The Bones Beneath Read Online Free Page B

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