The Bones Beneath Read Free Page B

shortly, then stood up, walked slowly round the desk and shook his hand. It felt a little odd, as though she were wishing him luck. As though she thought he would need it.
    Holland was walking back towards the desk. He thanked Colquhoun for the tea, and for the ‘special biscuits’.
    She turned and reached for the tin, proffered it. ‘Take them with you for the car,’ she said.
    Holland hesitated for a second or two, as surprised by the unexpected act of generosity as anything else, then took the tin. ‘Cheers.’
    ‘What’s it going to be, three or four hours?’
    ‘Could be closer to five,’ Thorne said. ‘Depending.’
    ‘Plenty of time for everyone to get acquainted with one another.’ She looked at Thorne. A well-practised expression of compassion that could not disguise a degree of naked curiosity. ‘Though I gather you and Nicklin…’
    ‘Yeah,’ Thorne said.
    I think I know you pretty well.
 
    ‘So, these just for us then?’ Smiling, Holland waved the tin of biscuits at Thorne. ‘Or do we have to share them?’
    ‘Well, I’m sure my officers aren’t going to say no.’ The deputy governor walked back around her desk and sat down. She adjusted the position of a framed photograph whose subject Thorne could not quite make out from where he was standing. ‘But the prisoners will obviously be cuffed, so it’s up to you.’ She looked up at Dave Holland with the first proper smile she’d managed all morning. ‘Do you really want to be hand-feeding Stuart Nicklin custard creams?’

THREE
    Jeffrey Batchelor raised his forearm, buried his face in the material of the thick, brown crew-neck sweater and sniffed. Fully dressed again, he looked at himself in a small mirror on the back of the door, then across at the senior prison officer who had only finished strip-searching him five minutes before.
    ‘Just feels odd,’ he said.
    ‘Bound to,’ Alan Jenks said. ‘First time back in your own clothes since you came in, right?’
    Batchelor nodded. ‘I suppose that’s right.’
    First time in eight months. In two hundred and thirty-six days. He pointed at Jenks, managed a dry laugh.
    ‘First time I’ve seen you out of uniform.’
    Jenks checked himself out in the mirror. He was wearing jeans, same as Batchelor, with a black sweater over a denim shirt. ‘Yeah, well, they don’t want what’s going on to be too obvious,’ Jenks said. ‘They want it all
low-key
.’ He used his fingers to put quotation marks round the last words, then nodded towards the door and another room on the far side of Reception where two of his colleagues were prepping the other prisoner. ‘
He
does, anyway. He’s the one calling the shots, you ask me.’ He nodded, conspiratorial. ‘Don’t you reckon?’
    Batchelor shrugged, as though any opinion he might have was hardly worth considering. He certainly had one, but he knew that where Stuart Nicklin was concerned, it was usually best to say nothing.
    He’d learned that before he’d even met the man.
    ‘I mean, you’re his mate,’ Jenks said.
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘Or whatever it is.’
    ‘I’m not,’ Batchelor said.
    ‘Doesn’t matter to me either way.’
    ‘It’s not like that.’
    Jenks stared at the prisoner for a couple of seconds, then smiled like he wasn’t convinced and turned away. He reached up into an open metal cupboard on the wall for the D-cuffs. Turned back and dangled them. ‘Yeah well, not easy to be too low-key when you’re walking about wearing these buggers.’
    ‘I suppose not.’
    Jenks stepped across, workmanlike. ‘Hardly going to look like we’re sightseeing, is it?’
    Batchelor closed his eyes and held out his arms.
    On the wing the evening before, he had looked up to see Nicklin in the doorway of his cell. A small wave like there was no need for concern, like he was just passing. He had laid down the book he was reading, got to his feet.
    ‘All set?’
    He had nodded, his mouth too dry suddenly to spit out an answer