freestone shook her head, smirked like Thorne and Porter were as thick as pig-shit. She was somewhere in her early thirties, tall and large-breasted, with dark hair scraped back from her face and tied up. Thorne might almost have found her sexy in a hard-faced, brittle kind of way. If she were wearing a different dressing-gown perhaps, and he hadn’t been laid in twenty years.

‘Are you saying that a police officer, or officers, made your brother the prime suspect because they couldn’t find anyone else?’

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘Or that they were responsible for the murder in the first place?’

She took a crumpled tissue from her dressing-gown pocket, used one corner to dab at the inside of a nostril. ‘There was the odd copper who wouldn’t have been too gutted if Grant got sent down again.’ She stuffed the tissue back. ‘Put it that way.’

Thorne resisted looking across at Porter and sensed that she was doing likewise. ‘I don’t suppose you fancy naming this “odd copper”,’ he said.

She didn’t.

Thorne and Porter were standing, but when they’d first come into the living room Freestone had dropped into an armchair and turned towards the large, flat-screen TV in one corner. She’d switched it on, then muted the volume, and spent much of the conversation staring at the screen.

‘Why did he run, Jane, if he didn’t kill Sarah?’

It was an obscure cable channel. Every time Thorne looked, someone was being shown around a house.

‘Because he knew he was in the frame, and he didn’t want to go back to prison, did he? Even though this was an unrelated offence, they had him marked down inside as someone who messes with kids.’

‘Marked down?’ Thorne said. ‘Nobody planted those children in his garage.’

Freestone ignored the dig, studied the TV as though she could read lips.

‘Don’t you think he would have been better off staying put,’ Porter said, ‘if he really didn’t do it?’

‘Stop fucking saying, “if”.’ She turned suddenly, looking about ready to punch someone’s lights out. ‘Grant was with me when his girlfriend was killed. We were in the park with my kids.’ She pointed back towards the corridor. ‘Go and fucking-well ask them.’

The woman could easily make such an invitation, knowing it would never be accepted. Her eldest child was eight years old. Whatever they might say if asked now, neither he nor his little brother could be trusted to remember what had happened back when neither of them had been old enough to say much of anything.

Porter held up a hand, left a beat before trying again. ‘Wouldn’t he have been better off trying to prove he was innocent?’

The look Freestone gave Porter before she turned back to the TV made it clear that now she knew they were both stupid.

‘Does Grant think he was stitched up?’ Thorne asked.

‘Have a guess.’

‘Is that what he said at the time? Did you see him before he disappeared?’

‘I haven’t seen him in five years.’

‘Nobody’s suggesting that he’s hiding under the bed, but the two of you must have been in touch, surely?’

‘Must we?’

Thorne took a couple of steps towards the armchair. ‘He’s phoned you, written you letters, something. Is it what he still thinks?’

Freestone pushed herself up, waited for Thorne to move out of the way so she could get past. ‘I’m going for a piss. Give you two a chance to have a good old nosy while I’m gone.’ She pointed to a door. ‘My bed’s through there, in case you do want to check underneath…’

As soon as she had left, as soon as they’d heard the lock slide across on the bathroom door, Thorne and Porter did as Freestone had suggested. They moved quickly, and in virtual silence around the room, drew each other’s attention to items of interest with a nod or a whisper. There were photographs on a low, glass table to the side of the TV: Jane Freestone and a man Thorne recognised as her brother, wearing smiles they’d been holding for a few seconds too long; a holiday snap of a well-built man with ginger hair and moustache sitting on a balcony in shirt and shorts, posing with his pint; Freestone’s kids in a playground, running towards the camera. Porter looked at the magazines on a box below the window: Heat, Auto Trader, Nuts. Thorne flicked quickly through the utility bills, fastened together with a bulldog clip next to the midi-system. He looked for any overseas numbers on the BT calls list and noted that the Sky subscription was for the complete films and sports package. He moved away to study the spines on the row of CDs when he heard the toilet flush.

When Freestone returned, she walked straight back to the armchair and sank into it as though there were nobody else in the room.

Porter nodded towards the photograph of the man with the beer. ‘Is that the kids’ dad?’