The Bones Beneath (10 page)

Jeffrey Batchelor spoke to his daughter every night.

In a tender rush and jumble of words that were sometimes spoken out loud he told her about his day, such as it had been. The humour if he had managed to find any, the small moments of triumph. He told her how very much he and her mother and her younger sister missed her. How sorry he was that he had got things so wrong, that he had made it all a thousand times worse. Every night, last thing of all, lying there in the dark as the prison settled around him, he made sure Jodi knew how much she had been loved.

Tonight, for all the obvious reasons, the words were that bit harder to come by. It was painfully frustrating when, for those very same reasons, he needed to talk to her more than ever.

He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them.

The tiled wall of the cell cold against his back, head bowed, filled with images of blood-spattered stones and white noise, he felt suddenly more lost and more alone than he had been in a long time.

He felt like he had on his first night behind bars.

Back then, whenever Batchelor closed his eyes, Nathan Wilson’s would be staring right back at him. Wide and terrified, until the light in them began to die, fading slowly to a pinprick like an old-fashioned TV turning off. Blank now, but they were still zooming in and out of focus, coming up towards Batchelor’s own face then falling away again, the head crashing down and down and down on to the edge of the kerb. His hands tangled tight in the boy’s hair, the spatter of blood soft against them and each dull, wet crack vibrating up his arm.

Those same pictures – the sense-memories vivid and undimmed – came back now as he recalled that first night in Long Lartin. It was almost certainly the fact that he was
not
there tonight, the change in location and of atmosphere, that was making things so difficult; that was throwing him so very much off kilter.

Fear as well, of course.

Batchelor was anything but stupid, so he was as afraid as he had ever been.

He tried and failed to talk to his daughter again, so settled instead for a few simple prayers. One for Jodi, of course, and for Sonia and Rachel. One for the soul of Nathan Wilson whom he had murdered and one for Nathan Wilson’s suffering family…

The lights went out automatically.

He lay on his side, his knees still pulled up, and waited for sleep.

The prayers had definitely helped and now, instead of thinking about the past, he tried to imagine what the next day was going to bring. The island was the perfect place for all this in many ways.

The history and the holiness.

It was tailor-made for him, Nicklin had said that.

‘It’s ideal, Jeff,’ he had said. Lying back on his bunk, a bar of chocolate in hand and Batchelor dry-mouthed and stiff in the doorway. ‘Now, trust me, I’m not a big believer in fate, but sometimes you just have to believe things have happened for a reason. That little so-and-so sending his text to your daughter and her stringing herself up. You winding up in here, on the same wing, the same corridor as me, for heaven’s sake. The place I was sent twenty-five years ago that – I swear to God – could not be more spot on for you. It’s all got to mean something, hasn’t it? You know me, Jeff, I think about things a
lot
, but I couldn’t have planned this more perfectly if I’d tried…’

Now, Batchelor lay in the cell at Abersoch police station, and as the heating pipes grumbled above him and a group of lads began singing tunelessly somewhere nearby, his body tensed then heaved and the first sob exploded in his throat.

It was disconcerting, a cell that was this spartan. One that so singularly failed to reflect the personality of any one of its doubtless hundreds of inhabitants. Nicklin liked to think that his cell back at Long Lartin said a good deal about the man he was. There were books and magazines. There were things on the walls. There were news stories and articles and there were pictures, some of which he had painted himself and not by numbers either, like the majority of the wannabe Francis Bacons.

This was just a box; blank, utilitarian. A raised sleeping platform with a blue plastic mattress and a metal toilet bowl in the corner. Yes, there was the obscenity gouged into one of the tiles by a guest who had not been searched properly, but nothing that made him feel as though any human being held within its dull white walls might ever have had a single intelligent thought.

Still, it was only for one night.

Perhaps two…

The silence was a bonus though. Were it not for the occasional sound of heavy footsteps somewhere in the custody suite above, he might almost have been able to convince himself that he was quite alone. That he had been left to his own devices. The sensation was heady, gorgeous… until a minute or two after the lights went out, when the weeping started in the cell next door.

He gave it a minute, but it quickly became apparent that this was more than just a few tears before bedtime.

‘Come on now, Jeff,’ he shouted. ‘There’s no need for this.’

Need clearly had little to do with it, though the gasps and racking sobs were certainly bordering on the self-indulgent.

‘You need to try and cheer up. Think about tomorrow. Think about the good things…’

There was no let-up from his neighbour.

Nicklin waited a little while longer, then started to sing.

‘The thigh bone’s connected to the leg bone… the leg bone’s connected to the ankle bone.’ He was grinning, moving his head and tapping his fingers against the mattress. ‘The ankle bone’s connected to the foot bone… Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones…’

He carried on for a minute or two longer, ad-libbing nonsensical connections; knees to buttocks, toes to skulls. He listened, was pleased. The volume from the adjoining cell had definitely come down a little.

He said, ‘You can’t afford to lose your sense of humour, Jeff. None of us can. We’re all buggered without that.’

It struck him that Tom Thorne was certainly someone who was able to see the funny side of things when necessary. He remembered one or two of the looks they’d exchanged on the journey, some of the remarks. It was very important, a sense of humour.

He lay back, thinking, humming.

Thorne was going to need it.

Thorne was up, showered and getting dressed before seven. He did not need to open the curtains to know that the weather was bad. He had to turn up the TV to hear it above the noise of the rain chucking itself against the windows. He stuffed his dirty clothes down into his overnight bag then checked his phone. There was a text from Phil Hendricks.

In addition to a slew of junk emails there was one from Yvonne Kitson. She told him she had read through the most recent of the letters given her by Annie Nicklin. There was no important information relating specifically to the trip Thorne was on, to Tides House or the murder of Simon Milner. There
were
one or two things she thought Thorne would be interested in reading, however, and she had sent him a number of extracts.

Thorne downloaded the attachment and finished packing his things.

Before leaving the room, he sat on the bed and watched a local news bulletin. He wanted to make sure that the hotel manager had been the only person anyone from the police station had been mouthing off to. The last thing he needed to see this morning was the local newscaster cheerily announcing that a notorious serial murderer was visiting the area. He was relieved that a stolen skip-lorry in Pwllheli and some offensive graffiti at a bus stop on the Caernarfon road was as sensational as it got.

He was the last one down to breakfast.

Karim was already tucking enthusiastically into an enormous fry-up and Wendy Markham was eating poached eggs. Holland appeared to be sticking to coffee and toast and was looking warily out of the window. The sun was almost fully up and now, beyond an empty car park and a sliver of beach, the sea was – unfortunately – all too visible. It lashed relentlessly against the shingle, wind-whipped, the colour of strong tea.

Thorne took the empty seat next to Markham, who shifted slightly to make more room and smiled at him. ‘Sleep well?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, fine,’ Thorne said. ‘You?’

A nod, another smile.

‘I wonder if they’ve got any seasickness pills here?’ Holland said. ‘Maybe I should ask…’

Thorne waved until he caught the attention of the teenage girl who had served them the night before. He asked for builders’ tea and a bacon sandwich. The girl solemnly informed him that the sandwich wasn’t
actually
on the menu, picking one up to prove it, but as they definitely had both bacon and bread she’d see what they could rustle up. He told her he was very grateful.

Karim looked up from his plate and cheered and Thorne turned to see Fletcher and Jenks sloping in. They dumped their overnight bags near the door and dropped on to chairs at an adjoining table. Their grunted greetings and less-than-chirpy demeanours suggested they might have had a somewhat later night than was advisable. Thorne suggested they should get some coffee and, as if on cue, the manager appeared, instructing the waitress to bring a pot of coffee across for the two extra guests. Pritchard hung around, ostensibly to make sure that everyone was enjoying their breakfast, though it quickly became clear that he was keen to quiz Fletcher and Jenks on the night they had spent at the rival hotel.

‘OK for you, was it?’ he asked. ‘Over there?’

Fletcher managed a ‘yeah’.

‘Decent rooms? I mean, I know they’re a bit pricier than here, but that doesn’t mean anything, does it?’ Uninvited, he pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘Some people think a coat of paint and a satellite dish means they can rip people off and I don’t think that’s on. What about the dinner, then? Up to scratch?’

Jenks told him that they’d spent most of the evening in a nearby pub and called in at the Chinese on the way back. Pritchard nodded and cast a knowing look towards Thorne and the others. Said, ‘Feeling all right, are you?’

While the manager carried on interrogating the largely monosyllabic prison officers, Karim and Markham began talking about boats and Holland wandered towards Reception in search of seasickness pills.

Thorne turned away from the table and took out his phone.

He read through the extracts from Nicklin’s letters that Yvonne Kitson had thought would be of interest. Scrolling through the text, it was a jolt the first time he came across his own name; seeing the casual way in which he and some of those close to him had been talked about. As though Nicklin was one of their number. Before he had finished reading, though, the shock, the anger had graduated into something else entirely. Having Nicklin’s thoughts laid out before him like this – in a manner over which Nicklin himself could have no control, about which he had no knowledge – gave Thorne a welcome sense of something that was hard to name, but felt like empowerment.

Made him feel, for once, as though he had the edge.

The feeling stayed with him through breakfast and for the time it took the team to check out, load up the vehicles and drive down to the police station. It was still there somewhere, even when he was tearing a well-deserved strip off the custody sergeant and his two PCs; telling them he hoped that their ‘fat, flapping mouths’ had not jeopardised the security of his entire operation. Thorne could only assume that when he had finished shouting, once the shame-faced officers had scuttled away to collect Nicklin and Batchelor from the cells, his good mood had started to show through again. As the prisoners emerged, as Jenks and Fletcher moved to reapply the heavy-duty cuffs, Thorne tried to give nothing away, but his disposition was clearly obvious to one person at least.

Nicklin took one look at him and said, ‘Someone’s happy about something.’

They drove along the coast for fifteen minutes, passing quickly through the seemingly deserted village of Aberdaron, where – according to the owner of the Black Horse – their boatman lived. A mile or so beyond it, they began to climb steeply and then, following the set of printed instructions provided by the sergeant at Abersoch police station, they turned sharply off the narrow road on to an even narrower dirt track.

The two cars slowed to something below walking pace as they bumped heavily across deep ruts and potholes. The track twisted sharply down, with the overhanging branches of bare, black trees scraping against the car on one side and a steep drop to a water-filled ditch on the other. In places the Galaxy’s wheels were no more than inches from the edge and though the rain had eased considerably, the wipers still had work to do. Thorne leaned close to the windscreen, hands tight around the wheel, and Holland braced himself against the dash.

‘You sure that sergeant wasn’t taking the piss?’ he asked. ‘You did upset him, remember?’

After a long few minutes, the track began to get wider and flatter and the sea appeared in front of them suddenly as they rounded a sharp corner; brown between grey outcrops of rock. Several vehicles were parked in a line along one side of the track, while directly ahead at the edge of a concrete slipway, their transportation was being prepared for departure. Thorne parked up carefully, sat there for a moment or two and studied it. He had been expecting something that conformed to his idea of what a ferry was, but the only vessel he could see looked a lot more like a bog-standard fishing boat. Thirty or forty feet long at a push, bright yellow where it wasn’t dirty or rusting, and sitting on a trailer.

‘Is that it?’ Jenks asked. ‘Bloody hell…’

Thorne watched a man climb down from the boat and trudge through the mud to a stockpile of large plastic canisters. He picked one up, carried it back to the boat and heaved it part way up the ladder from where it was collected by a second man waiting on the deck. Thorne guessed that the liquid slopping about inside was oil.

‘Don’t be disappointed if there isn’t a cocktail lounge,’ Thorne said.

As he climbed out of the Galaxy, Thorne saw two people emerge from a mud-spattered Land Rover that had probably been white to begin with. He nodded across, guessing who they were. They came over and the woman who had led the way introduced herself.

Professor Bethan Howell was a forensic archaeologist based at Bangor University, who had been assigned to the team by North Wales police. She was a little below average height and perhaps a few pounds above the average weight for it. She wore wire-rimmed glasses and a baggy, black cap and, in an accent rather more mellifluous than some he had heard the night before, she told Thorne that the job sounded interesting, that she was keen to get to work. She introduced the crime scene investigator she had brought with her, a pasty-faced individual named Andrew Barber. He shook Thorne’s hand and stared out at the water. His expression suggested he had been offered the choice between this job or washing a corpse and now believed that he’d made the wrong decision. Knowing that Howell and Barber ought to get acquainted with the CSM and the exhibits officer, Thorne waved Markham and Karim across from the second Galaxy, then went to make himself known to the boatman.

He shouted up to the man on the deck, who in turn pointed to the man who was still busy ferrying the plastic containers across the sludge.

Thorne walked over and introduced himself.

Huw Morgan was somewhere in his mid-to-late thirties; moon-faced and unshaven, with close-cropped dark hair. He wore dirty grey overalls and heavy work boots and, once he’d shaken Thorne’s hand, he pointed with a thick, grubby finger to the man on the deck of the boat. ‘That’s my father, Bernard,’ he said. ‘He’s the crew.’ When he saw that Thorne was looking at a third man, who was hauling himself up into the seat of a small tractor, he said, ‘That’s Owen,’ as if no further explanation were necessary.

‘Right,’ Thorne said.

Morgan continued loading the containers, while the tractor was driven across and positioned at the front of the trailer and Howell and the others unloaded their equipment from the back of the Land Rover: a small diesel-powered generator on wheels, several large canvas bags, two metal boxes the size of large suitcases and a pair of common-or-garden spades. Helping Howell carry one of the boxes across to the boat, Thorne expressed surprise that she hadn’t brought rather more equipment. He’d certainly been on more straightforward jobs than this one where twice or three times as much gear had needed humping around.

‘No point,’ she said. ‘I’ve made doubly sure there’s everything we’re likely to need. There
is
a larger boat, apparently… the one they use to take livestock or heavy machinery backwards and forwards, but there’s no vehicles once we get over there, just the odd tractor or whatever. There’s no roads, as such.’ Grunting with the effort, she pushed the box up the metal ladder and Morgan Senior dragged it on to the deck. ‘So, we don’t really want to be taking anything we can’t move around easily.’

‘I had a
very
short conversation about using a helicopter,’ Thorne said.

‘Nobody willing to splash out?’

‘No chance. Anyway, there’s far too many of us.’

Overhearing them, Morgan shouted from the cabin. ‘Going to be a bit of a squeeze as it is,’ he said. ‘I’m only supposed to carry twelve, tops, and I’ve got all you lot plus all that equipment.’ He glanced down towards the cars; the Galaxy in which Jenks and Fletcher were still sitting with the prisoners. ‘Plus whoever you’ve got in there.’ He saw a worried look pass between Howell and Barber. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Just won’t be very comfortable, that’s all. It’s a working boat, this.’ He pulled on a grubby-looking green hat. ‘She’s not built for pleasure…’

Once everything had been loaded and as soon as everyone had changed into waterproofs and suitable footwear, Nicklin and Batchelor were brought out of the car. They remained cuffed as they were helped up the ladder. If Morgan was remotely interested in who was being brought aboard his boat, he made a great job of hiding it.

Like he had said, it was a squeeze. The prisoners and prison officers took seats on the narrow metal bench that ran along the edge of the deck, the handcuffs making it dangerous for Nicklin or Batchelor to remain standing. Howell and Barber sat on top of their equipment in the centre of the deck while everyone else found room where they could, grabbing hold of a rope or pole as soon as Morgan told them they needed to.

On Morgan’s signal, the tractor pushed boat and trailer slowly down into the water. Once the boat was safely afloat, the engines grumbled into life and the tractor reversed back up the slipway, taking the trailer with it. Morgan gave the driver a wave, turned the boat around and said, ‘Right then.’

For ten minutes or so, the
Benlli III
motored steadily out to sea, moving parallel with the Lleyn peninsula. The rain had thankfully stopped, but it still felt bumpy enough to Thorne. He was careful to watch his footing on the slippery deck as he moved forward to the edge of the cabin from which Morgan was steering the boat. He had to raise his voice above the rhythmic grind and thrum of the engines.

‘Lucky with the weather,’ he said. ‘It was pissing down an hour ago.’

‘You’ve got no idea.’ Morgan spoke without turning around. ‘We’ve not been able to run regular trips for months now. In the summer we’ll sometimes do three full trips a day, showing tourists the wildlife, the old smuggling routes, what have you. This time of year, though, it’s a dead loss. It was clear for a couple of days last week, managed to take a birdwatcher across, but otherwise it’s been really bad.’ Now he turned, nodded at Thorne. ‘So yeah, bloody lucky.’

‘Changes fast, does it?’

‘You’ve got to keep an eye on it, put it that way. Like, I knew eventually it was going to clear up this morning, even if it didn’t look that way first thing. That’s most of the job, if I’m honest. No point taking a group across unless I know I can get them back again, is there? I mean, don’t get me wrong, sometimes there’s sod all I can do about it. We had one lot stuck out there for three weeks earlier in the year, but we try not to let that happen too often.’

Thorne said, ‘Pleased to hear it.’ His hands were freezing where he was holding tight to the edge of the cabin door. He dug into his jacket pocket for gloves.