Kitson glanced up at the well-weathered
FOR
SALE
sign and, when she looked back towards the front door, she saw that it was open and that Sonia Batchelor was waving from the step. She had begun talking before Kitson had reached the front door, and continued as she showed her through to a neatly arranged sitting room.
‘We need to downsize,’ Sonia said. ‘Rachel and me. Well, I mean, obviously we do. For seven years, at least.’
Kitson nodded.
Rachel: the younger daughter. Seven years: the minimum term.
The woman sat down on an artfully distressed leather armchair and waved Kitson towards a matching sofa. She was forty-three, if Kitson remembered correctly; skinny, with grey roots showing through a dye-job and long, thin fingers that moved almost constantly against the arm of her chair. She had worked full-time for the local council up until just over a year before, something in social services. The job had been the most insignificant of her losses.
‘Only silly offers so far,’ Sonia said. ‘Just because people know we’re desperate to sell, I suppose. They know the address from the news or whatever, so they’re trying to grab a bargain.’ She looked around the room, nodded. ‘I’m not going to let anyone take advantage of us though.’
The house was a four-bedroom semi, a mile or so from the centre of Northampton. A nice, quiet road. Neighbourhood Watch and carefully trimmed front hedges. Just over a year before there had been a family of four living here, but now there were only two. Sonia Batchelor had lived here with her college lecturer husband and two children. Today, there was only one child and Sonia Batchelor was the wife of a convicted murderer.
‘I’d offer you tea,’ she said. ‘Truth is though I’ve been jumpy as hell ever since you called and I’m desperate to know what this is about.’
‘Sorry,’ Kitson said. ‘I did tell you Jeff was all right.’
‘Yes, you said that —’
‘That it wasn’t really Jeff I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Right, but whatever it is, it obviously involves him, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So…?’
‘It’s about your husband’s relationship with Stuart Nicklin.’
Sonia narrowed her eyes. ‘Relationship?’
‘You do know who Stuart Nicklin is?’ Kitson asked.
Sonia nodded quickly. ‘Yes, well, I bet there wasn’t any problem selling
his
house, was there? I mean, there’s always sickos and ghouls willing to splash out on properties with those kind of associations, aren’t there? Way over the asking price sometimes, if the body count’s high enough. Mind you, the council knock them down more often than not, don’t they? Or is that only if the killings actually happened at the house? You know, the “house of horror” kind of thing. Like Nilsen or whoever. Actually, I always get the Nilsens mixed up, Donald and Dennis. I know the surnames are spelled differently and that one was the Black Panther and the other one killed young men and cut them up and only got caught because his drains started to smell.’ She blinked slowly, let out a sigh. Said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Sonia, shut
up
.’ She looked at Kitson. ‘Sorry, I can’t stop talking…’
‘Why don’t I go and make us some tea?’ Kitson said.
Sonia showed Kitson where the kitchen was, then stepped into the back garden and smoked, signalling through the window to let Kitson know where the teabags were, that she didn’t take sugar.
Back in the sitting room a few minutes later, she said ‘sorry’ again. The cigarette seemed to have calmed her down. Kitson gave her another minute, drank her tea and looked around. There were family pictures in polished frames arranged on top of a large pine trunk beneath the window.
The usual.
Mum and dad and two smiling kids. Assorted combinations of the four. In the park with a dog, pulling stupid faces at the dinner table, on a boat somewhere.
Jeffrey Batchelor and his elder daughter, Jodi.
Sonia saw Kitson looking and said, ‘Sometimes… even now, it’s like it didn’t really happen. Like it was just a bad dream. If the phone goes in the evening, I’ll think it’s her ringing from the station. I’ll still be expecting Jeff to go and collect her, stomping out into the hall and moaning about being nothing but a bloody taxi service.’ She almost laughed. ‘You got kids?’
Kitson nodded. ‘Oh yeah, I know exactly what that’s like.’
They both looked at the photograph for a few seconds more. Jodi’s hair was a little darker than in the only picture Kitson had seen previously. The one in the file.
Just a bad dream
.
The November before last, Jodi Batchelor, aged seventeen, had hanged herself in her bedroom after being dumped by her boyfriend via text message. Her father had found her body. The following day, Jeffrey Batchelor had confronted his daughter’s boyfriend – nineteen year-old Nathan Wilson – at a bus stop near his house and, following a heated exchange, had attacked him in front of several onlookers. In what those witnesses had described as a ‘frenzied assault’, Batchelor had kicked and punched Wilson, giving him no opportunity to defend himself. He had repeatedly smashed the boy’s head against a kerbstone, and, according to the witnesses, had continued to do so long after the boy was dead.
‘Stuart Nicklin is currently under police escort,’ Kitson said. ‘He’s being taken to a location in Wales, where he claims to have buried a body twenty-five years ago. And he’s taken Jeff with him.’
Sonia stared for a few seconds. ‘I don’t understand. I only saw Jeff last week. He would have said.’
‘He wouldn’t have known it was happening,’ Kitson said. ‘Not exactly when, anyway. That’s not allowed for security reasons.’
‘Still, he would have said something, surely.’
‘He would have been told not to.’
‘By Nicklin?’
‘Possibly,’ Kitson said. ‘But certainly by the prison authorities.’
Sonia sat back, shaking her head as though trying to make sense of what she had been told. ‘So, what is it that you want?’
‘We want to know what you think about their relationship. Nicklin and your husband.’
‘What are you implying?’
‘I’m not implying anything.’ Kitson leaned forward. ‘Listen, Sonia, we have no bloody idea why your husband is currently keeping Stuart Nicklin company, but we do know that Mr Nicklin does nothing without a very good reason. So, right now we’re scrabbling around trying to find anything that might help us. You knew that the two of them had become close?’
Sonia nodded.
‘How did you feel about that?’
She grunted. ‘Well, obviously I wasn’t thrilled. My husband’s a good man, despite what happened. He’s a man with
faith
.’ She held Kitson’s eyes for a few moments, as though keen for what she had said to sink in. ‘I’m not a believer, none of the rest of the family are, but he is. He’s not a nutcase about it, nothing like that… doesn’t force it on anybody else, but he’s kind and compassionate and he’s got a conscience. He’s everything Stuart Nicklin isn’t. So, I felt sick, if you want to know the truth. But the fact remains that Nicklin…
helped
Jeff in there.’ She leaned forward to pick up a mug of tea, which was probably no more than lukewarm by now. ‘Jeff was finding it really hard. A few weeks after he first went in, he had some sort of… breakdown. They had him on suicide watch for a couple of days. He was in a real state, to be honest…’
Kitson had read the file. She knew that Batchelor had handed himself in to the police immediately after the attack on Nathan Wilson. He had pleaded guilty to murder and continually refused to allow any consideration of diminished responsibility. He had accepted his punishment. There was no doubt that prison would have come as a shock to a man like Jeffrey Batchelor, but now his wife was hinting that something serious had happened, over and above the necessary adjustment.
‘Was he attacked?’ Kitson asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Maybe he was threatened.’
‘I really don’t know,’ Sonia said. She clicked her fingers. ‘But suddenly everything had changed and when I went to see him he wasn’t the same person he had been the week before. There was just a blackness. There was this… despair I couldn’t shake him out of.’
‘But Nicklin could?’
Sonia shook her head. ‘Trust me, I know how ridiculous it sounds. I spoke to one of the chaplains in there a bit later, someone Jeff had been talking to a lot ever since he’d been inside. He couldn’t explain it either, but he’d certainly noticed the difference. Jeff and Nicklin started spending time together and things changed. Next time I went in, he was calmer. More like his old self. He was talking about the future, courses he wanted to do in prison, that sort of thing.’ She took a mouthful of tea, pulled a face. ‘I’ve no idea how he did it, let alone why, but somehow Nicklin managed to talk my husband round. Thank God he did…’
Kitson looked across at the photographs again. ‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question though, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘
Why
. Why would Nicklin want to take Jeff under his wing like that.’
Sonia put her mug down. She sat back and folded her arms. ‘Listen, I’ve got no bloody idea what’s in this for Nicklin,’ she said. ‘But I think I know what Jeff gets out of it. I think Nicklin makes him realise that what he did wasn’t so terrible.’ She shook her head. ‘I mean, yes it
was
terrible, course it was and nothing’s going to bring Nathan back or make his parents feel any better. I just mean… compared to what Nicklin did. Someone like Nicklin helps Jeff remember that he’s just a good man who snapped, that’s all. An ordinary man, who’s
nothing
like the Nicklins of this world.’ She looked away for a few seconds, grimacing as though she were about to cry out or spit. When she turned her eyes back to Kitson, she said, ‘Maybe you’ve got this the wrong way round and it was all Jeff’s idea to go.’
‘You really think so?’ Kitson asked.
‘I think my husband needs Stuart Nicklin there to remind him who he is.’
They cut north for a while, the single-lane B-road running almost parallel with the Welsh border, just a mile or so away across the fields. Though they were still in England, the small towns and villages they passed through had decidedly Celtic-sounding names: Gronwen, Gobowen, Morda. ‘You sure we haven’t taken a detour into Middle Earth?’ Holland said, clocking a road sign.
Jenks, who looked like he was no stranger to the world of fantasy fiction, laughed from the back seat. Said, ‘I’ll keep a lookout for Orcs.’
Once across the border, Thorne turned west and they made good progress through the Dee Valley, the Holyhead road almost precisely following the path of the river as it wound through Llangollen. To the left, the landscape was soon densely wooded with conifers, while hills rose steeply away on the other side of them, mist shrouding the higher peaks. Holland pointed out the ruins of an abbey, said that Sophie had mentioned it.
‘You wait until we get where we’re going,’ Nicklin said. ‘There’s remains way older than that.’
‘Nice to know,’ Thorne said.
‘Shame there won’t be time to enjoy the sights.’
‘We find the remains of that boy, I’m happy.’
‘You should try and come back,’ Nicklin said. ‘Bring your other half.’
Driving through the small town of Corwen, they passed a statue of a warrior on horseback brandishing a sword, a couple posing for photographs in front. Jenks wanted to know who the soldier was, but no answer was forthcoming. A mile or so down the road, Batchelor said, ‘It’s Owen Glendower. The statue.’
‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’ Jenks asked.
‘Last proper Prince of Wales,’ Batchelor said. ‘Last one who was actually Welsh, anyway. He led a rebellion against the English at the start of the fifteenth century. Very much the father of Welsh nationalism.’
Thorne nodded. ‘One of those groups in the seventies and eighties who tried to burn the English out, weren’t they called the Sons of Glendower or something?’
‘That’s right,’ Batchelor said. ‘A bit like the Free Wales Army.’
‘Maybe there should be a statue of him setting fire to a holiday cottage instead,’ Holland said.
Nicklin laughed. ‘He loves his ancient history, Jeffrey does. Can’t get enough of it, still keeping his hand in. Always got his nose buried in some book, haven’t you, Jeff?’
‘I wish I knew a bit more, if I’m honest,’ Thorne said. He slowed for a set of temporary traffic lights, waited for the oncoming traffic. To his right, the hillside looked almost black, dotted with drifting, white clumps of grazing sheep. ‘All we got taught at school were dates, basically. Battle of Hastings, Wars of the Roses, whatever. I can still remember the dates, but I couldn’t tell you who was fighting or what they were fighting about.’
‘I can recommend a couple of books if you want,’ Batchelor said.
‘Wish I had time to read them,’ Thorne said.
‘Not so fond of
recent
history though, are you, Jeff?’ Nicklin turned in his seat to look at his fellow prisoner. ‘A few too many dead teenagers for his liking, isn’t that right?’
Batchelor blinked at him.
Fletcher laid a hand on Nicklin’s shoulder and gently eased him round again. ‘I think that’s enough now, Stuart.’
‘Just making conversation, Mr Fletcher,’ Nicklin said.
The lights changed and Thorne pulled away. Checking the rear-view as he put his foot down, Thorne could see how very pleased with himself Nicklin looked. As though he had just been congratulated for a remark that was hugely funny or clever as opposed to being pulled up for saying something nakedly malicious. It was clear to Thorne that the casual cruelty had not been about trying to make Batchelor feel bad. That had simply been the inevitable result.
It had all been a question of where the interest was.
Nicklin had been completely unable to tolerate someone else being the centre of attention, even if it was someone to whom he was supposedly close, even for just those few minutes of trivial conversation.
It had become necessary to adjust the focus.
Thorne remembered something he had been told many years earlier by a senior officer, when he had first joined a Murder Squad. There were, so he learned, two basic types when it came to murderers. There were those who would run from the scene of their crime as fast and as far as possible, and those who would hang around and offer to help the police with their enquiries.
There was little doubt as to which type Stuart Nicklin was.
Thorne was happy that Nicklin had been caught, happier still that he had been the one to catch him. Sometimes though, he regretted the part he had played in giving so much attention to a man who could bear almost anything except being ignored. In many ways, that man was still the child who had been expelled from school. The boy who had rescued Martin Palmer from the bullies, only to dominate and control him in unimaginable and perverse ways. Someone who had discovered, at an absurdly early age, how good it felt to hurt people and how much fun it was to make others do it for you.
Suddenly, Nicklin leaned forward, sighing heavily. He spoke in a theatrically whiny voice. ‘Are we nearly there yet?’
‘God, you sound like one of my kids,’ Fletcher said.
Thorne had to admit, it was a very good impression of a bratty teenager. It hadn’t struck him so forcibly before that Nicklin was such a skilled mimic. It made sense, he supposed, when you had spent so much of your life pretending to be someone you were not.
Nicklin was clearly enjoying Fletcher’s reaction. ‘Are we? Are we nearly there?’
Thorne looked at the sat nav. There was less than sixty miles to go, but according to the timings on the screen, they were still an hour and a half away. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Only difference is I can’t threaten you with taking your PlayStation away,’ Fletcher said. ‘Or no more trips to McDonald’s.’
Nicklin turned to the prison officer and now his face was completely expressionless; eyes flat and unblinking. ‘Not very much anyone can threaten me with, Mr Fletcher…’
All but the last few miles of their journey took them across Snowdonia National Park: eight hundred square miles of mountains, forest and agricultural land, the majority of which remained privately owned. They drove west towards the coast for a while, the road twisting just beneath Blaenau Ffestiniog, the ‘hole’ in the middle of the park where the heritage railway and the once thriving slate mines drew thousands of tourists every year. As they skirted the edge of the huge, manmade reservoir at Trawsfynydd, Holland pointed out a pair of hulking concrete towers, stark against the mountains on the far side.
‘Looks like a Bond villain’s hideout,’ he said.
This time it was Nicklin who enthusiastically seized the chance to provide the required information. These were, he told them, the twin reactors of a now decommissioned nuclear power station; a place to which he and the other boys from Tides House had been brought on an educational visit a quarter of a century earlier.
‘They took us up to that steam railway at Ffestiniog too. Chuff, chuff, pennies on the line, all that. Then someone had the bright idea of teaching us all about nice, clean nuclear power.’ He stared across the water. ‘It was a bloody disaster though. There were a
lot
of dead fish in there and apparently animals had been dying all over the place… bit of a scandal at the time. I swear that when we left they waved Geiger counters all over us.’
Fletcher said, ‘Bloody hell.’
‘We were all fine,’ Nicklin said. ‘Assuming the Geiger counters were working properly. Mind you, this stuff can take years to affect you, can’t it? Maybe, if I’d ever had kids, they’d have been born with two heads or webbed feet or whatever.’
Thorne was thinking that Nicklin’s absence from the gene pool was no great loss. Glancing across and catching Holland’s eye, he could see that he was thinking much the same thing.
‘I remember that Simon was with us that day,’ Nicklin said. ‘You know, Simon, who we’re going to be looking for?’
‘Simon, the kid you murdered,’ Thorne said.
‘That’s the one,’ Nicklin said, cheerfully. ‘I remember that he was getting really wound up. Scared to death, he was. Silly bugger spent every day for weeks afterwards banging on about how he was going to get cancer.’
‘I bet you had nothing at all to do with winding him up,’ Thorne said.
‘Oh, I had everything to do with it.’ Nicklin sat back in his seat. The power station was lost to view behind tall trees. ‘You’ve no idea how boring it was on that island, Tom. Well, you’ll see when we get there. I needed a hobby…’
The last stretch took them through Porthmadog, slowing beside the miniature railway running along the Cobb, then out into open country again, the darkening fields flooded on their right and above a streak of blue sky narrowing to grey and then a dusty pink at the horizon. A few miles further on, the vista became almost absurdly melodramatic as the sea came suddenly into view.
‘Needs music,’ Holland muttered. ‘Like a film…’
Twenty minutes later, driving into the village of Abersoch, the sat nav announced that their destination was ahead.
Thorne outlined the itinerary for the remainder of the day. By now everyone understood that they would not be travelling to the island until the following morning. It was already after two thirty and would be starting to get dark in an hour or so. ‘We need to make a start bright and early,’ Thorne said. ‘Give ourselves a full day. Though I’m hoping it won’t take that long.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Nicklin said.
Jenks leaned forward to tap Fletcher on the arm. ‘Not that we’ll be complaining about the overtime, mind…’
‘So, what’s the plan for tonight?’ Nicklin asked the question casually, as if they were just a gang of mates on the town and it was a toss-up between a nightclub and a quiet dinner somewhere.
‘Not got one yet,’ Thorne said. ‘For now, we need to see what we can do about getting you and Mr Batchelor a nice uncomfortable bed for the night.’