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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