Buried-6 Read Free Page A

command units dealt with everything from contract kil ings to serious drug crime. Aside from the Kidnap Unit, these OCUs included the Flying Squad, the Hostage and Extortion Team, and the Projects Team, with whom Thorne had worked on the joint gangland operation that had ended so badly the previous year.
    ‘Not the Kidnap Unit, merciful y. They’re high-flyers; they don’t like to mingle with the likes of us. They like to stay a bit mysterious .’
    ‘Wel , I suppose there has to be an element of secrecy, bearing in mind what they do. They have to be a bit more discreet than the rest of us.’
    Thorne looked unconvinced. ‘They fancy themselves.’ He leaned across and turned on the radio, tuned it in to Talk Sport.
    ‘So this bloke Mul en knows Jesmond, does he?’
    ‘Known him for years.’
    ‘Same sort of age, then?’
    ‘I think Mul en’s a few years older,’ Thorne said. ‘They worked together on an old AMIP unit south of the river somewhere. The DCI reckons Mul en was the one responsible for bringing Jesmond on. Pul ed our Trevor up through the ranks.’
    ‘Right . . .’
    ‘Remind me to punch the fucker, would you?’
    Hol and smiled, but looked uncomfortable.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Someone’s kidnapped his son . . .’ Hol and said.
    On the final stretch of the Edgware Road, approaching Marble Arch, the traffic began to snarl up. Thorne grew increasingly frustrated, thinking that if the congestion charge had made a difference, it was only to people’s wal ets. On the radio, they were talking about the game Spurs were due to play the fol owing evening. The studio expert said they were favourites to take three points off Fulham, after three wins on the bounce.
    ‘That’s the kiss of bloody death,’ Thorne said.
    Hol and was clearly stil thinking about what had been said a few minutes earlier. ‘I think you just see these things differently,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve got kids, you know?’
    Thorne grunted.
    ‘If something happens to somebody else’s—’
    ‘You think I was being insensitive?’ Thorne asked. ‘What I said.’
    ‘Just a bit.’

    ‘If I was really being insensitive, I’d say it was divine retribution.’ He glanced across and raised an eyebrow. This time, the smile he received in return was genuine, but it stil seemed to sit less easily on Hol and’s face than Thorne might once have expected.
    Hol and had never been quite as fresh-faced, as green and keen, as Thorne remembered; but when he’d been drafted on to Thorne’s team six years before as a twenty-five-year-old DC, there had certainly been a little more enthusiasm. And there had been belief. Of course, he and his girlfriend had been through domestic upheavals since then: there’d been the affair with a fel ow officer who’d later been murdered on duty; then the birth of his daughter, who would be two years old later in the year.
    And there’d been a good many bodies.
    An ever-expanding gal ery of those you only ever got to know once their lives had been taken from them. People whose darkest intimacies might be revealed to you, but whose voices you would never hear, whose thoughts you could never be privy to. An exhibition of the dead, running alongside another of the murderous living. And of those left behind; the pickers-up of lives.
    Thorne and Hol and, and others who came into contact with such things, were not defined by violence and grief. They did not walk and wake with it, but neither were they immune. It changed everything, eventual y.
    The belief became blunted . . .
    ‘How’s everything at home, Dave?’
    For a second or two, Hol and looked surprised, then pleased, before he closed up, just a little. ‘It’s good.’
    ‘Chloe must be getting big.’
    Hol and nodded, relaxing. ‘She’s changing every five minutes. Discovering stuff, you know? Doing something different every time I get home. She’s real y into music at the moment, singing along with whatever’s on.’
    ‘Nothing with twangy guitars,