Free Buried-6 by Mark Billingham Page B

flyaway grains that dotted the tabletop around their edges. Insubstantial. Virtual y weightless.
    Something so wonderful coming from nothing.

    FIVE
    Fifteen minutes from the Mul en house, in the largely affluent suburb of Stanmore, Butler’s Hal School had occupied its hundred-plus acres of lush parkland for a little under a century.
    Hol and read a potted history of the place, flicking through the school’s lavish prospectus as he waited in a car at the end of a mile-long driveway. Of its 250-plus pupils – most of whom were fed in from a nearby prep school in the same foundation – almost a third were boarders. Of the total number, around 40 per cent were girls, first admitted as sixth-formers in the early eighties, then into the main body of the school ten years after that.
    Kenny Parsons, who had gone in search of a toilet fifteen minutes earlier, knocked on the window. Hol and looked up, wound down the window.
    ‘It’s a fair bet that if you can afford to send your kids here, you can afford to cough up a decent ransom,’ Parsons said. ‘These kids might as wel have targets on their backs.’
    ‘Wouldn’t be al owed,’ Hol and said, lifting the brochure. ‘There’s a very strict uniform code.’
    Parsons looked back towards the school. ‘There’s a very strict everything code.’
    Hol and got out of the car, tossed the brochure on to the back seat. He and Parsons began walking towards the school building. ‘“Falsehood dishonours me”,’ he said.
    ‘Come again?’
    ‘That’s the translation from the Latin, apparently. “Lies shame me”, or whatever. The school motto.’
    Parsons nodded, vacant. ‘The lower sixth should be out in a minute,’ he said.
    The end of the school day was staggered, with pupils from upper and lower years coming out at twenty-minute intervals. Porter and three col eagues, working in teams of two, were already elsewhere on the school premises, talking to children from the fourth and fifth forms in the presence of teachers or parents. As Hol and and Parsons moved towards the school’s main exit, they joined another pair of SO7 officers, fal ing in behind them as they walked across the car park, cutting through the massed ranks of silver or black people carriers: Porsche Cayennes, Volvos and BMW X5s. One of the officers, a skinny Essex boy with bad skin, put his face close to the tinted window of a Lexus as he passed, tried to see inside. ‘What do these people do? ’ he said.
    Hol and, Parsons and the others stopped in the school quad, loitering outside a pair of vast wooden doors, which slammed open as the first of the students began to emerge. Like al those officers working on site, the four were smartly, though informal y, dressed: khakis and casual jackets; suits over polo shirts. They could easily have been teachers, or even, in one or two cases, students out of uniform.
    Parsons was clearly stil thinking about his col eague’s question as he watched the first wave of pupils emerge, and spoke above their chatter. ‘Wel , I don’t think many of them are coppers. And I can’t see any of their kids becoming coppers, either.’
    ‘They do have scholarship places,’ Hol and said. ‘Not everyone’s dad’s an oil bil ionaire or a footbal er, you know.’
    ‘That’s a fair point,’ the Essex boy said. ‘Take Mul en for a kick-off. Unless he was seriously bent, I can’t see how he’d be rol ing in it.’
    Parsons said something about a DCI’s pension, about Mul en making seriously good money as a security consultant, but Hol and had stopped listening. He was watching two girls, aged fifteen or so, heads together, whispering. He was thinking about Chloe. Deciding that, even though it was a long way off, he wouldn’t argue if there was so much as a chance of her getting into a place like this. That he would argue until his last breath with the idea of her ever becoming a copper.
    Officers had travel ed to Butler’s Hal late on the Monday – the first day the