‘Where is it?’

‘It’s in the bedroom.’

‘Well go back and get it and get down there.’

Thorne and Nicklin watch Holland turn and walk quickly back towards his bedroom. Thorne moves back into the room and resumes his position at the window.

‘You can go with him if you want,’ Nicklin says. He rattles his cuffs against the bedstead. ‘It’s not like I’m going anywhere, is it? Well, not yet anyway.’

Thorne turns from the window and looks at him. He feels a flicker of something in his gut, there for a second, then gone.

The cuffs are rattled again. ‘Something tells me you’ll be taking these off in a minute.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Thorne says.

Nicklin leans back and closes his eyes. Says, ‘We’ll see.’

Holland sees the two bodies as soon as he pushes open the back door and sweeps the torch beam across the garden. Jenks is lying on his belly in the grass. Fletcher is sitting with his back against the toilet wall, as though it’s a balmy summer’s evening and he’s catching forty winks. There is blood pooled between his legs and the rain has begun to take it, running in stringy rivulets and dripping off the edge of the concrete platform on which the toilet has been built.

Holland keys his radio. He squeezes hard to control the tremor in his fingers. He says, ‘Fletcher and Jenks are down. Stabbed, looks like. They’re both down.’

He waits, stepping towards the toilet door, which is closed.

Thorne’s voice crackles back at him. ‘Say again, Dave.’

‘Shit… there’s so much fucking blood.’

‘Whose blood, Dave? Where’s Batchelor?’

Holland yells out as he kicks the door open. It clatters against the wall and swings back again, but Holland can see that the stall is empty. ‘Batchelor’s gone,’ he says. ‘Fletcher and Jenks are down and Batchelor’s gone.’ He turns on the spot and swings his torch around wildly, in case Batchelor is still somewhere nearby, but there’s only rain and the dark wall at the end of the garden. The mountain rising up on the other side.

‘What about signs of life, Dave?’ Thorne is not shouting, but his voice is raised and he is speaking slowly. ‘Have you checked for signs of life?’

Holland is panting by now. He wipes the rain from his eyes, lays his torch on the grass and kneels down next to Fletcher. He grabs a wrist and presses his ear to the officer’s chest. It comes away wet, and the radio is slick with blood when he brings it to his mouth.

‘Nothing,’ he says.

‘Are you sure?’

He crawls across to where Jenks is lying and turns him over, grunting with the effort. The man’s chest is sodden, the stain on his jacket black in the half-light from the open doorway behind them.

‘Dave?’

He checks for a pulse. He leans close to the man’s face and waits for a breath, holding his own while he listens.

‘Shit.’

‘Talk to me, Dave.’

‘Shit… there’s nothing,’ Holland says. ‘Just blood…’

Thorne is still at the bedroom window, the radio pressed to his ear, listening to Holland gasp and curse, when he spots the torch beam moving on the mountainside. The light skitters, perhaps five hundred yards away and fifty feet up, briefly illuminating rocky outcrops and grey clumps of heather and gorse as it climbs upwards.

He keys the transmit button.

‘Batchelor’s on the mountain,’ he says. ‘Him and whoever killed Fletcher and Jenks. You need to get after him, Dave.’

‘You don’t think Batchelor killed them?’

‘No chance,’ Thorne says. ‘Somebody came for him.’ He looks again, but he can’t see the torchlight any longer. ‘Quick as you can, Dave. I’ll radio Karim and get him to follow you.’

Holland tells Thorne that he’s on his way.

It’s still dark on the mountainside and Thorne guesses that whoever is using the torch knows very well that there’s a chance he will be seen and is choosing to use it only when necessary. He looks down into the garden and sees the beam of light swing as Holland picks his own torch up.

He turns to Nicklin. ‘This was never about you, was it? It was always about Batchelor escaping.’

‘Well, it’s an escape of a sort, I suppose,’ Nicklin says.

Thorne sees Nicklin smile, waiting for the penny to drop and when it does Thorne understands what Batchelor is doing, what he’s being led away to do.

‘This is the perfect place for him to do it,’ Nicklin says. ‘Very peaceful very… spiritual. Besides, you’d be amazed how hard it is to get it done in prison. They’ve been watching him anyway, you know, since he had his wobble when he got that boy’s letter. But even if they weren’t, it’s never very easy. Trust me, if it was, people inside would be topping themselves every day of the week.’

Suddenly Holland’s voice cuts in, hoarse, urgent. ‘I was wrong. Jenks is still breathing. Jesus…’

‘You sure?’

‘He’s alive, but only just.’ Holland sounds close to tears. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’

‘I’ll sort it, Dave.’

‘We need to get him to hospital… get a helicopter or something.’

‘I said, I’ll sort it. I can get a phone signal at the abbey ruins.’ Thorne is already moving across to the bed. He drops down on to the edge and reaches for his boots. ‘You get after Batchelor, all right?’

‘Shouldn’t I wait with Jenks?’

‘Listen, if you don’t get to Batchelor before he reaches the top of that mountain, there’s going to be another body to worry about.’

‘OK…’

‘Be careful, all right, Dave? Whoever’s up there with him is obviously dangerous. As soon as I’ve made the call I’ll join you.’

Holland tells Thorne that he’s on the move. He says, ‘Don’t forget to call Karim.’

Thorne ends the transmission, punches the button again and says, ‘Sam, are you awake? We’ve got an emergency up here. Sam…?’ He struggles to pull his boots on, cursing as he waits for a response.

‘I don’t want you to tell Karim what’s happening,’ Nicklin says.

Thorne looks up. ‘What?’

‘Tell him to relax. Tell him there’s nothing to worry about.’

Thorne freezes, fingers tight around his bootlaces.

‘Yes,’ Nicklin says, ‘you are going to the abbey ruins, but I’d prefer it if you left your phone here, along with your radio.’

Thorne gets slowly to his feet. That lurching in his belly is back suddenly and it stays there, like speeding across an endless series of humpbacked bridges. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Remember the letters?’ Nicklin asks. ‘The ones I wrote to my mother?’

Suddenly, Thorne cannot think straight. He shakes his head, struggling to understand. ‘Yes… what?’

Nicklin’s expression makes it perfectly clear that he’s enjoying Thorne’s confusion, the delay before he puts him out of his misery. ‘Look, I know what you think you’re supposed to do, what the procedure is, and so on. The thing is, I’m not really sure you can save Alan Jenks anyway and, more to the point, aren’t there other people you care about more?’ Nicklin waits, cocks his head. ‘People that need you?’

Thorne stares at his prisoner for no more than a second or two, but he sees a confidence borne out of craft and careful planning; of complete certainty that Nicklin is going to get what he wants, because he knows Thorne too well.

When the radio crackles into life and Samir Karim says, ‘I’m here, guv. What’s the problem?’ Thorne raises the radio slowly to his mouth.

He says, ‘Relax, Sam, it’s nothing to worry about.’

Across from him, Nicklin nods his approval.

‘False alarm.’

Batchelor stumbles again in his effort to keep up and cries out as his palm is scraped by the edge of a low rock.

‘You all right?’

Batchelor nods, too out of breath to shout.

The man who stabbed Fletcher and Jenks is perhaps twenty feet ahead of him and has not lost his footing once. Batchelor has still not got a good look at him, but the man seems young, certainly younger than he had been expecting. Not that he had known what to expect, not really. It was just that, despite some of the events he had witnessed in prison, the people he had encountered, it still seemed strange to him that someone so young could do such things so easily.