The Bone Field Page 17

  Tina shook her head. ‘None. But they’re definitely determined, so you need to convince the cops to take this seriously.’

  Charlotte nodded, and Tina watched her go. She would have killed for a cigarette right then. She checked the kitchen drawers and cupboards, hunting round not only for a smoke but car keys, in case they needed to make a quick getaway, as well as any useful weapons. There were no cigarettes, and no sign of car keys either, but Tina did find a small, surprisingly sharp filleting knife which she slipped blade-down into the back pocket of her jeans.

  She walked into a musty-smelling living room where Charlotte was talking on the phone in French, sounding suitably dramatic.

  ‘The police are on their way,’ she said, putting down the phone, a relieved smile on her face.

  But just as Tina was allowing herself to relax for the first time that afternoon, there was a loud knock on the front door.

  Twenty-nine

  A figure appeared at the back window, moving stealthily. Tina got just enough of a look to see it was the young Frenchman who’d held her hostage earlier before yanking Charlotte down behind the sofa, and ducking out of sight herself.

  It was only going to take him a few seconds to realize that there’d been a break-in and then he’d know they were in here. Tina was also pretty certain that he wasn’t the same person who’d knocked on the front door. He wouldn’t have been able to get round the back quickly enough – which meant there were at least two of them. Potentially more. And this time they wouldn’t risk taking prisoners.

  Tina thought fast. She could already hear the young man at the back door, trying the handle.

  She motioned for Charlotte to stay put and crawled out from behind the sofa and along the floor before slowly standing up next to the doorway, slipping the knife from her back pocket, trying to keep out of sight of the back window.

  He was inside now, walking through the narrow hallway, only just the other side of the wall. Inches away.

  Slowly, his feet creaking on the floorboards, he stepped into the living room. At that moment, a number of things happened. First, he spotted Charlotte crouched down behind the sofa and immediately pointed the gun at her. Second, out of the corner of his eye he saw Tina standing against the wall, and swung round towards her. Third, the older French gunman appeared at the back window, saw his colleague, as well as Tina next to him in the shadows, and shouted a warning.

  Tina had a split second to react and she used it, leaping at the younger gunman, using one hand to knock his gun hand away and the other to shove the knife into his neck. Tina had killed three times in her life – always men who’d deserved it, and on whom she’d wasted no feelings of guilt – but she’d never stabbed anyone, and it was horrific seeing the blood spray from the gunman’s severed artery. Even so, she hugged him close to her, leaving the knife in there and turning him so he was blocking the view of the other gunman. At the same time she pulled the gun from his hand and fired a shot through the window.

  ‘Move!’ she screamed at Charlotte, letting the mortally wounded man drop to the floor and firing a second shot at the older man as he dived out of the way and out of sight.

  Charlotte didn’t move. It was as if she was frozen as she stood staring at the gunman dying on the floor in a rapidly growing pool of blood.

  With her finger still tensed on the trigger, Tina pulled her over to the back door. She opened it, pointed the gun round the corner so only her hand was exposed and fired two shots, one at chest height, one towards the ground, in case the gunman was lying in wait, then a shot in the other direction, before dragging Charlotte out of the door and frantically looking both ways. There was no one there so Tina thrust Charlotte forward, yelling at her to run.

  Charlotte sprinted across the back yard away from the house while Tina followed, running backwards, her eyes searching for the older gunman. Almost immediately he emerged firing, getting off three wild shots before he’d even clocked her position. During her time in the police Tina had been firearms-trained, and she was a good shot. Still running, she clutched the gun two-handed to steady it and fired a single shot back. It missed, but it was close enough to encourage the gunman to jump back behind the corner of the house.

  The yard ended with a low wooden fence that led into a freshly ploughed field sloping downwards to a line of trees. Charlotte was already over when Tina got to it. More shots rang out behind her as the older gunman got brave again. Tina turned and fired two more rounds back at him, noticing as she did so that a third gunman had appeared round the other side of the house and was also firing.

  Adrenalin coursed through her. The strange thing about these sorts of situations was that they never felt real, and events happened so fast that there was never enough time to feel fear. Tina remembered reading somewhere that soldiers in a battle never think they’re the ones who are going to be shot, and she understood that completely as she turned her gun on the newly arrived man and fired off another round, forcing him to jump behind a stone wall.

  She shoved the weapon in the front of her jeans, vaulted the fence and sprinted into the field, knowing that as a moving target she was going to be hard to hit.

  ‘Run! Run! Run!’ she yelled as she gained on Charlotte, keeping a good three yards from her so as not to make it too easy for the gunmen. Tears were running down Charlotte’s face as she ran at a pace she almost certainly hadn’t run in a long time. But then a gun at your back does that to a person. ‘Zigzag when you run!’ Tina encouraged her. ‘Make it hard for them!’ At the same time, she turned round and saw the two gunmen at the back fence taking aim. Almost immediately they began firing but they were a good thirty metres away and not good shots either. Tina fired back, again forcing them to take cover.

  And then she was pulling the trigger and nothing was happening. She threw the gun down, turned and hared off down the slope.

  Even when they hit the tree line neither of them stopped. There was no path and they had to force their way through the undergrowth. Charlotte’s breathing was coming in short, desperate pants but, credit to her, she kept going.

  Tina looked over her shoulder. All she could see were trees but she knew their pursuers wouldn’t give up. She wondered how the gunmen had been able to find them so quickly, and guessed that whoever was in the car they’d seen on the road had also seen them. As the immediacy of the danger they were in passed and her adrenalin began to fade, Tina felt the fear begin inside her gut. She’d come close to being killed back there, and once again her luck had held. But she knew, as she’d always known, that it couldn’t hold for ever. That was what was keeping her running now, a fear that if she didn’t run, the end might come today.

  They must have gone two hundred metres through the woods when a ravine opened up directly in front of them. They stopped at the edge. The ravine stretched in both directions and there was a steep, almost vertical drop of about forty feet down to a wide stream below.

  ‘Oh God,’ panted Charlotte. ‘We’ve got to get down there?’

  ‘There’s no other way as far as I can see. We’re just going to have to climb down the slope.’

  ‘I don’t think I—’

  ‘There’s no choice, Charlotte,’ Tina said, looking her in the eye. ‘If we get down there, it makes us harder to follow. But we’ve got to move.’ She squeezed Charlotte’s shoulders. ‘This’ll all be over soon, I promise.’

  Charlotte put on a brave smile. ‘Thank God I’ve got you with me. It’s my first bit of luck for a long time.’

  And then, without warning, a gun went off and she staggered forward into Tina’s arms, her eyes wide with shock, the smile freezing on her face.

  Over her shoulder, Tina saw the man in the black fedora standing in the trees, only a few metres away, a gun pointed straight at Tina. She only got the barest glimpse of his face. He was old, in his sixties, with a heavily lined face, but what she would always remember about him was his completely calm, almost serene demeanour, as if he’d been waiting there the w
hole time for them to arrive.

  As he fired again, Tina jumped into the ravine, pulling Charlotte with her. Suddenly she was hurtling down the near-vertical slope. She lost her grip on Charlotte, struck a bush that knocked her off course, and then she was immersed in cool water, slamming her back against a rock on the bottom.

  For a couple of seconds she was too dazed to move, then she opened her eyes, saw Charlotte lying face up and motionless in the water a few feet away, and grabbed her by the shoulders, pulling her into the shelter of a narrow cut in the bank caused by the water’s flow. A bullet hissed by and struck the water a couple of metres away. Tina looked up. From the angle she was at now she could no longer see the top of the ravine, which meant the gunman wouldn’t be able to see her.

  She looked down at Charlotte. The back of her dress was red with blood. More blood ran from her nose, and a bruise was already beginning to form on her forehead. Her eyes flickered open and tried to focus on Tina. She was whispering something, but even when she put her ear right down to her lips, Tina couldn’t make out what she was trying to say.

  Then her eyes closed again, and her breathing grew more shallow.

  ‘Don’t die on me,’ hissed Tina, pushing her hand against the bullet wound she could see, trying to stop the bleeding as the plaintive wail of a far-away siren started up in the distance. ‘Don’t you dare die on me.’

  Thirty

  The incident room was abuzz with activity when I walked in just after 4.30. There must have been twenty people in there and the bulk of them were crowded round a single desk, including Olaf and my nemesis, DI Glenda Gardner. Jools was at her desk and she nodded when she saw me, and gave me a barely perceptible thumbs-up.

  Other people turned round too, as if an apparition had just walked in. It didn’t make me feel any more welcome. Glenda gave me the kind of look she usually reserved for sex offenders, but Olaf gave me a big smile, which I wasn’t expecting, and peeled away from the group.

  ‘Ah, the man himself. I was just about to call you. Where have you been?’

  ‘I’ve got a potential lead for you, boss,’ I said quietly. ‘But I need to discuss it in private. What’s going on here?’ I motioned towards the group at the desk.

  ‘We’ve got a lead too. Come and look at this.’

  He led the way over to the desk and the rest of the group moved out of my way. Glenda glared at me as I passed but I ignored her.

  A large-screen PC was on the desk, and the screen was frozen at what appeared to be a view from an upstairs window at night. The icon at the bottom of the screen showed that it was the beginning of a one-minute-eighteen-second video clip. For a single terrifying moment I thought it might be footage taken from the scene of the Bill Morris murder last night – footage that would incriminate me – but I quickly dismissed this. If they thought I’d had anything to do with Morris’s murder I’d be in handcuffs right now and they wouldn’t be going through this pretence. Even so, the view could easily have been into Morris’s back garden and it spooked me.

  Olaf leaned down beside me and pressed play. ‘We got sent this an hour ago by a bloke who lives three miles away from Maurice Reedman’s house.’

  The footage was high-quality and clearly filmed on a handheld camcorder from the man’s bedroom as he looked down beyond his garden fence to a tree-lined track the other side of it. I could just make out a black BMW X5 and, as the camera panned into the darkness, I could see a man with his back to the camera, changing the rear number plate. At the same time another man came into view. He was no longer wearing a mask but it was impossible to see his face as he hurried past the back of the car and into the trees, setting off the intruder light in the cameraman’s garden as he did so.

  ‘The bloke lives in a quiet area,’ continued Olaf, ‘and he was upstairs when he heard a car pull up round the side of his house, so he decided to take a look in case they were burglars. This footage was taken nine minutes after your call to me ended, so the timings fit for the getaway vehicle. Now watch what this dirty bastard does.’

  He pointed at the guy without the mask who, as the cameraman filmed, squatted against one of the trees, half facing towards the house, his every action lit up by the intruder lights, and proceeded to take a remarkably rapid shit. I knew from my time in uniform that burglars in particular like to shit in the houses they rob. It’s not so much a sign of disrespect, more a product of adrenalin, and I guessed this was the case here. A couple of the guys watching chuckled, including Olaf, while the women made noises of disgust, as did the cameraman. But he kept filming, panning in as far as he could on the guy’s face. The camera blurred as it moved towards close-up but it had got enough of him for a possible ID. And there was something else too: the arms of his jacket were rolled up, revealing a sleeve tattoo on his left forearm.

  I stood back from the screen as the guy pulled up his jeans and jogged back to the car, disappearing from view. ‘That’s the man I fought with,’ I said to Olaf, feeling vindicated. ‘And as you may recall, DI Gardner,’ I continued, addressing Glenda, ‘I described him as mixed race, with a scar near his collarbone and a sleeve tattoo on his left forearm. And there he is.’

  Glenda nodded, her mouth closed and lips pursed tight. She was breathing through her nose as if she didn’t trust herself not to blow her top.

  I didn’t get an apology. Nor did I expect one. Instead I turned back to the film, watching as it ended with the BMW reversing down the track and out on to the road with its lights off. The cameraman tried to get the registration number but it was too dark. Not that it mattered. This was a major lead, and a real piece of luck.

  ‘Good work, Ray,’ said Olaf, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘We’ve got a few good stills we’ve circulated to the super-recognizers so, if he’s known, we’ll have a name.’

  The super-recognizers are the Met’s team of some two hundred officers, spread out over the boroughs, who all share a talent for remembering faces. Set up in the wake of the 2011 riots, they regularly outperform even the most up-to-date software when it comes to IDing suspects. If anyone was going to put a name to the man who’d almost killed me, it would be one of them.

  Olaf led me away from the group and into his office, closing the door behind him. He had some coffee bubbling away in his percolator and he poured us both a cup.

  ‘I tell you, Ray,’ he said with a satisfied sigh when we were sitting opposite each other, ‘I don’t know how he managed that.’

  ‘How who managed what?’ I said, confused.

  ‘The suspect on the film. Taking a shit that fast. That must be a world record. And then to not fucking wipe.’ He shook his head and gave me a man-to-man look. ‘What sort of filthy sod does that, Ray? Eh?’

  ‘The kind of filthy sod who gets himself caught. The kind we like.’

  I smiled, and he smiled back. I could tell he was in a good mood. The pressure was off him a little, now that we were making progress.

  ‘So what have you got for me?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve heard from a source that the hit on Forbes and Reedman was the work of the Kalamans.’

  ‘Who’s the source?’

  ‘It comes from an old colleague of mine via a source within the Kalaman outfit. You know who they are, don’t you?’

  Olaf shrugged, his neck momentarily disappearing into his shoulders. ‘I’ve heard the name a few times,’ he said noncommittally.

  ‘Then you know what’ll happen to the source if word gets out about him.’

  ‘And is he an official CHIS?’ Olaf asked, using the official police acronym for an informant.

  ‘As far as I know,’ I lied.

  ‘Have you got names for the gunmen?’

  ‘No, but my old colleague’s working on it. I’ll need to send him photos of our suspect. And just so you know this isn’t some bullshit lead, Cem Kalaman, the leader of the gang, attended Medmenham College for seven years in the 1980s, so he had the intimate knowledge of the grounds that at least one of the killers would have
needed. And that’s not all.’ I took a deep breath. ‘I’ve just heard from Chesterman over at Thames Valley that the school caretaker at the time the girls went missing was found hanging at his home last night. An intruder was spotted leaving by a neighbour, so the killing looks suspicious.’

  Olaf pulled a face. ‘Blimey. Not another dead body. I’m assuming it’s connected to this.’

  I nodded. ‘I’d say so. You remember I told you yesterday I thought Dana Brennan and Kitty Sinn were murdered in the grounds of Medmenham College, and that I didn’t think it could have been done without the caretaker at the time knowing something about it? Well, he may not have been actively involved but I’m guessing he turned a blind eye to people coming on to the property in the summer holidays, probably for money. He was a loose end.’

  Olaf sighed. ‘Like Henry Forbes. These killers are good at tying up loose ends.’ He took a gulp of his coffee and spilled a bit down his shirt. ‘What about Tina Boyd?’ he asked, moving his tie to cover the stain. ‘Has she had any joy with that woman Forbes was trying to find?’

  ‘Charlotte Curtis. I haven’t heard back from her. I’ve left a couple of messages.’ In fact I’d left three, the last one only ten minutes earlier. I wasn’t panicking yet. It might be that Charlotte lived in a place with no phone reception and they were still there talking, but I was beginning to feel a little uneasy.

  Olaf gave me a serious look. ‘You’ve done good, Ray. I was coming under a lot of pressure from above to pull you off the case because of what happened the other night.’

  ‘I hear DI Gardner wanted me off the case as well.’

  ‘She’s just doing her job.’

  ‘She was suggesting I was corrupt in some way. I’m not.’

  Olaf sighed. ‘I’ve always known that. But let’s put it behind us, eh? We’re still a long way from solving this case.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, getting to my feet and taking my coffee with me.