TT12 The Bones Beneath Read online

  ‘Some very strange people in there.’

  ‘Can’t argue with that,’ Nicklin said.

  Burnham shook his head, sadly. ‘I can’t help wondering if we’ve got it all wrong,’ he said.

  Nicklin turned and stared at him. ‘Go on.’

  The warden shifted slightly in his chair. ‘Look, I’m just a layman and I’m not saying we should go back to Victorian times or anything, but it seems to me that we give these people too much freedom in there. That’s the one thing they’re supposed to have lost, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t that the whole point? So then we lock them up in places where they’re free to do all sorts of things. Free to take drugs and commit horrific acts of violence.’ He lifted his stick a foot or so, waved it in Nicklin’s direction. ‘Where the likes of you are free to carry on terrorising people.’

  Sitting next to Nicklin, Fletcher grunted and smiled. ‘Well, you’ll not be hearing any argument from me.’

  ‘As I said, just a layman.’

  Nicklin nodded, like he was weighing up what had been said. He turned his gaze on Burnham. ‘How often do you get post out here?’

  The warden looked nonplussed for a second or two. ‘Once a week,’ he said. ‘It comes over on the boat, obviously. Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ Nicklin said. ‘I should just be a bit careful how you open it from now on, that’s all.’

  Burnham blanched. ‘Sorry?’

  Nicklin sat back, beaming. ‘Joke.’

  Thorne stepped forward and laid a hand on Burnham’s arm. ‘I’m going to have to throw you out now, sir. There are things we need to talk about.’

  Burnham stood up a little faster than he might otherwise have done. He said, ‘No problem,’ and walked quickly to the door without looking back.

  Thorne looked hard at Nicklin and Nicklin, a picture of innocence, said, ‘What?’

  ‘Some people might consider what you just said as threatening behaviour.’

  ‘Oh come on, it was a joke. Can’t you even make a joke these days?’ He shook his head and looked mournfully at Fletcher. ‘It’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you.’

  ‘We need to get on,’ Thorne said.

  Nicklin was looking at the door. ‘People like him are full of opinions, aren’t they? Didn’t stop him lapping up a few horror stories, did it? Sitting there with his tongue out and his limp little dick twitching for the first time in God knows how long.’

  Thorne remembered the men in the Black Horse the night before, hanging on Holland’s every word. It didn’t seem to matter which side of the fence the storyteller came from, people were always captivated by tales of trauma and transgression.

  Deviance never ceased to be fascinating.

  Talking of which…

  ‘Right then.’ Thorne took a chair from against the wall, dragged it across and sat as close to Nicklin as was possible. Knees almost touching, as though they were in an interview room. As though there were not an audience watching, enrapt, with tea, coffee and biscuits on a trestle table a few feet away.

  ‘Where is she, Stuart?’

  ‘Really?’ Nicklin looked mildly disappointed. ‘You really want me to make it easy for you?’

  ‘I want you to stop pissing us all about. I’m perfectly happy to call that boat back right now, and we can all go home.’

  ‘You might be,’ Nicklin said. ‘But I’m not sure how your superiors would feel.’ He smiled. ‘You know she’s here, don’t you? Course you do, because you’ve checked. So how would it look if you just happily sailed away and left her? How would her family feel? Do you want to go back to uniform, Tom?’

  ‘Just tell us where to look.’

  ‘Oh, come on… you’re a suit again now, aren’t you? You’re one of the elite. Shouldn’t you be showing us all that you deserve it?’

  Bethan Howell was shaking her head and, a few feet away, Holland sat back and folded his arms. Said, ‘This is so out of order.’

  Nicklin showed no sign of having heard him. His eyes were on Thorne.

  Thorne stared right back, fighting to keep his temper. Seeing Nicklin’s pale puffy features blur, then sharpen into those of the man he’d arrested for murder ten years before.

  Shattered, bloody…

  There was some comfort in the memory, an easing of the longing to do it again, witnesses or not.

  ‘I mean, just for your own self-esteem surely,’ Nicklin said. ‘Don’t you fancy doing a spot of detective work?’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  ‘She’s got a name,’ Brigstocke said. ‘She was called Eileen Bennett. She was fifty-three when she disappeared.’

  ‘Nicklin said she was an old woman.’

  ‘Yeah, well, she would have seemed old to Nicklin when he was seventeen, wouldn’t she? My kids think I’m ancient.’

  Thorne was back at the abbey ruins. He turned his face away from a raw wind coming off the sea, struggling to shake off the stiffness in his neck and shoulders and watching the signal indicator on his phone move perilously close to no bars. It had been more or less obvious since the conversation with the Morgans the previous evening, but he asked anyway.

  ‘Are we sure about this?’

  ‘Well, trying to get twenty-five-year-old incident reports out of North Wales police is proving tricky to say the least,’ Brigstocke said. ‘But the case is certainly on record. She was reported missing by an elder sister. The woman’s dead now, but she used to travel to the island every year apparently, to throw a wreath into the water.’

  Thorne turned around, looked out to sea. That was what Bernard Morgan had been trying to call to mind the night before.

  ‘So…’

  ‘So, why won’t he tell us where she is?’

  ‘Obviously we’re wasting our time trying to fathom him out,’ Brigstocke said. ‘He won’t, simple as that. Or at any rate he won’t yet. We’ve just got to deal with it.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Thorne said. ‘Has he got us over that barrel again?’

  ‘Well, he’s right, isn’t he? Fact is, it’s not going to look too clever if we just do nothing. If we refuse to search.’

  ‘Can’t we say that he was deliberately obstructing the search?’

  ‘It’s not a good idea —’

  ‘It’s the truth.’ Thorne needed to raise his voice above the wind, but it wasn’t an effort. ‘Come on, Russell, they’d love nothing better than to slap his ugly mug all over the front page.’

  ‘Oh, that’ll be happening however this turns out,’ Brigstocke said. ‘But you know how it works. They’ll sell a lot more papers if it’s an exclusive interview with him than if they’ve got a few comments from the likes of you and me. He can tell them all sorts of things.’

  ‘I warned you this would happen,’ Thorne said. ‘Back when you were giving me that good news, bad news shit.’

  ‘That was when it was all about Simon Milner.’ Brigstocke was starting to get defensive, a tone to his voice that Thorne knew he should take as a warning. ‘We didn’t know about Eileen Bennett back then.’

  ‘It’s a game, I told you that. It always is.’

  ‘We need to find her,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Bottom line.’

  ‘How do you suggest I do that?’ Thorne looked back along the track and saw Howell and Holland coming towards him. He could see the smoke drifting from Howell’s cigarette. ‘I know that waterboarding’s probably frowned upon, but I’m more than happy to give it a go.’

  ‘What does he want?’ Brigstocke asked.

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘I mean, is there something specific? A bigger cell? Comfier toilet seat, what?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s anything physical.’ Thorne told Brigstocke what Nicklin had said to him in the school hall. ‘It’s about me,’ he said. ‘We both know that’s what it’s always been about. Why else am I here?’

  ‘So, do what he says.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do some detective work.’ Brigstocke’s voice dropped. Friendly again, conspiratorial,
but only up to a point. ‘Listen, Tom, if he’s saying that, it must be because he knows you can work out where she is. There must be clues of some sort. Something. God… how should I know?’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ Thorne said.

  Holland and Howell were only fifty feet or so away. Thorne raised a hand to them. He did not want them to hear him arguing with Brigstocke and he needed to confer with them anyway. See if either of them had any bright ideas. He wanted to get off the line, but not before he’d said, ‘I still think waterboarding would be easier.’

  By the time Holland and Howell reached him, Thorne was sitting on the edge of the wall that ran around the graveyard, the ancient bell tower rising up behind him. Howell heaved herself up and sat next to him, her boots bouncing against the stone.

  ‘So, what’s happening back there?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t suddenly decided to draw us a map of where she’s buried,’ Holland said. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

  ‘He didn’t say a lot after you left.’ Howell dug into her pocket for her phone and, seeing that there was a signal, she began scrolling through her messages. ‘Just sat there looking rather pleased with himself.’

  ‘He’s got every right to be,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s got us where he wants us.’

  Howell grunted. ‘Right, he’s got all the attention. The power.’

  ‘My boss reckons he’s asking me to try and work out where Eileen Bennett’s body is because he thinks I should be able to.’ He saw Howell looking at him. ‘The woman’s name.’

  Howell nodded and went back to her phone, smiled at something.

  ‘I’m glad that somebody’s getting good news,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Just my daughter checking in,’ Howell said. ‘Well, asking for more money. She’s at uni.’ She looked up at Thorne. ‘You’re more than welcome to say I don’t look old enough to have a daughter at university, by the way.’

  ‘I was thinking it.’

  ‘I’ll settle for that.’ She put her phone away. ‘You two got kids?’

  Holland told her that he had, but that his daughter Chloe was a long way off going to university. She told him he should start saving up now, then looked at Thorne.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Well… sort of. A stepson. Sort of…’

  The three of them stared out across the plain at the patchwork of fields stitched together by lines of earth or dry stone. Thorne could just make out two figures walking in the distance. North to south, away from the lighthouse, along the cliff path that would lead them past the island’s small stretch of beach. He could see that it was a man and a woman and realised that it was Craig and Erica; the couple Burnham had introduced him to the previous day, who were helping out at the bird observatory. Thorne guessed that they had been working in one of the hides along the cliff path, checking out nesting sites or whatever it was they did.

  ‘It had to be quick,’ Holland said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nicklin. He was on his way off the island, right? From what he said, he hadn’t even meant to kill Milner, it was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. So, there’s a boat waiting for him, his mate’s out there in the dark flashing a torch or whatever. He’s already got one body to get rid of. I can’t see him taking a lot of time in getting shot of another one.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Howell said. ‘He’s dug a grave for the boy, then Eileen comes along, demanding to know what he’s doing with her shovel. He’s got to think quickly.’

  ‘He’s not going to dig another grave,’ Thorne said. ‘No time for that.’ He watched Craig and Erica moving past an area of the field close to where they had recovered Simon Milner’s body. Just beyond lay the drop down to the sea; the rocks over which Nicklin had clambered to get off the island twenty-five years before.

  ‘Maybe he took her back to the cottage,’ Holland said. ‘Have we checked to see if there’s any sort of cellar? What about a well? I bet there’s loads of wells on the island.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the police have checked that out?’ Howell asked. ‘Once they knew she was missing.’

  ‘He didn’t take her back,’ Thorne said. He stood up on the wall and stared out. Craig and Erica had stopped to look at something. They must have seen him, because one of them waved. ‘He threw her over the edge. God, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  Howell held out a hand. Thorne took it and pulled her to her feet. ‘So, what, you think she was washed out to sea?’

  ‘Maybe, but he’s dropping heavy hints that she’s still here somewhere.’

  Holland shook his head. ‘Like you said though, could all be rubbish.’

  Thorne grunted a ‘Maybe.’ He was trying to remember something Nicklin had said the day before. Pacing around in that field, trying to locate the spot where he had buried Simon Milner. That was when he had told Thorne about his escape; the waiting boat, his route down to the sea.

  That’s where I went down… went into the water…

  ‘I know where she is,’ Thorne said. He jumped down on to the track, the impact pushing the breath noisily from his lungs. He straightened, moved quickly to the nearest gate and pushed through it into the field.

  Holland helped Howell down from the wall and they followed; moving as quickly as they could across grass that was still damp, doing their best to catch up as Thorne jogged across the field towards the point where the land ran out.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Wendy Markham had discovered a cupboard stuffed with old magazines and was sitting on the small stage at the far end of the hall, thumbing through copies of Woman’s Weekly and Woman’s Own that were older than she was. Barber was hunched over a table nearby, struggling with a jigsaw he was convinced had some pieces missing, and Fletcher and Jenks sat within touching distance of the tea and biscuits, exchanging gossip about a female colleague who had allegedly got a little over-friendly with an armed robber in the prison library.

  Nicklin and Batchelor sat close together on a bench underneath the window. Nicklin did not have to make any special effort to talk quietly. He had become well used to having conversations in a place where you were almost always in danger of being overheard; where a degree of concealment in word as well as deed had become second nature.

  ‘So, what did you and Thorne talk about last night?’ he asked. ‘When he walked you down to your cell.’

  Batchelor shook his head. ‘I told him I wanted to speak to my wife, that was all.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said he might be able to make that happen.’

  Nicklin smiled. ‘I’m guessing he wanted something from you first though, right?’

  ‘Yes, but I couldn’t give him anything, could I?’

  ‘No you couldn’t.’ Nicklin looked across and saw Fletcher watching them.

  ‘Everything all right, Stuart?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better, Mr Fletcher.’

  The prison officer bit a biscuit in half and gestured with what was left of it. ‘You won’t get away with this for very long, you know?’

  ‘Get away with what, Mr Fletcher?’

  ‘Pulling DI Thorne’s plonker like this. He doesn’t strike me as a man with a lot of patience.’

  ‘Come on, Mr Fletcher. It’s not too bad hanging about here, is it? Isn’t this better than patrolling the wing?’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘On top of which, Barcelona’s a pricey place, exchange rate on the euro and what have you. So if you want to enjoy your holiday, you’ll need all the overtime you can get.’

  ‘All right, Stuart, that’s enough.’

  ‘If you know something, you should tell him,’ Jenks said.

  ‘I’m only trying to make things a bit more interesting.’

  ‘I’m not sure he sees it that way.’

  ‘Come on, how would it look if I helped the police too much?’ Nicklin waited, allowing the officers time to consider what was clearly an extremely serious question. ‘How would that go down back at Long Lartin? I’ve got
a reputation to protect, haven’t I?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Jenks said. The quieter and less demonstrative of the two officers was as animated as Nicklin could remember. ‘You’ve certainly got one of those.’

  Nicklin waited until Fletcher and Jenks were whispering again. Something about the ‘pair of them being at it like rabbits in the fantasy section’.

  ‘Why did you bother asking Thorne? About ringing your wife. I told you I’d make sure that happens, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, but if I could have done it last night, it would have made things easier, don’t you think? One less thing to worry about.’

  ‘I’m not worried about anything, Jeff.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose you are.’

  ‘Are you worried?’

  Batchelor pushed his boot back and forth across the floor, leaving worms of dried mud on the worn parquet.

  ‘Look, of course you are, but it’s not like you needed your arm twisting or anything, is it? That’s not how I remember it.’

  ‘No,’ Batchelor said.

  ‘You remember what you were like back then?’ Nicklin shook his head as if the memory pained him, as though it were almost too terrible to contemplate. ‘After the letter?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Who was it showed you a way through that?’

  Batchelor dislodged some more mud on to the floor.

  ‘Right. So, I wish you’d trust me. It’s hurtful that you don’t.’

  ‘I don’t mean to hurt you,’ Batchelor said, quickly.

  ‘I’ll tell you much the same thing I told Thorne yesterday,’ Nicklin said. ‘It’s not out of the goodness of my heart. I mean, you’re not stupid, you know that. But ultimately it’s something that suits both of us, isn’t it? It works for both of us or neither of us. Which is why I need to know that you’re still OK with everything.’

  ‘I’m OK with it.’

  ‘Good.’ Nicklin leaned across until their shoulders met. ‘And I won’t forget about that phone call. It might not be the longest conversation you’ve ever had, mind you.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Batchelor said. ‘I don’t have very much to say.’