For ever.
Whatever he did, he reckoned he was fucked. It was, he thought sadly, the story of his life.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
‘Please Ramon,’ whimpered Junior, his whole body shaking with fear. ‘Don’t do it, man.’
Ramon thought of the nights out drinking he’d had with Junior, the conversations they’d had. There’d been some good times.
The room fell silent. Even Junior’s whimpering stopped, as if he knew he’d done as much as he could and now it was just a matter of finding out whether it had worked or not.
It hadn’t.
Keeping his hand steady, Ramon pulled the trigger.
Forty-four
Tina Boyd lived in a village just inside the M25, and I felt myself relaxing as I passed the pub on my left and stopped just outside a row of old flint cottages. Before I’d left to come here I’d checked my car all over for tracking devices, and bought a disposable mobile phone and switched my own one off. I’d also followed some classic anti-surveillance techniques to make sure I wasn’t being followed. The visit today from Cem Kalaman and his goons had got me worried. I didn’t like the way my security had been compromised. It meant from now on I was going to have to be very careful – although I had a grim feeling that however careful I was, it wasn’t going to be enough.
I got out of the car, breathing in the slightly less polluted air, and looked around, to check that no one was watching Tina’s place, then knocked on the door.
A few seconds later, Tina answered the door. She was dressed in T-shirt and jeans. Her feet were bare, the toenails freshly painted a plum colour, and I caught a vague hint of perfume.
‘I wasn’t sure what to bring so I settled for this,’ I said, handing her a bottle of grape juice. After the three days I’d had I could have done with a real drink but I’d heard somewhere that Tina was a recovering alcoholic, so I didn’t want to throw temptation in her way. ‘It’s good to see you in one piece,’ I told her. ‘You look remarkably well.’
‘So do you,’ she said, ‘considering you’ve been through the ringer too. Come in.’
I followed her into a small but quaint-looking kitchen where a laptop was open on the table.
‘I’ve got a few things out for you,’ she said, opening up the grape juice and pouring us both a glass. I caught another hint of the perfume as she gave me mine. ‘You wanted to know who that address you gave me earlier was registered to,’ she continued, referring to the house Dan Watts’ informant had told me he’d taken the trafficked girl to the previous night.
‘And what did you manage to find out?’ I asked, taking a seat opposite her at the table.
‘It belongs to a company based out of Bermuda called Turner Wright Holdings. When I tried to find out further details I hit an immediate dead end. We’re not going to get any more that way.’ She paused. ‘However … the house is only twenty minutes from here and I had a little bit of time on my hands earlier, so I drove over there to take a look. There was one car in the driveway, a Mercedes SLC convertible. I took down the registration and checked it out. It belongs to Lola Sheridan.’
I sat back in the chair. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘There was something else too. Have a look at this.’ She turned the laptop round so I could see it.
On the screen was an old, slightly grainy photo of a group of five young women standing in a bar, with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, laughing at the camera. They looked drunk and happy.
‘The woman on the far right is Lola Sheridan. The picture was taken in 1988.’
Immediately I saw the resemblance to Kitty Sinn. Both women had long dark hair and olive skin, with the same small, almost dainty features, and big hazel eyes. They weren’t a perfect match by any means but Lola would certainly have been able to pass herself off as Kitty to people who’d never seen either woman before, like holidaymakers in pre-internet Thailand.
‘Where did you find this?’ I asked.
‘I managed to track down a woman from Lola’s course at Goldsmiths who’d known her pretty well and spoke to her on the phone. Apparently, Lola wasn’t very popular. Most of her fellow students, male and female, thought she was a bitch. I asked the woman if she had any old photos with Lola in them and she dug out this one from freshers week, when people hadn’t yet discovered what she was really like.’
‘How did you manage to get all that from a stranger?’
‘I told her I was a journalist doing a new piece on the Kitty Sinn murders, and I was collecting photos of people who were close to her before she disappeared. I offered her two hundred pounds for any shot and a credit when the article was published. It was enough.’
‘Jesus, you’re a fast worker. How much do I owe you?’
‘I’ll bill you. I’m more interested in what you know about this whole thing. So what’s your theory, Ray Mason? What happened? Who’s involved, and why?’ She sipped her drink, looking at me over the glass. ‘Start from the beginning.’
I sighed. ‘Look Tina, I’ll be honest. It’s best not to know too much about this case. I shouldn’t have got you into it in the first place.’
‘You didn’t. Henry Forbes did. You’re not responsible for me, Ray.’
‘There are dangerous people involved. The kind who could easily kill you.’
‘And they almost did kill me yesterday, which is all the more reason to bring them to justice. And I’m a big girl. I’ve dealt with dangerous people before.’
If I’m honest, I didn’t know what to do. Part of me knew that the more I told Tina, the more I was putting her in danger. But right now I needed allies more than ever, and Tina was the kind of person who could dig up answers far more effectively than most of the people I’ve worked with. And she wanted to be involved.
And, of course, it was an excuse to keep seeing her.
‘OK,’ I said after a long pause. ‘I’ve been thinking constantly about this for the last few days, so here’s what I think happened, although I’ve got to be honest, a hell of a lot of it is guesswork.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Go on.’
So I told her that I thought Kitty Sinn’s cousin Alastair Sheridan had met Cem Kalaman at Warwick University. Kalaman was a sadist, as was Alastair, who’d already sexually assaulted Kitty as a teenager, and had probably committed other crimes as well. Together they’d abducted and murdered Dana Brennan, using Alastair’s knowledge of the area. Their motive was still unclear but I suspected it was for sexual gratification masquerading as devil worship, and that Dana had been chosen because she was young and wouldn’t offer much resistance. They’d killed her in the grounds of Medmenham College after Kalaman had paid the caretaker, Bill Morris, to be away from the premises. Other people might have been involved, including Lola, but I wasn’t sure.
Lola, though, had definitely been involved in their second murder. Having gained confidence from killing Dana, Cem, Alastair and Lola had meticulously planned Kitty’s murder, using Henry Forbes as their stooge. Their motive was still unclear but was most likely a combination of jealousy and sexual sadism, along with a desire to silence Kitty in case she made public that Alastair and Lola had sexually assaulted her some years earlier; and of course greed, since both the cousins benefited financially from her death, albeit at a much later date.
Their plan had worked almost perfectly. Kitty had been murdered just before she was supposed to go to Thailand after being lured to the grounds of Medmenham College, and Lola, who looked a lot like her, had gone in her place. The only hitch was that Kitty’s friend Charlotte Curtis had seen Forbes and Lola in a taxi as they travelled to the airport together. Luckily for them both, Charlotte hadn’t realized it wasn’t Kitty at the time, and so they’d got away with her murder.
Tina sighed. ‘So that’s why Charlotte had to die. Because she could solve the mystery of the disappearance.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘Jesus, it seems so unfair. If that taxi hadn’t stopped at the traffic light
s … if she hadn’t been walking down that street on that afternoon at that time … then she’d still be alive. I wish I’d saved her, Ray. I got so close. We almost made it.’ She leaned forward in her seat and fixed me with an intense stare. ‘That’s why I want to stay involved. It’s personal for me. I want to make amends.’
‘I understand that,’ I said, ‘but these guys have got real power. Kalaman runs a huge and successful crime business; Alastair Sheridan’s a well-known fund manager who hobnobs with senior politicians, and is currently on a trade mission with the Chancellor of the Exchequer. There may even be others who are part of this. It’s going to be very difficult, and very dangerous, to gather evidence against them.’
She picked up her glass from the table and took a drink. ‘Have you got any proof of their involvement in all this?’
‘Nothing. But I have a contact in the NCA whose job it is to investigate the Kalaman outfit, and he has an informant on the inside. Last night this informant drove a young woman who’d recently been trafficked into the country to the address where you saw Lola Sheridan’s car today. I think Cem Kalaman and Alastair Sheridan and whoever else is involved have continued killing young women but nowadays they use the outfit’s people-smuggling contacts to source their victims.’
Tina frowned. ‘So this woman’s probably their next victim. Are the NCA going to raid the place? If the girl’s been trafficked illegally, a criminal offence has been committed.’
It was a good point. I’d called Dan Watts on the way over here and told him all this but he’d been understandably reluctant to do anything that might put his informant in danger, and had said he’d keep an eye on things and let me know if the tracking device with the girl went on the move again.
‘I don’t know what their plans are,’ I said to Tina, ‘but they’re definitely on the case.’
‘That might not be enough,’ she said. ‘Do you think we should go over there?’
‘And do what? We can’t just break in. The girl might be fine. She might not want to come with us. And all we’ll do is alert Lola Sheridan to the fact that we’re on to her.’ I sighed. ‘To be honest, right now I can’t afford to do anything else illegal. I’m in enough shit as it is. It’s easier to leave the heavy work for the NCA and concentrate on gathering evidence quietly.’
She nodded. ‘Sure. I understand.’ But something in her tone suggested she was disappointed in me.
In truth, I was tired after a long and brutal week which had seen me come close to death more than once. All I wanted was to have a night away from it all, and let someone else deal with it for once.
Which, as it turned out, was to prove a very big mistake.
Forty-five
So that was it. Ramon knew there was no way back for him now he’d killed Junior.
He’d had to do it. It was kill or be killed. Dog eat dog. But he knew that Dan the Pig wouldn’t see it that way. To him it would be murder, and that meant going back inside. For the rest of his life. And Jonas had filmed him doing it. Afterwards, the man in the suit, Mr Bone, had smiled then walked out without a word while Jonas had taken the gun off Ramon before grabbing him in a bear hug and saying, ‘You’re one of us now,’ while Junior lay dead on the floor between them.
Ramon didn’t feel too bad about killing Junior. Junior had tried to set him up, so he’d got what was coming to him. Even so, it hadn’t felt good watching the two guys who’d been on the door emptying his pockets, then dragging his corpse out by the legs, leaving a dirty smear of blood behind them.
Jonas had given him the keys to Junior’s 4×4 and told Ramon it was his if he wanted it. So here he was an hour later, sitting in it outside his block of flats and wondering what his next move was going to be. Staying put wasn’t an option. If he betrayed Jonas, Jonas would show the Feds the video of him killing Junior. And if he stopped feeding Dan the Pig information, they’d throw him back inside anyway.
In the end, there was only one way out. Run. In an envelope stuffed into his jacket was six grand in cash, his savings from the work he’d done for the Kalamans, as well as the cash Dan the Pig’s friend had given him today. He’d served time with an Algerian forger who still lived on Archway and the guy had promised to do Ramon a cheap deal on a high-quality fake passport if he ever needed one. All he had to do was get one sorted, then he could get across to France and lie low for a while. Figure out what to do.
It wasn’t as if he was leaving anything behind. He had no family. No real friends. Junior had been the man he’d seen most of, and obviously he wasn’t going to be seeing him again any time soon. He was totally alone in the world. There wasn’t a single person who cared shit about him. He thought of his grandpa who would have been ashamed of what he’d become. And Keesha. His baby sister, Keesha. What would she have thought if she’d grown up and could see him now?
Ramon cursed out loud in the silence of the car, and hunted round for Junior’s smokes. He found some, and a lighter, in the glove compartment, and lit one.
Nicole. The girl with the eyes like Keesha’s. She’d liked him. They’d talked on the way over to that place last night and she’d actually seemed interested in what he had to say. He wondered if she was still there with that cold-eyed bitch, and what the cold-eyed bitch had planned for her. That guy today, Dan the Pig’s friend, had asked him what he knew about girls going missing, and he’d seemed interested in where he’d taken Nicole.
Ramon pulled on the cigarette and blew smoke out of the half-open window. As he did so, he made a plan in his head. He was going to rescue Nicole. Take her from the cold-eyed bitch, ditch the trackers, and then the two of them could make a break for it, split the country, and leave all this shit behind.
It was a dangerous move, but then Ramon was a dangerous man. He’d killed tonight. He wasn’t someone you messed about with.
Suddenly feeling good about what he planned to do, he fed the old witch’s postcode into Junior’s satnav, backed out of his parking spot, and drove out of the estate.
The drive to the bitch’s house seemed faster than it had been the previous day and it had just gone ten p.m. when Ramon turned into the wood with its gnarly old trees looming up on either side of him that looked like something out of a scary movie.
He drove slowly, not allowing himself to feel any doubt about what he was doing. It was like that time back in the ends when he’d gone to the Clifton Estate looking for revenge and had shot dead Terrell Wright. He’d been determined to do what he had to do then, and he was determined to do it now too. And if Nicole wasn’t there, he’d make the cold-eyed bitch tell him where she was. And if anything had happened to her, then Christ he’d make the bitch pay.
When he got close to the white house and saw it poke out ahead of him through the trees, he switched off his headlights and turned the car around so it was facing the way home. He cut the engine and got out, sniffing the night air. Somewhere nearby an owl hooted but otherwise the woods were silent. It made Ramon feel uncomfortable. He was used to noise.
He walked quickly along the track before cutting into the undergrowth by the side of the house. The lights were on inside and he could see a black car in the shadows on the far side of the driveway, but couldn’t remember whether it had been there the previous night or not.
A high hedge blocked off access to the back of the house but there was a wooden gate about Ramon’s height in the middle. It was bolted from the inside, so he hauled himself up and managed to scramble over the top, almost falling over the other side.
The back garden was a tangled mess of weeds and bushes but a narrow path led to the back door. Ramon walked up to it, telling himself that he’d got this far. Now he just wanted to get in and out as fast as possible.
The back door was locked too, but that was no problem for Ramon. You learned a lot while you were in nick, and in his last years inside, after he’d been transferred to Pentonville, he’d shared a cell with this old white guy who was a career burglar, who’d taught him all he needed to know ab
out breaking into a house. And this one was particularly easy. The door was old, and so was the lock, and Ramon used a bump key to open each of the pins in turn, before slowly opening the door and feeling the first wave of adrenalin as he stepped inside. The old white guy, Branks, had told him there was no bigger buzz than breaking into someone’s house and taking whatever you wanted. Especially when they were asleep inside. ‘It’s like raping them,’ he’d said. ‘But more fun, and a lot less trouble.’ Ramon wasn’t sure if this was the case or not, but he had to admit, it made him feel powerful creeping inside unannounced like this.
He was in the kitchen. Dirty plates were piled up like they were in his place, and it smelled of good food. There was a pot of something on the hob. It looked like chicken soup. He dipped his finger in. The soup was cold but he pulled out a piece of chicken anyway, munching it down in one go and wiping his hand on his trouser leg.
The kitchen led into a hallway that ran down to the front door. Ramon could hear a woman’s voice coming from one of the rooms. She was talking quietly and Ramon couldn’t make out what she was saying. He’d brought a large hunting knife with him because you never knew what kind of danger you were going to run into, and now he pulled it free of its sheath and walked to where the voice was coming from.
He put his ear against the door and immediately heard Nicole’s voice. She sounded out of it, and again Ramon couldn’t quite make out what she was saying.
Then he heard the other person speak and he recognized the voice of the cold-eyed bitch from last night.
‘Stay still,’ she said, her voice harsh.
‘It hurts,’ said Nicole.
‘It won’t hurt for much longer,’ said the bitch. ‘Stay still.’
Ramon had no idea what was going on in there but he felt a surge of anger and flung open the door.
Nicole was sitting in a big armchair, wearing a sleeveless black dress that reached down to her ankles. Her feet were bare and Ramon couldn’t help noticing how pretty they looked. But it was her eyes that drew his attention. They were only half open and dazed, like she’d been on the crack, and her head was lolling to one side.
The Bone Field Page 26
