Buried

Peter Lardner had died in an ambulance which had taken twenty-five minutes to reach the cottage.

‘One more reason not to live in the countryside,’ Thorne had said.

Porter reached down, felt for the lager can on the floor. ‘So what about Luke?’

Thorne could not shift the picture of the boy’s face when they’d finally unwrapped the tape. Red from the adhesive, and wet with tears and sweat, but still that crazed expression around his eyes.

Crazed, just like words scrawled in rage on the wall behind a poster.

‘He’s alive, which I suppose is the main thing. But he won’t be able to wake up tomorrow and just get on with it, will he? That’s going to be who he is now. Getting over that kind of thing’s all about support, and there’s not much of a family for him to go back to.’ He clocked Porter’s expression. ‘What?’

‘I meant what about the case against him?’

Thorne shrugged, picked up his own can. ‘Fuck knows. They’ll have to charge him…’

They each took a drink. Thorne asked Porter if she was hungry, and she told him that she wished she’d eaten something before they’d started celebrating. Thorne got up and went into the kitchen to make them both toast.

They talked easily about nothing through the open door, letting the dirt settle. Like they’d been out all night dancing, or at a party.

Like nobody had bled to death.

Thorne turned from monitoring the grill when he heard Porter get up and watched her walking across the room towards the stereo. He told her to put on some music, apologised for the absence of any Shania Twain. He checked on the toast, flipped over the slices of bread on the grill-pan, then felt her fingers against his shoulder.

She was leaning into him as he turned round, one hand on his face and the other fumbling with the buttons on his shirt.

‘We’ll leave the toast then, shall we?’ Thorne said.

Her tongue tasted sweet and boozy in his mouth. He bent his knees to press his groin against hers, and they staggered away from the cooker, lips pressed back hard against gums and teeth banging together.

She leaned back against the kitchen table and he went with her. Then he felt the pull and the pop, and the dizzying rush of pain, slicing deep from thigh to ankle.

He waited until they’d broken the kiss before he cried out.

PART FOUR. A PICTURE OF THE DAMAGE

THIRTY

Thorne lay perfectly still in the tight, white tunnel and tried to listen to Johnny Cash.

The music was faint in his headphones, and all but drowned out by the noise of the MRI scanner that was slowly putting together a picture of his spine. Of the state of it. The sound, like a pneumatic drill, made it seem as if he were listening to some radical, techno remix of the Man in Black, but it was still better than the alternative. They’d told him he could choose one of their CDs for the twenty minutes or so he’d be inside the chamber, but Thorne had decided to take no chances and brought The Man Comes Around along with him. Good job he had. Even the little he could hear was preferable to some of the shit on the laminated list he’d found waiting for him in the changing room.

Jamie Cullum, Katie Melua, Norah bloody Jones.

He lay, quite still as he’d been instructed. Straining to hear. His hand around the rubber panic button he’d been told to squeeze if he felt uncomfortable or alarmed for any reason. If he wanted to stop the procedure.

The rhythm of the machine, the repetitive clatter, like a buzz that had been slowed, began to fade. The noise relaxed him. He started to drift and reflect, savoured the luxury of the time, the space inside his head. Like slipping between pristine sheets after too long in a bed that was stained and stinking.

Six days since the end of it. The end of part of it, at any rate.

Everything now would be in the hands of judges and lawyers. All Thorne and the rest of them could do from hereon was present those people with the material, and hope they made decent decisions.

They’d already made a couple of very brave ones.

Luke Mullen had been charged with the murder of Peter Lardner, though there was good reason to believe that when it eventually came to trial, the jury would not convict. Thorne was happy to take the stand as a defence witness, and believed that the extenuating circumstances which would probably see Luke Mullen acquitted – along with the fact of Tony Mullen’s former position – probably accounted for why the magistrate had decided to release the boy into his father’s custody. There were strict conditions, of course: Luke would need to report to a police station at regular intervals. He would not be going back to school.

It had been an equally brave decision to remand Maggie Mullen for trial in Holloway Prison.

Although, in the end, the magistrate had been left with little choice. The charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice, relating to the death of Sarah Hanley, certainly warranted bail, and a surety of fifty thousand pounds was set. However, once Tony Mullen – the only person in a position to act as guarantor – had refused point-blank to do so, prison had been the court’s only option.

Thorne remembered Mullen’s face in the sitting room as his wife had made her confession, and guessed that his decision to see her jailed had probably been easier to make than the magistrate’s.

What had Thorne said to Porter that night?

Not much of a family for him to go back to…

And unbidden, as Thorne remained motionless, different voices started to make themselves heard. Drifting in from nowhere and demanding attention.

A series of remarks and suggestions that began to curl around or lie across one another; to tease and illuminate.

Insisting…

I’ve always thought the sexual element of the attack was more important.

Listen, I accept all the evidence about abusers having been abused themselves.

Maybe it wasn’t Luke he was calling.

We already looked at the parents.

Until one single, big idea crowded out all the others, and the noise in Thorne’s head was louder, harder to ignore, than that coming from the machine.

And what Lardner had said. The last thing he’d said:

Why don’t you tell the inspector all about it? Why you can’t bear to let him touch you…

Thorne pulled off the headphones and began to squeeze the rubber button.

Jane Freestone had stood up and wandered away when she’d seen him coming. Thorne watched her walk to the fence, spit and light a cigarette. Then he sat down next to her brother on the bench.

The same one Grant Freestone had been sitting on when Thorne and Porter had nicked him a week earlier.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Freestone said.

‘Calm down.’

‘I’m here with my sister, all right?’

Freestone had been released from custody in Lewisham on the same day that Maggie Mullen was charged. Now, aside from the compulsory rehab clinic, and weekly visit to sign the Sex Offenders Register, his life was more or less his own again. Though Thorne would soon inform those who needed to know just how often that life seemed to involve sitting in a local park, on the bench nearest to the children’s playground.

‘You shouldn’t be so arsey,’ Thorne said. ‘If it wasn’t for some of us, you’d be on remand for Sarah Hanley by