The Bones Beneath Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    Tides House was an experiment that failed.
    It was neither a young offenders’ institution nor a children’s home, but something in between; something
different
, with the day-to-day emphasis on spiritual awakening and reflection. Somewhere a kid whose future looked bleak might grow and change. Doomed to constant sniping from reactionary quarters of press and Parliament, Tides House closed its doors only three years after opening them, leaving little to show for the efforts of those behind it but ruined careers and crumbling buildings. It was while Nicklin was there, twenty-five years before, that he had met Simon Milner, a fifteen-year-old-boy with a history of repeated car theft behind him.
    The boy whose body they were on their way to look for.
    ‘It’s going to get a lot better as well,’ Nicklin said. ‘Trust me. You want scenery, you just wait until we get there.’
    Thorne looked at the rear-view again. Nicklin seemed to have shifted as far as he was able to his left, so as to place himself directly in Thorne’s line of sight. So that their eyes would meet.
    ‘We’re not going for the scenery,’ Thorne said.
    Nicklin grunted and shrugged. ‘What, you’d rather be searching on a council estate, would you, Tom? Dodging the dog turds while you’re digging up some chav’s back garden. You’d rather be draining a quarry?’
    Thorne’s fingers tightened a little around the steering wheel and he knew that it was unlikely to be the last time. He exchanged a look with Holland, reminded himself that they were still only twenty minutes into it.
    His mobile sounded, a message alert.
    He reached down to the central cup-holder for the phone, keyed in his pass code and read the text from DI Yvonne Kitson.
     
    how’s it going? on my way to talk to the ex-wife
    He looked at the mirror again when he heard tutting from behind him.
    ‘Don’t you think you should keep your eyes on the road, Tom?’ Nicklin shook his head and turned to Fletcher. ‘What do
you
think?’ The prison officer said nothing. ‘You look down at your phone for that all-important message from whoever it might be, next thing a tractor appears from nowhere, rolls across our path…’
    Thorne’s fingers started to tighten again and, in an effort to relax a little, he conjured a memory that immediately did the trick. A vivid and wonderful image that eased the tension in his neck and shoulders. One that allowed his jaw to slacken and the corners of his mouth to widen just a fraction…
    He remembered a cold February afternoon. The echo of a gunshot still ringing and the look of surprise on a ruined face. Those frozen, perfect moments just after Thorne had smashed the butt of a revolver into Nicklin’s mouth. Shattered teeth splitting the gums and full, flapping lips that burst like rotten fruit.
    Eyes wide and strings of blood running through his fingers.
    ‘I mean, for heaven’s sake,’ Nicklin said, leaning forward again. ‘Let’s get there in one piece,