Thorne was staying in the same room he’d been given the night before and, with no further guests expected, he had more than a vague suspicion that they had not bothered to change the bed. He wondered if that was why he had been allocated the same room. Perhaps Pritchard thought a customer was less likely to make a fuss if it was only himself he could catch a whiff of on the sheets.
That aside, Thorne found the rust-spotted bathroom mirror and the cracked handle on the wardrobe door as oddly comforting as the curly wire on the TV remote. He lay on the bed in his underpants and a faded Willie Nelson T-shirt. The phone was pressed to his ear. Though the sound of the television was muted, he continued to flick back and forth between the channels.
‘At least it sounds like there’s something in what Nicklin’s telling you,’ Helen said.
‘Yeah. I’m sure there’s something.’ Thorne stopped at a channel showing some arty-looking film with subtitles. He wondered idly if there might be any dirty bits. ‘It’s just about trying to work out what that is.’
‘Shame. We were looking forward to having you back.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Thorne said. ‘I don’t care if he tells me he’s buried another twenty on that sodding island. I’m coming back tomorrow.’
‘Well, I know one little lad who’s going to be happy,’ Helen said.
‘You reckon?’
‘He saw a Woodentop on the street today and pointed and said “Tom”.’
‘That’s funny,’ Thorne said. It had only been a few months since Alfie had begun to say Thorne’s name, back when he was working in south London and still wearing uniform. ‘He’s asleep, is he?’
‘Well away,’ Helen said. ‘I’m not far behind him, either.’
‘Yeah, sorry for calling so late.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘You going to be happy too?’
‘What do you think? It’s been a bit shitty at work, last couple of days, and with you not around it’s just been… shittier.’
Thorne was happy to hear it, but knew it was not just because she missed his sunny personality or red-hot body. It was clear that there were things she needed to talk about and Thorne would have to put in some time as an emotional punchbag when he got home. ‘Tell me tomorrow,’ he said. He hoped he hadn’t sounded dismissive, or uninterested.
‘You sound a bit down,’ Helen said.
‘Well, it’s hardly surprising, is it?’
‘No, apart from the business with Nicklin, I mean. Everything OK?’
‘I’m fine.’ Thorne had managed to find a football match showing on one of the Eurosport channels. He watched, struggling to work out who the two teams were without any sound. He could hear Helen taking a drink of something. The absence of that punchbag when it was needed often meant an extra glass or two of wine. ‘I was just thinking about my dad a bit,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
Helen said, ‘OK…’
‘Sitting there with those two tonight, Huw, and his dad. You should have seen the pair of them. They were like a team, you know? Taking the piss, pretending to get annoyed with each other… I just miss that.’
‘Course you do.’
‘Never really like that with me and my old man, but I miss it anyway. I was thinking about going fishing with him this morning, for God’s sake. I haven’t thought about that in donkey’s years.’
‘It’s only natural.’
‘I miss how it was before the Alzheimer’s. No… I miss that too.’
‘Tom —’
‘He was funny with it, sometimes. When he got worked up. Swearing like a docker in the supermarket…’
Neither of them spoke for a long few seconds. Thorne stared at the TV, struggling to get comfortable on the bed. He could hear Helen taking another drink.
‘I’d better get some sleep,’ he said. ‘Sorry…’
‘Call me tomorrow when you’re on the way back and I can get some dinner on. Or maybe we could just get a takeaway.’
‘Sounds good.’
‘Chinese?’ Helen suggested. ‘Without the added seagull…’
It was after midnight and Thorne had an early start in the morning, but once he’d finished talking to Helen and established that Frankfurt were a goal down to Bayer Leverkusen, he still felt the need to have a shower. It was as much about the day he’d had, the company he’d been keeping, as it was about the fact that he could skip having one in the morning and give himself an extra half-hour in bed.
When he’d dried himself off, he lay down on the bed with the damp, thin towel around his waist.
Come on, how many more did he kill?
Was he the worst one you ever had?
I’d bloody love your job
…
He lay there for another few minutes, then he turned the television off and called Helen back.
‘Sorry, were you in bed?’
‘Almost,’ she said.
‘I can’t sleep…’
There were a few seconds of crackle on the line, a siren somewhere and the fierce breathing of the sea outside his window.
‘I’d better get another glass of wine,’ Helen said.
He’s not taking the painkillers any more.
He’d begun leaving them on the tray, so the man doling them out has stopped bothering, which is fine. The pain has eased a little anyway, it’s not stopping him from sleeping any longer. But the fact is that he wants it, wants whatever is left of it. Not taking the painkillers means that his head isn’t fuzzy all the time, which is good, because it means he can focus.
And the pain lets him hold on to his anger.
He’s got no idea what the man’s name is of course, just as he had no idea what the couple’s names were, so he’s made one up. He calls him Adrian. It’s the name of someone he works with, a weaselly little tosser who gets on his nerves. It’s a little bit nerdish too, which he thinks suits the man with his thick glasses and ratty ponytail and his hairless, white belly which is now on display again. Just an inch or two of it, sagging beneath the bottom of his black T-shirt.
Adrian sits on a chair in the middle of the room, reading a comic of some sort. He studies him from the edge of the bed. He sits close to the metal bedstead, so he doesn’t have to stretch his arm out. He’d asked for some ointment for the welts where the cuffs had rubbed, but Adrian wasn’t having any of it. He said much the same thing as when he’d been asked for the antibiotics. He wasn’t a bloody chemist, something like that.
He watches Adrian read, the lips pursed in concentration. Adrian glances up for a second as he turns the page. He sees that he’s being watched but it doesn’t appear to bother him, and he quickly goes back to his comic.
‘Is that any good?’
Adrian looks up again, says nothing.
‘They’ve made a film of it, haven’t they? You’ve probably seen it, but reading’s always better, I reckon.’ He swings his legs up and eases gently back towards the bedstead. He reaches round with his free hand and props up a pillow behind him, then leans slowly back against it. He winces, but grits his teeth until the urge to cry out has passed. It hurts like hell, but at least the grubby pillowcase isn’t sticking to his wound, which means it’s starting to scab over. ‘I have this running argument with a mate of mine,’ he says. ‘He says they’re comics. Gets really annoyed when I tell him they’re graphic novels, try and explain how dark they are, how brilliant the artwork is. He doesn’t listen. His loss though, right?’
Adrian looks up again and now he shuts what is undoubtedly just a comic with a glossy cover and lays it down gently by the side of the chair. He leans back and says, ‘I don’t want to be your friend. So you’re wasting your time trying to crawl up my arse.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘Yeah,’ Adrian says. ‘You were.’ He nods down to the comic. ‘I don’t give a toss what you or anyone else calls them, but I’m bloody sure you’ve never read one in your life.’
‘Are they your friends?’ he asks. ‘The other two.’
‘Never met them before.’ Adrian says this almost proudly. ‘We share an interest, that’s all.’
‘What about whoever’s organised this? Whoever’s in charge.’
‘What about them?’
‘Are they your friend?’
‘How do you know I’m not in charge?’
‘You said you were here to do certain things, so I’m guessing someone put you here. Put you together with the other two.’
‘You’re such a smartarse,’ Adrian says.
‘So people tell me.’
‘Yeah, well look where it’s got you.’
‘I can hear you on the phone, you know.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Outside.’
‘So?’
‘I can’t hear what you’re saying, not really, but I recognise the tone. It’s funny you should talk about crawling up arses, because that’s exactly what I’m hearing when you’re on the phone talking to whoever it is. Is it the boy or the girl? Looked to me like the girl was the one calling the shots.’ He waits, but Adrian says nothing. ‘Yeah, definitely her, I reckon. Even if she wasn’t a nutter, she’d scare the crap out of you, wouldn’t she? She’s got tits and everything. Probably makes you feel a bit funny in your downstairs special place, doesn’t it?’
Adrian gets to his feet. He walks over to the wall and leans against it. He licks his lips and plasters on a smile. ‘Obviously, there’s certain things I’m supposed to do,’ he says. ‘But now I’m the only one here, so there’s nothing to stop me pissing all over your food if I feel like it. Nothing to stop me doing all sorts of things.’ There’s a sheen of sweat on Adrian’s face and, standing there scratching his belly, he resembles nothing so much as the creepy, friendless twerp he has clearly been made to feel like too many times. But the sickly smile is still terrifying.
Adrian pushes himself away from the wall, moves towards the bed.
The pain has fed his anger as he hoped it would. It felt good to rant at Adrian and now, watching him get closer, he’s feeling stronger than he has at any time since he was taken. He starts to imagine getting out of this room, thinks about what he will do to Adrian, how much damage he will inflict, as soon as he comes up with any sort of plan. The anger, if it is not keeping the fear at bay completely, is at least balancing things out a little.
‘You want to be careful,’ Adrian says. ‘Shooting your mouth off.’ He reaches behind and draws the Taser from his back pocket. ‘Might be fun to see what happens if we push this up against your balls and give you a jolt.’
‘I’ll probably get a stiffy. A bit more painful than Viagra, but you might be on to something there.’
Adrian fires the Taser, watches the current arc between the electrodes for a few seconds, then puts it back in his pocket. ‘I’m not talking about that though.’ He nods towards the door. ‘She left her scalpel behind.’ He carries on nodding. ‘Oh yeah, and if you keep winding me up, I might be tempted to have a crack with it. I mean how hard can it be, right?’ He holds out his hand towards the bed. ‘Thing is though, I’m not getting a lot of sleep, no more than you probably, and what with that and way too much coffee… well, you can imagine.’ Adrian’s hand begins to shake theatrically and he stares at it, eyes wide, amused and mock-alarmed in equal measure.
From the bed, he stares at it too and just like that, the anger is gone. The rush of confidence evaporates. The part of his brain that is still managing to think sensibly is telling him that, despite what they’ve done so far, they obviously want to keep him alive. Reassuring him that money, or whatever else they’re after, is far too important to them to risk killing him.
Suddenly though, it’s the other part of his brain where the synapses are beginning to spark and spit. However much he tries to fight it, to dampen down the dread that presses him hard back into the pillow, a gallery of friends and family, of those he loves, is taking shape behind his eyes.
He begins to think about dying in this room.
Jeffrey Batchelor closed his eyes and turned his face to the spray. He tried to imagine that the boat he was on would soon be pulling into Shanklin or Douglas or that he was heading home after a day’s fishing off Falmouth with the girls. That it was Sonia, Rachel and Jodi sitting across from him and that it was their voices just audible beneath the crash of waves and the throb of engines, and not those of Nicklin or Fletcher.
Their laughter he could hear.
The Batchelors had always enjoyed holidays in the UK; ‘stay-cations’ or whatever they were called. He and Sonia had both travelled abroad as students and he had been all over Europe on research trips for work, but any attempt at anything far-flung as a family had usually ended badly. Foreign holidays had been cursed with illness and lost luggage, the stress of complex travel arrangements almost always resulting in arguments. To be fair, it had been the adult members of the family who probably deserved most of the blame. He knew that with other families it was the other way round more often than not, the kids moaning about being away from friends and TV and a decent Wi-Fi signal, but he and Sonia were the ones who got bitten or caught food poisoning. The ones who fell out and spoiled it for everyone else. The girls had been great as a rule, trudging off to the Isle of Wight or the Lake District without complaint, content to play their part as the younger half of the ‘Boring Batchelors’. He knew that they had found it dull, the weather and the walking, the old-fashioned card games, especially as they had got older. He and Sonia had always known that they’d be off somewhere more interesting with their mates, first chance they had.
Jodi had always talked about travelling…
He opened his eyes, saw the Irish Sea rising and falling ahead of him, the edge of the boat moving in rhythm with it.
He was on his way to a very different island, and because he was not the same as the man who had brought him, because he was sensible and sensitive and reacted to things the way the vast majority of ordinary people did, he was as scared as it was possible to be at the thought of what was waiting for him. The things he was going there to do.
Nicklin had told him how perfect the island was, had talked for hours about the history of the place, the stories of those who had travelled to the place and were buried there.
‘Think about that, Jeff,’ he had said. ‘Twenty thousand of them. They reckon you’re only ever six feet from a rat in London. Where we’re going, you’re probably never more than that far from the bones of a saint.’
If it was true, then up to now Batchelor hadn’t felt it. There was peace and quiet for sure, but nothing he would call spiritual. Maybe he was just too frightened to pick up on all that stuff.
More than anything, he wanted to talk to Sonia, and Nicklin was still telling him that it was going to happen. All a question of timing, he said. Batchelor had spent a long time now, trying to work out what he would say when the moment came, knowing that he might not have very long in which to say it. He would need to pick his words carefully.
Listen, love, it’s me. You’ll be hearing things, from reporters and from the police probably and I just wanted you to hear them from me first. You remember what happened a month or so after I started my sentence? To me, I mean. You remember that things were suddenly different
…
Should he tell her the truth? That was the big question.
It was easy enough to tell her how much he loved her, that he missed her, but what about when it came to giving her reasons? Would she hate him if he did? He thought he knew his wife well enough to believe that she wouldn’t, but it was still a gamble.
Was it worth risking that, just to have her understand?
Something happened, love. I’m talking about Jodi and Nathan. I found something out
…
Having her hate him was not a price he was prepared to pay.
He hoped he would know what to say when it came to it, when he heard his wife’s voice. He hoped that his faith would guide him. He hoped above all that there would be enough of it left by then. It had been such a struggle clinging on to it, plenty of times when it would have been so much easier to just let it go. The journey he had been on had been so strange and terrible that were it not for the conviction that it must all be somehow necessary, he would have stopped believing long before now.
From staring up at his daughter, her flawless features grey and bloated, to the sea that was now spitting in his face and moving beneath him, remorselessly bearing him towards an island built on bones.
From that bedroom to this boat.
He heard a laugh and looked across at Nicklin. The man who had saved him for reasons that were now obvious enough.
Nicklin smiled. Shouted, ‘All right, Jeff?’
Batchelor smiled back, nodded.
Another price that was far too high.