The owner/manager of the Black Horse in Abersoch was clearly thrilled at having four of his rooms occupied in the depths of the off-season. Seeing his reaction, Thorne tried to imagine how excited the man might have been with
six
rooms taken, but Fletcher and Jenks had booked themselves into a rival establishment at the other end of the village. Sitting in his cubby-hole at Reception, the manager had taken the news well. He had smiled as he shrugged and muttered, ‘More fool them.’
Welcoming the new arrivals like long-lost relatives, that smile had stayed plastered to Elwyn Pritchard’s round, red face as he gleefully handed over keys on oversized wooden fobs, scribbled down the Wi-Fi password and escorted each of his guests to their rooms in turn. The unalloyed joy was there in his voice as he ran through checkout times the following day, made sure they knew about regulated parking hours in the street outside and explained that the boiler was playing up, while assuring them that there should be plenty of hot water for everyone provided they ‘didn’t go mad’.
‘We’ll try not to,’ Thorne said.
Within a few minutes of shutting the hotel room door behind him, Thorne had taken his shower – unable, as it turned out, to go
too
mad beneath the lukewarm dribble – then crashed out on the lumpy bed for the best part of an hour and a half. When he woke, it was dark outside. He could not clearly recall what he had been dreaming about, but the thin sheets were clinging to him.
He turned the temperature of the shower right down and climbed back in.
He called Yvonne Kitson while he was getting dressed. She had not been back at home more than half an hour, she said, and was busy getting wine down her neck while she struggled to get her kids’ tea organised. She gave Thorne the highlights of her conversation with Sonia Batchelor.
‘So, you know… maybe Sonia’s right and it’s not
all
about Nicklin,’ Kitson said. ‘Sounds like Batchelor’s getting something out of being with him.’
Thorne sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘It was Nicklin that insisted on this.’ He turned the phone’s speaker on, tossed it on to the pillow, then lay back and pulled on his jeans. ‘It was one of his conditions.’
‘Just doing Batchelor a favour, maybe?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Worried about leaving him on his own?’
‘Remember who we’re talking about here, Yvonne. It’s not like he’s the prison chaplain.’
Kitson laughed. Thorne heard another mouthful of wine going down.
‘What happened at the care home?’
She told him what Annie Nicklin had given her. At that moment the box was still sitting in the boot of her car.
‘I need you to have a look at them, Yvonne.’
‘Can I feed my kids first?’
‘Yeah, sorry.’ He sat up, walked across to collect the shirt he’d dragged from his overnight bag and draped across a chair. ‘Look, I know it’s a long shot, but he might have said something in one of those letters, given some hint as to what he’s up to. God knows, a letter to his mother might be the one time he’s honest with someone.’
‘Based on what she told me, I seriously doubt it,’ Kitson said.
‘Well just have a look,’ Thorne said. ‘Obviously we’re only really interested in the most recent ones. Unless you’ve got nothing better to do than sit and read all of them.’ He watched himself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door as he buttoned up the shirt. When he was done, he tucked the shirt into his jeans. He ran a hand across his gut and pulled the shirt out again.
‘I think I might take my wine out to the car with me,’ Kitson said. ‘Sit and read the letters in there.’
‘Whatever lights your candle,’ Thorne said.
She told him what Annie Nicklin had said to the care worker, the residents having nightmares. She said, ‘I’m not really sure I want them in the house.’
Thorne closed the wardrobe door, looked around for his shoes.
His hair was still a little wet, so he put the shudder down to a trickle of water creeping between his shoulder blades.
When Thorne, Holland, Karim and Markham wandered down from their rooms and into the lounge, Elwyn Pritchard was installed behind the bar. If anybody had been playing a piano, chances are they would have stopped as Thorne and the others walked in. While the fruit machine tweeted and buzzed in the corner, they exchanged nods with a gaggle of flinty-looking drinkers who were clearly regular customers and gave the impression of having been in the bar a good while already.
Thorne took his wallet out and ordered the drinks.
‘I’m guessing you’re starving,’ Pritchard said.
‘I could eat a horse,’ Karim said. ‘But I’m trying to give up beef.’
It took Pritchard a few seconds to get the joke, then he laughed as though it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard; two explosive belly-laughs followed by a series of staccato hisses. When he’d recovered – though still grinning like an idiot and shaking his head – he said, ‘Now, I’ve taken the liberty of assuming that you won’t want to risk food poisoning at either of the iffy takeaways in town.’
‘Won’t we?’ Thorne asked. He had clocked a Chinese place on the way into the village and had been thinking about hot and sour soup and Singapore noodles ever since.
‘A lot of local cats go missing,’ Pritchard said. ‘You take my meaning.’
‘Right.’ Thorne glanced at Holland, who shrugged.
‘I’m only messing with you, boys. Actually it’s the seagulls you want to worry about. They catch them on the roof, pass it off as chicken.’ As Pritchard set three pints and a gin and tonic down on the bar, he explained that he’d decided to think ahead and that he’d used his initiative. ‘I opened the kitchen for you, special,’ he said.
Thorne took a mouthful of Guinness. Said, ‘Thanks.’
‘Yeah, I thought: Sod it.’ Pritchard nodded, wiping the bar. ‘I’ll splash out and bring the kitchen staff in for the night, because they’ve had a bloody long drive and they’ll be wanting something decent inside of them when they get here.’ He looked at Thorne. ‘Sounds like you’ve got a big day lined up tomorrow.’
Thorne put his glass back on the bar; leaned against it. ‘How do you know
what
we’re doing tomorrow, Elwyn?’
Pritchard looked a little thrown. ‘Well… I know a couple of the lads at the station pretty well and one of them said something about a trip out to the island, that’s all.’ He pointed to one of the regulars, a skinny man with a shaved head. ‘Plus, Eddie over there… his cousin’s the boatman who’s taking you across in the morning, so, you know… there you are.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘The lads at the station didn’t happen to say anything about who we might be taking to the island?’
Pritchard shook his head, stared down at the bar as he wiped at it a little harder. ‘No, I don’t know nothing about that. One of the lads just mentioned something about going to the island, that was all.’
Thorne looked at Holland, got another shrug.
He stared along the bar at Eddie, who stared right back, mouth full of crisps.
Pritchard turned and took a sip from a pint of his own. He fiddled with one of the optics for half a minute, then turned back and flipped the damp bar-towel across his shoulder. ‘Why don’t you take a seat and I’ll send one of the girls over to take your order?’
As they moved slowly away from the bar into the dining area, Holland began talking to Markham, something about a TV show they had both watched. Karim leaned close to Thorne and nodded.
He said, ‘I think we should risk the chinky…’
They sat at a table within sight of the bar, set somewhat snugly for four. It was one of several that had been laid, though there seemed little chance of anyone else having booked for dinner or popping in on a whim. Thorne wondered if they had actually just been left that way since August or whatever. The tablecloths dusted and the cutlery and glasses given a quick wipe every couple of weeks.
They studied their menus. Gammon and egg, gammon, egg and pineapple, fish and chips…
‘Fish should be all right, shouldn’t it?’ Holland asked.
Markham shook her head. ‘It’ll all be frozen out of season, doesn’t matter how close the sea is.’ In fact, the sea was no more than a couple of hundred feet away from them, beyond a high wall and a line of dilapidated beach huts. Save for the light of a far-distant boat, it was pitch black outside the floor-to-ceiling dining-room windows, but they could hear the roar and shush of the water as it churned against the shore.
Holland stared into the blackness. ‘Reminds me,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t kidding about those seasickness tablets…’
A waitress who could not have been much older than fifteen came across and took their order. Fish and chips for Holland and Thorne, leek and potato soup for Markham and a casserole made with local sausage, which Karim decided to gamble on. They took the opportunity to get a fresh round of drinks in.
At the bar, the conversation in Welsh grew suddenly animated. Karim leaned towards the others. ‘Listen to that,’ he said. ‘Only language in the world where it sounds like you’ve got something stuck in your throat.’ He made a noise like a cat trying to get rid of a fur ball.
Holland laughed. ‘Don’t know whether I should be listening or trying to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre.’
Thorne noticed Eddie and a couple of the other lads at the bar turning to stare across at them. ‘I think you might want to keep it down,’ he said.
‘What?’ Karim sat up straight to look.
Markham spoke quietly to Karim, as if she were speaking to a child. ‘You can’t speak Welsh, but you need to remember they can speak English.’
Holland looked across and raised a glass to Eddie, who sniffed and turned slowly back to his friends. ‘At least they know we’re coppers,’ he said, grinning. ‘It might be the only thing that stops us getting beaten up.’
‘Or it might be exactly why we
do
get beaten up,’ Thorne said.
The food arrived quickly and only Karim seemed unhappy with it, his gamble having clearly failed to pay off. It didn’t stop him tucking in though.
‘So you think it’s a problem?’ Holland asked. ‘The boys at the station shooting their mouths off?’
Thorne shrugged, mouth full. He swallowed, said, ‘I’d be a bit more worried, but this place is so bloody isolated. It’s not like anyone who fancies it can just nip over and have a look at what we’re doing.’ He speared a chip, angrily. ‘Don’t get me wrong though, I’ll still be having serious words in the morning when we pick Nicklin up. Gobby sods…’
The child waitress came over and asked if everything was OK. They all made rather more enthusiastic noises than the food merited.
‘He’s not what I expected,’ Markham said. ‘Nicklin.’ She looked at Thorne. Her brown hair was freshly washed and perfectly blow-dried and she had clearly taken the opportunity to reapply dark red lipstick, and mascara which highlighted eyes that were green enough to begin with. ‘I mean, I knew who he was, obviously, did some reading.’
‘He’s changed a lot in ten years,’ Thorne said.
‘I don’t mean physically.’
‘So what were you expecting?’
‘I’m not sure, just someone a bit less… childlike. Or maybe I mean childish. In the station, when we dropped him off, that stuff about being strip-searched? It was like he was showing off.’
‘He likes an audience,’ Holland said.
‘So why all this business about making sure the press are kept away?’
‘He’s not stupid,’ Thorne said. ‘He knows the press are going to get hold of it eventually. It’s more about enjoying the fact that he can get us to do what he wants. Yeah, he likes an audience, but not as much as he likes making people jump through hoops for him.’
Karim jabbed a dripping fork in Thorne’s direction. ‘Making
you
jump through hoops, you mean. That’s basically what he wants. At the end of the day, you’re the only audience he’s really bothered about.’
Thorne put down his knife and fork, picked up his glass. He’d had enough to eat anyway.
‘Got a bit of a thing, has he?’ Markham asked. She leaned towards him, curling strands of hair around her jaw with the backs of her fingers.
Thorne remembered the look on Nicklin’s face back in that darkening playground, triumphant somehow despite the blood and broken teeth. He remembered the look on his face earlier that day, when he’d turned from the urinal to tuck his cock away. His eyes, whenever Thorne had caught them in the rear-view, as though Nicklin had been staring at it, waiting.
Thorne drained his glass. ‘Yeah. A thing.’
When the waitress came to clear the table, nobody sounded interested in coffee, but Karim and Holland both seemed keen on at least one more drink before bed. Thorne pushed his chair back, announced that he was heading up. Wendy Markham finished what was left of her drink and said that she was ready to do the same.
Karim looked at his watch. ‘It’s not even ten.’
‘Listen, I’m not your dad,’ Thorne said. ‘But I will be seriously pissed off if either of you isn’t up to it in the morning, all right?’ He pointed at Holland, nodded at Karim. ‘He’s a nutcase, but you should know better, Dave.’
‘Just a quick half, honest,’ Holland said.
Karim nodded, solemn. ‘Maybe a couple of brandies.’
Thorne and Markham said, ‘Goodnight’ to Pritchard and his friends as they left the bar, then walked in silence past Reception and up the two flights of stairs to the floor where all four of them were staying.
Markham’s room was along the corridor to the left, while Thorne’s was half a dozen paces in the other direction. They stood together on the landing and exchanged a look. Just an awkward moment or two of politeness before separating, a second or two too long.
‘Right then…’
‘Fancy a nightcap in my room?’ Markham asked.
Thorne swayed, his weight shifting from one foot to the other. He could feel the colour flooding his face and saw that the same was happening to Markham’s. She was about to say something else when he managed to stammer, ‘I’m really knackered, Wendy. It was a ridiculously early start this morning. Well, for
both
of us…’