TT12 The Bones Beneath

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Bad luck for Nathan too, as it turned out… because the old red mist descended, understandably, all things considered, and our Jeff, who up until that point would not have said boo to a goose, beat the little shit to death right there and then with his bare hands.’ He looked at Jeff, then to his audience. ‘I know… who would have thought it?

  ‘So, Jeff hands himself in, because he’s a good, God-fearing citizen. On top of which, he’s covered in this kid’s blood and there’s half a dozen witnesses, so there’s not much point pretending he didn’t do it. He’s charged with murder, blah blah blah, there’s a trial and he’s sent down. End of story.’ Nicklin paused for effect, then leaned even further forward and dropped his voice to a whisper in an attempt to heighten the drama. ‘Only it isn’t… not by a long chalk. This is actually where it starts to get really interesting, because a few weeks after Jeff gets sent to prison, he receives a letter —’

  ‘Shut up!’

  Everyone turned to look at Jeffrey Batchelor, who was staring white-faced at Nicklin. The muscles were working in his jaw and his skinny chest strained against the arm that Jenks had thrown across it.

  Nicklin cocked his head. ‘I beg your pardon, Jeff?’

  ‘I said, shut up…’

  Thorne watched, intrigued. Batchelor had seemed oddly disconnected from almost everyone for the majority of his time away from the prison, but on those occasions when he had interacted with Nicklin, there had always been an element of fear in the way he spoke; the manner in which he held himself. Looking at Batchelor now though, Thorne could see that it was entirely absent.

  Batchelor was no longer afraid.

  ‘This is my story,’ he said. He raised his cuffed hands and pressed them against his chest. ‘It’s my pain.’ His clenched fists rose and fell in his lap as he spoke; measured, the anger held in check. ‘It’s all mine and you can’t have it… however much you want it, however much you feed off it. It’s mine, so I’ll tell it, OK?’

  Nicklin did not seem unhappy. ‘Fill your boots,’ he said. ‘I think I’d probably tell it better, but it’s your funeral.’

  Batchelor sat back, waited until Jenks had removed his arm, then nodded, to reassure the officer that there would be no need to replace it. ‘Yes, I got a letter,’ he said. ‘I’d had a lot of letters… from Nathan’s family, I’m sure you can imagine the kind of thing. Wanting me to rot in hell. The horrible stuff they wanted to happen to my wife, to our daughter.’ He swallowed. ‘Our other daughter.

  ‘This one was something different though. It was a letter from Nathan’s best friend, Jack. He was writing because he wanted me to know that Nathan had loved Jodi more than anything in the world and that he would never have split up with her. Jack said he knew that was true.’ He shook his head, barely perceptible, as though he could still not quite believe what he was about to say. ‘He knew… because it was him that had sent the text message.’

  Thorne looked around the room, saw the stunned reactions and guessed that he was wearing much the same expression. He let out the breath he had not realised he was holding.

  ‘In his letter, Jack told me he’d taken Nathan’s phone when he wasn’t looking,’ Batchelor said. ‘That he’d sent that text to Jodi as a joke. He wanted me to know that Nathan hadn’t had anything to do with it, that I’d murdered someone who was completely innocent and was as devastated by Jodi’s death as anybody. It had all just been a stupid… joke.’ Batchelor blinked slowly, screwing his eyes up. ‘I got that letter and I… went to pieces.’

  Thorne reached for his cup and filled his dry mouth with tepid coffee.

  ‘Jesus,’ Markham said.

  Nicklin grunted a laugh. ‘Yeah, well not even he could help.’ He looked around the room. ‘You do know Jeff’s a little bit Goddy, right?’ He nodded, as though that explained something. ‘Nearly lost his faith, that letter turning up like that. Understandable though, you find something like that out. That’s when we got close, isn’t it, Jeff?’ He looked across, but Batchelor had gone back to studying that fascinating piece of worn carpet. Nicklin carried on as though he was not there at all. ‘He was all over the place, back then, poor bastard. I pretty much talked him round. Saved his life, or good as.’ He leaned back, pleased with himself, rolled his head around, working the stiffness from his neck. ‘What did I tell you, though? One hell of a story, isn’t it?’

  Bethan Howell was the first to move. She stood up and lifted her jacket from the back of the chair. ‘I need to get some air.’

  Nicklin nodded towards the window. The rain was starting to beat more heavily against it, thrown against the glass on angry gusts. ‘It’s horrible out there,’ he said.

  Howell began to put her jacket on. She said, ‘It’s horrible in here.’

  FIFTY

  Howell was sheltering beneath the front porch. Thorne had followed her and for a minute they stood in silence. They stared out through the curtain of rain across the dark fields, the wind riffling through Howell’s short blonde hair and whipping the smoke from her cigarette into Thorne’s face.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘You sure you don’t want one?’

  Thorne shook his head.

  ‘It’s very impressive.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That degree of self-control.’

  ‘Not about everything,’ Thorne said.

  Howell took a drag, sighing out the smoke like she had really needed the nicotine hit. ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘That story.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Your daughter dies like that, you lose it and beat a kid to death, then you find out it was the wrong kid.’ She looked at him. ‘That it was just a bloody joke.’

  Thorne nodded, shivered a little.

  ‘I’ve got two kids,’ Howell said. ‘Eighteen and sixteen, and they’re still doing stupid things like that on each other’s phone. Messing with the other one’s Facebook account, playing jokes, you know? Fraping, they call it.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It only takes one careless remark, doesn’t it?’

  They said nothing for a few moments, then Howell half-turned and nodded back at the front door. ‘He loved it, though, didn’t he? Nicklin. Like Batchelor said, he feeds off stuff like that.’

  ‘I should have shut him up earlier,’ Thorne said.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Truth was, I wanted to know the end of the story.’

  ‘We all did.’

  ‘I was at the farm,’ Thorne said. ‘When I went to get the food, you know? We were talking about pollution… how there’s no pollution here at all.’

  Howell nodded. ‘Yeah, the island’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?’

  Thorne knew that it was. He had seen it walking to the lighthouse, sensed it standing at the abbey ruins. ‘It was,’ he said. ‘We’ve ruined it.’

  ‘You’re being daft.’

  ‘Bringing him here. That’s as much pollution as anywhere needs. Nicklin and the reason we brought him. It’s like we caused an oil slick or something. Like we turned up and dumped shit everywhere.’

  ‘Maybe you should come back,’ Howell said.

  Thorne looked at her. The lamp hanging from the porch cast just enough light to see the fine spray across her forehead, her eyes squinting against the rain and the smoke.

  ‘Like Burnham said. You should come back another time.’

  Thorne shook his head. ‘There’s always going to be associations, isn’t there? How much peace are you ever going to get, when all you can see is his face grinning at you and bones in a plastic bag?’

  Howell watched him for a while. ‘I’m guessing you see his face quite often.’

  ‘More often than I’d like,’ Thorne said. ‘There’s been a few like that down the years, but he’s the worst.’ He sucked at a curl of passing smoke. ‘I hope he hasn’t got into your head.’

  ‘No chance,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it’s str
ictly dead people’s faces for me. Most of the people I… find don’t have faces any more, so I make them up. I don’t know what Simon Milner or Eileen Bennett looked like, but I’ll imagine it.’ She gestured back at the front door. ‘Trust me, I’ll have forgotten that arsehole’s face tomorrow.’

  Thorne wasn’t sure that he believed her, but he stood for a few seconds in silence, thinking just how wonderful such a forgetting would be. He reached into his pockets, producing his phone from one and a torch from the other. He turned up his collar and nodded along the track. ‘I need to make a quick call.’

  Howell took a final drag. Said, ‘You can stay here. I’m going back inside.’

  Thorne explained that he had no wish to get soaked, but that the abbey ruins had so far proved to be the only place where he could get a mobile signal.

  ‘Typical,’ she said. ‘Six-hundred-year-old ruins on an all-but deserted island and I can’t get a decent signal in my front room in the middle of Bangor.’

  ‘Maybe those monks knew something we didn’t.’

  ‘What, silence and celibacy? I don’t think I’m interested.’

  ‘Didn’t they also make shedloads of wine?’ Thorne said. ‘They were probably pissed most of the time.’

  ‘That’s a fair point,’ Howell said. ‘Talking of which…’

  She was crushing her cigarette against the wet stone wall as Thorne turned on the torch and stepped out into the rain.

  ‘So where’s everyone sleeping?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Still not sorted it out.’

  ‘I presume you’ll be staying close to Nicklin.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll have to be.’

  ‘Not too close though, right?’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  Standing in the ruined belltower, Thorne was largely sheltered from the worst of the weather, though enough rain to piss him off still came in through the ‘windows’ when the wind blew in the right direction.

  ‘What about the forensic team and what’s-her-name? The CSM?’

  Thorne turned his face away from the wind and water. ‘Markham.’

  ‘I can’t hear you.’

  He raised his voice above the growl of the surf crashing on to the rocks just ahead and below him. ‘Wendy Markham.’

  ‘Yeah, her.’

  ‘She’s staying in the same place she was last night,’ Thorne said. ‘With Howell and the CSI.’

  ‘What about you and the prison lot?’

  ‘We’re in a separate cottage. Me, Dave and the four from Long Lartin.’

  ‘Sounds cosy,’ Helen said.

  ‘Oh, it’ll be lovely. I reckon we’ll be keeping each other awake all night, giggling and talking about girls and football.’

  ‘I still find it hard to believe there’s only one boat. Or that there’s nobody else capable of sailing the bloody thing.’

  ‘Just the way it is.’

  ‘It’s definitely coming tomorrow, is it?’

  ‘Don’t tempt fate, for God’s sake.’ Thorne turned and looked towards the sea, watched the beam from the lighthouse sweep across the stretch of water in his line of vision and away. Once the darkness had returned he could just make out the lights of a large boat in the far distance. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Any problems with the weather tomorrow, I’m swimming for it.’

  For a few minutes they talked about what Helen had been doing at work. They talked around some of her ongoing cases – the banter and the bullshit and the less than serious moments – though it was clear that she still wanted to talk properly when Thorne got back.

  ‘I know it’s only Wales,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It feels like you’re on the other side of the world, or something. Just a long way away, you know?’

  ‘Feels like that to me too,’ Thorne said. ‘Something about this place. It’s like going back in time.’ Helen replied, but the line broke up and he couldn’t catch it. ‘Listen, do you know what fraping is?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s when kids put fake pictures or status updates or whatever on somebody else’s Facebook page. Frape is Facebook rape, you get it?’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘You’re so not down with the kids.’

  ‘I think that’s probably a good thing,’ Thorne said.

  ‘You fancy going out somewhere tomorrow night?’

  Thorne could not be sure exactly what time he would make it home the following day, but barring disasters it would be in time for dinner. ‘Sounds great,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll see if I can get my dad to take Alfie.’

  ‘What about Indian?’ Thorne waited a few seconds for a response, then looked at his phone and saw that he had lost the signal. He moved from one corner to the other, held the handset at arm’s length, swearing loudly enough to raise several dead saints as he tried to get the signal back. When the tell-tale bars eventually reappeared on the small screen, he called Helen again, but she was engaged.

  He waited, guessing that she was trying to call him back.

  He looked out into the blackness, paying particular attention to the lower slopes of the mountain rising up behind the chapel, still thinking about that torch-beam he had seen in the back garden of the Old House.

  He turned and stared past the point where the land fell away, but he couldn’t see the boat any longer. It was only the noise that told him the sea was there at all.

  Howell and the others were sitting around a table in the parlour when Thorne returned to Chapel House. If the empty one on the floor was not evidence enough, the laughter and increased volume of conversation pointed towards a second bottle of wine having been opened. Barber was dealing from a tatty-looking pack of playing cards and each person had a pile of matches in front of them.

  ‘All good?’ Holland asked.

  ‘Wet,’ Thorne said. He looked around for something to dry his hair with, but could see nothing. With no bathroom facilities, towels were clearly the responsibility of those visitors who could bring themselves to wash at a kitchen sink in ice-cold water. He shook the water from his hair, pointing towards the closed door and the sitting room beyond. ‘Everything all right in there?’

  ‘Fine,’ Holland said, picking his cards up. ‘Nobody fancied listening to Nicklin any more, that’s all. So we came out here.’

  ‘He’s in a talkative mood,’ Howell said.

  ‘Nobody likes a chatty psycho, do they?’ Markham fanned her cards out, every inch the experienced player.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Thorne said. ‘It’s when he’s sitting there saying nothing that you want to worry. When the cogs are turning.’

  Holland tossed a few of his matches into the middle of the table. ‘Four,’ he said.

  ‘Call,’ Markham said.

  Thorne leaned down and snatched Holland’s cards from him. ‘Come on, Dave. I think we need to get that lot bedded down.’

  ‘Shame,’ Holland said. He pushed back his chair, then reached for the empty box at the other end of the table and began dropping his matches back in. ‘I was making a killing here.’

  When Thorne opened the door to the sitting room, all heads but Batchelor’s turned to him. ‘We should make a move,’ Thorne said. He stepped inside and looked at Fletcher, then at Jenks. ‘Time to get your boys to bed.’

  Nicklin was the first one to his feet, Fletcher quick to follow, a little taken by surprise.

  ‘Bagsy the top bunk,’ Nicklin said.

  FIFTY-ONE

  ‘No chance,’ Fletcher said. He peered into the bedroom and shook his head, as though he were no more than a dissatisfied guest at a hotel. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

  ‘And there I was thinking this was your job,’ Thorne said.

  ‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, isn’t it?’ Fletcher planted his feet and squared his shoulders. ‘This is not what I’m paid for.’

  ‘No, not normally, I understand that. But these are special circumstances.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘Everybody
else is having to adapt.’

  ‘There’s not enough money, mate. Nowhere near. Sorry, but you’ll have to sort something else out.’

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘You share a fucking room with him.’

  As soon as they had arrived at the Old House, Thorne had escorted the group from room to room; allocating beds, talking through the protocols that would see everyone safely through to the following morning. Thorne had told Holland to take the first of the single rooms and Holland had not complained. Jenks had seemed fine about sharing a room with Jeffrey Batchelor once Thorne had pointed out that the prisoners would be handcuffed to their bedsteads throughout the night. Batchelor had said nothing. Nicklin had moaned briefly about human rights, but Thorne sensed that it was just for show and the protest petered out once Thorne had made it clear that there was simply no alternative.

  As they had approached the second of the rooms containing two single beds, Fletcher – seeing what was coming – had begun grumbling and hanging back, like a child in fear of the dentist who has just heard the whine of the drill.

  Now they stood on the landing outside the room. Cop and prison officer staring one another out.

  Thorne was nominally head of the entire operation, but it gave him no formal authority over either of the officers from Long Lartin. Both had seemed content up to this point, happy to go along with everyone else while they clocked up the overtime. This, though, was a sticking point, and it was clear that Fletcher was not going to budge.

  ‘I’m frankly rather hurt, Mr Fletcher,’ Nicklin said.

  Fletcher shrugged. ‘I couldn’t give a toss what you are.’

  ‘I’m the one that’s going to be handcuffed to the bed like a wild animal, so you’ll be perfectly safe. I don’t see what it is you’re objecting to.’

  ‘And I don’t have to give you reasons.’

  ‘Is it a personal hygiene issue?’

  ‘It’s a not wanting to share a room with a murderer issue.’

  Nicklin nodded towards the other officer. ‘Mr Jenks doesn’t seem to have a problem.’

  ‘It’s hardly the same thing.’