Holland leaned forward to turn the radio down. They had been listening to news and sport on 5 Live on the drive up from London and now there was a phone-in debating whether the royal family were value for money. They brought in a lot of tourists, according to John from Ascot, so were consequently worth every penny. Frank in Halifax said they were bone-idle parasites, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they were bone-idle German parasites.
‘We need to talk about music,’ Holland said.
‘Do we?’ Thorne asked.
‘A four-hour journey?’
‘Maybe five.’
‘Right. So the choice of music’s pretty crucial, I’d say.’
‘I suppose.’
‘Nothing about it in the operational notes.’
‘That was an oversight.’
‘Three pages on risk assessment… page and a half on “comfort break” procedure, for God’s sake, but not a single word about what we might be listening to.’
‘I’m not sure there’s going to be much chance. It’s not a pleasure trip.’
‘Surely we need to know the protocol, just in case.’
‘I’ll probably just connect my phone.’
‘What, your music?’
‘I’ve got plenty of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson,’ Thorne said. ‘I’ve got a Hank Williams playlist that’ll get us to Wales, easy.’
Holland sat back, shaking his head. ‘Jesus, I know we’re talking about people who’ve done some awful things, but these prisoners do have basic human rights, you know?’
‘You’re hilarious,’ Thorne said. He was stony-faced, but in truth he was enjoying the back and forth. What might be their last chance to laugh for a while.
Holland helped himself to a last biscuit. He put the lid back on the tin and set it down in the footwell. He looked at Thorne.
‘So, why you?’ he asked.
It was the same question Thorne had asked Brigstocke, that Helen had asked Thorne as soon as he’d told her what was happening. The same question Thorne had been asking himself for the last six weeks. Before he had the chance to tell Holland that he couldn’t think of a single reason that didn’t scare the hell out of him, the gate opened and the only man who knew the answer appeared.
That twist in his gut.
Jeffrey Batchelor was walking in front, a prison officer in plain clothes keeping pace alongside him. He stared at the sky, at the trees beyond the gates, as if mildly surprised to see that they were still there. Nicklin was a step or two behind, the hand of the officer with him reaching out to usher gently, almost but not quite touching the prisoner’s shoulder.
Thorne and Holland got out of the car.
Nicklin smiled when he saw Thorne, and nodded. Sorry I’m a bit late, you know how it goes. If anything, he picked up his pace as he drew closer, the smile broadening until it became a grin. Were it not for the handcuffs, it looked as though he wanted nothing in the world so much as to throw his arms wide, good and ready for a much-anticipated hug.
FOUR
It would be more than twenty-five miles before they hit the first of several motorways. Until then they would be travelling on winding, narrow roads, their progress subject to drivers in no particular hurry. They would be at the mercy of lumbering agricultural vehicles and unable to make use of blues and twos except in the case of genuine emergency. Not that Thorne had been looking forward to any of it, but this stretch of the journey was the one he had been most nervous about.
This was where they were exposed.
His eyes flicked to the wing mirror, the second Galaxy behind.
Over the last few days, nights, he had entertained dark fantasies of tractors appearing from nowhere and rolling across their path, lorries emerging from unseen lanes behind them, men appearing with shotguns. The car’s blood-soaked interior and the leering face of a scarecrow as the prisoners were spirited away. They were, after all, unlikely to run into anything similar in a built-up area or at sixty miles an hour on the M54. No, this was where it would happen. The middle of bloody nowhere, close to the prison and then again later on as they got near to their destination; miles from the nearest CCTV camera, on quiet country lanes that were not overlooked. Of course, Thorne knew perfectly well that it would not happen. He was allowing his imagination to run riot. Still, however unlikely, it remained the worst case scenario.
Where Stuart Nicklin was concerned, the worst case scenario would always be the first that came to mind.
Thorne glanced at the rear-view.
Nicklin was sitting on the driver’s side, in the row of three seats directly behind him, an empty seat separating him from Principal Prison Officer Chris Fletcher. Batchelor and Senior Prison Officer Alan Jenks sat close together on the pair of seats behind that. Seatbelts fastened for them, hands in laps, the prisoners remained cuffed. Those provided by the prison had been exchanged for rigid speed cuffs: a solid piece of metal linking the two bracelets and fastened in such a way that the prisoners’ wrists were fixed one above the other. That way it was impossible for arms to be thrown around the neck of anyone in front and the cuffs used to throttle.
Twenty minutes after leaving Long Lartin, they were still snaking through open Worcestershire countryside. Outside it was cold, but cloudless. Fields that remained frost-spattered stretched to the horizon on either side, beyond drystone wall and tall hedges dusted with silver.
Twenty minutes during which nobody had said a word, the silence finally broken when Nicklin leaned forward so suddenly as to make each of the car’s other occupants start. He leaned forward and craned his head, pushing it as far as he could into the gap between the two front seats.
Said, ‘This is nice.’
Stuart Anthony Nicklin, who was now forty-two years old, had been expelled from school at the age of sixteen. His expulsion, together with a boy named Martin Palmer, had been for an incident of semi-sexual violence involving a fellow pupil, though it later emerged that at around the same time he had murdered a fifteen-year-old girl. This was shortly before he ran away from home and vanished for more than fifteen years.
‘The countryside,’ Nicklin said. ‘The scenery.’ He looked at Fletcher, turned around to look at Batchelor and Jenks. ‘All of it.’
Nicklin had reappeared in his early thirties as a completely different person; a man with a new name and a new face, virtually unrecognisable, even to Martin Palmer, with whom he established contact once again. Despite the years that had passed, Nicklin had lost none of his power over his former partner-in-crime. He skilfully manipulated Palmer, terrifying him into acting out his own twisted fantasies in a three-month killing spree. They murdered at least six people between them; men and women stabbed, shot, strangled, bludgeoned to death. Though Nicklin might not always have had his hand on the gun or the knife, it became apparent to anyone following the case that all of those deaths were down to him.
And he was more than happy to claim credit for them.
It ended in a school playground on a cold February afternoon. The man who had been scared into killing and a female police officer, both dead. Four months later, after one of the biggest trials in recent memory, Nicklin began yet another life, this time as one of the UK prison population’s most notorious serial killers.
‘This is what you miss.’ Nicklin nodded out at the view. ‘Ordinary, gorgeous things. Trees and big skies and the black ribbon of road stretching out ahead of you, like this.’ He sat back and laughed, raised cuffed hands to scratch at his nose. ‘Even the smell of cow-shit…’
It emerged during the investigation that, for almost ten years before he and Palmer had begun killing, Nicklin had been happily married. That he had been holding down a regular job. What he had been doing for those earlier ‘lost’ years, however, had never been altogether clear. Later, it was discovered that immediately after running away, he had spent some time working as a rent boy in London’s West End. It was during this period – still in his teens and yet to reinvent himself – that, following his umpteenth conviction for soliciting, he was sent to a retreat for troubled teenagers on a small island off the north-west coast of Wales.