The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Simon Kernick

  Title Page

  Day One Tuesday

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Day Two Wednesday

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Day Three Thursday

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Day Four Friday

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Day Five Saturday

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Two Weeks Later

  Fifty-two

  Copyright

  About the Book

  When the bones of a young woman, Kitty Sinn, who went missing without trace in Thailand are discovered in the grounds of a school just outside London, an enduring mystery takes on a whole new twist.

  Kitty’s boyfriend at the time, and the man who reported her missing, comes forward and tells DI Ray Mason of the Met’s Homicide Command that he knows what happened to Kitty, and who killed her.

  But soon he too has been shot dead. Now the only link to Kitty lies 500 miles away in the Bordeaux countryside where a middle-aged teacher, Charlotte Curtis, lives alone. But Charlotte is in terrible danger because she possesses a single piece of information that will blow Kitty’s case wide open.

  Only two people know how to find her.

  One is private detective, Tina Boyd, and the other is a man who wants her dead as quickly as possible …

  About the Author

  Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was the biggest selling thriller of 2007. His most recent crime thrillers include Siege, Ultimatum, Stay Alive and The Final Minute. He is also the author of the bestselling three-part serial thrillers Dead Man’s Gift and One By One.

  Simon talks both on and off the record to members of the Counter Terrorism Command and the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, so he gets to hear first hand what actually happens in the dark and murky underbelly of UK crime.

  Also by Simon Kernick

  The Business of Dying

  The Murder Exchange

  The Crime Trade

  A Good Day to Die

  Relentless

  Severed

  Deadline

  Target

  The Last 10 Seconds

  The Payback

  Siege

  Ultimatum

  Wrong Time, Wrong Place

  Stay Alive

  The Final Minute

  The Witness

  Digital Shorts

  Dead Man’s Gift

  One By One

  Day One

  Tuesday

  One

  The whole thing started when a young man took his girlfriend of a few months on a trip to Thailand.

  This was way back in 1990, in the days when Thailand was still in the process of being ‘discovered’ by backpackers, and mass tourism, with its big hotels, and stag and hen parties, and five-star yogic spas, was pretty much unheard of. The young man’s name was Henry Forbes. He was twenty-five years old and a lecturer in Humanities (whatever that is) at Brighton Polytechnic, as the University of Brighton was called in those days. His girlfriend, who had just finished her last year at the same place, was called Katherine Sinn, but I remember from reading about the case at the time that everyone referred to her as Kitty.

  Kitty Sinn. I always thought it was a nice name.

  Anyway, the trip was to last two months, beginning just over a month after the end of Kitty’s final exams. We know for a fact that they arrived in Bangkok on the afternoon of Sunday, 29 July 1990 because they were recorded entering the country by Thai immigration, and their passports were stamped. They stayed two nights in Bangkok before taking the overnight train down to the resort of Phuket, where they spent four days at the Club Med on Kata Beach. They were remembered by the staff as a polite, quiet couple who kept themselves to themselves and who seemed very much in love. From Phuket they took a taxi to the Khao Sok National Park, site of Thailand’s oldest rainforest, a two-and-a-half-hour drive north, hoping to see some wildlife as well as the spectacular limestone karsts for which the area is famous. They stayed at what at the time was the park’s only guesthouse, arriving there on Sunday, 5 August.

  There were only four other guests there that night: an Australian couple in their sixties and two young Dutch backpackers. All the guests remembered Kitty and Henry having dinner in the restaurant before retiring to their bedroom, where later that night they had a blazing row that was so loud that the guesthouse owner, a local man called Mr Watanna, had to intervene and threaten them with eviction if they didn’t quieten down. According to Henry’s later statement, the row had been over a former girlfriend of his and had got out of control, culminating in him slapping Kitty, something he claimed was totally out of character.

  The following morning the row clearly hadn’t been resolved because Kitty asked Mr Watanna to drive her to the coastal town of Khao Lak, offering him five hundred baht in payment as long as he didn’t tell Henry where she was going. She said she needed time to think. Henry tried to stop her leaving, apologizing profusely, at one point getting down on his knees and literally begging her to stay. But, by all accounts, Kitty was adamant and she left with Mr Watanna.

  According to Mr Watanna, he dropped her off outside the Gerd and Noi Bungalows near the main beach at Khao Lak, where she intended to get a couple of nights’ accommodation while she pondered her next move. He then drove straight back to the guesthouse, arriving approximately four hours after he’d left.

  For the next three days, Henry remained at the guesthouse, hardly venturing outside his room as he waited for Kitty to return. These were the days before mobile phones and the internet, so when someone was out of contact, they were definitely out of contact. When she didn’t come back, Henry persuaded Mr Watanna to tell him where he’d taken her.

  Henry then called the Gerd and Noi Bungalows, only to be told Kitty hadn’t been staying there. Worried now, he paid Mr Watanna to take him to Khao Lak, and spent the day searching the town and its handful of hostelries for Kitty, which was when he discovered that she hadn’t been staying anywhere else round there either. Finally he called Kitty’s mother but she hadn’t seen or heard anything from her daughter. That was when Henry contacted the Thai police to officially report her missing, while her mother contacted the police in England.

  An alert was put out to police stations across the southern Thai peninsula to look out for her, but still s
he didn’t show up.

  Kitty was a very pretty girl, petite and dark, with a sweet, almost childlike face. According to both staff and students at the poly she was a lovely person who even volunteered for the Samaritans in her spare time, and she came from a wealthy, respectable family. In other words, she was a newspaper’s dream, and her disappearance in what was then considered an exotic and far-flung country where a lot of British youngsters were heading attracted a huge amount of media attention both in the UK and beyond.

  Suspicion quickly fell on Mr Watanna who was the last person known to have seen Kitty alive. He was arrested and interrogated by Thai police. There were even claims by his lawyer that he’d been beaten and tortured. The police were under huge diplomatic and media pressure to get a result and doubtless they in turn put pressure on Mr Watanna, who was held in custody without charge for more than two weeks. But with nothing linking him to any foul play, and no sign of a body, he was eventually released.

  Finally, with Kitty missing close to a month without any confirmed sightings, and having been interrogated several times himself by the Thai authorities, Henry returned home, where he was questioned at length by officers from Sussex CID. But, because of the circumstances of the disappearance, he was never considered a real suspect. He took an extended leave of absence from the poly citing emotional stress, and didn’t return to his job until the following year.

  In the meantime the investigation had steadily faded into the background as other stories muscled their way on to the news pages, and there were no new confirmed sightings. People just lost interest. But the mystery element remained – the fact that no trace of Kitty was ever found, nor any record of her leaving Thailand. It was as if she’d disappeared into thin air. Many people – and I have to admit I count myself among their number – assumed that Mr Watanna was responsible. He may have been happily married with no criminal record, and there may have been no evidence linking him to the murder, nor any changes in behaviour to suggest he might be carrying the emotional burden of having killed someone, but even so, he was the most obvious culprit. He died in 1997, at the comparatively young age of forty-six, having never managed to rid himself of the black cloak of suspicion. If he’d had any knowledge of what actually happened to Kitty, he took it with him to the grave.

  And so life moved on and, I’ll be honest, I hadn’t read, heard or even thought anything about the strange disappearance of Katherine ‘Kitty’ Sinn for years until, more than a quarter of a century after she went missing, I got a phone call out of the blue from a lawyer called Maurice Reedman saying he represented the Henry Forbes – his emphasis, not mine – and telling me that he had information that might be of interest to the police.

  And so here we were in the dining room of Reedman’s grand period house just outside London, Henry and him on one side of a big wooden table, me alone on the other.

  Henry Forbes had the look of a man weighed down by the world. His face was pale and sagging round the edges, the lines deep and unforgiving, the black hair I remembered from those old photographs now grey and thinning. He looked every inch his fifty-one years. His eyes were narrow and suspicious, and a thin sheen of sweat clung to his forehead. He also couldn’t seem to sit still. Reedman, on the other hand, must have been at the wrong end of his sixties, and looked every inch the plump, well-fed lawyer with his expensive three-piece pinstripe suit, its waistcoat straining against his ample girth, and small, perfectly manicured hands. His grey hair was thick and lustrous. All told, he was far too dapper for a man called Maurice.

  I kicked off proceedings. ‘You asked to see me, Mr Forbes?’

  ‘I did. I’ve read about you, DS Mason, and I trust you. So does Mr Reedman.’

  I didn’t say anything. It was 8.30 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten.

  Henry sighed. ‘What I’ve got to say …’ He paused, placing his hands on the table and staring down at them. One finger began to drum a nervous beat on the wood. ‘I have a secret.’ He glanced at his lawyer, who nodded. ‘It concerns a possible murder.’

  I opened my notebook. ‘Well, you’d better tell me then.’

  It was the lawyer, Reedman, who spoke next. ‘I asked for this meeting in my home because I’d like it to be off the record. Now I’m aware that this is an unusual request but hear me out. I’ve spoken at length to my client and I firmly believe he has information that will be of great relevance to you. However, his information will incriminate a number of very powerful individuals, and may, to a lesser extent, incriminate himself. So, in essence, he’s not willing to make an official statement until he and I have assurances that he will receive the full protection of the law, including a new identity, and immunity from prosecution.’

  ‘You know as well as I do that I can’t offer immunity from prosecution, Mr Reedman,’ I told him.

  ‘Exactly. Which is why I want this conversation off the record. Then you can go back to your superiors, tell them what we tell you, and they can decide whether they want to help my client. If they don’t, he will say nothing and there will, I promise you, be nothing you can do about it.’

  I frowned, not liking the threat in Reedman’s tone but curious about what Henry Forbes knew.

  ‘I explained to you on the phone earlier about who my client is, didn’t I?’ continued Reedman. ‘He was Katherine Sinn’s boyfriend, the man who reported her missing in Thailand in 1990.’

  ‘And is this about Kitty Sinn’s disappearance?’

  ‘Is this off the record?’

  ‘Effectively this conversation’s off the record anyway, you know that. We’re not in a police station, and your client’s not under caution, so nothing said here is admissible in a court of law.’

  ‘Can I ask you not to take notes?’

  I sighed and closed the notebook. ‘OK, but as long as we get to the point of this meeting. I’m hungry.’

  Reedman sat back in his chair, putting his manicured hands together and steepling his fingers. ‘This meeting is about Katherine Sinn, yes. As you may or may not be aware, unidentified human remains have been dug up in the grounds of a private school in Buckinghamshire.’

  I’d seen something on the news about the story the previous week. The school, running low on funds, had sold a parcel of land to developers to build houses on, and when the first bulldozers had broken ground they’d turned up human bones belonging to a young woman. It was currently Thames Valley’s case and, as far as I was aware, they hadn’t ID’d the woman yet, or released details about how or when she’d died.

  ‘My client believes those bones belong to Katherine Sinn,’ said Reedman.

  This, as you can imagine, was something of a shock to hear, since the last time she was seen – and it seemed from the records that there’d been a number of witnesses who’d seen her – Kitty had been more than six thousand miles away from Buckinghamshire.

  I looked at Henry. ‘Is that right, Mr Forbes? Are they Kitty’s bones?’

  Henry swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s her.’

  ‘So how did she get there?’

  ‘She was murdered.’

  ‘By you?’

  ‘I want immunity before I say anything else.’

  ‘I told you, I can’t offer immunity for murder. If you were responsible, it’s in your best interests to tell me now.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her. I promise. I’m not a killer.’

  He took a deep breath, a thin bead of sweat running down his forehead, and Reedman cut in. ‘But my client is in a position to identify the individuals who did kill Ms Sinn.’

  Henry looked at me. ‘These are very powerful people. They have friends. They can get to me. And they would kill me if they knew I was here talking to you. I need immunity, a new identity. Protection for the rest of my life. If I get that then I’ll give you something huge, I swear it.’

  ‘That’s why we need to make a deal that suits everyone,’ said Reedman.

  Henry seemed genuinely terrified, but then in
my experience a lot of people scare easily, particularly when they know they’re in trouble. At the time I doubted the powerful people he was talking about were really all that powerful, or capable of doing Henry any harm.

  Which turned out to be a very big mistake on my part.

  ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I said. ‘We need to know what Mr Forbes knows before we even start talking about deals.’

  ‘I’m afraid not, DS Mason,’ said Reedman, putting a hand on Henry’s arm – a clear gesture for him to stop talking.

  I kept looking at Henry. ‘I could arrest you right now for obstruction of justice.’

  Reedman shook his head decisively. ‘On what grounds exactly? You agreed to have this conversation entirely off the record. Now, you have some bones that will inevitably turn out to belong to Katherine Sinn, but that’s all you’ll have. It won’t actually change a thing regarding my client. At the time of Katherine’s disappearance there were a number of witnesses who said that he couldn’t have killed her. His story has always held up under the scrutiny of both the Thai and the British authorities, and will continue to hold up. There will be no evidence connecting him with the bones. And, after twenty-six years, almost no chance that there will be any evidence connecting anyone else to them either. You’ll be at square one, and that’s where you’ll remain. Unless …’ He held up a finger and eyed me closely. ‘Unless you can make a deal that will protect my client, allow him to be treated leniently by the courts, and give him a completely new identity under the witness protection programme. Then he will tell you all he knows. Now, we need to move fast on this, DS Mason. I strongly believe that Mr Forbes is in real danger. So, please, why don’t you call your boss and see what he, or indeed she, has to say?’

  ‘Give me something I can use,’ I countered. ‘Something that will make it easier to sell a deal.’

  ‘This deal sells itself,’ said Reedman firmly.

  ‘It doesn’t,’ I said.

  Henry stood up, walked to the window and took a couple of deep breaths, then walked back. ‘I think there’ll be another body buried in the same place as Kitty,’ he said. ‘There may even be more than one.’