Halfway up the track, Thorne turned and looked down towards the dock, watched the
Benlli III
heading back out to sea. The boat seemed even smaller than it was from this far away, this high up, the older Morgan almost indistinguishable from the younger as he moved around the deck.
Huw had said that, all being well, he would return to collect Thorne and the others before dark.
All being well.
Thorne looked at the sky. Was it starting to darken or was that his imagination? The wind certainly seemed to be picking up a little. He turned and pushed on up the track towards the school, Fletcher, Jenks and the prisoners in front of him. Holland moving purposefully, a step or two ahead of them.
Nicklin was saying something to Batchelor, leaning close, but from where he was, Thorne could not make out what was being said. It didn’t much matter. Nicklin had been gabbling ever since they’d collected him from the station and Thorne assumed that the prison officers would pass on anything they thought might be of interest.
Burnham was waiting for them in the school hall, along with Bethan Howell, Barber and a tired-looking Wendy Markham. The warden was talkative and Howell was keen to know what the plan was, but Thorne only stayed long enough to grab two cups of coffee and tell everyone that he’d be back in ten minutes.
He walked down the steps on to the track and turned north towards the chapel. Trudging up the slope, he was struck again – as he had been the day before, when he was searching for a phone signal – by the mountain rising up to his right, looming above the farm and the scattering of cottages at the edge of the plain. He looked up, thinking that, at no more than four or five hundred feet, it was more a glorified hill than anything else, though the cliffs on the other side of it had certainly looked high enough when the boat had passed them half an hour before. It wasn’t a steep rise and he wondered how long it would take someone to climb it.
How long it would take someone with the
inclination
to climb it.
He remembered once again that weekend spent walking with Louise, the excuse for the boots that had cost a small fortune and were still not as comfortable as he’d been assured they would be.
There had been several hills involved then.
It had not gone well.
Looking up, Thorne saw a man a few hundred feet above him on the slope. It was hard to tell if he was on his way up or down. The man had binoculars and appeared to be looking straight at him. Thorne assumed it was the birdwatcher he had spotted the previous day on the way back from the lighthouse.
The man lowered his binoculars and turned away.
Thorne carried on towards the chapel.
‘Don’t say I never do anything for you.’
Karim took the coffee gratefully, but his good cheer evaporated as soon as he remembered that Thorne was responsible for his having spent the night freezing his tits off in the first place.
Thorne nodded down at the lilo, the thin blanket folded across it. ‘Looks cosy enough to me,’ he said.
Karim grunted and walked quickly to the door. ‘I’m desperate for a slash,’ he said. ‘It was either desert my post or piss in the font.’
‘You’re an example to us all,’ Thorne said.
Once Karim had stepped outside, Thorne moved away from the black body bag lying on the floor at the foot of the altar and walked across to read the large wooden plaque on the wall. It said that the chapel had been built in 1875. The warden had already told him that, back then, the islanders had been given the choice of a working harbour or a chapel and had plumped for a place of worship.
It didn’t make a lot of sense to Thorne, but he had as much truck with organised religion as he did with hill-walking or heavy metal.
Karim pushed back through the heavy wooden door, draining his coffee cup. ‘Bloody hell, it’s nasty enough having to piss in one of those compost things. Can’t imagine what it’s like to take a dump.’ He flopped down in one of the pews. ‘Not that we’ve had enough to eat to make that happen. Cup-A-Soup and a cheese sandwich was all we had last night.’ He slapped his substantial gut. ‘I’m wasting away here, mate.’
‘I’ll take you for a curry when we get back,’ Thorne said.
Karim grinned. ‘I tell you who else would like that.’
Thorne looked.
‘I reckon our crime scene manager’s got a bit of a thing for you.’
‘Rubbish.’ Thorne hoped he wasn’t reddening, stared down at the edge of a pew.
‘Seriously,’ Karim said. ‘She was asking me if you had a girlfriend or whatever. And don’t think we didn’t notice her following you up to bed the other night.’
‘She didn’t follow me to bed.’
‘Well, she left at the same time.’
‘And?’
‘I’m just saying. She’s pretty fit…’
Thorne turned away and walked towards the door. He said, ‘We need to crack on.’
‘So, am I supposed to stay here all bloody day?’ Karim asked.
‘Somebody needs to,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ll see if I can get Dave to swap with you later on, but I shouldn’t moan too much if I were you. At least it’s warm in here. It’s getting seriously nippy out there.’
Karim was lying down again, his feet up on the pew, when Thorne pulled the chapel door closed behind him.
He walked through the graveyard past the huge Celtic cross – its inscription commemorating Lord Newborough, who had owned the island in the nineteenth century – to the ruins of the ancient abbey just beyond. It was basically no more than the damaged remains of a sunken bell tower – all that was left of what had once been a two-storey structure that also served as a lookout post – but it was still many centuries older than the chapel Thorne had just left.
He stepped into it and immediately felt the temperature drop. A change in the sound, the quality of the silence.
There were large, flat stones arranged into some kind of table or low altar at one end. A modern wooden bench sat against the wall at the other. Thorne stood still between the two; hands thrust deep into pockets, listening to the wind’s low note through holes in the stone, supposedly put there hundreds of years before by a Spanish man-o’-war the lookout had failed to spot. He stayed for a minute, perhaps two, before stepping out and walking quickly back to the track.
Fifty yards or so down, he walked past the birdwatcher he had spotted on the side of the mountain. He recognised the man’s red woolly hat.
The man said, ‘Good day for it,’ and Thorne grunted.
Thinking that any day spent looking for bodies was unlikely to make his list of good ones.
A second or two before the man was past him, Thorne was suddenly struck by the idea that he had seen his face somewhere before. That it was more than just the red hat that was familiar. Convinced that he knew the man, but with no idea how, Thorne opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again once he realised that he had nothing to say and that the birdwatcher was already gone. He turned and watched the man stride away along the track.
Bethan Howell was standing outside the school. She was leaning against the wall, staring out across the plain, smoking.
‘So, how was your night?’ Thorne asked.
‘Quite fun, actually,’ she said. ‘Well, the wine helped. We all sat around the fire telling scary stories. It was a bit like being on a school trip or something, except that the stories were true.’ She saw Thorne looking at her cigarette and reached into her pocket. ‘Want one?’
‘God, yes,’ Thorne said. ‘But I’d better not.’
‘I can see why you might need one.’ She nodded back towards the school. ‘Mr Nicklin’s every bit as much of a charmer as I was expecting,’ she said.
‘Really? I thought the pair of you were starting to hit it off.’
She smiled. ‘He’s what got the ball rolling last night. Those scary stories I was talking about.’ She took a drag. The wind took the ash away fast. ‘I mean, you read about these characters in the paper, but you never know what they’re going to be like, do you? I’ve spent plenty of time dealing with the bodies they leave behind, but this is the first time I’ve actually had the pleasure.’
‘You’re doing well,’ Thorne said.
‘Am I?’
‘Yesterday, in there.’ Now, Thorne nodded towards the school. ‘He was doing everything he could to push your buttons. Talking about getting turned on by corpses, all that.’
‘Oh, he pushed them all right.’
‘Didn’t look like it.’
‘I was shaking like a leaf.’
‘You did a good job of hiding it.’
‘You reckon? I didn’t know whether to burst into tears or kick him in the bollocks.’
‘Well, I know which I’d like to have seen,’ Thorne said.
A gull of some description flew by just a few feet overhead, and they watched as it wheeled away, screeching loudly before it dropped into a garden behind one of the cottages.
‘So what’s the story on this woman we’re looking for?’
Thorne told Howell as much as he knew; went through Nicklin’s story about being interrupted while he was digging Simon Milner’s grave.
‘So, that’s twenty thousand saints, a teenage boy and an old woman,’ she said. She took a drag and let the smoke out slowly to be whipped away from the side of her mouth. ‘Not that the two dead people would be as important to any of these pilgrims as their precious imaginary saints.’
‘Not a churchgoer then?’ Thorne said.
‘Weddings and funerals, same as most people,’ she said. ‘Too many funerals lately.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it, when you do what we do? How many coppers do you know who are full-on God-botherers?’
‘Not too many.’
‘Right. He gave us free will, did he?’ She took a final, deep drag, then began stubbing her cigarette out against the wall. ‘What, so we could use it to butcher people? Teenage boys and old women?’ She looked at him. ‘Sorry. Bit of a hobbyhorse.’
‘Not a problem,’ Thorne said. ‘Actually, you sound a lot like my mate, Phil.’ He realised that he still hadn’t got back to Hendricks, had yet to hear the grisly details of his friend’s latest conquest.
Howell dropped the nub into the pocket of her waxed jacket and nodded out across the fields. ‘So she’s out there somewhere, is she? Body number twenty-thousand and two.’
Thorne nodded, then walked past her towards the steps that led up to the school. He said, ‘Let’s go and see if our friend feels like telling us where, shall we?’
Inside the school, Nicklin was holding court.
Markham and Holland were whispering in the far corner of the hall, Batchelor stared into space and Fletcher and Jenks looked as though they’d heard it all before, but Burnham and Barber sat transfixed by whatever lurid prison yarn Nicklin was regaling them with.
Nicklin looked up when Thorne and Howell came through the door. He looked relaxed, one leg crossed over the other, his handcuffed wrists resting on one knee. ‘He’ll tell you.’ He nodded at Thorne.
‘Tell them what?’ Thorne asked.
‘Some very strange things go on inside Her Majesty’s prisons.’
‘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.’