The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  I asked him if the investigating officers had come up with any leads at the time.

  Olaf shook his head. ‘No. They had loads of people on it too, but they never turned up a thing.’

  ‘But we’re officially linking the murders of Dana Brennan and Kitty Sinn to the double murder last night?’

  ‘We are, but for the moment we’re still keeping the inquiries separate, with the chief super overseeing everything. Thames Valley are going to continue with the excavation at the school and remain in charge of the forensics gathering, but they’re going to liaise with us, and I want you to be the main point of contact. I think we both know that the key to this lies in the past. I’ve got a lot of good workers on this team but you’re one of the few really good detectives.’

  I didn’t say anything. In my experience compliments delivered in the workplace are often followed by a whole load of work.

  ‘I want you to dig up everything you can on the Dana Brennan and Kitty Sinn murder cases, look for connections to Henry Forbes or anyone else. And look for anything that might lead us back to what happened last night.’

  ‘That’s a big job, sir. These are both major historic unsolved cases. I’m going to need help.’

  ‘You can borrow Julia Hutchings from other duties to help you. I’ll clear it with Glenda. I don’t mind how you go about it but make sure you give me daily briefings of where you are with it. OK?’

  I didn’t have much of a choice but to accept the role. Even so, I liked the idea of digging up the past, seeing if I could find what other people might have missed. It was a challenge, even if it was a hell of a lot of work. I told Olaf I’d get on to it right away.

  ‘Good. The first thing I want you to do is go down to Hampshire and talk to Dana Brennan’s parents. They’re still together and they still live in the house where Dana was brought up. They’ve already been told by local liaison officers that the remains are those of their daughter, and I want them to know that we’re taking this investigation very seriously. And you never know, they might be able to provide something that will help.’ He didn’t add ‘God knows what’ but he might as well have done. The subtext was that there was little chance of anything new coming from the visit but, like him, I recognized it had to be done, because you never know.

  The task of facing the parents, even after all this time, wasn’t going to be easy, and I didn’t relish it. But I wasn’t going to shirk it either.

  ‘What about Kitty Sinn’s next of kin? Now that she’s been ID’d, we’re going to need to talk to them.’

  Olaf shrugged. ‘There aren’t any. No immediate ones anyway. She was an only child. Her father died in 1988 and her mother in 1992. There are cousins and an uncle, I think. I’ll look them up and then we’ll get liaison down to them, but for the moment, let’s concentrate on the Brennans. On the way back you might want to stop at the school where they found the bodies – Medmenham College, it’s called. I’ll tell the SIO you’re coming. His name’s Jerry Chesterman and he’s a good guy.’ He picked up two heavy-looking files from his desk. ‘These are all the inquiry notes on the two girls. You’re going to have to go through them, but there are abbreviated reports covering the salient facts at the beginning.’

  I picked them up, opened the first one, and saw a blown-up black and white photo of a young girl with blonde hair and a round face smiling at the camera. I guessed this was Dana Brennan. She looked younger than thirteen and the image made me angry. Someone had evaded justice for her murder for far too long.

  ‘Don’t tell the parents that the killer cut her throat. I want that kept quiet.’

  ‘I wouldn’t even think of it,’ I said, still staring at the photo and wishing I’d throttled the secret out of that piece of shit Henry Forbes when I’d had the chance.

  ‘But I don’t want you to forget that’s what happened to her, Ray. That some bastard who’s still out there pretty much cut that little girl’s head off. I don’t care what you have to do. Just find out who did it.’

  I looked at him. As police officers, we’re always told to avoid getting too emotional for obvious reasons, that we must concentrate on the facts. But I think that lesson had been lost on Olaf. He wore his heart on his sleeve in a way that was frowned on these days, and there was a simmering anger in his eyes.

  ‘I’ll do everything I can, boss,’ I told him. ‘But make sure you watch my back.’

  Eight

  The man who walked into the arrivals hall at Bordeaux Airport looked ordinary enough. He was somewhere in his sixties with iron-grey hair, lined skin that might have been olive once but was Celtic-pale now, and a very good posture for one his age. He was dressed in a black coat and trousers with an open-necked white shirt and he was wearing dark prescription glasses and an old-fashioned black fedora hat. Closer inspection, though, would have picked up a few strange characteristics. The nails on both of his ring fingers were unusually long, and the little finger on his left hand was missing, while beneath the dark glasses his eyes were a yellow, almost jaundiced colour round the pupils. And there was a smell about him that wasn’t quite right. Like damp, manure-fed earth.

  His real name was Mergim Nushi, but those few who knew him addressed him as Mr Bone, which was a name he’d given himself when he first arrived in England back in the early seventies. To everyone else he was simply The Dark Man. For decades now he’d been called upon to clear up the mess made by others. He was a fixer of problems; a granter of wishes; the guardian of an underground empire; and for many people the last face they ever saw. But none of that was decipherable from the vaguely benign expression on his face, or the half-smile that lifted his lips at the edges.

  There were a couple of dozen people hanging around the barriers, mainly taxi drivers waiting to collect passengers from the London flight, but The Dark Man walked past them and nodded at a man in a suit who was leaning against a pillar holding a sign that said ‘Mr Picard’, the name on the passport he’d used for this trip.

  The driver peeled away from the pillar and the two of them walked out of the terminal building, without speaking. It was only when they were inside the car, a silver Mercedes C-Class, that he introduced himself to The Dark Man.

  ‘Monsieur Picard, I am Monsieur Laroux. I am happy to be of service to you and your employers. I have organized a hotel for you in Villeneuves, and in the back seat you will find the goods you requested.’

  The Dark Man nodded and, as the Mercedes pulled out of the car park, he reached behind him and picked up the small black case from the back seat. He flicked it open and looked down at the brand-new Walther PPK pistol in its casing, along with a separate suppressor and two spare magazines. Wrapped in a piece of cloth was a black K-Bar neck knife with a four-inch blade, secured in its sheath, as well as a cheap Nokia mobile phone.

  ‘The phone is untraceable to you, as are the gun and the knife,’ explained Laroux.

  The Dark Man replaced everything in the case and slipped it under the front seat.

  Laroux, the man next to him, was a French underworld contact of The Dark Man’s boss, and it was a measure of his boss’s standing that a man as senior as Laroux had come to him. His organization’s specialities were high-end people-smuggling and heroin, and Laroux himself had a reputation for reliability.

  ‘Is everything to your satisfaction?’ asked Laroux.

  He was a big gruff man but, even so, The Dark Man could smell anxiety on him.

  ‘Everything is perfect,’ The Dark Man replied. ‘And our target? Is there any news on her?’

  Laroux hesitated. ‘As requested, we have a number of cameras set up in her house. But she has found one of them.’

  This was the problem when you used subcontractors. Even ones with a reputation for reliability. You didn’t have control over the situation. ‘That isn’t good,’ said The Dark Man, removing his glasses and staring at Laroux.

  Laroux quickly looked away. ‘She hasn’t been to the police yet, or looked for any of the other cameras, but she has
been online.’

  ‘What’s she been looking at?’

  ‘Bug finders. That kind of thing. Also, articles from a shooting in London last night. Two men were killed.’

  The Dark Man nodded. He knew about the killings Laroux was referring to. He’d set them up himself, although he hadn’t actually been there in person. If he had been, there wouldn’t have been any witnesses to the crime. One of the most important lessons he’d learned about killing in his long career was that you should always eliminate the witnesses. If The Dark Man had had his way, Henry Forbes would have been eliminated many years ago. He’d been overruled at the time, and the result was that they now had a situation where a police detective had survived the attack last night. It was a problem The Dark Man knew he’d have to fix before too long.

  In the meantime he had the problem of Charlotte Curtis to deal with, and this was going to be a far more subtle operation. Whether she lived or died depended on her actions over the next few hours.

  ‘Where is she now?’ he asked.

  ‘When I checked an hour ago, she was at home. She’s a teacher and it’s the Easter vacation so she’s not working this week.’

  The Dark Man nodded slowly. ‘I need you to supply me with a car and her address.’

  It was time to pay her a visit.

  Nine

  I’ve only been in love once in my life. That was with the woman who became my wife. Her name was Jo and we were together from beginning to end for just under two years. It was without doubt the happiest time of my life although, to be fair, the competition’s been pretty scarce on that front.

  We met on the job. Before the onset of Tinder that was pretty much the only way I met anyone of the opposite sex. Jo had come into our offices to demonstrate a new facial recognition software package to my team. I remember the first time I saw her, I knew straight away she was something special. It wasn’t the looks so much, it was her zest for life. She was only a little thing but she had a big smile and an infectious laugh, and she bantered easily with my colleagues. She even got me laughing, which is no easy feat.

  Afterwards I took her business card on the pretext of talking to her more about the package. It took me a week of thinking about it before I finally phoned the number on it. Thankfully, she remembered me well enough, and after a couple of minutes of small talk I asked her out for a drink. When she said yes, it was as if I suddenly understood what all those songs had been about. I was delirious with excitement, even though I kept telling myself to calm down, and that it almost certainly wouldn’t come to anything.

  But it did come to something. Our first date in a bar in Surrey close to where she lived was fun and relaxed. It led to a second, then a third, and soon we were in a proper relationship. We didn’t get to spend too much time together. We both had demanding jobs, and Jo also had twin seven-year-old daughters from another relationship, so there were plenty of obstacles in our way. Even so, I knew within weeks that she was the one for me. I met her daughters, Chloe and Louise, and they were both so polite and sweet that they won me over immediately, and deep down I began to see them as the family I’d never had. I would have proposed there and then but forced myself to be patient.

  I finally popped the question after eight months. I didn’t do it publicly. I’m not that kind of man. I did it while we were lying in bed at her house early one evening drinking red wine, the girls having gone to their dad for the weekend. She was sitting propped up against the pillows with a big smile on her face. I took her in my arms, kissed her forehead, and the words just came tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

  There was a three-second pause while Jo stared at me open-mouthed; then, just as I was beginning to think I’d made a huge and totally avoidable mistake, her face lit up and she said yes.

  It should have been a fairytale. For a while it was. She was the love of my life, and I’d developed a strong bond with her girls. We moved in together in Surrey, and I was even thinking about leaving the force altogether. Life was good. In fact, it was better than I could ever have imagined it to be. We would have been together for decades, I’m convinced of it.

  But then one night I saw a news report on TV, and something awoke within me. Something dark and terrible. And from that day on it was the beginning of the end for me and Jo, and our fairytale.

  I was thinking about that, and the fragility of family life, as I drove down to Hampshire to see the parents of Dana Brennan. How a perfect life can be shattered by events over which you have no control.

  The village of Frampton lay in a quintessentially English stretch of countryside a couple of miles west of the A33 between Reading and Basingstoke at the northern edge of the county, one of a dozen villages and hamlets connected by quiet country lanes. Frampton itself was little more than a collection of pretty cottages and a pub surrounding a minor crossroads and, as I drove into it, I stopped the car outside a row of three terraced cottages next to a well-tended graveyard. The middle cottage had an old Hovis bread sign above the front door. This had once been the village shop which Dana had visited minutes before she disappeared for ever.

  On a sunny day like this one, Frampton looked a peaceful, idyllic place, and as I sat there in the silence I imagined a similar day twenty-seven years earlier: a pretty young girl coming out of the shop, jumping on her bike with her bag of shopping and riding off without a care in the world. To her death.

  I thought of the twins then, Chloe and Louise. I hadn’t seen them in five years. I missed them. I really did. They’d be fourteen now. A year older than Dana when she’d been snatched.

  A burst of emotion rose up in me and I forced it back down, pulling away from the kerb and turning right at the crossroads. The houses quickly gave way to high, impenetrable hedges on either side of the road, before giving way again to woodland on the left side and bright yellow rapeseed fields on the right. A car came past the other way but otherwise the road was empty. It would have been even quieter back in 1989.

  A small copse of trees appeared ahead on my left and I slowed down. This was the place where Dana had been taken. The file from the original investigation was on the seat next to me, and I flicked it open now and pulled out an old blown-up photo of a child’s bike lying in the undergrowth, a plain white bag with its contents spilling out a couple of yards away, all barely a yard from the road and surrounded by scene-of-crime tape. It was a forlorn sight.

  Straight away, I knew the killer must have known these back roads. They were too far from the beaten track for him to have stumbled on them randomly. According to the file, every male living within a five-mile radius had been questioned, and none of them had been considered a suspect. And yet a stranger would have stood out.

  The case was as much a mystery now as it had been then, possibly even more so given the fact that Dana’s remains had been found alongside Kitty Sinn’s, and once again I was reminded of the fact that I’d come so close to getting answers from Henry Forbes, but hadn’t.

  It was a failure on my part, one I knew I was going to have to rectify.

  The Brennans lived in a small whitewashed cottage with ivy creeping up the walls, on a lane directly off the road where Dana had disappeared. An old-style Land Rover Freelander was parked in the driveway and I pulled up beside it.

  I’m not used to doing these kinds of visits, and I was feeling tense as I knocked on the door.

  A few moments later, a fit-looking woman in her early sixties answered the door. Her eyes looked tired, and it was clear she’d been crying recently, but she smiled when she saw me. I introduced myself and she invited me inside.

  The cottage was more cramped than it had looked from the outside, and the ceilings were low and criss-crossed with old oak beams. I had to duck down to avoid getting whacked as she led us through a narrow hallway into the sitting room where Mr Brennan sat.

  He got up from his chair when he saw us but it was clearly a major effort for him. Olaf had told me he was sixty-four but he looked a lot older than that.
His face was ghostly pale and so gaunt the skin was stretched taut over the bones, and his hair hung in thin grey wisps over a wrinkled scalp. Even so, his grip was surprisingly strong as he shook my hand.

  ‘Steve Brennan,’ he said, looking me in the eye. ‘Pleased to meet you, and thank you for coming out all this way. You’ve met my wife, Karen.’

  We shook hands and I introduced myself.

  ‘Not the Ray Mason?’ he said when I told him who I was. ‘Oh yes, you are, aren’t you? I thought you looked familiar. I recognize you from the papers.’

  The attempt on my life three years back had caused quite a media furore, not least because it involved ‘the boy from the burning house’. A gang of three men had tried to abduct me at gunpoint from outside my home. Their plan, it seemed, was to film my murder, probably by beheading, then post it on the internet. At the time I was a DI in the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command with a couple of successful ops under my belt, and therefore a potential target for terrorists looking to make a big news splash. The gang were acting alone, just a bunch of homegrown young men radicalized on the internet, and thankfully they were amateurs. I disarmed one of them and used his gun to shoot him dead, along with the second gunman. The driver had tried to escape but I’d shot out his tyres and nicked him. He was now serving eighteen years for conspiracy to murder.

  The police had managed to keep my name out of the papers. I was questioned at length by investigating officers so that they could be satisfied I’d acted lawfully by using the minimum force necessary to protect my life, but, although they’d concluded I had, the families of the two dead men had persisted with a private prosecution against me for murder. At about the same time I’d been involved in another case where I’d shot dead several terror suspects, and my name and photo had ended up being leaked to the media. Other aspects of my past, things I wanted kept secret, had come out too, and as a consequence I was now probably the most famous detective in the land – a situation I hated.