The Bone Field Page 14

  ‘Since then he’s massively expanded the business. Annual turnover from the legitimate and illegitimate sides of the business is now estimated at over a billion a year, and that’s a conservative estimate. You can buy a lot of people with that kind of money, and they have. They’ve also bought privacy. The names of Cem Kalaman and his associates never appear in any newspapers. No one outside law enforcement has any idea who they are. Even you don’t know much about them.’

  He paused.

  ‘Three years ago, a freelance investigative journalist did some digging and wrote a pretty explosive piece about them. The Kalamans’ lawyers slapped an injunction on the journalist and the newspaper that was going to print the story, effectively killing it. Three months after that, the journalist was found dead in his bath with his wrists slashed. The body of his girlfriend was in their bedroom. She’d been beaten to death with an iron. There’d never been any history of domestic violence in the relationship, and none of the neighbours reported hearing an argument or fight on the night they died. Even so, the verdict was murder suicide. Case closed.’

  I sighed. ‘Jesus. I never even heard about that, and I read the papers.’

  ‘It didn’t make many column inches, and no newspaper printed the connection between the journalist and the Kalamans. No one wanted to get involved, because if you cross the Kalamans, there are unpleasant consequences. These people have been around for the best part of fifty years. That’s a lot of time to build up contacts, and they’ve got some very good ones. You remember what it was like at Soca. Go for the easier targets, leave the hard ones alone. It’s the same at the NCA. I’m running the official investigation into the Kalamans, and do you know how many people I’ve got? Two.’

  That was exactly what it was like when I’d worked organized crime. We never went after the big boys. Just the mid-rankers. It was why I’d left.

  ‘So what have they got to do with the Forbes murder?’ I asked him.

  Dan took a long look round to check we weren’t in earshot of anyone before continuing. ‘Because it’s so hard to build a case against them, our efforts have been aimed at turning someone within their organization. And now we’ve got someone. He’s given us some good titbits of information. This morning he called telling me there’s a rumour that the Kalamans were directly involved in Henry Forbes’s murder.’

  ‘What else does he know?’

  ‘Nothing more than that.’

  I didn’t say anything for a few moments as I digested this new information. It made sense. Henry Forbes had been terrified of the people who’d killed Kitty Sinn, and had said that they had friends in very high places, and a long reach. Also, only an organized crime outfit like the Kalamans would have been able to pull together a three-man assassination team armed with high-quality weapons at such short notice.

  ‘I fought with one of the gunmen,’ I told Dan. ‘He was about five feet ten, I think mixed race, and he had a sleeve tattoo on his left forearm and a one-inch scar on his neck, here.’ I pointed to a spot just above my collarbone. ‘Does he ring any bells with you?’

  ‘Not off the top of my head,’ said Dan, ‘but I’ll get our asset to keep an eye out.’

  ‘I think whoever ordered Henry Forbes’s killing was also involved in the murders of Dana Brennan and Kitty Sinn. How old’s Cem Kalaman?’

  ‘Forty-eight.’

  ‘So he would have been in his early twenties when the girls died. You said his father wanted him to become a doctor or a lawyer and not go into the family business, so I’m guessing he had a decent education. Do you know where he went to school?’

  Dan shook his head. ‘No, but I can find out now if you want. It’ll just take a phone call.’

  ‘Please.’

  We were at the edge of the park now, a long way from anyone, and it had started to rain, big heavy drops that suggested more to come. I waited patiently while Dan made the call, hoping that the gods were smiling down on me.

  A minute later he came off the phone. ‘Medmenham College,’ he said. ‘That’s the place where the bodies were found, isn’t it?’

  I nodded, swallowing down a sudden feeling of euphoria. Finally, I was beginning to get somewhere. ‘That’s right. So, now we’ve got a connection between Cem Kalaman and the victims. What I haven’t got is motive. The conventional wisdom has always been that Dana Brennan’s killing had a sexual motive. Has Kalaman got any predilections that way?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Dan, ‘but I’m sure if he had he’d keep them quiet. He’s a family man these days with a wife and three kids.’

  I took out my phone and scrolled through the photos until I came to the one I was looking for, then handed him the phone. ‘Forbes had a tattoo on his underarm similar to this sign I photographed at an abandoned building near the school yesterday. The killers tried to burn it off him. Have you seen anything like it before?’ It was a long shot, but one worth taking now I was here.

  Dan stared at it for a long time and his body seemed to bristle with tension. ‘This isn’t good,’ he said quietly, before handing back the phone.

  ‘What is it?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I’ve seen this sign before. Back in my National Crime Squad days. We raided a house belonging to an Albanian people trafficker who was wanted for murder. We found the suspect and his girlfriend there. They’d both been tortured to death and the house had been ripped apart, as if the killers had been looking for something. It was a mess in there, Ray. They’d died badly, and they’d been gone a couple of days when we found them. During the search of the place, one of the SOCOs found a loose floorboard in one of the rooms, pulled it up, and found a carrier bag hidden in the space below it. There was twelve grand in cash inside. That, and a DVD. After it had been tested for prints and DNA, a couple of us played it back at the station.’ He stopped and shook his head slowly, and his voice cracked when he spoke again. ‘What was on it, I will never forget.’

  ‘Tell me,’ I said, even though a part of me didn’t want to hear.

  ‘It was footage of three men in a room, their faces hidden by black hoods, assaulting, raping and finally killing a young woman on a bed. The whole film lasted about ten minutes, the quality wasn’t all that good, and there was no sound, but it was still one of the most horrendous things I’ve ever seen. And painted on the wall behind the bed was a symbol exactly like the one you’ve just shown me.’

  Now it was my turn to take a deep breath. I’m no expert when it comes to technology, but recordable DVDs were not around in 1990, so I dispelled my initial thought, that the young woman in the film could have been either Dana or Kitty.

  ‘Did you ever find out who killed your suspect and his girlfriend?’ I asked Dan.

  He shook his head. ‘No. The case was a dead end. He had a lot of enemies but my guess is that he was blackmailing someone with that footage, and they came looking for it.’

  ‘Where’s the DVD now?’

  ‘Archived, I suppose. As I said, it was a long time ago and it was never proven that the footage was real. I’ve always thought it was, though, and in the light of what you’ve shown me, I think I was right to. I’ll go back and pull out the case notes from that murder, and see if there’s any link between the Albanian and the Kalamans. And I’ll talk to my inside man about IDing the shooter you tangled with.’

  ‘Thanks. We need that shooter. If we get him in custody, he might talk.’

  Dan put a hand on my arm and gave me a serious look. ‘You’ve got to help me here, Ray. This op with our informant – it’s not exactly official. We’re running it off the books.’

  ‘Jesus. Is that wise?’

  ‘It’s the only way we’re going to get anywhere, I promise you. But the point is, I don’t want anything to get out about it, or else I’m finished, and so’s the whole investigation into the Kalamans. So for the moment, your info comes from an anonymous source, OK? And if I get you the shooter’s name, you need to let me know before you make an arrest so I can warn my info
rmant.’ He put out a hand. ‘Deal?’

  There are stringent rules in place governing the police’s use of informants. Sometimes they’re bent a little by officers, but it’s a very risky business, and a sackable offence, and I was surprised that a family man like Dan with close to twenty years’ service under his belt, and who I’d always thought was straight as a die, would take that risk. He must have wanted the Kalaman outfit very badly.

  ‘Deal,’ I said, and shook his hand.

  The wind had picked up, whipping the rain into us, and Dan pulled up the collar of his jacket. ‘I need to go. You’re digging up some good stuff on the Kalamans, Ray, and they’re not going to like it. Tread carefully.’

  ‘Sounds like we both should,’ I said, and watched as he walked away, his shoulders just a little more slumped than they had been earlier, as if I’d woken memories within him he’d prefer to have kept hidden.

  Twenty-five

  Tina Boyd was a fit woman. She went to the gym three times a week and ran 10K every Sunday, but close to twenty-five years of smoking a pack a day had taken its toll, and her breaths were coming in painful gasps by the time she and Charlotte Curtis stopped running.

  She leaned against a tree to get her breath back while Charlotte stood a few feet away, head bowed with her hands on her knees, panting like a dog. They hadn’t seen a single person since they’d fled into the valley, at least a mile back now. They’d followed the stream at a hard run as it meandered through a narrow, twisting valley screened by wood-covered hills on both sides. Numerous paths and tracks disappeared off it like tree roots, every one of them a potential ambush point.

  ‘Where are we heading?’ she asked Charlotte once her breathing was finally heading back to normal. Behind them, the countryside stretched back, green and verdant. There was no sign of pursuit. No sign of anything. They might as well have been standing there a thousand years ago.

  Charlotte straightened up. Her face was red and sweaty, her eyes still alive with fear. ‘I don’t know. Anywhere away from here.’ She looked at Tina. ‘Thank you. For what you did back there.’

  ‘That’s OK. They may have wanted you alive, but I don’t think they were quite so bothered about me.’ Tina cleared her throat and wiped her brow, patting her jeans pockets. ‘Shit.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I left my cigarettes in the hire car.’

  ‘And you’re worried about them now?’

  ‘I never like to be too far away from them.’ She looked round. ‘Where does this path lead?’

  ‘The valley keeps going for a long way. Twenty kilometres at least, but it crosses a couple of roads eventually, and there are paths leading out at various points. The nearest village is about an hour’s fast walk from here.’

  ‘They’ll expect us to go there.’

  ‘These men definitely aren’t local, they won’t know the area.’

  Tina wasn’t convinced. ‘They can read maps and they’re not fools. There are also quite a few of them. I counted four altogether. They’ll keep at least one back, and the others will try to cut us off at some point. We need to get off this path, and keep moving away from your house.’

  Charlotte wiped her brow with the hem of her dress. She looked like she was about to cry. ‘What’s going on? Look at me. I’m just an ordinary housewife. I’ve never done a thing wrong in my life, and now suddenly all these people are after me. They think I know something about Kitty Sinn. They’ve been spying on me for God knows how long, and then yesterday a masked man came into my house and—’ She stopped, her face twisted with emotion.

  Tina waited for her to continue.

  ‘He killed my dog. Cut its throat, and then told me that if anyone came asking about Kitty Sinn, I was to tell them nothing or the same would happen to me.’

  Tina frowned. ‘Was it one of the men who held us prisoner today?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I think this one was English, although he had a trace of an eastern European accent.’

  ‘So, what do you know? Henry Forbes hired me to track you down, and he wanted to talk to you urgently about Kitty.’

  Charlotte sighed and looked round. ‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since I found out about Kitty. Do you think she even went to Thailand?’

  Tina considered this. ‘It seems impossible, but there were witnesses who said she did. So I guess she did.’

  ‘Just before you turned up today, I remembered something that seemed strange at the time, but which I’d totally forgotten. Now, though, it seems relevant.’

  ‘Go on.’

  There was a pause before Charlotte continued. She wiped her brow a second time, still panting a little. ‘You know, Kitty was so excited about that Thailand trip. She was an only child and her mum was very protective of her, and this was her first proper holiday on her own, probably ever. We had goodbye drinks on the Thursday night in Brighton. Just the girls.’ Charlotte smiled. ‘I’ll always remember it. We pub-crawled all the way across Brighton and ended up losing everyone along the way, so in the end it was just me and Kitty. She was staying at my place, and on the way home we climbed some scaffolding round a church and sat up on the roof looking out over the whole of Brighton. It was a really warm night and we sat there with this amazing view, and chatted until the sun started coming up. Later that day we said our goodbyes because she was going to a party with Henry that night and then they were leaving the following day for Thailand. And I never saw her again.’

  Charlotte continued to smile as she remembered that final evening, then frowned. ‘Except I did. I was walking on Grand Parade on the Saturday they were leaving. It was mid-afternoon and this taxi came past and stopped at the traffic lights. I saw Henry in the back so I walked over to say hello. The thing was, it was as if he didn’t want to see me. He looked away so I leaned down and banged on the window. I could see Kitty in the back with him but she was looking away as well, as if she didn’t want to see me either, which wasn’t like her at all. We were best friends. Eventually, Henry turned my way. I was motioning him to open the window so I could say goodbye, but he wasn’t having any of it. He just gave me this little wave. So I tried to get Kitty’s attention but she just gave me this little wave as well and tried not to look my way either, as if she was embarrassed. Then the lights turned green, the cab pulled away, and I was just left there staring after it.’

  Charlotte shook her head, seemingly deep in thought. ‘At the time I was upset, but I put it down to the fact that they must have had a big argument and just didn’t feel like talking. I thought Kitty might have tried to phone me from the airport and apologize, or at least leave a message on my answering machine. But she never did, which again wasn’t like her at all. She would never have got on a plane, having been that rude to me, without giving me some sort of explanation.’

  Charlotte sighed. ‘I really resented her for treating me like that, even after I heard she’d gone missing. And it’s only today – God, what is it, twenty-six years later – that it suddenly occurs to me there was something not quite right about Kitty that day. The woman in the car looked like her – she had the same hair, the same profile – but the more I think about it now, the more I’m convinced that it wasn’t her at all. It was someone else.’

  Twenty-six

  It had been a very late night, thanks to Junior insisting Ramon join him for a drink after they’d finished delivering their cargo, so it was after two when Ramon finally opened his eyes to begin the new day, and it took him a few minutes to summon up the energy to clamber slowly out of bed.

  He chucked on some clothes and wandered into the kitchen, hunting for food to ease the growling in his stomach. The place was a mess, and apart from a Pot Noodle and a couple of blackening bananas on the sideboard, there was nothing edible. He missed the discipline of prison, of getting up in the morning, eating meals when they were served to you, going to the gym, to classes. His days had been mapped out for him then. Now, unless Junior needed him for something, he was his own boss, and
he wasn’t very good at it.

  But this was the story of Ramon’s life. He just wasn’t very good at things. When they’d released him from the pen with a little bit of money and some basic qualifications, he’d tried to go straight. But no one wanted to employ him. It wasn’t just that he was a criminal, it was the fact that he was a killer too, and no one wanted to work next to a killer. It was mad really. One single moment of insanity when he’d been nothing more than a kid and he was left with something that was going to follow him around for the rest of his life.

  In the end, broke, pissed off, and living alone on the tenth floor of a tower block where he knew no one, it was inevitable that Ramon would end up going back into crime. It hadn’t taken long to happen. One day, a guy he knew from the old days back on the estate had approached him in the street. The guy’s name was Strike and he wanted Ramon to work as his bodyguard. The pay was three hundred a week cash. Ramon was on sixty-two notes a week plus housing benefit from the social, so it took him all of three seconds to say yes.

  Strike managed ten different crackhouses spread out across north-east London. He delivered them product, and collected the takings every day. Then, when he’d made sure that the takings were right, and he wasn’t getting ripped off, he delivered the cash to another address. Obviously carrying this sort of money and product around was a dangerous business, not so much from the Feds but from two-bit gangbangers looking to make an easy buck by holding him up, so he needed a bodyguard. Ramon was big and scary-looking, and his murder conviction gave him street cred, so he was the perfect choice. He knew he shouldn’t be getting involved, but the thought of all that money … In the end, it just turned his head.