The silence between them growing dangerously long, Thorne asked himself why he wasn’t telling Helen about the business with Wendy Markham. Would it not have earned him an inestimable number of Brownie points? Wouldn’t it be proof positive that he was not the kind to play away when the chance presented itself? It was frustrating, but the fact was that he and Helen had not even been together six months and he could not be sure how she would react. She might well have been delighted, at his honesty and of course at the decision he had made. She would probably have laughed and made some crack about Markham being ‘blind’ or ‘desperate’ but would she then be spending the next few days imagining the worst? Would it actually do more harm than good in the long run?

Thorne could not see any point in chancing it.

‘What did you mean, about Phil being busy?’

‘I think he’s got a new boyfriend,’ Helen said.

‘Really?’

‘I called him a few hours ago and some bloke answered.’

‘Bloody hell, he can’t keep it in his pants, can he?’

‘Told me Phil was in the shower. Said it like he was about to go and join him. He sounded a bit giggly, you know, like he was pissed.’

‘Yeah, well he’d have to be to get off with that ugly bastard.’

Helen laughed. ‘You ask me, there’s a new tattoo on the cards.’

Though he was rapidly running out of space, Hendricks liked to commemorate each new sexual conquest with a trip to the tattoo parlour.

‘Oh well, good for him,’ Thorne said, thinking: Well, at least somebody’s getting his leg over. It made him even more determined to tell Hendricks about the shag that got away. ‘So how was your day?’

‘It was fine,’ Helen said.

It was code, a game they played. Helen Weeks was a DS on a Child Abuse Investigation Team and, as such, dealt with more horror and suffering every day than the average hard-as-nails Murder Squad copper saw in a month. Most of the time she chose to keep it to herself, to keep it from anyone close to her. Every so often though, the day would come when she would need to offload some of it and then Thorne’s job was simply to be there and to listen while she poured it all out.

Desperate half-lives and broken bones no bigger than a bird’s.

‘Fine’ just meant ‘not now’, that was all. ‘Not yet…’

Instead, the laugh came back into Helen’s voice as she told him about a 999 call that had been doing the rounds: a tinny recording downloaded on to the phone of almost every copper she’d run into that day. A man had called the emergency services and announced that he’d been stabbed. When the operator had asked him how many times he’d been stabbed, the man said, ‘This is my first time.’

Thorne was naked and staring at himself in the rust-spotted bathroom mirror by the time they said goodnight.

Helen said, ‘Keep an eye on Nicklin tomorrow, all right?’

‘I’ll not be taking my eyes off him,’ Thorne said.

He walked back into the bedroom, set an alarm on his phone and turned on the TV. He slipped beneath the thin duvet and flicked through the channels with the remote that was attached to the wall. He was tired, but watched a few minutes of some film he could not make head or tail of until he could barely keep his eyes open. He turned the TV off and leaned over to switch off the bedside light.

Within a few moments he was wide awake again.

He turned the light back on and reached for a paperback thriller that Helen’s father had sent, thinking he might like it. A few pages were more than enough. Religious conspiracies and clues in paintings or symphonies or whatever. They had yet to meet, so it was understandable that Helen’s father might make a mistake about the kind of thing his daughter’s boyfriend liked to read. Or perhaps it was just that Thorne’s mind was suddenly racing too fast for anything to settle, to gain purchase.

He got out of bed to fetch the small, laminated photograph from the inside pocket of his jacket. It had been part of the background material Brigstocke had passed on to him when the operation was being put together; a faded photo from a quarter of a century before, taken in the place he would be travelling to in the morning.

Thorne lay down again and studied the picture.

A dozen or so boys, the majority looking surly or plain awkward. The members of staff not looking an awful lot happier, save for the woman at the heart of the gathering. A shawl around her shoulders, heavy-framed glasses and a smile of satisfaction, of pride in the men and boys around her.

He took a last look at the two boys standing together at the far end of the back row, then put the picture down.

He thought about two dead teenagers and Jeffrey Batchelor waking to it every day of his life. A third, who was the only one smiling in a faded photograph. He thought about a boy who was now only bones and a mother desperate to lay her son to rest; praying that the man who had killed him was telling the truth.

Got a bit of a thing, has he?

He remembered what Helen had said to him about Nicklin, her insistence that he stayed careful. He thought about her trying to get Alfie to sleep then climbing into bed wearing one of his old Johnny Cash T-shirts.

The smell of body-butter on it afterwards.

He lay awake and thought about Helen, but when he finally turned off the light and his hand crept down beneath the duvet, Thorne was thinking about Wendy Markham.

SIXTEEN

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.