The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  At first all went well. Strike was good company and Ramon had a laugh driving round with him all day. Strike was careful too in the way he operated, which Ramon appreciated, never carrying too much product or cash at any one time, and always varying the times of his pick-ups and deliveries so as not to get the Feds suspicious. It was also obvious that he worked for someone else, someone with even more street cred than Ramon, because no one ever tried ripping him off, and he was treated with respect that bordered on fear. So it was all pretty easy. Strike even paid for driving lessons for Ramon so he could be the one doing the driving. ‘Then you can be like my chauffeur,’ he’d said with a guffaw.

  The problem was, as soon as Ramon passed his driving test, Strike started getting lazy. Most days he’d get Ramon to do the deliveries and collections while he stayed behind at home, saying he needed to get other stuff done. Since he was still paying three hundred a week and Strike never missed a payment, Ramon didn’t make a fuss, though it rankled.

  About this time, he met Strike’s boss, Junior. Junior was impressed with Ramon, and was especially interested in knowing he was a killer who’d spent close to half his life inside. Soon Ramon was working directly for Junior and his weekly salary had doubled to six hundred notes – more money than he’d ever seen, and more than he could spend. Even his probation officer stopped leaning on him. Life, for once, was actually going well.

  And then, just like it always did, everything went wrong. One night while he was at home drinking a beer, smoking a spliff and watching Spurs on the TV, there was a knock on the door. He’d had a peephole installed just in case someone tried to rob him – at the time he had more than four grand in cash hidden all over the flat – and the moment he stared through it and saw the National Crime Agency warrant card blocking his view he knew it was all over.

  He was on the tenth floor and there was nowhere to run, so as soon as he’d made sure the two Feds outside his door were genuine, he let them in, fully prepared to go back to nick. In a way, he was almost relieved. At least in prison he knew where he was at and he got no nasty surprises. But it soon became clear that these Feds weren’t interested in putting him back behind bars. They had a much better idea. They were going to blackmail him. The black one – a little guy in a flashy suit with a nose like a pig’s snout – introduced himself as Dan, the white one called himself Frank. Dan was the boss, so he did the talking, and he told Ramon they knew all about the work he did running crackhouses. Ramon denied everything and told them to get out, which was when Dan showed him some footage he had on his mobile phone. It showed Ramon entering and leaving three different crackhouses with the holdall he used to store the drugs and money. Then, just as he was about to tell them they had nothing on him, the footage changed to inside one of the crackhouses and it clearly showed Ramon unloading a bag containing rocks of crack and handing them to another man, before taking a wad of bills from him.

  ‘Remember, Ramon, you’re out on licence,’ Dan the Pig told him. ‘That means we can put you back inside any time we want, just like that, and there’s shit you can do about it.’

  Ramon had just stood there staring down at this little black man in his nice suit wishing he could kill him, and knowing he couldn’t do a fucking thing, because they had him bang to rights.

  After that, Dan the Pig told him what they wanted him to do. Junior worked for the Kalamans, and so too, though he didn’t know it, did Ramon. Now he was going to help bring them down by becoming Dan the Pig’s snitch. It was that or return to jail.

  Ramon had played out that scene in his mind a hundred times since, and every time he always told that little prick to send him back to jail if he wanted because he wasn’t going to be no one’s snitch.

  The problem was that in real life he hadn’t said that, which was why he was still free.

  He poured boiling water into the Pot Noodle, gave it a stir, and walked out on to the flat’s tiny balcony, ignoring the cold wind and the splashes of rain as he stared over the city beyond. It probably wouldn’t have been a bad view if the two tower blocks opposite hadn’t been built. In the narrow gap between them he got a view of an industrial estate and some railway tracks.

  As he munched on the noodles, trying and failing to stop them burning the inside of his mouth, Ramon thought about the position he was in. It reminded him of something that had happened back when he was a kid living at his granddad’s place. They’d had rats in the tiny back garden so his granddad had put out traps, and one day a real big bastard of a rat had got caught in one. When Ramon had gone out to take a closer look, it had still been alive, trying to move its head, even though it was pinned under the metal and its back looked broken. It had writhed and twitched in the trap for a long time before it died, its eyes wide open in shock. Ramon felt like that rat now. Trapped, and with no possible way out. The Feds weren’t going to stop leaning on him until he came back with the kind of information that could really hurt the Kalamans, even though he had a feeling someone from the outfit would find out what he was doing and kill him long before that happened.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a phone ringing inside his flat. It wasn’t his usual phone either. It was the one Dan the Pig had supplied him with. Ramon walked back in, shutting the door behind him, and picked it up off the kitchen table, thinking that he was going to have to start hiding this phone better, in case he got a surprise visit from Junior.

  ‘Can you talk?’

  The guy must have been all of five feet seven high but he always sounded at least a foot taller and wider when he spoke.

  ‘Yeah, I can talk,’ said Ramon wearily. He’d been instructed a hundred times only ever to carry the phone with him when he could talk. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Take a walk. Find somewhere quiet. Then call me back in ten minutes. Usual number.’ He cut the line.

  Arsehole.

  Ramon hated the way Dan the Pig treated him. Like he was his bitch. Do this. Do that. Risk your neck while I sit on my arse writing reports.

  But when he’d tried pulling out a couple of months back, finally plucking up the courage to tell them they could sling him back in nick if they wanted to, Dan the Pig had told him to think twice about that, because it might get out that he’d helped the police try to infiltrate the Kalamans, which would make him a marked man. The way he’d said it was like he was trying to help Ramon, but really he was threatening him. Pull out and we’ll let everyone know you’re a snitch. His life wouldn’t be worth living.

  They had him. The bastards had him.

  Ramon flung on his coat, got the lift down to the ground floor, and walked fast for five minutes until he got to the rec near Lordship Lane. A couple of hobos were sitting on a bench next to the kids’ playground drinking cans of cheap beer, but apart from them the place was empty. Ramon found a bench as far away from them as possible, under some trees and out of the rain, and called the number he had for Dan the Pig.

  ‘You need to keep an eye out for a mixed-race man about five ten,’ said Dan the Pig, getting straight down to business. ‘He’s got a sleeve tattoo on his left forearm and a scar about an inch long near his collarbone, at the bottom of his neck. Can you remember that? I don’t want you writing it down.’

  ‘Course I can remember. I’m not a retard, man.’

  ‘If what you told me’s right, he’ll be one of Kalaman’s more reliable shooters. All you need to do is give me his name. We’ll do the rest.’

  ‘But I haven’t met many of the boys yet, you know that.’

  ‘You need to start pushing to get to know people, Ramon. You’ve been on the fringes for six months now. That’s a long time. You need to move up to the next level.’

  ‘I’m going as fast as I can. You know how hard it is.’

  ‘And you’re doing good work. That tip this morning was a decent one. See what else you can get.’

  ‘When are you going to let me go?’ Ramon was conscious of the desperation in his voice, and hated himself for it.


  ‘Are you going to cut out the illegal stuff?’

  ‘Yeah, I am.’ He was.

  ‘Then the sooner you get us information we can use to make an arrest, the sooner you’re free from all this.’

  ‘And what about that film you’ve got? Will you get rid of that?’

  ‘You’ve got my word,’ said Dan the Pig.

  Ramon knew his word was probably shit, but at least it gave him a glimmer of hope.

  ‘You know I told you about the illegal run we did last night,’ he said, ‘up on the Norfolk coast. We picked up a bunch of girls from a dinghy, and a big, heavy holdall as well.’

  ‘Any idea what was in it?’

  ‘I dunno. It felt like guns.’

  ‘So did you put the tracking device we gave you on it?’

  ‘I didn’t get a chance. Junior was with me.’

  ‘You’ve got to make the chance, Ramon.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. You ain’t the one taking the risks. If I get caught doing something like that, I’m dead.’

  ‘Then don’t get caught. You want to stay out of prison, you’re going to have to take risks, brother. Where did you deliver the holdall?’

  Ramon remembered the postcode and building number from the van’s satnav, and he reeled it out to Dan, looking round as he did so, just to check no one was listening in on his conversation, but it had started raining properly now, and even the hobos had disappeared.

  There was a pause while Dan wrote it down.

  ‘And were there people there to take the holdall off you?’

  ‘Yeah. But I’d never seen them before.’

  ‘Describe them.’

  Ramon couldn’t remember much about either man, and it had been dark, but he gave as good a description as he could.

  ‘Good work, Ramon,’ said Dan when he’d finished writing all this down.

  ‘Don’t you want to know about the illegals we picked up? They were all young girls. Seventeen, eighteen. We took them to a real shitty-looking brothel.’ Ramon thought of Brown Eyes, the girl who smiled at him, just like Keesha used to all those years ago.

  ‘All right, give me the address. Obviously we take trafficking very seriously, but this isn’t our jurisdiction, so don’t expect anything to happen yet.’

  Dan the Pig didn’t seem interested, and when Ramon gave him the address, he had the feeling the bastard wasn’t even writing it down, which was typical. That was the Feds all over. They pretended to care but they were just like everyone else. Looking after themselves.

  ‘Some of these girls were young, really young,’ Ramon added.

  ‘And we’ll look into it,’ said Dan the Pig. ‘Now, see if you can get me a name for the man with the sleeve tattoo and the scar.’

  He ended the call, leaving Ramon sitting alone in the rain, staring through branches at a bleak grey sky and wondering if his life was always going to be like this.

  Twenty-seven

  I was just finishing a late lunch of fried saltimbocca with spring vegetables in a little Italian place I know in Marylebone and thinking about my meeting with Dan Watts and what it represented when I got a call from DCI Jerry Chesterman over at Thames Valley. I pushed away my nearly empty plate, took a sip of coffee and, since I was the only diner still in the place, took the call, knowing exactly what Chesterman was going to say.

  I was right too.

  ‘Bill Morris, the caretaker of the school at the time the girls went missing – the man you were interested in – was found hanging last night,’ he said after the briefest hello.

  The man I was interested in. I didn’t like the sound of that. ‘Seriously?’ I said, sounding suitably surprised, and knowing I was going to have to be very careful. I have a rule. Never say more than you have to, and always take a second to think before you speak. If in doubt, take two. ‘Does it look suspicious?’ I asked, having taken two.

  ‘Yes it does. The neighbour saw someone at the back door. He called the police.’

  ‘Did the neighbour get a look at him?’

  ‘No. All he got was that it was an IC1 male about six feet tall. I gave you Morris’s details. Did you get a chance to visit him?’

  One second’s pause while I worked out that there was no way he could know I had. ‘No, I didn’t. It’s a pity. I was sure he had questions to answer, and now it looks like I was right.’

  I don’t think Chesterman was especially pleased to hear that, but he didn’t argue the point. Instead we talked about the progress of the dig. No more body parts had been found and the school was reopening the following week so he’d authorized extending the existing hole by a further five metres in both directions and, if nothing further was found, ending the operation. This seemed like a good idea, and I told him so before ending the call.

  I didn’t think Thames Valley would find anything in Bill Morris’s house that would incriminate me. They sounded too overstretched, and I’d been careful. Sadly, I didn’t think they’d find anything that incriminated or helped ID the murderer either, especially if it was the Kalamans behind it. You don’t spend years creating a huge and successful criminal enterprise without being highly professional and knowing how to avoid the long arm of the law.

  For the first time I felt a twinge of concern about Tina Boyd. An outfit like the Kalamans wouldn’t have much difficulty in tracking down Charlotte Curtis, and if her reticence with me was anything to go by it sounded like they might have already found her. I looked at my watch. It was almost three. Getting on for two hours since I’d talked to Tina. She’d told me then she was only minutes away from Charlotte’s house and she’d have called me as soon as she’d spoken to her. Tired of waiting, I’d called her just before my lunch arrived, but the phone had gone straight to voicemail and I’d left a message. There was probably a perfectly good explanation for why I couldn’t get hold of her, but it still made me antsy. Charlotte Curtis knew something important and I wanted to know what it was.

  I went back to my lunch, and cleaned the plate. I love my food. It’s one of my few true pleasures. I cook when I can, and when I can’t, I track down restaurants where they serve fresh, decent but not necessarily expensive fare like this one, and make them my regular haunts. I was tempted to knock down a quick glass of Chianti as well – red wine’s another of my pleasures, especially when it’s combined with good food – but I resisted, not wanting to offer my detractors another reason to kick me off the case.

  Instead, I drained my coffee cup, paid the bill, and called Tina again as I walked back outside into a wet, chilly afternoon. Again it went to voicemail, and again I left a message. I tried Olaf next, wanting to let him know about the potential lead I had, but he wasn’t answering either.

  I’d parked my car over near Marylebone station, and I was on my way back to it, mulling my next move, when my phone rang.

  It was DC Jools Hutchings from Ealing cop shop. ‘You’ve got a problem, Ray,’ she told me. There was background traffic noise and I could tell she was phoning me from outside. ‘The word I’m hearing is they’re moving you off the case.’

  I tensed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Conflict of interest. I know DI Glenda’s been briefing against you – you know how much she hates you, Ray – but I think it’s pressure from above that’s really counting. The problem is, there are still no leads at all on this case. No DNA from the murderers; no sign of the getaway car; no word from the street. Nothing. And there’s you, the only witness to the killings, working on a case you’re effectively a part of.’

  ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, Jools,’ I said, wondering how long I was going to have keep saying this for.

  ‘I know that. But it’s not what I think that matters. It’s all about perception. Everything’s got to stand up to outside scrutiny, and to some people, your presence doesn’t look right. I’m just saying, OK?’

  I sighed, stepping out of the rain and into the shelter of a shop. ‘Did you manage to get me that information on Kitty’s next of kin?’

 
‘I’ve emailed it to you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘We can still talk, you know. But I’ve got to be careful. I can’t afford to lose my job.’

  ‘I know. But I’m not off the case yet. So can you meet me at that coffee shop off the Broadway and we can run through what you’ve got?’

  She was wise enough to spend a couple of seconds thinking about it before answering, ‘Sure, I can do that.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there in half an hour.’

  I was five minutes early getting to the Hot Gossip café, a three-minute walk from Ealing nick.

  The place was barely a third full and Jools was already there, at a corner table well away from the window with a cup of what I knew would be green tea. Her body was very much her temple. And a nice temple it was too. She had some sheets of paper laid out on the table in front of her.

  I ordered a bottle of fizzy water from the counter and joined her.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘It’s nice to get out of there,’ she said. ‘The atmosphere isn’t good. It’s getting very boring looking for non-existent suspects driving non-existent getaway cars.’

  This was the problem these days. As a general rule, with the onset of technology and the continued stupidity of most murderers, murder investigations tended to be straightforward affairs. You checked the cameras; the DNA from the crime scene; the obvious suspects; and bingo, you usually found your killer. There was very little actual detective work involved. Consequently, when you had a case such as this where the killers were well organized, knew the police’s methods, and didn’t have any obvious connection with the victim, catching them was far from easy, and, put bluntly, Ealing MIT just weren’t used to it.

  ‘So, what have you got for me on Kitty Sinn’s next of kin? I’ve only managed to find out a little bit about her background. You know, only child, dad died before she went missing, mother died afterwards.’

  Jools picked up one of the sheets of paper in front of her. ‘That’s right. Mary Sinn committed suicide in 1992, aged fifty-four. She was suffering from advanced multiple sclerosis. The only other family Kitty had were the uncle and two cousins on her mother’s side you mentioned. There was a lot of money in the family. Kitty’s grandmother had an estate with a net worth of sixteen million, money that had come from her late husband’s business, and when she died in 1998, apart from several small bequests to charity, all the money went to Kitty’s two cousins, Alastair and Lola Sheridan, because Kitty had already been declared dead under the seven-year rule.’