‘You’re doing well,’ Thorne said.

‘Am I?’

‘Yesterday, in there.’ Now, Thorne nodded towards the school. ‘He was doing everything he could to push your buttons. Talking about getting turned on by corpses, all that.’

‘Oh, he pushed them all right.’

‘Didn’t look like it.’

‘I was shaking like a leaf.’

‘You did a good job of hiding it.’

‘You reckon? I didn’t know whether to burst into tears or kick him in the bollocks.’

‘Well, I know which I’d like to have seen,’ Thorne said.

A gull of some description flew by just a few feet overhead, and they watched as it wheeled away, screeching loudly before it dropped into a garden behind one of the cottages.

‘So what’s the story on this woman we’re looking for?’

Thorne told Howell as much as he knew; went through Nicklin’s story about being interrupted while he was digging Simon Milner’s grave.

‘So, that’s twenty thousand saints, a teenage boy and an old woman,’ she said. She took a drag and let the smoke out slowly to be whipped away from the side of her mouth. ‘Not that the two dead people would be as important to any of these pilgrims as their precious imaginary saints.’

‘Not a churchgoer then?’ Thorne said.

‘Weddings and funerals, same as most people,’ she said. ‘Too many funerals lately.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s hard, isn’t it, when you do what we do? How many coppers do you know who are full-on God-botherers?’

‘Not too many.’

‘Right. He gave us free will, did he?’ She took a final, deep drag, then began stubbing her cigarette out against the wall. ‘What, so we could use it to butcher people? Teenage boys and old women?’ She looked at him. ‘Sorry. Bit of a hobbyhorse.’

‘Not a problem,’ Thorne said. ‘Actually, you sound a lot like my mate, Phil.’ He realised that he still hadn’t got back to Hendricks, had yet to hear the grisly details of his friend’s latest conquest.

Howell dropped the nub into the pocket of her waxed jacket and nodded out across the fields. ‘So she’s out there somewhere, is she? Body number twenty-thousand and two.’

Thorne nodded, then walked past her towards the steps that led up to the school. He said, ‘Let’s go and see if our friend feels like telling us where, shall we?’

Inside the school, Nicklin was holding court.

Markham and Holland were whispering in the far corner of the hall, Batchelor stared into space and Fletcher and Jenks looked as though they’d heard it all before, but Burnham and Barber sat transfixed by whatever lurid prison yarn Nicklin was regaling them with.

Nicklin looked up when Thorne and Howell came through the door. He looked relaxed, one leg crossed over the other, his handcuffed wrists resting on one knee. ‘He’ll tell you.’ He nodded at Thorne.

‘Tell them what?’ Thorne asked.

‘Some very strange things go on inside Her Majesty’s prisons.’

‘Some very strange people in there.’

‘Can’t argue with that,’ Nicklin said.

Burnham shook his head, sadly. ‘I can’t help wondering if we’ve got it all wrong,’ he said.

Nicklin turned and stared at him. ‘Go on.’

The warden shifted slightly in his chair. ‘Look, I’m just a layman and I’m not saying we should go back to Victorian times or anything, but it seems to me that we give these people too much freedom in there. That’s the one thing they’re supposed to have lost, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t that the whole point? So then we lock them up in places where they’re free to do all sorts of things. Free to take drugs and commit horrific acts of violence.’ He lifted his stick a foot or so, waved it in Nicklin’s direction. ‘Where the likes of you are free to carry on terrorising people.’

Sitting next to Nicklin, Fletcher grunted and smiled. ‘Well, you’ll not be hearing any argument from me.’

‘As I said, just a layman.’

Nicklin nodded, like he was weighing up what had been said. He turned his gaze on Burnham. ‘How often do you get post out here?’

The warden looked nonplussed for a second or two. ‘Once a week,’ he said. ‘It comes over on the boat, obviously. Why?’

‘No reason,’ Nicklin said. ‘I should just be a bit careful how you open it from now on, that’s all.’

Burnham blanched. ‘Sorry?’

Nicklin sat back, beaming. ‘Joke.’

Thorne stepped forward and laid a hand on Burnham’s arm. ‘I’m going to have to throw you out now, sir. There are things we need to talk about.’

Burnham stood up a little faster than he might otherwise have done. He said, ‘No problem,’ and walked quickly to the door without looking back.

Thorne looked hard at Nicklin and Nicklin, a picture of innocence, said, ‘What?’

‘Some people might consider what you just said as threatening behaviour.’

‘Oh come on, it was a joke. Can’t you even make a joke these days?’ He shook his head and looked mournfully at Fletcher. ‘It’s political correctness gone mad, I tell you.’

‘We need to get on,’ Thorne said.

Nicklin was looking at the door. ‘People like him are full of opinions, aren’t they? Didn’t stop him lapping up a few horror stories, did it? Sitting there with his tongue out and his limp little dick twitching for the first time in God knows how long.’

Thorne remembered the men in the Black Horse the night before, hanging on Holland’s every word. It didn’t seem to matter which side of the fence the storyteller came from, people were always captivated by tales of trauma and transgression.

Deviance never ceased to be fascinating.

Talking of which…

‘Right then.’ Thorne took a chair from against the wall, dragged it across and sat as close to Nicklin as was possible. Knees almost touching, as though they were in an interview room. As though there were not an audience watching, enrapt, with tea, coffee and biscuits on a trestle table a few feet away.

‘Where is she, Stuart?’

‘Really?’ Nicklin looked mildly disappointed. ‘You really want me to make it easy for you?’

‘I want you to stop pissing us all about. I’m perfectly happy to call that boat back right now, and we can all go home.’

‘You might be,’ Nicklin said. ‘But I’m not sure how your superiors would feel.’ He smiled. ‘You know she’s here, don’t you? Course you do, because you’ve checked. So how would it look if you just happily sailed away and left her? How would her family feel? Do you want to go back to uniform, Tom?’

‘Just tell us where to look.’

‘Oh, come on… you’re a suit again now, aren’t you? You’re one of the elite. Shouldn’t you be showing us all that you deserve it?’

Bethan Howell was shaking her head and, a few feet away, Holland sat back and folded his arms. Said, ‘This is so out of order.’

Nicklin showed no sign of having heard him. His eyes were on Thorne.

Thorne stared right back, fighting to keep his temper. Seeing Nicklin’s pale puffy features blur, then sharpen into those of the man he’d arrested for murder ten years before.

Shattered, bloody…

There was some comfort in the memory, an easing of the longing to do it again, witnesses or not.

‘I mean, just for your own self-esteem surely,’ Nicklin said. ‘Don’t you fancy doing a spot of detective work?’

THIRTY-SEVEN

‘She’s got a name,’ Brigstocke said. ‘She was called Eileen Bennett. She was fifty-three when she disappeared.’

‘Nicklin said she was an old woman.’

‘Yeah, well, she would have seemed old to Nicklin when he was seventeen, wouldn’t she? My kids think I’m ancient.’

Thorne was back at the abbey ruins. He turned his face away from a raw wind coming off the sea, struggling to shake off the stiffness in his neck and shoulders and watching the signal indicator on his phone move perilously close to no bars. It had been more or less obvious since the conversation with the Morgans the previous evening, but he asked anyway.

‘Are we sure about this?’