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  She’s a good kisser and I can feel the inner wolf being aroused. I put my hand on the back of her neck and draw her into my kiss as my other hand touches her knee, then moves up her leg under the hem of the dress, caressing her thigh. And I’m wondering to myself: am I looking at a lover for the night? Or a victim?

  Her

  The champagne’s perfect, and Greg/Matt is great company. Handsome and charming, with a beautiful smile. But you know, the problem with men like him – men who have no real respect for women, or indeed any empathy for them – is they think they’ve got you. They don’t realize that other people can be just as intelligent and observant as they are, and see right through them.

  But I’ve got to admit, I’m having fun too. If you know what you’re getting then you’re not going to be disappointed, so when he leans forward to kiss me I kiss him right back, and I even let his hand drift up my thigh, although he has the good sense not to rush and instead lets his hand linger a few inches above the knee, his forefinger drawing delicate circles on my skin.

  ‘I’m going to need to go to the bathroom before we go any further,’ I tell him, thinking it’s quite hard to drag myself away from his touch. I haven’t been with a man for several months now – not since some cock of a guy I met on Tinder who seemed to think sex with a woman was a race against time – and I miss the touch of a man. I get the feeling that Greg/Matt knows what he’s doing between the sheets too.

  I walk across the deck as the light from a perfect half moon sparkles across the sea and a warm breeze envelops me. It really is a good night to be alive, I think. Following the directions I’ve been given, I go through the wheelhouse and down steps that take me through a spacious lounge area with two long sofas and a huge TV screen dominating one wall. The toilet is down a corridor on the right. Further along I can hear the TV blaring out of Frank the bodyguard’s room. It sounds like he’s watching porn.

  I lock the bathroom door behind me and stare at myself in the mirror. When I was a young girl I used to imagine the life I’d be living when I was older. I’m forty-two now and, by this age, I was convinced I’d be happily married to a nice guy and with lovely children. And instead here I am on a horny stranger’s boat in the middle of the Caribbean, thousands of miles from home. For a moment I feel a pang of utter regret.

  Then I force the emotion aside, throw cold water on my face to wake myself up, and prepare for what I have to do.

  Him

  Well, you already know I’ve killed once. And when you enjoy something, you want to do it again, right?

  But I’m no fool. I was lucky to get away with killing Elizabeth, and suspicion still hangs over my head about that one, hence the fact that I left the States. However, one of the great things about being free to roam wherever you want is that opportunities are always arising. Three years ago, I was in Bocas del Toro, a set of beautiful islands on the Caribbean coast of Panama – you ought to go there, it’s totally unspoiled – and I met this chick from Oregon who was backpacking through central America. She was twenty-nine years old and an absolute peach. I can’t remember her name but I remember the body. I was in a beach bar, just like today, she came past, we chatted, I got her back to the boat, and that was it… I went to town on her. I can’t remember whether I planned to kill her or not but, either way, when we were in bed she started playing up – trying to get me to stop hurting her – and that just turned me on even more. By the time I’d finished, she was in such a bad way I had to finish her off.

  I offered Frank a ten grand bonus to help me clean up the mess and we sailed away that night, chopped her up, then sent the bits of her overboard for the sharks to eat, leaving no one any the wiser. I did it again in San Andrés with a Colombian girl over from the mainland, who was working as a waitress. One look at my yacht and she was hooked. She ended up as sharkfeed too, while Frank got another ten grand richer. But, like I say, I’m careful. I only do it when I’m certain no one can pin me to the crimes.

  This time round I’m not so sure. St Lucia’s less of an out-of-the-way place, and this chick – Jane, that’s her name – is staying at a well-known resort where she’s likely to be missed. She might even have told someone where she was going.

  But you see, that’s the beauty of being able to sail wherever I please. Nobody knows who I am. I can be gone just like that. So I guess what I’m saying is, I haven’t made my decision yet, and I know Frank won’t care either way because he likes the money.

  So it’s 50–50. Does she live? Does she die?

  And do you know what? As I come down the steps into the lounge, I’m beginning to think she’s got to die. The thing is, she’s too pretty to let go, and there’s something about her I can’t trust. For a start she knows who I am, and that’s bad. How do I know she won’t tell anyone, or even sell the story of how she slept with the infamous Greg Fairman etc etc? That’s what women are like. The bitches can never keep their mouths shut. And that really pisses me off.

  I take out a large filleting knife from the drawer just beneath the row of used paperbacks, and immediately it’s as if all my pleasure receptors have flooded my body with euphoria. I can’t stop myself now. I’m going to have to have her.

  The door to the lounge opens on the other side of the room and she steps inside, looking for something in her handbag.

  She stops, senses me in the room, and looks up. We face each other, and she sees the knife down by my side. The blade is very bright and very sharp, and her eyes widen.

  ‘How you doing?’ I say, unable to stop myself from grinning.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she says, unable to take her eyes off the knife. Her face shows concern but not the outright fear I like to see.

  ‘We’re going to have a little party,’ I tell her, ‘and if you do what you’re told, I’ll drop you back on land later.’ I don’t give her time to take in what I’m saying. The way to establish control is not to give the other person time to think. So I lift the knife and stride towards her, my eyes boring into hers, my free hand reaching out to grab her arm.

  But she’s fast. Turning on her heel, she runs back down the corridor, slamming the door shut behind her. The problem for her, though, is there’s no escape that way. I locked the door at the other end of the corridor before she came on board just in case of this eventuality, so she’s trapped. And Frank’s down there too, in his cabin. It’s time to get him to earn his money, so I shout his name at the top of my voice. ‘Frank, I need your help here. We’ve got a runner.’

  I open the door to the corridor, taking a fighting stance in case the bitch is planning an ambush, but she’s not there and the far end of the corridor is in darkness; I can’t see her anywhere. The only light’s coming from the crack in the door to Frank’s cabin, and I wonder if the bastard’s sitting there with his headphones on watching TV. I can hear it blaring in there, playing porn by the sound of things. Jesus, you can’t get the help these days.

  I shove open Frank’s door and am just about to yell at him to come and give me a hand finding this bitch when the words stop in my throat. Frank’s lying on his double bed, head propped up on a couple of pillows, wearing the same clothes he was wearing earlier, but there’s a hole where one of his eyes used to be, a deep slash mark on his throat, and the sheets around him are soaked in blood. At first I’m confused. Then I’m scared. Someone’s killed him. Someone on this boat. Someone who knows what they’re doing. Because it’s clear from how he’s lying that he didn’t even have time to react.

  I hear a noise behind me and bang, someone’s on me in the darkness, slamming me back against the wall, twisting my wrist so hard it forces me to drop the knife. A head slams into my face and I feel pain like I’ve never felt before shooting up from my nose. I’m wobbling on my feet like a punch-drunk boxer, completely overwhelmed by the suddenness of the attack, so shocked that it takes a second to register that there’s a new pain in my groin, not as intense but somehow I know it’s worse because I can feel wetness coming down my legs,
and then I manage to stagger back into the light of the lounge.

  And that’s when I look down and see the knife handle sticking out of my crotch, and I just have to time to feel truly sorry for myself that I’ve ended up like this, before mercifully I faint.

  Her

  I have to splash water on Greg’s face to wake him up. By this time I’ve removed the knife from what’s left of his ball sac and roughly bandaged it up to stop him bleeding to death. He’s lying on his back between the two sofas, his right hand cuffed to the leg of the glass coffee table, and he looks up at me, blinking, his face understandably pale and splattered with blood where I bust his nose, and when he sees me holding the throwing knife by the tip of the blade, his eyes widen. He knows I killed Frank, he knows I mean business, and it scares the shit out of him.

  ‘Call me an ambulance,’ he demands, his voice weak. ‘I’m hurt. Badly. You need to get me help. You stabbed me.’

  ‘I was always going to stab you, Greg,’ I tell him. ‘It’s just I’d planned to do it at the dinner table. But you got a little impatient. But then that’s you all over, isn’t it? You just can’t control your impulses. That’s how we found you.’

  ‘Who’s we? Who are you?’

  It’s very rare I get to talk about my work, and he’s not going to be blurting it out to anyone else, so I tell him. About how I was hired by Elizabeth White’s older brother Robert, himself a wealthy entrepreneur, to avenge the death of his sister. Robert’s own investigators had tracked Greg down to this particular yacht in the Caribbean and it was they too, who’d connected him to the disappearance of American backpacker Shelley Romano in Panama, and then the following year to the disappearance of Colombian waitress Roberta Penĕz. From there it hadn’t been very hard for me to track the yacht’s movements and initiate a meeting between Greg and myself.

  I shrug. ‘And that leaves us here and now.’

  He still looks confused. ‘But why hire you?’

  ‘Because, like you, I’m a killer, Greg. The difference is I’m a professional and you’re an amateur. That’s why I’m up here and you’re down there with a hole in your balls.’

  ‘I’ll double whatever they’re paying you, if you just get me help.’

  I shake my head. ‘It doesn’t work like that. Otherwise I’d be out of business.’

  If you’re a professional like me, you spot warning signs and I spot one now. Greg is still talking to me, offering me the yacht, more money, the whole works, the strangled desperation of the condemned in his voice, but twice now, he’s glanced behind me, the movement of his eyes barely perceptible. But sometimes that word – barely – is the difference between life and death.

  I swing round fast.

  A short Asian man in a black smock is standing there with a very sharp-looking cleaver raised above his head, ready to land a blow on the back of mine. For a single moment he freezes in shock, surprised by my speed. The throwing knife leaves my hand and hits him blade-first in the throat. He makes a strange gurgling noise and the cleaver wobbles in his hand, so I give him a quick kick between the legs and he crashes backwards through the door and lands on his back.

  Behind me I hear Greg wriggling round but he’s not going anywhere. I retrieve my knife and turn back. ‘So who’s he?’ I ask.

  ‘The chef,’ he gasps.

  ‘Jesus. So you even lied about preparing dinner?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, like it makes any difference.

  ‘Anyone else on board I should know about?’

  He shakes his head, and I shake mine too. ‘You really are a piece of crap,’ I tell him, raising the knife. ‘I usually don’t take pleasure in my work, but tonight I’m going to make an exception.’

  Two hours later, I can see the dark shadow of the island of Martinique in the distance, the lights of the villages on the southern coastline shimmering in the darkness. Greg lies dead on the lounge floor and the yacht’s wiped clean of my prints. However, I’m not one to take chances. I’ve been doing this a long time now – killing people for money – and the reason I’ve survived as long as I have is because I’m extremely cautious. Right now, aside from my clients, only one person knows what I do for a living.

  My psychiatrist friend Vincent might have been an awful lover, but we share a deep mental connection and I trust him. He’s efficient too, so when he says he’s going to meet me at specific coordinates in the St Lucia Gulf two miles south of the beach at Grande Anse des Salines, I know he’ll be there, and he is.

  I swing Greg’s yacht round so that it’s alongside the powerboat Vincent’s driving, and pull off my blood-spattered dress so I’m naked except for my underwear and handbag. Then, feeling a sense of liberation, I set the yacht’s coordinates to a point deep into the Caribbean Sea, put it onto autopilot at seven knots, and run down to the lower deck. As Vincent keeps pace, I jump across onto his boat, giving him a brief nod. He passes me a fresh dress, turns the boat away and we head through the darkness towards Fort-de-France, Martinique’s capital and chief port, and the destination of our hotel.

  In exactly forty-five minutes a small explosive device made up chiefly of a kitchen timer, a 9 volt battery, and a connector, which I placed on a pile of fuel-soaked clothes below deck, will ignite and start a fire which will almost certainly destroy Greg’s yacht and all the evidence on it. Not that it really matters. I arrived in St Lucia by boat, sidestepping passport control. No one knows that I was there. A couple of people might have seen me get on the yacht from a distance but they wouldn’t have got a good look at my face, and by the time Vincent and I leave Martinique on the Miami flight tomorrow afternoon, I’ll look completely different. I’m safe. It was that easy.

  As you can imagine, in my line of business, getting work’s not very easy, so I’m always on the lookout for the next job. I’ve saved quite a nice little nest egg of close to a million dollars, and the three hundred grand I’m going to get for taking care of Greg will really help towards my retirement fund, but I’m still a long way short of where I need to be, particularly after a big contract I was given last year ended in failure, so I take the opportunity to check my emails as Vincent steers us towards land.

  I smile when I see the first message. It’s from a numbered hotmail account that I immediately recognize as belonging to a potential client in England who I’ve been communicating with for a while. The email contains a link, which I immediately click on. After a few seconds I’m redirected to a page where there’s a short message and a photo. The message is simple. It says: ‘This is him.’

  It’s the photo that really grabs my attention, though. You see, I recognize the man with the dark hair and strong, narrow jaw who is staring confidently out at me. The man my potential new client wants me to kill. His name’s Ray Mason, and he’s a detective in London’s Counter Terrorism Command. Not only that. He’s also the only person I’ve been hired to kill who’s still alive, and his survival cost me close to a million dollars. Clearly, he’s a very unpopular man if someone else wants him dead, and that’s fine by me.

  Because this time I’m going to make sure it happens.

  Read on for an exclusive extract from Simon’s new novel

  Out 12 Jan 2017

  Available to pre-order now

  Dear Reader,

  As a writer, I’ve traditionally been known for writing standalone thrillers, sometimes with recurring characters, sometimes not. But for a long time now I’ve been carrying around the idea for a series in my head. The thing is, it’s not your traditional crime fiction series where each book is an individual story but featuring the same central protagonists every time. Instead, I’ve wanted to try something that’s been used many times on TV, but one that hasn’t been explored very much in crime fiction, and that’s the use of a single story arc told over a number of books. My idea was for each book in the series to end with a satisfactory conclusion but also a partial cliff-hanger that leads onto the next one, so that the reader’s appetite remains whetted.

 
; The first of The Bone Field books starts with a mystery. In 1990, a 21 year-old graduate, Katherine ‘Kitty’ Sinn vanished while holidaying in Thailand with her boyfriend. Despite huge publicity and a major search, no trace of her was ever found. Then, in 2016, Kitty’s bones are discovered in the grounds of an English public school, along with those of a girl who went missing nearby in 1989. Only one man can provide answers. Henry Forbes, the boyfriend who reported Kitty missing in Thailand, now a college lecturer in his fifties, tells murder squad detective, DS Ray Mason, that a number of powerful people were involved in Kitty’s murder but before he can give any further details, he’s murdered in an attack in which Ray only narrowly escapes with his life, and suddenly the whole mystery comes alive again.

  The Bone Field books centre round Ray’s search for the truth of what happened to Kitty, and for the individuals who killed her, a search that will come close to destroying him. The story will take will also bring back some familiar characters from my other books, including Murder Squad cop turned private detective, Tina Boyd. Again, taking my inspiration from some of the more successful TV box sets, I’m very keen to add an element of unpredictability to the Bone Field books. Just because a character is popular, and central to the plot, it doesn’t mean he or she is going to survive the series. Many won’t. People the reader is rooting for will die, because what I want to do is create a narrative that’s intense and emotional, as well as fast and exciting, and most importantly of all, keeps the reader constantly guessing.

  I hope I’ve achieved that in this, the first of the books, but I’ll leave you guys to judge whether or not I’ve been successful. In the meantime, thanks very much for taking the time to read The Bone Field, and for your continued support. I really appreciate it.