Death Message

Nicklin nodded, pleased with himself. ‘I told Marcus you were the right man for the job…’

HMP Long Lartin in Worcestershire housed around six hundred of the country’s most dangerous adult prisoners. Stuart Nicklin certainly fitted into that category. Thorne would never forget the face of a boy named Charlie Garner. A child forced to watch while his mother had been strangled; to sit alone for two days with her body, starving and dirty and howling.

Thorne looked at Nicklin, seated across from him behind a shiny, battered table. He was wearing jeans and training shoes. A dark blue bib over a light grey sweatshirt.

Not a monster, certainly.

However those readers of the Daily Mail and others of a similar persuasion chose to label the likes of Stuart Nicklin, however the word seemed the only one fitting to describe what they had done, Thorne found it hard to believe that such offenders were naturally evil. The description suggested that others were naturally good. This was a concept Thorne found equally tricky to grasp. And it introduced a religious co

Nicklin was a man, not a monster…

‘You had lunch?’ Nicklin asked. Thorne shook his head. ‘Very good today.’ He patted his belly. ‘Piling on the pounds, of course, but I’m hardly the type to work out all day, am I?’

A man Thorne would be happy to see die in prison.

In the pub the night before, Lilley had talked about there being a couple of those she’d put away on whom she’d always keep a watchful eye. Observe their progress through the system. It was the same for Thorne, and Nicklin was top of that mercifully short list.

‘Why is he sending the pictures to me?’

Nicklin pretended to be taken aback. ‘Bloody hell. You don’t want to waste any time, do you?’ The voice was quieter than the one Thorne remembered, and coarser. He presumed that Nicklin, like many prisoners, was smoking heavily. ‘On a promise later on?’

‘You’re not as fascinating as you think you are,’ Thorne said. ‘And I get bored very easily. Why am I getting the pictures?’

Nicklin raised a hand to his face, brushed delicately at the side of his nose for a few seconds. ‘That was a favour to me,’ he said.

Thorne tried hard to show nothing. ‘Why does Marcus Brooks owe you any favours?’

‘I suppose you could say that I took him under my wing.’

‘I bet you did.’

‘Showed him the ropes when he got here.’

Thorne had already checked. Like many prisoners, Brooks had been moved around. He’d spent time in Wandsworth and Birmingham before arriving at Long Lartin towards the end of the previous year. ‘Was that all you showed him?’

‘No point. I could see Marcus wasn’t interested in anything like that.’

‘Which probably made it even more exciting, right?’

‘Where are you dredging this stuff up from?’ Nicklin asked.

At the time of his arrest five years before, Nicklin had been married for several years, but he’d lived a number of lives under assumed names, and had worked, during one of them, as a rent boy in the West End. Thorne had no idea if Nicklin had a conventional sexuality of any sort; only that he would fuck anyone, in any way necessary, to gain power over them.

‘We were close,’ Nicklin said. ‘Friends.’

‘This is all very heartwarming…’

‘I was around to dole out the odd piece of advice when he came in here, and he did the occasional good turn for me. There’s always someone wants to have a go at the local nutter, you know? Marcus helped me out once or twice.’

‘I thought you could look after yourself,’ Thorne said. ‘I heard about that poor bastard in Belmarsh.’ Thorne had been sent a full report when, two years previously, Nicklin had left a fellow inmate brain-dead after calmly but forcefully jamming a sharpened spoon into his ear.

Nicklin beamed. ‘I’m touched that you’ve been taking an interest.’

‘Well,’ Thorne said, ‘I worry. We all do. Me and the families of the men and women you killed. Charlie Garner’s grandparents. We like to be double sure you’re still where we think you are. That you haven’t got creative with the bed-sheets or a bottle of smuggled painkillers.’

Nicklin’s expression didn’t waver. ‘Seriously, I’m touched. And it’s good, you know, that the pair of us have been keeping an eye on each other.’

Thorne felt the colour rising. ‘What?’

Nicklin waved the question aside, as though he preferred to delay such prosaic push and shove for a little longer. ‘You’ve not changed much, I don’t think.’ He pointed at the straight scar that ran along Thorne’s chin. ‘This is new. And there’s a lot more grey in the hair. Looking pretty good, though.’

Thorne could not say the same thing. He didn’t know if the baldness had been Nicklin’s choice, but the creased and pitted head only emphasised a weight gain far greater than might normally have been expected from an extended diet of prison food. If his teeth were looking better, the other features had sunk into the jaundiced flesh of his face. A rash of tiny whiteheads was clustered just inside one nostril. There was dry skin along the lines of both lips. But the eyes were warm still, and seductive.

‘What did you mean?’ Thorne asked. ‘When you said Brooks was doing you a favour.’

The Legal Visits Area was little more than a large corridor with a series of interview booths ru

Thorne nodded.

‘Right, well, you can imagine how fired up he was then. A fortnight before he was due to get out. He went through that whole fucking hippy-dippy range of shit you’re supposed to go through when you lose someone: guilt, denial, rage, acceptance, whatever. Only he went through them fast, and he never quite got to the nice toasty part at the end. Marcus was just left with the rage, and it did him a power of good. It made him able to deal with what had happened, to make decisions. It reconfigured him.’

‘Why was he so sure it was the Black Dogs who were responsible?’

‘Someone in here passed the word. I don’t know who, but those fuckers made certain he got the message.’ Nicklin widened his eyes. ‘They wanted him in pain, and he was. He still is, I know that much. But now, so are they. All he talked about before he got released was how much he was going to make them suffer in return. We talked about it a lot.’

‘You must have fucking loved that,’ Thorne said. ‘Someone else you could send out there and encourage to kill.’

‘I did nothing, I swear. Marcus didn’t need any encouragement. I just made the odd… suggestion.’

‘The pictures?’

‘I asked if he’d mind sending you the messages.’

Thorne leaned forward, but Nicklin did not back away an inch from him in return. ‘Where did you get my number?’

Nicklin puffed out his cheeks. ‘For someone who clearly has a brain, you can be as thick as shit sometimes. And careless.’

Thorne’s mind was racing through scenarios. He knew Nicklin was good with computers, and must have had access to them inside. Had he been hacking into phone records? If he could get them…

‘Three things.’ Nicklin raised his fingers one at a time. ‘Shop around for your utilities. Try to keep that overdraft under control a bit. And stop eating so many takeaways, or I swear you’ll end up as porky as I am.’