The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  ‘I’m coming!’ I shouted. ‘Police! Leave her alone!’

  At the same time I made another huge effort to drag Walters back up.

  Sensing he was nearly there, he let go of me with one hand and grabbed at the railing, trying to heave himself up. I don’t know what he was thinking – maybe he was still too stoned to know what he was doing – but he then let go of my other hand before he’d got a proper grip on the railing and the next second his hands were slipping rapidly down the rails until they hit the concrete at the bottom. Before I could crouch down to grab him, he lost his grip with one hand, then the other, and suddenly he was falling backwards through the air, arms and legs flailing, his eyes wide in absolute shock.

  As I stood there, mouth agape, his head hit the tarmac with a sickening crack that reverberated round the buildings, followed a microsecond later by the rest of him. He lay there utterly still. And utterly dead.

  For a long moment the whole world was silent and no one moved, as if everything had been frozen in time.

  And then it exploded.

  With a great roar, the mob charged towards the steps at either end of the building, their faces alive with hate and bloodlust, and I knew that if I got caught now, I was dead. The two men attacking Jools seemed to get a new lease of life. The one pulling her hair dragged her to her feet and shoved her against the railings, while his friend jumped up and joined in the attack. And still there was no sign of any help.

  With a roar of my own, I sprinted towards them, ignoring the pain from the blow Walters had landed. They were trying to push Jools over the edge but she was fighting back hard. As I bore down on them, one of them peeled away from her and put up his fists in a boxing stance, but I could see the doubt in his eyes, and I wasn’t stopping for anyone. I charged into him, knocking his fists aside and launching a flying headbutt straight into his face, sending him sprawling. At the same time, Jools punched the second attacker while his head was turned, and he pulled himself away from her, trying to get out of the way as I came at him. I ran straight into him, punching and kicking, using my weight and adrenalin to pummel him to the ground.

  There must have been thirty hooded locals charging up the steps trying to cut off our escape back over the walkway to where help was. Incredibly, Olaf and co. seemed to have no idea what was happening, and those TSG officers down below who could see it were too busy using their shields to deflect the missiles now being thrown at them in earnest to raise the alarm.

  I grabbed a shaken Jools by the arm and we ran towards the footbridge. But a few of the guys coming up the steps were faster than I was expecting and the lead one – short and squat, with a scarf pulled up over his face and a kitchen knife down by his side – was taking the steps two at a time. Someone else a few yards behind him was holding a baseball bat, and others had bottles. It looked like the first guy was going to get to the top before we were past them. If that happened, we were finished.

  Beside me, I heard Jools curse, her voice cracking with fear. Fear was pulsing through me too. It was like being in the middle of a nightmare, knowing that you were being pursued by an army of thugs desperate to kill you. I could hear them coming up on to the balcony behind me too. Even if help arrived now it would be too late.

  There was only one way of getting out, and a moment’s hesitation from me and it would fail.

  At the end of the balcony the railings joined the wall that ran up the side of the stairwell, and a large brick post at the top of the steps marked the point. I knew I had to time my run just right, and it required me to finish with an all-out sprint.

  ‘Keep running!’ I hissed at Jools, letting go of her arm and breaking away from her. I heard her cry out as if she thought I was deserting her, but then the cry stopped abruptly as she saw me jump up on to the post with one foot and launch myself at the first guy in what was my best attempt at a flying kung fu kick. The guy was still three or four steps from the top so his head was at the perfect height to connect with the toe of my shoe. He never even had time to bring up the knife as the kick sent him crashing back down the steps and straight into the two guys right behind him. Unfortunately for me, I kept flying until I crashed heavily into the wall opposite me, managing to hit it shoulder first. I bounced back off it and landed painfully on my back on the steps.

  Without looking back, I rolled over and jumped to my feet just as Jools came running past. She started to slow but I screamed at her to keep going, and she didn’t need telling twice. I could hear the yells of the mob almost in my ear as I ran back up the steps and sprinted across the walkway towards where the rest of the cops were, not daring to look back.

  And that was when the first CO19 cops appeared at the end of the walkway, weapons outstretched, levelling their shouts of ‘Armed police!’ at my pursuers. I ran past one, and was pushed, manhandled and pretty much flung bodily into the opposite stairwell where a puce-faced Olaf stood.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ he roared. ‘What have you done?’ I started to answer but he pushed me down the steps, shouting at Jools to follow too. ‘Come on, come on, move it! We need to get you out of here before they lynch you. What happened?’

  ‘I saw Walters and chased him,’ I panted as we ran down to ground level. ‘We had a struggle. He fell. I think he’s dead.’

  He glared at me. ‘You fucking idiot! Did you push him?’

  ‘Course I didn’t,’ I snapped. ‘I’m not that fucking stupid.’

  ‘Yes you fucking are. I support you through thick and thin and you kill the only suspect we’ve got.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him. It was an accident.’

  ‘It was, sir,’ put in Jools. ‘I saw it. It wasn’t Ray’s fault.’

  Olaf just looked disgusted. ‘Save it. I’m not fucking interested.’

  Below us on the green, the second mob, now some fifty strong, were throwing everything they could at the dozen or so TSG officers facing them in a long and worryingly thin line, the two sides barely twenty yards apart. When they saw us the mob suddenly surged forward with a cacophony of shouts but, credit to them, the TSG stood their ground, and two of them actually ran at the crowd, wielding their batons overhead, causing it to surge backwards just as quickly and buying us a few moments of time as Olaf ushered us across the tarmac to one of the TSG riot vans with its rear doors open.

  ‘Right, get them out of here!’ he yelled at the TSG sergeant we’d seen earlier. ‘And, Ray?’ he added as I clambered into the back after Jools. ‘You’re fucking suspended.’

  He slammed one door shut. The sergeant poked his head in, told us to keep down and hold tight, and then slammed the other door shut and smacked the side of the van, which accelerated away in a screech of tyres, sending us both rolling along the floor. Missiles slammed against the windows. The van slowed, then sped up again, the sirens blaring. I caught a glimpse of a fire burning somewhere and the next second a fire extinguisher hit a side window, cracking it. I could hear the angry roars of the crowd but the van kept going, veering wildly as it tried to clear a path through the mob.

  I looked at Jools, and she managed a weak smile.

  ‘It’s going to be all right,’ I told her.

  But as the shouting faded and the missiles stopped and we drove out of the estate and past a convoy of riot vans coming the other way in a scream of lights and noise, I knew there was no way it was going to be OK.

  No way at all.

  Thirty-six

  It was almost midnight when The Dark Man closed his apartment door behind him, put down his overnight bag, and poured himself a small glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label. He was pleased to be home, even if he wasn’t pleased with the way the day, or indeed the week, had gone.

  Taking the whisky with him, he walked through the apartment and used his thumbprint to open the state-of-the-art lock to his strong room. This was the one place in his apartment, indeed anywhere, where he could talk freely. The room was like a cell. A chair and simple desk were the only furnishings. The bare walls were s
oundproofed, reinforced concrete. The floor was tiled marble. There were no electricity sockets. There was nowhere to hide any kind of listening device. It was as secure a space as a private citizen could create.

  The Dark Man sat down at the desk, unlocked the drawer and removed a mobile phone that had been bought with cash for him three years earlier. Before he’d left the previous day he’d attached a single human hair to the phone’s case with spittle. If anyone had picked up the phone in the meantime, the hair would have come off. It was an old, low-tech trick of working out whether someone had been tampering with your possessions, and a very effective one. The Dark Man only ever made calls to one number from this phone, and having checked that the hair was still in place, he counted down the seconds until midnight then called it.

  The man at the other end of the line had been waiting for a call in a room very similar to this one, and he picked up immediately.

  ‘What happened over there?’ he said. ‘I heard on the news there had been a shooting incident involving a British national. Was that our woman?’

  ‘It was,’ confirmed The Dark Man. ‘I shot her twice and she fell down a ravine, so I didn’t get to see her body, but our contacts in France tell me she’s dead.’

  ‘We could have done without that kind of attention, but I trust that you made the right move.’

  ‘There has been a complication, though,’ added The Dark Man, who hated complications as much as the man at the other end did. ‘Our target was visited by a private detective just before we arrived. The private detective spent some time with her and was there when the target was shot. I tried to kill her too—’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Yes. We recovered her mobile phone. Her name’s Tina Boyd. She survived the confrontation.’

  There was a short silence as the man on the other end took in this information. ‘I’ve heard that name before. She used to be a detective in the Met. Do you think she knows anything?’

  The Dark Man had thought about this all the way home. He thought probably not. He wasn’t sure that even Charlotte Curtis knew why she was being targeted. He said as much.

  ‘Monitor the situation. If it looks like she’s a potential threat, we’ll have to neutralize her.’ The man on the other end sighed. ‘That’s not the only complication. The police moved in to arrest one of the team from the Forbes hit a couple of hours ago. According to our sources there was a struggle, and our man fell to his death, so at least he can’t talk any more, but I’m concerned. How did the police find him?’

  So was The Dark Man. The hit team had been led by Jonas Mavalu, one of his most reliable operatives. ‘I’ll look into it.’

  ‘Do you think we have a leak?’

  The Dark Man thought about this. ‘I will talk to our contacts in the police,’ he said quietly, ‘and if we have, I will sniff out the source and make the person pay very dearly.’

  ‘Now give me some good news,’ said the man on the other end. ‘Do we have a new girl ready for us?’

  The Dark Man smiled and took a tiny sip of the whisky, barely wetting his lips. ‘Yes, she’s perfect. Young. Completely untraceable. She’s being groomed now.’

  ‘Good. It will be nice to relax and enjoy her. It’s been a difficult time since they discovered the bodies at the school.’

  ‘We expected that,’ said The Dark Man, who’d wanted the two bodies dug up and reburied somewhere secure years ago, and whose entreaties had always been overruled. ‘But we’ll deal with our problems.’ He thought of all the people they’d killed down the years: the innocent; the guilty; the young; the old. ‘We always do.’

  Thirty-seven

  It was 2.30 a.m. when I walked through my front door after another long and eventful night.

  In this country, you can’t drop a man from a third-floor balcony in front of getting on for a hundred witnesses, most of them hostile in the extreme, and not end up undergoing some pretty serious questioning. In my case, the people doing the questioning were Hackney CID. I’d been taken to Hackney nick straight from the Ridgeway Estate and, to be fair to the cops there, they were largely sympathetic to my plight. I told them the truth. Anton Walters’ fall was an accident. We’d been struggling, he’d toppled over the railings, I’d tried to save him but had been unable to. Put like that, it didn’t sound like an open-and-shut case, but I was certain the estate’s CCTV cameras would bear out my version of events. Although they didn’t say as much, I could tell the detectives interviewing me believed my story. They’d even given me a lift home in an unmarked car, although unfortunately, in the end, it wasn’t up to them whether I faced prosecution or not. That was the job of the Independent Police Complaints Authority, the IPCC, to whom the case would now be referred, and I guessed while this whole thing hung over my head there was no way I’d be allowed back on the team.

  Like it or not, I was off the case – and if Olaf’s words were anything to go by, probably permanently.

  Well, officially, at least. Unofficially, I wasn’t giving up that easily.

  As soon as I’d got to Hackney nick I’d called Dan Watts and told him what had happened. The conversation hadn’t gone well. At first he’d blown his top at me for not telling him about the impending arrest, but after I’d explained to him that there was no way the fallout would affect his informant, given that the lead that led to the raid had come from amateur camera footage, he’d calmed down a bit.

  ‘It had to be you though, didn’t it, Ray? The one who was having a fight with him. The one who was trying to pull him back up.’

  ‘Look, it wasn’t my fault I spotted the guy.’

  ‘So I presume you’re off the case.’

  I sighed. ‘Yeah, I’m off it. I still need to see your informant though.’

  ‘That can’t happen now.’

  ‘Anton Walters had the same tattoo that Henry Forbes had, Dan. The sign I saw at the school, and you saw on that snuff film. Something major’s going on here and the inquiry team aren’t going to find it. They’re not even looking. But me, I’m getting somewhere. I’ve got a lot of good information.’

  ‘That’s true, but you’re also off the case. I can’t be seen cooperating with someone who’s suspended.’

  ‘Then don’t be seen. Come on, Dan, take a chance. You’re not exactly overloaded with help. I can help you.’

  He hadn’t said yes, but then he hadn’t exactly said no either. Instead, he’d told me he needed to talk to his informant and hung up.

  I kicked off my shoes and opened a bottle of wine, my inner voice not even bothering to tell me I shouldn’t be doing it. I poured myself a large glass, gulped greedily, and switched on the TV, wanting to know how they were reporting the events in the Ridgeway Estate. The story came up immediately on Sky News. They had some camera footage of the mob throwing bottles at a much bigger line of riot police, who then baton-charged them. The reporter said that there’d been a major disturbance, and a man had been killed while fleeing from police, but that it was now under control and there were no reports of further injuries.

  I switched off and sat down with the wine and my laptop. I was off the case, suspended, and the subject of an IPCC investigation. I’d been warned by Hackney CID that charges could come later, including the possibility of murder. I knew I should play it safe, give up the case and keep my head down.

  The problem was, I’d made a promise to Mr and Mrs Brennan that I’d bring their daughter’s killer to justice. They’d believed in me. I’d seen it in their eyes. I wasn’t going to let them down, even if it meant leaving the force and becoming a private detective like Tina Boyd.

  Tina. In all the drama of the last few hours I’d forgotten about her. I checked my phone and saw that I’d received a message at 11.53 p.m. from an unknown foreign number.

  It was her. She apologized for the delay in calling me but said that a lot had happened, and could I phone her on the number she was calling on as soon as I got the message.

  I took another gulp from the wine, savouring th
e taste, and debated whether I should be calling her in the middle of the night, before concluding that I’d never be able to sleep without hearing what she’d found out.

  Tina answered on the sixth or seventh ring. Unsurprisingly she sounded groggy as she croaked a tentative hello.

  ‘Tina, it’s Ray. I’m sorry to disturb you. I’ve only just picked up your message. Are you OK to talk?’

  ‘Yeah sure,’ she said, yawning, and I could hear her moving about in bed.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In a hotel room in France with a gendarme outside my door for security.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. What happened?’

  ‘I’ve got bad news, Ray.’ And straight away I knew what she was going to say before she said it. ‘Charlotte Curtis is dead.’

  I took a deep breath, exhaled. ‘What happened?’

  ‘We were ambushed at her place by some local gunmen. They took our phones but we managed to escape on foot across country. The problem was, there were four of them at least, Ray. They caught up with us, Charlotte got shot, and I was lucky I didn’t. I got her to hospital but they told me she died on the operating table. I feel terrible about it. I let her down.’

  ‘They would have killed her anyway. You did what you could.’

  ‘It wasn’t enough.’

  ‘Sometimes it isn’t. Are you OK, physically?’

  She sighed. ‘Just some bumps and bruises. I hear your day’s been pretty eventful too.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I don’t have my mobile any more so I called the Ealing MIT trying to get hold of you. They told me you were off the case but I managed to speak to a DC Hutchings.’

  ‘Jools? Is she all right?’ I hadn’t seen her since we’d got to Hackney nick.

  ‘She’s fine. She told me what happened. You seem to have the same capacity for getting into trouble as I have, Ray.’