The Bone Field

by Simon Kernick

  Olaf claimed to be descended from Viking stock on his father’s side, but to be honest, he didn’t look much like a Viking. He was a short, burly guy, completely bald, with hairy ears and a head that was almost a perfect square. He looked like a retired wrestler. At one time he’d been very fat, thanks to his dietary regime of booze and crap food, coupled with long hours at a desk and no exercise, but after breaking a chair by sitting on it during a meeting with the commissioner at Scotland Yard he’d lost four stone, and any mention of the chair-breaking incident, in jest or otherwise, was strictly forbidden in his presence.

  I liked Olaf. He was a street cop through and through and had cut his teeth in the Flying Squad, the Met’s armed robbery division, where he’d developed his taste for pies, beer, colourful language, and strong-arming suspects. With thirty-two years’ service, and seemingly no desire to retire, he was one of the last of a dying breed of old-school coppers. He even wore a sheepskin jacket that looked older than he did.

  ‘What the fuck happened?’ he demanded, stopping in front of me. ‘Can’t you go anywhere without someone getting killed?’

  I gave him the kind of look that told him I wasn’t interested in banter, and he met it with a smile. Olaf didn’t smile that much but when he did, he meant it.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’ve been better,’ I told him, dabbing a wet handkerchief against my jaw where the gunman I’d grappled with had hit me with the shotgun stock. It hurt like hell but I didn’t think there was anything broken.

  ‘What happened in there?’

  ‘When I got back in the house after talking to you, the gunmen were already inside. I hid while they killed Forbes and his lawyer. I didn’t intervene.’ I had a feeling this was going to bother me for a long time.

  ‘Well you managed to have a fight with one of them.’

  ‘Only because I was spotted trying to record what was happening on my phone.’

  ‘Did you get anything?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing useful. I was too far away.’

  He looked disappointed. ‘That’s a pity. Did you get much of a look at the one you were fighting with?’

  ‘I think he was mixed race, possibly Asian. He had a scar on his neck here. And a sleeve tattoo on his left forearm.’

  Olaf nodded. ‘That’s a good start, Ray. It’s going to help.’

  ‘This was a targeted, professional hit, boss. They were a three-man team. A driver and two gunmen, in a black BMW X5. The security gates were closed when I went outside, and I’m certain they weren’t let in, so they must have opened the gates themselves. They knew exactly who they were looking for and where they were going. They walked straight into the dining room where Henry Forbes and his lawyer were. They questioned both men. It had to be about the Kitty Sinn case.’

  Olaf looked over towards the house, a thoughtful expression on his face, then back at me. ‘You said Henry Forbes told you there might be more bodies buried alongside the one they dug up last week in Buckinghamshire.’

  ‘That’s right. It was pretty much the last thing he said to me. I don’t know if he was talking out of his arse or not.’

  ‘He wasn’t. I’ve just spoken to the SIO over at Thames Valley to let him know that his body might be Kitty Sinn’s.’ He sighed. ‘It turns out they dug up more remains this afternoon. They think they’re of a teenage girl, but no ID as yet.’

  I shook my head, thinking how close I’d been to finding out what had happened to Kitty, and now to this other girl. ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘There’s more. They’ve found a clear mark on one of the neck vertebrae that indicates the girl’s throat was violently cut. Whoever we’re dealing with here is one sick bastard.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You did a good job, Ray, and we’ll use what you’ve learned to find these people.’

  With that he turned and walked into the house, leaving me sitting there with the whiff of failure hanging over my head like a noxious cloud.

  Three

  Charlotte Curtis lay in her bath wondering if she was finally getting over the death of her husband.

  Theirs had been a happy marriage. They’d never wanted children which, because she was a school teacher, was considered ironic by some people, including members of her own family. But Charlotte had always got her fill of children through teaching and had never been particularly maternal. This meant that she and Jacques had concentrated all their love on each other. They’d formed a bond that had seemed unbreakable, and certainly neither of them would have broken it themselves; but fate, as cold and emotionless as ever, had had other ideas. In 2011, at the age of only forty-four, Jacques had been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. The prognosis was poor, and within six months it had spread to his stomach and lungs. After that he’d gone downhill fast, almost as if he was willing himself to reach the end – Jacques was too proud a man to let himself wither away to nothing – and he’d died on a cold January day in 2012 in a local hospice with Charlotte holding him in her arms.

  That had been four years, three months and ten days ago now, and not a day had gone by when she hadn’t thought of him. At first she’d wanted to die herself, the pain had been that terrible, but gradually, step by tiny step, and with the help of friends, she’d emerged from the blackness, and the pain had slowly eased to a dull, constant ache. It had only been in the past year that she’d finally felt she could live again, and three months earlier she’d actually met someone. Lucien was ten years younger, rakishly handsome, totally inappropriate, and exactly what she needed. She knew it wouldn’t last, and wasn’t even sure she wanted it to. But his presence had made her feel like a woman again, and for that she was thankful.

  She submerged her head in the hot water thinking that Jacques would probably have liked Lucien, and she knew he’d be pleased that she’d found someone. When he knew that he was dying, that there was absolutely no way back, Jacques had taken her hand, looked her in the eyes and told her with the utmost seriousness that he would never forgive her if she allowed her mourning for him to get in the way of her life. ‘The greatest gift you can give me is to live again,’ he’d said. ‘To find a man who will love you like I do, and to love him just the same.’

  Thinking about those words now, Charlotte felt herself welling up again. Jesus. Over four years and he can still do that to me. She sat up in the bath, took a deep breath – and something caught her eye.

  One of the spotlights in the ceiling didn’t look quite right. She frowned, wondering if she was imagining it. But she wasn’t. The spotlight in the far corner of the bathroom had a tiny black hole on the edge of its metal attachment that Charlotte was sure hadn’t been there before. She was observant like that. She hoped it wasn’t some kind of rot in the ceiling. She’d always been awful with DIY, relying first on Jacques and then on various handymen to maintain her house. She wasn’t exactly flush with cash either, so if it was serious, she was in trouble.

  For a few seconds she stared at the offending spotlight, reluctant to get out of the bath and take a closer look. The water was warm and soothing, while the air in the bathroom had a distinct chill to it. Eventually, though, she relented and, wrapping herself in a towel, she grabbed a chair from the bedroom and placed it under the light. She was only five feet four and the ceilings in the house were high, so she had to stand on her tiptoes and stretch towards it. Placing one hand on the ceiling to balance herself, she squinted against the light’s brightness, her face only a foot from the offending hole, which couldn’t have been more than half a centimetre across.

  And that was when she saw that the hole was perfectly round, as if it had been created by a drill, and that it had a tiny, barely noticeable lens poking out of it at a forty-five-degree angle. The lens’s casing was white, making it difficult to pick out against the colour of the ceiling.

  At first she was simply confused by what she was looking at, and it took a couple of seconds for her brain to tell her that this was a hidden camera, and that it
had been positioned at a perfect angle to watch her while she was in the bath.

  Charlotte felt her skin crawl and she began to shake as the full ramifications of what she’d just discovered came home to her. Someone had come into her home – the home she’d loved since the day she and Jacques had first driven up to it eighteen years ago, the home they’d turned from an old wreck of a barn into a beautiful three-bedroom family home through years of hard work and dedication … someone had come in here, drilled a hole in the ceiling and was spying on her while she was naked and vulnerable. Charlotte loved her baths. They were her nightly ritual. A time for relaxation and reflection. Now that time, so precious these past few years, had been utterly defiled. God, for all she knew someone could even be watching her now.

  With an angry grunt, she grabbed the camera casing between her thumbnail and forefinger and tugged hard. The casing came loose with a crack, dislodging plaster dust, then came free altogether as she pulled again, leaving behind a hole in the ceiling the size of a penny. She moved her finger round inside the hole but there was nothing else in there.

  Charlotte got down off the chair and inspected the camera. There were no wires attached, but that wasn’t necessarily a surprise. Everything was wireless these days. She didn’t know a thing about spy cameras but this piece of kit looked expensive.

  Which begged a nasty question. Who had put it there?

  She hadn’t been burgled, and no workmen had been inside the house for months, so her first thought was that it must have been Lucien. After all, she didn’t know him that well, and he wasn’t friends with anyone she knew. He lived thirty kilometres away in Villeneuves, and they’d met online, so it was possible he was some kind of pervert, and he was just good at hiding it. But she quickly dismissed the theory. Lucien might have been handsome and macho but he was as cackhanded at DIY as she was. Also, he’d never been unattended in the house long enough to install it, and it wasn’t as if he needed to see her naked either. He’d done so plenty of times.

  Then who was it?

  And that was the thing. There was no obvious answer to that question. Charlotte was a normal, popular woman, respected by both the locals and the ex-pat community for her work at the local school who, as far as she knew, had no enemies, and who’d lived unmolested and unthreatened in this house for eighteen years.

  But someone was watching her, and his handiwork was recent. The camera hadn’t been there a week ago, she was sure of it. It might not even have been there yesterday.

  The bathroom felt tainted so she dried herself quickly in the bedroom and flung on a gown and slippers. It struck her that the person who’d planted the camera might actually still be in the house. It was highly unlikely, of course, but she wasn’t going to take any chances. Conscious of the silence, she went downstairs to the kitchen and pulled a carving knife from the knife rack. Kado, her little black Affenpinscher, was resting in his basket. He raised his head when he heard her then slipped back into sleep. He was far too small to be a guard dog but Charlotte knew that he’d have made a serious fuss if a stranger had come into the house. The problem was, out here, a mile and a half from the nearest village and a hundred metres at least from her nearest neighbour, Monsieur Dalon, who was half deaf anyway, Kado could make as much noise as he wanted and no one was going to hear. Charlotte had always perceived her isolation to be an advantage, a bulwark against the outside world, but no longer. Now it made her feel terribly vulnerable.

  She looked out of the kitchen window into the pitch-black night and felt very exposed. Maybe the person wasn’t inside at all. He could be out there in the darkness watching her right now and she wouldn’t know it.

  Clutching the knife tightly in her hand, she went from room to room, checking that the house was empty, before pulling down all the blinds and bolting the doors. No one was getting in here now.

  But they’ve already been in, whispered an unwelcome voice in her head.

  Picking up a reluctant Kado from his basket, Charlotte retreated to her bedroom and lay down on the bed with the dog next to her and the knife on the bedside table. Kado immediately fell asleep again, nuzzled up against her. This made her feel better, not because she liked having him on the bed with her – she didn’t – but because she was confident that it meant there was no one else in the house, otherwise he’d be making a lot of noise. Kado wasn’t a big fan of strangers.

  Charlotte sighed and looked at the knife, wondering if she could ever stab someone, then told herself to calm down. Yes, someone had invaded her home and installed a camera to film her in the bath, but it was probably some pathetic pervert from the village, someone who didn’t have the balls to ask her out. Not some evil serial killer planning to do her in. And when she found out who this person was – and she would find out – she’d report him to the police immediately.

  ‘This is my home,’ she whispered. ‘I am safe here.’

  But somehow she didn’t quite believe it.

  Four

  The boy from the burning house. That’s what the media had dubbed me back in the day.

  When I was seven years old, my father, a lazy drunk from a wealthy background, murdered my mother and two brothers in a fit of booze-induced rage. He would have killed me too if he’d been able to catch me, but I’d hidden in an upstairs cupboard of our rambling old country home while he’d roamed from room to room hunting me down. He’d even opened the cupboard where I was hiding, but I’d covered myself in a pile of old coats and somehow remained undiscovered. I will always remember those long, terrifying seconds that seemed to stretch for minutes as my father poked the blade of his knife into the coats, and I felt its tip against my skin, and I had to hold my breath and dared not move.

  In the end, the bastard had set fire to the house in a bid to smoke me out. My own father was that intent on killing me. Even now, sometimes, the thought makes me shudder.

  I’d had no choice but to break cover, and he’d spotted me. Then, with his clothes alight and a bloodied knife in his hand, he’d chased after me, screaming obscenities. To escape him, I’d had to jump from an upstairs window, landing in a flowerbed from where I’d been rescued, shivering and in shock, by firefighters shortly afterwards, somehow having avoided serious physical injury.

  Mentally, though, it was a different story. That night has haunted me all the way down the years, and no amount of therapy – and believe me, I’ve had a lot – has ever managed to consign it entirely to the past where it belongs. It’s also made people treat me differently, especially colleagues in the force. Everyone knows who I am. The boy from the burning house whose family was wiped out in a single act of extreme violence, who joined the army, and then the police; a man who’s been stalked by violence and controversy throughout his career.

  Someone you can’t quite trust.

  It was no real surprise, therefore, to find myself in an interview room at Ealing nick, dressed in police-issue overalls while my clothes were tested for DNA, having already had my hands tested for firearms residue, while opposite me sat two particularly grim-looking colleagues of mine from Ealing MIT. It was close to one a.m. and all I’d eaten that night was a forlorn-looking cheese and onion slice from the canteen that tasted like sawdust, so I wasn’t in the best of moods as I faced down my two inquisitors.

  DI Glenda Gardner, Olaf’s second in command, was one of the sternest, most humourless people I’d ever met. Everything about her was severe from her haircut to her trouser suits, but she was great at scaring the hell out of suspects just by sitting in a room and fixing them with one of her glares. Although I couldn’t stick her – and she couldn’t stick me – I rated her as a copper.

  Next to her sat DS ‘Taliban’ Tom Tucker, so-called because of the immense full-face beard he sported. He was only thirty-one, but the facial hair made him look like a ginger Father Christmas, and I was fairly certain that one day he’d look back at photos of himself from this era and wonder what the hell he’d been thinking. He was a pleasant enough guy but, like a l
ot of the graduate cops, he was a bit of a yes man with an eye on promotion.

  I’d just finished going through exactly what had happened that night in excruciating detail, and for the first time I was beginning to understand how the crims felt when they were sat in here.

  Except usually they were guilty of something.

  ‘So,’ said DI Glenda, fixing me with one of her trademark glares, ‘let me get this absolutely right. You get a call out of the blue from Maurice Reedman because, in his words, you’re the only man his client trusts, even though you’ve never actually met him before. You drive over there alone to see the two of them. They try to set up an immunity deal for Mr Forbes and when you go out to discuss this with DCI Olafsson, leaving the front door on the latch, three men turn up in a car, open the security gates, even though presumably they don’t have the code, then drive inside. They don’t see you but just go straight in the house through the open front door and kill both Mr Forbes and Mr Reedman. You try to make an audio recording of what’s going on, not a video recording, but the quality’s too poor to be of any use. Then, as the gunmen make their escape, they see you, there’s a struggle, shots are fired, but you’re unhurt.’

  ‘Well, I got a blow to the jaw.’

  ‘But you weren’t shot,’ said Taliban.

  ‘No, Tom,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t shot. He was going to shoot me, and he pulled the trigger, at point-blank range, but he’d run out of shells. They were in a hurry by then. They could hear the sirens. So they left.’

  ‘You seem remarkably unfazed considering all you’ve been through,’ said Glenda.

  It was true. I did come across as unfazed, but not because I hadn’t been shaken up by what happened. I had been. I just did a good job of holding my emotions in. But then I’d been holding them in my whole life.

  ‘I am fazed,’ I told her wearily. ‘But, as you know, it’s not the first time I’ve been in that kind of situation.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m sure it’ll hit me soon enough.’