The Bones Beneath (9 page)

‘I know,’ she said, nodding. ‘Stupid idea.’

‘Stupid time, that’s all,’ he said.

They both looked elsewhere for as long as it took to let a breath out, then turned towards their rooms at the same time. They separated quickly, the floorboards groaning beneath the cheap carpet as they walked, as they fished for the oversized wooden fobs in their jacket pockets.

Casually, desperately.

Thorne pushed his key towards the lock, fumbled it and tried again.

He took care to keep his eye firmly fixed on the door that was no more than a few inches in front of his face, well aware that, fifteen feet to his left, Wendy Markham was doing exactly the same.

The writing was tiny and precise, but the way it was laid out, the words crushed against one another, meant that it took Kitson two or three attempts before she was able to read through any of the letters quickly.

It was impossible to tell if Nicklin had
written
them quickly. Had it all come out in a rush or had he taken his time? Were his descriptions and diatribes spontaneous or had he thought carefully through every phrase, perfected each image? She could not understand a need for haste, not from someone with so much time on his hands, but sometimes there was an unmistakable energy to the words. A strange urgency about them. Or was that simply down to the layout, the way the words had been crammed on to every page?

She sorted out the batches of rubber-band-wrapped envelopes before she started, laying them along the back seat of the car. She turned around to retrieve a fresh batch when she was ready and tossed the ones she had finished with back into the box, which was nestling in the footwell.

Kitson had done as Thorne had suggested and read the most recent letters first. The whole thing felt weird enough anyway, but it was never stranger than when she was beyond the point where Annie had stopped. When she was opening envelopes. Now she was the only reader, looking at words that she was the first to see, other than Nicklin himself of course. She lifted each off-white, rectangular envelope and opened it fast, the tearing of the paper masking the sound of her breath catching every time.

The odd one had been opened and read by prison officers before it had been sent out. Kitson knew they did that. They would have checked all his incoming mail of course, but only dipped randomly into the letters that were going the other way. She had no idea who he might have been writing to other than Annie and his ex-wife. Did he correspond with his ‘fans’, of whom there were plenty? Did he reply to the marriage proposals from the crackpot bitches all desperate to snag themselves a killer as a husband? The desperate souls convinced that Mr Right would be someone with at least a couple of killings to his name.

She stopped after an hour for a cigarette, got out of the car and smoked it in the garage. She didn’t smoke as often as she once had, but kept a packet in the glove compartment for the difficult days or nights. She would sneak out now and again, when everybody else was asleep, and the pack would usually last her a month or so. Her other half knew but pretended he didn’t, and her eldest son had caught her once. He’d smelled it on her and gone ballistic. He’d called her a hypocrite when she’d tried to lecture him after he’d got drunk and thrown up on the landing outside his bedroom. It was hard to argue with.

More than once, a single dried strand of rolling tobacco had fallen out into her lap as she’d unfolded one of the letters. She brushed it quickly away, hoping it was not one that Nicklin himself had plucked, sticky from his lips.

After two and a half hours, Kitson had read as much as she was willing to for one night. She had got through all the letters from the previous few months and a good many of those from much earlier. A hundred or so altogether. She wondered how Thorne would feel about being talked about, and not just in the most recent letters. She tried to imagine how she would feel if she was the one Nicklin was thinking about like that and couldn’t. She put the cardboard box back into the boot of the car and tossed an old dog blanket across it.

She smoked one more cigarette then went inside to email Thorne.

Helen was laughing…

‘… and the bloke who runs the place is like this cartoon Welshman,’ Thorne said. ‘With a big red face and looking like he’s always just about to burst into song.’ They both laughed. ‘Honestly, he’s like a dog with two dicks because he’s got some actual guests, but he’s a bit over-friendly for my liking.’ He sat on the edge of the bed, moved the phone from one ear to the other and leaned down to untie his shoelaces. ‘I think there’s every chance we’ll be murdered in our beds.’

‘It all sounds lovely,’ Helen said.

Thorne looked around the room, wondering what else he could find to tell her about. ‘Oh and the remote control for the TV is attached to the wall… on a curly wire. I swear, it’s actually
attached
, so people can’t nick it. Does anybody bother to steal remote controls?’

‘Some people’ll take anything, you give them the chance.’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’ Thorne could hear Alfie shouting in the background. Helen’s son, just a few months away from his second birthday. Helen tried and failed to shush him. ‘How’s he doing?’

‘Well, he’s not asleep.’

‘Because I’m not there to read him a story,’ Thorne said.

‘Oh, is that it?’

‘Seriously, I’ve got the knack of getting him off now.’

‘He does miss you,’ Helen said. ‘His mood’s different.’

‘Really?’

‘I’ve told you.’

Thorne glanced up at the mirror on the wardrobe door, saw that he was grinning.

‘So everything’s going OK, then, is it?’ Helen asked. ‘How you getting on with your new CSM?’

Thorne sat up straight. Why on earth would she ask that? Had she heard something in his voice? How could there be
anything
in his voice?

‘Yeah, she’s OK,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ve hardly spoken to her, tell you the truth. She was stuck in the back-up car with Sam Karim.’

‘Right…’

Thorne could still see the look on Wendy Markham’s face when she’d asked him back to her room. The intention had been obvious enough. I mean, nightcap? Had she brought a bottle of wine or something with her? Obviously, there was no bottle of anything. It was a pretty straightforward proposition. Thorne felt good about turning her down, he felt… noble.

And yet…

She was seriously fanciable, no question about it and being propositioned by anyone was nice, was a buzz. She was older than Helen, he guessed, probably early forties, but still a fair few years younger than he was. When he’d asked for her to join the operation as crime scene manager, Thorne had remembered exactly who she was and what she looked like and that he’d flirted with her a little when they’d first met. No point pretending he hadn’t. Something about the way she’d spoken to him on the landing had suggested there would be no strings attached, no awkwardness afterwards.

Just a bit of fun while they were away.

‘I called Phil,’ Thorne said. The change of subject sounded jarring, even to him.

Phil Hendricks. Thorne’s closest friend. A man whose shaved head, tattoos and body piercings made him look more like the lead singer in a death-metal band than the skilled and respected pathologist he was. Someone who remained fiercely loyal to Thorne, though that loyalty had been regularly tested, and who was usually first with a joke, despite his sadness at an unfulfilled desire to be a father.

‘When?’

‘Just before I called you. He wasn’t answering, so I left a message.’

‘Oh, I think I know why he was busy,’ Helen said.

The truth was, Thorne had called Hendricks because he’d wanted to tell him about what had happened with Wendy Markham. Brag a little. They’d have laughed about it, joked about what might have been and Hendricks would have pretended to be shocked that Thorne had passed up a golden opportunity. Ultimately though, his friend would have been pleased, impressed that Thorne had done the right thing. Having grown close to one another in recent months, Helen was now Hendricks’ friend too.

Thorne was pleased about it, even if that triangle had proved to be a tricky one in the past. In a previous relationship, his best friend and his then-girlfriend had regularly taken great delight in ganging up on him.

The silence between them growing dangerously long, Thorne asked himself why he wasn’t telling Helen about the business with Wendy Markham. Would it not have earned him an inestimable number of Brownie points? Wouldn’t it be proof positive that he was not the kind to play away when the chance presented itself? It was frustrating, but the fact was that he and Helen had not even been together six months and he could not be sure
how
she would react. She might well have been delighted, at his honesty and of course at the decision he had made. She would probably have laughed and made some crack about Markham being ‘blind’ or ‘desperate’ but would she then be spending the next few days imagining the worst? Would it actually do more harm than good in the long run?

Thorne could not see any point in chancing it.

‘What did you mean, about Phil being busy?’

‘I think he’s got a new boyfriend,’ Helen said.

‘Really?’

‘I called him a few hours ago and some bloke answered.’

‘Bloody hell, he can’t keep it in his pants, can he?’

‘Told me Phil was in the shower. Said it like he was about to go and join him. He sounded a bit giggly, you know, like he was pissed.’

‘Yeah, well he’d have to be to get off with that ugly bastard.’

Helen laughed. ‘You ask me, there’s a new tattoo on the cards.’

Though he was rapidly running out of space, Hendricks liked to commemorate each new sexual conquest with a trip to the tattoo parlour.

‘Oh well, good for him,’ Thorne said, thinking: Well, at least somebody’s getting his leg over. It made him even more determined to tell Hendricks about the shag that got away. ‘So how was your day?’

‘It was fine,’ Helen said.

It was code, a game they played. Helen Weeks was a DS on a Child Abuse Investigation Team and, as such, dealt with more horror and suffering every day than the average hard-as-nails Murder Squad copper saw in a month. Most of the time she chose to keep it to herself, to keep it from anyone close to her. Every so often though, the day would come when she would need to offload some of it and then Thorne’s job was simply to be there and to listen while she poured it all out.

Desperate half-lives and broken bones no bigger than a bird’s.

‘Fine’ just meant ‘not now’, that was all. ‘Not yet…’

Instead, the laugh came back into Helen’s voice as she told him about a 999 call that had been doing the rounds: a tinny recording downloaded on to the phone of almost every copper she’d run into that day. A man had called the emergency services and announced that he’d been stabbed. When the operator had asked him how many times he’d been stabbed, the man said, ‘This is my first time.’

Thorne was naked and staring at himself in the rust-spotted bathroom mirror by the time they said goodnight.

Helen said, ‘Keep an eye on Nicklin tomorrow, all right?’

‘I’ll not be taking my eyes off him,’ Thorne said.

He walked back into the bedroom, set an alarm on his phone and turned on the TV. He slipped beneath the thin duvet and flicked through the channels with the remote that was attached to the wall. He was tired, but watched a few minutes of some film he could not make head or tail of until he could barely keep his eyes open. He turned the TV off and leaned over to switch off the bedside light.

Within a few moments he was wide awake again.

He turned the light back on and reached for a paperback thriller that Helen’s father had sent, thinking he might like it. A few pages were more than enough. Religious conspiracies and clues in paintings or symphonies or whatever. They had yet to meet, so it was understandable that Helen’s father might make a mistake about the kind of thing his daughter’s boyfriend liked to read. Or perhaps it was just that Thorne’s mind was suddenly racing too fast for anything to settle, to gain purchase.

He got out of bed to fetch the small, laminated photograph from the inside pocket of his jacket. It had been part of the background material Brigstocke had passed on to him when the operation was being put together; a faded photo from a quarter of a century before, taken in the place he would be travelling to in the morning.

Thorne lay down again and studied the picture.

A dozen or so boys, the majority looking surly or plain awkward. The members of staff not looking an awful lot happier, save for the woman at the heart of the gathering. A shawl around her shoulders, heavy-framed glasses and a smile of satisfaction, of pride in the men and boys around her.

He took a last look at the two boys standing together at the far end of the back row, then put the picture down.

He thought about two dead teenagers and Jeffrey Batchelor waking to it every day of his life. A third, who was the only one smiling in a faded photograph. He thought about a boy who was now only bones and a mother desperate to lay her son to rest; praying that the man who had killed him was telling the truth.

Got a bit of a thing, has he?
 

He remembered what Helen had said to him about Nicklin, her insistence that he stayed careful. He thought about her trying to get Alfie to sleep then climbing into bed wearing one of his old Johnny Cash T-shirts.

The smell of body-butter on it afterwards.

He lay awake and thought about Helen, but when he finally turned off the light and his hand crept down beneath the duvet, Thorne was thinking about Wendy Markham.