Buried-6 (17 page)

‘And?’

‘And I checked . . . Someone
did
. There were two cal s logged in October last year saying that we ought to take a look at him, but we never did. He wasn’t mentioned by name. It was more: “there’s a kid in my son’s class who looks like the picture I saw on the TV” sort of thing. But the school was named, and for some reason the tip was never acted on, the cal s were never fol owed up. They got buried in the file and ignored, and ultimately, that’s down to me.’

‘Hang on, you weren’t the one who ignored them. You never even knew about them.’

‘I’l find out who
did
ignore them, but that’s not the point. Whoever it was, they looked at that piece of information and dismissed it, presumably because it sounded like bol ocks.

Within the general framework of the case, the direction we were moving in, they looked like crank cal s.’

‘The obvious route is usual y the right one, Yvonne.’

‘Wel , it wasn’t this time.’ Kitson had lowered her voice, but now it was growing louder, more strident. ‘We had our heads up our arses, and when a posh public school four or five miles away was mentioned, it was ignored because we thought we were looking in the right place. Because we were far too busy talking to kids at the comprehensives in the shittier parts of Edgware and Burnt Oak. Knocking on every door on the Deansbrook estate, and on the Wal grove . . .’

Andy Stone came round the corner and Kitson trailed off. Stone nodded at the two of them, non-committal, and walked away again after a second or two. Thorne thought that Stone wasn’t the greatest copper he’d ever known, but every so often his instincts were spot on.

Kitson spoke quietly again. ‘Now that kid can afford to be a cocky little sod, because he knows he’s got away with it. Because we let him. He can swan around, wearing the same earring he wore on the night he kil ed Amin Latif, because he thinks he’s bul etproof.’

An officer by the lift kicked the doors, then walked briskly past them towards the stairs, announcing that he couldn’t be bothered to wait, that he was desperate for a fag.

‘I know al about fucking up,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ve done stuff that makes this look trivial.’

That got something to soften around Kitson’s eyes. ‘I’m not arguing,’ she said.

‘There wouldn’t be any point.’

‘I just want to put this right.’

‘Wel , that’s the good part. Unlike most of the times I’ve fucked up, it sounds like you’ve got the chance.’

Now that they were out of the more dangerous territory, they returned to the lifts.

‘Bearing in mind how we came across Farrel in the first place, are we chasing up a possible link to
this
case?’ Kitson pressed the button. ‘We’re sure that he
knows
Mul en at least.’

Considering the strange turn that the case had taken in the previous twelve hours, Thorne now thought it even less likely that there could be a connection between the kidnapping of Luke Mul en and a six-month-old racial y motivated murder. But he also remembered what he’d just said to Kitson about the most obvious route. ‘It can’t hurt to talk to him when you get the chance,’ he said.

The lift arrived and they stepped inside.

‘I certainly plan on getting the chance,’ Kitson said. ‘But he’s not the easiest kid to talk to.’

‘How are your three, anyway?’

The doors slid across as an officer from Serious and Organised slipped quickly inside. Kitson answered Thorne as though she were measuring her own children against others she might recently have met.

‘Fucking
gorgeous
.’

On the ground floor, Thorne’s phone rang as he moved gingerly through the revolving doors.

‘This is Graham Hoolihan. You left a message . . .’

Hoolihan was the DCI whose details had been passed on by Carol Chamberlain. He had led the investigation five years earlier into the murder of Sarah Hanley, believed to have been kil ed by her boyfriend, Grant Freestone. Thorne had left Hoolihan a message the previous afternoon.

‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t know if Carol Chamberlain explained why we’re interested in Grant Freestone . . .’

She had, but evidently it hadn’t been to Hoolihan’s satisfaction. So Thorne went over it again. Outside Scotland Yard, the pavement was thick with people on their way to work, hurrying towards Parliament Square and Buckingham Gate. Though the rain had as good as gone, there were stil one or two umbrel as up, as it looked like it hadn’t gone very far.

Hoolihan did not know Tony Mul en, and was unaware of any threats that might have been made against him by Grant Freestone. He was sure about one thing, though: ‘Freestone’s not a kidnapper.’

Thorne was consistently surprised by how ready people were to put criminals into boxes. Lazy or just unimaginative, it seemed strange to him. If a seemingly respectable doctor could be a serial kil er in his spare time, why was it so difficult to conceive of a paedophile and suspected murderer kidnapping someone? ‘Did you know him?’ Thorne asked.

‘I never
met
him,’ Hoolihan said. ‘Though I hope to have that pleasure one day.’

‘I hope you do, too.’ Thorne marked down the man on the phone as one of those who hated to fail, but guessed that it was the result – or the lack of one – more than any sense of injustice that needled him. Points or passion; it usual y came down to one or the other.

‘You could try talking to one of the people on Freestone’s MAPPA panel. They
ought
to have known the bastard. They watched him for six months after he came out, didn’t they?’

‘Thanks, I’l do that.’

‘I can’t tel you who they were, mind you, except for the copper who was involved. I dug his name out before I cal ed.’

Thorne reached into his jacket pocket and scribbled down the details on the back of a used Travelcard. ‘He’d have the names of the others on the panel, would he?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Hoolihan said. ‘We certainly didn’t have anything to do with them at the time. We just wanted to find Freestone. Once he’d buggered off, a bunch of social workers, or what have you, was no use to anyone. The whole thing was a waste of bloody time, if you want my honest opinion. Do-gooders who didn’t real y do a fat lot of good!’

‘Why “do-gooders”?’

‘They decide to tel Sarah Hanley about Freestone. About what he’s like. They then tel
Freestone
what they’re going to do, so he goes marching round there, him and Hanley argue, and he throws the poor cow through a coffee table.’

‘You think it was the MAPPA panel’s fault that Sarah Hanley was kil ed?’

Hoolihan paused, unwil ing perhaps to go quite that far. ‘The “PP” is supposed to stand for “Public Protection” . . .’

The chat didn’t last much longer, with both men keen to get on with their days. Afterwards, Thorne sat on one of the concrete bol ards and made four phone cal s trying to get hold of DCI Cal um Roper. Once he’d tracked down his quarry, he made an appointment to see him later that morning. During their brief conversation he outlined the Mul en case, taking care to drop the names Hignett, Brigstocke and Jesmond, and to stress the urgency of the situation. He never mentioned Grant Freestone.

Then he began heading towards Westminster tube station, exchanging nods with an armed officer he knew by sight. He watched as a kid with a Mohican posed next to the officer while his mate took a photo. The copper smiled politely and put a hand on the kid’s shoulder. The kid grinned like an idiot and pointed towards the copper’s machine-gun. Thorne turned at the clatter of heels on the pavement behind him.

‘Hold on . . .’

Porter caught up, fel into step beside Thorne, and the two of them carried on walking. They had not spoken since the cursory exchanges the night before, at the crime scene.

‘You move pretty fast for a short-arse,’ she said.

They carried on in silence past Christchurch Gardens, original y part of St Margaret’s, Westminster and burial site of the seventeenth-century Irish adventurer Thomas ‘Colonel’

Blood, who stole the Crown Jewels. In point of fact, Blood was buried twice, his body having been dug up by those keen to make sure that he was real y dead before being interred again. Thorne had known one or two vil ains himself, happily no longer walking around, who it might have been worth checking up on . . .

‘Thanks for speaking up at the briefing,’ he said.

‘About what?’

‘What you said about Luke. About him not being able to get in touch. It’s ridiculous, this idea that he kil ed anyone.’

‘I’m not sure what I think, if I’m honest.’

Thorne looked surprised, and wasn’t shy about letting her know just how sure
he
was. ‘It’s bol ocks. Somebody’s holding him.’

‘Who?’

Thorne almost smiled. ‘I don’t have
all
the bloody answers.’

At the north end of Victoria Street the view improved, with the London Eye becoming visible through the grey, and the monstrous Department of Trade and Industry building giving way to the splendour of Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster beyond. It was not much after eight o’clock, and the weather stil looked like it could turn at any moment, but there were already plenty of snap-happy visitors being led around on overpriced walking tours by guides waving umbrel as.

‘Why don’t we just keep going up to Embankment?’ Porter said. ‘We can get the Northern Line straight up to Colindale. You can give me the tourist bit round Becke House.’

Thorne stopped, waited for a chance to cross the road. ‘I’m not heading back there just yet. There’s bugger-al else to do, so I’m going to chase up this Freestone thing.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’

‘Talk to someone who knew him.’

Porter stepped back from the kerb as a lorry overtook a car on the inside. ‘Want some company?’

‘Why don’t I give you a shout a bit later?’ Thorne said.

‘OK.’ Porter looked like she had a lot more to say than that.

Thorne saw a gap in the traffic and stepped into it. ‘See where we both are after lunch?’

The rain had come again before he’d reached the other side of the road. He picked up speed as he turned towards the river and made for the tube station, feeling wetter, and more of a miserable shit, with every step.

NINE

If the fixtures and fittings at Central 3000 had made Thorne’s shared cupboard at Becke House feel shabby, DCI Cal um Roper’s office on the twelfth floor of the Empress made it seem downright medieval.

Roper had read the look on Thorne’s face as he was shown in. ‘It’s only because we’re new,’ he’d said.

When it had been built in 1961, the Empress State Building – a thirty-storey tower block in Hammersmith – had been impressive enough to be named after a world-famous skyscraper across the Atlantic. Back then, its distinctive triangular footprint had seemed radical and interesting, but forty years on it had been in dire need of the eighty-mil ion-pound refurbishment that had won several major awards and restored much of its former glory. Though not quite as swish as the glass-and-steel Ark just up the road, its fabulous new facilities had proved hugely popular, with almost half of the office space behind the shiny, blue, solar-control ed double glazing being snapped up by the Metropolitan Police Service.

Thorne had stood in the vast atrium, gazed around as his ID card was swiped at the first of three separate security checkpoints. He’d been a little depressed by the fact that a building a year younger than he was had needed such a comprehensive facelift. How long before his own frame and superstructure would be in need of serious attention? He’d taken back his wal et and felt a spasm of pain as he’d reached round to tuck it into his back pocket.

What do you mean ‘how long’?

Though he worked at a desk that Donald Trump might have kil ed for, Roper had chosen to lead Thorne to the other end of his office, where four oatmeal-coloured armchairs sat around a low, glass table. Roper pushed aside a green file, watched as a young woman with lipstick on her teeth laid down a tray of coffee, and biscuits wrapped in cel ophane. ‘You know what coppers are like,’ he said. ‘This place’l be a shit-hole inside a month.’

Thorne smiled and nodded, but seriously doubted it. He’d taken in the man as quickly as the surroundings and decided that Roper was probably the type who liked to keep everything tidy. He was tal , and looked pretty fit for a man Thorne put in his early to mid-fifties, with hair that had been subtly coloured, and cut every bit as nicely as his dark blue suit. Not a man to let things slip, if he could help it.

When he’d said ‘new’, Roper had been talking about he and his team, just as much as the facilities they occupied. The Special Enquiries team was an offshoot of what had once been the Fraud Squad, part of the SO unit that had become SCD6. Those on its roster had been brought together to tackle any case where the victim – or perpetrator – was deemed to be in the public eye. The SE team handled cases involving corrupt MPs, blackmailed TV personalities, drug-fucked pop stars and royalty behaving badly. It was widely thought of as a prestigious gig, and Cal um Roper, for one, looked as though he thoroughly enjoyed being part of it.

The ‘
Sexy
Enquiries Team’, Hol and had cal ed it once.

Thorne had pointed out that he and Hol and spent their days dragging bloated bodies from dirty rivers, or trying to ID corpses so badly burned that they looked like Coco Krispies with legs. In comparison, issuing parking tickets sounded sexy . . .

‘You’l have spoken to Graham Hoolihan then?’ Roper had already helped himself to a biscuit and asked the question with his mouth ful , like he’d suddenly remembered it.

‘That’s right.’ Thorne was more than a little thrown, but hoped it didn’t show. He tried to work backwards, to work out how Roper had made the connection to Freestone so quickly.

Roper leaned forward for his coffee and provided the answer before Thorne had had a chance to figure it out. ‘I made a couple of cal s. Found out you were thinking that your kidnapper might have previously made threats against Mr Mul en.’

Thorne made a mental note not to drop Trevor Jesmond’s name into any more conversations.