The Bones Beneath by Mark Billingham

them I wouldn’t move far from home.’ She glanced up at an old woman shuffling past the table and lowered her voice. ‘So, you know… there were a few broken windows, dog mess through the letterbox.’
    ‘That’s why you’re supposed to keep it secret.’
    Annie smiled, girlish suddenly, as though she’d been gently scolded for doing something foolish and completely trivial. ‘Well, it didn’t really matter where I was living in the end, because I couldn’t go out. I already had bad diabetes, arthritis and all the rest of it. I was falling to pieces basically, had to have one of those warden-controlled flats, so they could keep an eye on me. Then suddenly I got scared to open the front door, agoraphobia or whatever it is. By that time I hadn’t got any friends left anyway.’ She leaned towards Kitson. ‘Funny that… how they all drift away once your son turns out to be a serial killer.’
    Kitson laughed, reached for a biscuit.
    ‘So, in the end I hadn’t got a lot of choice and moved in here.’ Annie looked around. ‘These are my friends now. Most of them are too bloody gaga to know or care about Stuart.’
    Kitson could see the slightest of tremors now, the woman’s head shaking though her eyes stayed fixed on the same point. Thorne had told Kitson about talking to Annie Nicklin ten years earlier, back when he was still hunting for her son. She had been thoroughly cantankerous, he had said. Uncooperative and stubbornly protective of her son, even though Thorne was sure she had known perfectly well what he had done. Ten years on, she seemed a very different woman to the one Thorne had described.
    One who had come to terms with the past, perhaps. Her own and her son’s. One more at peace with everything.
    ‘You mentioned journalists,’ Kitson said. ‘Have they been to see you?’
    ‘One or two.’
    ‘Recently?’
    ‘I lose track of time, love.’
    ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    ‘They always have the same questions,’ Annie said. ‘That’s the funny thing. Did Stuart start fires when he was little? No. Did he used to hurt animals? Not as far as I know. Do you still love him?’ She looked away for a few moments. ‘Bloody stupid question, that is.’
    Stupid or not, Kitson was suddenly desperate to know the answer, though Annie Nicklin’s expression made it clear that was not going to happen.
    ‘Course, they’re all desperate to ask the one
big
question,’ Annie said. ‘Not that they do, but you can see they’re thinking it.’
    ‘Which is?’
    ‘Did I
do
something to him?’
    ‘What would you tell them if they did ask?’
    The old woman shrugged. ‘Well, I must have, mustn’t I?’
    Kitson, with no idea how to respond, brushed crumbs from her lap.
    ‘You still haven’t said what you want…’
    Kitson told her about the trip to look for Simon Milner’s remains and her son’s insistence on being escorted by the detective who had caught him ten years ago. She said, ‘We were wondering about Stuart’s letters.’
    ‘One every week,’ Annie said. She sounded almost proud. ‘Every single week since he’s been inside, regular as clockwork. But I stopped reading them a long time ago.’
    Kitson nodded. Another wasted journey. She began to wonder if she could beat the rush hour back, what she had in the house for dinner.
    ‘They all used to say the same thing though. The letters from prison.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘That it wasn’t my fault. None of it.’ Her voice was a little less sure, suddenly, the tremor a little more pronounced. ‘That I mustn’t blame myself. It was the same as when I first went to see him after he was sent down. He told me not to come any more, simple as that. He said I shouldn’t have to go through it, that it wasn’t fair. Because what happened wasn’t my fault.’
    Kitson stared at the smile that would not stay in place and suddenly understood exactly what Stuart Nicklin had done to his mother. What he had succeeded in doing over a prolonged period of