Palmer shook his head. 'They're different. Newer.'
'What about the bridge? Can you get your bearings from that?'
Palmer looked up at the metal footbridge, a quarter of a mile away, high above the embankment valley. 'That wasn't even there. They were still building it. I can remember the noise…'
Thorne suddenly felt wetter and a damn sight colder as the thought hit him. How devious and clever could the fourteen-year-old Smart Nicklin have been? Was Karen McMahon buried under a hundred tons of concrete bridge support? If she was, they'd almost certainly never find her. Not that Jesmond or those above him would even agree to looking. He'd had enough of a job getting a search on this scale organised. The three magic initials had done the trick in the end. Having spoken to Hendricks he was far from sure whether it was even possible, but the outside chance of the killer's DNA being salvageable had swung it. They'd got nothing from any of Nicklin's recent victims, but maybe he'd not been quite so careful back when he was still a beginner.
DNA – a huge breakthrough in the struggle to catch and convict murderers. A useful weapon when it came to getting the better of one's dimmer superiors…
Palmer's eyes moved from the bridge to the slopes that rose up on either side of them. He studied the small troop of uniformed officers, positioned at various points along the bank on his right-hand side. Some stood perfectly still, radios in hand, and some of them were moving slowly, their steps mirroring those of himself and Thorne.
'What's going to happen?' Palmer asked. 'How's this going to work?'
'As soon as we get a fix, whenever you can give us somewhere to start, a team will come in to clear the area – get the grass cut, bring in machinery to make it a bit more manageable. For a while, it'll be more like Ground Force than anything.'
Palmer nodded quickly. This wasn't what he wanted to know. 'I mean what about afterwards? The actual searching. The digging…'
Thorne puffed out his cheeks. Not having been involved in an operation like this for a number of years, he wasn't a hundred per cent sure himself. 'A team of specially trained officers. With dogs probably…'
Palmer flinched. Thorne wondered how on earth they trained dogs for this.., specialty. It wasn't something he bothered to think about for long. Sniffing out drugs was one thing, but sniffing out death?
'Cadaver dogs' they called them in the States. A vivid image caught him off guard for a second, took a little breath away…
Lolling, leathery tongues, and paws scrabbling away at soil. Tearing through delicate cobwebs of skin and pressing down through chalk sticks of powdery bone.
Thorne waited a few seconds. 'Then, if we find a body, we'll bring in a forensic archaeologist…'
Palmer cut him off. 'You won't find anything.' He stopped and looked down at Thorne. His wrists were cuffed in front of him and his naturally stooping gait had become almost absurdly exaggerated. He looked like a hunchback. 'Why would she be here?'
The question, seemingly genuine and heartfelt, prompted Thorne to ask one of his own. One he'd asked before. Why had Palmer not considered the possibility that Nicklin might have had something to do with Karen McMahon's disappearance? 'Not back then, maybe,'
Thorne said. 'That's fair enough. But now, since he came back, and the killing began, now that you know about him. Don't you at least think it's possible?'
Something like a smile appeared on Palmer's face, as it had when Thorne had pressed him on this before, and he more or less repeated the only answer that he seemed prepared to give.
'Anything is possible, I suppose. If either of us was responsible for what happened to Karen that day, it was me…'
'Tell me why.'
Palmer leaned forward as if he might fall, but at the last second he took a huge step and his momentum carried him away. Thorne watched him go for a second or two, thinking. Was it something about Karen, the thing which Palmer seemed to be keeping back? Or was there something else? Something he wasn't saying about Nicklin?
Thorne moved off after him, following in his wake as Palmer noisily stamped down a path. The rust- coloured couch grass wind-whipped and sopping. Sharp enough to draw blood. The ground itself was sodden underfoot. Muddy water squelched up and into Thorne's boots as they walked.
'I talk to her sometimes,' Palmer said suddenly. 'I know that sounds very stupid.'
Thorne didn't think so. He'd enjoyed, or more accurately, endured, a number of conversations with the dead down the years.
'What do you talk to her about?'
'I don't so much now, but before, I used to tell her what I'd done.'
'Confessing?'
Up ahead, Palmer grunted. 'She knew anyway, of course.'
'Did she forgive you?'
'You could never be sure what Karen was thinking. I don't think even Stuart knew a lot of the time…'
Palmer began to move well ahead of Thorne. He veered off sharply to the left, away from the embankment that climbed steeply up to the new housing estates and towards the gentler slope on the other side. At the top, high metal fencing separated this wild, untended patch of wilderness from a shiny new industrial park. Thorne glanced towards the embankment on his right. The officers were still tracking their movements, one or two moving gingerly down the slippery bank.
'She knew what I was thinking all the time, of course. All the time…' He said something else. Thorne strained to hear, but it was lost on the wind.
Palmer's strides were getting bigger, the distance between himself and Thorne growing with every step. Thorne started to move a little quicker, but they had come through the grass now and were heading into an area where progress, for him at least, was rapidly becoming far trickier. Though the ground was suddenly drier, the undergrowth was denser, his feet heavier. He couldn't raise his legs high enough to step over the huge expanses of bracken and briar. He stumbled through masses of bare bramble, across a tangle of spiky dead thistle heads. He swore as he caught his hand on something sharp, and bringing it to his mouth, he lost sight of Palmer for a second or two. He looked round quickly, in time to see a uniformed officer a hundred or more yards away, sliding down the embankment on his backside. He was on the verge of calling out, when he heard Palmer's voice…
'That's because I loved her, I suppose. I always loved her…'
Thorne pushed aside the overhanging branches of a dead blackberry bush, and saw him standing thirty feet away. Thorne was breathing heavily. He suddenly felt rather stupid. He looked at Palmer up ahead of him, stock still. What on earth had he been worried about?
He followed Palmer's tracks through a shin-high patch of dried-out ferns until he was standing alongside him.
'Was Karen the only woman you ever loved?'
'Yes. The only woman.' He turned to Thorne and smiled sadly, like an idiot. 'I always loved Stuart, of course.'
Palmer raised his handcuffed wrists and pointed as best he could towards the gnarled black roots of a sorry-looking oak tree a few yards away.
'This is it. I found a baby bird here once.' He turned around and began looking excitedly in different directions. 'The sheds we used to mess about in were over there. Stuart's house was up there.' He looked at Thorne, nodded. 'It was around here, where we used to come, the three of us. This was the last place I saw Karen.'
Thorne turned around. After a few seconds, he made out the figure of Dave Holland at the top of the embankment, talking to two uniforms, drinking tea. Thorne stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled loudly to attract Holland's attention. When he had it, he started pointing.
Holland waved and began to speak into his radio. Checking in his rear-view mirror, Thorne saw that Palmer's head was bowed, as if he was looking down at the metal around his wrist and around that of Dave Holland who was sitting next to him, and quietly reminding himself how the handcuffs came to be there. How he came to be in the back of this particular car. The detective driving the Vectra behind them caught Thorne's look and flashed his lights. Thorne raised a hand in acknowledgement.
