Buried

Thorne moved slowly around to the back of her chair. ‘Was she still alive when you left?’ he asked.

Maggie Mullen lowered her head, shook it.

Thorne stared down at hair that had gone unwashed for days. Only she and the man she’d been with in Sarah Hanley’s house that day knew if she was telling the truth. ‘You know that her children discovered the body, don’t you?’

‘Yes…’

Tony Mullen’s hands were trembling in his lap. He swallowed hard, then muttered, ‘Christ…’

‘So, you just walked out,’ Thorne said.

She nodded, but kept her eyes down. ‘Yes, we walked out, and we hoped nobody had seen us.’ She looked up. ‘And nobody had. We went to Kathleen Bristow, who’d assigned us the job of making the visit, and told her that we’d had to cancel it, that we’d never gone. We made up some story about me being poorly. Then, when the body was discovered, it all got forgotten anyway, and it looked like we were safe.’

‘Is that why he killed Bristow?’ Thorne asked. ‘Did she keep a record of the fact that you were due to have visited Sarah Hanley?’

‘I suppose so. She certainly knew that he and I were involved with each other. She caught us together in a pub once after one of the meetings. Maybe her knowing that was enough to scare him.’

‘But why now?’

She shifted in her chair, let her head fall back and talked to the ceiling. ‘I don’t know what’s in his mind. I can’t pretend to know why he’s done any of this.’

‘Maybe you should have asked him,’ Mullen said. ‘During one of your cosy little chats on the phone.’

‘Please, Tony…’

‘I can’t believe that you knew he had Luke, but you said nothing. He had our son and you said nothing.’

Thorne looked at what was left of Mullen, and despite everything he’d felt about him until this point, he was overwhelmed by sympathy for the man. He’d lied by omission, thinking only that he was covering up simple adultery, unaware that there was so much more at stake.

‘At the beginning I thought he was just trying to frighten me, you know? Because I’d told him we were finished, and I’d talked about the Sarah Hanley business. He knew this woman from somewhere, paid her to take Luke from the school, and I thought it would just be for a day or something, that he was just making sure I got the message.’

Thorne knew then that he’d been right about the video; about how strange it was that nothing had been addressed to Luke’s father. The boy had been told what to say. The words had been aimed solely at his mother because the message was meant for her and no one else.

‘What did he say?’ Mullen asked. ‘After he’d taken Luke, what did he say when you spoke to him?’

She looked as though this was the hardest answer she’d had to provide so far. ‘He said he was doing it because he loved me so much.’

‘Sweet Jesus!’

‘It’s what he believes. He’s not well.’

‘Why didn’t you sort this out straight away?’ Mullen was reddening, breathing noisily. ‘Why didn’t you agree to everything, anything, whatever he wanted, so that he’d let Luke go? You saw that video, you saw what they were doing to Luke.’

‘He said he didn’t want to make it easy. He promised not to hurt him, told me that the drugs weren’t doing him any harm. He told me he wanted to be sure I knew how serious he was.’

‘Serious?’ Thorne said.

‘Then, after the first few days, there was nothing I could do. I was terrified because everything had escalated.’

Mullen bucked in his seat, punching at the chair around him, swinging at nothing. ‘He killed people. He started fucking killing people.’

‘That’s what I mean,’ she shouted. ‘I knew that he’d lost control, that I couldn’t predict what he was going to do or how he was going to react. He said he wouldn’t hurt Luke, but I didn’t know what would happen if I told the police.’ She glanced at the telephone. ‘I still don’t. All I could do was keep talking to him, make sure that Luke was still all right.’ Her hand rose to her head, closed around a clump of hair and began to pull. ‘I fucked it all up, I know I did, but it went so completely mad that I didn’t know what to do.’ She looked wildly from her husband to Thorne and back again. ‘I was thinking of Luke all the time. But…’

Thorne nodded. He did not want to listen to any more. There were no more tears left, but Maggie Mullen’s face looked as though it were made of cracked plaster. He remembered the words she’d used when she’d described what had happened on the day Sarah Hanley died. ‘Everything just got out of hand,’ he said.

An hour or more passed as slowly as any Thorne could remember. The minutes crawled by on their bellies, each through the glistening, greasy trail of the one before, as he watched Tony and Maggie Mullen damage themselves and each other. Screams that sliced and flayed. Accusations swung like bludgeons, and the silences burning away the flesh from the little that was left between them.

Drawn from the top of the house by the noise, Juliet had appeared in the doorway. Demanding to know what was happening, and understandably reluctant to go upstairs again, she had begun a shouting match with her mother that was just starting to get nasty when Thorne’s mobile rang. Tony Mullen moved quickly to manhandle his daughter from the room as Thorne took the call.

When it was over, Thorne turned back to them. He raised a hand quickly, a gesture to reassure them that the news was not the worst they could have been expecting. ‘Nobody there,’ he said. ‘They went in five minutes ago and the flat’s empty.’

Mullen’s expression was one Thorne had seen several times since he’d first got involved with the case: relief that washed briefly across a mask of panic, then unthinkable fury.

Maggie Mullen was breathing heavily. ‘They went in there very quickly. How could they be sure it was safe?’

‘They decided that they couldn’t afford to wait,’ Thorne said. ‘Going in fast is always iffy, but waiting might have been riskier, and it certainly didn’t help last time. There was an armed response vehicle close by and they took the chance.’

‘You said there’d be no guns.’ She pointed a shaking finger, spat out the words. ‘You promised.’

‘No,’ Mullen said, cold. ‘No, he fucking didn’t.’

‘Is there anywhere else?’ Thorne asked. ‘Anywhere else he might have taken him?’

Thorne could see that as soon as the idea presented itself to her, she knew it was the right one.

‘His mother’s house. She had a cottage somewhere near Luton, in the middle of bloody nowhere.’ She couldn’t look at her husband. ‘I went there once.’

‘Call him,’ Thorne said.

She closed her eyes and clamped a hand across her mouth, which muffled the end of her refusal.

‘Call him…’

It took a few minutes before Mullen and Thorne saw her walk across to her bag, take out her phone. Watched her gather herself, and dial.

Then speak to the man who had kidnapped her son.

She told him that she needed to talk; that she knew it was late but that she was coming to see him. She insisted. She said she knew where he was and swore that she would be coming alone.

She pressed back fresh tears and took a deep breath before she asked how Luke was.

Then she hung up.

Nodded…

Mullen was face to face with Thorne before he had completed a step. ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Just try and fucking stop me.’

Thorne looked into Mullen’s eyes and knew that if he did, and it got physical, he would be in serious trouble. ‘It’s really not a good idea,’ he said, brandishing his mobile. ‘Don’t make me get a