The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  ‘And do not try to find any more of the cameras either. We are going to be watching you these next few days and weeks. You will go about your life just as before, but you will not leave the house for more than three hours at a time, unless it’s to go to work, and unless you receive permission from me. If you fail to abide by these rules, I will hurt you. Badly.’ His mouth caressed her ear as he spoke this last word, and she felt the coldness of his tongue on her skin.

  ‘I won’t do anything, I promise.’ More than anything else in the world right now, she just wanted him out of there. Then she’d go straight to the police and tell them everything.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Charlotte Curtis,’ the man hissed. ‘But no one can protect you from me, least of all some backwoods gendarmes. Look at your dog. Go on, look what I’ve done to it.’

  Charlotte lowered her eyes, her throat tightening as once again she saw Kado lying there, his blood still spreading across the tiled floor.

  ‘Now, bury it, tell anyone who asks that he died of natural causes, then go on with your life as before. That way you live for a few more years.’

  He moved the knife away from her throat and ran the tip gently up one cheek and into the folds of skin only millimetres from the corner of her right eye, then slowly slid it down again, running it over her breast, touching the nipple through the fabric of her dress, deliberately violating her.

  Charlotte remained absolutely still, sick with fear and unable to speak.

  Finally, he removed the knife, released her from his grip, and walked back round the corner into the entrance hall.

  Only when she heard the front door shut did she run over to the sink and vomit profusely, knowing that for a reason she couldn’t even begin to fathom her life had suddenly changed for ever.

  Eleven

  It was mid-afternoon by the time I reached Medmenham College, an all-boys public school for both day pupils and boarders which thankfully, given the circumstances of its new-found fame, was closed for the Easter holidays.

  The gates to the school were open and two uniforms stood guard to prevent any members of the public getting inside. They moved aside for me after I showed them my warrant card and I drove down a long, perfectly straight driveway which led to the main building, a grand redbrick mansion, four storeys high, with turrets on either end and a clock tower in the centre. This, I thought as I surveyed the perfectly manicured lawns, was how the rich lived, and I wondered how much it cost to send a child to this place.

  A large number of news vehicles and camera crews were penned off to one side behind lines of police tape. Word was now out that the remains found the previous day belonged to Dana Brennan, and, although the case was an old one, it was still etched on the consciousness of those of a certain age, and therefore newsworthy. It’s also true that the media love the idea of a serial killer, and two bodies dug up with the prospect of more to come was enough to get them here in serious numbers. When they found out that the other body was Kitty Sinn, I suspected their numbers would quadruple, which was going to be a serious headache for us.

  I followed the road round the side of the main building and parked outside a maintenance block alongside the dozen or so police vehicles already there. Another uniform stood guard, blocking access to the path that led down behind the main building. Security was important at an ongoing crime scene like this. There was a temptation for the media and civilian rubberneckers to try to get a closer look at what was going on and, even after all these years, we didn’t need them contaminating anything.

  I told him who I was and he called the SIO to let him know I was on my way. Olaf had described DCI Jerry Chesterman as a good guy, but that didn’t necessarily mean he was competent. Olaf knew a lot of good guys, and I had the feeling that most of them were drinking buddies and vague acquaintances he’d made down the years.

  I followed the footpath as it ran alongside another well-kept lawn with playing fields beyond that led down to a quiet, pretty stretch of the River Thames, the view partially shaded by a row of well-spaced mature oak trees. On a sunny day like today, with the air largely still, the scene was peaceful and bucolic, the kind that reminds a person of everything that’s good about England.

  Twenty yards from the river the path forked off to the right through thick woodland and heavy tangled undergrowth, turning into little more than a dirt track. Walking along the track towards me was a bald man in a suit carrying a hard hat in his hand who, though he was better dressed, reminded me a lot of Olaf himself. Chesterman was young for an SIO, no more than mid-thirties, with a round, unblemished face, chubby cheeks, and not much in the way of what you’d call gravitas.

  After we’d done the intros, I got him to fill me in on the details of the crime scene as we walked through the woodland to the place where they’d recovered the two bodies.

  ‘They were found in a parcel of woodland right at the south-east corner of the school’s grounds,’ he said, ‘directly adjacent to the river. The school sold it off to developers eighteen months ago to raise funds. The plan was to build a single luxury property with river frontage, and the builders broke ground here two weeks back. They’d dug about half the foundations when, last Monday, they discovered the first skeleton. It was still largely intact but broken in half by, we think, the digger’s bucket. And that was Katherine Sinn. Obviously the builders called us in immediately and we dug round the area where the body was found in a twenty-foot radius, didn’t find anything else, and were on the verge of finishing up when we unearthed the other skeleton yesterday. Dana Brennan’s.’

  ‘I heard her throat was cut.’

  ‘That’s right. There was one fairly even groove in her C4 vertebra that suggested a single, very deep knife wound. There was a similar injury on Katherine Sinn’s vertebra as well.’

  I looked at him. ‘Can we do everything possible to keep that information out of the papers? For the sake of the families.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, but you’ve seen it round here. The media are crawling all over the place, and there’s a lot of scope for leaks.’

  I knew what he meant. Police officers don’t get paid huge salaries and the temptation to feed titbits to newspapers in return for cash can be one they don’t all resist. I’d never done it myself but then I’d never needed to. It’s easy to take the moral high ground when you’ve got money.

  We stopped at a large clearing in the trees that was largely taken up by a hole in the ground about seven feet deep and fifty feet across. Two diggers sat idle on the far side, while a few yards beyond, lined up in another break in the trees, was a cluster of police vehicles and a mobile incident room. Thick mud covered the bottom of the hole, which had been divided into eight equal-sized sectors using tape, and a dozen or so scene-of-crime officers, clad in their white overalls, were busy trawling through the mud. Two yellow flags sticking up some distance apart marked the spots where the remains of Dana and Kitty had been found.

  I didn’t feel any emotion staring into the hole. I’d used it all up earlier when I’d visited Dana’s parents and now I was back in business mode. In front of me, the river was just visible through the trees about twenty-five yards away. I pointed at the track carved out of the woodland down which the diggers and police vehicles had come from the main road.

  ‘Has that access road always been there?’ I asked.

  DCI Chesterman shook his head. ‘No. It was put in by the developers. Eventually it’s going to be the new house’s driveway.’

  I looked round. ‘So when these two young women were buried here, this was all woodland that you could only reach on foot?’

  Chesterman nodded. ‘Exactly. The killer or killers could have driven as far as the maintenance block, which is forty-five metres from the nearest body, then they’d have had to carry the bodies down here. I’ve got maps and aerial photos of the area in the incident room. Do you want to have a look?’

  I followed him into the incident room, a large campervan-style vehicle with a row
of windows down each side where a couple of people sat tapping away on keyboards. In an inquiry like this, where it was all about the recovery of bodies that had been in the ground for a long time, and where any evidence was likely to be down there with them, there wasn’t much need for a big team of detectives at the scene.

  One of the desks had been cleared and a laminated Ordnance Survey map taped to it, along with two poster-sized aerial photos of the area, one taken a good few years ago, the other taken very recently.

  ‘Here we are on the map,’ said Chesterman, tapping it with his forefinger.

  I leaned in close to where he was pointing and saw the school grounds next to a major bend in the river, where the Thames curved south to north. We were in a fairly rural area for south-east England, at the southern end of the Chiltern Hills between the two river towns of Henley and Marlow. On either side of the school grounds, narrow manmade water channels ran up from the river creating a makeshift moat protecting the school from intruders on either side. To the north of the grounds, a succession of fields ran adjacent to the river for more than a mile before coming to the nearest riverside property. To the south was an adjoining property consisting of a large house with grounds that ran down to the river, and included part of the same woodland that we were now in. There were no other immediate neighbours.

  ‘Who lives here?’ I asked, pointing at the house next door.

  ‘A Russian businessman called Dimitri Valkov. He bought the property two years ago. He’s obviously got deep pockets because he offered to buy the school as well for forty million pounds but they turned him down.’

  ‘What’s his history?’

  ‘He made his money in natural gas, moved his operations to London in 2006, and he’s been UK-based ever since. He never visited England before 2000 though, so he’s not a suspect.’

  I inspected the two aerial shots of the school and the surrounding area. Aside from the addition of the access road and the fact that in the old shot the area round where the bodies were discovered was much more overgrown, both photos looked remarkably similar.

  I pointed to the old one. ‘When was this taken?’

  ‘June 1988, so that’s what it would have looked like when the girls went missing.’

  ‘Who owned the house next door back then?’

  ‘A couple called the Butlers. They owned it between 1954 and 1992. Mr Butler died in 1983 and Mrs Butler in 1991. It was then sold nearly a year later to an American divorcee who owned it until it was sold to Mr Valkov.’

  I looked at him. ‘Jesus. How do you remember all that?’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ve got a good memory.’

  ‘So, the big question. Have you got any potential suspects?’

  Chesterman shook his head. ‘No one. I was hoping you might have something.’

  I told him what Henry Forbes had told me before he’d been killed: that there were a number of people involved in Kitty Sinn’s murder. ‘I think Henry was involved too, otherwise there’s no way he’d have known that Kitty was buried here. And I think at least one of the killers must have direct links to this school, either as a staff member or pupil, because there’s no way you’d bury bodies here unless you were very familiar with this place.’

  Chesterman looked at me. ‘But why bury the bodies here in the first place? I know both girls went missing in the summer holidays so it’s unlikely the killers would be disturbed, but it would have been a real effort to transport them here, carry them down to the river and then bury them deep in the ground. Because these weren’t shallow graves. Both girls were buried six feet down.’

  ‘Unless they were killed nearby,’ I said.

  ‘But where? The school was locked up for the summer.’

  ‘Was there a caretaker here at the time?’

  ‘Yes. His name’s Bill Morris. He worked here until he retired in 2010. He lived in the caretaker’s cottage next to the maintenance block – here.’ Chesterman pointed at a spot on the 1988 aerial photo.

  I looked at the photo. A service entrance to the school, thirty metres down from the main entrance, led to the caretaker’s cottage and the maintenance block behind it where I’d parked earlier. Both entrances were protected by high gates, and the water channels running up from the river protected the school’s boundaries. Even the next-door property had a high boundary wall facing the road and entrance gates as well. In other words, the school was pretty much impregnable.

  I frowned. ‘What I can’t work out is how the killers got into the school to bury the bodies. I’m assuming both sets of gates were locked in the summer holidays. Did anyone else have access to the keys other than the caretaker?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Chesterman answered uncertainly, ‘but I’ll find out.’

  ‘The killer, or killers, would have had to bring the victims here in a car, so the only way they could do it is to get the gates open, then park round the maintenance block somewhere, and carry the bodies down from there. I can’t see how they could do it without the caretaker knowing. Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘We have. He lives up the road in Hambleden. In fact we’ve interviewed him twice now.’

  ‘Why? Has he got a record?’

  ‘He’s had two police cautions for separate offences. The first was for domestic violence back in 1997. He assaulted his wife and she called the police on two occasions but wouldn’t press charges, so he got a caution instead. The second time was in 2007. He was caught accessing a child porn site in the US through his credit card details, one of about fifteen hundred people in this country. Because of the sheer numbers of people involved, and the fact that the images on his PC weren’t as bad as those on some of the others, he wasn’t charged. He did lose his job, though.’

  I shook my head, unable to understand how anyone could possibly get off on child porn, even though I knew far too many people did. ‘Jesus. And what did he say in the interviews?’

  ‘He confirmed that he was living on site both summers but was adamant he saw and heard nothing.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  ‘He’s a miserable old bastard, and when we interviewed him the second time this morning, after the discovery of Dana Brennan’s body, he brought a lawyer along, and was acting more worried, but I think that was just because of the child porn connection. He swore blind he’d only ever looked at child porn once and, whether that’s true or not, he had no connection to either of the two girls. He also worked at the school for twenty-six years without any problem, so ultimately, there’s no reason not to believe him.’

  I stared at the photos again. This case was already beginning to frustrate me. A huge amount of planning must have gone into Kitty’s murder, and yet Dana’s appeared to have been a random abduction. Nothing linked them except the geographical proximity of the remains and the fact that they both happened in the middle of summer. But if the killers had murdered them elsewhere, why bring them here? There were plenty of other burial sites where they wouldn’t be found. And even if the girls were still alive when they were brought here, there was still the problem of getting them past the caretaker’s cottage without making a noise.

  None of it made sense.

  And that was when I spotted it on the map. A small round building partly obscured by trees, hidden away in woodland on the neighbour’s grounds, no more than fifty metres as the crow flies from where we were standing now.

  I asked DCI Chesterman what it was.

  He looked down to where I was pointing. ‘It’s a folly,’ he said. ‘The reason I know is I spoke to Mr Valkov’s estate manager last week and he told me. Apparently it was built in the eighteenth century.’

  ‘Forgive my ignorance,’ I said, ‘but what’s a folly?’

  ‘It’s a building that’s just for decoration,’ replied Chesterman, who truly was a fount of knowledge. ‘It doesn’t actually serve any practical purpose. A lot of them were built by the rich over the last couple of hundred years. According to the manager, this one’s in pretty poor condit
ion and the owner’s applied to get it knocked down.’

  ‘I’d like to take a look at it if I can.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Why?’

  ‘These girls died somewhere. It might well have been there.’

  ‘Mrs Butler lived in that house at the time so it’s unlikely they were murdered in her garden.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, but the folly’s a hundred metres from the main house and it’s only a few metres from the boundary with the school.’ I studied the photo again. ‘It looks like you might be able to get across to it from the rear of the caretaker’s house, where the channel ends here.’ I tapped the spot with my finger.

  ‘I can’t see what you’re going to find there after all this time,’ said Chesterman.

  ‘Neither can I,’ I said. ‘But I’m here now, and I don’t think it’ll do any harm to have a look.’

  ‘It’s private property so I’ll have to speak to the estate manager and get his permission.’ Chesterman pulled out his phone and dialled the number while I waited. ‘There’s no answer,’ he said eventually. ‘I’ll try him again later.’

  I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to four and the traffic back into London would be getting heavy soon. ‘I can’t really wait around,’ I said. ‘Maybe another time. Could you email me copies of the photos and maps of the school?’

  He said he would, and we walked back outside.

  ‘How long do you think you’ll be digging for?’ I asked as we passed the hole a second time.

  ‘Now that we’ve found a second body we’re going to have to extend the dig. At least another week, I’d think.’

  ‘If you find anything of note, can you let me know?’

  Chesterman said he would, we shook hands, and I walked away.

  But I didn’t head directly back to the car. Instead, as soon as I was out of sight, I cut away from the path and walked through the woods until I came back to the newly dug access road. The channel, which was about three metres wide and filled with black, stagnant water, ran alongside the road. Woods lined the bank on the opposite side and, as I walked in the direction of the caretaker’s cottage and the maintenance block, I saw the outline of the folly poking through the undergrowth.