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matter,’ Batchelor said. ‘Either.’
    They were the first words Batchelor had spoken since they’d left Long Lartin.
    Holland turned back to him, nodded. ‘So, enjoying yourself then?’
    Batchelor shrugged. ‘Better than sitting in a cell, I suppose.’
    Holland studied the man in the handcuffs. He was tall and skinny, long-limbed. His light-brown hair was thin and wispy, and behind delicate glasses with thin metal frames his eyes closed tightly when he blinked, as though he was surprised each time it happened.
    Delicate.
He
looked delicate. He looked, Holland decided, like a history lecturer at a sixth-form college, which is exactly what he was.
    What he had been.
    ‘So, why are you here, Jeff?’ Holland asked. ‘Or, why do you
think
you’re here?’ He gave it a few seconds. He glanced at Jenks, but the prison officer was sitting with his head back and his eyes closed, appearing to be thoroughly uninterested. ‘I mean, I presume it wasn’t your idea.’
    ‘Nicklin doesn’t think he’s well liked,’ Batchelor said.
    Holland laughed. ‘Oh, you reckon?’
    ‘Liked now, I mean. By police officers. I gather an officer died when he was arrested.’
    ‘Her name was Sarah McEvoy,’ Holland said. ‘She was a good officer.’
    The truth was that Sarah McEvoy had been a very troubled young woman, with a serious drug dependency that had made her anything but a good officer. It was the reason she had been in that playground to begin with. The weapon Stuart Nicklin had used against her.
    And she and Dave Holland had been lovers.
    ‘So, what then? He just wants someone along as a witness, does he?’
    Batchelor blinked, eyes shut tight. ‘I suppose so.’
    ‘And you were the lucky winner. Or did you get the short straw?’
    ‘Like I said, better than sitting in a cell.’
    They said nothing for a while. The rain grew a little heavier outside, noisy suddenly against the glass. Holland wondered if Jenks might actually be asleep.
    ‘Listen,’ Holland said. ‘I’ve got a daughter, you probably heard me say that. Not as old as yours was. Not as old as… Jodi was.’ Batchelor was staring back at him now, unblinking. ‘I just wanted to say that I understand what you did. I don’t condone it, not for a second, course I don’t. But I understand why you did it.’

SEVEN
    There had been some debate about when and where to remove the handcuffs and in the end they had decided to do so in the car. To allow Nicklin to walk in and out of the service station without them. The intention was still to avoid unwanted scrutiny wherever possible and though this was one of Nicklin’s ‘conditions’, it suited Thorne well enough. He did not want media attention any more than Nicklin did.
    Blurry pictures and speculation. Manufactured outrage.
    All of them were probably worrying unduly. Chances were that leaving the cuffs on as Nicklin walked in would not have caused any major problems. Thorne could not see too many people open-mouthed and scrabbling for their phones to alert the red-tops. There might be some rubbernecking, why wouldn’t there be, but nobody would guess what, or more importantly
who
, they were seeing. Watching him, as he was shepherded towards the Gents, Thorne doubted that even those who had followed the case closely, back when he was on every front page in the country, would recognise Stuart Nicklin now.
    Five years ago, when Thorne had last been into Long Lartin to see him, the change had been drastic enough. Now, Nicklin looked even less like the man whose face, in one endlessly reproduced photograph, had once been so familiar. The expression of contentment that had come to be seen as defiance, eyes wide but most often described as ‘blazing’. A simple holiday snap, contextualised below a thousand prurient headlines and a name that was still a convenient byword for evil.
    A ‘monster’, who was finally beginning to look genuinely monstrous.
    Five years ago, Thorne had been shocked at Nicklin’s