Thorne was out of his seat. He couldn’t keep the astonishment and the disgust from his voice. ‘So he kidnapped your son?’
‘I was stupid,’ she said, clutching at her husband. ‘I was so stupid to do it when I did. He’d just lost his mother and he was in pieces, and I thought it would be a good time, you know… to tell him, because he would have other things on his mind. But he went completely off the rails.’
Thorne stared, thinking, You’re telling me. He waited for the rest.
‘And, God help me, I mentioned Sarah Hanley.’
‘What?’
‘We never talked about what happened. It was just like a film we’d seen or something. But I wanted him to accept that it was over and leave me alone, and I said something about how terrible it would be if anyone ever found out. It was just something I said, because I was desperate and I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t trying to threaten him.’
‘What was it that happened?’ Thorne asked.
Mullen just gasped out his wife’s name.
‘I was there when Sarah Hanley died,’ she said.
Tony Mullen got slowly to his feet and, as both of his wife’s hands were in his, she rose with him. Their fingers twisted, whitened, and the tension grew in their arms until they were pushing at each other, standing in front of the sofa, straining and searching for some leverage, a low moan somewhere in the throat of one of them…
Thorne was out of his chair, fearing violence, but the moment passed and Mullen dropped back on to the sofa as if he’d been gutted. Thorne stared at the two of them. Took a few deep breaths as a hundred questions careered through his mind.
Knowing that he could wait for the answers, he took out his phone and began to dial.
Maggie Mullen saw what was happening. She stepped towards him and reached out a hand. ‘Please, not like last time,’ she said. ‘Don’t go in there like you did at that flat. Don’t charge in there with guns. I don’t know how he’ll react. I’ve no idea what he’ll do.’
Thorne nodded and raised the phone. ‘I need a home address.’
She gave it to him without a second thought. ‘Please,’ she said again. ‘Luke’s unharmed… so far. He’s fine. Promise me you won’t do anything stupid, that you won’t go in there with guns…’
The number Thorne was calling began to ring. He looked at Tony Mullen and followed the man’s wide eyes to those of the woman who was pawing at his sleeve. ‘How do you know Luke’s unharmed?’
Her eyes left his. ‘I’ve spoken to him.’
Mullen’s voice was hoarse. ‘You’ve spoken to Luke?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not to Luke. I haven’t spoken to Luke.’
Porter answered her phone.
She’d just started driving back from Kathleen Bristow’s house in Shepherd’s Bush. She pulled over to take down details as soon as Thorne had her attention and began to take her through it. He gave her an address in Catford, the other side of the city from him, and still a good distance south-east of where Porter was.
‘How soon do you think you can get a team there?’ He asked.
‘They’ll be there before I am,’ Porter said. ‘Almost certainly.’
Thorne passed on Maggie Mullen’s concerns: her belief that the kidnapper’s reaction to an armed entry was highly unpredictable; her plea for them to be cautious.
Porter sounded dubious. ‘I can’t make any promises,’ she said.
When Thorne hung up, he told her Porter had assured him that she’d do her best.
He didn’t feel bad about lying to her.
TWENTY-FIVE
You think about the kids.
First and last, in that sort of situation, in that sort of state; when you can’t decide if it’s anger or agony that’s all but doubling you up, and making it so hard for you to spit the words across the room. First and last, you think about them…
‘Why the hell, why the fuck, didn’t you tell me this earlier?’
‘It wasn’t the right time. It seemed best to wait.’
‘Best?’ She took a step towards the man and woman standing on the far side of her living room.
‘I think you should try to calm down,’ the man said.
‘What do you expect me to do?’ she said. ‘I’d really be interested to know.’
‘I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your decision…’
‘You think I’ve got a choice?’
The other woman spoke gently. ‘We need to sit down and talk about the best way forward-’
‘Christ Almighty. You just march in here and tell me this. Casually, like it’s just something you forgot to mention. You walk in here and tell me all this… shit!’
‘Sarah-’
‘I don’t know you. I don’t even fucking know you…’
For a few seconds there was just the ticking, and the distant traffic, and the noise bleeding in from a radio in the kitchen…
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re what?’ Sarah Hanley smiled, then laughed. She gathered the material of her dress between her fingers as her fists clenched at her sides. ‘I need to get to the school.’
‘The kids’ll be fine,’ the man said. He looked at the woman who was with him and she nodded her head in complete agreement. ‘Honestly, love. Absolutely fine.’
‘… that’s when she came at him,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘When she came at both of us, scratching and spitting and swearing her head off. He only raised his hands to protect his face, because she was out of control. He didn’t mean to push her.’
‘She was thinking of her children,’ Thorne said.
‘So were we. That’s why we were there, why the decision was made to tell her about Grant Freestone’s past.’
‘And it never occurred to anyone that she might not take the news very calmly?’
Maggie Mullen had slunk back to the armchair. Her arms were wrapped around each other at the waist as she spoke. From the sofa, her husband watched, ashen-faced, as though all but the smallest breath he needed to stay alive had been punched out of him.
‘We were trained to have these conversations,’ Maggie Mullen said. ‘We tried to be sensitive. Everything just… got out of hand.’
‘What happened afterwards?’
‘We panicked. There was such a lot of blood. We didn’t know what the hell to do, and in the end we just decided to leave.’ She looked at Thorne. ‘I can’t remember whose idea it was, really I can’t, but it was all such a mess. It was just a stupid accident.’
‘An accident for which you knew Grant Freestone would probably get blamed.’
‘We never thought about that,’ she said. ‘I didn’t anyway, I swear. When he did get blamed, we talked about it, but we didn’t know what to do for the best. It was too late to come forward by then, to try and explain.’
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.’