Free Buried-6 by Mark Billingham Page A

doing what was simple and sound, and not by refusing to accept what you’d been told and banging on about how many names were on a fucking list.
    Mul en emptied his glass and thought about the name he hadn’t written down. He told himself that it was unimportant; that it was acceptable within the scheme of things; that he’d done it for the right reason. A sil y reason perhaps, but one worth the very smal est of lies.
    He would have loved to forget the man to whom that name belonged, but it would never slip his mind. It was a name with unhappy connotations, after al . But it was a name – and this was al that real y counted – that he knew damn wel had nothing to do with his son’s disappearance. With who was holding Luke, or where, or what they wanted. So why did it matter, and what harm could come from leaving one name out of it?
    He listened for a minute or two more, then moved back to the fridge.
    What harm?

    AMANDA
    It was a bag. Just a plastic bag, that had done al the damage; was stil doing it if assorted shrinks and social workers knew what they were talking about.
    Probably one of those real y cheap, stripy ones that you picked up at late-night supermarkets and shitty corner shops. The driver of the second car had never gone so far as to describe the bag in court, but that was how she always imagined it. Fluttering across the street and up on to the windscreen, held there by the wind, blinding the driver for that crucial second or two and causing him to swerve. A shapeless piece of jetsam that made him drive into the silver Mercedes coming the other way. That floated up like smoke at the impact, and sent her daddy through the glass.
    Cheap and insubstantial. Virtual y weightless. Something so terrible coming from nothing . . .
    The boy was dosed-up now and out of it, and Conrad was getting a bit of sleep in the next room. It was the middle of the day, but both their body clocks had gone haywire. The curtains were closed al the time; it could have been morning, noon or night. It didn’t real y matter one way or the other. It was boring, that was al . They just had to stay where they were for as long as the whole thing took; until they knew what was happening next.
    When she dwel ed on what had happened to her father, which was often, she never real y thought about the other driver: unsighted and screaming behind the wheel; giving his evidence in a neck-brace; limping away down the steps outside the court while her mother shouted after him. She thought instead – and she knew how irrational it was – about the person who had sold the plastic bag. About the person who had fil ed it with fruit, or fish, or fuck-al worth talking about, and about al the hands the bag had passed through before it was final y tossed into the gutter. She thought about the people who would never know the part they had played in her father’s death. She imagined al their faces. She gave each one a life, and a family to fil it. And in her darkest moments, of which there were many, she’d take a member of that family away, and watch the life she’d made for someone fal apart.
    She walked across to the portable CD player in the corner of the bedroom, turned the music up just a little to drown out the boy’s breathing. She took what she needed from her handbag and sat back down on the floor.
    They’d argued again about the usual thing, Conrad doing that low, disappointed voice he saved up for the drug conversations. He told her that she needed to keep a clear head.
    She pointed out that it was precisely because the situation they were in was so stressful that she needed the lift. He got angrier then, reminded her that she always needed it, and she told him that the last thing she needed was for him to be so self-righteous, and that she’d sort herself out afterwards, when they had the money.
    Nodding her head to the music, she tipped out the powder; measured and scraped and cut. She rol ed up the note and stared at the lines, at the