The Bone Field Page 22

I gave an empty laugh. ‘I can’t deny that. I’m sorry for putting you in that situation though. I shouldn’t have sent you there.’

  ‘You didn’t. I volunteered. And I’m OK. The police aren’t going to prosecute me for anything.’

  ‘What could they prosecute you for?’

  ‘I killed one of the gunmen.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, taking a deep breath. ‘You don’t mess around, do you?’

  ‘If I did, I’d be dead. It was self-defence.’

  ‘Have they been able to ID him?’

  ‘They haven’t even been able to find him. The others must have taken him away. Do you have any idea who’s behind this?’

  ‘Some,’ I said, not sure how much I wanted to tell her over the phone. ‘Did you manage to find out from Charlotte if she knew why she was being hunted?’

  I heard her moving about in bed and lighting a cigarette. ‘She wasn’t entirely sure, but what she did say is on the day that Kitty was going to Thailand with Henry, she saw them in a taxi in Brighton and went over to say hello. She didn’t think the woman in the taxi was Kitty. She said it looked like her but it wasn’t her. She was firm on that. It was only after they found Kitty’s body last week that she began to have doubts.’

  I sat up straight in my chair, the adrenalin starting to fizz again. ‘So my theory was spot on. Someone went to Thailand in her place. Someone who looked like her.’

  ‘That’s right. And Charlotte definitely saw Kitty early the previous morning because the two of them had been out all night and seen in the dawn together.’ Tina cleared her throat. ‘Charlotte also told me that Kitty had two cousins, a brother and sister, whom she hated. Apparently, Kitty had been sexually assaulted by the brother when she was a teenager, but she’d never told anyone about it.’

  This was high-quality information. ‘The two cousins are Alastair and Lola Sheridan,’ I said. ‘And I’m sure they’re connected to Kitty’s murder. Possibly Dana Brennan’s too.’ I took a gulp of the wine. ‘When are you coming home?’

  ‘I’m booked on the morning flight into Heathrow. Your colleagues in Ealing MIT are meeting me for a debrief.’

  I asked her if we could meet afterwards and she hesitated before answering. ‘But you’re off the case, Ray.’

  ‘Officially. Unofficially I still have an interest. Will you do some work for me on a freelance basis? I’ll pay whatever the going rate is.’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘Investigating the murders of Kitty Sinn and Dana Brennan.’

  ‘But the police have already got plenty of resources looking into it.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling they’re looking in the wrong places. I think we might have more luck.’

  Tina yawned. ‘OK. I’ll call you when your people have finished with me. Right now, I need to get back to my beauty sleep.’

  ‘Sure.’ I paused, and could hear her breathing down the phone. ‘Listen, I’m glad you’re OK.’

  ‘You too,’ she said, and ended the call.

  I finished the wine, poured myself another glass, leaving only a third in the bottle, and walked over to the window. I felt totally alone right then, up there in my empty apartment. Me against a hostile world that seemed to keep closing in. It was why I’d wanted to see Tina again. I needed an ally. A partner. Someone who was on my side. Once I’d had my wife, Jo, but she was long gone. Then I’d had my friend and colleague Chris Leavey, and now he was gone too. Murdered in front of me barely a year ago.

  I drank more of the wine, hoping to kill the pain, and told myself to calm down. At least my theory about the Kitty Sinn murder had been right. Henry Forbes had taken someone else to Thailand, presumably as an elaborate, and risky, move to cover up her murder. The motive was still unclear but I was beginning to think it was at least partly to do with a family grievance, whether it was money, a desire to cover up the alleged sexual assault Charlotte had mentioned to Tina, or something else. But that still didn’t explain why Cem Kalaman was involved, and why Dana Brennan had been targeted a year earlier, though it was possible there was an occult element too. I’d seen that pentacle symbol too many times now for it to be a coincidence, and I made a mental note to try to find out what it meant tomorrow.

  I put down my wine, knowing I was going to need a clear head for whatever tomorrow brought, and checked my emails on my phone.

  There were two of interest. One was from Amber, my friend Chris Leavey’s daughter. I still heard from her periodically. She was in her final year at university, and I’d saved her life during the op that killed her father. Although I didn’t like to admit it, I avoided seeing Amber and her mum. They reminded me too much of Chris.

  The other email was from Dan Watts, and it contained the file the NCA had on Cem Kalaman. It was shockingly thin, listing his directorships, his annual income according to his tax returns (about £800,000 per year), a single police mugshot, and his biography. He had no criminal convictions but had been questioned by the police on six occasions between 1992 and 2008, including once on suspicion of the murder of his own father who’d been shot to death in a restaurant alongside his bodyguard in 1999. On only one of those occasions had he been charged. That was in 2002 for conspiracy to murder after he’d been caught on a hidden microphone appearing to order the killing of a business rival. However, the tape of the conversation had somehow gone missing from the police evidence locker, no one involved in the alleged plot wished to cooperate – including the rival, who’d ended up shot to death eighteen months later – and the charges had quickly been dropped.

  In all, Cem Kalaman had spent the sum total of four days of his life in police custody and yet, according to a note at the end of the file, he was suspected of being the chief executive of a billion-pound business empire that had been built on the proceeds of crime, and whose employees were suspected of carrying out a total of at least forty-five murders between 1970 and the present. Cem Kalaman was, it seemed, the British equivalent of the Teflon Don, and it was interesting to note that the police hadn’t questioned him about anything for the past eight years. He’d also shown himself to be a talented operator since the business had increased in size by ten times since he’d taken over the reins. Unlike the vast majority of criminals, the guy clearly knew exactly what he was doing.

  In the mugshot, dated September 2002, he didn’t look particularly impressive. A young man, with black curly hair and very dark eyes, he sat staring blankly at the camera, giving nothing away. It was hard to believe he was who he was supposed to be.

  It was only when I was reading the file through for a second time that I saw it. After Medmenham College, where Cem had gained three mid-grade A Levels in Maths, Psychology and Economics, he’d spent a year at Warwick University between 1987 and 1988 before dropping out. I grabbed my phone, scrolled down my inbox and found Jools’s email, and skimmed through her notes until I saw what I was looking for. Alastair Sheridan, Kitty’s cousin and Lola’s brother, had also gone to Warwick University. He’d been there between the years 1987 and 1990. The same time as Cem Kalaman.

  Suddenly I was there. Henry Forbes knew Kitty Sinn’s cousin Lola before he knew Kitty. Lola’s brother, Alastair, was at the same university as Cem Kalaman. Kalaman had been a pupil at the school where Kitty was buried. It was also highly likely he had ordered Henry’s murder. All, then, were linked either directly or indirectly to Kitty.

  Were these people her killers?

  If so, then one way or another I was going to bring each and every one of them to justice.

  Day Four

  Friday

  Thirty-eight

  Sometimes at night I dream terrible dreams. In the worst ones I’m back as a child in my burning home, hiding in the cupboard, listening as my father roams the hallway outside calling my name, knowing that he’s possessed by some kind of demon and that if he finds me, he will kill me, just as I know he’s killed my mother and brothers. The dreams are always vivid. They’re exactly how I remember that black February night when I
lost my whole family. I can even smell the acrid, choking smoke. And they always end the same way, just as that night had ended, with me forced from my hiding place, running to the bedroom window, choking on the smoke, opening it and looking down at that immense drop into the darkness, hearing my father come in the room, and jumping … jumping into the yawning abyss …

  I woke with a start. The clock on the bedside table said 7.27 and the sheets were bathed in sweat. I sat up, slowing my breathing, allowing myself to come back to reality. There was a half-full glass of water on the bedside table and I picked it up and drained it before getting out of bed, already putting the dream behind me. I’ve had a lot of therapy over the years to try to help me come to terms with what happened that night, and thus confine it to where it belongs: in the past. But the scar runs very deep in my psyche, and I’ve been told by more than one expert that it will probably remain there in one form or another until I die. All I can do is attempt to control its effects, and the best way to do that is to keep busy.

  The first thing I did while the coffee brewed was Google ‘demonic signs’, hoping to get a hit on the sign I’d been seeing so much of these past few days, but no match came up. So I Googled ‘occult expert’ instead. There were a number of people, mainly in the US, offering various services to do with the occult such as tarot readings, and even exorcisms, but I finally found a website run by a man called Cornell Stamoran who billed himself as the UK’s foremost expert on Satanism, and who had written four books on the subject. A quick glance at the photo of the man himself on the homepage didn’t inspire much confidence, but beggars can’t be choosers so I gave it ten minutes while I ate some cereal, then called him.

  It was still before eight so I was expecting to leave a message, but the phone was answered on the second ring by a man who sounded like a combination of Vincent Price and Graham Norton and who spun out his ‘hello’ for a good three seconds.

  ‘Cornell Stamoran?’

  I kid you not. He answered with a ‘This is he.’

  I told him who I was and about the sign that had cropped up as part of our inquiry. ‘It’s a pentacle with what looks like some kind of rune inside. I can’t find any likeness on the internet, so I’m wondering if you might be able to identify it.’

  ‘I know a great deal about the occult, that is true, but I would need to see this particular symbol to correctly identify it. Can you send over an image?’

  ‘I’d rather come in person with it,’ I told him. ‘Whereabouts are you based?’

  He gave me an address in Southwark. I wrote it down and asked him if he was free that morning. ‘I can get to you for nine-thirty if that’s any good. We do need to move quickly on this.’

  ‘Er, yes, I think I can fit you in,’ he said. ‘Will there be any, um, remuneration? I charge sixty pounds per hour for consultations.’

  ‘Call this community service,’ I said. ‘Your good deed for the day.’

  ‘I don’t do good deeds.’

  ‘You do now,’ I told him, and hung up.

  I’d decided to walk to Cornell Stamoran’s address. The day was sunny and cool, with the kind of chill breeze that reminds you you’re in England in April, and the route took me down to the river and along the South Bank with its views across to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, before old merged into new and the gleaming skyscrapers of the City of London surged towards the sky.

  On the way I called Tina and was more relieved than I’d like to admit when she answered. She told me she was at the airport and the plane was on time. Once again I told her to be careful, and once again she told me she knew how to look after herself.

  Five minutes after I put the phone down to Tina I got a call from the Independent Police Complaints Commission. Whenever an individual dies as a result, directly or otherwise, of a police operation, the IPCC automatically get involved. I’d last been on the wrong side of dealings with them after shooting the two men who’d tried to kill me outside my old apartment, and I’d been expecting their call.

  The woman on the other end of the phone wanted me to come into their offices as soon as possible for an interview but, after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I managed to put her off until nine a.m. on Monday morning while I organized a Police Federation rep to come in with me. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy interview, or a short one. The circumstances of Anton Walters’ death were controversial. I’d yet to see the CCTV footage of what happened, but I was pretty certain there’d be plenty of people out there eager to pin the blame for his death on me.

  Cornell Stamoran lived in the top-floor flat of a grimy post-war terraced house not far from the New Kent Road that backed on to the railway tracks running into Waterloo station. At one end of the road was a kebab shop, the litter from the previous night still scattered outside, while at the other was a boarded-up house with an old fridge outside it on the pavement. To the south and north were sleek blocks of luxury flats, yet this place seemed to have been entirely forgotten by the gentrification going on all around, and it made me think that maybe I should have been paying Stamoran after all, because if he lived here he clearly needed the money.

  It was almost exactly 9.30 when I buzzed on his doorbell and was let into a bare hallway that smelled of wet anoraks. I negotiated two steep staircases before being greeted at the top by a very large, very out-of-shape man in a black tracksuit and slippers with an unruly beard, and much sparser yet still unruly hair that had been bunched up into a greasy ponytail that probably had its own ecosystem. I put him at about forty years old, but the kind who probably wasn’t going to make it much past fifty.

  ‘Mr Stamoran, DS Mason,’ I said, flashing my warrant card and putting out a hand.

  His shake was firm but slightly moist.

  ‘Please,’ he said, in that voice of his, squinting at me through a pair of cheap black glasses, ‘come in.’

  I followed him into a cramped living area with bookshelves lining the walls and a minute TV in one corner. Opposite the TV was a large reclining chair that looked new on which lay a very large sleeping cat, and behind the chair, next to the tiny kitchen area, was a badly chipped wooden dining table with a chair at either end. I could smell fried food and sweat.

  I negotiated my way round the back of the reclining chair and sat down at the table opposite Stamoran. He offered me a drink but I said no. I took out a blown-up copy of the photo of the symbol I’d taken in the folly and placed it on the table.

  ‘So, you’re an expert on matters of the occult,’ I said, quoting his website.

  ‘That is correct,’ he concurred, a suitably sombre expression on his face. ‘I’m a senior member of the British Occult and Psychic Society, and the UK ambassador for the California-based Black Chapel Legion, the most important occult group in the United States.’

  I didn’t have a clue who any of these organizations were, and for all I knew he could have founded them himself and been the only member. But it didn’t really matter. ‘So can you tell me what this sign means?’

  Stamoran put on a pair of reading glasses and brought the paper close to his face. ‘I have seen this before,’ he said as he stared at it. ‘I think I know what it is, but I need to check something.’ He shuffled over to one of the bookcases and scanned the shelves before finding the book he was looking for.

  As he did that, I looked round. Stamoran’s place was on the dishevelled side of ordinary and only a low shelf in the corner with a pack of tarot cards and two candles on it, and a tapestry of a sun just above, showed any signs of his profession, if you could call it that.

  He sat back down, leafing through the book – an old hardback with a plain black cover the size of an encyclopedia – until he found what he was looking for. He held the book open and pushed it across to me. There on the page was the symbol I’d seen in the folly and on the underarms of both Anton Walters and Henry Forbes.

  I nodded. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a rarely used symbol associated with an old Ammonite god called Moloch
who was demonized in Hebrew lore. He was considered the causer of plagues and was said to be close to Satan.’ He looked at my photo again. ‘Where did you find this?’

  I had to be careful how much I told Stamoran. Not only should I not be here, I didn’t want him putting two and two together and realizing who this case was about. But at the same time I had to give him something.

  ‘It was close to a murder scene,’ I replied. ‘We believe it may have been daubed there by the killers.’

  Stamoran stroked his beard. ‘Interesting. And was there any evidence, other than this, that it was a ritual murder?’

  ‘Our inquiry’s a cold case review which means the murder was an unsolved crime from some years ago. The remains of the victim have only recently been discovered so we don’t know.’

  ‘It’s not the Kitty Sinn case, is it?’ he asked, his eyes lighting up.

  I shook my head. ‘No. This murder happened some time before that.’ I thought back to Dana Brennan, snatched from a country road on a summer’s afternoon. ‘The female victim was abducted and we think murdered by more than one person. Because of the proximity of the sign to where the body was found, we think it might have had some significance for her killers.’

  Stamoran cleared his throat and sat back in his chair. ‘You know, there are hundreds and hundreds of different demons in religious folklore. The vast majority are considered harmless.’ He paused, stroking his beard again. ‘But Moloch is different. He’s one of the most powerful demons of all, a prince of Satan who has always been associated with human sacrifice. In ancient times he was worshipped by the Ammonites who built great bronze statues in his honour, and sacrificed women and children to him because they thought that would protect them from disaster and give them the power to destroy their enemies.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Do you know of any groups in the present day who worship him?’

  ‘Do you know, detective, it’s a common fallacy among the general populace that Satanism is intrinsically evil, and that the worship of Satan involves all kinds of black rites. I blame it on The Exorcist and all the films that have followed since.’ He sounded genuinely angry as he spoke. ‘I’m a Satanist, yet I don’t sacrifice anything to Satan, human or otherwise.’