Kitson laughed, because she thought she ought to.

Claire looked at her. She was already reaching for her cigarettes again. ‘I didn’t, you know. Some of the papers made out that I knew, but I didn’t. I still feel physically sick just thinking about what he did.’

Kitson said she believed her, because she thought she ought to.

Watching the woman light another cigarette, trying not to stare at what might have been the smallest of tremors in her fingers, Kitson told her what she had come to talk about. She explained about the prisoner escort operation that was currently taking place and why she had needed to wait until it was happening before having this and several other conversations. ‘Trying to minimise the risk of word getting out,’ she said.

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘Why’s he doing it?’

Claire turned and stared, shook her head. ‘Seriously? Why the hell do you think I’d know?’

‘We thought you might have an idea, that’s all,’ Kitson said. ‘Because he writes to you. The prison told us about the letters he writes, so we wondered if he’d said something.’

‘I don’t see the letters,’ Claire said. ‘I’ve got an arrangement with the witness protection team and they’re intercepted. Destroyed.’ She opened the side of her mouth, allowed a wisp of smoke to escape. ‘Well, they say they destroy them. Maybe they’re reading them for a laugh. Maybe they’re making a few extra quid putting them on eBay. I don’t give a toss, tell you the truth. I don’t care about anything he might have to say.’

‘What do you think’s in them?’

‘I told you, I don’t care.’

‘You’re not even curious?’

‘Not remotely.’ She turned to look at Kitson again. ‘I only went to see him once. Five or six years ago. Some journalist was writing a book and I knew they were going to come looking. I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen and I knew he was the only one who could make it stop, that he’d have some… leverage or whatever. That was the only time.’ She swallowed, took a deep drag. ‘The only time.’

‘What did he say?’ Kitson asked.

‘He tried to tell me that he still loved me.’ Claire leaned slowly forward and pulled her feet beneath the bench. She looked disgusted. ‘That he missed me. Oh yes, and just before I left he told me how much better the sex with me had been right after he’d killed someone. How thinking about what he’d done, all those lovely details, made him harder when we’d been doing it, and how he was telling me all this now because he thought I’d like to know, because he thought it would turn me on. Because it was turning him on, right there in the visitors’ room.’ She dropped her cigarette, still only half smoked, and stood up. ‘So, no. Not curious.’ She turned and watched Kitson get to her feet. She said, ‘Sorry you wasted your time.’

‘Not to worry,’ Kitson said. ‘I think I’ve got a day of it. Fact is, I’m really just doing a favour… several favours for the copper who’s been lumbered with taking your former husband back there to look for this body. Same copper that caught him, matter of fact.’

‘Thorne,’ Claire said.

Kitson was surprised for a moment, until she realised that obviously this woman would have known who Tom Thorne was. ‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘I only met him properly once. It was another officer who questioned me after the arrest, but then he came in afterwards, asked if I was all right.’ She began to walk back towards the road. ‘Then I saw him at the trial, of course.’

Kitson followed. ‘Can’t have been easy,’ she said. ‘Sitting through that.’

‘Easier for me than for some.’

Kitson knew what she meant. Someone had mentioned that they’d needed to lay on extra seating in the courtroom. Enough to make room for the families of all the victims.

‘For ages I didn’t know what to think about him,’ Claire said. ‘About Thorne, I mean. It was strange, because he saved me in a way, I suppose, but at the same time he ruined my life. Does that sound weird?’

‘Not really.’

‘I wasn’t sure if I should love him or hate him.’

‘A lot of people feel like that,’ Kitson said.

SIX

The cars turned on to the M5 just before eleven o’clock, a short and less than picturesque stretch that took them through the Black Country. They passed West Bromwich and Dudley, Walsall and Wolverhampton, before the motorway curved around to the west and became the M54. Twenty-five miles further on, the Midlands would give way to Shropshire, three lanes would become one, and things would inevitably slow up again. It was the main reason that the journey was likely to take so long, that it had required such a degree of thought and planning. Of the two hundred or so miles the convoy needed to travel, less than fifty were on motorways.

Conversation up to this point had been a little stilted. The prisoners had been busy taking in the views, spectacular or otherwise, while Thorne was wary of getting into anything too drawn out with Holland for fear of missing something important being said behind him. Thus far, those with easily the most to say for themselves had been the two prison officers. Thorne guessed that Jenks and Fletcher were good friends. The conversation between the pair seemed relaxed and uninhibited, more so perhaps than it might have been back in prison, where the surroundings made it unwise to give away too much in the way of personal information.

Where shivs and sharpened toothbrushes were not the only weapons.

Both men were in their mid-to-late thirties; Jenks clean-shaven and with a dirty-blond mullet, in contrast to Fletcher’s closely cropped scalp and neatly trimmed goatee. Both were well built, useful-looking, though Fletcher, the senior of the two, was shorter and wider, with a physique that did not so much suggest steroids as scream them. He had a flat Brummie accent, while the softer-spoken Jenks was pure Estuary; Kent, Thorne guessed, or north Essex.

Both were good talkers.

So far, Thorne had learned about Mrs Fletcher’s minor operation the previous month and the problems Jenks was having with his car. He had discovered that Fletcher was an Aston Villa fan and that Jenks had bought tickets to see a well-known comedian just before Christmas. Now everyone in the car was finding out where each of them was planning to take their family on holiday the following year. The Jenkses were heading to Orlando – ‘for the kids, obviously’ – while Fletcher had settled on Barcelona, because he fancied visiting the Nou Camp stadium and his wife had some ‘stupid thing about old churches’.

Thorne switched his attention to the radio, when a message came through from the back-up car. In the relatively short time they had been on the road, Karim had already radioed in once to report that there were no problems with the vehicle and that all was well with him and his ‘co-pilot’. Now, Holland picked up the radio and listened, rolling his eyes at Thorne, while Karim checked in a second time to report that, essentially, there was nothing to report.

Holland put the radio back. ‘He really needs to get out of the office a bit more.’

Thorne smiled, wondering how Wendy Markham was coping.

Nicklin leaned forward and said, ‘So, who is that behind us?’

Thorne saw no reason not to tell him.

‘They’ll be the ones getting busy with the bones then?’

‘Busy making sure the bones end up where they’re supposed to,’ Thorne said. ‘We’ll be meeting a forensic archaeologist up there.’

‘Obviously.’

Thorne looked at Nicklin in the mirror. ‘This is all providing we’ve got some bones to begin with.’

‘Oh, there’s plenty of bones where we’re going.’

Thorne had done the reading. ‘That’s just a myth.’

‘Got to be some truth to it,’ Nicklin said. ‘There’s human odds and sods turn up there all the time. Various bits and pieces knocking around on the beach or on the side of the mountain. Some poor old woman with a spade, trying to dig up her carrots or whatever… oh look, it’s somebody’s foot!’ He barked out a laugh and sat back. ‘Anyway, I really wouldn’t worry about having a wasted trip, because I can promise you I left some there.’ He turned to the window. ‘Not that they were bones when I left…’