TT12 The Bones Beneath Read online

  ‘No worries,’ Karim said. ‘All goes a lot quicker when you’ve got company, doesn’t it?’

  ‘If you say so.’ Thinking about who he and Holland would be sharing the journey with, Thorne decided that they were definitely getting the shitty end of the deal. Just before turning away towards his own car, he caught Wendy Markham’s eye. He read the expression and decided that he could be doing worse after all. Four or five hours stuck in the car with Sam Karim, the crime scene manager might well be creating a crime scene of her own.

  Climbing into the driver’s seat, he was glad that Holland had left the engine running. He pulled his gloves off, leaned across and tossed them into the glove compartment.

  ‘Almost like that’s what it was designed for,’ Holland said. He had already started on the biscuits and offered the tin to Thorne.

  Thorne shook his head. He had been up for more than four hours, but despite having had no more than a cup of tea – creeping round the flat so as not to wake Helen and Alfie – he was still not hungry. Catching movement on the far side of the compound, he looked up and saw an officer walking the perimeter, doing his best to control a fearsome-looking German shepherd. He watched dog and handler walk past two more officers on their way towards the purpose-built staff coffee shop, a Portakabin that had been tarted up and pithily christened The Long Latté.

  Holland leaned forward to turn the radio down. They had been listening to news and sport on 5 Live on the drive up from London and now there was a phone-in debating whether the royal family were value for money. They brought in a lot of tourists, according to John from Ascot, so were consequently worth every penny. Frank in Halifax said they were bone-idle parasites, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they were bone-idle German parasites.

  ‘We need to talk about music,’ Holland said.

  ‘Do we?’ Thorne asked.

  ‘A four-hour journey?’

  ‘Maybe five.’

  ‘Right. So the choice of music’s pretty crucial, I’d say.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Nothing about it in the operational notes.’

  ‘That was an oversight.’

  ‘Three pages on risk assessment… page and a half on “comfort break” procedure, for God’s sake, but not a single word about what we might be listening to.’

  ‘I’m not sure there’s going to be much chance. It’s not a pleasure trip.’

  ‘Surely we need to know the protocol, just in case.’

  ‘I’ll probably just connect my phone.’

  ‘What, your music?’

  ‘I’ve got plenty of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ve got a Hank Williams playlist that’ll get us to Wales, easy.’

  Holland sat back, shaking his head. ‘Jesus, I know we’re talking about people who’ve done some awful things, but these prisoners do have basic human rights, you know?’

  ‘You’re hilarious,’ Thorne said. He was stony-faced, but in truth he was enjoying the back and forth. What might be their last chance to laugh for a while.

  Holland helped himself to a last biscuit. He put the lid back on the tin and set it down in the footwell. He looked at Thorne.

  ‘So, why you?’ he asked.

  It was the same question Thorne had asked Brigstocke, that Helen had asked Thorne as soon as he’d told her what was happening. The same question Thorne had been asking himself for the last six weeks. Before he had the chance to tell Holland that he couldn’t think of a single reason that didn’t scare the hell out of him, the gate opened and the only man who knew the answer appeared.

  That twist in his gut.

  Jeffrey Batchelor was walking in front, a prison officer in plain clothes keeping pace alongside him. He stared at the sky, at the trees beyond the gates, as if mildly surprised to see that they were still there. Nicklin was a step or two behind, the hand of the officer with him reaching out to usher gently, almost but not quite touching the prisoner’s shoulder.

  Thorne and Holland got out of the car.

  Nicklin smiled when he saw Thorne, and nodded. Sorry I’m a bit late, you know how it goes. If anything, he picked up his pace as he drew closer, the smile broadening until it became a grin. Were it not for the handcuffs, it looked as though he wanted nothing in the world so much as to throw his arms wide, good and ready for a much-anticipated hug.

  FOUR

  It would be more than twenty-five miles before they hit the first of several motorways. Until then they would be travelling on winding, narrow roads, their progress subject to drivers in no particular hurry. They would be at the mercy of lumbering agricultural vehicles and unable to make use of blues and twos except in the case of genuine emergency. Not that Thorne had been looking forward to any of it, but this stretch of the journey was the one he had been most nervous about.

  This was where they were exposed.

  His eyes flicked to the wing mirror, the second Galaxy behind.

  Over the last few days, nights, he had entertained dark fantasies of tractors appearing from nowhere and rolling across their path, lorries emerging from unseen lanes behind them, men appearing with shotguns. The car’s blood-soaked interior and the leering face of a scarecrow as the prisoners were spirited away. They were, after all, unlikely to run into anything similar in a built-up area or at sixty miles an hour on the M54. No, this was where it would happen. The middle of bloody nowhere, close to the prison and then again later on as they got near to their destination; miles from the nearest CCTV camera, on quiet country lanes that were not overlooked. Of course, Thorne knew perfectly well that it would not happen. He was allowing his imagination to run riot. Still, however unlikely, it remained the worst case scenario.

  Where Stuart Nicklin was concerned, the worst case scenario would always be the first that came to mind.

  Thorne glanced at the rear-view.

  Nicklin was sitting on the driver’s side, in the row of three seats directly behind him, an empty seat separating him from Principal Prison Officer Chris Fletcher. Batchelor and Senior Prison Officer Alan Jenks sat close together on the pair of seats behind that. Seatbelts fastened for them, hands in laps, the prisoners remained cuffed. Those provided by the prison had been exchanged for rigid speed cuffs: a solid piece of metal linking the two bracelets and fastened in such a way that the prisoners’ wrists were fixed one above the other. That way it was impossible for arms to be thrown around the neck of anyone in front and the cuffs used to throttle.

  Twenty minutes after leaving Long Lartin, they were still snaking through open Worcestershire countryside. Outside it was cold, but cloudless. Fields that remained frost-spattered stretched to the horizon on either side, beyond drystone wall and tall hedges dusted with silver.

  Twenty minutes during which nobody had said a word, the silence finally broken when Nicklin leaned forward so suddenly as to make each of the car’s other occupants start. He leaned forward and craned his head, pushing it as far as he could into the gap between the two front seats.

  Said, ‘This is nice.’

  Stuart Anthony Nicklin, who was now forty-two years old, had been expelled from school at the age of sixteen. His expulsion, together with a boy named Martin Palmer, had been for an incident of semi-sexual violence involving a fellow pupil, though it later emerged that at around the same time he had murdered a fifteen-year-old girl. This was shortly before he ran away from home and vanished for more than fifteen years.

  ‘The countryside,’ Nicklin said. ‘The scenery.’ He looked at Fletcher, turned around to look at Batchelor and Jenks. ‘All of it.’

  Nicklin had reappeared in his early thirties as a completely different person; a man with a new name and a new face, virtually unrecognisable, even to Martin Palmer, with whom he established contact once again. Despite the years that had passed, Nicklin had lost none of his power over his former partner-in-crime. He skilfully manipulated Palmer, terrifying him into acting out his own twisted fantasies in a three-month killing spree. They murdered at least six peopl
e between them; men and women stabbed, shot, strangled, bludgeoned to death. Though Nicklin might not always have had his hand on the gun or the knife, it became apparent to anyone following the case that all of those deaths were down to him.

  And he was more than happy to claim credit for them.

  It ended in a school playground on a cold February afternoon. The man who had been scared into killing and a female police officer, both dead. Four months later, after one of the biggest trials in recent memory, Nicklin began yet another life, this time as one of the UK prison population’s most notorious serial killers.

  ‘This is what you miss.’ Nicklin nodded out at the view. ‘Ordinary, gorgeous things. Trees and big skies and the black ribbon of road stretching out ahead of you, like this.’ He sat back and laughed, raised cuffed hands to scratch at his nose. ‘Even the smell of cow-shit…’

  It emerged during the investigation that, for almost ten years before he and Palmer had begun killing, Nicklin had been happily married. That he had been holding down a regular job. What he had been doing for those earlier ‘lost’ years, however, had never been altogether clear. Later, it was discovered that immediately after running away, he had spent some time working as a rent boy in London’s West End. It was during this period – still in his teens and yet to reinvent himself – that, following his umpteenth conviction for soliciting, he was sent to a retreat for troubled teenagers on a small island off the north-west coast of Wales.

  Tides House was an experiment that failed.

  It was neither a young offenders’ institution nor a children’s home, but something in between; something different, with the day-to-day emphasis on spiritual awakening and reflection. Somewhere a kid whose future looked bleak might grow and change. Doomed to constant sniping from reactionary quarters of press and Parliament, Tides House closed its doors only three years after opening them, leaving little to show for the efforts of those behind it but ruined careers and crumbling buildings. It was while Nicklin was there, twenty-five years before, that he had met Simon Milner, a fifteen-year-old-boy with a history of repeated car theft behind him.

  The boy whose body they were on their way to look for.

  ‘It’s going to get a lot better as well,’ Nicklin said. ‘Trust me. You want scenery, you just wait until we get there.’

  Thorne looked at the rear-view again. Nicklin seemed to have shifted as far as he was able to his left, so as to place himself directly in Thorne’s line of sight. So that their eyes would meet.

  ‘We’re not going for the scenery,’ Thorne said.

  Nicklin grunted and shrugged. ‘What, you’d rather be searching on a council estate, would you, Tom? Dodging the dog turds while you’re digging up some chav’s back garden. You’d rather be draining a quarry?’

  Thorne’s fingers tightened a little around the steering wheel and he knew that it was unlikely to be the last time. He exchanged a look with Holland, reminded himself that they were still only twenty minutes into it.

  His mobile sounded, a message alert.

  He reached down to the central cup-holder for the phone, keyed in his pass code and read the text from DI Yvonne Kitson.

  how’s it going? on my way to talk to the ex-wife

  He looked at the mirror again when he heard tutting from behind him.

  ‘Don’t you think you should keep your eyes on the road, Tom?’ Nicklin shook his head and turned to Fletcher. ‘What do you think?’ The prison officer said nothing. ‘You look down at your phone for that all-important message from whoever it might be, next thing a tractor appears from nowhere, rolls across our path…’

  Thorne’s fingers started to tighten again and, in an effort to relax a little, he conjured a memory that immediately did the trick. A vivid and wonderful image that eased the tension in his neck and shoulders. One that allowed his jaw to slacken and the corners of his mouth to widen just a fraction…

  He remembered a cold February afternoon. The echo of a gunshot still ringing and the look of surprise on a ruined face. Those frozen, perfect moments just after Thorne had smashed the butt of a revolver into Nicklin’s mouth. Shattered teeth splitting the gums and full, flapping lips that burst like rotten fruit.

  Eyes wide and strings of blood running through his fingers.

  ‘I mean, for heaven’s sake,’ Nicklin said, leaning forward again. ‘Let’s get there in one piece, shall we?’

  Thorne’s eyes stayed on the road, the half-smile still in place.

  He said, ‘I’ll do my best.’

  FIVE

  It was a sign of the times perhaps, but even as a respectably dressed woman in her forties, it felt uncomfortable to be hanging around outside a primary school. Was it best to wait in one place or move around a little? Which looked less like lurking? Yvonne Kitson guessed that she was not arousing as much suspicion as a man might and certainly a damn sight less than a seventies’ DJ or children’s TV personality.

  Still, it made her feel decidedly uneasy.

  She had been there fifteen minutes or so already and been on the receiving end of hard looks from a middle-aged couple, a woman walking past with a pushchair and a male teacher who had stood for half a minute and stared through the fence at her from the far side of the playground. Kitson had stared right back. She had been hugely tempted to march through the gate, push her warrant card into his fat face and shout, ‘On top of which, I’m a mum of three kids, you twisted little tosspot…’

  Tempting, but ultimately stupid and unjustified.

  Stupid, because it would almost certainly have scuppered the meeting she was here for. Besides which, she knew that the teacher was doing his job. Those who preyed on children came in all shapes and sizes and were not all as conveniently recognisable as Jimmy Savile.

  Or should that be unrecognisable.

  It was horribly ironic, Kitson thought, that the man who for decades got away with being one of the most active predatory paedophiles in the country’s history had actually looked like most people’s idea of one.

  After another few minutes, the woman Kitson assumed to be the one she was waiting for walked out of the school and across the playground towards her. She stopped just for a few seconds outside the gate, long enough to produce cigarettes from a pocket and nod towards a small park on the other side of the road. To say quietly, as though to herself, ‘Over there.’

  Kitson waited half a minute, then followed and sat down at one end of a bench as the woman at the other was lighting her cigarette. She looked a little older than the thirty-nine Kitson knew her to be. She had brown hair past her shoulders and glasses with heavy black frames. Like Kitson, she wore a dark skirt and jacket.

  They could both have been teachers. Or police officers.

  ‘Waiting long?’

  ‘Quarter of an hour or something,’ Kitson said.

  The woman showed no inclination to apologise for having kept Kitson waiting. She just smoked for half a minute. Said, ‘Paedo patrol check you out? Short teacher with a fat face?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kitson said, laughing.

  ‘You want one of these?’ The woman proffered her cigarette.

  Kitson shook her head. ‘Thanks for doing this, by the way. Agreeing to talk to me.’

  ‘I don’t have a lot of choice, do I? I need to keep you lot sweet.’ She flashed Kitson a look and took a long drag. ‘Only takes one stupid copper gabbing in the pub, one mention of the wrong name and the whole lot falls apart.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Kitson said.

  ‘It’s taken ten years to build this.’

  Kitson nodded back towards the school. ‘Where do they think you’ve gone?’

  She waved her cigarette. ‘They think I’ve come out to do this, same as usual. Which means I’ve got about five minutes, which is fine because I don’t want to talk to you for longer than five minutes.’ She put the cigarette to her lips then lowered it again. ‘I don’t want to talk about him for five seconds.’

  ‘It’s nice round here,’ Kitson sai
d. The school was on the outskirts of Huntingdon, in Cambridgeshire, seventy miles or so from London. Far enough away. ‘Leafy.’

  The woman nodded, smoked.

  ‘Kids nice?’

  Another nod. She said, ‘I was lucky,’ then snorted at the absurdity of it.

  The woman who had once been Caroline Cookson was still doing the same job she had been doing ten years before, when her life had changed beyond all recognition. Everything else about her was different though. Her name, her accent, the colour and style of her hair. She had been relocated and given a new identity once the full horror of what her husband had done became clear. A man who had called himself Cookson back then, but whose real name was Stuart Nicklin.

  ‘I don’t know what to call you,’ Kitson said.

  ‘Claire Richardson. My name’s Claire Richardson.’

  The officers monitoring Caroline Cookson’s witness protection had given Kitson a name and phone number, the address of the school where ‘Claire Richardson’ worked. Beyond that though, Kitson knew nothing about her. Had she remarried? Did she have children?

  Kitson asked her.

  ‘No kids,’ Claire said. ‘I’ve had a boyfriend for a couple of years.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Yeah, well he hasn’t killed anyone yet, so you know… that’s a plus.’ She took a last drag on her cigarette, dropped the nub and ground it beneath her boot. ‘Mind you, I didn’t know any of that was happening last time, did I?’

  Kitson laughed, because she thought she ought to.

  Claire looked at her. She was already reaching for her cigarettes again. ‘I didn’t, you know. Some of the papers made out that I knew, but I didn’t. I still feel physically sick just thinking about what he did.’