Buried-6 by Mark Billingham

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    ‘Also, Jack’s had a dodgy back for years,’ she said. ‘He’s got some fantastic stuff he rubs on at night. I can bring it next time I see you.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘So you’ve had a double result.’
    Thorne thought about the video, the man with the syringe. He wondered if this could possibly be the same man whose face Carol Chamberlain stil remembered from a courtroom a dozen years earlier. A man who’d taken children before.
    With one hand, he reached for his discarded sandwich. The other put pen back to paper and began to scrawl.
    Drew box after box after box around the man’s name.

    CONRAD
    He’d come to realise a long time ago that nearly everything came down to fish and ponds. To how big a fish you were and the size of the pond you swam around in. That and time, of course. He’d decided that time was a very weird thing to get your head round.
    Obviously, he’d never read that book about it by the bloke in the wheelchair; the one who spoke through some machine he’d invented and sounded like a Dalek. He wouldn’t have understood it if he had, he knew that much, but he was pretty bloody sure that it would have been interesting. Time never ceased to amaze him, the way it messed you around. How you always got back from somewhere quicker than you got there. How the first week of your summer holiday seemed to last for ages and then the second week flew by and was al over before your skin had started peeling. How time dragged on and on when you were waiting for something to happen.
    It didn’t seem like five minutes since Amanda had danced across and stuck her tits out at him. Since she’d been happy to let him get his end away for a few Bacardi Breezers and the promise of a favour. Five minutes . . . six months . . . whatever . . . and now they were shooting a kid ful of drugs and sitting and waiting for something to happen.
    To be honest, he’d been happier doing what they’d done before. It was easy – in and out – and if anyone got hurt it was only because they real y asked for it. People who were stupid enough to get al heroic – with money that belonged to fucking Esso or whoever – deserved a kicking, as far as he was concerned. This was different, though. There was no guts in it, nothing to make you feel like you’d earned what you’d made. It felt shameful, like something only a pussy or a wanker would do. It was a weakling’s crime.
    Maybe he’d feel different when the two of them were sitting somewhere warm, spending the money. Maybe then he could forget how they’d come by it. He hoped so, anyway.
    Amanda was in the kitchen. Cheese on toast, probably; baked beans or something. She kept tel ing him that they’d splash out on somewhere flashy, go to a place with a doorman and photographers outside when the money came through. He’d asked when that was likely to be; told her that he was getting fed up sitting around with his thumb up his arse. That he wanted it finished. She’d told him that it wouldn’t be much longer. That it would be over and done with soon enough, one way or another. He’d thought that sounded a bit fucking ominous.
    He’d looked across at the boy then, slumped in a corner of the bedroom, and thought that it sounded very fucking scary . . .
    That had been a while ago. Hours and hours. Days, even. Time dragging its feet like some poor bastard who knows he’s got a beating coming.
    He knew it was al his own fault. That he’d had the chance to say ‘no’ early on, to say that it was a stupid idea. He couldn’t lay al this at Amanda’s door; but stil , he hated it.
    Waiting and not knowing.
    And feeling like a very smal fish.

    SIX
    There were posters covering almost every inch of the pale green Anaglypta: the Spurs team of 1975, with Steve Perryman in front holding the bal ; a futuristic Roger Dean landscape; the female tennis player walking away from camera scratching at a bare buttock. In the corner of the room, a music centre sat on a