Two Weeks Later
Fifty-two
The last of the evening sunshine was glinting through her kitchen window as Tina Boyd put the finishing touches to the Moroccan lamb and chickpea stew she was cooking. She wasn’t much of a chef but she’d found this recipe in an old Gary Rhodes cookbook at her parents’ place and had added her own improvisations, making it something of a signature dish.
She looked at her watch again, but only ten minutes had elapsed since the last time she’d looked, and it was still twenty minutes before he was due to arrive. She smiled to herself as she realized how much like a teenage girl she was acting. But the truth was, she was falling for Ray Mason. They’d seen each other four times since that day at the farm in Wales, and this would be the first time they’d seen each other two nights in a row. Tina had had false dawns before where relationships were concerned, and had lost the man she’d long considered the love of her life eleven years ago. But she was allowing herself just to go with the flow with Ray and see where it took them.
She leaned over to empty some chopped coriander into the pot and felt the itch of the scar where the chainsaw had cut her that day. The wound had required fourteen stitches and would leave a permanent mark, but of course it could have been so much worse, and she shuddered as she recalled the way Jonas Mavalu had held the chainsaw just inches from her neck, and how she’d come within seconds of dying.
Both she and Ray had survived the interrogations of the investigating officers afterwards, who’d wanted to know how they’d ended up amid a pile of burning ruins containing four dead bodies in the middle of a national park two hundred miles from home. To protect Ray’s contact Dan Watts, and the unofficial undercover operation he’d been running, they’d concocted a story about how they’d been carrying out an unofficial surveillance op on Jonas Mavalu and had followed his car down to the farm. It wasn’t particularly plausible, and it was clear the police didn’t believe them, but the discovery of partially dissolved bone fragments belonging to at least six different people buried in the grounds, two of whom were women who’d been missing for years, had served to deflect attention away from them both, and just about kept Olaf off Ray’s back.
The investigation into who’d murdered the girls was ongoing but so far, according to the newspapers, no one had been arrested, nor was it known who exactly owned the property, given that the offshore company listed was owned by another offshore company, and so on. So far, too, the Kalaman name hadn’t made it into the newspapers. Jonas Mavalu might have had ties to Cem Kalaman but they were loose. The trafficked girl who’d died had not been identified; nor had the man in the hat, who’d almost killed Tina in France. He’d disappeared into thin air. As for Lola Sheridan, because Dan Watts’ use of the tracker devices that connected her to both his informant and the trafficked girl was unofficial and therefore illegal, and Tina’s sighting of her car at the house in Little Chalfont was inadmissible, there was no evidence against her for anything. As far as Tina knew, Lola’s name hadn’t even come up in the investigation. Nor had her brother Alastair’s.
So the Welsh farm case remained open, as did the Dana Brennan/Kitty Sinn case, and for the moment Tina and Ray were planning their next move. He was still suspended and had been threatened with arrest for obstruction of justice if he was caught again interfering with police investigations, but there was no way they were going to give this one up. They owed it to the dead.
But tonight they wouldn’t talk about that. Tonight they’d eat, relax and talk. They both deserved that.
The sound of her mobile ringing interrupted Tina’s thoughts and she immediately hoped it wasn’t Ray saying he was going to be late.
She picked up the phone from the kitchen table and saw that it was from an unknown caller. She never liked to answer calls when she couldn’t see the number, but for some reason she made an exception this time.
‘Tina?’ said a familiar-sounding woman’s voice down the other end of the line.
Tina frowned. ‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s Charlotte Curtis.’
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Epub ISBN: 9781473535237
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Published by Cornerstone Digital 2017
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Copyright © Simon Kernick, 2017
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Simon Kernick has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain by Century in 2017
Century
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781780894539
The Bone Field Page 30
