The old man reached for his glasses and picked up the photograph. ‘That what they were?’ he said. ‘Young offenders?’ He stared at the picture, shaking his head. ‘You wouldn’t have thought it, the way they swanned around, lying about and taking drugs on the beach. You’d have thought they were on holiday.’

‘It was a different approach,’ Thorne said.

‘Well, it didn’t work, did it? That’s why they shut it down.’

Thorne nodded. All the information had been there in the notes he was given before leaving London. The funding for the Tides House project had been hastily withdrawn following a violent knife attack on one of the boys and the escape – or so everyone had thought – of two others. The doors had closed within a few months and those in senior positions – most notably a woman named Ruth Livesey – had been pilloried in the press before being pressured into taking early retirement from the young offenders prison system.

Bernard held the picture out and Thorne moved to take it back. He doubted that Bernard had recognised any faces. If Thorne himself had not been told who was who, he would certainly have struggled to pick out Stuart Nicklin, though looking closely he could see that the eyes were the same; the challenge in the stare. He had been told that the tall, skinny boy standing next to Nicklin was Simon Milner. A shock of dirty-blond hair, an open-necked shirt. Thumbs held aloft…

Milner was the only boy smiling.

Thorne put the photograph away. Said, ‘Anyway… around that time, do you remember anyone going missing?’

‘You don’t mean those boys who escaped?’

‘A woman,’ Thorne said. ‘An elderly woman. I think she might have been a poet, or something.’

‘Yeah, there’s always plenty of those,’ Huw said.

‘Rings a bell.’ Bernard was nodding. ‘There was definitely some talk of a woman drowning.’

‘Drowning?’

‘Well, that’s what everyone thought, that she’d killed herself. Let’s face it, you can’t really go missing on Bardsey. There’s only one way off the island if you’re still breathing and that’s on the boat, so you’re either there or you’re dead, aren’t you?’

‘And this was definitely twenty-five years ago?’

‘Well, I can’t say for certain.’ He nodded at Huw, thinking. ‘He was only a lad, I know that much, so it was definitely around the time they closed the children’s home down. Or a bit afterwards, maybe. I think she might have died earlier than that though.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Thorne asked.

‘Well, she wouldn’t have been missed straight away, would she?’

‘He’s got a point,’ Huw said. ‘A lot of the people who stay on the island just want to be left alone, see. Some of them go out there for months at a time, especially the arty types and it’s not like they’re phoning home every day, is it? Sending postcards.’

‘If she went missing,’ Bernard said, ‘it might not have been noticed for quite a while. Especially as there was such a bloody hoo-hah about what was going on with Tides House. All the comings and goings when that place closed.’ He downed what was left of his beer, nodded. ‘I seem to remember taking another woman across afterwards,’ he said. ‘More than once, if I remember rightly. I think it might have been her sister. She wanted to see the last place she’d been staying. The place where she’d died. She might have had flowers… it was a long time ago. Like I said, there was some talk about her drowning herself.’ He leaned towards Thorne. ‘I think she might have been the type, you know?’

‘What, because she was a poet?’ Huw said.

‘Well, a lot of them do, don’t they?’ Bernard looked very serious. ‘Poets, writers, what have you. Too bloody sensitive by half.’ He waved his empty can at his son.

Huw laughed, standing and gathering the empties. ‘Another one?’

Thorne thought about it, but not for very long.

When Huw returned with fresh beers, he dropped into the armchair. ‘This is Mr Nicklin again then, is it?’

Thorne saw little point in evasion. ‘It’s what he’s telling us. We’ve got to decide if we’re taking him back to prison first thing in the morning or going back to the island to start looking for this woman.’

‘He couldn’t have known about her,’ Bernard said.

Thorne looked at him, opened his beer.

‘Well, Tides House was closed by the time anyone knew anything had happened to that woman, wasn’t it? And he’d gone before that anyway, so he wouldn’t even have known she’d ever gone missing, would he? Not unless he was responsible for it.’ The old man popped the tab on his can and shrugged as though what he was saying should have been perfectly obvious.

Thorne took a swig. ‘You should have been a detective, Bernard.’

‘Looks like we’ll be seeing you tomorrow then,’ Huw said.

‘Yeah…’

‘Actually, the weather’s looking a bit iffy tomorrow.’

‘Great.’

‘Morning should be OK though.’

Thorne tried to picture the blister pack of sickness tablets. He guessed he would have enough left to get him to the island and back.

‘I couldn’t do what you do,’ Bernard said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, you’re always dealing with people at their very worst, aren’t you? At their lowest. Bastards like that bloke you’ve got with you now, the one we’ve been talking about. Even when you’re dealing with normal people… a lot of the time you’re seeing them when they’re in bits. When their lives have been destroyed.

‘Let’s face it, a lot of the time you’re the one who has to tell them that their lives have been destroyed, then watch them fall apart in front of you.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘No… I couldn’t do that. I’ll stick to the fishing and what have you, thank you very much.’ He looked across at Thorne and raised his can in a small salute. ‘Fair play to you though, mind. I mean, some poor bugger’s got to do it, haven’t they?’

Thorne said, ‘True.’ Thinking that only a couple of hours ago he’d all but forgotten what his job was.

Thinking that you could never forget for long.

‘Listen to him,’ Huw said. ‘The bloke who thinks poets are too bloody sensitive.’

Bernard said, ‘You’re not too big to get a slap, you know.’

‘Oh, here we go.’

‘What?’

‘He’ll be wanting to arm-wrestle in a minute…’

Thorne smiled, happy enough to sit and drink with these two for a while and enjoy their bickering.

An hour later, walking from the Morgans’ house to the car, Thorne was well aware that the three cans of beer he’d put away, weak as they’d been, were probably enough to have put him over the limit.

He pressed the remote on the fob and the indicators flashed.

There was probably only one patrol car within a fifty-mile radius but Sod’s Law said that he’d run into it between here and the Black Horse, make some Welsh plod’s week.

Make bloody headlines, probably.

He got into the car.

He could always phone Holland, see how much he’d had to drink. He could go back to the Morgans’, ask for the number of a local taxi and come back to pick the Galaxy up in the morning. He could try thumbing a lift, flashing his warrant card and claiming it was an emergency.

He started the car and reached for a packet of mints in the door. Then he took out his phone and called Robert Burnham. He apologised for calling so late, and asked the warden if he would mind taking the satellite phone down to the dig and telling the exhibits officer to give him a call.

He was halfway back to the Black Horse when Karim rang back.

The forensic team were still hard at it, Karim told him. Looking forward to a well-earned drink and a good night’s sleep while some people would be bedding down next to a body in some spooky chapel. Thorne told him about Nicklin’s bombshell and asked him to let Howell and the others know that they would be doing it all again tomorrow.

‘You might be spending two nights in that spooky chapel,’ he said.