Fletcher brought the tea across. Said, ‘I don’t know if this is strong enough.’

Jenks took it, grunted. ‘Cheers.’

‘I could do with a few more of those sandwiches, to be honest.’ Fletcher scratched at his goatee. ‘That greedy CSI bastard took all the decent ones.’

‘Probably fancies himself because of that TV show.’

‘Right, but he’s basically just a dogsbody.’

On the other side of the hall, Nicklin tuned out the officers’ conversation and turned towards Batchelor. ‘You didn’t eat much, Jeff.’ He spoke softly, barely above a murmur. ‘When that nice old woman brought lunch down.’

‘I wasn’t hungry.’

‘Did you eat breakfast?’

‘I didn’t feel too good this morning.’

‘What about last night? Or were you too busy crying like a girl?’

Batchelor looked at him for the first time. His expression suggested that, once again, tears were not very far away. ‘How can you act like this is… normal?’

‘You need to keep your strength up, Jeff. All this charging about in the fresh air. You’re not used to it.’

‘I want to speak to my wife,’ Batchelor said. ‘I want to talk to Sonia.’

Nicklin sat back. ‘Well, of course you do, and I’ve told you it’s going to happen, but I don’t think it’s very likely right this minute, do you?’ He nodded towards Fletcher and Jenks. ‘I mean even if one of those idiots decided to lend you his phone, you heard what they were saying about signals. It’s going to be tricky getting to the top of that lighthouse with those handcuffs on.’

‘What about the satellite phone? I could use that.’

Nicklin glanced across to make sure that Fletcher and Jenks were still too engrossed in their own conversation to have been listening. ‘You need to shut up about this now, Jeff. You need to stop whining.’ He closed his eyes and thought for a few seconds. He listened to the low moan of the wind outside, the bleating of sheep like the horns of toy cars, and the distant scream of gulls. All these sounds were reassuringly familiar to him and the pictures that came into his head prompted a nice broad smile.

He leaned across. ‘This is a chance to blossom, Jeff,’ he said.

Batchelor’s head dropped, then sank lower still as a sigh pushed the breath from him.

Nicklin lifted hands that were cuffed tightly, one above the other, and gently touched them to Batchelor’s. ‘You need to embrace this opportunity,’ he said.

From the track, Thorne could just make out the team at work in the field far below him. The shiny white overalls of Howell and Barber, the bright red waterproof jacket Wendy Markham was wearing.

He keyed his radio and asked Holland what was happening.

‘Just digging,’ Holland said. ‘Obviously, they have to go through the soil that’s being removed, in case there’s evidence.’ Thorne could hear Howell shouting something, Holland responding. ‘She says it’s the backfill from the original gravecut.’ Howell said something else, her words muffled by the wind. ‘As soon as we find anything, I’ll let you know…’

Thorne looked up to see Robert Burnham wandering along the track from the direction of the observatory, which was a couple of cottages along from the school. He stopped next to Thorne. He lifted his stick, gestured towards the fields.

‘Been busy?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Any luck?’

‘Nothing yet.’ As much to stop the conversation drifting into awkward areas as anything else, Thorne said, ‘So, tell me about this king.’

Burnham looked blankly at him.

‘Earlier on, remember? In the school hall, we were talking…’

‘Oh yes, the man in the handcuffs.’

‘Yeah, him.’

‘He obviously knows a fair bit about us.’

‘He was here a long time ago,’ Thorne said.

The warden stared, then nodded, pleased with himself when the penny dropped. ‘Ah… the home for young offenders. I remember Bernard Morgan telling me about that when I first came here. Bit of a disaster, by all accounts.’

‘So, this king…?’

‘Oh well… long before my time, but yes, we used to have our own king. Went back to the nineteenth century, I think, when the island was privately owned. There was a decent-sized population then… well, over a hundred anyway and a local man would be crowned King of Bardsey. There was a crown made of tin, a ceremonial snuff box, it was all very serious.’ He thought for a few moments. ‘Apparently, when World War One broke out, the last king offered himself and the men of the island to the war effort, but the government of the day turned him down because he was into his seventies by then. So, he thought: Stuff ’em, and declared the island to be a neutral power. Some say he actually threw in his lot with the Kaiser.’ Burnham laughed. ‘There’s loads of stories. Hard to separate the myths from the facts when it comes to this place.’ He turned to Thorne. ‘What we were talking about before. The prison for young offenders that wasn’t really a prison. That’s almost become a myth around here.’

Thorne shrugged. ‘Definitely not a myth.’

‘Such an odd idea,’ Burnham said. ‘Don’t you think? I mean, where do you stand on that kind of thing?’

‘I just catch them,’ Thorne said.

‘Of course… which is exactly why your opinion should count, because you’re someone who actually does the job. You spend your working life taking these people off the streets… people who have done some pretty awful things, I imagine. So, do you think we should try and rehabilitate wherever possible? Send them off for a bit of a holiday? Or should we just lock them up and throw away the key?’

Thorne stared out across the lattice of green. He could still see the white overalls, the red waterproof jacket. A still figure in a black beanie hat.

‘Some of them,’ he said.

The radio came to life in Thorne’s hand and Holland’s voice was tinny through the hiss and crackle.

‘We’ve found something. You should probably get down here…’

‘Perhaps later then.’ Burnham had clearly overheard. ‘We could carry on chatting, if you’re going to be around for a while.’

‘Doesn’t look like we will be.’ Thorne had already pushed through the gate and turned to close it behind him.

Burnham raised his stick in a kind of salute and turned away as Thorne broke into a gentle jog, letting the slope of the field do most of the work. For the first time since he’d boarded the Benlli III, he could feel the good mood returning. It would be great to get away and have Nicklin banged up again by dinner time. He could certainly think of a great many better ways to have spent the last forty-eight hours, but the thought of Simon Milner’s mother finally being able to lay her son to rest would more than make up for it.

Those moments with Nicklin that would linger a while yet; eyes meeting in a rear-view mirror.

He was no more than a minute away from the group when his radio crackled again. He stopped and snatched it from his pocket, fought to regain his breath. ‘I’m nearly there.’

‘I know,’ Holland said. ‘I can see you.’

Thorne looked across and saw Holland waving. ‘What?’

‘You need to go back and get Nicklin. We’ll have to start again.’

‘I thought you’d found something.’ Thorne could hear laughter in the background. Karim, Barber maybe.

‘Yeah, we did.’

‘What’s going on, Dave?’

‘Well, unless this kid we’re trying to find had cloven hooves, this is looking very much like a dead sheep.’

TWENTY-FOUR

Tides House

‘You were picked to come here,’ Stuart said. ‘Same as I was.’ He explained that each of the boys staying at Tides House had been specially chosen. They did not want anyone with a history of violence, he said, so everyone was there because of their involvement in fairly petty crimes, even if some of them were repeat offenders. ‘They’re trying to get to us before we do anything violent. That’s the whole point of it.’ He smiled. ‘Basically, it’s so we can “blossom” before we knife anyone.’