Текст книги "The Bones Beneath"

Автор книги: Mark Billingham

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

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.’

‘Some very strange people in there.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ Nicklin said.

Burnham shook his head, sadly. ‘I can’t help wondering if we’ve got it all wrong,’ he said.

Nicklin turned and stared at him. ‘Go on.’

The warden shifted slightly in his chair. ‘Look, I’m just a layman and I’m not saying we should go back to Victorian times or anything, but it seems to me that we give these people too much freedom in there. That’s the one thing they’re supposed to have lost, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t that the whole point? So then we lock them up in places where they’re free to do all sorts of things. Free to take drugs and commit horrific acts of violence.’ He lifted his stick a foot or so, waved it in Nicklin’s direction. ‘Where the likes of you are free to carry on terrorising people.’

Sitting next to Nicklin, Fletcher grunted and smiled. ‘Well, you’ll not be hearing any argument from me.’

‘As I said, just a layman.’

Nicklin nodded, like he was weighing up what had been said. He turned his gaze on Burnham. ‘How often do you get post out here?’

The warden looked nonplussed for a second or two. ‘Once a week,’ he said. ‘It comes over on the boat, obviously. Why?’

‘No reason,’ Nicklin said. ‘I should just be a bit careful how you open it from now on, that’s all.’

Burnham blanched. ‘Sorry?’

Nicklin sat back, beaming. ‘Joke.’

Thorne stepped forward and laid a hand on Burnham’s arm. ‘I’m going to have to throw you out now, sir. There are things we need to talk about.’

Burnham stood up a little faster than he might otherwise have done. He said, ‘No problem,’ and walked quickly to the door without looking back.

Thorne looked hard at Nicklin and Nicklin, a picture of innocence, said, ‘What?’

‘Some people might consider what you just said as threatening behaviour.’

‘Oh come on, it was a joke. Can’t you even make a joke these days?’ He shook his head and looked mournfully at Fletcher. ‘It’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you.’

‘We need to get on,’ Thorne said.

Nicklin was looking at the door. ‘People like him are full of opinions, aren’t they? Didn’t stop him lapping up a few horror stories, did it? Sitting there with his tongue out and his limp little dick twitching for the first time in God knows how long.’

Thorne remembered the men in the Black Horse the night before, hanging on Holland’s every word. It didn’t seem to matter which side of the fence the storyteller came from, people were always captivated by tales of trauma and transgression.

Deviance never ceased to be fascinating.

Talking of which…

‘Right then.’ Thorne took a chair from against the wall, dragged it across and sat as close to Nicklin as was possible. Knees almost touching, as though they were in an interview room. As though there were not an audience watching, enrapt, with tea, coffee and biscuits on a trestle table a few feet away.

‘Where is she, Stuart?’

‘Really?’ Nicklin looked mildly disappointed. ‘You really want me to make it easy for you?’

‘I want you to stop pissing us all about. I’m perfectly happy to call that boat back right now, and we can all go home.’

‘You might be,’ Nicklin said. ‘But I’m not sure how your superiors would feel.’ He smiled. ‘You know she’s here, don’t you? Course you do, because you’ve checked. So how would it look if you just happily sailed away and left her? How would her family feel? Do you want to go back to uniform, Tom?’

‘Just tell us where to look.’

‘Oh, come on… you’re a suit again now, aren’t you? You’re one of the elite. Shouldn’t you be showing us all that you deserve it?’

Bethan Howell was shaking her head and, a few feet away, Holland sat back and folded his arms. Said, ‘This is so out of order.’

Nicklin showed no sign of having heard him. His eyes were on Thorne.

Thorne stared right back, fighting to keep his temper. Seeing Nicklin’s pale puffy features blur, then sharpen into those of the man he’d arrested for murder ten years before.

Shattered, bloody…

There was some comfort in the memory, an easing of the longing to do it again, witnesses or not.

‘I mean, just for your own self-esteem surely,’ Nicklin said. ‘Don’t you fancy doing a spot of detective work?’

THIRTY-SEVEN

‘She’s got a name,’ Brigstocke said. ‘She was called Eileen Bennett. She was fifty-three when she disappeared.’

‘Nicklin said she was an old woman.’

‘Yeah, well, she would have seemed old to Nicklin when he was seventeen, wouldn’t she? My kids think I’m ancient.’

Thorne was back at the abbey ruins. He turned his face away from a raw wind coming off the sea, struggling to shake off the stiffness in his neck and shoulders and watching the signal indicator on his phone move perilously close to no bars. It had been more or less obvious since the conversation with the Morgans the previous evening, but he asked anyway.

‘Are we sure about this?’

‘Well, trying to get twenty-five-year-old incident reports out of North Wales police is proving tricky to say the least,’ Brigstocke said. ‘But the case is certainly on record. She was reported missing by an elder sister. The woman’s dead now, but she used to travel to the island every year apparently, to throw a wreath into the water.’

Thorne turned around, looked out to sea. That was what Bernard Morgan had been trying to call to mind the night before.

‘So…’

‘So, why won’t he tell us where she is?’

‘Obviously we’re wasting our time trying to fathom him out,’ Brigstocke said. ‘He won’t, simple as that. Or at any rate he won’t yet. We’ve just got to deal with it.’

‘Let me guess,’ Thorne said. ‘Has he got us over that barrel again?’

‘Well, he’s right, isn’t he? Fact is, it’s not going to look too clever if we just do nothing. If we refuse to search.’

‘Can’t we say that he was deliberately obstructing the search?’

‘It’s not a good idea —’

‘It’s the truth.’ Thorne needed to raise his voice above the wind, but it wasn’t an effort. ‘Come on, Russell, they’d love nothing better than to slap his ugly mug all over the front page.’

‘Oh, that’ll be happening however this turns out,’ Brigstocke said. ‘But you know how it works. They’ll sell a lot more papers if it’s an exclusive interview with him than if they’ve got a few comments from the likes of you and me. He can tell them all sorts of things.’

‘I warned you this would happen,’ Thorne said. ‘Back when you were giving me that good news, bad news shit.’

‘That was when it was all about Simon Milner.’ Brigstocke was starting to get defensive, a tone to his voice that Thorne knew he should take as a warning. ‘We didn’t know about Eileen Bennett back then.’

‘It’s a game, I told you that. It always is.’

‘We need to find her,’ Brigstocke said. ‘Bottom line.’

‘How do you suggest I do that?’ Thorne looked back along the track and saw Howell and Holland coming towards him. He could see the smoke drifting from Howell’s cigarette. ‘I know that waterboarding’s probably frowned upon, but I’m more than happy to give it a go.’

‘What does he want?’ Brigstocke asked.

‘God knows.’

‘I mean, is there something specific? A bigger cell? Comfier toilet seat, what?’

‘I don’t think it’s anything physical.’ Thorne told Brigstocke what Nicklin had said to him in the school hall. ‘It’s about me,’ he said. ‘We both know that’s what it’s always been about. Why else am I here?’

‘So, do what he says.’

‘What?’

‘Do some detective work.’ Brigstocke’s voice dropped. Friendly again, conspiratorial, but only up to a point. ‘Listen, Tom, if he’s saying that, it must be because he knows you can work out where she is. There must be clues of some sort. Something. God… how should I know?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ Thorne said.

Holland and Howell were only fifty feet or so away. Thorne raised a hand to them. He did not want them to hear him arguing with Brigstocke and he needed to confer with them anyway. See if either of them had any bright ideas. He wanted to get off the line, but not before he’d said, ‘I still think waterboarding would be easier.’

By the time Holland and Howell reached him, Thorne was sitting on the edge of the wall that ran around the graveyard, the ancient bell tower rising up behind him. Howell heaved herself up and sat next to him, her boots bouncing against the stone.

‘So, what’s happening back there?’ Thorne asked.

‘Well, he hasn’t suddenly decided to draw us a map of where she’s buried,’ Holland said. ‘If that’s what you mean.’

‘He didn’t say a lot after you left.’ Howell dug into her pocket for her phone and, seeing that there was a signal, she began scrolling through her messages. ‘Just sat there looking rather pleased with himself.’

‘He’s got every right to be,’ Thorne said. ‘He’s got us where he wants us.’

Howell grunted. ‘Right, he’s got all the attention. The power.’

‘My boss reckons he’s asking me to try and work out where Eileen Bennett’s body is because he thinks I should be able to.’ He saw Howell looking at him. ‘The woman’s name.’

Howell nodded and went back to her phone, smiled at something.

‘I’m glad that somebody’s getting good news,’ Thorne said.

‘Just my daughter checking in,’ Howell said. ‘Well, asking for more money. She’s at uni.’ She looked up at Thorne. ‘You’re more than welcome to say I don’t look old enough to have a daughter at university, by the way.’

‘I was thinking it.’

‘I’ll settle for that.’ She put her phone away. ‘You two got kids?’

Holland told her that he had, but that his daughter Chloe was a long way off going to university. She told him he should start saving up now, then looked at Thorne.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Well… sort of. A stepson. Sort of…’

The three of them stared out across the plain at the patchwork of fields stitched together by lines of earth or dry stone. Thorne could just make out two figures walking in the distance. North to south, away from the lighthouse, along the cliff path that would lead them past the island’s small stretch of beach. He could see that it was a man and a woman and realised that it was Craig and Erica; the couple Burnham had introduced him to the previous day, who were helping out at the bird observatory. Thorne guessed that they had been working in one of the hides along the cliff path, checking out nesting sites or whatever it was they did.

‘It had to be quick,’ Holland said.

‘What?’

‘Nicklin. He was on his way off the island, right? From what he said, he hadn’t even meant to kill Milner, it was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. So, there’s a boat waiting for him, his mate’s out there in the dark flashing a torch or whatever. He’s already got one body to get rid of. I can’t see him taking a lot of time in getting shot of another one.’

‘Makes sense,’ Howell said. ‘He’s dug a grave for the boy, then Eileen comes along, demanding to know what he’s doing with her shovel. He’s got to think quickly.’

‘He’s not going to dig another grave,’ Thorne said. ‘No time for that.’ He watched Craig and Erica moving past an area of the field close to where they had recovered Simon Milner’s body. Just beyond lay the drop down to the sea; the rocks over which Nicklin had clambered to get off the island twenty-five years before.

‘Maybe he took her back to the cottage,’ Holland said. ‘Have we checked to see if there’s any sort of cellar? What about a well? I bet there’s loads of wells on the island.’

‘Wouldn’t the police have checked that out?’ Howell asked. ‘Once they knew she was missing.’

‘He didn’t take her back,’ Thorne said. He stood up on the wall and stared out. Craig and Erica had stopped to look at something. They must have seen him, because one of them waved. ‘He threw her over the edge. God, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

Howell held out a hand. Thorne took it and pulled her to her feet. ‘So, what, you think she was washed out to sea?’

‘Maybe, but he’s dropping heavy hints that she’s still here somewhere.’

Holland shook his head. ‘Like you said though, could all be rubbish.’

Thorne grunted a ‘Maybe.’ He was trying to remember something Nicklin had said the day before. Pacing around in that field, trying to locate the spot where he had buried Simon Milner. That was when he had told Thorne about his escape; the waiting boat, his route down to the sea.

That’s where I went down … went into the water …

‘I know where she is,’ Thorne said. He jumped down on to the track, the impact pushing the breath noisily from his lungs. He straightened, moved quickly to the nearest gate and pushed through it into the field.

Holland helped Howell down from the wall and they followed; moving as quickly as they could across grass that was still damp, doing their best to catch up as Thorne jogged across the field towards the point where the land ran out.