Thorne picked one.
Driving out of the village, they both started when Maggie Mullen’s phone rang. She looked at the display. The phone was shaking in her hand.
‘It’s him…’
She said, ‘yes’ a lot; told the caller that she was nearly there and that she just wanted to talk. She asked how Luke was, begged the man on the other end of the phone not to hurt him.
‘What did he want?’ Thorne asked when she’d hung up.
‘He wanted to know where I was. If I was close.’
‘You said, Yes I am; it’s fine. What was that?’
‘He was worried,’ she said. ‘Told me that if I was driving, he hoped I was hands-free.’
Thorne accelerated into the countryside again and smiled grimly. ‘He knows you’re not alone…’
Five minutes later he turned on to a narrow track. It was overgrown and pitted with puddles. The car rattled across a cattle-grid, then followed the track down and to the right, until its lights picked out the house a few hundred yards away.
‘That’s it…’
It wasn’t what Thorne had expected. Not a cottage in any usual sense of the word. It wasn’t particularly small, and didn’t even look that old. But it was certainly isolated. Not exactly chocolate-box, but in the ideal position for some purposes.
Thorne slowed to a crawl as he approached. There were lights on in two rooms downstairs, at the front.
‘What are we going to do?’ Maggie Mullen asked.
‘Well, you are going to knock on the door. Go and say hello to your boyfriend.’
‘What about you?’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ Thorne said. He stopped the car, climbed out and moved away without shutting the door. From the shadows fifty feet from the house, he watched Maggie Mullen go to the front door. Saw it open and watched her walk inside, slow and stiff.
Then he moved quickly towards the back of the building.
He was in virtual darkness almost immediately. He pushed slowly through a low wooden gate whose top edge felt damp, rotten beneath his fingers. It opened into a knot of bramble. Stepping across, there was coarse, wet grass around his knees. As his eyes adjusted, Thorne could just make out the wall – higher in some places than others – that separated the garden from the fields beyond.
He kept close to the side of the house, moving away from it only when he needed to step around a long metal trough and what looked like an old butler sink full of earth and stones. He caught his hand on something as he edged along the wall, sucked in air fast, and wiped away the thickening beads of blood on his damp trouser-leg.
At the back of the cottage was a rusted table and chairs. An arrangement of bird tables. A rotary washing line that barely protruded above four feet of couch grass and thistle below it.
Thorne pressed his face against the window of a small extension. He could make out plates and pans on a drainer, the digital display on a microwave oven. There was a sliver of light at floor level from somewhere inside the house.
The back door was open.
He thought about Porter waiting for his call. About the phone sitting on the front seat of the car…
In the second or two between feeling the handle give and pushing, he considered all those times when he’d faced a similar decision. When he’d been torn between doing the sensible thing or saying, ‘Fuck it.’ When, on almost every occasion, he’d made the wrong choice.
He pushed.
And he stepped into the dark kitchen. Moved quickly to the door beneath which the light was coming. And listened. Though he could not hear voices, there was something about the quality of the silence from the other side of the door that told him there were people in the next room.
He waited.
Five seconds… ten.
Then a voice he’d heard before: ‘For heaven’s sake, stop pissing about and come in.’
Thorne did as he’d been invited, slowly. His pace slowed even further once he saw what was waiting for him. One step at a time, though his mind was racing, processing the visual information, asking questions.
Where’s the boy?
Man, woman, rope, knife…
Where’s the fucking boy?
TWENTY-SEVEN
‘I knew she was lying.’
‘Peter…’
‘About coming on her own.’ Lardner nudged his glasses with a knuckle. ‘I could hear it in her voice, clear as a bell.’ Laughing. ‘I mean, I’ve heard her lying often enough, haven’t I? Stretched out next to me, naked, telling her old man she’s tied up in a meeting…’
The buzzing in Thorne’s head had faded enough for him to formulate a response. ‘She’s lied to a lot of people,’ he said. He glanced towards a dustsheet-covered armchair in which Maggie Mullen sat directly ahead of him, beneath a small window. She didn’t return Thorne’s look. Her eyes moved back and forth every few seconds between Lardner and the brown panelled door a few feet away.
Lardner was sitting on the floor against a covered sofa that had been on Thorne’s right as he’d entered the small living room. He was wearing jeans and a rust-coloured shirt, and his legs were drawn up to his chest. His hands dangled between his knees, a carving knife held loosely in one of them. The other clutched the end of a rope which ran away from him, straight and taut, disappearing around the edge of a door beneath the stairs.
Cellar. Had to be.
Thorne asked the question even though he’d known the answer a second after stepping in from the kitchen: ‘Where’s the boy?’
There was a noise from somewhere beneath them. The rope shifted against the white painted floorboards.
Luke Mullen was alive.
Lardner turned his head towards the door and shouted, ‘Come on now, son, I told you I want to see this rope stay taut. You stay where you are, and come up here when I’m good and ready.’
Maggie Mullen leaned forward in her chair. Her fists were tight around the material of her sweater, pulling at it, wrenching. ‘For pity’s sake, Peter…’
‘You need to shush… really,’ Lardner said. ‘We’ve talked about this.’ He sounded tired but relaxed. He looked back to Thorne and rolled his eyes, as though another man would understand how exasperating all this nagging was.
Thorne nodded gently, tried to smile.
Lardner raised the hand that held the knife, rubbed it across the top of his head. The few wisps of dark hair were all over the place and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. ‘Silly,’ Lardner said. ‘All so bloody silly.’
A board moaned beneath Thorne’s feet as he shifted his weight, and he saw Lardner’s eyes fly to him, target him, in a second.
Not relaxed at all…
‘You should sit.’ Lardner nodded towards a low pine trunk next to the fireplace.
Thorne moved back until his calves met the edge of the box and dropped down slowly. He looked around, like someone who might be considering renting the place. The ceiling was Artexed: stiff spikes and whorls like hardened icing. A small landscape in a lacquered frame; a wooden barometer; a row of hardback books without jackets on shelves to one side of the front door. In the hearth, an arrangement of dried flowers poking from a stone vase, thick with dust.
‘Why are we here?’ Thorne said.
Lardner looked a little confused. ‘I don’t remember inviting anybody.’
‘You know what I mean. Why any of this?’
‘Well it’s a fair question. Because it is all senseless, all of it, but I’m not really the right person to ask.’ He drew a foot of the rope towards him and twisted it around his wrist. ‘I don’t want to sound childish, really I don’t, but I’m not the one who started this.’
‘Oh Jesus, Peter.’ There was suddenly anger in Maggie Mullen’s voice. ‘You can’t lay any of this madness at my door. All I wanted to do was get out of a relationship. I didn’t do anything wrong.’
It was as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘She made a mistake. And everything went haywire from that point, I suppose. I couldn’t believe she was trying to hurt me as much as she had. I convinced myself she didn’t know what she was doing…’