Buried

Freestone opened his mouth. Closed it again.

‘Hang on,’ Donovan said. ‘There’s never been any suggestion-’

Thorne pointed a finger and left it there. ‘He tied two kids up in a garage. That’s not a suggestion. How the hell do we know he hasn’t stuffed Luke Mullen in a cupboard with gardening twine round his neck?’

‘He’s fine, I swear.’ Freestone closed his eyes, rubbed the back of a hand across his forehead. ‘When’s Tony Mullen getting here? I need to see him.’

‘Why did you take him, Grant?’ Thorne waited until it was clear there was nothing coming back. ‘Why no ransom demand? Do you just not need the money? Or did you miss the last bit of the kidnapping correspondence course?’

Freestone sucked his teeth, thought about it. ‘I’ll talk to Mullen,’ he said.

Nobody said anything for a few moments after that, but when Porter started to speak, Thorne raised a hand to cut her off. ‘How old is Luke Mullen?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know exactly.’ Freestone blinked. ‘Fifteen? Sixteen?’

‘Dark hair? Blond?’

‘It’s… dark.’

‘What was he wearing when you took him?’

Freestone was growing increasingly flustered with each question Thorne fired at him, looking at Donovan more than once, and increasingly to Porter. ‘School clothes…’

‘Can we stop asking quiz questions?’ Porter snapped. ‘We need to move forward here.’

Thorne’s smile was ugly. ‘It’s all stuff he could have got from that newspaper story, anyway. He had a paper with him in the park.’

‘We have to make sure Luke is safe and unharmed,’ Porter said. ‘That’s the priority here.’ She looked back at Freestone, making sure that he understood what was important as well.

‘He’s safe. I haven’t laid a finger on him.’

‘Luke’s not the strongest of kids,’ Porter said. ‘We have to check.’

‘I’ve been looking after him.’

‘That’s good. That helps.’

‘You should really get Mullen now.’

‘What about the asthma?’ she asked. ‘Has he had any attacks?’

Freestone shook his head, kept on shaking it.

‘Shortness of breath? It’s why I was asking about the air.’

‘No, he’s fine.’

‘The family are worried because they’re not sure if Luke had his inhaler with him, but it sounds like he wouldn’t have needed it, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you know if he has it? So I could at least tell them.’

Freestone closed his eyes again. Let the answer come to him. ‘I think he said something about it.’

‘Do you know what an inhaler looks like?’ Porter started to mime it, pushing down on the imaginary pump.

‘Of course I do. Jesus…’

‘This is important, Grant. We need to know. Has he got one with him?’

A nod, small and fast, but frozen the second Thorne began to shout: ‘Have you seen Luke Mullen’s inhaler?’

‘Yes, I said so! I’ve seen the fucking thing.’ The intense agitation on Freestone’s face turned quickly to alarm when he saw Porter and Thorne relax. When the questions stopped. He turned to Donovan. ‘What’s going on?’

Donovan’s former career gave him rather more insight than someone in his position might otherwise have had. ‘I think you just gave them the wrong answer,’ he said. ‘Or the right one.’

Thorne looked at Porter, then up at the camera to share a small moment of success with the two watching DCIs.

Then he leaned back. Job done.

After Freestone had been taken back to the cells, they sat for a few seconds, relishing their newly acquired certainty. But each was aware that this feeling of having got something right would soon be replaced with a more familiar one. That of having nowhere else to go.

It was Thorne who broke the silence. ‘Asthma? That’s fucking genius.’

‘We both did a pretty good job,’ Porter said.

They congratulated each other for a few minutes more on how well they’d played the nice-and-nasty routine. On how they’d let Freestone believe there was tension between them; that he was far better off answering Porter’s questions than Thorne’s. Making him think it was simple confirmation they wanted, rather than proof.

‘He was so full of shit,’ Thorne said. ‘All that just to get a bit of leverage. So we’d agree to Mullen coming in.’

Porter raised her eyebrows. ‘Now, there’s a major question in itself.’

‘Like we haven’t got enough of those already.’

‘Number one in the hit parade being: if Freestone hasn’t got Luke Mullen…?’

And there it was. That familiar feeling…

Thorne’s first thought was that Brigstocke had come down to do his own bit of back-patting, but his face told a different story. As did the face of the man who appeared next to him in the doorway, then barged past into the interview room like he was a heartbeat away from cracking heads open.

‘Why wasn’t I told about Grant Freestone?’ Mullen asked. His question was absurd, considering that he obviously had been told: he was there, after all. After a second of incredulity from the others in the room, he condescended to correct himself: ‘Why wasn’t I told officially?’

Thorne rose from his seat and exchanged a glance with Brigstocke. He was happy to handle this one, though even as he opened his mouth he had no idea how he was going to handle it. ‘Your position as Luke’s parent, and as an ex-officer, makes your role in this case tricky, to say the least…’

‘Don’t talk shit to me. Where’s Freestone?’

‘He’s probably with the Force Medical Examiner by now, getting a dose of methadone.’

‘I want to see him.’

‘What you want is one thing,’ Thorne said, ‘and I do understand that you and Detective Superintendent Jesmond are… close friends. But I don’t think that coming in here and trying to give anyone orders is particularly helpful.’ He caught the look from Brigstocke, the warning to take it easy, but when his eyes returned to Mullen, the fury seemed to have cooled.

‘However you’d prefer me to put it, then. I would like to see him. He’s been asking to see me, so I think I have a right.’

‘He hasn’t got Luke,’ Thorne said. ‘He told us he had, but we’re pretty sure he was just telling us what we wanted to hear.’

‘Pretty sure?’

‘We’ve got him talking to us about Luke being asthmatic, for Christ’s sake…’

Confusion washed across Mullen’s face.

Porter chipped in to explain. ‘We asked him early on about Allen and Tickell and he blanked us. Later, he was just giving us stuff he could have picked up from the paper. So we needed to feed him something specific, something untrue. To catch him out with it.’

‘He isn’t our kidnapper,’ Thorne said.

Brigstocke stepped towards Mullen. ‘You probably don’t know whether to feel relieved or not. It’s hard, I know.’ He held out an arm as though offering to lead him back out the way he had come. But Mullen wasn’t about to go anywhere.

‘I still want to see him,’ he said.

Brigstocke lowered the arm which had been so studiously ignored. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see much point.’

‘What about this connection to the dead girl?’