The Bones Beneath

Until it had become clear that they were the silly buggers.

The night he left Thorne cuffed to the bed, Nicklin did exactly as he had done so often back then, when he had been a ‘guest’ at Tides House. He lifted the grating, squeezed into the entrance and pulled the grille back into place. Once he had descended the half-dozen steps to the level of the vault, he settled happily into the hole.

He worked his way very slowly through his remaining bars of chocolate.

He listened to the activity above him.

He heard the helicopters come and go, ferrying in police officers, taking away the bodies of Fletcher and Jenks. He heard the swoop and buzz of aircraft on the far side of the mountain and presumed they were searching for Batchelor’s body. It was not until he was back on the mainland that he knew for certain they had found it.

He waited the best part of three days, before emerging from his hiding place in the early hours of the morning, scrambling down to the water and meeting the boat. By that time, a scrap of crime scene tape fluttering from a fence post was the only hint that anything out of the ordinary had ever taken place on the island.

Three weeks on, Stuart Nicklin looked very different from the man who had climbed from the earth beneath a Celtic cross, stretching as though he’d had no more than an iffy night’s sleep.

He very much doubted that even his own mother would recognise him.

Not that she would get the chance, of course. He had only sent that card to make her think that it was a possibility, but he had no intention of going to see her, of spending so much as a moment in a place that stank of piss and death and broken biscuits.

Now, it was time to get out and enjoy himself a little.

He got up and walked across the lounge. A week into December and there was tinsel wherever he looked and a plastic Santa on the wall above the bar area. He mixed himself a strong Bloody Mary and helped himself to a couple of bags of crisps.

He was genuinely pleased to see that Tom Thorne seemed to be doing all right. Last thing he would have wanted was for Thorne to lose his job, anything like that. From what Nicklin had seen, the detective inspector seemed pretty much back to his old self.

It looked like there was not even going to be a scar on his lip…

It was fine, because he knew very well that what happened on Bardsey had marked Thorne on the inside, which was far more important. That, and the enduring image of Thorne handcuffed and helpless had got Nicklin off a time or two, his hands busy beneath nice clean hotel sheets.

He checked the departures board and saw that he was being told to go to the gate. He knew there was plenty of time yet, so he settled back down with his drink. He smiled at one of his fellow travellers gathering up carry-on luggage and bags of duty-free. The man smiled right back. Everyone looked excited about escaping the pre-Christmas chaos for some much-needed winter sunshine.

He sat back and flicked through a travel magazine.

Two weeks on an almost deserted island.

The irony was not lost on him, of course, though he was hoping for rather better weather.

SIXTY

It had been late morning on the day after Stuart Nicklin’s escape, and Thorne was in the A&E department of Bryn Beryl Hospital in Pwllheli, having his wounds treated by a red-headed nurse named Olga, when the call finally came through to him. This was several hours after they had traced the signal from Phil Hendricks’ mobile phone, which had been turned back on an hour or so before that. Forty-five minutes since armed officers had raided a basement flat in Catford, south-east London.

‘Tom?’

There had been tears from both of them and words choked back. Thorne, struggling to speak anyway, his lip badly swollen and only partially stitched back together.

‘Phil…’

‘You sound fu

Later, Thorne would not be able to recall clearly what else had been said. They had spoken one another’s name, something about Thorne’s voice, and after that it was all a bit of a blur.

‘Probably the painkillers,’ Helen had said.

‘I suppose.’

Now there were more tears, from Helen on this occasion, as the three of them sat and ate together for the first time since it had happened.

‘Don’t you start,’ Hendricks said.

‘Shut your face.’ Helen got up and began gathering the remains of the takeaway from the Bengal Lancer. Hendricks had said that while he was being held captive this was the thing he had been looking forward to the most.

‘I was exaggerating, obviously,’ he said later. ‘Just thinking that, you know, if it made the papers, we might start getting a few free poppadoms thrown in.’

Though Thorne was still spending most of his time at Helen’s place in Tulse Hill, they had decided to get together at Thorne’s in Kentish Town. It was around the corner from the restaurant but, more importantly, Hendricks did not yet feel too comfortable venturing far from his own flat, which was only five minutes away, on the edge of Camden.

This was the first time he had left home other than for hospital appointments, of which there had been many.

‘I spend most of the time just standing in the kitchen,’ he had said, while they were still eating. ‘Going over what happened that night they snatched me. Re-imagining it, you know? This time, I manage to get to the knives and I stab the pair of them. I stab them lots.’

Helen returned from the kitchen with cans of beer. They were opened and slowly drunk from to cover a sudden, awkward silence.

‘No more from Dawson then?’ Hendricks asked.

Thorne shook his head. ‘Yvo

Hendricks emptied his can. ‘Give me five minutes with him.’

The man Hendricks had known as ‘Adrian’ was actually Damien Dawson, a twenty-seven-year-old telesales operative from Essex. His fingerprints had been all over the flat in which Hendricks had been held and were on record, following a caution eighteen months earlier for stalking an actress who had spoken one line in an episode of Doctor Who. Since his arrest, he had told officers from the Kidnap Unit that he had been recruited via an internet chatroom by the female half of the couple he had met later on. He remained adamant that he did not know anybody else’s name or how any of them had come to be involved.

Thorne guessed that this was the same couple who had been spotted in and around Aberdaron. Casually walking the streets hand in hand, in the hours leading up to the murder of Huw Morgan and the assault on his father, who was discovered trussed up, battered and bleeding, a few feet away from his son’s body. The pair who had later taken the boat across to collect Nicklin and the mysterious ‘birdwatcher’ from Bardsey.

Mysterious, until Thorne had remembered why the face of the man in the red woolly hat had been so familiar. A face that, unlike his mentor’s, had not changed a great deal in twenty-five years.

A creased and faded photograph. The figure standing on the other side of Stuart Nicklin from Simon Milner.

A boy with shaved head and dark eyes.

Having done some digging, Thorne discovered that Ryan Gough had never been charged with the attempted murder of Kevin Hunter at Tides House. With no witnesses willing to make any sort of statement, the case against the boy had never quite stacked up. Thorne had no idea what Gough had been doing with himself in the intervening years, but he had the horrible suspicion that Fletcher and Jenks were not the first people he had killed on Stuart Nicklin’s say-so.

As things stood, he could not be certain they would be the last.

‘They’ll keep working on him,’ Thorne said. ‘Dawson.’

‘He came into the bedroom again,’ Hendricks said. ‘Not long before he left. Waving a kitchen knife around and talking shit about what he was capable of doing with it and I really thought he was going to do something bad. Something worse, you know?’