Little more had been gleaned from the details of his mobile-phone activity. The phone itself had been in Luke’s possession when he’d gone missing, so it had not been possible to check his contacts list, but records of calls and text messages provided by the phone company had yet to reveal anything that looked important. Luke had called his sister more than anybody else.
Thorne stared at the dust, at the shape of it, marking the absence of something, and found himself holding his breath. He imagined a young, alert mind racing, and fighting hard as the drug took hold, as eyelids dropped and thoughts slipped into the wet. Sopping and inky-black…
He pulled down the sleeve of his jacket, gripped it between fingers and palm and leaned down to wipe away the marks from the glass.
‘You won’t find him in here.’
Thorne turned to see Juliet Mullen standing in the doorway of her brother’s room. He slapped the grey dust marks from his sleeve. ‘Actually, I’ve found quite a lot of him,’ he said.
The girl rolled her eyes and walked past him into the room, clearly unimpressed, and unwilling to discuss anything as tedious as an abstract concept. She leaned back against a wall and slid slowly down it until she was sitting on the grey carpet. ‘So…?’
Thorne looked around, then back at Juliet. ‘Well, Luke was certainly tidy.’
‘Nothing gets past you, does it?’
‘I am a detective.’
‘Can you prove that?’
‘I’ve taken exams.’
‘They must have lowered the pass rate.’
She wasn’t smiling, but Thorne sensed that behind the studied air of boredom and irritation, it was a struggle not to; that she was enjoying the banter. Her hair was long, the same charcoal as the make-up around her eyes and the hooded top she wore over baggy jeans. Skateboarder chic, Thorne thought it might be called. Or grunge, or something. He thought about asking her, then decided it wasn’t such a great idea.
‘What was on the video?’ she said suddenly.
It took Thorne a moment to work out what she was talking about; a moment before deciding he would not answer.
‘Mum and Dad watched it this morning, before they called Porter. Just the once, I think, but it was enough. Obviously they wouldn’t let me see it. And they didn’t want to talk about it afterwards, so…’
‘So?’
‘So… I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask.’
Thorne watched her draw her knees up, shrinking into the corner of the room. He couldn’t help but be reminded of the previous evening with Phil Hendricks. Now, as then, he could see the pain and the longing beneath the pose; the anguish, raw behind the flippant remark. It couldn’t hurt to tell her.
‘It was Luke. Just Luke on the tape.’
She nodded quickly, as though something she already knew had been confirmed. It was a mature gesture, self-possessed, but in the next instant a tremor in the soft flesh around her mouth turned her back into a child again. ‘What did he say? Did he say anything?’
‘Juliet, I can’t-’
‘They were crying after they’d watched it, the pair of them. They pretended they weren’t, which was a bit bloody pointless, if you ask me. I mean, I knew what it was, you know? I didn’t think they were watching porno at nine o’clock in the morning.’
‘They didn’t want you to get upset,’ Thorne said.
‘Right, that’s brilliant. So now all I can think about is what might have been on the tape. What whoever’s got Luke might have been doing to him. How much pain he might have been in.’
‘He’s doing OK. Honestly.’
‘Define “OK”.’
Thorne took a deep breath.
‘“OK” as in having a whale of a time?’ She began plucking at the pile of the carpet. ‘Or “OK” as in still breathing?’
It was as tough a question as had been thrown at Thorne in a long time. ‘Nobody’s hurting him.’
Her head dropped to her knees. When she heaved it up again fifteen or twenty seconds later, the eyeliner was beginning to run. ‘He’s got a year and a bit on me, but sometimes it’s like I’m the older sister.’ Her eyes roamed from one part of the room to another, like she was searching to prove her point. ‘I have to look after him in loads of ways. You know what I mean?’
Thorne stepped across and sat down on the edge of the bed. The duvet was dark blue and neatly squared away. He guessed that Luke had probably made the bed himself before leaving for school on Friday. ‘Yeah, I think I do,’ he said.
She sniffed. ‘Pain in the fucking arse…’
The silence that followed was probably more uncomfortable for the girl than it was for Thorne. It was less than half a minute before she pulled herself to her feet. ‘Right…’ Like she had a lot to be getting on with.
Thorne stood, too. He cocked his head towards the doorway, towards the rest of the house. ‘It’s good that you’re all so… close. At a time like this, you know?’
Juliet Mullen nodded, pushed her hair back behind her ears.
‘What did they argue about?’ Thorne walked back to the workstation and looked at the photograph pinned to a corkboard above it: Luke on his father’s shoulders, eyes wide behind orange swimming goggles; the pair of them grinning like idiots and the sun bouncing off the blue water around them. ‘Luke and your dad, last Friday morning.’
‘Stupid stuff about school.’
‘Work stuff?’
‘About Luke not making the rugby team or something. It wasn’t a big deal.’
‘Your dad seems to think it was.’
‘That’s just because of what’s happened. Because he’s feeling guilty. Because the last time he saw Luke, the two of them were shouting at each other.’ She took a pace towards the bed and leaned down to smooth out the duvet where Thorne had been sitting. ‘Luke was already feeling bad about it by the time we got to school. He told me he was going to say “sorry” when he got home, that it was all his fault for being cheeky or whatever.’
‘Was it?’ Thorne asked.
‘I can’t even remember. It was just bloody silly because those two never argue, you know? They’re really close. It’s that whole father-son thing?’ It sounded like a question at the end, as though she were making sure Thorne knew what she meant.
‘Right.’
‘See you later.’
Thorne watched her leave. He knew exactly what she’d meant and, more importantly, he now also knew what had bothered him about the video.
What it was that Luke had said… or hadn’t said.
He stopped on his way out, seeing that the corner of a poster near the door had come unstuck, and when he reached across to press it back in place, he noticed the writing beneath. He peered at the words, at the small, neat letters written in black ink on the wallpaper. A stark and secret litany of frustration, impatience or rage.
Fuck off
Fuck off
Fuck off!
From the school, Holland had gone straight back to Central 3000 and found himself a desk out of the way. He needed ten or fifteen minutes to gather his thoughts, to get into the Police National Computer system and to go over the relevant material. It was only when he’d done both, when he was as certain as he could be that he had something worth shouting about, that he called Becke House and spoke to Yvonne Kitson.
‘How’s your kidnap going, Dave?’
‘Fine.’
‘Missing us?’
‘Listen, Guv, I need to talk to you about the Amin Latif murder.’
It was a little over six months since the eighteen-year-old Asian, an engineering student at a local sixth-form college, had been beaten to death by three white youths at a bus stop in Edgware. It had been, for all the obvious reasons, a high-profile investigation, but despite the media coverage, an extensive enquiry and even a witness who had provided a detailed description of the main attacker, the case had quickly gone cold.