TT12 The Bones Beneath

by Mark Billingham

  ‘Bang go your nice cosy crime figures.’

  Duggan shrugged. ‘Well yes, and it’s going to be complicated, I can see that. Divvying it up to everyone’s satisfaction. Still, I’m sure we’ll get it sorted out.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Thorne said. Bearing in mind that Duggan and his opposite number could not even get on the same page when it came to divvying up the bill for Nicklin’s accommodation, he thought that the Welshman’s confidence was probably misplaced. He looked across at the other officers milling around in the otherwise empty custody suite. He saw now that their surliness was no more than nerves.

  They could not be blamed for that.

  ‘Let’s get him in then, shall we?’

  Ten minutes later, the cars stood empty in the station courtyard and the prisoners were being booked in. Thorne and Holland stood close behind them at the booking desk. Fletcher and Jenks were sitting with cups of tea next to Karim and Wendy Markham. Batchelor kept his head down, as quiet as he had been for the majority of the journey, while Nicklin seemed content to chat away to the custody sergeant while all the necessary paperwork was completed.

  ‘I saw a sign for Portmeirion on the way here,’ Nicklin said.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘It’s where they filmed The Prisoner, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you say so,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘You know, the village? The penny farthings?’ Getting no joy from the custody sergeant, Nicklin turned to Thorne. ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Tom?’

  Thorne nodded. He’d seen it. ‘Never really understood it, though.’

  ‘“I am not a number!”’ Nicklin said, good and loud. He turned round and said it again for the benefit of Fletcher and the others, then turned back to look at Thorne. ‘That’s the thing though, isn’t it? For the last ten years, that’s exactly what I’ve been. Stuart Anthony Nicklin, prisoner number 5677832.’ He laughed, shook his head. ‘Between you and me, Tom, I never understood it either. That stupid white balloon bouncing along the beach…’

  The sergeant glanced up from his paperwork. ‘Can you take the cuffs off now, please? The prisoners need to turn out their pockets.’

  Jenks and Fletcher got up, moved to stand close to Thorne and Holland while the handcuffs were removed. Nicklin handed over his tobacco tin and wristwatch. Batchelor, just a watch.

  ‘Right, do we need to strip-search them?’ the sergeant asked.

  Duggan stepped forward, nodding. ‘We should follow the standard procedure.’

  ‘They were searched at Long Lartin,’ Thorne said. He looked at Fletcher, who nodded to confirm it. ‘Neither of them has been out of our sight since we left.’

  ‘Comfort breaks?’ Duggan asked.

  ‘One each, in full view at all times.’

  Duggan looked at the sergeant. The sergeant shrugged.

  ‘Look,’ Nicklin said. ‘It sounds like you lot really want to get your rubber gloves on and procedure’s there for a very good reason.’ He looked at Duggan, then at Batchelor. ‘We don’t want to get anyone into trouble, do we, Jeff?’

  ‘We can leave it,’ Thorne said.

  Duggan nodded at the sergeant, who said, ‘Whatever.’

  ‘Shame.’ Nicklin looked across at the pair of young PCs waiting anxiously nearby. Both reddened. ‘Sorry, boys. Mind you, you’d only have made Mr Jenks and Mr Fletcher jealous.’

  ‘Shut it now, Stuart,’ Fletcher said.

  Once Nicklin and Batchelor had signed to confirm the short inventory of their possessions, the PCs stepped across to escort them to the cells. Jenks and Fletcher followed as the prisoners were led away and both police officers kept their hands on their telescopic batons. Just before disappearing from view around a corner, Nicklin shouted back over his shoulder.

  ‘You should all get an early night,’ he said. ‘And try not to eat anything iffy. You’ll need strong stomachs tomorrow.’

  Holland looked at Thorne. Said, ‘That’s a point, I need to get seasickness tablets.’

  Nicklin had already rounded the corner, but there was no mistaking the amusement in his voice. ‘I’m talking about after we get there…’

  Thorne ran through the pick-up arrangements for the following morning, quickly shutting the custody sergeant up when the man tried once again to suggest that a different station might have made his own life a little easier. He said goodbye to Duggan who promised to call him later and let him know if he would be tagging along the next day. Then, Thorne and Holland walked out into the station courtyard, Karim and Markham a few steps behind.

  ‘So, what is the plan for tonight?’ Holland asked.

  Markham said she didn’t think they would have a great many options and Karim laughed. He said this was probably the kind of place where they still pointed at planes.

  ‘I need a hot shower and a cold beer,’ Thorne said. ‘In that order.’

  TWELVE

  Kitson looked up from the game of Candy Crush on her BlackBerry. She returned the smile of an old man who was working at a large jigsaw and figured out that by the time she got home later on, she would have driven the best part of two hundred miles for these three interviews. North London to Huntingdon, then across to Northampton and back down, finally, to Watford. Unless the woman she had left until the end had something useful to tell her, her day’s work would have generated nothing but a claim for travel expenses.

  One of the care workers stopped at the table to set down a cup of tea and a plate of digestives.

  Kitson thanked her.

  ‘She won’t be long,’ the care worker said. ‘Just doing her hair and getting some slap on. Mrs Nicklin always likes to look her best.’

  Kitson stared at her, confused. She had come to see someone who – like the teacher Kitson had spoken to that morning – had been given a brand new identity. A woman whose name was not the one she had lived with up until ten years before.

  The care worker shrugged, said, ‘No big mystery. She tells everyone…’

  When Annie Nicklin finally emerged through a door at the far end of the communal living room, she was being escorted by a second care worker. She walked slowly, but surely, what little weight she had supported on two sticks. Her eyes on Yvonne Kitson every step from the door to the chair.

  The care worker brought a cup of tea across for her. Annie leaned her sticks against the chair then turned to study Kitson with an expression that showed no hint of animosity or suspicion. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Go on, love.’ She spoke slowly, but her voice was oddly high and light. The London accent was still strong.

  Kitson reached for her bag. ‘Do you not want to see my ID?’

  Annie waved the suggestion away. ‘Well, you’re either a copper or a journalist, aren’t you? Either way, you’ve got questions of some sort.’ Her white hair was thin in places, the pink scalp visible beneath. The liver-spotted hands were clawed against the arms of the chair. Kitson knew that she was eighty-five, but she looked even older.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re using your own name,’ Kitson said.

  ‘It’s my name.’

  ‘You were given witness protection.’

  ‘I didn’t want it,’ Annie said. ‘All that nonsense was their idea. Didn’t want to deal with the aggravation of people trying to hurt me, I suppose.’ She shrugged. ‘So I took their daft name, but I was never very good at keeping my real one a secret and I told them I wouldn’t move far from home.’ She glanced up at an old woman shuffling past the table and lowered her voice. ‘So, you know… there were a few broken windows, dog mess through the letterbox.’

  ‘That’s why you’re supposed to keep it secret.’

  Annie smiled, girlish suddenly, as though she’d been gently scolded for doing something foolish and completely trivial. ‘Well, it didn’t really matter where I was living in the end, because I couldn’t go out. I already had bad diabetes, arthritis and all the rest of it. I was falling to pieces basically, had to have one of those warden-controlle
d flats, so they could keep an eye on me. Then suddenly I got scared to open the front door, agoraphobia or whatever it is. By that time I hadn’t got any friends left anyway.’ She leaned towards Kitson. ‘Funny that… how they all drift away once your son turns out to be a serial killer.’

  Kitson laughed, reached for a biscuit.

  ‘So, in the end I hadn’t got a lot of choice and moved in here.’ Annie looked around. ‘These are my friends now. Most of them are too bloody gaga to know or care about Stuart.’

  Kitson could see the slightest of tremors now, the woman’s head shaking though her eyes stayed fixed on the same point. Thorne had told Kitson about talking to Annie Nicklin ten years earlier, back when he was still hunting for her son. She had been thoroughly cantankerous, he had said. Uncooperative and stubbornly protective of her son, even though Thorne was sure she had known perfectly well what he had done. Ten years on, she seemed a very different woman to the one Thorne had described.

  One who had come to terms with the past, perhaps. Her own and her son’s. One more at peace with everything.

  ‘You mentioned journalists,’ Kitson said. ‘Have they been to see you?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘Recently?’

  ‘I lose track of time, love.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘They always have the same questions,’ Annie said. ‘That’s the funny thing. Did Stuart start fires when he was little? No. Did he used to hurt animals? Not as far as I know. Do you still love him?’ She looked away for a few moments. ‘Bloody stupid question, that is.’

  Stupid or not, Kitson was suddenly desperate to know the answer, though Annie Nicklin’s expression made it clear that was not going to happen.

  ‘Course, they’re all desperate to ask the one big question,’ Annie said. ‘Not that they do, but you can see they’re thinking it.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Did I do something to him?’

  ‘What would you tell them if they did ask?’

  The old woman shrugged. ‘Well, I must have, mustn’t I?’

  Kitson, with no idea how to respond, brushed crumbs from her lap.

  ‘You still haven’t said what you want…’

  Kitson told her about the trip to look for Simon Milner’s remains and her son’s insistence on being escorted by the detective who had caught him ten years ago. She said, ‘We were wondering about Stuart’s letters.’

  ‘One every week,’ Annie said. She sounded almost proud. ‘Every single week since he’s been inside, regular as clockwork. But I stopped reading them a long time ago.’

  Kitson nodded. Another wasted journey. She began to wonder if she could beat the rush hour back, what she had in the house for dinner.

  ‘They all used to say the same thing though. The letters from prison.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That it wasn’t my fault. None of it.’ Her voice was a little less sure, suddenly, the tremor a little more pronounced. ‘That I mustn’t blame myself. It was the same as when I first went to see him after he was sent down. He told me not to come any more, simple as that. He said I shouldn’t have to go through it, that it wasn’t fair. Because what happened wasn’t my fault.’

  Kitson stared at the smile that would not stay in place and suddenly understood exactly what Stuart Nicklin had done to his mother. What he had succeeded in doing over a prolonged period of time. He had systematically ground her down. Gradually, his real intention masked by fake concern for her well-being, he had worn away any resistance to the deep-seated conviction that she was actually to blame for everything he had done. That she had made him what he was. It was clear that Nicklin despised her and that making her suffer was every bit as important, as sustaining to him, as the suffering he had inflicted on his victims and their families.

  Perhaps more so.

  Annie Nicklin told everyone who she really was because she thought she deserved to be hated.

  ‘So, he killed another one, did he?’ Annie asked. ‘This boy on the island, you said.’

  ‘He claims he did.’

  ‘Well, he tends not to lie about that kind of thing.’

  ‘He’s left it a long time though, don’t you think?’

  ‘He’ll have his reasons.’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Kitson said. Later, Kitson would remember that at no point did it occur to Nicklin’s own mother that it might have been because he was sorry.

  Annie was looking around, waving to attract the attention of one of the care workers, who came over and asked if everything was all right. Annie looked at Kitson. Said, ‘I get very tired, love. Have to sleep a lot during the day.’

  ‘It’s time for your tablets anyway,’ the care worker said.

  Annie reached for her sticks. ‘It’s a wonder I don’t bleedin’ rattle when I walk.’

  Kitson started to gather up her things. In the last look before the old woman turned away and began the slow walk back to her bedroom, Kitson saw a snapshot of someone for whom the pain of arthritis or whatever else she needed tablets for was negligible in comparison to what her own son had done to her. Was still doing to her.

  Thin lips stretched across discoloured teeth. Light going in the eyes.

  No, definitely not peace, Kitson thought.

  After a trip to the toilet, Kitson was on her way to the front door when the care worker came hurrying towards her carrying a small box. ‘Annie wants you to have this.’

  Kitson took the box and turned back one of the cardboard flaps. She saw the bundles of letters, batches of sealed and faded envelopes bound together with elastic bands. ‘Is she sure?’

  ‘That’s what I asked her,’ the woman said. ‘I mean, I know what’s in there. She told me that she’d heard some of her friends crying in the night.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Sometimes a few of the residents can get distressed during the night. It’s quite common.’ The care worker took half a step away, nodded back at the box in Kitson’s arms. ‘Annie said getting these out of the building might stop them having nightmares.’

  THIRTEEN

  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 ge
tting 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.