TT12 The Bones Beneath

by Mark Billingham

  The pain has fed his anger as he hoped it would. It felt good to rant at Adrian and now, watching him get closer, he’s feeling stronger than he has at any time since he was taken. He starts to imagine getting out of this room, thinks about what he will do to Adrian, how much damage he will inflict, as soon as he comes up with any sort of plan. The anger, if it is not keeping the fear at bay completely, is at least balancing things out a little.

  ‘You want to be careful,’ Adrian says. ‘Shooting your mouth off.’ He reaches behind and draws the Taser from his back pocket. ‘Might be fun to see what happens if we push this up against your balls and give you a jolt.’

  ‘I’ll probably get a stiffy. A bit more painful than Viagra, but you might be on to something there.’

  Adrian fires the Taser, watches the current arc between the electrodes for a few seconds, then puts it back in his pocket. ‘I’m not talking about that though.’ He nods towards the door. ‘She left her scalpel behind.’ He carries on nodding. ‘Oh yeah, and if you keep winding me up, I might be tempted to have a crack with it. I mean how hard can it be, right?’ He holds out his hand towards the bed. ‘Thing is though, I’m not getting a lot of sleep, no more than you probably, and what with that and way too much coffee… well, you can imagine.’ Adrian’s hand begins to shake theatrically and he stares at it, eyes wide, amused and mock-alarmed in equal measure.

  From the bed, he stares at it too and just like that, the anger is gone. The rush of confidence evaporates. The part of his brain that is still managing to think sensibly is telling him that, despite what they’ve done so far, they obviously want to keep him alive. Reassuring him that money, or whatever else they’re after, is far too important to them to risk killing him.

  Suddenly though, it’s the other part of his brain where the synapses are beginning to spark and spit. However much he tries to fight it, to dampen down the dread that presses him hard back into the pillow, a gallery of friends and family, of those he loves, is taking shape behind his eyes.

  He begins to think about dying in this room.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Jeffrey Batchelor closed his eyes and turned his face to the spray. He tried to imagine that the boat he was on would soon be pulling into Shanklin or Douglas or that he was heading home after a day’s fishing off Falmouth with the girls. That it was Sonia, Rachel and Jodi sitting across from him and that it was their voices just audible beneath the crash of waves and the throb of engines, and not those of Nicklin or Fletcher.

  Their laughter he could hear.

  The Batchelors had always enjoyed holidays in the UK; ‘stay-cations’ or whatever they were called. He and Sonia had both travelled abroad as students and he had been all over Europe on research trips for work, but any attempt at anything far-flung as a family had usually ended badly. Foreign holidays had been cursed with illness and lost luggage, the stress of complex travel arrangements almost always resulting in arguments. To be fair, it had been the adult members of the family who probably deserved most of the blame. He knew that with other families it was the other way round more often than not, the kids moaning about being away from friends and TV and a decent Wi-Fi signal, but he and Sonia were the ones who got bitten or caught food poisoning. The ones who fell out and spoiled it for everyone else. The girls had been great as a rule, trudging off to the Isle of Wight or the Lake District without complaint, content to play their part as the younger half of the ‘Boring Batchelors’. He knew that they had found it dull, the weather and the walking, the old-fashioned card games, especially as they had got older. He and Sonia had always known that they’d be off somewhere more interesting with their mates, first chance they had.

  Jodi had always talked about travelling…

  He opened his eyes, saw the Irish Sea rising and falling ahead of him, the edge of the boat moving in rhythm with it.

  He was on his way to a very different island, and because he was not the same as the man who had brought him, because he was sensible and sensitive and reacted to things the way the vast majority of ordinary people did, he was as scared as it was possible to be at the thought of what was waiting for him. The things he was going there to do.

  Nicklin had told him how perfect the island was, had talked for hours about the history of the place, the stories of those who had travelled to the place and were buried there.

  ‘Think about that, Jeff,’ he had said. ‘Twenty thousand of them. They reckon you’re only ever six feet from a rat in London. Where we’re going, you’re probably never more than that far from the bones of a saint.’

  If it was true, then up to now Batchelor hadn’t felt it. There was peace and quiet for sure, but nothing he would call spiritual. Maybe he was just too frightened to pick up on all that stuff.

  More than anything, he wanted to talk to Sonia, and Nicklin was still telling him that it was going to happen. All a question of timing, he said. Batchelor had spent a long time now, trying to work out what he would say when the moment came, knowing that he might not have very long in which to say it. He would need to pick his words carefully.

  Listen, love, it’s me. You’ll be hearing things, from reporters and from the police probably and I just wanted you to hear them from me first. You remember what happened a month or so after I started my sentence? To me, I mean. You remember that things were suddenly different…

  Should he tell her the truth? That was the big question.

  It was easy enough to tell her how much he loved her, that he missed her, but what about when it came to giving her reasons? Would she hate him if he did? He thought he knew his wife well enough to believe that she wouldn’t, but it was still a gamble.

  Was it worth risking that, just to have her understand?

  Something happened, love. I’m talking about Jodi and Nathan. I found something out…

  Having her hate him was not a price he was prepared to pay.

  He hoped he would know what to say when it came to it, when he heard his wife’s voice. He hoped that his faith would guide him. He hoped above all that there would be enough of it left by then. It had been such a struggle clinging on to it, plenty of times when it would have been so much easier to just let it go. The journey he had been on had been so strange and terrible that were it not for the conviction that it must all be somehow necessary, he would have stopped believing long before now.

  From staring up at his daughter, her flawless features grey and bloated, to the sea that was now spitting in his face and moving beneath him, remorselessly bearing him towards an island built on bones.

  From that bedroom to this boat.

  He heard a laugh and looked across at Nicklin. The man who had saved him for reasons that were now obvious enough.

  Nicklin smiled. Shouted, ‘All right, Jeff?’

  Batchelor smiled back, nodded.

  Another price that was far too high.

  THIRTY-SIX

  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.’