The Bones Beneath Read Online Free PDF

shall we?’
    Thorne’s eyes stayed on the road, the half-smile still in place.
    He said, ‘I’ll do my best.’

FIVE
    It was a sign of the times perhaps, but even as a respectably dressed woman in her forties, it felt uncomfortable to be hanging around outside a primary school. Was it best to wait in one place or move around a little? Which looked less like lurking? Yvonne Kitson guessed that she was not arousing as much suspicion as a man might and certainly a damn sight less than a seventies’ DJ or children’s TV personality.
    Still, it made her feel decidedly uneasy.
    She had been there fifteen minutes or so already and been on the receiving end of hard looks from a middle-aged couple, a woman walking past with a pushchair and a male teacher who had stood for half a minute and stared through the fence at her from the far side of the playground. Kitson had stared right back. She had been hugely tempted to march through the gate, push her warrant card into his fat face and shout, ‘On top of which, I’m a mum of three kids, you twisted little tosspot…’
    Tempting, but ultimately stupid and unjustified.
    Stupid, because it would almost certainly have scuppered the meeting she was here for. Besides which, she knew that the teacher was doing his job. Those who preyed on children came in all shapes and sizes and were not all as conveniently recognisable as Jimmy Savile.
    Or should that be
un
recognisable.
    It was horribly ironic, Kitson thought, that the man who for decades got away with being one of the most active predatory paedophiles in the country’s history had actually looked like most people’s idea of one.
    After another few minutes, the woman Kitson assumed to be the one she was waiting for walked out of the school and across the playground towards her. She stopped just for a few seconds outside the gate, long enough to produce cigarettes from a pocket and nod towards a small park on the other side of the road. To say quietly, as though to herself, ‘Over there.’
    Kitson waited half a minute, then followed and sat down at one end of a bench as the woman at the other was lighting her cigarette. She looked a little older than the thirty-nine Kitson knew her to be. She had brown hair past her shoulders and glasses with heavy black frames. Like Kitson, she wore a dark skirt and jacket.
    They could both have been teachers. Or police officers.
    ‘Waiting long?’
    ‘Quarter of an hour or something,’ Kitson said.
    The woman showed no inclination to apologise for having kept Kitson waiting. She just smoked for half a minute. Said, ‘Paedo patrol check you out? Short teacher with a fat face?’
    ‘Yeah,’ Kitson said, laughing.
    ‘You want one of these?’ The woman proffered her cigarette.
    Kitson shook her head. ‘Thanks for doing this, by the way. Agreeing to talk to me.’
    ‘I don’t have a lot of choice, do I? I need to keep you lot sweet.’ She flashed Kitson a look and took a long drag. ‘Only takes one stupid copper gabbing in the pub, one mention of the wrong name and the whole lot falls apart.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ Kitson said.
    ‘It’s taken ten years to build this.’
    Kitson nodded back towards the school. ‘Where do they think you’ve gone?’
    She waved her cigarette. ‘They think I’ve come out to do this, same as usual. Which means I’ve got about five minutes, which is fine because I don’t want to talk to you for longer than five minutes.’ She put the cigarette to her lips then lowered it again. ‘I don’t want to talk about
him
for five seconds.’
    ‘It’s nice round here,’ Kitson said. The school was on the outskirts of Huntingdon, in Cambridgeshire, seventy miles or so from London. Far enough away. ‘Leafy.’
    The woman nodded, smoked.
    ‘Kids nice?’
    Another nod. She said, ‘I was lucky,’ then snorted at the absurdity of it.
    The woman who had once been Caroline Cookson was still doing the same job she had been doing ten years before, when her life