TT12 The Bones Beneath Read online

  She smoked one more cigarette then went inside to email Thorne.

  FIFTEEN

  Helen was laughing…

  ‘… and the bloke who runs the place is like this cartoon Welshman,’ Thorne said. ‘With a big red face and looking like he’s always just about to burst into song.’ They both laughed. ‘Honestly, he’s like a dog with two dicks because he’s got some actual guests, but he’s a bit over-friendly for my liking.’ He sat on the edge of the bed, moved the phone from one ear to the other and leaned down to untie his shoelaces. ‘I think there’s every chance we’ll be murdered in our beds.’

  ‘It all sounds lovely,’ Helen said.

  Thorne looked around the room, wondering what else he could find to tell her about. ‘Oh and the remote control for the TV is attached to the wall… on a curly wire. I swear, it’s actually attached, so people can’t nick it. Does anybody bother to steal remote controls?’

  ‘Some people’ll take anything, you give them the chance.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’ Thorne could hear Alfie shouting in the background. Helen’s son, just a few months away from his second birthday. Helen tried and failed to shush him. ‘How’s he doing?’

  ‘Well, he’s not asleep.’

  ‘Because I’m not there to read him a story,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Oh, is that it?’

  ‘Seriously, I’ve got the knack of getting him off now.’

  ‘He does miss you,’ Helen said. ‘His mood’s different.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  Thorne glanced up at the mirror on the wardrobe door, saw that he was grinning.

  ‘So everything’s going OK, then, is it?’ Helen asked. ‘How you getting on with your new CSM?’

  Thorne sat up straight. Why on earth would she ask that? Had she heard something in his voice? How could there be anything in his voice?

  ‘Yeah, she’s OK,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ve hardly spoken to her, tell you the truth. She was stuck in the back-up car with Sam Karim.’

  ‘Right…’

  Thorne could still see the look on Wendy Markham’s face when she’d asked him back to her room. The intention had been obvious enough. I mean, nightcap? Had she brought a bottle of wine or something with her? Obviously, there was no bottle of anything. It was a pretty straightforward proposition. Thorne felt good about turning her down, he felt… noble.

  And yet…

  She was seriously fanciable, no question about it and being propositioned by anyone was nice, was a buzz. She was older than Helen, he guessed, probably early forties, but still a fair few years younger than he was. When he’d asked for her to join the operation as crime scene manager, Thorne had remembered exactly who she was and what she looked like and that he’d flirted with her a little when they’d first met. No point pretending he hadn’t. Something about the way she’d spoken to him on the landing had suggested there would be no strings attached, no awkwardness afterwards.

  Just a bit of fun while they were away.

  ‘I called Phil,’ Thorne said. The change of subject sounded jarring, even to him.

  Phil Hendricks. Thorne’s closest friend. A man whose shaved head, tattoos and body piercings made him look more like the lead singer in a death-metal band than the skilled and respected pathologist he was. Someone who remained fiercely loyal to Thorne, though that loyalty had been regularly tested, and who was usually first with a joke, despite his sadness at an unfulfilled desire to be a father.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just before I called you. He wasn’t answering, so I left a message.’

  ‘Oh, I think I know why he was busy,’ Helen said.

  The truth was, Thorne had called Hendricks because he’d wanted to tell him about what had happened with Wendy Markham. Brag a little. They’d have laughed about it, joked about what might have been and Hendricks would have pretended to be shocked that Thorne had passed up a golden opportunity. Ultimately though, his friend would have been pleased, impressed that Thorne had done the right thing. Having grown close to one another in recent months, Helen was now Hendricks’ friend too.

  Thorne was pleased about it, even if that triangle had proved to be a tricky one in the past. In a previous relationship, his best friend and his then-girlfriend had regularly taken great delight in ganging up on him.

  The silence between them growing dangerously long, Thorne asked himself why he wasn’t telling Helen about the business with Wendy Markham. Would it not have earned him an inestimable number of Brownie points? Wouldn’t it be proof positive that he was not the kind to play away when the chance presented itself? It was frustrating, but the fact was that he and Helen had not even been together six months and he could not be sure how she would react. She might well have been delighted, at his honesty and of course at the decision he had made. She would probably have laughed and made some crack about Markham being ‘blind’ or ‘desperate’ but would she then be spending the next few days imagining the worst? Would it actually do more harm than good in the long run?

  Thorne could not see any point in chancing it.

  ‘What did you mean, about Phil being busy?’

  ‘I think he’s got a new boyfriend,’ Helen said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I called him a few hours ago and some bloke answered.’

  ‘Bloody hell, he can’t keep it in his pants, can he?’

  ‘Told me Phil was in the shower. Said it like he was about to go and join him. He sounded a bit giggly, you know, like he was pissed.’

  ‘Yeah, well he’d have to be to get off with that ugly bastard.’

  Helen laughed. ‘You ask me, there’s a new tattoo on the cards.’

  Though he was rapidly running out of space, Hendricks liked to commemorate each new sexual conquest with a trip to the tattoo parlour.

  ‘Oh well, good for him,’ Thorne said, thinking: Well, at least somebody’s getting his leg over. It made him even more determined to tell Hendricks about the shag that got away. ‘So how was your day?’

  ‘It was fine,’ Helen said.

  It was code, a game they played. Helen Weeks was a DS on a Child Abuse Investigation Team and, as such, dealt with more horror and suffering every day than the average hard-as-nails Murder Squad copper saw in a month. Most of the time she chose to keep it to herself, to keep it from anyone close to her. Every so often though, the day would come when she would need to offload some of it and then Thorne’s job was simply to be there and to listen while she poured it all out.

  Desperate half-lives and broken bones no bigger than a bird’s.

  ‘Fine’ just meant ‘not now’, that was all. ‘Not yet…’

  Instead, the laugh came back into Helen’s voice as she told him about a 999 call that had been doing the rounds: a tinny recording downloaded on to the phone of almost every copper she’d run into that day. A man had called the emergency services and announced that he’d been stabbed. When the operator had asked him how many times he’d been stabbed, the man said, ‘This is my first time.’

  Thorne was naked and staring at himself in the rust-spotted bathroom mirror by the time they said goodnight.

  Helen said, ‘Keep an eye on Nicklin tomorrow, all right?’

  ‘I’ll not be taking my eyes off him,’ Thorne said.

  He walked back into the bedroom, set an alarm on his phone and turned on the TV. He slipped beneath the thin duvet and flicked through the channels with the remote that was attached to the wall. He was tired, but watched a few minutes of some film he could not make head or tail of until he could barely keep his eyes open. He turned the TV off and leaned over to switch off the bedside light.

  Within a few moments he was wide awake again.

  He turned the light back on and reached for a paperback thriller that Helen’s father had sent, thinking he might like it. A few pages were more than enough. Religious conspiracies and clues in paintings or symphonies or whatever. They had yet to meet, so it was understandable that
Helen’s father might make a mistake about the kind of thing his daughter’s boyfriend liked to read. Or perhaps it was just that Thorne’s mind was suddenly racing too fast for anything to settle, to gain purchase.

  He got out of bed to fetch the small, laminated photograph from the inside pocket of his jacket. It had been part of the background material Brigstocke had passed on to him when the operation was being put together; a faded photo from a quarter of a century before, taken in the place he would be travelling to in the morning.

  Thorne lay down again and studied the picture.

  A dozen or so boys, the majority looking surly or plain awkward. The members of staff not looking an awful lot happier, save for the woman at the heart of the gathering. A shawl around her shoulders, heavy-framed glasses and a smile of satisfaction, of pride in the men and boys around her.

  He took a last look at the two boys standing together at the far end of the back row, then put the picture down.

  He thought about two dead teenagers and Jeffrey Batchelor waking to it every day of his life. A third, who was the only one smiling in a faded photograph. He thought about a boy who was now only bones and a mother desperate to lay her son to rest; praying that the man who had killed him was telling the truth.

  Got a bit of a thing, has he?

  He remembered what Helen had said to him about Nicklin, her insistence that he stayed careful. He thought about her trying to get Alfie to sleep then climbing into bed wearing one of his old Johnny Cash T-shirts.

  The smell of body-butter on it afterwards.

  He lay awake and thought about Helen, but when he finally turned off the light and his hand crept down beneath the duvet, Thorne was thinking about Wendy Markham.

  SIXTEEN

  Jeffrey Batchelor spoke to his daughter every night.

  In a tender rush and jumble of words that were sometimes spoken out loud he told her about his day, such as it had been. The humour if he had managed to find any, the small moments of triumph. He told her how very much he and her mother and her younger sister missed her. How sorry he was that he had got things so wrong, that he had made it all a thousand times worse. Every night, last thing of all, lying there in the dark as the prison settled around him, he made sure Jodi knew how much she had been loved.

  Tonight, for all the obvious reasons, the words were that bit harder to come by. It was painfully frustrating when, for those very same reasons, he needed to talk to her more than ever.

  He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them.

  The tiled wall of the cell cold against his back, head bowed, filled with images of blood-spattered stones and white noise, he felt suddenly more lost and more alone than he had been in a long time.

  He felt like he had on his first night behind bars.

  Back then, whenever Batchelor closed his eyes, Nathan Wilson’s would be staring right back at him. Wide and terrified, until the light in them began to die, fading slowly to a pinprick like an old-fashioned TV turning off. Blank now, but they were still zooming in and out of focus, coming up towards Batchelor’s own face then falling away again, the head crashing down and down and down on to the edge of the kerb. His hands tangled tight in the boy’s hair, the spatter of blood soft against them and each dull, wet crack vibrating up his arm.

  Those same pictures – the sense-memories vivid and undimmed – came back now as he recalled that first night in Long Lartin. It was almost certainly the fact that he was not there tonight, the change in location and of atmosphere, that was making things so difficult; that was throwing him so very much off kilter.

  Fear as well, of course.

  Batchelor was anything but stupid, so he was as afraid as he had ever been.

  He tried and failed to talk to his daughter again, so settled instead for a few simple prayers. One for Jodi, of course, and for Sonia and Rachel. One for the soul of Nathan Wilson whom he had murdered and one for Nathan Wilson’s suffering family…

  The lights went out automatically.

  He lay on his side, his knees still pulled up, and waited for sleep.

  The prayers had definitely helped and now, instead of thinking about the past, he tried to imagine what the next day was going to bring. The island was the perfect place for all this in many ways.

  The history and the holiness.

  It was tailor-made for him, Nicklin had said that.

  ‘It’s ideal, Jeff,’ he had said. Lying back on his bunk, a bar of chocolate in hand and Batchelor dry-mouthed and stiff in the doorway. ‘Now, trust me, I’m not a big believer in fate, but sometimes you just have to believe things have happened for a reason. That little so-and-so sending his text to your daughter and her stringing herself up. You winding up in here, on the same wing, the same corridor as me, for heaven’s sake. The place I was sent twenty-five years ago that – I swear to God – could not be more spot on for you. It’s all got to mean something, hasn’t it? You know me, Jeff, I think about things a lot, but I couldn’t have planned this more perfectly if I’d tried…’

  Now, Batchelor lay in the cell at Abersoch police station, and as the heating pipes grumbled above him and a group of lads began singing tunelessly somewhere nearby, his body tensed then heaved and the first sob exploded in his throat.

  It was disconcerting, a cell that was this spartan. One that so singularly failed to reflect the personality of any one of its doubtless hundreds of inhabitants. Nicklin liked to think that his cell back at Long Lartin said a good deal about the man he was. There were books and magazines. There were things on the walls. There were news stories and articles and there were pictures, some of which he had painted himself and not by numbers either, like the majority of the wannabe Francis Bacons.

  This was just a box; blank, utilitarian. A raised sleeping platform with a blue plastic mattress and a metal toilet bowl in the corner. Yes, there was the obscenity gouged into one of the tiles by a guest who had not been searched properly, but nothing that made him feel as though any human being held within its dull white walls might ever have had a single intelligent thought.

  Still, it was only for one night.

  Perhaps two…

  The silence was a bonus though. Were it not for the occasional sound of heavy footsteps somewhere in the custody suite above, he might almost have been able to convince himself that he was quite alone. That he had been left to his own devices. The sensation was heady, gorgeous… until a minute or two after the lights went out, when the weeping started in the cell next door.

  He gave it a minute, but it quickly became apparent that this was more than just a few tears before bedtime.

  ‘Come on now, Jeff,’ he shouted. ‘There’s no need for this.’

  Need clearly had little to do with it, though the gasps and racking sobs were certainly bordering on the self-indulgent.

  ‘You need to try and cheer up. Think about tomorrow. Think about the good things…’

  There was no let-up from his neighbour.

  Nicklin waited a little while longer, then started to sing.

  ‘The thigh bone’s connected to the leg bone… the leg bone’s connected to the ankle bone.’ He was grinning, moving his head and tapping his fingers against the mattress. ‘The ankle bone’s connected to the foot bone… Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…’

  He carried on for a minute or two longer, ad-libbing nonsensical connections; knees to buttocks, toes to skulls. He listened, was pleased. The volume from the adjoining cell had definitely come down a little.

  He said, ‘You can’t afford to lose your sense of humour, Jeff. None of us can. We’re all buggered without that.’

  It struck him that Tom Thorne was certainly someone who was able to see the funny side of things when necessary. He remembered one or two of the looks they’d exchanged on the journey, some of the remarks. It was very important, a sense of humour.

  He lay back, thinking, humming.

  Thorne was going to need it.

  THE SECOND DAY

&
nbsp; ISLAND OF TIDES

  It has been a day and a half – perhaps two days – since he’s last seen or heard anything of the young couple who took him from his flat and he’s spent most of that time handcuffed to the bed, feverish, shirtless and splayed out flat on his belly. It’s been necessary to stay off his back of course, impossible to do anything else after what the girl had done to him. Some time the following day he had asked for the hastily applied wad of bandage to be removed, and the new bloke, the one who was now feeding him painkillers like they were Smarties, seemed happy enough to oblige.

  ‘Air needs to get to the wound,’ he had told him. ‘Please. It’ll heal quicker.’

  His new guard, whose face he had still not seen up to that point, hadn’t bothered saying anything. He’d just sauntered across and torn the bandage away, left the room before the screaming had stopped.

  The air had felt icy against his flesh, painful for those first few minutes.

  He’s sitting up now, perched on the edge of the bed, one hand still cuffed to the metal bedstead. The wound is throbbing and the constant supply of painkillers means that his head feels like it could spin round, detach itself from his neck and fly off into the ceiling at any time. He eats with his free hand, lunch or dinner or whatever it is. A sandwich removed from its wrapping and a bag of crisps that has been opened for him. He eats, though he is not particularly hungry. He drinks from the water bottle he’s been given, though he hates having to piss in the bucket. He stares at the young man who is sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, flicking through a newspaper and waiting for him to finish.

  ‘What’s happened to the other two?’

  The man glances up for a moment, then goes back to his Daily Mirror. He is early twenties, a little on the pudgy side with wire-rimmed glasses. Pale with long, greasy hair tied back into a ponytail, a dark T-shirt and jeans. Not quite as uber-goth as the couple had been, but someone who could probably do with spending a bit more time outdoors.