The Bones Beneath (3 page)

Jeffrey Batchelor raised his forearm, buried his face in the material of the thick, brown crew-neck sweater and sniffed. Fully dressed again, he looked at himself in a small mirror on the back of the door, then across at the senior prison officer who had only finished strip-searching him five minutes before.

‘Just feels odd,’ he said.

‘Bound to,’ Alan Jenks said. ‘First time back in your own clothes since you came in, right?’

Batchelor nodded. ‘I suppose that’s right.’

First time in eight months. In two hundred and thirty-six days. He pointed at Jenks, managed a dry laugh.

‘First time I’ve seen you out of uniform.’

Jenks checked himself out in the mirror. He was wearing jeans, same as Batchelor, with a black sweater over a denim shirt. ‘Yeah, well, they don’t want what’s going on to be too obvious,’ Jenks said. ‘They want it all
low-key
.’ He used his fingers to put quotation marks round the last words, then nodded towards the door and another room on the far side of Reception where two of his colleagues were prepping the other prisoner. ‘
He
does, anyway. He’s the one calling the shots, you ask me.’ He nodded, conspiratorial. ‘Don’t you reckon?’

Batchelor shrugged, as though any opinion he might have was hardly worth considering. He certainly had one, but he knew that where Stuart Nicklin was concerned, it was usually best to say nothing.

He’d learned that before he’d even met the man.

‘I mean, you’re his mate,’ Jenks said.

‘Not really.’

‘Or whatever it is.’

‘I’m not,’ Batchelor said.

‘Doesn’t matter to me either way.’

‘It’s not like that.’

Jenks stared at the prisoner for a couple of seconds, then smiled like he wasn’t convinced and turned away. He reached up into an open metal cupboard on the wall for the D-cuffs. Turned back and dangled them. ‘Yeah well, not easy to be too low-key when you’re walking about wearing these buggers.’

‘I suppose not.’

Jenks stepped across, workmanlike. ‘Hardly going to look like we’re sightseeing, is it?’

Batchelor closed his eyes and held out his arms.

On the wing the evening before, he had looked up to see Nicklin in the doorway of his cell. A small wave like there was no need for concern, like he was just passing. He had laid down the book he was reading, got to his feet.

‘All set?’

He had nodded, his mouth too dry suddenly to spit out an answer quickly.

‘Not having second thoughts, are we?’

‘Just a bit nervous,’ he had said, eventually.

Nicklin had laughed, hoarse and high-pitched, then stepped across the threshold. ‘You should be excited, Jeffrey,’ he’d said. He had lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘We’re going on holiday…’

Batchelor winced and sucked in a breath as the cuffs were double locked, the snap catching the skin.

‘Sorry,’ Jenks said.

‘No problem, Mr Jenks,’ Batchelor said. ‘Not your fault.’

First time back in cuffs since he’d climbed out of that van, two hundred and thirty-six days before.

Thorne stood by the side of the back-up vehicle – a Ford Galaxy identical to the one he and Holland were in – talking through the half-open window to DS Samir Karim, who would be driving, and to the woman in the passenger seat. Once they had reached their destination, Karim would be working as exhibits officer, while Wendy Markham was on board as civilian crime scene manager. This was assuming that any crime scene was actually found, that there
were
any exhibits.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ Thorne said.

‘Exhibit A… bugger all,’ Karim said, grinning.

Thorne glanced at Markham, who seemed happy enough. Maybe, like Holland, she was just looking forward to getting out of the city. Thorne could not think of anywhere much further out.

Karim was chuckling now. ‘Actually, better make that Exhibit Sweet
F
A!’ With no discernible quality control when it came to his jokes, Karim was every bit as indiscriminate about gambling. He regularly took bets on time of death or length of sentence, but was equally happy to run books on the grisliest of murder case minutiae. Since being brought into the team, he had been predictably keen to discuss the odds on finding the body they were going to look for, the number of hours they might have to spend digging.

For now, Thorne was happier talking about the route.

While other areas of security were causing him a degree of concern, he could be confident that this part of the operation at least had stayed under wraps. Their progress would be monitored, the two vehicles tracked by satellite in real time, but only he and Karim actually knew which way they were going.

They went over it one more time.

‘Don’t worry, it’s sorted,’ Karim said. He tapped the side of his head to suggest that the information had been memorised. As though he had no need of the sat nav and would have happily swallowed the map Thorne had supplied were it not for the fact that it was laminated.

Thorne looked at his watch. ‘If we ever get going.’ They had been at the prison almost an hour and a half already. He had wanted to be long gone by now. ‘Don’t know why we bothered to get up so early.’

‘Maybe we can make up some time on the road,’ Karim said.

‘Not going to happen,’ Thorne said. The cars would stay in touch by radio, but it was important that they maintained visual contact too. ‘Inside lane on the motorways wherever possible, Sam, all right? Nice and steady and don’t be playing silly buggers and trying to overtake.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘It’ll take as long as it takes.’

‘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.

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 people 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.

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.’