The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  There was no point denying it, so I told Mr Brennan that yes, I was the Ray Mason.

  ‘You’ve had a very hard time,’ he told me, a new respect in his voice.

  ‘So have you,’ I said.

  ‘I’m glad that private prosecution failed. It would have been a travesty of justice if you’d been found liable for those killings.’

  ‘I know, but I never let it bother me too much.’ Which wasn’t entirely true. There’d been times when I’d let the fear that I might lose the case get the better of me.

  Mrs Brennan offered me a drink but I declined. These kinds of interviews are hard enough as it is, so it’s best to get straight on with them. I took the sofa facing the Brennans, who sat next to each other in matching chairs holding hands. I could feel the underlying well of tension in the room.

  ‘I understand you were given the news that Dana’s body was found by the local police last night,’ I said. ‘How much did they tell you?’

  It was Mr Brennan who answered, his voice quiet. ‘Not much. Just that her remains had been discovered in Buckinghamshire.’ He paused. ‘And that it was definitely her.’

  ‘How did Dana die?’ asked Mrs Brennan, her voice tight.

  ‘We know that she was murdered,’ I said, ‘but at the moment we’re not sure how, and it may be that we never know.’ I’d agreed with Olaf not to tell them that her throat had been cut, and I made a mental note to make sure that the Thames Valley SIO did everything he could to keep this information out of the media.

  ‘Do you know how long she was alive for after she was taken?’ asked Mr Brennan.

  I shook my head. ‘It’s impossible to tell for sure because of the length of time she’s been gone, but usually in these kinds of cases the victim is killed within hours of the abduction.’ I wanted to add that it was unlikely she’d suffered too much, but I didn’t know that, so I said nothing. Instead I told them that there was a second body buried close to Dana’s, and that it had now been formally identified as Kitty Sinn. They were both familiar with Kitty’s disappearance and were as shocked as everyone else to learn that her remains had turned up in England when she’d been reported missing in Thailand. ‘Obviously it’s no coincidence that they were buried near each other,’ I said, ‘so we believe they were killed by the same person, or persons. I know this is a long shot, but can either of you think of any connection between your family and Kitty Sinn?’

  I wasn’t surprised when they both shook their heads and said no, but you have to ask these things, because you never know.

  ‘Do you have any suspects at all?’ asked Mr Brennan.

  ‘Not yet, I’m afraid. But I’m going to tell you something in confidence, and I would ask you not to repeat this to anyone. You may have heard on the news this morning that a man called Henry Forbes was murdered last night along with his lawyer. This is the same Henry Forbes who reported Kitty Sinn missing back in 1990, and who was her boyfriend at the time.’ I gave them some basic details of what had happened, knowing that they’d be able to get more out of the newspapers over the next couple of days, but didn’t mention anything about my meeting with Henry and his claims of information about who Kitty’s killer was. ‘We’ve got a number of active lines of inquiry going because if we find who killed Mr Forbes, it may well lead us to whoever murdered your daughter.’

  The Brennans had a number of questions about these new developments and I answered them as best I could before asking questions of my own about Dana’s abduction: was anyone seen acting suspiciously in the area in the days or weeks prior to the attacks (no); had Dana ever been approached by strangers before (no); et cetera, et cetera. Unfortunately, they stirred up painful memories, and Mrs Brennan became increasingly upset as the interview progressed until eventually she burst into tears.

  ‘I don’t know what else we can tell you,’ she said, dabbing the tears away with a tightly clutched tissue. ‘There was nothing to make me suspicious. Our life was good. We were happy. I didn’t see it coming. I just didn’t. And I should have done. I bloody should have done. Then maybe Dana would still be alive.’

  ‘It’s OK, love,’ said Mr Brennan, putting his arm around her. He held her for a while, then turned to me, and I could see that he too was fighting back the tears. ‘You finding Dana has brought the whole thing back to us. Since it happened, we’ve got on with our lives, as far as you ever can when something like this has happened. I suppose we never lost hope that she would be found alive one day, that she’d turn up all these years later and we could start again.’ He paused, fought hard to compose himself, and a single tear ran slowly down his cheek. ‘It’s strange, but I can still picture her smile and hear her voice perfectly in my mind. That never fades. Never.’

  ‘She was such a lovely girl,’ said Mrs Brennan, no longer making any effort to fight back her tears. ‘She was so kind and thoughtful. Do you know what they said on her last school report? I’ll show it to you. I want you to see it.’

  Mr Brennan tried to put a hand on his wife’s forearm as she moved out of his embrace. ‘I’m sure DS Mason hasn’t got time for this, love.’

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see it.’ I could see how much it meant to her that the police tried to understand Dana as a living, breathing human rather than a statistic.

  Mrs Brennan hurried out of the room and returned a minute later with a worn-looking report book in her hand. Her tears had stopped now and she was actually smiling. ‘Look at this from her form teacher, Mrs Eagle.’ She opened up a page, held it in front of me, and started reading. ‘“Dana is a real shining star and a lovely, hard-working girl. She is popular with her classmates and always ready to help out. In short, a real pleasure to teach and to be around.” That’s what my Dana was like, DS Mason. It’s not an exaggeration. She was such a good, sweet girl. And her little sister Katie doted on her. Can you imagine what it was like for her when Dana went? Katie was only ten. She was absolutely lost. You know, she blamed herself because it was her idea to do the baking that day.’

  I remembered reading the twins’ school reports. How proud I’d been. How close I’d come to asking Jo if we could have a child of our own. It could all have been so different. A life. A family.

  But I’d fucked it all up.

  ‘I’ve got something else to show you,’ said Mrs Brennan. ‘This.’ She produced a photo from behind the report book and handed it to me with an imploring look. ‘I keep this picture with me all the time. It was taken when Dana was eleven. It was my favourite one of her because it showed all the joy that was in her soul.’

  I looked at it. Saw a young girl down on one knee hugging a cocker spaniel and giving the camera a huge gap-toothed smile.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said, and I realized my voice was cracking with emotion. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything more, I just kept staring at this innocent little girl whose life had been ended by a killer who’d got away with his crime.

  ‘How could someone do this to my little angel? She was riding to the shop to get some ingredients for a cake because Katie wanted to do some baking. I was going to drive down there but Dana said, “No mum, I’ll do it for you.” Why did I let her go? Why?’ All the pain came hurtling out of Karen Brennan now and she burst into great howling sobs.

  Once again Mr Brennan took her in his arms and led her back to her chair, the photo and the report book still clutched tightly in her hand like precious stones.

  He turned back to me, frail yet composed, and I saw a strength in him I hadn’t noticed before. ‘Thank you so much for coming but I don’t think we can help you any more. We just want the chance to bury our daughter in peace.’

  I didn’t know what to say, but in that moment I felt that these people had to hear more than simple platitudes. Every police officer knows you should never promise anything you can’t guarantee to crime victims or their relatives because it can so easily come back to haunt you, but the fact was I couldn’t help myself. The need to see justice done in this case was
so overwhelming that it no longer mattered to me what it cost to get it.

  So I stood up, my hands no longer shaking, the tension fading as a renewed purpose took hold of me, and looked at them both in turn.

  Mr and Mrs Brennan looked back at me, and Mrs Brennan’s sobbing subsided.

  I took a deep breath. ‘I promise you both, here and now, that I will find who killed your daughter. It may well have been more than one person, we don’t know yet, but I’ll find whoever was involved and whatever it takes – whatever it takes – I will bring them to justice and make sure they spend the rest of their miserable lives behind bars. You both know who I am. You know my history, and what happened to me as a child. And you know that I mean it when I give you my word that I won’t give up. Because I won’t.’

  Mr Brennan came forward and embraced me. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered in my ear, before letting go.

  Mrs Brennan put the picture of her daughter into my hand. She looked up at me and her eyes were alive with passion. ‘Take this, so it’ll always remind you of your promise.’

  I could have objected, but it was too late for that. I took the photo and placed it carefully in my wallet. Because she was right: it would always remind me of my promise.

  A promise that would take me all the way to hell.

  Ten

  Henry Forbes. Before she’d heard his name on the radio that morning, Charlotte Curtis hadn’t thought about him for a long, long time. They’d been lovers once, back in the early nineties in Brighton. Henry was an ex-public schoolboy from a wealthy Home Counties family who lectured in Humanities at Brighton Polytechnic, as it was then. He’d had little ambition and seemed content just to drift through life, taking what he could from it. When she’d thought of him, which was extremely rarely, Charlotte was always reminded of the phrase ‘there was less to him than met the eye’. He’d only had one claim to any sort of fame and that was that in 1990 his girlfriend had gone missing without trace while they’d been travelling together in Thailand.

  Kitty Sinn, the girlfriend in question, had been one of Charlotte’s closest friends. They were the same age and they’d been on the same teaching degree course, both graduating just before Kitty went missing. Kitty had been a lovely girl – fun, vivacious, but most of all kind and loyal. Charlotte had no doubt they’d have stayed in touch if she hadn’t gone missing like that.

  Strangely enough, it was Henry’s link with Kitty that accounted for the fact that he and Charlotte had ended up together. After he’d come back alone from Thailand, Henry had had a nervous breakdown, taken a leave of absence from his job, and disappeared for a year to a beach in Indonesia – which was typical of the Henry she remembered: he’d never actually go and do something worthwhile like help build an orphanage in Africa or put his teaching skills to good use, he’d prefer to sit in the sunshine feeling sorry for himself. Charlotte, meanwhile, had got herself a teaching job at a primary school in Brighton, and she and Henry had run into each other after his return from Indonesia. It was the first time she’d seen him since before the Thailand trip and they’d got talking. Kitty was still missing and Henry had the haunted, spaced-out look of a man who’d been on the wrong end of far too much unwanted attention. Charlotte had felt sorry for him and, if she was honest with herself, she was intrigued to spend more time with the man who’d been one of the last people to see her best friend before she’d disappeared. She and Henry had gone for a drink and somehow they’d ended up in bed, which wasn’t what she’d been planning at all.

  The relationship, if you could call it that, had lasted eighteen months. The sex had been good but everything else had been dull and superficial, and she’d found Henry hard work, like a child who wants his own way the whole time. She hadn’t even found out anything insightful about what had happened to Kitty. Henry hadn’t wanted to talk about it, and that was that. Very occasionally she’d catch him staring into space and it had made her wonder what there was more going on back there than he liked to let on. In the end, though, she hadn’t been prepared to hang around to find out.

  When she’d broken up with him, Henry had been mortified. He’d tried to win her back with constant phone calls, and turned up on her doorstep at all hours, often drunk, declaring his undying love for her. She’d tried to be as patient and as nice about it as she could, but when that hadn’t worked, she’d started ignoring him. Unfortunately, that hadn’t worked either. He’d bombarded her with more phone calls and letters; he’d threatened suicide and blamed Charlotte for everything that wasn’t right with their relationship. Finally, she’d opened her back door one morning to find a human turd on the doorstep. Whether Henry had been responsible or not she didn’t know but it was the final straw. She’d contacted the police, they’d spoken to Henry, clearly given him a real scare – he’d always struck her as a coward – and that was it. She’d never heard from him again. They’d never even crossed paths on the street in Brighton, which wasn’t the biggest town in the world. A few months later she’d met Jacques, a big man who she felt sure could have protected her against anything and anyone, and the memory of her time with Henry, and the unpleasant aftermath, faded into the past.

  Now, almost a quarter of a century later, two gunmen had shot him dead at his family lawyer’s home. His family lawyer! Only someone as pretentious as Henry Forbes could have a family lawyer. She wondered if Reedman had in fact been the target and Henry was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time – although, now she thought of it, there was something weirdly coincidental about his murder happening at just about the same time she’d discovered the camera in her bathroom.

  It was a gorgeous spring afternoon as she returned home from walking Kado. She knew she still needed to talk to the police about the camera she’d found, but was certain they wouldn’t do anything about it, so decided to put it off until later.

  Kado still had plenty of energy so she let him stay outside in the garden where he ran about the place, sniffing in bushes and generally acting as if he’d been fed amphetamines. She watched him play while she made herself a cup of green tea in the kitchen and then, leaving the back door slightly ajar so that he could come back in when he was ready, she settled herself in her favourite armchair by the fireplace and picked up the book she was currently reading, the new one by one of her favourite authors, Peter James.

  For a while all the stress of the last twenty-four hours disappeared as Charlotte turned the pages, immersing herself in the story. She loved reading. She always had. It relaxed her completely, even during times of stress. It was only when the clock dinged to announce it was three o’clock that she put the book down, wondering vaguely why Kado hadn’t come back into the house.

  Getting up from her seat, she made her way back towards the kitchen and saw him asleep on the floor, basking in the sun’s rays just inside the back door. She smiled and walked past him, contemplating making another cup of green tea.

  It was only as she was rinsing her cup did she see it, out of the corner of her eye.

  The patch of red on the floor next to Kado.

  Slowly, and with a growing sense of dread, she looked down.

  Kado lay completely still on his side facing her, a deep wound in his throat where it had been cut almost from ear to ear. The blood was still oozing out and clinging to his fur before dripping down on to the tiles and forming a small but growing pool.

  The cup fell from Charlotte’s hand, shattering into dozens of pieces, but she hardly noticed. With a wail of raw emotion, she rushed over and crouched down beside him, placing her hand against the wound, desperate to stop the bleeding even though she knew immediately that he was already dead.

  And then she heard movement round the corner in the entrance hall and, as she looked up, a man wearing a black fedora, with a scarf pulled up over his face, strode into view, a bloodied knife in one gloved hand.

  The sheer terror Charlotte experienced then didn’t exactly root her to the spot but it slowed down her reactions so much that she moved like an o
ld woman as she got to her feet, her bare knee slipping in Kado’s blood.

  The man moved purposefully but unhurriedly, as if he’d done this kind of thing many times before, grabbing her by the hair with his free hand and pulling her towards him. His grip was strong, and when she felt the sharpness of the knife’s blade against her throat, she suddenly realized she was about to die. Her one hope was that it would be quick.

  But the death blow never came. Instead, the man wrapped an arm around her midriff so there was no possibility of escape, and put his mouth close to her ear. ‘No struggling,’ he whispered, ‘or the knife will drink your blood.’ His accent was foreign. Eastern European, or maybe Middle Eastern, it was hard to tell. And he smelled strange too, almost musty, as if he’d been lying in a cellar for a long time in the clothes he was wearing.

  ‘What do you want?’ she managed to whisper.

  ‘Some time soon, people will come to see you,’ he continued, his voice a low hiss. ‘Police officers. It may be a day, it may be a week, but they will come. They will ask you questions. You will tell them you know nothing. Do you understand?’

  ‘Questions about what?’

  ‘About your old friend Kitty Sinn.’

  Charlotte couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Kitty? She disappeared years ago. I haven’t seen her in …’ God, how long had it been? ‘Twenty-five years, maybe more. I don’t know anything about her.’

  ‘Good. When the police and the media come knocking on your door, you say you hardly remember her. Because if you tell them anything, anything at all, it won’t matter what protection you are given, I will find you and I will kill you. Just as I killed your dog. Now, do you understand what I’m saying?’

  She had no idea why this man was so interested in her or Kitty, but he had a knife to her throat and it was obvious after what he’d done to Kado that he was ruthless enough to use it. ‘Yes,’ said Charlotte. ‘I won’t say anything. To anyone.’