Thanks,
Day One
Tuesday
One
The whole thing started when a young man took his girlfriend of a few months on a trip to Thailand.
This was way back in 1990, in the days when Thailand was still in the process of being ‘discovered’ by backpackers, and mass tourism, with its big hotels, and stag and hen parties, and five-star yogic spas, was pretty much unheard of. The young man’s name was Henry Forbes. He was twenty-five years old and a lecturer in Humanities (whatever that is) at Brighton Polytechnic, as the University of Brighton was called in those days. His girlfriend, who had just finished her last year at the same place, was called Katherine Sinn, but I remember from reading about the case at the time that everyone referred to her as Kitty.
Kitty Sinn. I always thought it was a nice name.
Anyway, the trip was to last two months, beginning just over a month after the end of Kitty’s final exams. We know for a fact that they arrived in Bangkok on the afternoon of Sunday, 29 July 1990 because they were recorded entering the country by Thai immigration, and their passports were stamped. They stayed two nights in Bangkok before taking the overnight train down to the resort of Phuket, where they spent four days at the Club Med on Kata Beach. They were remembered by the staff as a polite, quiet couple who kept themselves to themselves and who seemed very much in love. From Phuket they took a taxi to the Khao Sok National Park, site of Thailand’s oldest rainforest, a two-and-a-half-hour drive north, hoping to see some wildlife as well as the spectacular limestone karsts for which the area is famous. They stayed at what at the time was the park’s only guesthouse, arriving there on Sunday, 5 August.
There were only four other guests there that night: an Australian couple in their sixties and two young Dutch backpackers. All the guests remembered Kitty and Henry having dinner in the restaurant before retiring to their bedroom, where later that night they had a blazing row that was so loud that the guesthouse owner, a local man called Mr Watanna, had to intervene and threaten them with eviction if they didn’t quieten down. According to Henry’s later statement, the row had been over a former girlfriend of his and had got out of control, culminating in him slapping Kitty, something he claimed was totally out of character.
The following morning the row clearly hadn’t been resolved because Kitty asked Mr Watanna to drive her to the coastal town of Khao Lak, offering him five hundred baht in payment as long as he didn’t tell Henry where she was going. She said she needed time to think. Henry tried to stop her leaving, apologizing profusely, at one point getting down on his knees and literally begging her to stay. But, by all accounts, Kitty was adamant and she left with Mr Watanna.
According to Mr Watanna, he dropped her off outside the Gerd and Noi Bungalows near the main beach at Khao Lak, where she intended to get a couple of nights’ accommodation while she pondered her next move. He then drove straight back to the guesthouse, arriving approximately four hours after he’d left.
For the next three days, Henry remained at the guesthouse, hardly venturing outside his room as he waited for Kitty to return. These were the days before mobile phones and the internet, so when someone was out of contact, they were definitely out of contact. When she didn’t come back, Henry persuaded Mr Watanna to tell him where he’d taken her.
Henry then called the Gerd and Noi Bungalows, only to be told Kitty hadn’t been staying there. Worried now, he paid Mr Watanna to take him to Khao Lak, and spent the day searching the town and its handful of hostelries for Kitty, which was when he discovered that she hadn’t been staying anywhere else round there either. Finally he called Kitty’s mother but she hadn’t seen or heard anything from her daughter. That was when Henry contacted the Thai police to officially report her missing, while her mother contacted the police in England.
An alert was put out to police stations across the southern Thai peninsula to look out for her, but still she didn’t show up.
Kitty was a very pretty girl, petite and dark, with a sweet, almost childlike face. According to both staff and students at the poly she was a lovely person who even volunteered for the Samaritans in her spare time, and she came from a wealthy, respectable family. In other words, she was a newspaper’s dream, and her disappearance in what was then considered an exotic and far-flung country where a lot of British youngsters were heading attracted a huge amount of media attention both in the UK and beyond.
Suspicion quickly fell on Mr Watanna who was the last person known to have seen Kitty alive. He was arrested and interrogated by Thai police. There were even claims by his lawyer that he’d been beaten and tortured. The police were under huge diplomatic and media pressure to get a result and doubtless they in turn put pressure on Mr Watanna, who was held in custody without charge for more than two weeks. But with nothing linking him to any foul play, and no sign of a body, he was eventually released.
Finally, with Kitty missing close to a month without any confirmed sightings, and having been interrogated several times himself by the Thai authorities, Henry returned home, where he was questioned at length by officers from Sussex CTD. But, because of the circumstances of the disappearance, he was never considered a real suspect. He took an extended leave of absence from the poly citing emotional stress, and didn’t return to his job until the following year.
In the meantime the investigation had steadily faded into the background as other stories muscled their way on to the news pages, and there were no new confirmed sightings. People just lost interest. But the mystery element remained – the fact that no trace of Kitty was ever found, nor any record of her leaving Thailand. It was as if she’d disappeared into thin air. Many people – and I have to admit I count myself among their number – assumed that Mr Watanna was responsible. He may have been happily married with no criminal record, and there may have been no evidence linking him to the murder, nor any changes in behaviour to suggest he might be carrying the emotional burden of having killed someone, but even so, he was the most obvious culprit. He died in 1997, at the comparatively young age of forty-six, having never managed to rid himself of the black cloak of suspicion. If he’d had any knowledge of what actually happened to Kitty, he took it with him to the grave.
And so life moved on and. I’ll be honest, I hadn’t read, heard or even thought anything about the strange disappearance of Katherine ‘Kitty’ Sinn for years until, more than a quarter of a century after she went missing, I got a phone call out of the blue from a lawyer called Maurice Reedman saying he represented the Henry Forbes – his emphasis, not mine – and telling me that he had information that might be of interest to the police.
And so here we were in the dining room of Reedman’s grand period house just outside London, Henry and him on one side of a big wooden table, me alone on the other.
Henry Forbes had the look of a man weighed down by the world. His face was pale and sagging round the edges, the lines deep and unforgiving, the black hair I remembered from those old photographs now grey and thinning. He looked every inch his fifty-one years. His eyes were narrow and suspicious, and a thin sheen of sweat clung to his forehead. He also couldn’t seem to sit still. Reedman, on the other hand, must have been at the wrong end of his sixties, and looked every inch the plump, well-fed lawyer with his expensive three-piece pinstripe suit, its waistcoat straining against his ample girth, and small, perfectly manicured hands. His grey hair was thick and lustrous. All told, he was far too dapper for a man called Maurice.
I kicked off proceedings. ‘You asked to see me, Mr Forbes?’
‘I did. I’ve read about you, DS Mason, and I trust you. So does Mr Reedman.’
I didn’t say anything. It was 8.30 p.m. and I hadn’t eaten.
Henry sighed. ‘What I’ve got to say …’ He paused, placing his hands on the table and staring down at them. One finger began to drum a nervous beat on the wood. ‘I have a secret.’ He glanced at his lawyer, who nodded. ‘It concerns a possible murder.’
I opened my notebook.
‘Well, you’d better tell me then.’
It was the lawyer, Reedman, who spoke next. ‘I asked for this meeting in my home because I’d like it to be off the record. Now I’m aware that this is an unusual request but hear me out. I’ve spoken at length to my client and I firmly believe he has information that will be of great relevance to you. However, his information will incriminate a number of very powerful individuals, and may, to a lesser extent, incriminate himself. So, in essence, he’s not willing to make an official statement until he and I have assurances that he will receive the full protection of the law, including a new identity, and immunity from prosecution.’
‘You know as well as I do that I can’t offer immunity from prosecution, Mr Reedman,’ I told him.
‘Exactly. Which is why I want this conversation off the record. Then you can go back to your superiors, tell them what we tell you, and they can decide whether they want to help my client. If they don’t, he will say nothing and there will, I promise you, be nothing you can do about it.’
I frowned, not liking the threat in Reedman’s tone but curious about what Henry Forbes knew.
‘I explained to you on the phone earlier about who my client is, didn’t I?’ continued Reedman. ‘He was Katherine Sinn’s boyfriend, the man who reported her missing in Thailand in 1990.’
‘And is this about Kitty Sinn’s disappearance?’
‘Is this off the record?’
‘Effectively this conversation’s off the record anyway, you know that. We’re not in a police station, and your client’s not under caution, so nothing said here is admissible in a court of law.’
‘Can I ask you not to take notes?’
I sighed and closed the notebook. ‘OK, but as long as we get to the point of this meeting. I’m hungry.’
Reedman sat back in his chair, putting his manicured hands together and steeplinghis fingers. ‘This meeting is about Katherine Sinn, yes. As you may or may not be aware, unidentified human remains have been dug up in the grounds of a private school in Buckinghamshire.’
I’d seen something on the news about the story the previous week. The school, running low on funds, had sold a parcel of land to developers to build houses on, and when the first bulldozers had broken ground they’d turned up human bones belonging to a young woman. It was currently Thames Valley’s case and, as far as I was aware, they hadn’t TD’d the woman yet, or released details about how or when she’d died.
‘My client believes those bones belong to Katherine Sinn,’ said Reedman.
This, as you can imagine, was something of a shock to hear, since the last time she was seen – and it seemed from the records that there’d been a number of witnesses who’d seen her – Kitty had been more than six thousand miles away from Buckinghamshire.
I looked at Henry. ‘Is that right, Mr Forbes? Are they Kitty’s bones?’
Henry swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s her.’
‘So how did she get there?’
‘She was murdered.’
‘By you?’
‘I want immunity before I say anything else.’
‘I told you, I can’t offer immunity for murder. If you were responsible, it’s in your best interests to tell me now.’
‘I didn’t kill her. I promise. I’m not a killer.’
He took a deep breath, a thin bead of sweat running down his forehead, and Reedman cut in. ‘But my client is in a position to identify the individuals who did kill Ms Sinn.’
Henry looked at me. ‘These are very powerful people. They have friends. They can get to me. And they would kill me if they knew I was here talking to you. I need immunity, a new identity. Protection for the rest of my life. If I get that then I’ll give you something huge, I swear it.’
‘That’s why we need to make a deal that suits everyone,’ said Reedman.
Henry seemed genuinely terrified, but then in my experience a lot of people scare easily, particularly when they know they’re in trouble. At the time I doubted the powerful people he was talking about were really all that powerful, or capable of doing Henry any harm.
Which turned out to be a very big mistake on my part.
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I said. ‘We need to know what Mr Forbes knows before we even start talking about deals.’
‘I’m afraid not, DS Mason,’ said Reedman, putting a hand on Henry’s arm – a clear gesture for him to stop talking.
I kept looking at Henry. ‘I could arrest you right now for obstruction of justice.’
Reedman shook his head decisively. ‘On what grounds exactly? You agreed to have this conversation entirely off the record. Now, you have some bones that will inevitably turn out to belong to Katherine Sinn, but that’s all you’ll have. It won’t actually change a thing regarding my client. At the time of Katherine’s disappearance there were a number of witnesses who said that he couldn’t have killed her. His story has always held up under the scrutiny of both the Thai and the British authorities, and will continue to hold up. There will be no evidence connecting him with the bones. And, after twenty-six years, almost no chance that there will be any evidence connecting anyone else to them either. You’ll be at square one, and that’s where you’ll remain. Unless …’ He held up a finger and eyed me closely. ‘Unless you can make a deal that will protect my client, allow him to be treated leniently by the courts, and give him a completely new identity under the witness protection programme. Then he will tell you all he knows. Now, we need to move fast on this, DS Mason. I strongly believe that Mr Forbes is in real danger. So, please, why don’t you call your boss and see what he, or indeed she, has to say?’
‘Give me something I can use,’ I countered. ‘Something that will make it easier to sell a deal.’
‘This deal sells itself,’ said Reedman firmly.
‘It doesn’t,’ I said.
Henry stood up, walked to the window and took a couple of deep breaths, then walked back. ‘I think there’ll be another body buried in the same place as Kitty,’ he said. ‘There may even be more than one.’
‘Henry,’ snapped Reedman, ‘sit down and stop talking now.’
‘I know they’d killed before Kitty and it wouldn’t surprise me if they’d carried on killing afterwards.’
‘Henry!’ Reedman shouted.
I glared at Henry, tempted to reach over the table and wring the truth out of him. ‘How the hell do you know that? Because this isn’t some little game. We’re talking about murder victims. If you know something and you don’t tell us, we will dig up every last aspect of your past and we will find out what you did, and you’ll be locked up for a very, very long time.’
Henry looked like he was about to burst into tears. ‘I didn’t kill anyone, I swear it.’
Reedman reached across and pulled his client back down into his chair. ‘Just make the call, DS Mason,’ he said. ‘Please.’
I got up, wondering what I was getting into here. ‘I’ll be five minutes,’ I said, and went out through the front door, leaving it on the latch.
The night was chilly – it was still only mid-April – and clear. Reedman’s large detached home was set in a narrow stretch of greenbelt land just inside the M25 between RAF Northolt and Gerrards Cross, with fields to the back and front of the property. You could hear the drone of the traffic on the M25 and the stars were obscured by the wall of light to the east, but there was still something comfortably rural about the place. The house itself was set in about an acre of grounds with a long driveway leading down to wrought-iron gates, and was probably worth the best part of £3 million. But then you rarely come across a poor lawyer.
I walked slowly round the side of the house and pulled out my phone, dialling my boss at Homicide and Serious Crime Command, DCT Eddie Olafsson, or Olaf as he was universally known behind his back. For the last six months I’d been working for one of the Metropolitan Police’s Murder Investigation Teams, based out of Ealing, having moved across from Counter Terr
orism Command where I’d spent much of the previous fifteen years. Things had ended badly for me in CT and I’d been suspended for close to four months before finally being given a second chance as a detective sergeant in Olaf’s team, having been told in no uncertain terms that he was one of the very few DCTs who’d have me. When I’d told Olaf earlier about Reedman’s call asking me to meet up with him and Henry Forbes, he hadn’t been keen for me to go, given that we already had a big enough caseload, but he’d agreed because he was old enough to remember the Kitty Sinn case.
As luck would have it our team were on twenty-four-hour callout all week so I wasn’t disturbing Olaf on a night of gallivanting, and he answered on the third ring.
‘So, did Henry Forbes have anything interesting to say?’ he asked me.
I told him that he had claimed the remains found in the school in Buckinghamshire the previous week were Kitty Sinn’s, and that he could name several people involved in her murder. ‘And there’s something else too. He says there may be other bodies in there.’
‘Are you sure he’s not yanking your chain, Ray?’ boomed Olaf, who had a very loud voice.
‘No. He’s telling the truth. And he’s scared too. He says the people responsible will kill him.’
‘And he didn’t give you any details about how Kitty Sinn got all the way back from Thailand without being spotted, even though her face was all over the papers, and ended up buried in the grounds of a boarding school?’
‘No, nothing. His lawyer’s keeping him on a tight leash. He doesn’t want Forbes to say anything until he’s got him round-the-clock protection and a new identity, plus a deal which means he won’t serve any prison time for perverting the course of justice or anything like that. But the thing is, he must have been heavily involved in her murder otherwise there’s no way he’d know where she was buried.’
Olaf made a low growling sound that I’d learned was his version of a sigh. He was a man who could do nothing quietly. ‘That’s what I’m thinking too,’ he said. ‘Well, the good thing is, it’s not our problem. It belongs to Thames Valley. I know the SIO running the case. I’ll give him a call nowand tell him what you’ve just told me, and they can take it from there.’
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