The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  Which was pretty much what I’d expected. ‘Do we know anything about these cousins?’

  ‘There’s not much to know. Alastair’s a very successful hedge fund manager.’ Jools consulted another sheet of paper. ‘He worked in the City after leaving Warwick University and set up the fund in 1996 with a handful of clients. Over the years he’s grown it so that it now manages more than two hundred million of clients’ money. According to his Wikipedia entry, he’s worth in excess of fifty million pounds and has expressed an interest in getting into politics.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Forty-eight, and married with a five-year-old son. No criminal record. I tried to get hold of him earlier but apparently he’s in China as part of a UK trade mission, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, so he’s obviously a big cheese. And he wants to be kept in the loop on any developments to do with Kitty’s case.’

  ‘I bet he does,’ I said, picking up on the fact that he was the same age as Cem Kalaman. ‘He didn’t go to Medmenham College, did he?’ I asked, thinking that this would be too good to be true.

  It was. Jools shook her head. ‘He went to a private school in Newbury.’

  ‘What can you tell me about Lola?’

  ‘Lola Sheridan is forty-seven. Never married. Apparently she’s an artist, although I couldn’t find any details of any exhibitions she’s ever done. She’s listed on the electoral roll as living in the house she grew up in, just outside Whitchurch in Hampshire. Her father Robert lived there too until he died in 2013.’

  I took a sip from my water. ‘So Alastair and Lola inherited everything,’ I mused.

  ‘That’s right. But I’m not sure it’s a sufficient motive to kill Kitty. She went missing in 1990, so they would have known they’d have to wait for at least seven years to pass before she could be declared dead. And even then, they’d still have to wait for the grandmother to die too. In the end they didn’t inherit until 1998. I mean, I’ve heard of forward planning, but that’s taking it a bit far. If they were going to kill anyone, they’d have done a lot better to kill Grandma.’

  I nodded, taking this in. ‘But there was definitely bad blood in the family. Did you know that Kitty’s mother, Mary, tried to burn down the Sheridan house one night in 1991 while Robert and Lola were in it? She was detained at the scene and actually tried to fight off the arresting officers.’

  Jools pulled a puzzled expression. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘And I can’t believe it was random. She targeted them, and she must have been very, very angry about something because she had no history of violence. My guess, looking at it now, knowing what we know, is that she blamed them for Kitty’s death.’

  ‘That’s a big stretch, Ray.’

  ‘She poured petrol through the letterbox and tried repeatedly to set it alight knowing there were people inside.’ I thought about it some more. ‘Look, I’m not saying that proves she blamed them for Kitty, but it’s definitely something that warrants further investigation. You’ve been through the background of Henry Forbes, and Alastair and Lola Sheridan. Is there anything that links them?’

  ‘Nothing that immediately springs to mind.’

  I sat back in my chair. At the moment there was nothing at all to implicate either cousin in Kitty’s disappearance, yet right now they were the only ones who had a motive, however tenuous.

  ‘You didn’t say where Lola Sheridan went to university.’

  Jools consulted her notes. ‘Goldsmiths. She did a degree in History.’ She pulled that puzzled expression again, and then her face broke into a surprisingly infectious smile. ‘Isn’t that where—’

  ‘Henry Forbes did his degree, yes. Were they there at the same time?’

  ‘Forbes’s details are on here,’ she said, taking an iPad from her bag.

  I waited while Jools found the file she was looking for.

  ‘He left in 1989,’ she said, ‘while he was still doing his PhD, and finished it at Brighton Polytechnic. Lola Sheridan was at Goldsmiths from 1988 until 1991.’

  ‘So Henry’s doing his PhD at Goldsmiths. He’d been there since he first started at uni. Then midway through he leaves and goes to a polytechnic. I wonder why.’

  Jools shrugged. ‘Maybe he was bored. You’ve changed departments at the Met a few times, you know what it’s like.’

  But I didn’t quite buy that. Whichever way you looked at it, Brighton Polytechnic was a bit of a career comedown from Goldsmiths. ‘We need to find out whether Henry and Lola knew each other. My guess is they did.’

  Jools’s phone vibrated on the table, and she picked it up.

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Apparently there’s been a major development. I need to get back right now.’ She looked at me. ‘Can you give it twenty minutes before you come back to the incident room? I don’t want to make it too obvious I was with you.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, conscious that my own phone hadn’t buzzed to tell me of this important development.

  She got to her feet and, as she passed me, gave my shoulder a squeeze. ‘Good luck.’

  I watched her go, thinking it was a pity she was married. She was pretty and kind, with a good heart and a strong backbone, and for just one fleeting second I imagined us walking off into the sunset, hand in hand, her two young sons in tow, a ready-made family for me to step into, just like before. A real life. The kind that other people have.

  Then I forced myself back to reality, ordered a coffee, and tried Tina Boyd’s mobile again. It was ten to four now and still no sign of her.

  Where the hell was she?

  Twenty-eight

  They moved in silence, watching constantly for signs of an ambush. Although Charlotte led the way, Tina was the one encouraging her to keep up the pace, and it wasn’t easy. The afternoon was hot, and since leaving the track next to the stream there’d been a lot of hiking uphill through woodland. Charlotte was flagging badly.

  ‘How much further until we hit a road?’ Tina asked her.

  Charlotte took the opportunity to stop and answer. She was swaying a little on her feet and had the listless look of someone who wasn’t going to last much longer. ‘Another few hundred metres. Then it’s a walk of about a kilometre into Massoules. We’ll be able to get help there.’

  ‘Is there no way of getting to Massoules without going on the road? We’re going to be very exposed out there.’

  ‘There are a couple of farms on the way. We could stop at the nearest one.’

  Tina wiped sweat from her brow. She was wary of going anywhere near a road. There were four men after them, in at least two cars, and even though it felt like they’d been going for hours it was unlikely they’d covered more than a few miles, during which time they’d seen neither dwelling nor human being. This part of France was close to pure wilderness, which suited the bad guys a lot better than it did them.

  For the first time, Tina could understand why they were so keen to get hold of Charlotte. After Henry had come to see her the previous week, Tina had gone through the whole Kitty Sinn case. She remembered aspects of it from when she was a young girl too, the complete mystery of her disappearance. Now it seemed that Kitty had never left England, and that someone had gone in her place. After so long it was highly unlikely that Charlotte could provide the evidence needed to ID the impostor, but someone somewhere was clearly taking no chances.

  Which meant they weren’t going to give up the hunt until they absolutely had to.

  ‘OK, Charlotte, get your breath back. I’ll lead the way, and when we get on the road, you do everything I say. If I tell you to jump in the nearest hedge, you jump. Understand?’

  Charlotte put her hands on her hips, breathing heavily. ‘I understand.’

  Tina looked her in the eye. ‘I’m going to get you back to safety.’

  Charlotte returned her gaze. ‘They’re not going to stop, are they? Not until they’ve killed me.’

  No, thought T
ina, they’re not. But she didn’t say that. ‘As soon as you’ve said what you need to say to the British police, there’ll be no incentive for these people to touch you. And then one day you’ll be able to look back on this whole experience like it was just a nightmare you once had.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘You will. But if what you say is right, that it wasn’t Kitty who went to Thailand with Henry, then we’ve stumbled into a major conspiracy. I know it’s not easy out here, but can you think back to those days? Did Kitty ever mention anyone, anyone at all, who might have wished her harm? Because someone clearly did.’

  Tina waited while Charlotte thought about it. At the same time, she looked around. The path they were on now was narrow and the trees came very close to the edges. The woods were dark and foreboding, but also largely impenetrable, and nothing moved within them.

  ‘Kitty was an only child,’ said Charlotte eventually, ‘but I know she had two cousins. I only remember them ever being mentioned once. We shared a house together – me, Kitty and two other girls, Jenny Geisler and Tara … someone. God, I can’t even remember Tara’s last name. One night we all stayed in, smoked a couple of joints, and got wrecked on cheap wine. We used to do that sometimes. You know what it’s like when you’re a student.’

  Tina knew exactly what it was like. She remembered her own times at uni. They’d been good days. Before cynicism and the real world took over.

  ‘I remember the conversation started to get morbid,’ continued Charlotte, no longer breathing heavily. ‘Someone, I think it was Jenny, started talking about the time an ex of hers tried to rape her when she was about sixteen. She got quite upset about it, but I always remember that Jenny liked to say things that got her attention, so it was hard to know whether she was making it up or not. Then someone – again, I can’t remember who it was, it might even have been me – saw that Kitty was sitting there in silence with tears running down her face. We all asked her what was wrong but she wouldn’t tell us. She kept saying it was nothing, but you know what it’s like. People don’t take no for an answer when they’ve had too much, and we kept hassling until eventually she just got up and went to bed.

  ‘I was worried about her so I went into her room a few minutes later and saw that she was still crying her eyes out. I sat down on her bed and just held her in my arms while she sobbed.’ Charlotte frowned. ‘That’s when she told me that the same thing had happened to her when she was young. She said that one time when she was about twelve, her two cousins – a boy and a girl – had held her down and molested her while they’d been in their grandma’s garden, and that the boy had tried to rape her. She’d fought back but I got the feeling the assault had been pretty bad. Kitty told me that she hated them, her cousins, that they were truly awful people. I told her she should go to the police about it but she said no, she just wanted to forget about it, and she swore me to secrecy.’

  ‘How old were these cousins?’ asked Tina.

  ‘I don’t know, but I think they were roughly the same age as her, maybe a bit older.’

  Tina thought about this. Her cousins might have been awful people but this still sounded like an out-of-control children’s game, not something that would have led them to kill Kitty years later.

  ‘And that’s it?’

  Charlotte looked at her, and something in her eyes gave Tina the idea there might be something more. But then she shrugged and said, ‘That’s all I can think of.’

  ‘You had a relationship with Henry Forbes. Did he ever talk about Kitty?’

  ‘Only when I brought her up in conversation, and he was never comfortable talking about her. Do you think he killed her? It’s awful to think I might have been in a relationship with a murderer.’

  ‘He definitely had something to do with it,’ said Tina. ‘When you were with him, did you ever see a tattoo on his underarm?’

  Charlotte nodded. ‘Yes. It was a pentacle with the letter “M” inside it. An awful thing. I asked him why he’d got it done, and he said something about it being part of a student bet. Again, it was one of those things he didn’t really like to talk about.’

  Tina wiped the sweat from her brow with a shirtsleeve. They had to keep going.

  ‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

  Charlotte looked nervous. ‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’ She took a deep breath. ‘God, I don’t want to die.’

  ‘You won’t. I’ve been in situations like this before.’

  ‘Really? When?’

  ‘More than once. I was a police officer for a long time. Do what I say and you’ll be OK.’ She patted Charlotte on the arm and smiled. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  They continued along the path until it gave way to a quiet country road. Tina poked her head out of the trees and looked both ways. To her left the road disappeared over the brow of a hill less than fifty metres away while to her right it ran for about a hundred metres before rounding a corner. There were no cars coming from either direction and the late afternoon was still, with just the chirp of cicadas breaking the silence.

  ‘We have to go right to get to Massoules,’ said Charlotte.

  Tina took a deep breath. She acted tough but she too was just as scared of death, and the fact that she’d faced it several times before didn’t make her feel any better. Still, she knew from experience that hesitation was fatal, so she stepped on to the road and began jogging at a decent pace.

  ‘I don’t know if I can keep up,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘You’re going to have to, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I think there’s a farm up here somewhere on the left.’

  Tina could hear Charlotte’s panting in her ears. She ignored it and concentrated on keeping moving. She had to get Charlotte to safety. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t her problem, that technically she was a civilian who had every right to turn her back on this whole thing. What mattered was that she was part of something important again. Tina felt wanted. She felt needed. Even amid the exhaustion, the thirst and the fear, it was a good feeling.

  On both sides of the road the trees had disappeared now, replaced by parched-looking fields with little in the way of hiding places.

  ‘The farm’s up this track,’ said Charlotte between pants, pointing at a gap in the fields just ahead. ‘It’s not far.’

  Straight away Tina knew it was their best bet, and she ran across the road, Charlotte following. Almost immediately she heard the sound of a car coming fast, and she redoubled her pace.

  ‘Come on – quick!’

  Grabbing Charlotte by the arm she dragged her on to the track. A few yards along it, a large tangled thorn bush stuck out of the ground. Tina pulled Charlotte behind it and crouched down out of sight just as the car came driving past. Tina caught only a fleeting glimpse of it. It was black, the same colour as the cars that had pulled into Charlotte’s driveway, but it didn’t slow down, and after a few seconds the low rumble of the engine faded away.

  Tina got to her feet and, together, she and Charlotte ran along the track. When they were out of sight of the road and they could see the farm behind a low stone wall, they slowed their pace to a walk. There was a barn and a cattle shed on either side of a courtyard and then an old stone farmhouse at the end with an ancient-looking car and tractor outside.

  Charlotte stopped at a standpipe next to the cattle shed and, as the cattle watched, turned on the tap and drank out of her cupped hands. Ignoring her own thirst, Tina walked up to the front door and knocked hard.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Is no one home?’ asked Charlotte as Tina knocked a third time.

  ‘It doesn’t look that way. Follow me.’

  She walked round the back of the farmhouse, looking in a couple of the windows. It was clear the house was empty. It was also clear, given the fact that all the windows were shut, that whoever lived here wasn’t coming back soon. Tina stopped at the dilapidated back door and tried it. The door rattled on its hinges but didn’t open.

  ‘Christ,’ said C
harlotte, a note of defeat in her voice. ‘What are we going to do?’

  Her naivety impressed Tina. ‘What do you think we’re going to do?’ she said, finding a rock in the back yard and smashing one of the panes. She cleared out the rest of the glass with the rock then peered inside.

  It always amazed Tina how many people left their keys in the lock. It was like an open invitation to burglars, and she was thankful that houseowners in France were just as slapdash. Reaching through, she unlocked the back door and stepped into the welcome coolness. Charlotte hesitated a couple of seconds, then followed.

  The house’s interior was old-fashioned and definitely in need of a good clean, with a smell of mothballs and lint which reminded Tina of her grandparents’ house, and immediately brought back the kind of happy childhood memories that adulthood had all too infrequently produced. She went through to the kitchen, found a chipped mug in one of the cupboards, and filled it with water at the tap. She drank down three cups’ worth, then splashed a load more water over her face.

  Charlotte appeared in the doorway.

  ‘See if you can find a phone somewhere,’ Tina told her. ‘We need to get the police up here as soon as possible. And pull out all the stops when you talk to them. Make sure they know that there are four armed men and they’ve been shooting at us. That way they’ll take it seriously and respond in numbers. The last thing we need is the neighbourhood gendarme turning up here. It’ll give away our location and they’ll kill him and us.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who they are, these people who are after me?’